But people with metastatic cancer don't follow the tidy, cheerful narrative. They don't necessarily fit the inspirational survivor mold. And so they're ignored.

In the middle of her righteous New York Times Magazine story on breast cancer this past weekend, writer Peggy Orenstein dropped the bombshell statistic that "only an estimated 0.5 percent of all National Cancer Institute grants since 1972 focus on metastasis." As University of Kansas Cancer Center chairman Danny Welch explained to her, "A lot of people are under the notion that metastatic work is a waste of time." Orenstein went on to reveal that last year, for the first time in its history, the Komen Foundation featured a woman with Stage 4 cancer in its ads. And the author herself described meeting a different woman with metastatic breast cancer by admitting, "It isn't easy to face someone with metastatic disease," calling the woman's condition her own "worst fear."

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The story begins back in March, when Tyler, the Creator cheerfully announced on Twitter that "They Let My Stupid Ideas Come To Life, Thanks Dew!" He followed up by unleashing the first spot he directed – a surreal vision in which Errol Chatham finds himself distracted by a fellow restaurant patron – the "nasty," rampaging, Dew-chugging Felicia the Goat.

Now, in the third and newest spot, Felicia's terrified waitress, now bruised and hobbling on crutches, is led into a lineup at a police station. And there's the goat, flanked by a tough-looking group of young minority men. The white cop tells the blond lady to make an identification, but the goat ominously warns, "Ya better not snitch on a playa," because "snitches get stitches."

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In recent months, Yahoo has not won a reputation as the most family-friendly of organizations, in spite of its new CEO, Marissa Mayer. You may recall hearing a word or two about how everything in the world was going to be different henceforth for working parents back when Yahoo hired her last year, while she was still pregnant. Instead, Mayer made good on her vow to power through her own brief maternity leave like a character out of Monty Python, popping out a baby while never breaking stride. True to form, by November, she was confidently declaring, "The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be."

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The Hollands filed the suit against Cox Media, claiming "invasion of privacy, misappropriation of likeness, defamation and emotional distress" after the image of Adam, who was born with Down syndrome, began appearing as a punch line on various websites. Most notably, Cox's Florida radio station WHPT-FM's Cowhead Show reportedly altered the photo of Adam to make it appear he was holding a sign touting its "Retarded News."

The station's director has apologized, sort of, by issuing an email that says, "The segment 'Retarded News' is designed to highlight odd stories that are seemingly always in the news. Stories such as botched bank robberies and failed crimes. These stories are NOT about disabled individuals." I guess if you're using the image of someone with Down syndrome on your "Retarded News," but not actually talking about people with Down syndrome, he thinks it's somehow ok.

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Imagine he wanted – and legally had the right to be – that child's father. It's a very real scenario, all across America. But in one state, that may soon be changing.

As a riveting CNN story last summer, at the height of "legitimate rape" fever, illuminated, a stunning majority of states – 31 of them – offer some form of visitation and custody rights for men who impregnate their rape victims. And it's not just the threat of having to co-parent with one's assailant that's a nightmare for many victims -- it's the ugly opportunism it inspires. As attorney Shauna Prewitt, whose daughter was the product of a sexual assault, wrote back then, "When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child." A baby can become a bargaining chip.

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Silverman had been going through a period of intense personal stress lately – his death came just one day after he packed up his recently sold home. Just last month, he'd closed the shelter because he could no longer afford to maintain it. He had said he was struggling to keep up with his heat and grocery bills.

In his dogged efforts to help men and to raise public awareness, Silverman worked to remove the stigma that can often prevent men from speaking out because of pride and fear and misunderstanding. Yet where Silverman came up short was in perpetuating the Men's Rights movement's fiction that there's any gender equity as far as violence and victims. The Calgary Herald recalled, in its coverage of his death, Silverman's oft-repeated insistence that "men are about as likely as women to say they have been the victims of domestic abuse."

