IKEA Monkey

Last Friday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order lifting the state's drought emergency in all but four counties.

What is the point of Whole Foods when you can buy gluten-free pie crust, organic sweet corn, and quinoa in most regular grocery stores? Whole Foods doesn’t seem to know, and neither do the people who used to shop there, which is why a major shareholder of the supermarket chain wants Whole Foods to clean itself up and see whether anyone might be interested in a merger.

The Wall Street Journal reports that today, activist investor Jana Partners and some allied companies bought almost a 9% stake in Whole Foods, becoming the chain’s second-largest investor. Jana Partners has big plans for the grocery chain. Those could include behind-the-scenes technology and operations changes to help it compete with standard grocery chains.

Other stores collect data on their customers and what they buy, something that Whole Foods is still only experimenting with in Dallas and in Philadelphia.

The firm considers Whole Foods stock to be “undervalued,” and thinks that bringing in fresh board members to turn things around quickly could be good for investors. The firm also plans to explore a sale. One recent rumor was that Kroger was considering buying Whole Foods, and other firms might be interested.

Investors in public companies want growth, but Whole Foods is no longer growing. Its same-store sales have actually been shrinking. Those customers may be shifting their spending to standard grocery stores, or visiting other natural-foods markets like Trader Joe’s or Sprouts.

“As most retailers know, once traffic has been lost those patterns rarely reverse,” a Barclay’s analyst wrote in a note about Whole Foods. (warning: auto-play video at that link)

That’s why the activist investors want to try a fast turnaround, getting those customers back before they get out of the habit of shopping at Whole Foods.

Be honest: this is so fucking relatable.

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Donald Trump's travel to his private club in Florida has cost over an estimated $20 million in his first 80 days as president, putting the president on pace in his first year of office to surpass former President Barack Obama's spending on travel for his entire eight years.

A 30-second video of a United Airlines passenger being dragged from his seat and bloodied on an overbooked Sunday flight at O'Hare International Airport racked up more than 6 million views Monday and sparked plenty of outrage.

For United, the video threatened to unravel more than a year of work...

White House press secretary Sean Spicer posted a photo Friday of a briefing after the Syrian airstrike.

More than constructing giant catapults or using underwater tunnels, drug traffickers often try to get their product across borders using produce. After being known to shove the stuff inside pumpkins, pineapples, fake carrots, and limes, some smugglers recently tried (unsuccessfully) to use bananas to get the job done, the Associated Press reports.

Over the weekend, German police found 847 pounds of coke inside a banana shipment from Ecuador that ended up in a warehouse outside of Cologne. Although the coke wasn't hidden inside the actual fruit, cops found hundreds of packages of the stuff hidden throughout 26 crates, along with a GPS tracker authorities believe was being used to track the shipment.

Weirdly enough, this isn't the first time smugglers have tried to use bananas to sneak coke into a country. Just last month, police in Spain found 15 pounds of coke shoved into more than 50 fake bananas, AP reports. It's not clear if that shipment was also from Ecuador, but it resulted in the arrest of two Spanish men and one Italian thought to have ties with a criminal organization. 

This month's banana-blow shipment almost usurped the record 851 pounds of cocaine cops found in Berlin back in 2014, which had been placed in banana shipments from Colombia. That stash ended up at local supermarkets across the city, and was the most coke authorities had ever discovered in the German capital.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

"We're seeing activity that we didn't even see when it was the Soviet Union," Navy Admiral Michelle Howard said,

Chicago had a longer average time than New York City, Los Angeles and other usual suspects, according to a new study. [ more › ]

Samurai Jack is one of the most under-appreciated cartoon series of the past 20 years. Following a nomadic samurai who regularly gets into skirmishes in a dystopian techno-punk future, its debut—between 2001 and 2004—was on the children's TV channel Cartoon Network. However, it's anything but childish: When it comes to cartoons being considered "art"—both on an aesthetic and emotional level—Samurai Jack is up there with anything from Fantasia to that Simpsons episode where Homer's mom has to go into hiding and the credits roll over him staring up at the stars.

