MTV's Real World/Road Rules Challenge show, and its enduring popularity, is one of television's most damning indictments of American youth. For that reason I watch every week, disgusted—like eating a whole bag of Fritos and bitterly regretting it—while these drunken, bloated ex-Real World and Road Rules cast members booze and sloppily fuck and compete greedily for sweet, sweet cash. The whole thing is a complete mess. Literally! The cast and crew of the most recent iteration The Island, airing now (sigh), reportedly left behind tons of trash for the Panamanian locals to clean up:

The Atlantic has said it didn't vet Jill Greenberg's politics before hiring her to shoot John McCain. Even if it had known about her controversial anti-George Bush photographs, it wouldn't have cared, as a matter of policy. The policy may soon change: Greenberg is gloating she left McCain's eyes bloodshot and skin gnarly for the Atlantic's October cover. Worse, from the magazine's perspective, is that she tricked the Republican presidential nominee into standing over an unflattering strobe light, then posted the worst shots and Photoshops to her personal site:

AP science reporter Seth Borentstein has either been spending too much time cooped up in the lab, or he just has a thing for hurricanes. Per his report:

If you happen to be a commuter train driver, it's probably not a good idea to be texting with a teenager while you chug along. Lots of people might die.

With its crack team of arrows, Newsweek makes sense of this week's natural disaster for you. After the jump, the verdict. Ike=Fail. "Houston, you have a problem. And so might Bush/McCain. Will FEMA redeema?" What? Also, only the hurricane and the Department of the Interior get down arrows. Biden, the Clintons, Obama, Palin, McCain-even 9/11-get sideways arrows. And the arrows point both ways. It seems that if you can't make a judgment using simply an arrow, you're in trouble. Or maybe, the situation is too nuanced and varied to be summed up with an arrow. In which case, go back to words. The Economist doesn't use arrows. The Economist uses words. [Newsweek]

Why do we anthropomorphize the weather? The standard convention of naming large tropical storms began as way to simply keep track of multiple simultaneous events, but it also has the unusual side effect of allowing people to believe that the storm is literally out to get them. Hurricane Ike is currently "ravaging" South Texas with his "ferocious" winds and "roaring" floodwaters and will soon spread his "wrath" across the whole Gulf Coast. This time it's personal! Now we obviously don't want to make light of the situation the individual residents find themselves in, because it is personal for someone with a basement that is now underwater. But if you want to tell the human drama of natural disaster, is it really necessary to turn the low pressure system into a sentient being with a grudge? Hurricane Katrina Changed Everything, of course, but a little perspective on "catastrophic" storms might be in order. The death toll currently stands at three (one was a nursing home patient and an other a 10-year-old struck by a tree branch) but, sad as that is, it's still less than the death toll from that California train crash—another disaster that the cable news networks have all but ignored. Oh, and the big Galveston Hurricane of 1900? 8,000 dead and the town was nearly erased from the map. That rain cloud must have been pissed. [Check the local coverage from the Houston Chronicle.]

Apologies are in order to Charles Gibson, widely presumed to be too soft to credibly interview Sarah Palin. If anything, the ABC News anchor's first exchange with Palin, aired last night, is all the more embarrassing to Palin precisely because Gibson was hand-picked by her handlers. The Republican vice presidential nominee's awful performance is apparent enough from the transcript, which contains her horribly stilted answer to a question about Iran, invoking "nucular weapons... given to those hands of Ahmadinejad" and already compared to Miss South Carolina's famous thoughts on "the Iraq" at a teen beauty pageant. But things are even worse on video, as seen after the jump.

Hey internet trolls, troll-victims, and other people whose lives have been ruined by the buzzy, robotic forces of the internet! Would you like to go on television and share your woes with millions of Tyra Banks fans? If so, we have good news for you. Producers for the Tyra Banks Show, a talk show of sorts in which a thirty-something former model bellows about herself and her bowel movements for an hour, are looking for people to appear on an episode about the various wicked pitfalls of the web. "Have you or anyone you know had their life ruined because of the internet? Have something with blogs, myspace, facebook affected your entire life in a negative way? We want to hear your stories ASAP," the casting call pries. Yay! Now you can ruin your life all over again, in front of a larger audience! Here's hoping our dear old friend John Fitzgerald Page makes an appearance. Full casting notice is below.

At what point does empathy for elfin British pop singer Lily Allen begin to dry up? So far this year she's had a miscarriage, broke up with her lover and lost a contract to Agent Provocateur. Last night she got drunk at the GQ Men Of The Year awards, drunkenly told off her co-host Elton John, got in a big fight with her future sister in law and infuriated police by revealing details of a secret kidnapping. Fun to watch (click the video icon to do so), but telling Elton John "fuck off... I'm 40 years younger than you and have my whole life ahead of me: probably does not enhance Allen's chances of retaining her BBC Three show, which she still has not yet lost. Unfortunately, if Allen is on the typical cycle of starlet drunkenness, she has further to fall before the rehab and bounceback. [Daily Mail, Dan News]

Realizing that no Federal or local agency will be able to do much of anything when Hurricane Gustav reaches New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin has initiated the mandatory evacuation of half the city's coastal parishes today. And he when he says get out, he means it. There will be no emergency centers and the Superdome will not be a scene of mass chaos and tragedy this time around-because it's going to be closed. More on the evacuation, and video of Nagin's scary-ass warning, after the jump.

