So the people marketing the movie Independence Day: Resurgence, they decided to create a tube, Independence Day: My Street, "where one could enter their physical address and see their block pulverized by the U.S. Air Force and UFOs."

I am wondering just what sort of sad and serious self-loathing would possess a person, to want to watch their home be destroyed by terrestrial serial killers and alien marauders, when I encounter the next line: "The clever idea backfired when the media noticed that users would enter in the addresses where tragedies took place, i.e. Brussels Airport, Café Bonne Biere in Paris and 1 World Trade Center, the latter generating eerie images reminiscent of 9/11."

Something is wrong with the humans.

Like, there is this Sarah Shapiro person. For three years she worked for a thing called The Bachelor, which has apparently bestained the television for two decades now. In this show, "twenty-five women competed for one eligible man, and though the goal was a wedding, the approach was tawdry—an open bar insured that contestants were rarely sober, and the bachelor and his chosen mate spent the night in a suite outfitted with night-vision cameras."

Shapiro says her Bachelor producer duties involved coercing the contestants to "open up, and to give them terrible advice, and to deprive them of sleep."

To insure that intense emotions were captured on camera, she sometimes misled contestants who were about to be rejected. "The night they were going to get dumped, I would go to the hotel room where they were staying and say, 'I'm going to lose my job for telling you this, but he's going to pick you—he's going to propose,'" Shapiro said.

After the contestant left the set, disconsolate, Shapiro joined her in a limousine while the stereo played a song that the contestant had been primed to see as "'their song' for their love story with the Bachelor." Shapiro kept jalapenos or lemons hidden in her jacket pocket—dabbing something acidic in her eye allowed her to cry on cue, which helped elicit tears from the contestant. "I'd have arranged with the driver to have the song play just until I got a shot of her crying—then cut the music so I could start the interview," Shapiro explained.

In a recent profile, Shapiro is described, aptly, as "a feminist sadist, punishing her unenlightened sisters."

She was especially haunted by the memory of a lawyer who was rejected by Jesse Palmer, the Bachelor of Season 5. Shapiro was told to extract tears in an interview. "She wouldn't give me anything," Shapiro remembers. Her bosses were irritated, and the crew was going into overtime, but Shapiro says she "just couldn’t get her to crack." At 4 a.m., Shapiro got nasty: "I asked her, 'Do you think he dumped you because you are fat?' I knew she had food issues." The woman began crying and hyperventilating. "I made the cameras follow her to a minivan that was waiting to take her to the airport." The next day, the contestant called Shapiro and accused her of ruining her life.

Shapiro says, "I realized what I had just done, and looked at myself—I was wearing stretched-out size-16 Gap jeans, a puffy down jacket with streaks of nacho cheese and marshmallow goo, my hair was greasy, my skin was broken out, my walkie was hanging off my belt—and I just thought, Oh, my God, I'm a monster."

Today, the monster is making the big money. Shapiro sold to Lifetime a fictional knockoff of The Bachelor, called Unreal, in which she revisits the lives of the women she ruined. Season one; season two—now, a third season.

Then, of course, there is The Apprentice. This is the show billed as the "ultimate job interview" in the "ultimate jungle," where 15 to 18 people would each season compete for a job in one of The Hairball's companies. The "losers," they would be picked off, one by one—or, sometimes, if The Hairball was in a mood, in batches—all dispatched with The Hairball's signature "you're fired."

Anyone empathizing with the people fired, they would not watch the show more than once. Return viewers, then, they would be those that identified with The Hairball. That is, sadists.

Many sadists, they watch the television. Hunter S. Thompson, he identified this phenomena many years ago, in explaining the appeal of the televised Watergate hearings.

The tip of the iceberg began emerging about six months after Nixon took his second oath of office, when Senator Sam Ervin took his initially harmless-looking "Watergate Committee" act on national TV. It didn't catch on, at first; the networks were deluged with letters from angry housewives, cursing Ervin for depriving them of their daily soap operas—but after two or three weeks the Senate Watergate hearings were the hottest thing on television.

Here, by god, was a real soap opera: tragedy, treachery, weird humor and the constant suspense of never knowing who was lying and who was telling the truth . . . . Which hardly mattered to the vast audience of political innocents who soon found themselves as hooked on the all-day hearings as they'd previously been on the soaps and the quiz shows. Even Hollywood scriptwriters and apolitical actors were fascinated by the dramatic pace and structure of the hearings.

The massive complexities of the evidence, the raw drama of the daily confrontations and the deceptively elfin humor of "Senator Sam" came together in a multileveled plot that offered something to almost everybody—from bleeding hearts and Perry Mason fans to S&M freaks and the millions of closet Hell's Angels whose sole interest in watching the hearings was the spectacle of seeing once-powerful men brought weeping to their knees.

Around the time of those hearings, Samuel Alito, he joined a group of wealthy Princeton graduates known as the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), which worked to prevent women and un-white people from attending the university.

"People nowadays just don't seem to know their place," read one article wept by these worthies. "Everywhere one turns, blacks and Hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and Hispanic. The physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports. And homosexuals are demanding the government vouchsafe them the right to bear children."

Yesterday Alito read from the Supreme Court bench his 50-page dissent in Fisher v. University of Texas, wherein the majority, on very narrow grounds, concluded that, sometimes, and pursuant to the Equal Protection Clause, "affirmative action" programs are permissible. Alito, he thundered that the majority had engaged in "affirmative action gone wild."