If you need convincing, watch "The Birth of Evil Part I & II," the Emmy award–winning two-part episode that details the beginnings of the series' main antagonist, Aku, and try to tell me it's not as visually impressive or moving as anything else on TV.

Samurai Jack's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky, is a low-key genius. You may have never heard his name before, but the 47-year-old Russian American was instrumental in Cartoon Network's holy trinity: Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and The Powerpuff Girls. He created the first two, and he wrote, directed, and produced all three.

The climactic final season of Samurai Jack premiered on Adult Swim last month, so I got in touch with Tartakovsky to find out how it feels to have impacted an entire generation with his cartoons.

Firstly, though, why did he want to release the conclusion to Samurai Jack now, 13 years after the last episode was shown? "Well, the story was never finished, so it definitely felt like we needed to," he explained. "The show's popularity has increased as time's gone on, so I felt eventually we needed to finish it."

As well as steadily gaining more fans since it first came out, Samurai Jack—along with Dexter's Lab, and Powerpuff Girls—has seemingly gotten better with age. I know when I look back at episodes like Dexter's "Omelette Du Fromage"—one that somehow remains hilarious for all ten minutes, despite the only words uttered being "omelette," "du," and "fromage"—I still shake with laughter. And when I re-watch the Powerpuff Girls, I notice how they were, as silly as it sounds for a children's cartoon, sort of televisual feminist pioneers, in that they were three undoubtedly feminine characters who were completely unbound by gender constructs. They kicked the shit out of grown men, they outsmarted the bad guys, and they saved the day without ever relying on male assistance, unlike many other female heroes of the time.

In all of Tartakovsky's programs, there is a depth and subtlety that goes way beyond what other animated shows were doing at the time, and you could argue they laid down the blueprint for injecting subliminal adult humor into children's films, which is now the standard for any Pixar or Disney computer-animated feature. But he seemed pretty nonchalant when I suggested this to him.

"It's just all the stuff that I wanted to see on TV," he said. "Whenever I needed to think of ideas or stories, I thought of myself watching TV and would think about what I would want to see or feel."

But surely he must realize his work has been hugely influential to younger generations?

"Yeah, it feels good," he said. "Nothing makes me feel warmer than when people come up to me and say they do what they do in art or animation because of one of my shows."

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WATCH: 'Inside the Boundless Cartoon Universe of Mike Perry'

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Artistic inspiration comes thick and fast in Tartakovsky's work. You need only look at the imaginative Powerpuff Girls villains, like HIM and Mojo Jojo; or the detail that goes into the average Samurai Jack landscape; or the comic inventiveness that runs throughout the whole visual world of Dexter's Lab. Mind you, artistically this wasn't strictly down to Tartakovsky himself, but from working with long-time collaborator Don Shank—whose unique retro future stylings can also be seen in Up, The Incredibles, and Ren & Stimpy—as well as fellow animator Craig McCracken, who created The Powerpuff Girls.

You can also flip all that on its head, and look at the range of influences Tartakovsky has managed to inject into his own work. In Samurai Jack alone you can see traces of films like Seven Samurai, and Shogun Assassin, as well as anime like Ninja Scroll, and Speed Racer.

"It's funny that a lot of my influences aren't actually manga and anime," he explains. "For Jack there are a lot of 70s films: The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Sergio Leone westerns, Sam Peckinpah films, as well as [Akira] Kurosawa, of course."

Samurai Jack certainly has a more cinematic feel than any of Tartakovsky's best Cartoon Network stuff: there are more widescreen, more atmospheric silences lingering on a single shot, and more tension. Considering it's primarily aimed at children, Tartakovsky's work has just as much durability as your average standalone episode of ER, The X-Files, or any other iconic television program aimed at adult audiences. It's more imaginative, more vibrant, and boasts more variety from episode to episode.

Now we're living in a post-Simpsons world, where people want adult themes in their cartoons, and in an age in which anime and manga have never been more popular, it seems like the right time for Samurai Jack to return to our screens. For me, it's still one of the best TV shows—adult or otherwise—of the last 20 years.

Follow Tom Usher on Twitter.

Did You Know?

Ah, the Friend Zone. Most of us know it as the cruel and inhumane process by which we women force unwilling men — often through use/threat of violence — to be our platonic friends and have conversations and drinks and stuff without giving them any sex in return for their efforts. But did you know it is also a means of MURDERING THE ENTIRE WORLD, or at least just all the white people? Hans Fiene does.

In an essay for The Federalist that perfectly blends the Friend Zone panic of the manosphere with the White Genocide paranoia of the alt-right, Hans explains how evil, friend-seeking women are not just destroying men, but also killing the “demographics.”

The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.

Perhaps I’m overstating the danger a bit, but the point remains: Americans need to raise our sagging birth rates. One of the best ways we can do so is by reversing the trend of Americans waiting longer to get married. So, apart from tearing down America’s institutions of higher education, which tend to slow down the recitation of wedding vows, how do we do that? It’s quite simple. We tear down the Friend Zone.

You know, it sure is weird how conservatives can simultaneously scream about birth rates while also insisting that we don’t have room for all the undocumented immigrants and their children who are already here. It is almost like they are only talking about needing more of just one kind of people. Weird!

Hans uses this concern to transition into a Sarah Maclachlan SPCA commercial for all the young men who are put into FRIEND ZONE JAIL by cruel women who do not want to sex them up.

Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.

Huh, I wonder why these men — so cruelly trapped and jailed by these friendship-seeking harlots — cannot simply take some personal responsibility and just not be friends with people they do not want to be friends with. Apparently it is because they are pledging their hearts to us while we keep them from women who actually do want to have 10,000 of their babies.

Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration. Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.

So let’s get this straight! Is it that there are a certain amount of women who are hogging all of the dudes and forcing them to be our friends, leaving them unable to locate the secret trove of women who want their sperm? Is that what is happening here?

Some of my best friends are guys — straight guys, even! Shockingly enough, none of them have pledged their hearts to me. They are, in fact, far more interested in dating girls who are not me, just as I am interested in dating guys who are not them. Almost like we are normal friends or something.

But according to Hans, that is UNPOSSIBLE.

Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed. For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.

Intrepid journalist (and caring person) that I am, I checked with several of my guy friends to see if I am forcing them to be my friend against their will. As it turns out, they are adults who feel pretty comfortable making their own friendship decisions, and who are able to find value in human beings for reasons other than wanting to take them to Poundtown.

Hans believes that every man who is willing to perform the dreaded task of spending one-on-one time with a woman is only doing this because he wants to date her. He attempts to explain friendship from an “economic perspective” by explaining that men exist in a “competitive friendship market” and that women are not capable of giving men what they want in a friendship:

1. Someone who shares his interest in activities such as watching movies where things explode, playing video games where things explode, or putting fireworks in things so they’ll explode. Bonus points if you enjoy yelling at football players through the television set and laughing at noxious flatulence.
2. Someone who won’t pressure him to open up beyond his comfort level if his girlfriend breaks up with him,he loses his job, or his mom gets eaten by a yeti.
3. Someone who cherishes the man tradition of showing affection through insults and general jackassery.

If you are a lady who believes your dude friends are genuinely “just friends,” ask yourself this: Which of these things are you better at giving a man than another man is?

I would probably be the first one to admit that if someone’s primary goal in friendship were to have someone to fart and watch stuff explode with, I might not be their ideal friend, whether or not they were a man. Because that actually seems pretty darned boring. As strange as Hans might find this, I think most of the men I am friends would find that shit pretty boring as well, at least in excessive amounts. They are generally smart and interesting people who want to talk about smart and interesting things.

Additionally — I don’t want to date that guy either. Like, a dude who wants to sit around watching splodey things and farting and can’t have a normal human conversation with a woman without it being a sex thing is the exact opposite of what I am looking for in the #ROMANCE department. In fact, I think that not being able to be platonic friends with women is a pretty big red flag that a guy is either boring or predatory.

