If there are better ways to spend a minute and a half on YouTube than listening to George Takei reading smutty literature, I'd like to hear them. But until then, I'll keep alternating between this and Gilbert Gottfried's enlightening narration of E.L. James's ode to rough sex.

Gawker posted a couple of strange stories today within two hours of each other, both tangentially related to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last Friday.

The first was a shootout over a misunderstanding while two people talked about the killings in Newtown, Conn.:

According to the Associated Press, a patron at the All Cuts Barber Shop in Wentzville, Mo. remarked Tuesday that he wanted to kill the suspect, Adam Lanza — who is already dead. Somehow, inexplicably, 57-year-old Lester Davis was offended and took the comment as a threat, asking, "You want to murder me?"

Police say Davis then went to his car, got a pistol and fired three shots at the unnamed customer. Fortunately no one was injured.

That's dumb, sure. But it doesn't hold a candle to the next item:

[A] Virginia man walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Strasburg this morning armed with a 2 x 4 labeled "High Powered Rifle," though the Shenandoah County Sheriff's Office believes he was trying to make a point about school security — or, rather, lack thereof.

Whatever his intentions, 33-year-old Christopher Johnson was immediately approached by a school employee upon entering the school that shares its name with the one in Connecticut that was targeted by a mass murderer last Friday.

According to Sheriff's Office rep Major Scott Proctor, the school's resource officer was on the scene within seconds and Johnson was arrested for disorderly conduct.

So that settles it: What little sanity we had prior to the tragedy at Sandy Hook has been thrown out the damn window. If this is our future, bring on the apocalypse already.

Somehow culinary-punching-bag Guy Fieri managed to sneak Indoor S'Mores Pizza past the disapproving eyes of most of the internet for almost an entire year. But Eater managed to discover the item's Sam's Club page, featuring a parade of comments from disappointed purchasers of the two pack of dessert pizzas.

My favorite, by user "NoellesMommy," who also provided the above photo:

I bought two packs (4 pizzas) for a church dinner. First of all, according to the package, you are supposed to place them directly on the rack in the oven to bake. Marshmellow melted and fell down into the bottom of both ovens and smoked the entire kitchen/dining room area up (not to mention made a HUGE mess in the oven). Then I tried to slice them with a pizza cutter and most of the topping came off while slicing. Finally, the taste was HORRIBLE! I would have never expected it to be spicy. These pizza's were a total disappointment!

Cons: quality, price, taste

I feel like NoellesMommy should have at least mentioned one pro- to the item — after all, everyone prefers criticism when accompanied with a compliment. Perhaps she should have mentioned that the pizzas are refreshingly free of "donkey sauce."

Investigative reporter John Dougherty's Cyanide Beach, a documentary on an Italian mine that's linked to the parent company that wants to open the Rosemont Mine, is now available for viewing on YouTube.

Okay, so they announced this, like, a month ago. THAT CHANGES NOTHING ABOUT OUR CULTURAL REACH. In fact, I'd argue that it makes us even greater trend setters as this idea had been kicked around that long.

From BetaBeat:

2012 was the year of the reaction GIF blog, where everyone from law students to editors filled Tumblrs with GIFs meant to capture (and laugh at) the human condition. Then came an avant-garde form of election coverage, where stables of live-GIFers fought with Photoshop to bring their devoted audiences the funniest, most compelling GIFs of the presidential candidates.

Now, the GIF has received the ultimate sign of zeitgeisty approval: “GIF” (the verb) is officially the Oxford American Dictionaries’ 2012 word of the year.

“GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun,” Katherine Martin, head of the US dictionaries program at Oxford said in a statement. “The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace.”

Spectacular. Remember, despite what any dictionaries or original creators of the GIF format say, the only pronunciation of "GIF" that won't get you made fun of is with a hard "g" sound, as in "graphic," not a soft "g" sound, as in "gin."

With so many new homes in Tucson and similar desert cities creating small loft apartments, patio homes and remodeled barrio homes, I thought it time to concentrate on how potted gardens fill the desire to have a garden - regardless of limited small outside spaces.

We are experiencing our cold December and therefore it is important to be mindful of the micro-climate of our home. Elevations, nearby washes, hardscape, and orientation of your home all contribute to this phenomenon. An inner city balcony might be warmer than the sidewalk entrance, depending on which side of the building it is on. Paying close attention to the differences around your home and in your neighborhood will help you develop a sense of what plants do well for you and what you need to protect in the event of a freeze or frost alert. You might want to pick up an outdoor thermometer that has one or two extra sensors where you can record daily high and low temperatures to see what the different temperatures are.

Tips for preventing frost damage:

* Water the plants well the morning before possible frost/freeze.
* Cover with frost cloth. Do not use plastic covers.
* Tie or fasten the bottom so that the air does not get under it. Use clothespins!
* Bring potted plants that are very tender close to protected walls, under balcony rooves,
in garages or inside if possible.
* Use Styrofoam cups on columnar cactus tips.

