Over on Thought Catalogue, one man chronicles his quest to get DENIED a a medical marijuana card in the golden state.

Scientific American just wanted to let you know that online dating isn’t any better than offline dating and that furthermore you’ll probably die alone. Our advice: get a cat.

Feminism aside and all,“Thanks to Spanx” is enough of headline to be worth sharing.

So I quit the Boy Scouts after getting a lecture on the 10 Commandments and saying to myself “I’m the only one here who doesn’t smoke a ton of pot but I’m being chastised for saying ‘god dammit’?” This week marks the Scouts’ 102nd anniversary and Wired reprinted a really interesting article asking whether the Boy Scouts are still relevant. Religious (and potentially discriminatory viewpoints) aside, the values they promote are so backward that I can’t think of an organization more in need of a refresh.

• Don’t forget kids: foosball is the devil.
• It’s about time Lemmy got his very own Shiraz. I’m thinking he’ll stick with Jack though.
• You probably read about this at least a hundred times over the weekend via Facebook. If not though, you don’t need Forbes to tell you you’re unhappy. Either way: Miami has been named America’s Most Miserable City. Most of this seems to be related to the housing industry, which leads to …
• Hurricane Season and insurance and oh god why are we talking about this already! A bill to shrink the pool of homeowners covered by Citizens Property Insurance, supposedly the insurer of last resort, passed the House on Friday. Suddenly switching people from a state-backed insurance pool to unregulated insurance with inadequate notice sounds rather stupid yet TOTALLY the type of back-assward thing Florida would do.
• Cargo Pants are the zombies of the fashion world. The George Romero back from the dead lurking horror kind, not the 28 Days Later disease infected raging killer kind. While we’re at it, other zombie types you may be unaware of.
• Unpublished Coffee Table Books. I’m pretty sure I could write this one.
• Friend Ted started a podcast revolving around interviewing people with weird and/or interesting jobs. Give it a listen if you ever wondered what it was like to be a radio host in Wyoming or a Golf Ball Diver.

Via Waxy, a story about why one ten-year attendee is skipping SXSW this year. Considering the volume of boring newsfluff pouring out this year, I’m not in the least bit surprised.

“Yeah, if they take what I say seriously, they’ve got a real big problem.” Miss Piggy, a puppet, calls out Fox News as not being news, but the fact that she did so was not in fact news. In other non-news, my head hurts.

Former THL fave Chuck Klosterman turned a misinformed rant on an album into an incredibly stupid commentary on gender, prompting rebuttals all involving different varieties of the phrase “Old Man Yelling” to varying effect. However, Jen is the only one to connect the dots and realize that if Klosterman isn’t our generation’s Andy Rooney, he soon will be.

The best part about the SOPA blackouts? Watching people on Twitter flip the hell out.

Mid to late January is good for one thing only: waiting for February, which itself is only good for contemplating suicide. So here are some links to take your mind off the fact that you’re not being showered in gifts and egg nog at the present moment.

• Is it funny that I’m posting this on SOPA blackout day? I mean I think it’s funny that I’m posting this on SOPA blackout day. How to access Wikipedia on SOPA blackout day. Also: the R.I.A.A. is still staffed by total dicks (even when it isn’t SOPA blackout day).
• Fake product reviews are the glue that hold internet comedy together.
• Did not wearing a helmet save Gene Hackman’s life when he was hit by a car while cycling in Key West? Of course not, but assuming that helmets are the one-size-fits-all answer to bicycle safety only creates a false sense of security, argue the folks over at Lovely Bicycle.
• Between the Republican Primary catfights and football, there have been a lot of non-story stories going around. To that end: Tim Tebow exists, and people write godawful crap about him.
• Related, sort of not really: G.O.P.-Friendly Super PAC or Mary J. Blige Album?
• The Story of my Life, bro.
• Tax season is more or less upon us and yet again I seem to be the only person I know who actually does their own return. If you can add and you actually care about people, AARP is still accepting volunteer applications for their Tax-Aide program. I’ll be writing about my own experiences doing volunteer tax prep shortly.
• I’m going to go on record and say that the last Magnetic Fields albums was farcically disappointing. “Oh you people like goofy pop songs? Well here’s 30 minutes of overproduced chamber music. Hope you like harpsichords!” Anyway, people seem to have high hopes for the next album Love At The Bottom Of The Sea, the first single for which is streaming online now. It features guys in drag and is woefully short. Fun!
• In closing, someone needs to get Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd on the phone.

We love everything Bleeding Palm does over here at THL. We’re super creepy mega-fans, and that’s the honest truth. We like them better than we like ourselves. That is why I wrote up a post about their newest site on the Florida Turnpike for the Miami New Times. Make sure to click on it and poke around and appreciate Bleeding Palm’s sick mind(s).

The story of Pinochle written by KT Kieltyka for The Hairpin reminds me so much of my own delusional yet magic filled youth. I can’t even begin to tell you the things I believed for too long. I hope I have kids one day that trust the lies I tell them till they’re in middle school. Life’s too short. Enjoy.

The Miami New Times’ annual People Issue will probably be stacked in green metal boxes all over town by tomorrow, but today, it’s up online. Read about Jimbo Luznar of Jimbo’s, activist Vanessa Brito, and Oba Ernesto Pichardo. I mention them in particular because they’re interesting people, and, of course, because I wrote those. Enjoy!

If you watch just one minute of Patrick Swazye at a disco with a PBR today, make this that minute.

Hey everybody! Long time no see. I wanted to let you know about On The Fence, a podcast I’ve been doing for the past few weeks with Steve. Basically, we shoot the breeze about whatever’s going on in the world. Posted on Friday was yet another episode about the #Occupy movement, with Misael Soto on board for a first-person perspective. And there’s a new episode coming soon. As in tomorrow. Subscribe it in your iTunes, add it to your Google-plus-one, like it on Facebook, and retweet it to your followage.