At the very least, that's what the headline would say if The Fluffington Post wrote it. But, to whit: today, Brian "Oh Fuck They Rehired Lawson" Moylan writes a post about how Four Square is one of the dumbest things on the planet and how its users are annoying jackasses.
And you know what? He's right! Four Square is Dungeons & Dragons-level idiotic, with rewards and competition that have no actual value except the kind of self-satisfaction one gets from being able to say they're a 33rd-level wizard with a douchebag of infinite holding. We wouldn't go as far as to say that the users are jackasses—more like all Four Square users are just bored. Or perhaps boring. Hard to decide.
However, Moylan's Gawker co-worker, video editor and Gawker.TV version of Nick Denton, uses Four Square. All the time. It shows up in Facebook feeds, so it must be true:
For sure, worse things have been said about Richard Blakeley, mostly by Get Off My Internets, but still, slagging off your own coworker by association when he sits two seats away from you at work?
Richard Lawson deftly refers to Marion Cotillard—the world's favorite French woman—as "a French swan turned into a human woman by a witch's spell." Gold.
It's arguable that Captain America—or rather, Captain America—is one of the reasons that '90s were a decade that personified the shitty comic book adaptation, and as it's been since Spider-Man and X-Men made the genre viable again, the new adaptation of the classic Marvel property is treading very softly to avoid any missteps. Like the Great Search For Anakin Skywalker Or At Least A Marionette With Blonde Hair, names have been flying around as being on the "short list" for the role for a while now, and everyone is weighing in on the rumors. And look, while we all are aware that John Krasinski plays one note extraordinarily well, it's probably a waste of time to spend 251 words going over why Krasinski is a bad choice based on a rumor that was updated an hour later with a completely different short list of candidates and has Krasinki going from "pretty much in the bag" to "no longer [being] on the list." It also probably doesn't make much sense to deride Krasinski as a choice for Captain America—a guy who has, historically, just been an avatar of democracy that spends most of his time in and out of costume pulverizing bad buys—because he lacks the depth required to play the part. This isn't Tony Stark we're talking about, it's not the overwrought and permanently beset Peter Parker, it's not even Bruce "The Juice Is Loose" Banner, for chrissakes. Captain America is the former captain of the high school football team who goes on to join the military to seek further muscle-related glory and ends up getting more performance-enhancing drugs than Mark McGwire's batting arm. Hell, Chris Pine might just be too versatile for the role.
And anyway, Marvel doesn't need a whole lot of help in the casting department, least of all from Gawker staffers. This is the company that okayed Kesley Grammer as The Beast—an astonishing choice that still mathematically makes no sense whatsoever—Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, Cliff Robertson as Uncle Ben, Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier, and on and on. Okay, okay, we're all agreed that Halle Berry wasn't exactly transcendent as Storm, but give Marvel their due: at least they didn't give her a superhero franchise of her own.
These are not the days of Dolph Lundgren's Punisher or The Flash as played by Dawson Leery's dad. Not only have the comic book companies become infinitely more savvy about the casting process and the business of making adaptations worth seeing, but their properties themselves are no longer the two-dimensional, "Hey, let's just put the wall of this building sideways and film Spidey walking across it with the camera turned ninety degrees" affairs. They attract enough star power and talent that Marvel and DC can have their pick of the litter. They're bound to fuck up on casting now and again, but you can rest easy that it won't be Captain America they play fast and loose with.
After positing that the Chilean earthquake shortened one of our Earth days (not to be confused with Earth Day) 1.26 microseconds, one has to consider that other earthquakes probably even out the effects. There was an earthquake in Haiti, then a small earthquake off the coast of Japan; an earthquake in Chile, then another in Taiwan. Forget trying to do the math on whether we've split the rotational difference between all of those earthquakes, though, because it's the end of the world anyway.
Update: Richard Lawson over at Gawker was apparently thinking the same thing and offers this link to expert seismologists saying it's just a coincidence. That's exactly what they always say in apocalyptic movies after the government finds out we're all inextricably fucked to our gills.