Maybe Hans thinks all men are stupid? Apparently he does:

If, then, the average male coworker, male neighbor, or male Nepalese yak herder is better at producing masculine companionship, why is an average man giving his business to you? It’s not because he wants your friendship. It’s because he wants to convince you to open up the supply chain of a romantic relationship to him, and he foolishly believes he can do so by being a loyal friendship customer. “Pay my dues in the Friend Zone,” he thinks, “and one day she’ll promote me to boyfriend.”

You know what? There are totally some dudes that do this. There are also some women who do this. But if you think of being someone’s friend as “paying dues” until you get to bone them, then you are a shitty friend, and would probably be an even shittier person to date.

And now for the best part, wherein God enters the equation, because dude is of course a Minister!

Just because men don’t want to be your friend, however, doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy your company. They most certainly do. They love discovering how you see the world, what you think about life, the universe, and everything. They love your kindness, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, support, and your nurturing heart. They love being in your presence when you display the wonders of the feminine virtues.

But because God designed these virtues to entice men into marriage, the average man will never be content to receive those gifts in a form of companionship that doesn’t lead to marriage. Quite simply, men can’t be at peace being just friends. And there’s nothing you can do to change that. Platonic chilling won’t stop your inner (and outer) beauty from pulling a man towards romantic love. Telling him he’s like a brother to you won’t stop his brain from shouting “Marry that woman and impregnate her now” when he encounters your femininity.

So wait — “God” made me an interesting person to talk to so that I may lure a man who just wants to watch splodey things and fart into marriage? What is in this for me, then?

That apparently does not matter to Hans. He asks that women like me who are forcibly holding men in Friendship Jail set them free by calling them up and saying the following thing:

“It’s not my fault that your facial symmetry grosses out my ovaries, but it was my fault that I got your hopes up by putting you in the Friend Zone. As restitution, please accept the phone numbers of five girls I know who find you attractive. Stop wasting your time with me and go hang out with a girl who might one day bear your children.”

Given that none of my guy friends want to date me either, I feel like this might be an awkward thing to say. Especially considering that many of them already have girlfriends and/or wives. Also, if they were single and I knew five girls who wanted to date them, I already would have told them about that.

If this is not the case and you actually do want to marry them and bear their children, Hans suggests you tell them that immediately and “fast track” them to marriage town, since there is no possible way that they were hanging out with you for any other reason, like maybe you are funny or smart or nice or you have things in common outside of boning.

So get brave. Get married. Get pregnant a bunch of times and give birth to a bunch of beautiful little future taxpayers. The time has come to fight for our future. The time has come to rebuild America’s demographic glory atop the rubble of the fertility-killing Friend Zone.

Eh. You know what, Hans? I am totally fine with not doing that. I don’t want to get pregnant and have babies, and I certainly don’t want to be part of anyone named Hans’s mission to rebuild any kind of “demographic glory.”

[The Federalist]

A new form of male birth control, Vasalgel, is tantalizingly close to human trials—but we’ve heard that story before. Let’s take a look at some of the contraceptives for dudes that are languishing due to lack of funding.

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Drew and Jonathan Scott, the improbably famous and successful non-identical identical twins who are better known as “The Property Brothers,” frequently attend events together, presumably because their contract with HGTV (signed in blood, despite the network’s objections) bars either twin (let’s call them Property…

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Those clowns at The Guardian put a video on YouTube that shows a very good beagle running onto the field during a Northern Premier League match and interrupting the action for over seven minutes. The creator of the video, perhaps believing nobody wants to watch a dog prance around a soccer field for seven minutes,…

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QUINCY, MA—Saying she would stop looking at her phone and tablet at least an hour before going to sleep, local woman Carina Anielski, who drinks six cups of coffee per day, told reporters Tuesday that she was trying to cut down on blue light around bedtime. “I heard that too much blue light can really mess with your circadian rhythm, so I’m going to keep it way down,” said Anielski, who consumes a full 12 ounces of highly caffeinated beverage roughly every two hours between the cup she has upon arriving at work and the cup she consumes after dinner. “I’ve also put a filter on all my devices that blocks out blue light, so I’ve got an added layer of protection. Seriously, one blast of that stuff at the wrong time and I’m wide awake till four in the morning. I have to take some precautions.” At press time, Anielski, who also drinks at least six Diet Cokes every day, was shutting down her laptop promptly at 9 p.m.

