BlackBook

Ever wonder how Ren & Stimpy got on the air? Why Sam always climbed through Clarissa's window? Who came up with the song "Killer Tofu" on Doug? Me too. And in the spirit of "ask, and you shall receive" is a new book full of all the golden answers to all your '90s-nostalgia questions: SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age. 

RIP, Margaret Thatcher, I guess. With the recent deaths of film critic Roger Ebert, designer Lily Pulitzer, and now Thather, this is about the damnedest Rule of Threes I've ever seen. Of course, it could be much worse, as a lot of people on Twitter are confusing the hashtag "#nowthatchersdead" to mean "now that Cher is dead." Easy mistake, I suppose, as there are a whopping thirteen people on Twitter who didn't even know who Margaret Thatcher was in the first place. Can you believe it? I suppose I should compile my "Best Tweets About the Falklands War" post soon. In other news, this is going to be a profoundly obnoxious week on the internet.
 

Bow-tie enthusiast and Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson stopped by Chicago yesterday to lend his support in the fight for same-sex marriage, the legislation for which may pass in the Illinois General Assembly before the session ends on June 9. Said Ferguson: "A lot of people who were not comfortable with marriage equality … turn on the television and see a show that has a lot of different families in it — and one of those families just happens to be gay. They’re realizing they have a great time watching the show, then they’re watching a gay couple that’s having a lot of the same problems and issues they have. They realize ‘Oh they’re not so different from me.’ And at that point, we’re in their living rooms." [Chicagoist]

Nothing has made me feel more ancient than the news this morning that some kids on the internet are mad at Azealia Banks and Rihanna. What did they do? Well, they both performed in front of green screen-projections of sea imagery (in the video for "Atlantis" and on SNL, respectively). Apparently, there's a whole world of people who are into that sort of thing. Naturally, they live in their underwater cave fantasy worlds, but mostly on Tumblr, where 90% of terrible things exist under the guise that it is "art" (or porn, I guess). 

Rainbow parties? Colored bracelets that indicate sex acts you'll perform? That's kid stuff. Get a load of what Life magazine found teen girls doing with their hair bows in 1944. These little tramps communicated all kinds of subversive sex messages with just a ribbon in their hair.

This is somewhat personal, because my dad was once an editor for Newsweek International and wrote an unforgettable cover story on the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. It’d be enough of an insult to his résumé that the magazine has been pared down to 14 pages of Tina Brown political slashfic, but the Tumblr incarnation of this sorry media outlet operates strictly beyond the pale.

When my beloved cat, Tex, died after I had left home and moved to a city several hundred miles away, my parents buried him in the backyard. I was very sad to be away from home during his final days—he'd lived a long thirteen years and, shockingly, weighed close to twenty pounds—and returning home for Christmas that year was strange, as I expected him to waddle around the corner of the kitchen counter as I lugged my suitcase in the front door. But I'm glad that my parents didn't stuff him and turn him into a helicopter, because that is straight-up batshit crazy. 

It's that time of year again when we start handing out awards and honors to famous people, sometimes only to make them more famous. And Bradley Cooper, who is quite handsome and, yes, sexy, was awarded for his looks and got the honor to grace the cover of People's annual Sexiest Man Alive issue. While that other popular hottie Ryan Gosling got an honorary mention in the issue (it also lauded Liam Hemsworth's jawline and the perpetually furrowed brow of Chris Evans, among others), Gosling's fans are pretty upset that he didn't get the title that went to Cooper.