It’s been a couple years since we frequented a Gawker Media blog. Back in the Golden Age, we were rabid followers of Gawker, Defamer, and Wonkette.

Or, more precisely: Jessica Coen, Mark Lisanti, and Ana Marie Cox.

They were witty companions throughout the day. They had distinctive voices.

We like distinctive voices. Might have something to do with radio, our first love. Seventies radio. Local radio, before stations got scooped up and homogenized by corporations.

But the voices left Gawker. They were replaced by other voices, some more companionable than others, and then, later, a lot more voices — a cacophony, really. Twelve posts a day, you can absorb. Beyond that, a blog becomes a newswire. If we want headlines, we’ll check Memeorandum.

So Gawker evolved away from our interest. And soon, it plans to evolve beyond blogging.

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• Splash Mountain Baptism
• Stone’s Throw Haunted Mansion of Sinners
• Enchanted Glossolalia Room

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A Fourth Amendment tee is an appropriate start, but if metallic-ink screen printing is readily available, we can probably come up with a couple dozen more nekkid-scanner-friendly designs. Give us a weekend to brainstorm.

And yes, they offer printed shorts, too.

4th Amendment Wear [via Weigel]

First the news, in case you missed it over the weekend. It was in the Times, so it must be Big:

PORTLAND, Ore. — A Somali-born teenager who thought he was detonating a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony downtown here was arrested by the authorities on Friday night after federal agents said that they had spent nearly six months setting up a sting operation.

The bomb, which was in a van parked off Pioneer Courthouse Square, was a fake — planted by F.B.I. agents as part of the elaborate sting — but “the threat was very real,” Arthur Balizan, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge in Oregon, said in a statement released by the Department of Justice. An estimated 10,000 people were at the ceremony on Friday night, the Portland police said.

Frightening stuff, as the FBI sez:

“Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” said Arthur Balizan, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon. “At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack.”

Whoa, hold on a sec: At every turn?

Perhaps — and we’re just spitballing here — from the very first turn?

As an Expat Oregonian — half our library is from Powell’s, just a few blocks from Pioneer Courthouse Square — we take more than a passing interest in this case. So let’s take a leisurely stroll through the indictment…

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• Babies make excellent hostages.
• Don’t feel guilty. Other shoppers don’t feel pain.
• Take the oldest car you can. When fighting for the last parking space, the other driver will have more to lose.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j1N3G37_SQ

The past few weeks have been intensely frustrating. Not because of the election — everybody saw that coming — but because of all the unsolicited misdiagnosed advice we’ve had to slog through since then.

It was the economy, stupid. It was always the economy. And it’ll still be the economy two years from now.

Unless, of course, it was the stories.

That’s the remedy a couple of pixel-pushers at HuffPo are hawking — Republicans tell better stories than Democrats:

Conservatives are the heroes of their own stories. Progressives need to internalize that same sense of pride in their efforts and then infuse their policy narratives with political champions.

Before we continue, let’s note for the record that “infuse their policy narratives” is a compelling example of shitty storytelling. In the movie version, the doctor would be smoking like a chimney in the examination room.

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