Have a question? Email Marylee

Sign up for our Potted E-Newstoday. Receive monthly potted garden information as well as SW Arizona freeze alerts, heat and wind advisories.

With the deadline (Dec. 21) fast approaching, now seems like a good time to get you folks caught up on Tucson Weekly's GIF contest, and what it's all about.

Animated GIFs have, as of late, entered a sort of renaissance period. They've been used lately to recap everything, from TV shows like The Walking Dead to the Olympics to the Presidential debates.

Now, we want to see the GIFs that capture the essence of Tucson. We want things that are funny, things that are beautiful and things that might be just a bit weird.

The deadline, as stated above, is Dec. 21. For full details, check out the contest page here.

Remember: WHEN YOU ENTER, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A LINK TO YOUR GIF. We can't give you a prize if there's no GIF to give prizes for.

Check out our previous GIF contest stories below for examples, descriptions, and the contest entry page.

So We're Having An Animated GIF Contest

Enter Our GIF Contest: We Literally Have a Stack of Gift Cards To Give Away

Show Us Your GIFs!: What We Want to See

Weekly Wide Web: Show Us Your GIFs!

"Show Us Tucson in GIF Form" Contest Entry Page

• facebook.com/pimacountyfair
• I would love to hear T-Pain do a solo rendition of "I'm On A Boat."

Today, the Pima County Fair Facebook page spent the last few hours asking what fairgoers wanted to hear this year in their Hip-Hop/R&B category (if we're nitpicking, and we are, those are not the same kind of music), and were treated to the kind of responses you'd expect to see when you crowdsource on social media:

On T-Pain:

"I had a great comment going and criticizing the support of what i call GHETTO GARBAGE music but twice today my screen blips and i lose my post but i don't give up easy. So yes, why the hell support this crap, at least bring in someone whose lyrics aren't FN THIS AND FN THAT every other line. Or go ahead and support the FU g eff generation and the disrespect thats consuming us."

I will not support talentless artists

Hollywood Undead

A MILLION TIMES YES

On Tyga:

The Center for Responsive Politics tries to untangle the web of campaign dollars related to Arizona's Center to Protect Patients Rights, which doled out $23.2 million dollars last year. The CPPR brought in more than $25 million from donors whose identities are shielded because the group is technically a nonprofit, not a political committee.

From the report:

All but one of CPPR's recipient groups are 501(c)(4) organizations under the tax code. Such groups are defined as "social welfare" organizations and aren't supposed to be primarily political. Many, however, laid out millions in the 2012 election cycle for various types of outside spending, freed to do so in part by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision.

The fact that the organizations don't have to disclose the names of their donors made them attractive repositories for contributions from individuals and corporations wanting to have an impact on the elections without having their roles known.

Among other groups given grants by CPPR, Free Enterprise America, which received the largest amount at $3.6 million, is also the most mysterious recipient. It doesn't appear to have a website, and little is known about it. Its address in Phoenix, however, is the same as that of DC London, a political consulting firm.

And another group, American Commitment, received a grant of $1.6 million from CPPR and paid out nearly $1.9 million in outside spending in 2012, much of it to support Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in his bid for an open Senate seat. Flake prevailed, getting about 50 percent of the vote. American Commitment's address in Washington is shared with a consulting firm called DC London.

DC London is run by Sean Noble, who happens to be on American Commitment's board — and is also the president and executive director of CPPR. In fact, DC London and another Noble consulting firm, Noble & Associates, were paid a total of $3.1 million by CPPR in 2011, far outstripping the $340,000 that Noble & Associates was paid by the group in 2010. (DC London received no payments from CPPR in 2010.)

Noble is tied to the Koch brothers. He spoke at a 2010 meeting of wealthy conservatives that they sponsored, making a presentation with the head of Americans for Prosperity, a group co-founded by David Koch to which CPPR has also given money. A former policy strategist for AFP now heads CPPR grantee American Commitment.

It turns out that there's a course at Brown University, entitled "Open Source Culture," that studies "the line between sampling and stealing," examining the idea of open source works and how today's Internet-centric culture has taken the idea of using "found footage," expanded upon it, and transformed it (for example: Danger Mouse's "Grey Album," a mash-up of Jay-Z's "Black Album" and the Beatles' self-titled "White Album").

• wiki.brown.edu
• "Da Great Gatsby" cover.

As a final project, student Katherine Lee created "Da Great Gatsby," a reinterpretation (remix?) of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," as run through Gizoogle, a search engine/translator that spits out Snoop Dogg-ified versions of whatever is put into it. As Lee put it, she had been using the translator "to read NPR," which sounds fantastic, truly.

Her reasoning, according to the page cataloging the project?