The Emmy nominated and Golden Globe award-winning cast returns for the two-hour season premiere, with John Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, January Jones, John Slattery, Christina Hendricks, Justin Bieber, Taylor Lautner, Ricky Gervais, Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino, Sidney Poitier, Hulk Hogan, Joan Fonda as the ghost of Ida Blankenship, and Kim Kardashian as the kind and gentle king of the sea, Flipper. After the mid-trimesterly season finale, occurring approximately 17 minutes into the fourth episode so that cast, crew and caterers can re-re-renegotiate their contracts, the regular players will be joined by more than a smattering of zombies, muppets and teenage vampires. Look! It’s Lindsay Lohan! What’s she doing here? Hard to say. Read more at The Huffington Post.

Isn’t it wonderful how we’re friends! Save that you’re the friend who fetches tea, empties my chamber pot & bathes me. #DowntonAbbeyProblems

First cousins make for excellent bedfellows! (So long as there’s a sizable country estate in play.)#DowntonAbbeyProblems

Please feel free to call us by our given names, the Right Honourable Robert & Cora, Earl & Countess of Grantham. #DowntonAbbeyProblems

Ain’t no roses like the Dowager Countess’s Roses. #Fact #DowntonAbbeyProblems

Read more at The Huffington Post.

I. Background

Gender:
□ Male
□ Female
□ It’s complicated

Marital status:
□ Single
□ Married
□ Divorced
□ To be resolved during the course of the dinner

 Read more at The Huffington Post.

BROWNBERG: Welcome to Lightning Brunch, where we give you behind-the-scenes coverage and in-depth analysis of today’s financial headlines, mostly through the art of restating the obvious.

CHAVEZ: Aligning bad news with bad developments and good news with good developments.

BROWNBERG: All the while striving to ignore any nuance to the naturally reactive cycles of free-market economies, but always bearing in mind our ethical responsibility not to further exacerbate or in any way worsen the current financial predicament, especially through the shallow pursuit of hype or ratings, by willfully cultivating any sense of PANIIIIIIIIIIIIIC!!!!!!!!!! Read more at The Huffington Post.

A Brief Working Theory as to the Socio-Semiotic Lexicographic Post-Structuralist Aesthetic Paleographic Mechanisms of Twitter, afterWittgenstein. #Glee

1               Twitter is everything that is the case.
1.1           Twitter consists of tweets, which are general statuses of states of affairs.
1.2           The general status of everything is is that is the case.
1.21         The general status of everything is not wasor will be; there is limited past and no future to a tweet.
1.3           The status is the totality of the tweets.
1.4           The status is determined by the tweets, and by these being all of the tweets, though there are a few more coming through right now.
1.41         Would everyone please stop tweeting for a moment; I know that Glee is on, but I’m trying to have a rational thought here.

 Read more at The Huffington Post.

In our family, to think of Roger Federer as anything but the greatest player in the history of the game of tennis is nothing short of heresy; to extol his virtues would be like trying to fit one more angel on the head of a pin. And this was it, Federer versus Robin Soderling at the 2009 French Open, a historical event on par with witnessing Lord Nelson versus Napoleon at Trafalgar, Henry V versus Charles d’Albret at Agincourt. Now, Federer’s grail, his first win at the French Open, lay in sight, and with that victory, a chance at canonization like Saint Sampras before him. The red clay at Roland Garros never looked so promising.

And then, during the second set, with Soderling to serve, a man wearing a red shirt leaped from the bleachers and descended onto the court and ran up to Federer and put a hat on our hero’s head. My father was following the match on a very high definition television, a device which renders all sporting events and nature shows so immediate that fifteen minutes in, I get a headache and have to remove my glasses. Thus, I was in the next room, watching on a far less resolute screen, as security guards chased down the spectator. Then a more familiar disruption of play took place: The phone rang. After years of such calls, I already knew who it was, and already knew not to pick up the phone. Read more at The Huffington Post.

For those who are unaware of Rebecca Black (a doubtful prospect, indeed!) or her magnificent corpus of sheer Euterpean delight (i.e., her one and only song, “Friday”), she is a 13-year-old native of Anaheim, California, a middle-school student, who, on a shoestring budget, recorded a music video that quickly went viral, though deeming the whole phenomenon “viral” would understate the gravity and reach of viruses — with 167,000,000 YouTube views (at least 4,000 of them being mine), more people have watched Ms. Black’s video than died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Read more at The Huffington Post.

An Open Letter from Colonel Gaddafi to the American People.

Text Martin Marks  Illustration Brian Fee

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To the Good Citizens of the United States of America,

Over the past several days, I’ve taken time out of what has proven to be an increasingly hectic, NATO-warplane-filled schedule to address my people as to the geo-political benefits of serving as human shields, and to write your Congress a heartfelt little thank-you note for their continued support. But, over the weekend, I realized something quite shocking.  It has been a long time since you and I last spoke! An inexcusably long time! For this, I must apologize. You must trust me when I say that it is quite a challenge to run a modern democracy—there are so many elaborate costumes!

Now, you might be a teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy bit angry at me. A lot of things have happened over the years, things that might be termed by some as being—how to put this?—“explosive” in nature, and perhaps—though nothing can be proven—originating from our country, kept happening. Please know that the people responsible for these deeds—certainly not anyone that we know—will most assuredly and decisively be punished, if they haven’t been already, which, undoubtedly, they already have. Read more at The Huffington Post.