One of the most insane slices of pop-culture WTF-ery ever has a Chicago connection. Did you know? [ more › ]

It’s Equal Pay Day, a day dedicated to bringing awareness to the wage gap. It’s narrowed since the ‘60s, but there’s still progress to be made, especially considering naysayers still believe the gap doesn’t exist.

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Japan may be the greatest culinary destination on Earth. It could take a lifetime to explore the food there thoroughly, but even a short trip can open up worlds of discovery. Here are some of Daniel's top picks from a recent trip to Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukui, and Ishikawa. Read More

The comments on our tinted moisturizer post yielded a spattering of popular products, with four emerging with the most votes. Now it’s time to make it known which is the best of the best.

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Later this month, my son will turn a year old.

We'll throw a party — grander than some but probably more laid-back than most — eat gyros and cupcakes, talk about how squirmy he is, how cute his four teeth are. It promises to be thoroughly normal. His start in life, though, was another matter.

Seven...

She is a fug favorite, and she's been missed.

Between the apps, restaurant websites, and regular old phone calls, it’s easier than ever to make dinner reservations these days. But for whatever reason, people don’t t cancel reservations when they can’t make it. It’s rude, yes, but it also affects the restaurant in ways you may not have thought of.

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You know what the reaction was on 4chan — the troll site now best-known for catapulting Donald Trump to the presidency — on the day James Jackson was arrested for driving a sword through 66-year-old Timothy Caughman? Disappointment. Disappointment in the fact that he had such a low body count.

What has he even achieved? Not even a good kill count. Just One, Old, man. Now Brevik. Brevik was an hero my lad. Imagine working all that shit out then planning it. He was not wrong either. They were indoctrinating kids.

Over on the AskTrumpSupporters subreddit, one user casually suggested that violent white supremacists were the result of “anti-white sentiment.”

I think that White Supremacist gangs are a symptom of the racial problems we have in this country and how they are covered up. There is a major intersection of anti-white sentiment, black on white crime, and criminal culture combined with people at the top only looking at one side of the equation ( handfuls of isolated racist whites rather than the racial motivations of thousands of affiliated criminal gangs) no doubt leads to white radicalization and white supremacy.

We need to acknowledge the very real race problems we have in America, unfortunately it looks like it is only getting worse with the left doubling down with accusations of racist or nazi everytime they lose.

Jackson’s worldview and ideas, which he went on about at length in a jailhouse interview earlier this week, are completely, frighteningly familiar to me, as someone who has been researching and writing about the “manosphere” and white supremacist parts of the internet for several years. Like many others, Jackson’s ideas and plans were fomented on Nazi sites like Stormfront. Like many, many others, Jackson’s views come in at the intersection of both racism and misogyny. He claimed his goal was to kill as many black men as possible in order to keep white women from dating them. He told the New York Daily News that his greatest wish was for said white women to look at his actions and decide against dating black men, because perhaps he had some kind of point.

“Well, if that guy feels so strongly about it, maybe I shouldn’t do it,’” he told reporters, imagining what he hoped would be the reaction of white women to his murder of a 66-year-old black man.

The combination of racism and sexism among these men has resulted in an overarching obsession and hysteria regarding interracial dating. You’ve got a bunch of asshats who believe they are “owed” women, and they deeply fear black men are taking the women they believe they are rightfully entitled to. This is what they mean, largely, when they talk about “white genocide.” Not only is there a massive conspiracy to keep them from having sex, they believe, but also a plan to kill them. This is what they think.

On the Nazi pick-up artist blog “Chateau Heartiste,” Jackson’s views are echoed, ever so casually.

