If you were fooled by this...

These women better know that human males have got it like that. Gorrillas are ones who got it bad.

They seem terribly concerned for the health and safety of their child—but only after the washing machine starts. (Via The New Civil Rights Movement.)

The woman, 26-year-old Estrella Carrera, was found at her home in a suburb of Chicago, dead in her bathtub. Carrera was reportedly stabbed to death, still wearing a sequined dress she likely wore to her own wedding reception. Her husband of just hours, Arnoldo Jimenez, is now being hunted by more than 30 law enforcement agencies... Carerra's two children, aged 2 and 9, were staying with her father while she celebrated her wedding. Her body was found after she failed to pick up her kids on Sunday, and her relatives became concerned. Jimenez is the father of her two-year-old son.

A Florida mother who fatally shot her four children before killing herself Tuesday called three of the kids who had sought help from a neighbor back to the house before firing the fatal shots, authorities said.... Three of the children had gone to a neighbor's front door before dawn to say their mother had shot them. The mother then called the children back to the house and killed them.

Yesterday Obama said that listening to his kids talk about their friends with same-sex parents helped bring him around on the issue of marriage equality. Parenting expert Bristol Palin weighs in:

While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that—as great as her friends may be—we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home.

Studies don't show that kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Studies show that kids generally do better growing up in two-parent homes—you know, the kind of home that Bristol Palin isn't providing for her child.

The insect nipple.

A Strongsville man walked into a restaurant Thursday night and shot to death his wife and a daughter, who was celebrating her 10th birthday, police Chief Scott Mielke said Friday morning. A second daughter was injured in the attack, but survived.

She says...

On a recent flight to New York, I was delighted when a stewardess came over and gave me a bottle of champagne.
‘This is from the captain — he wants to welcome you on board and hopes you have a great flight today,’ she explained.
You’re probably thinking ‘what a lovely surprise’. But while it was lovely, it wasn’t a surprise. At least, not for me.

Throughout my adult life, I’ve regularly had bottles of bubbly or wine sent to my restaurant table by men I don’t know. Once, a well-dressed chap bought my train ticket when I was standing behind him in the queue, while there was another occasion when a charming gentleman paid my fare as I stepped out of a cab in Paris.
Another time, as I was walking through London’s Portobello Road market, I was tapped on the shoulder and presented with a beautiful bunch of flowers. Even bar tenders frequently shoo my credit card away when I try to settle my bill.

And whenever I’ve asked what I’ve done to deserve such treatment, the donors of these gifts have always said the same thing: my pleasing appearance and pretty smile made their day.

Yes, I got this from you, Fnarf.

This is one of them. I will not say what I was looking for when the image appeared on my screen.

When Michael Lajun Green met up with his ex-girlfriend—and the mother of his two young children—at a room in the Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City, they were attempting to reconcile after a period of discord and estrangement, Los Angeles police said. But early Monday, the couple began to argue. The confrontation turned physical, investigators said, and shortly before 5 a.m. Green pulled out a handgun and shot his ex-girlfriend in the head before fleeing with the children.

• Kelly O

The first installment of Sherman Alexie's new column begins:

I thought the Bar Method, an upscale exercise gym, was doomed to failure because I never saw anybody exercising. But recently, predawn, I walked past the place and through the large picture windows saw a couple dozen women lying on the floor violently thrusting their pelvises into the air.

Continue reading >>

Nine-year-old Savannah Hardin is dead because she wanted a chocolate bar.

A Madison man and his wife have been arrested for allegedly torturing and starving the man's 15-year-old daughter, who told authorities she was forced to live in the basement of their home on the city's Southeast Side for years. The girl, who weighs about 70 pounds, told authorities she was forced to drink her urine and eat her feces, according to a police affidavit.... [The] girl was forced to spend most of her time in the basement without a bathroom and was given little to eat, and an alarm would sound if she went upstairs. According to the affidavit, Drabek-Chritton was home-schooling the girl.

Yesterday in Pierce County:

The 2-year-old mystery surrounding the disappearance of Susan Powell might forever lack answers after police said her long-investigated husband, Josh Powell, set his house on fire Sunday afternoon, killing himself and his two young boys moments after a caseworker brought them for a supervised visitation.... Three bodies, believed to be those of Powell and his sons, Charlie, 7, and Braden, 5, were found in the same room in the house, authorities said.

Santorum in January:

For the second time in as many days, Rick Santorum waded into the issue of gay marriage, suggesting it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent. Citing the work of one anti-poverty expert, Santorum said, "He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives." At a private boarding school Friday, the Republican presidential candidate's voice grew emotional as he argued that only a man and woman should be able to marry... [Three] students in the audience had gay parents.

Thank goodness those boys had a father. Lesbian moms—or lesbian foster parents—would've been tragic.

In fact, I believe it was still illegal for gay couples to adopt back when this straight 48-year-old millionaire adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend:

The multimillionaire trust-fund heir adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend Heather Laruso Hutchins last fall, after being accused of drunk driving in a 2010 accident that left 23-year-old Scott Wilson dead. Goodman is being sued by Wilson’s parents for wrongful death. According to police reports, Goodman ran a stop sign on February 10, 2010 in Wellington, Florida and smashed into Wilson, sending his car into a canal.

Scott Wilson, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Central Florida, was killed in 2010
Circuit Judge Glenn Kelly had previously ruled that the trust funds set up for his two biological children were off-limits in the lawsuit, according to the Palm Beach Post. Court papers show that Goodman adopted Ms Hutchins in October of last year, CBS12.com reported. ‘My reaction was that it was both awful and brilliant,’ Belray Beach adoption attorney Charlotte Danciu told CBS12.com. The adoption papers state that Hutchins, now a legal child of Goodman, is immediately entitled to at least a third of his trust.

Is incest against the law in Florida? (Thanks to Slog tipper Tim.)

It was the French philosopher Foucault who noted that the West as a whole didn't have something like the ars erotica of the Near and Far East...

• The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by Hosukai

For my readers...

Mitt Romney:

Because every child deserves a mother and a father, we step forward by recognizing that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Illinois:

Fiedler walked out of her home and saw her next-door neighbor Sara McMeen standing over a baby on the ground. “I asked her, ‘Is everything all right?’” Fiedler recalled Saturday. “She said: ‘No, everything is not all right.’” Then McMeen did the unthinkable, Fiedler said. “She put the gun to the baby and she shot it.” Those chilling details echoed through the quiet streets of a rural community 90 miles southwest of Chicago that woke up Saturday still grappling with the aftermath of what police said was a murder-suicide the day before that left five people dead. McMeen, 30, was killed. So was her boyfriend, Daniel Warren, 29, and their daughter Maggie Warren, 10 months. McMeen’s other two children Skyler Lemke, 8, and Ian Lemke, 7, were also dead, according to Livingston County Coroner Michael Burke.

This image was fabricated by a Parisian ad agency, Fred & Farid, for the purpose of marketing Wrangler jeans.

Here is the video for the ad campaign...

Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian — of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? — men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.