* First, completely on the serious, pause a moment in memory of Andrea Collins Smith, who documented her struggle with inflammatory breast cancer on PunkRockMommy until she passed away Saturday. She is survived by her husband, Kelly, six children, and everyone who spent time on her site and came away staggered by her grace and candor. Peace and prayers to her family. [Photo by JackHag66]
* Back during the long, Parliament-smoked dream that was the 1990s, there was a skate and surf shop on 
Route 70 in Cherry Hill called Failure. I remember having a great conversation with the owner, who was a kid about my own age, about why he'd picked the name and what it means to own your own shortcomings and how maybe the only way to prevent bad luck from getting to you is to call it out first.
If performance purge is your thing, prepare to throw it down at Fail Camp, an upcoming all-day session being put on by the Independents Hall shared workspace. Personal failures, professional missteps, bad choices in general -- they "want your fail." Like all your hopes and dreams, it goes down on July 26. Get the info here.
* It's hard to decide who comes off looking worse in the whole Lizz Winstead vs. Moe and Tracie thing. Is it Winstead, who sounded like a finger-wagging old lady (she actually wrote "Their work on Jezebel has made them role models for young women everywhere"), or Moe and Tracie, who just seemed unbearably childish and disappointing?
Though I guess that's the point here. Winstead came to the conversation expecting the Jezebels to confirm every bit of last-century truth in re: sex and rape (casual sex is always dangerous, rape is always as cut-and-dry as "no means no"). Except Moe and Tracie's experiences don't seem to be bearing out those assumptions. Moe could have had a rational discussion about the whole "gray rape" thing, about which she's written intelligently and engagingly on the Jezebel. Instead she just kind of sounded like a drunk. Everyone involved failed, as Jezebel editrix Anna Holmes observed today.
* Finally, I will resist the urge to make the obvious stimulate-my-economy-baby joke here and simply tell you straight: The online porn industry is reporting a jump in memberships coinciding with the arrival of the first batches of Bush Bribe checks. [NYPost] Makes sense, if you think about it. Gas is expensive, people are cranky, nobody's got money to go out anyway . . . though I thought the whole point of the Internet was so people could look at free porn? (Hat tip, TaxGirl)