Equalism is more than a big lie; it’s a corruption of civilized man’s soul. As the good doctor Thiel explains, femcuntery will only achieve wrecking power in a nation of degenerated men unable and unwilling to act to preserve their culture and protect their tribe. Women are followers and will follow their nation right into the abyss if it guarantees their social standing among peers; as I’ve been saying, it’ll take shitlord men with big balls to bring their women to heel and their nation back to greatness.

Perhaps my first encounter with the term “cuck” was when I wrote a silly little article about White Supremacists losing their shit about a Nickelodeon show called “Bella and The Bulldogs.” The director of the show was a black man who had previously made a B movie called “The Cuckold” — about a white man with a fetish for watching his wife have sex with other men, specifically black men. They believed, sincerely that this show was being used to promote cuckoldry, as a fetish, to children. They were specifically furious over the fact that the “cool guy” and potential romantic interest on the show was black. They screamed and howled over the fact that they believed young white girls were being brainwashed to prefer black men.

The site I wrote it for got rid of comments in a redesign, but there were thousands. I was screamed at for days. They made various memes of my face. Over a fucking Nickelodeon show. And what scared me most was their absolute sincerity. The absolute despair. The kind of fury and anger and despair that most people only reserve for someone who just stabbed their baby in the face. Over, again, a Nickelodeon show.

This is where the whole “cuck” thing came about first — in white supremacist forums, in which idiots sincerely discussed their dreaded fear that the world, and black men in particular, were conspiring to deprive them of the nubile young white girls they felt entitled to.

But like the word “cuck,” these views are not just confined to shadowy, secluded parts of the internet anymore. On more mainstream conservative sites, it’s not at all uncommon to see people posting variations on the “diversity is code for anti-white” theme. There is obsessive talk of “Western Civilization” — by which they mean “white people.” And I very rarely see these people being told to fuck off.

It is entirely the same thing Steve King — a Congressman — was talking about the other day when he was on his charming “demographics are destiny” rant.

You have these people with “mildly” racist and sexist views to begin with. They’re mad at Black Lives Matter, they think women are lying about the pay gap, that we lie about rape. They are furious that other people often don’t like them and don’t want to socialize with, or — perhaps more importantly — date them because of these views. Thus the constant “But they call us racists and sexists and it’s UNFAIR!” shit. They get into these forums with a bunch of people who feel just as they do, and they become echo chambers in which these views are shared by the majority of members. And because it’s an ongoing thing, the stakes keep getting raised. This is how radicalization happens. This is how James Jackson happens.

In the worst of these forums, violence and murder are far from taboo subjects. Just yesterday, in a post on the misogynistic Sluthate forum (formerly PUAHate, the site notoriously frequented by mass murderer Elliot Rodger) titled “If you actually killed/raped a bunch of sluts…” anonymous men lamented the fact that killing women wouldn’t be as effective as they would like.

If you actually punished a bunch of sluts for their slutty behavior, all you would do is create martyrs. Feminists would be marching in the streets. I mean, Jesus Christ, feminists were marching in the streets simply because Trump got elected, and all he did was talk shit. He didn’t actually do anything to them.

So, what can you do? Watch the world slowly kill itself, I guess. People won’t listen. They’ll just keep getting more slutty and lazy until the bubble pops, when the economy finally collapses. Then, their immorality will hit home.

When Hillary Clinton referred to “deplorables,” these are the people she was talking about and she was absolutely, 100% correct to do so. They are not just deplorable, they are straight up evil, and at this point, they are psychotic. My biggest fear with a Trump presidency was that these people would be emboldened, and to some degree, I would say that is starting to come to pass.

[New York Daily News]

“Everyone wanted to get out of the car because they were afraid of the turkey,” said John Tarabocchia, dispelling any uncertainty about the scariest part of a driving a very fast car into a flying turkey. Not the blunt surprise of impact, or even the minor cuts the family suffered from flying windshield shards—just…

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Here's your chance to see an artist who is poised to make 2017 her year, right as she leaves the launchpad. [ more › ]