Erin H

Grant Hart, drummer and singer of the seminal alternative rock band Hüsker Dü, has died at 56 after being diagnosed with cancer. The news was confirmed by his bandmate Bob Mould in a lengthy Facebook

This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Grant Hart, Husker Du Drummer and Singer, Dead at 56

Stone Island likes to bring technology to its fashion lines, like the strangely compelling AirPod pockets sown into its Fall/Winter collection we saw last month. Now the fashion concern has a new sweater that changes color depending on the temperatur...

From Kitchn → Le Creuset Just Launched a New Line of Millennial Pink Cookware

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Changing the difficulty of in the upcoming RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole will also change the color of your character's skin, Eurogamer reports.

When adjusting how difficult you want the game to be, the easier you

This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: New 'South Park' Game Changes Difficulty Based on Skin Color of Character

After a week of storms and high water, Hurricane Harvey has now left at least 43 people in southeast Texas dead. In addition to the damage to infrastructure, property and residents’ lives, the possible environmental consequences of the massive flooding in the nation’s largest petrochemical complex are just now…

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Do your kids struggle to wake up, no matter how loudly you shout that if they're not quick, you'll steal their cereal? Perhaps you could try tempting them into wakefulness with the scents of either Olaf from Disney's Frozen or the armpit scent of Des...

The Houston Independent School District announced some fine news Wednesday: Once the public schools are dried out and back in session, parents won’t have to worry about lunch fees for the 2017-2018 school year. The school will provide free meals to all students who want them, up to three a day, thanks to a waiver from the US Department of Agriculture granting emergency approval for all the district’s families, under the National School Lunch/Breakfast Program.

The school district is still asking parents to complete the applications online, however, to ensure adequate funding and to track student data.

“The flooding that is affecting the city of Houston has been devastating to so many. Some of the areas that are the hardest hit are filled with working parents whose limited funds will need to go toward recovery efforts,” said Houston ISD Superintendent Richard Carranza. “This waiver will give our families one less concern as they begin the process of restoring their lives. It will also provide a sense of normalcy by allowing students to have access to up to three nutritious meals each and every school day.”

While some Houston schools have been flooded, others have been serving as shelters for people in the community. It’s not yet certain when all the schools will be able to reopen, according to superintendent Carranza. Every effort will be made to help kids get back to something like a normal-ish school year, even if their families have had to evacuate to other parts of the city:

“In no way, shape or form do I feel this is going to be a lost year,” says Carranza. “I have every expectation that, you know, we’ll look back at the end of the school year and just be tremendously proud of how our city came together, how the nation came to wrap its arms around Houston.”

The biggest challenge isn’t necessarily the school facilities themselves; it’s making sure the roads and other infrastructure are restored to handle the 200,000 students in the district’s 280 schools. District crews have begun assessing damage; by Tuesday, they’d made it to 75 school campuses, sometimes having to get there by boat. Roughly half had some kind of damage — sometimes just minor leaks, but some schools had several feet of water in them.

If we were in third grade, we would insist the schools be kept flooded year round so we could go from class to class in an inflatable raft. Don’t go talking to us about polluted filthy water and structural danger and mold and inaccessibility, we are thinking like an eight-year-old here and it would be fun! Until our feet got too pruney.

The other challenge for getting the schools back in service, of course, is the personnel — a lot of teachers and staff have evacuated and may have lost their homes, so there may be a lot of shuffling. Carranza said a preliminary decision on when schools could open would be made late this week. He’s also been getting advice from administrators of schools that have dealt with similar disasters, and says the goal will be flexibility: Some schools may have to merge student populations if buildings are unavailable, and if large numbers of families are still living in shelters, then buses will go to the shelters.

Carranza, who is starting in his second year as superintendent, says the district is

aggressively trying to communicate with its students and staff over social media and the website, in both English and Spanish […]

“I’m heartbroken for our families and I’m heartbroken for our employees and I’m heartbroken for our city because we’re going to be in pain for a little while. I think the more we can do to come together, the better.”

And the kids are going to get fed. In the HISD press release on the free meals, Nutrition Services Officer Betti Wiggins (is that a Head Lunch Lady name? It is!) said,

We want to reduce any stress connected to food while families work toward getting their personal affairs in order. All HISD students will have access to good food, made with as many local and fresh ingredients as possible and served with love and a smile.

At the risk of sounding like damn Pollyanna optimists, we’re betting there’ll be no shortage of volunteers to help the schools get back to doing school stuff. If you want a signal that people are already in a rush to help, we’d note that the Houston ISD Foundation’s “Donate” page is currently overwhelmed. Give them a little time to sort that out, and come back. And the district’s Twitter feed is full of news of people raising money and donating supplies (disaster tip #1: Unless you have a whole school ready to donate, always give money!)

Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. If you want to give to Houston, go for it, then when you can, click our “Donate” linky.

[USA Today / NPR / HISD blog / HISD Harvey recovery cover page]

An actor set to appear in an upcoming reboot of "Hellboy" has exited the project after he realized the character for which he'd been cast was "of mixed Asian heritage," and that his casting would have whitewashed the role.

Federal prisons are now required to provide female inmates with a range of feminine hygiene products free of charge, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

Thought experiment: Would you rather have your Instagram hacked, OR have your ex hacked and your nude photos leaked on their account? Something to debate around the dinner table tonight, but unfortunately, Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber didn’t get to choose—Gomez’s account was infiltrated on Monday, and Bieber’s…

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My deep, abiding love for cooking in and cleaning my cast iron skillet is no secret. I'm a bit old-fashioned when it comes to maintaining a super-slick, no-stick finish on my pan: I clean it with oil and salt, rinse with water, heat it to dry, and slick it with a little oil before storing. Sure, it sounds like a lot of steps, but the whole process takes about three minutes and I enjoy every second of it.

So I was incredibly skeptical of a product that promised to make this task easier and faster. When Sir Scrubbington arrived in the mail, I set out to test it against my favorite method for speed and reliability.

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For the past 15 years, Tanya Johnson has been driving her boss nuts.

At a time when it seems like America is full of awful people who’d happily welcome a return to a nice state of civil war, when the president is a fatuous idiot who has no idea what he’s doing, and when really pretty much everyone is terrible, let’s take a moment to remember that most of us have some heroism inside us, and a lot of us can be pretty damned impressive when we’re called on to help others. Let’s have some appreciation for all the neighbors helping neighbors in Texas, because that’s just what you do.

The “Cajun Navy,” a loose-knit group of Louisiana volunteers who organized to help out after Katrina in 2005, has headed to Houston with their boats and trailers, where they’re using social media to help supplement the official rescue response. On a Hurricane Harvey Facebook page, Cajun Navy member Gary Davis of Youngsville, Louisiana, said they were on the way, and asked for as much detail as possible to ensure quick help:

People began asking for help, and they got it, too:

Katie Heaslip Pechon, of Madisonville, Louisiana, told NOLA.com Sunday that she and over 100 other Cajun Navy volunteers were working in Houston:

She said volunteers from Bayou Gauche and New Orleans are “headed out” to Texas “right now” to provide aid to residents in need. She stressed that people with boats are coming “out of the woodwork” to lend a hand. The Cajun Navy is also paired up with southeastern Louisiana storm spotters, she added.

Lots of boat heroes all over the area; this rescue was photographed by LA Times photojournalist Robert Gauthier:

LA Times reporter Matt Pearce has the details, which involves rescuers rescuing some guys who went to rescue others:

At the water’s edge, a Houston Police Department high-water rescue boat hauled out a trio of men in their underwear: Alex Domingues, 41, Mitchell Calderon, 19, and Emanuel Calderon, 20, all of them grinning. They had stripped down to their skivvies to swim to the rescue of an elderly man and woman, who by now were also in the boat.

“We seen the lady in her walker trying to walk on the other side of the water,” Emanuel Calderon said. “We took off our clothes — less weight.”

The man they helped rescue was Frank Andrews, 74, who has difficulty walking after four back operations in recent years. One of the Houston officers asked Andrews if there was anyone the authorities could call to notify that he was OK.

“I got nobody to help me, bottom line,” Andrews replied, sitting in a walker that converts to a chair. “It’s just the way it is. I don’t have a wife or a girlfriend.”

Andrews had tried to wait out the storm in his home, but it flooded, and he had no flood insurance: “shame on me,” he said. “It’s a quagmire, man.” While he was waiting at the side of a flooded freeway for help, the three young men swam over to help him, wrapping a sheet of plastic over his shoulders to keep him dry while waiting for a boat to come.

Then there was Daniel Gross, a 15-year-old kid who was helping his dad use a kayak to rescue neighbors who’d been flooded out. At one point, he got separated from his dad and the kayak, and waited on top of a flooded car until a police boat picked him up. Once reunited with his father, he headed right back out to keep helping people.

