The City of Detroit just wanted to hand out 5,000 applications for housing and bill payment aid to those at risk of homelessness, so of course chaos and violence erupted.

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer devoted a segment this morning to divining the numerological mystery that was—is?—Michael Jackson. His first and last names each have seven letters, for instance. And behold, people—"seven is, like, the number of G-d."

Run for your lives, Silicon Valley's terrifying nightlife is upon us! Any minute now, Twitter plans to start the party by assigning an extra-large numeric ID to a tweet, thus breaking various Twitter programs. Then Facebook makes its move.

A confluence of localvore do-gooderism and desperate poverty is transforming America's suburbs into a Third World hellscape, because otherwise-normal people are raising chickens in their backyards.

It's "funny/horrifying political photo funnies Friday" here at Gawker HQ! This is Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelwhatever wearing one of those popular "Snuggie" things.

Nobody lives in Detroit any more, and nobody reads print newspapers, so maybe it's not so bad that the few remaining Detroit residents can no longer get their awful papers delivered to their burned-out homes.

Yesterday we said the Democrats would not get to the magic 60 in the Senate, and we were right because then Jim Martin lost to Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Mos Eisley. But over in Minnesota, the recount is almost done. And comedian Al Franken might win.

The Department of Homeland Security is employing the cast of Sesame Street to indoctrinate America's littlest citizens in the nuances of societal distrust and paranoia. This makes sense because Sesame Street is a Leninist television program produced by the socialist government and dating back to the height of fiscal crisis brought about by the reckless expansion of the welfare state to whose beneficiaries Sesame Street was engineered to placate.And the Department of Homeland Security represents the biggest expansion of government since the New Deal!

Stock prices over the last year of Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

Weinstein Company head Harvey Weinstein is blogging away at Portfolio in a perfect storm of terrible news that we are required to cover. He is mad at you for going to Batman instead of some bullshit pretend indie he released to no acclaim. IT WON FOUR BAFTAS. The problem is the lying, biased media. "So, you see, its not that I'm not focusing on great independent films, it's just that no one is paying attention to them." So go see some weepie pretend indie and help Harvey Take Back the Multiplex! [Portfolio via NYO]

This is just like the other night when we flipped past ABC and Charlie Gibson said "up next, the robot revolution," which is a story we thought he probably should've led with. Anyway, monkeys finally control robots with their thoughts and mankind is basically defunct, now. [NYT, Drudge]

The world is running out of food! And not even fancy foods like heirloom cherry tomatoes or Sonic's deep-fried macaroni and cheese bites, but the basic boring foods that it seems like we should have plenty of, like rice. Rice! So Sam's Club, the warehouse division of Wal-Mart, is now "limiting sales of Jasmine, Basmati and long grain white rices." [Reuters]

Was this week a peek at a terrible future? A dreadful harbinger of things to come? Will all the weeks be like this from now on? Yeah, news-wise, it was slow, which is deadly for a blog like this, but it shouldn't have been slow. Two gubernatorial sex scandals! A heated election! A collapsing economy! Shouldn't it be crazy here? Maybe we're all too depressed to write about it! Look at Drudge. The image above has been on top of his site all day. He's talking about the presidential race, but everyone feels like that crying smiley face this week. Right? Let's take a look at the tape:

• Results 1 - 10 of about 128 for "blogger who came in from the cold". (0.36 seconds)
  

Yahoo! Food helps you adjust to the coming recession with this "dressed up" Ramen "recipe," a truly sad collection of words to end up in a sentence together. Next week: how to make a rucksack and the fine art of pencil sales! This will certainly come in handy for anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people in the next couple weeks. [Yahoo]

"Hillary sits down with 'Access Hollywood'"

Would you like to buy a life-like action figure modeled on popular internet-based "marketing guru" Seth Godin? Yes? Then please never, ever introduce yourself to us. [NerdApproved]

OIL HIT $100 A BARREL TODAY EVERYONE PANIC! It closed comfortably below that at $99.62, and adjusting for inflation it's not actually the highest it's ever been, but we're well on our way! Everyone invest in Flintstone cars. And Google. [NYT]

In response to the success of TMZ TV—it's the top-rated new syndicated show!—a reader asks:

The streets of the East Village are so very "I Am Legend" right now! It's like the rapture happened and only sleepy sinners are, at last, left behind! Hoorah. (This means: Cute dudes going to the deli in sweats.) This is a great preview of what New York's going to be in twenty years, after the mosquitos bring Chikungunya north from the tropics, like they did in Italy! End times! As my mother put it in an email yesterday: "WTF— it's 61 degrees there??" The Alaskan walruses are biting the hot dust! China's glaciers? Not so glacial. (Who knew China had glaciers?)