"I can FINALLY share this!" she wrote. "This was 10 weeks ago when I was having my C-section. Dr. Sawyer broke my water and my daughter reached up out of my stomach and grabbed the doctor's finger and my hubby caught this special moment. Truly amazing."

It is indeed a special moment. In the black-and-white photo, you can see an attending hand pushing Atkins' belly up as a small hand reaches past an umbilical cord and around the wet finger of the delivery doctor. It's an arresting image, one that captures baby Neveah – that's "heaven" spelled backward -- at precisely the instant she made her Oct. 9 entrance into the world. Her first human touch.

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Shit Girls Say

It began as a Twitter feed in 2011, but it was in 2012 that Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey's devastating drag parody of feminine phrases truly took over the world. Though blowing the lid off the Twinsies!-peppered world of chick vernacular earned Sheppard and Humphrey their share of critics, it also inspired a treasure trove of witty imitations, notably Chesca Leigh's also-gone-viral Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls. It even went old school and became a book. Shut UP! 

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From the beginning, the Lifetime movie, casting reliable train wreck Lindsay Lohan as the scandalous Elizabeth Taylor in her Richard Burton–marrying heyday, was dubiously touted as LiLo's big comeback vehicle. That she had made it through the shooting of an entire project without getting fired seemed sufficient, in at least the minds of Lohan and her publicists, to signal a triumph, the beginning of Lohan being known again as an actress and not just that lady who keeps fighting with her parents and driving on sidewalks. Lifetime eagerly — and with all apparent seriousness — promoted Sunday's "world premiere event" with a heavy rotation of television ads and billboards featuring a violet-eyed Lohan groaning under the weight of the world's largest ring pop. Yet even when the early reviews faintly praised Lohan's "almost decent" performance and debated how calculated  its "pure genius … for belly laughs" was, who could have predicted it would become quite the glorious collective bonding moment it was?

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Yes, it was a prepared speech. And yes, the same morons who found it distasteful earlier this week when the president got choked up are even unhappier now that this – and I'm quoting a Chicago Tribune commenter here – "frickin' crybaby" is staying put in the White House. But plenty of others – like apparently every human being on my Twitter feed right now – saw that video as an affirmation of exactly whom we were voting for on Tuesday. It's a video of a leader with a heart.

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You know it the easily exploitable moment it happens. It's when Mitt Romney trains his cool cyborg eye on Jim Lehrer and says, "I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I like PBS. I love Big Bird." It's when Uncle Joe from Scranton cannot keep a straight face around the guy with the backward baseball cap. It's when a candidate declares his commitment to moving women forward in the workplace by stating, "We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.  I went to a number of women's groups and said, 'Could you help us find folks?' And they brought us whole binders full of women."

Binders full of women. Whaaaaaa?

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Shockingly, Livingston did not immediately look down at her own body, suddenly realize she is not built like Brooklyn Decker, issue an immediate apology to her viewers for having the gall to appear on television, and go into hiding pending the loss of a Kenneth W. Krause-approved number of pounds.

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It's the most attention-getting spot in Luvs' recent witty campaign on the triumph of the maternal experience, and a mainstream victory for nursing moms. Tied to a piece of Nielsen data that revealed that second-time mothers are more likely to buy the brand, the Luvs series features a quartet of evolutionary "first and second" baby experiences, including a horrified adventure in temperature-taking and a fumble through a public restroom diaper change. But it's the lady who transforms from the shy new mother hiding her baby under a blanket and gazing apologetically around the room into the confident veteran who can look at her infant and crack, "She's already ordered," while her toddler issues a "Got a problem with that?" stare who's the standout. Sure, that second-timers statistic may be a little skewed, but the other message — that breast-feeding should be no big thing — is rock solid. This week AdWeek praised the spot for its "humor, skill, and grace," while Jezebel declared it "pretty cool."

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Earlier this year, Nye reignited his feisty call for attention to climate change, including battling the CNN anchor, who dismissed him as "the kooky guy who doesn't know what he's talking about" by shrugging him off, saying, "Yeah, I can read graphs, and there's a couple of things you can't dispute." Back then he added, in a phrase that should be plastered in every newsroom and classroom and etched into every laptop and smartphone: "I appreciate that we want to show two sides of the stories — there's a tradition in journalism that goes back quite a ways, I guess — but the two sides aren't equal here."

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So let's give props to the Catholic priest Paul Kelly of Maryborough, Australia, who took a stand against -- and illuminated the horrific stupidity -- of one of his nation's most cruelly backward laws. As Kelly explains in the Change.org petition he started, "A loophole in Queensland law allows people accused of murder to defend themselves in court by claiming 'gay panic' -- that is, if someone who they think is gay 'comes onto' them, the sheer panic they feel is partial justification for murder." And you thought Stand Your Ground was dangerously insane? There are places in the world where the mere perception that someone of your own gender might be into you gives you the right to kill him or her.

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On Wednesday, our greatest foe in the war on "sissy pizza" answered your prayers and launched "a bold solution to the rampant ignorance being thrust upon the people of this nation by lazy and blatantly biased news media outlets." Welcome to CainTV, the Web network whose motto brags, "We are not stupid." And nothing says "We are not stupid" like a rant against billionaire "Warren Buffet" [sic]. I remember him. He's the guy who made his fortune in Sizzler sneeze guards, right?

