Happy birthday, Kim Jong Eun! Did you know the new North Korean leader "learned to drive at age 3. By 8, he could safely maneuver dirt roads at 75 mph. As a teenager, he mastered four foreign languages. He is now learning three more." Click here to learn even more about the mythmaking meant to buttress Kim's claims to leadership.
Happy birthday, Blue Ivy Carter! Beyoncé has a baby girl. And it's real! No word on driving lessons yet. But Gwyneth Paltrow apparently has the propaganda apparatus well-covered.
Also! Happy birthday, this guy! And this guy!
Mitt Romney's upper lip remained handsomely stiff in a New Hampshire debate, even as all the other assorted kooks running for the Republican presidential nomination starting picking on him. His lead in the polls before the New Hampshire primary also remains rather turgid.
Remember when then-Senator Rick Santorum wanted to abolish the National Weather Service so he could help one of his big-dollar campaign contributors, AccuWeather?
Barack Obama recruits some muscle as he gets ready to battle Congress over military budget cuts and a new national defense strategy: the military itself. If congressional Republicans try to squeeze more cuts from the president, top generals are prepared to stub out cigars in their eyes.
And we'll still be the baddest mothers on the planet, even with a shrimpier military, top officials sweatily insist—on the same day reports surface that Iran is getting even better at enriching weapons-grade uranium and that they're playing ever more elaborate war games over a threatened closure of the Persian Gulf.
A statistical slapfight has emerged over whether the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, is really the historic defender of free speech that academics like to claim it is.
New Orleans OKs a curfew that will, basically, make sure poor black kids don't show up in the French Quarter after dinner and wind up bumming out horny tourists out to addle themselves with cheap liquor.
In a coincidence, Microsoft may have just the thing for tourists and others who want to avoid looking at people who are different—a GPS feature that will "avoid the ghetto." (Portlanders can use it to continue ignoring everyone who lives east of 82nd Avenue.)
Georgia isn't one of the few states left with Confederate symbols on their flags. (No, really. I checked.) But antebellum mathematics and problem-solving live on at one school district.
It's been a year since the Tucson shooting that nearly killed US Representative Gabby Giffords.
Um, wow. After four months, Washington, D.C., still has not one—but two—Occupy camps up-and-thriving. That's long enough for the Washington Post to start writing about how some occupiers are occupying some very special body parts.
"NOBODY EVER DIED OF STIFF SHORTS." THIS IS LIKE FRASIER AND M.A.S.H. AND JUST THE TEN OF US AND BLOSSOM AND TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT AND PORTLANDIA! VIOLENTLY MIXED UP IN HOLLYWOOD'S STOMACH AND THEN GENTLY EXPELLED. IS THERE A "PORTLAND HEIGHTS"?
