Blago on tape, considering taking Obama’s Senate seat himself: “Now is the time to put my fucking children and my wife first for a change… I fucking busted my ass … I gave your fucking baby health care… What do I get for that? Only 13 percent of you think I’m doing a good job, so fuck all of you.” [Chicago Sun-Times, via Political Wire]

“San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country’s first ban on the sale of all pets except fish. That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.” [SFGate]

“Look out, Washington, because there’s a whole stampede of Pink Elephants crossing the line.”

Your United States Geek Squad Cyber Command has unveiled a new logo, and embedded in one of its golden rings is a tired Gandalf reference secret code you’re invited to decipher:

9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

This is usually the moment where we sit back and, between earthquakes that annoy the shit out of us when we’re trying to master embedding a WebView in a navigation-bar iPhone app so we can display styled text in the damn window, let our mind roam over the universe of whimsically amusing responses, selecting ten candidates to keep you company until we wake up and discover what crazy shit Michael Steele said today.

Only Wired’s commenters already grabbed all the good ones. So we’ll just steal theirs.

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It’s not quite tentacle porn, but as predicted by Paul the Psychic German Octopus, Spain beat Germany in today’s World Cup action.

So your team just lost the quarterfinal of the World Cup, what do you do?

If you’re German midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger (say that one three times fast), you cry, then like a man, dry your tears and take off your shirt to win Stinque’s World Cup Hottie of the Day award!

The tears:

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Our own Miss Expatria has a new gig: she’s writing the WhyGo France Travel Guide for BootsnAll and is now the editor of Travel News Daily, which they’re calling “crack for travel addicts.” Fear her.

While we’re all having fun with Sharron Angle pretending that she doesn’t endorse Social Security privatization, let’s see what the grownups are thinking:

Is there a new, bipartisan consensus forming on Capitol Hill about whether (and how) to scale back Social Security benefits? A surprising number of signs point to “yes” — and that has many progressives looking ahead a few months to what they believe could become a serious fight.

And who’s sharpening their knives?

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