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I've tried to ignore it. I've tried not to say anything. Not just to you, today, but to lots of female celebrities, for years. I want to believe that if you were to go out and get a tattoo that said "I LOVE CHEESE" across your forehead, I would support your right to do whatever makes you happy. And as someone who keeps a stock of hair color in her closet in case there's ever a Feriapocalypse, and who doesn't own an item of makeup or moisturizer that doesn't boldly feature the word "youth" on the packaging, I'm not one to espouse growing older gracefully. I'd never sell anybody on the nobility of looking like you just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photograph.

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In the spot, hilariously titled "Pipe Job," a grim, middle-aged man is seen in his garage, methodically taping and running a pipe into his car. He then sits inside stoically, breathing deeply, his face a mask of weary woe. Cut to nightfall, and the man emerging from the garage very much alive. The tag line? "The new iX35 has 100 percent water emissions." Apparently someone thinks Hyundai's target demographic is the depressed, unsuccessfully suicidal car-buyer market. Way to own it!

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Yet reality is far more complicated than a jaunty ribbon on a lapel or the hopeful promise of "early detection." And the key to unlocking the secrets of a pernicious disease will not be found in a pink bottle of nail polish -- or even, very likely, in radical defensive surgery.

That point is well-illustrated in author Peggy Orenstein's blisteringly sensible cover story for the New York Times Magazine on "Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer." (It will appear in print this weekend, but is on the Times' site now.) Orenstein knows well the nightmare of breast cancer. She was diagnosed in 1996, at age 35. A decade and a half later, she was diagnosed again. And that span of time represents a massive shift in our cultural relationship with breast cancer – and a surprising new concern: what she calls "the dangers of overtreatment."

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Seems his fellow Republicans did not appreciate what Kush said on Twitter and Facebook regarding a 19-year-old female at the meeting, "Nice hat Working America chick but damn you are a radical bitch." Nor did it enjoy his remarks depicting the organization's state director Chelsey Evans as "Uh oh another Working America chick," or his observation that she had "nice boots…I know she makes more than min wage." And they definitely didn't find it too amusing when he declared that she "was hot enough to almost make me register democrat."

He's currently suspended, indefinitely, without pay.

"It was an ill-fated attempt at humor," Kush told Watchdog.org Wednesday. "Do I regret it? Yes … I absolutely crossed the line."

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We saw it in the epic bungling of mainstream media outlets like CNN and the New York Post. We saw it in the frenzy of Redditors and overeager tweeters. We saw it, most cruelly, in the story of a missing student, a young man whose body may have been pulled Tuesday night from the Providence harbor.

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But Armstrong has not been forgotten – especially by the U.S. government. On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a 28-page complaint against the man, detailing what USA Today plain-spokenly refers to as "several years of lying, cheating and manipulating" Uncle Sam during the six years he was sponsored by the Postal Service.

The suit claims "the USPS paid approximately $40 million to sponsor [Armstrong's] USPS cycling team from 1998 to 2004," a period Armstrong is charged with using "prohibited drugs" in violation of his contract. Under the False Claims Act, Armstrong could be held accountable for $100 million in damages. On the bright side, it looks like the government has come up with a plan to help the economy.

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We, by the way, are your teachers and employers and future employers and law enforcement officers. But don't take my word for it. Instead, learn from the shining examples of very dumb and very public behavior in just the last few days, and then henceforth, I beg you, pause for just a moment before opening your mouth or hitting the "send" button.

The most recent unfortunate victim of a yawning gap in internal filtering devices is the newly unemployed A.J. Clemente. For about five minutes this weekend, Clemente was a news anchor at KFYR-TV in North Dakota. But in an apparent case of nerves not seen since Albert Brooks perspired his way through the headlines in "Broadcast News," Clemente obliviously kicked off his debut performance by looking downcast and muttering a short string of obscenities. He would later chalk up the mini-meltdown to fear of flubbing the name of London marathon winner Tsegaye Kebede.

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That's the question that has set British gym shorts in a proverbial twist in recent weeks, after a man decided to sue London's Kentish Town Sports Centre for offering 442 hours a year for women-only hours.