Poor Denise Richards. Her disastrous Hot Shots of a marriage to Charlie Sheen crumbled, her acting roles have become few and far between, and now her last-ditch E! reality show has been canceled. Richards cursed and filth-talked her way through the show, Denise Richards: It's Complicated, apparently not caring how she—a mother of two little girls—would come across to audiences. I, for one, thought it was funny, in a hair-pulling kind of way—but middle-America rarely agrees with me! Ratings started high enough, with 1.5million people tuning into the premiere, but it was down hill from there. As there really is little else in showbiz left for her to do (save for Dancing With the Stars, I guess) we suspect she'll soon be applying for her real estate license. You know if her teeny tiny divorce settlement nest egg disappears. Above is a clip of Denise getting pwned! by a tabloid editor, and here is another horrifying clip.

One good way to create a website is to pay a single agency just enough money to do the job, put them on a tight deadline, fact check the content, and then publish it. Easy! Many people who are incompetent in several vital areas of life-human interaction, for example-have nevertheless managed to start and run successful websites with few start up costs at all. But the nation of Italy decided, hey, why don't we do the opposite of all that, and see how much money we can burn through in pursuit of a conceptual online fiasco? So they did! Italy wanted to build a website to market the nation to prospective tourists. The cost so far: $66 million over five years. And it doesn't even exist yet! Among the problems: Too many cooks in the kitchen ("Several government ministries — in two administrations — and each of Italy's 20 regions were involved in creating the portal"), a product that went live in 2007 full of embarrassing errors, databases that weren't compatible with each other, and a logo purchased for $150,000 that was eventually discarded for sucking too much. A consultant tells the WSJ that the government could have had an agency complete the entire project by now for around 2% of what's been spent. Try Blogspot.com, yo. [WSJ]

Hey lesbos and bi-curious ladytypes! We have got the perfect girl for you. She fancies herself the bisexual Carrie Bradshaw! You see, she's short but head-turning, she goes to fancy parties, and she hates fat people! (And Latinos and people with children.) We're not exactly sure why she's chosen to look for a woman at this point rather than a fella, but she sent us an email of a post that she put up on internet carnival Craigslist so we've decided to help her out. It's hideous! You should totally read it after the jump. Good luck ladies!

"The scientists say that among other things, the Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones." [Live Science]

Oh this is a nice, heartwarming story. Miley Cyrus—schizophrenic "singer"/"actor," five-pack-a-day smoker, nude model—is selling tickets to her 16th birthday party for $250. [Us]

"The company didn't ship DVDs to any of its customers Tuesday, and hadn't made shipments as of midday Thursday, Mr. Swasey said. Netflix made only a partial shipment from about half of its 55 nationwide distribution centers on Wednesday." [WSJ]

It's been an awful week from Tom Cruise at the movie studio he nominally operates, United Artists. His inner circle is gone, including a president who left in mid-July, an executive vice president who was said Monday to have fled and Cruise's former agent, who was pushed out as CEO of the foundering studio Wednesday. Now, from the Post, comes word that Cruise himself is about to be "neutered" within United Artists by controlling partner MGM because he doesn't know what he's doing, a humiliating second defeat in the wake of his 2006 ejection from Paramount by Sumner Redstone. Add this to Cruise's other recent setbacks:

Do you know what time it is? Time for the final awful excerpts of hot lady-banging dude blogger Tucker Max's movie script, that's what time! In the first half of the film, we saw Tucker asserting his status as an alpha male; in the second half, he reveals his sensitive side. Below, the final three lowlights of I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell-embracing the themes of multiculturalism, midget sex, and, yes, diarrhea. We hope this doesn't spoil the movie for you: 4. Tucker's Friend Is Down With Mexicans, Mane:

Yesterday we put out a call for the viciously panned script of I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, the upcoming film written by I-totally-fucked-that-chick blogger Tucker Max. We immediately received about a dozen copies of the script, which is apparently being forwarded around Hollywood like a list of bad lawyer jokes. I also could have said "like herpes," and I could also follow up by joking that the script is about as funny as a bad lawyer with herpes, haha. Friends, it opens with Tucker Max fucking a deaf girl and screaming "DON'T TAZE ME, BRO!." It is that bad. After the jump, three of the most terrible moments from the film's first half. Jesus, bro:

Sometimes we come across a PR item so ignorant, misguided, and inexplicable that we just have to shake our heads back and forth and sigh in a dramatic manner. We have one such item right here. If you ran a newspaper that had been terribly embarrassed for treating a racist publicity stunt as front page news just weeks ago-so embarrassed, in fact, that the editor responsible was quietly fired-would you not, in the future, do everything possible to distance yourself from the bad designer who fooled you with with the stunt? Metro NY decided: instead of that, why don't we just sponsor this guy's next fashion show? The press release for the upcoming L.E.S. Fashion Flipside show is below. As you can see, Metro is listed as one of only two sponsors for the show. And [bad designer], last seen trying to sell a copy of his poetry book "America, My Whore" to a reporter from Jewish Week, is listed as the first name under "boutiques." Urgh: