MONDAY, AUGUST 7 This week of seized substances, icky allegations, and gloriously foiled terror plots kicks off today with a veritable Molotov cocktail hurled at the contentious cultural monolith of MTV, courtesy of pop scholar/effective intellectual Stanley Crouch. Editorializing for the New York Daily News, Crouch began by crediting the 25th-anniversary-celebrating entertainment network with everything from revolutionizing the worlds of music and film to advancing humanity's ability to perceive images quickly. (Plus, The Real World did more for the natural and expected inclusion of gays in everyday life than 1,001 pride marches.) But such triumphs rise above vast pools of waste, including, as Crouch put it, MTV's countless hours of broadcasting "the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, dope dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism, and anarchic gang violence [are] broadcast around the world as 'real' black culture." Crouch knows the network's hardly the sole culprit, blasting both the "gold-toothed knuckleheads and mindless hussies" who make bank peddling these pornographic fantasies to MTV, as well as the "far too many black people" obsessed with celebrity and ready to interpret "illiteracy and rule-of-thumb stupidity as a 'cultural' rejection of white middle-class norms." Crouch closes his righteous grousing with a challenge to MTV's Christina Norman, "the president of the network—and a black woman," who finds herself in the surreal position of defending Where My Dogs At?, the MTV comedy featuring "a cartoon figure strongly resembling Snoop Dogg" and two black women on leashes, who crawl around on all fours and eventually defecate on the floor; the show aired at 12:30 on a Saturday afternoon. "We can be sure that Christina Norman will have a simplemindedly liberal justification for the material, but I doubt that [protestors] will want to hear it," writes Crouch. "Nor will the millions of black women who oppose this kind of material and are beginning to rise into the sorts of positions that will make them an influential special-interest group. I don't know how long it will take, but change is on the way."

TUESDAY, AUGUST 8 Speaking of pop-culture inspiring change, or at least action: Today brings news of a study conducted by the Pittsburgh-based think tank the Rand Corporation, where researchers determined that teenagers who listen to music with sexually explicit lyrics begin having sex earlier than those who don't. The specifics are icky: According to the UK's Guardian, researchers conducted extensive phone interviews with 1,461 adolescents, all between the ages of 12 and 17, the majority of them virgins when the study began. Over a half-decade of interviews, researchers found that those kids who listened to music with "sexually degrading" lyrics—casting men as "sex-driven studs" and women as eternal prey—are almost twice as likely to start fucking for real within the next two years than those teens who listen to little or no sexually explicit music. Granted, the connection between pop lyrics and pop culture is well-documented; the year the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" was a hit, walking like an Egyptian went up 7,500 percent. Still, it's a goof to attribute something as fundamental as adolescent horniness to pop songs—but does that hold when the pop songs in question ruthlessly champion adolescent sexuality as the ideal? "It may be that girls who are repeatedly exposed to these messages expect to take a submissive role in their sexual relationships and to be treated with disrespect by their partners," said study author Steve Martino.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9 Speaking of social downers: Today brought Washington State's first big pot bust of "the season," alternately specified as "the pot season" and "the marijuana raid season" by the Associated Press. The scene: The upper end of a remote canyon about 15 miles north of Waterville, Washington, home to a quarter-mile stretch of marijuana plants, irrigated by a makeshift reservoir built nearby. The seizure: After spotting the plants during a yearly county flyover in a National Guard helicopter, Douglas County sheriff's deputies uprooted the goods, which measured one to three feet in height and most certainly would've made many people very happy and a few people flush with money. Despite the massive seizure, no arrests have been made. Pot-growing/pot-seizing season continues through October.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10 Today the western world awoke to learn of a horrifying international terror plot expertly avoided. Details on the events of 8/10—the date of an alleged dry run for a synchronized attack that would find suicide bombers blowing up 10 commercial flights crossing the Atlantic—come from all over. "Terrorists planned to concoct an 'explosive cocktail' using MP3 players and sports drinks," said CNN; "[t]he potential weapons would be assembled onboard and ignited in an attempt to kill hundreds in one strike," added ABC News. Today's terrifying new villain: acetone peroxide, AKA the "Mother of Satan," a liquid explosive would-be terrorists may have smuggled on board in the bottom of a drink container. The top of the bottle, ABC reports, would contain the original beverage, thus allowing terrorists to drink from the bottle if questioned by security; meanwhile, a co-conspirator on the flight would bring the detonator—in this case, the filament in a disposable camera's flashbulb. Liquid explosives with flash-bulb fuses are a legitimately terrifying prospect—good work, terrorists!—so thank God for the British and Pakistani intelligence agents who engineered today's masterful foiling of what could have been a nearly unprecedented nightmare. Keep up the good work, we beg you.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 11 The week continues with the Cops-worthy saga that unfurled early this morning in Seattle's Central District. Details come from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which reports the shit went down at a house at the corner of 20th Avenue East and East Columbia Street, where a 20-year-old former resident of the home got into an argument with a current resident over the possession of an Xbox. Before long, the Xbox was hurled out the window into the front yard, the aforementioned residents "engaged in a physical fight," and the 20-year-old former resident fled—after which police believe he set fire to the back porch of the home, with the alleged arson ravaging the home in its entirety. Firemen responded just after midnight, no one was hurt, and police are conducting an arson investigation.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 The week continues with the awfully creepy story of alleged sexual assault and "koochie kissin'" out of Beaumont, Texas, where a ninth-grade coach and an adult former student stand accused of operating an underage sex ring out of Ozen High School. According to the [Beaumont] Examiner, coach Tommy Granger and former student Byron Bell "were involved with what was known as The 3K Club, which provided ninth- and tenth-grade girls to several athletes for sexual favors. The 3K Club is short for 'Koochie Kissing Klick.'" "Basically, what we believe happened was there was an organized sexual activity that occurred between Byron Bell, Tommy Granger, and the [14-year-old female] victim," said Detective Sergeant John Boles to the Examiner. Coach Granger has been indicted on charges of indecency with a child, former student Bell has been indicted on charges of sexual assault of a child, and Ozen High is presumably 3K free.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 13 Nothing happened today.

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