America Is Freezing Cold, So Al Gore's An Idiot. Again.

• Hooray! It's that time of year when it's freezing cold, and everyone who Is Not A Scientist but is pretty damned sure real scientists must be wrong about global warming makes "jokes" about global warming because, duh, it is cold so how could the planet be warm? Like Rep. Vicky Hartzler, who earned herself her very own Washington Post explanation about How Does Global Warming Work Anyway, Huh?

   
   For those like Hartzler, here's some more, uh, fuel for their fire: It was super frickin' freezing cold in America on Tuesday:

  The Lower 48 shivered this morning in a November cold snap unrivaled in several decades. The average temperature over the contiguous U.S. fell to a frigid 19.4 degrees F. at 7 a.m. according to a dataset used by forecasters.

  All 50 U.S. states, including Hawaii, recorded a low temperature at or below 32 degrees.

  It was even cold in Hawaii! See? There's no global warming because it was cold in Hawaii. Take that, "scientists." Take that, "Al" "Gore." Take that, dumb liberals who keep linking to that one episode of Neil de Grasse Tyson on the beach with his dog, explaining the difference between "climate" and "weather." If we're really supposed to be so worried about irrevocable damage to this one planet we live on, then explain snow. And Hawaii! You can't!

  Yeah, expect more of the same old same old about how winter proves there's nothing to worry about. 'Tis the season.

• Our friends at Happy Nice Time People have the latest Bill Cosby news for you:

  Unfunny rape stories keep forcing their way into the newsfeed like they’re Bill Cosby’s penis.

  The latest: At least 10% of people both BELIEVE the accusations but have NOT LOWERED their opinion of the aging comedy icon/alleged rapist.

  What the fuck, people?

  According to a survey commissioned by Variety, 59% of respondents said they believe the women are telling the truth that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them. And yet, 51% said their opinion of him is unchanged.

  But wait, there's even more latest news than that. Go check out the whole piece to get yourselves up to date.

•  Did Jesus have a wife? 

  Jesus’s bachelorhood is almost taken for granted today. In the Catholic tradition, his single status forms the basis for the theological argument that priests cannot marry. Those making this argument point to a simple, undeniable fact: the New Testament contains no mention at all of Jesus’s having been married.

  That’s true as far as it goes. But as the Gospels present it, the biography of Jesus contains a gaping hole. None of the stories produced about him in the first century A.D.—stories with at least some potential to be accurate—tells us anything at all about his adolescence or 20s. During this time, was he employed, shy, heartbroken? Married or single? We have no way of knowing. [...]

  Indeed, in the scholarly world of ancient history and ancient texts, little is truly unimaginable—because so little, in the end, is truly known. Despite the piles of evidence suggesting that the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is a forgery, there remains the possibility, however slim, that it is authentic. So the question becomes this: How much historical reconstruction are scholars willing to stake on such narrow grounds? Or, alternatively: Even if the fragment were proved beyond a doubt to be authentic, could one small piece of papyrus really be so important as to fundamentally change our understanding of the past?

•  Sooo this:  

  

• If you are a woman of a certain age, who was once a little girl at a certain time, you might relate to this:  

  When I was growing up my childhood devotion was split between two women: Princess Leia and Laura Ingalls.

  At first glance these may seem like divergent idols: One a fictional, intergalactic princess, the other a real-life 19th century pioneer girl. But to my mind they were two sides of the same coin, sharing the most important qualities a woman could possess: fierce independence, a deep sense of adventure, and really fantastic hair. [...]

  I think it’s safe to say that while my love of Princess Leia may have been on the more extreme side it was not all that unusual for girls my age at the time. And as far as girlhood obsessions that turn into grown-up life lessons go it was hard to beat: Take charge, be brave, be loyal, have nice hair, and strangle to death the monster who forces you to wear an inappropriate bikini.

  Go read the whole thing. Then read it again. It's that great.

• The evolution of emojis explained:  

  Consider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your ­computer keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde comes from Spanish, and in modern English it’s used to indicate “approximately” (e.g., ~30 years) or “equivalence” (x ~ y) in mathematics. And, as of this year, according to a breakdown of the website emojitracker by Luminoso, a text-­analytics company, the tilde was surpassed in usage on Twitter by the emoji symbol for “joy.” [...]

  All of which is to say: The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man With Twirled Mustache.

• You know you want to read about the humping of Larry King by a monkey named Pete. You're welcome.