Or give a listen to this brief NPR story about a hero with no boat, Mashon Hunt, a 17-year-old from Rockport, Texas, who was one of several people who found the doors of a local elementary school open, and with her mom, pitched in to help provide for some 250 locals who made their way to the school:

You really can’t go far on Twitter without finding more evidence that people are, as the little girl said in her diary in 1944, really good at heart:

Were there some people who took the opportunity to be A Idiot? Of course — at least on Twitter, though not, apparently, on the ground or the water in Houston. Some entrepreneurial-success blogger from Godknowswhere dicksplained why red states are better at human decency than stinky leftists:

And A Idiot had Thoughts about how we don’t need Big Government, just neighbors in boats:

Yes, there were jerks. You’ll be delighted to know that while their sentiments got a few “likes,” they mostly elicited replies saying, in essence, either help or shut your piehole. Yr Wonkette doesn’t care who the Boat Heroes voted for — and we know for a fact a lot of them are #MAGA TRUMPs — we’re just glad they were there to help. And that the emergency services and FEMA will be there to help with stuff volunteers can’t do by themselves. It’s this social contract thing that we’re very big on. We really are all just a storm or an earthquake or, on a smaller scale, a car wreck or a job loss from disaster. And we help each other, even the people we yell at online sometimes. (OK, maybe we wouldn’t piss on Sebastian Gorka if he were on fire, but then again, we might.)

If you’re in a mood to help, we have a ton of links in our earlier Texas article. If you’re in an area affected by Hurricane Harvey and you know of someone needing help, the Cajun Navy is urging people to download the Zello Walkie Talkie app (Android link / iPhone link) and type “texas search and rescue” to find the nearest helpers. They really are everywhere.

Yr Wonkette is supported by reader contributions. After you’ve sent money to Texas, please click the “Donate” clicky. If it’s a choice, Texas needs it more today. Get back to us later.

[NOLA.com / LAT / ABC13.com / NPR]

The MTV Video Music Awards happened on Sunday night (they did) and no one made any bold fashion statements on the red carpet, but there were some pretty gowns, fresh suit twists and a lot of gladiator getups.

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Fug Nation Australia: report back!

The cookbook we're most excited about in 2017 is "Cheers to the Publican: Repast and Present." [ more › ]

Denver police launched an investigation this week after a video from a high school cheerleading practice surfaced that the superintendent called "extremely distressing."

A Democratic lawmaker went right up to the governor at a press conference asking if he would apologize. [ more › ]

A haunted house attraction has sprung up in Hollywood, taking visitors inside a recreation of scary world of Stephen King's "IT" - based on the new movie.

Can you recycle aluminum foil? The short answer is yes; the long answer is maybe. The biggest barrier to recycling aluminum foil is not what it's made of — because the material itself is 100 percent recyclable — it's that your foil is usually covered in food.

Historically, recycling processing centers have not been able to recycle products mixed with organic material (read: caked-on lasagna, oil splatters, and cupcake icing) because it would be too cost-intensive to clean stuff off before starting the recycling process. So for a long time you weren't allowed to put your foil in with your aluminum cans, even though it's made of the same thing and just as recyclable.

But there's new news! As we've all become more interested in living greener, recycling processes have evolved to the point where many recycling facilities are taking used aluminum foil in your regular curbside recycling bin!

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Lorde tweeted that she is "gutted" after Lollapalooza promoters canceled her Thursday show due to a weather emergency in Chicago. The festival also canceled headlining sets by Muse, Lil Uzi Vert and Porter Robinson. "This is the

This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Lorde 'Gutted' After Lollapalooza Cancels Headliner Sets

Under Armour on Amazon, 10-for-$35 undies at Aerie, discounted shorts from Urban Outfitters, and more lead Thursday’s best lifestyle deals.

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There is no bullshit with this product, so let’s just get straight to the point: the Ta-Ta Towel is a towel you sling around your breasts while you’re getting ready so you don’t accumulate sweat underneath them before you put on your clothes. Genius.

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You can get Best Buy products, Snapchat Spectacles and Instagram likes from a vending machine these days. You can even get a car. Now, Uniqlo wants to add its clothing to the myriad of items you can snag from a machine. The retailer is planning to in...

Sam Clovis, President Donald Trump's nominee to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist, maintained a now-defunct blog for years in which he accused progressives of "enslaving" minorities, called black leaders "race traders," and labeled former President Barack Obama a "Maoist" with "communist" roots.

Have we reached peak everything bagel spice yet? I don't think so. The flavorful seasoning blend — a mixture of poppy seeds, toasted sesame seeds, dried garlic, dried onion, and coarse salt — is great on bagels, of course, but it also has way more potential. This chicken proves it.

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Amazon has traditionally stuck to buying and producing films, relying on indie film studios to distribute its flicks to cinemas. However, its next big release will see the retail giant's burgeoning production arm move one step closer to becoming a fu...

When you’re, say, reading a book about politics, and suddenly interrupted by a man who “hasn’t read that one” but would like to supplement your reading with all of the information he’s heard related to it–maybe this was last week, and maybe this was a book about Russia (okay, this is a specific scenario)–do as Maxine…

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