You’re forgiven if you haven’t been following The Great Flash War, which pits Apple’s iGadgets against Adobe’s porn-enabling browser software. Flash, which brings you most of the intrusive advertising you’ve come to love about the Internet, has been missing from the iPhone and its progeny from the start.

Actually, it’s been missing from every other phone as well. But that’s another story.

The deal here is that Apple doesn’t want Flash getting between your fingers and its lovable smudgable glass screens. Android has invited Flash to its party, but Adobe’s showing up fashionably late to that one.

It’s all been very entertaining, if you’re the type who’s entertained by such things. And like all good Geek Religious Wars, it’s been entirely pointless: Folks will vote with their wallets. End of story.

Or so we thought.

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No Town Car or Crown Vic? N.Y. Streets Won’t Be the Same [NYT]

• The pig head is being dry-cleaned.
• Mutant Centaur.
• Lost directions to Equus LARP party.

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To be honest, we don’t trust Gawker Media these days. What began as a charming collection of rascals has evolved into a ravenous linkbait machine. Anything that appears in one of their blogs has to share the grain of salt we usually save for Politico: It may be true, but we’d feel more comfortable with a second source, from some joint that’s not hopelessly devoted to pageviews.

Most of the time we just ignore Gawker Media entirely — it’s been a long time since we frequented any of Nick Denton’s establishments. But sometimes they still cross our path, especially now that their posts are being syndicated elsewhere. (Is it really a wise use of TPM’s investment capital to run Gawker crap that sullies its growing reputation?) And they do show up on occasion in Memeorandum and its sister sites, the Google News of blogger chat.

Which is how we stumbled across Jezebel’s story on the Daily Show:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXmK28-3RMY

Being a Responsible Blogger, we’re supposed to have something Responsible to say about Stanley McChrystal’s meeting this morning with The President of These United States.

But reviewing the extant literature, it seems everybody else has already said it.

So, in lieu of yet another NSURLConnection gag a Responsible Overview of the Issues at stake, we present instead a singalong from a recent program featuring John Hodgman that we find appropriate to the occasion.

And if that’s not good enough for you, here’s a heartwarming story about a gentleman who was mauled by a bear. After he was struck by lightning.

Because while we may not be Responsible, we care.

Update: Damn, they yanked that video fast. Don’t tell Hodgman.

It looks like we won’t have Mike Lee to kick around after tonight, when he shames his fellow clones by going down in blazes in the Republican runoff for the Utah Senate nomination. Mike Lee’s last-minute flurry of emails to us Monday had the putrid smell of flop sweat, betraying the cardinal rule that Mike Lee Never Shows Fear. (Mike Lee smells bad enough in conventional circumstances, which is why there’s always a Cone of Distance surrounding him at movies.) Utah voters were also taken aback after the bombshell revelations that Mike Lee sponsored an East Coast horse race on Sunday and curses like a motherfucker on his blog.

Speaking from experience, we can honestly say that we wouldn’t trust Mike Lee to subclass an NSURLConnection. How can we trust him in the Senate?

Protest in Argentina [MSNBC, via PourMeCoffee]