“This is, how you say, my quorum medal.”

Nobel Prize for Literature No One Reads Not Awarded

Award-Winning Non-Statement:

The Swedish Academy has decided to postpone the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the intention of awarding it in 2019. According to the Swedish Foundations Act, the Nobel Foundation is ultimately responsible for fulfilling the intentions in the will of Alfred Nobel. During the past several weeks, we have pursued a continuous dialogue with the Swedish Academy, and we support Thursday’s decision.

In principle, the Nobel Prize shall be awarded every year, but decisions on Nobel Prizes have been postponed on a number of occasions during the history of the prizes. One of the circumstances that may justify an exception is when a situation in a prize-awarding institution arises that is so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.

The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize. Their decision underscores the seriousness of the situation and will help safeguard the long-term reputation of the Nobel Prize. None of this impacts the awarding of the 2018 Nobel Prizes in other prize categories.

Wait… What happened? Oh…

Swedish Nobel Academy confirms ‘unacceptable behavior’

The controversy which has continued for months surrounding the Swedish Academy “seriously damaged” the reputation of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the prestigious body announced in a statement on Friday.

The scandal started with 18 women publicly accusing well-known photographer Jean-Claude Arnault of sexual misconduct last November. The French-born Arnault is married to a Swedish Academy member Katarina Frostenson and the duo wields significant influence in Sweden’s art world.

The women claimed Arnault assaulted or raped them. The accusations, which cover the period between 1996 and 2017, were published in Sweden’s reputable Dagens Nyheter newspaper in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Also, according to the paper, Arnault bullied his victims into silence by threatening to use his contacts with the Academy and other influential people to “blacklist” them.

So the Nobel Prize for Literature is not being awarded because the husband of a member of the Academy who decided the recipient of the award is Chester the Molester. The scandal has resulted in a lack of a quorum. Quorum. Quorum is a funny word to say.

The world will bravely have to face an entire year without knowing the next Svetlana Alexievich or J. M. G. Le Clézio lurking in our midst.


Police Use Stun Gun On Man Attempting To Have Sex With Car

A Kansas man attempting to insert his penis into the tailpipe of a car had to be subdued with a stun gun after refusing to listen to police.

“We were called to the 1200 block of East Broadway to a report of a naked male underneath a car,” said Lt. Scott Powell of the Newton (Kansas) Police Department. “.. He was attempting to stick his penis into the tailpipe of the vehicle.”

The suspect did not respond to officer commands and officers used a stun gun to subdue him, the Newton Kansan reported.

Powell said the man was intoxicated to the point of being incoherent.

Police submitted a report to city prosecutors recommending a misdemeanor charge of lewd and lascivious behavior, the Associated Press reported.

So many jokes. Joke overload! ARGH! GET AWAY FROM MY MOTHER!

My Mother the Car is an American fantasy sitcom which aired for a single season on NBC between September 14, 1965, and April 5, 1966. A total of 30 episodes were produced by United Artists Television.

Critics and adult viewers generally panned the show, often savagely. In 2002, TV Guide proclaimed it to be the second-worst of all time, behind The Jerry Springer Show.

The show follows the exploits of attorney David Crabtree (played by Jerry Van Dyke), who, while shopping at a used car lot for a station wagon to serve as a second family car, instead purchases a dilapidated 1928 Porter touring car. Crabtree hears the car call his name in a woman’s voice. The car turns out to be the reincarnation of his deceased mother, Gladys (voiced by Ann Sothern). She talks (only to Crabtree) through the car’s radio: the dial light flashes in synchronization with “Mother’s” voice. In an effort to get his family to accept the old, tired car, Crabtree brings it to a custom body shop for a full restoration. The car is coveted by a fanatical collector named Captain Manzini (Avery Schreiber), but Crabtree purchases and restores the car before Manzini can acquire it.


Video shows man on South China beach walking off with dolphin

Authorities in China are searching for a man who was seen on a South China beach walking away with a dolphin draped over his shoulder on Tuesday, video footage shows.