Writing last week in the Daily Mail, patron Peter Lloyd explained his beef with the gym, noting that "they still charge them the same full-price membership fee as women, but refuse to offer the equivalent option of male-only sessions." Jezebel promptly labeled Lloyd a "jerk," who should "give us our 442 hours a year and stop crying." Wonkette, meanwhile, less charitably referred to him as a "Limey nutsack."

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The famously LGBT-averse organization has in recent months been taking awkward steps toward becoming more inclusive, thanks to a series of high-profile challenges and increasing pleas for greater tolerance within its ranks. In January, it announced it was "potentially discussing" changing its restrictions on gay members. Then, last month, it unveiled a new survey it's sending to its members that will feel them out on a few scenarios that "could happen if the Boy Scouts keeps or changes its policy" – scenarios that bear no small resemblance to recent high-profile stories involving gay Scouts and adult leaders who've been shut out because of their orientation. It was a peculiar move – one that had the appearance of progress but the suggestion that equality toward those oddly classified "open homosexuals" is something that can be dictated by the tastes of an organization's members.

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Palmer, whose online community is nothing if not robust and vocal, posted "A Poem for Dzhokhar" on Sunday. The poem, which takes its title from the first name of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, imagines the things a young man might not yet know: "you don’t know how to make something, but the instructions are on the internet/you don’t know how to make sense of this massive parade/you don’t know how to believe anyone anymore … you don’t know why you let that guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown." Underneath, she posted a link to the newly formed One Fund "to help the people most affected by the tragic events that occurred in Boston" -- noticeably right above a link to donate to "give me some help for the time and effort" of Palmer's own work.

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And the next day, the faculty shepherded the entire student body into the gym to cheer for the students to "Do your best" and sing, to the tune of "Ghostbusters," that they were "test crushers."

The rally may have been a well-intentioned attempt to defuse students' pre-test jitters. A school administrator later told me, "It wasn't to further promote testing. It was just about increasing confidence." Our principal echoed the sentiment, saying, "We did a very intense test prep this year. We recognize that our kids were saturated and starting to feel overload. The kids seemed like they needed the let loose." And, she noted, "The idea of bringing a group together to garner enthusiasm is something we do all the time."

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On Friday, the French Senate voted to approve same-sex marriage and adoption, a move that could bring about full change in the country as early as this summer (civil unions have been legal since 1999). France's justice minister Christiane Taubira, a vocal supporter of the measure, said Friday that the move would strengthen society "by granting the simple recognition of full citizenship to homosexual couples" and  "move our institutions towards ever more freedom, equality and personal respect." Yet conservatives in the French government vowed to continue to fight against the bill, declaring that "nothing is definitive and the debate continues."

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In an interview Friday on the "Today" show, Reece, who is married to surfing superstar Laird Hamilton, discussed her new book "My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper" and went at least a few shades of grey by declaring her submissiveness.

Reece, who was OF COURSE introduced as a "mother, model and former pro beach volleyball star" in that order, explains in the book, "to truly be feminine means being soft, receptive and – look out, here it comes – submissive."

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At issue were the lyrics to the new track "U.O.E.N.O." – in which Ross brags that "Put Molly all in her champagne. She ain't even know it. I took her home and I enjoy that. She ain't even know it." ("Molly" is slang for Ecstasy, non-partiers.)

The song has been scrutinized ever since writer Rosa Clemente noted the "problematic" line last month on her YouTube channel. Soon after, Ross told New Orleans radio station Q 93.3, "I would never use the term 'rape' in my records and as far as my camp … Nobody condones that. So I just wanted to reach out to all my queens that’s on my timeline, all the sexy ladies, the beautiful ladies that have been reaching out to me with the misunderstanding: We don’t condone rape, and I’m not with that. I want to make sure this is clear, that woman is the most precious gift known to man. It was a misunderstanding with a lyric, a misinterpretation where the term rape wasn't used."

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