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Perhaps the most positive thing about the campaign so far has been the swift and vocal outcry against it. The yay-science! clip features a trio of high-heeled, miniskirted sirens against a pink backdrop, smiling and laughing and tilting their heads adorably to images of test tubes and makeup brushes. The slogan? "Science: It's a Girl Thing!" The letter I in "science," by the way, is a tube of lipstick. Please, watch and enjoy. These women look so giddy, they belong in a tampon commercial.

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If you want to see everything you hate --  and then hate some more -- and then love about online culture, you can get it all in the tale of Karen Klein.

Klein is a bus monitor in the upstate New York town of Greece. As anyone who's ever been on one knows, school buses are a special circle of hell, with wheels. But when a video titled "Making the Bus Monitor Cry" emerged on YouTube this week, it was a particularly sickening display of schoolkid bullying. Over the course of 10 stomach-churning minutes, a group of students from Greece Athena Middle School verbally harass the 68-year-old Klein in a harrowing display of mob cruelty. It goes on and on and on, as the kids on Bus No. 784 call her a "troll," an "elephant" and a "fucking fatass" with "ugly-ass ears." When Klein tells them "Unless you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all," a boy responds, "Why don't you shut the fuck up?" When they goad her about the tears running down her face and she says, "I'm crying," one of them replies, "Yeah, you're probably missing your box of Twinkies." They poke and prod her, and at one point a kid says, "If I stabbed you in the stomach, my knife would go through you like butter." Appallingly, one of the boys told her that she's so ugly, her kids should commit suicide. What he didn't know was that Klein's son really did kill himself 10 years ago. And throughout it all, her tormenters just laugh and laugh at their own cruelty, egging each other on.

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It's no accident that the president's change of heart happened to make for a perfect sound bite. Nearly as fast as Barack Obama, leader of the free world, could utter the words "Same-sex couples should be able to get married," to ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts, @barackobama -- the president's not-nearly-as-popular-as@JustinBieber Twitter account -- was announcing "Same-sex couples should be able to get married." As of Thursday morning, it had been retweeted over 56,000 times and counting.

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The latest evidence? His encounter with 26-year-old Prince George's Community College student Stephon, who was born deaf. As Distriction reports, the president was appearing at an energy policy event with Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley when the young man got close enough to shake his hand. That's when Stephon told him in sign language, "I'm proud of you." And Obama smiled and signed back, "Thank you." Afterward, Stephon signed on YouTube that what transpired between them "was so amazing… I was just speechless."

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In a candid and wrenching plea on the eve of his 23rdbirthday last week, the Livermore, Calif., man did something extraordinary. He braved the mockery and opprobrium of the entire Internet in the calculated hope of "trying to go viral" and turn his life around. In a clip self-explanatorily called "Overweight guy asks for help," Gibbs explains, "I'm making this video because I don't know what else to do. I've tried losing weight on my own. Tried doing everything possible. Been on diets, been hospitalized. Always done what needed to be done at the time and then I'd just gain the weight back."

Gibbs' first wish -- to go viral -- has already come true. Within 24 hours, Gibbs' video had over 200,000 hits. It's now surged well past a million. And after Gibbs mentioned Dr. Phil in his video, the show reached out to him and is reportedly paying a visit to his home Wednesday.

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A deadpan new PSA for the FBI replays an iconic, oft-quoted '80s movie scene before trotting out none other than Michael Douglas himself to rail against it. "In the movie 'Wall Street,' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings," he says. "The movie was fiction, but the problem is real."

Douglas goes on to explain that "Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and the integrity of the financial markets," and, "If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is," before directing the viewer to contact the FBI for information on securities fraud.

Speaking in BusinessWeek this week, FBI Special Agent David Chaves revealed that the spot grew out of the FBI's desire to call attention to their Martha Stewart-sounding "Perfect Hedge" initiative, and to make clear that they still wear the pants, enforcement-wise. "At one point it was reported that the SEC was arresting people," Chaves said. "That's when I took the position that we need to be clear on what's going on." And who could the FBI recruit to hammer home the message? "I thought there was only one person to do it," said Chaves: the guy who played ultimate insider douchebag himself.

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The British company Punchdrunk's production is ostensibly the story of "Macbeth," though mixed with Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rebecca" and told in the form of an interactive maze that owes more to video games -- New York magazine compared the experience with "puzzle-horror first-person video games like BioShock" -- than Shakespeare.

Audiences form groups and are given "Eyes Wide Shut"-style masks as they enter the lounge area, which serves as the show's waiting room. They are told they aren't allowed to speak until they return to the lounge and also not to bother the actors -- but nothing else is off-limits. Then you are let loose in the hotel, where every room is decorated like a spread from "Nightmare Homes Monthly," and run into the "characters" (easy to spot because they aren't wearing masks). They perform their wordless scenes as they race from room to room. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fight (also a form of dancing, with some super-intense choreography). In one room, you might find a weeping woman looking at a photograph while packing a suitcase. In the basement, there's a dinner party where guests are either having a blood orgy or doing a sweeping waltz, depending when you arrive.

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From Martin's Livejournal:

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