A tourist who allegedly caught a dolphin and took it away from Hailing Island in Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, on May 1 will face punishment, Legal Evening News reported.

The beach is located on Hailing Island, a popular tourist destination off the coast of China’s Guangdong province, 150 miles south of Hong Kong.

A local marine patrol, cited by the British paper The Sun, said witnesses saw the man walk up to the dolphin after it beached itself. But rather than push it back into the water, the man left with the animal, the official said.

Sex? Food? Sex, then food? Food, then sex? Is he going to stick the dolphin in the tailpipe of a car? Is the dolphin going to get the Nobel Prize for Literature?


TRIGGER WARNING: GAWKER

‘Unfuckable’ Women Don’t Go on Killing Sprees, They Just Become Internet Journalists

When I was in high school, I felt completely undateable. Everyone around me seemed to be pairing off, falling in love, and racking up sexual milestones while I was still, as the song says, “sweet 16 and never been kissed.” And I felt awful about it. I fumed with anger over the unfairness of it all, writing shitty poetry deriding other girls for being the recipients of the attention and affection I felt sure I deserved.

So when I read 22-year-old Elliot Rodger’s extensive manifesto about his own dating woes 15 years after I’d graduated high school, I felt a flicker of recognition. I, too, knew what it was like to feel an extreme sense of loneliness and self-loathing curdle into rage, to feel like you were being unjustly denied access to the romance, sex, and companionship you so obviously were entitled to.

Yet it’s unlikely that Rodger would have ever seen me as a kindred spirit. For Rodger, whose treatise went viral after he went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, in the spring of 2014, women like me couldn’t possibly understand his pain. To the contrary, we were the source of it. “The ultimate evil behind sexuality is the human female,” Rodger’s manifesto declares towards the end. “They are the main instigators of sex. They control which men get it and which men don’t”—and, in Rodger’s view, never have to deal with the pain of denial themselves.

Central conceit of the story: Women don’t blame men for finding them unattractive like those darn incels do.

Basic summary of comments: Women blaming men for finding them unattractive just like those darn incels do.


via jesse.in.mb… Bonus Jezebel Link!

I Drove Myself Nuts Trying to Unravel the Mystery of Seemingly Unparented 9-Year-Old Instagram Shit-Talker Lil Tay

Social media stardom is a brutal Darwinistic competition, a craven and utterly shameless battle for space on our screens and in our brains carried out by a phalanx of influencers, thinkfluencers, beauty vloggers, charlatans, health quacks, spiritual phonies, and unhinged vegans. Recently, Lil Tay entered into this fray. Tay is—as far as we know—a 9-year-old girl, an ostensible recording artist, the self-described “youngest flexer in the game,” a possessor of some truly above-grade-level curse words, and the cause of my near-breakdown as I’ve tried to determine just who the hell put her up to this.

In the past few weeks, I embarked on a soul-pulverizing journey through Lil Tay’s social media channels, where I became convinced that she’s being put in front of the camera and in potentially dangerous situations by people who aren’t looking out for her best interests. After watching some of those videos, agape, several times, I set out to determine who exactly was shaping Lil Tay’s online persona and driving her dubious form of stardom, and, in the process, maybe learn something about the nature of social media fame. I also just desperately wanted to know where her fucking parents are.

Lil Tay has claimed that she was “poor AF,” three years ago, when she was 6, writing in one Instagram caption, “USE BE LIVIN IN THE HOOD IN ATLANTA BROKE ASF 3 YEARS AGO AND IM GONNA TELL YALL RIGHT NOW YOU YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH YOUR DREAMS IF YOU WORK HARD!” In another video, she smokes a breadstick [emp mine] and tells her viewers that she’s “richer than all y’all brokeass haters” and has five houses.

“I’m a nine year old millionaire and I be smokin’ dope,” she concludes.

I know we love to make fun of Anna Merlan, but this is actually a very interesting piece about a deeply weird artifact barfed up by the Internet.