Good morning, survivors!

This morning, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick announced he would appoint William "Mo" Cowan as interim senator to fill newly appointed Secretary of State John Kerry's seat until a special election. Cowan was Gov. Patrick's chief of staff from January 2011 to November 2012; before that he served as Patrick's chief legal counsel.

Barney Frank, who literally retired from the House of Representatives yesterday, wants to be a Senator now.

Last week Murray Waas reported in the Boston Globe that as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney refused to change the state's birth certificate to acknowledge legal births to same-sex parents. Gay couples with children were to cross out "mother" or "father" on the forms and write themselves in, leaving their children's official documents permanently altered. Romney later explained the thinking behind the decision this way: "Some gays are actually having children born to them. It's not right on paper. It's not right in fact." Here's the video.

In August, Dean Weeks, a firefighter in Clinton, Massachusetts, was ordered to fix his ex-wife's dryer as part of his divorce settlement. But apparently, he was still having some issues with his ex, so he (allegedly) did the reasonable thing, which is: he booby trapped her dryer to explode the next time she used it.

The first Massachusetts resident in over a year to win the Mega Millions jackpot had another reason to smile: His girlfriend had just broken up with him.

Malia Obama turns 14 this Wednesday, and Barack Obama has declared a United States federal holiday to celebrate the occasion.

The southern Massachusetts town of Middleborough is so goddamn tired of people cursing in public that it is mulling the institution of a penalty for profanity a la Demolition Man.

A teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts gave what may be the most depressing commencement speech ever, reminding graduating seniors that they're not nearly as special as they think they are.

Back in the halycon days called "the 1990s," you could beat up a man, rip the expensive athletic shoes off his feet, and carry your lace-up trophies away without being caught. No iPhones, no problems. No more!

Any day when even a single second of new footage of Mitt Romney trying to interact with human beings hits YouTube is going to be a good day, and here we've got four whole uncut minutes of it! This is quite a score, comedy-wise.

Last night CBS News did a segment about Alex Morse, the newly-elected 22-year-old mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts. It's not only newsworthy that Morse is the country's youngest mayor, but also newsworthy that he's one of only a handful of openly gay mayors. So, why did they gloss over the second fact?

Are Republicans scared of Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, the Matriarch of Mayhem? No, not at all! That can't possibly be why Karl Rove is already spending his SuperPAC dollars to destroy her in the state's first major ad buy, before the Democratic primary's even been held.

Updated. Three hundred protesters marched through Cambridge, Massachusetts last night. Their goal: Occupying Harvard Yard. Arriving at the edge of campus, the protesters found the University's gates locked and guarded by a phalanx of campus police. Boston's CBS affiliate reports:

Just as Massachusetts Senate candidate and liberal deity Elizabeth Warren was getting into a meeting with volunteers in Brockton last night, a decidedly unfriendly heckler rose up and started hurling accusations — and what experts are calling a "gender-based epithet"!

Every autumn for the past three years the well-intentioned senior boys and girls at Quincy High School in Quincy, Massachusetts have gone around sticking dozens of cheap plastic flamingos in people's yards along with signs asking for $20 donations. They call their activity "flocking." It's a harmless alternative to flash-robbing and other popular teen pastimes.

"I was raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference," reads a message on Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's website. Weirdly, former North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole said the exact same thing in her Senate campaign announcement speech in 2002. Which leads us to wonder: Is Scott Brown Bob Dole's Wife?

Good news for disenchanted liberals who are resting their last electoral hopes on the Massachusetts Senate campaign of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren! She raised $3.15 million in her abbreviated third quarter, doubling Sen. Scott Brown's total.

The presumed Scott Brown-Elizabeth Warren matchup for Senate in Massachusetts is off to a very serious issues-related start, with each one joking about the other's history (or lack thereof) of posing naked in magazines.

Opening public meetings with a magic trick or two can help you engage with your audience and ease them into the seemingly endless boredom-torture to come—but use discretion! Tricks that involve disappearing coins are probably fine. Tricks that involve disappearing women's undergarments are probably... not fine?