Alito was a racist back in 1972, when he joined CAP, and he's a racist now; everyone knows this; and this dissent proves it. Because what's interesting about the Fisher case—filed on behalf of a butt-hurt white girl, Abigail Fisher—is that some 47 students were admitted to the university with lower test scores or grades than she. But her lawyer, Edward Blum, whose career is devoted to pursuing cases that would prevent un-white people from getting jobs, going to school, or securing political representation, he did not challenge the admission of the 42 white students admitted ahead of Fisher. Only the admission of the five un-white people.

Fisher's argument was narrowly that she should have been admitted instead of one of those students of color. It was the case that collapsed any distinction between opposing affirmative action and demanding that white people be given preference.

But, even though this ruling is really narrow and does little to truly increase diversity at universities, Justice Samuel Alito issued a lengthy, blistering dissent that accused the school of paying "little attention to anything other than the number of minority students on its campus and in its classrooms."

It's an argument that depends on wholly ignoring the 42 out of 47 students that are white that got in despite having lower grades than Fisher's. Like Fisher and Blum, Alito simply assumes that the white students have merit and the students of color do not.

Alito also dissented in the other case to yesterday come out of the hideous lone-star sand wallow, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. Because women have no right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. That is a decision to be made by men. Like him.

Alito, he is hardly the only y-chrome bedeviled by the uppityness of the wimmins. For, as there float wisps of the idea that the Democrats may not only run for the president The Mad Bomber, but also for the vice-president Elizabeth "Republicans Are Good For The Markets" Warren, some of the men, they are getting the panty-twist, about how "the country isn't ready," for "two women."

First there was Democratic Senator Jon Tester. "I don't know. Is the country ready for two women? I don't know," fretted he. Next up: Democratic Congressmember John Lewis. "I'm not sure the country can take two women," he glummed. "I'm just not sure."

Tester, I'm not sure what his problem is. Except he is out in Montana. And I'm not certain women have arrived there yet.

As for Lewis, well, he may be past his sell-by date. People, like the food in the supermarkets, they have sell-by dates. And, once past them, they can get kind of gamey. The foods in the supermarkets, they don't really notice it, that they are starting to get soft and mushy, gray, a little rank. And neither do the humans. Notice it. Which can be kind of sad. When you're a human. Oozing past the sell-by date. And you're out in the public.

Gay Talese, he recently had a sell-by-date problem, out in the public. Asked at a Boston University appearance what women writers had inspired him, he said "none."

Now, this may be true. But if, at 84 years old, Talese had not passed his sell-by date, he certainly wouldn't have publicly said it.

Anyway. After the Tester emission, but before the Lewis one, Hadley Freeman, she wrote a fun little piece, about the Horror and Terror of two women running on the same ticket.

People-by-which-I-mean-men have been making rules about what ladies can't do since they realised women could literally create life while they were sitting in the corner of a cave scratching their balls. Even aside from little things like voting—women weren't given equal voting rights until 1928, presumably out of concern they would rub their boobs all over the ballots—women were banned from ski jumping in the Olympics until 2014. Yes, as in two years ago.

"Don't forget, it's like jumping down from, let's say, about two metres on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view," Gian Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation, explained in 2005, and you can't deny he had a point. We ladies know our uteruses get in a right sulk when we jump around and are only mollified if we watch Sex And The City and buy at least three pairs of shoes.

Concern about women's reproductive organs has long been the excuse for banning women from all manner of things, from marathons to pole vaulting, by men who apparently don't realise that they have internal organs, too. This kind of essentialist biological baloney is frowned upon today. But honestly, I might prefer it to what has taken its place.

Now, when people say, "But can a woman do x, y, z,", they don't mean, "Can a woman physically do this without stabbing herself in the ovaries?" They mean, "Can I bear to watch a woman do this without my testes crawling back up inside my body?" No longer do we have the polite pretence of concern for a woman's physical wellbeing; we just have straight-up, unapologetic misogyny. When anyone says, "Can we have a two-woman ticket for the US presidency?" they're saying, "We all know that the thought of two women in the highest office of power will cause a lot of people to throw up all over themselves. So let's not hurt their ickle feelings by suggesting it, 'kay?"

Some men in China, they have simply given up on the wimmins, and are instead having life-sized dolls.

An increasing number of singletons in China are choosing to opt for silicone over flesh as they enter into loving relationships with life-sized dolls.

With over 50 kinds of realistic dolls now on the market, the realistic toys differ depending on what the customer is looking for—different figures, eye and hair colours, and even different skin textures.

Buyers of the dolls are predominately male and some have even fallen in love with their dolls, giving them names, personalities and "souls" to match.

Zhang Fan, 36, who works as a stock broker in the Chinese capital, is another doll owner who claims his plastic friend is not just a toy or any random woman, but is in fact the female version of himself.

However, Zhang's parents are still urging him to marry a real person and they are only allowing him to play with it as much as he likes if he promises to find a nice girl and eventually settle down.

But he doesn't want the responsibilities that come with marriage—like buying a house or raising a child—and instead plans to spend his life with his doll.

Finally, if all this sort of thing compels you to reach for the Medicine, know that you are not alone. Some chimps, it seems, they are known to tosspot.

A drunken troop of booze-loving chimps has been discovered by scientists.

Researchers found a group in West Africa that spends their day drinking fermented sap from raffia palms.

And the primates are so keen on the alcohol—or ethanol—that they have developed "leaf sponge" tools to get it out.

The academics, from Oxford Brookes University, witnessed "all age and sex classes" downing the wine, with some consuming "significant quantities".

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbEOhD4dy-E]