Yes, watching a person eat hot dogs rapidly is disgusting, but watching a tiny hamster do anything is adorable, so it balances out.

With the National Football League currently entangled in the Ray Rice scandal, the good people of the internet are fighting back. 

Rice and newlywed wife Janay Palmer grabbed the attention of the media when a video of Rice dragging Palmer's, his then fiancee, limp body out of an elevator at an Atlantic City casino was made public by TMZ. Rice's attorney said the two had a "minor physical altercation." The minor altercation left Palmer unconscious and a seemingly unaffected Rice hovering over her body. Following the release of the video, the NFL felt the appropriate response to the footage and third-degree aggravated assault charge was a slap on the wrist and a two-game suspension. Somehow, the public didn't seem satisfied with that. 

When a second video of Rice punching Palmer in the face rendering her unconscious came to the surface, the NFL was under immense public scrutiny and embarrassment as so many had previously come forward to defend his actions in the earlier video. The NFL announced earlier this month that Rice has been indefinitely suspended from the Ravens. 


Of course, the internet has taken to a sea of victim-blaming and pity for Janay Palmer, but one Twitter user fought back with a photoshopped image of a CoverGirl ad. The latter company paired up with the NFL last year to offer female sports connoisseurs with a "nailgating" option that provides fans with a manicure set of their favorite teams colors and logo. CoverGirl created the partnership to offer women entertainment while the men are partaking fantasy football and binge-drinking. 

The CoverGirl ad features a model decorated with Ravens' colors for her nails and eye shadow. The photoshopped version displays the same thing, but the model's left eye has been altered to appear bruised and swollen with the text reading "Get your game face on."

CoverGirl told USA Today, "We developed our NFL program to celebrate the more than 80 million female football fans. In light of recent events, we have encouraged the NFL to take swift action on their path forward to address the issue of domestic violence.”

Twitter: 1, NFL: 0 

Basically everything the Loft shows as part of their monthly Essential Cinema series is worth seeing (and c'mon people, cough up the $5 suggested donation), but this month's selection of Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion is super-essential, if that's a thing.

The film, about French prisoners of war in World War I, was one of Orson Welles' favorite films and makes those "best movies of all time" lists quite frequently. It's a haunting film about war, intelligent and emotional, plus Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared the film "Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1," which almost certainly makes it worth watching, right?

Here's what Janet Maslin wrote about the film for the New York Times in 1999 when the film was refurbished and reissued:

'Grand Illusion'' presents a world in transition, and like-minded individuals forced to different sides of the battle lines. ''For you and me,'' Erich von Stroheim's assertively patrician German captain tells the French officer played with supreme gallantry by Pierre Fresnay, ''dying in war is a good way out.'' The captain is appalled by the kind of upheaval that has left him on a familiar footing with men like Lieutenant Marechal, played by the magnetic Jean Gabin at the height of his glory as France's favorite working-class hero. Gabin's deeply affecting performance embodies the courage and resiliance in which the film so fervently believes.

''Grand Illusion'' looks all the more radical now as a film with no need to spell out the obvious or follow the trajectory of an ordinary plot. It seems especially disarming now in its genius for keeping its story indirect yet its meaning perfectly clear. Its greatest dramatic heights seem to occur almost effortlessly, as a tale of escape derived from the experience of one of Renoir's wartime comrades evolves into a series of unforgettable crises and stirring sacrifices. ''Grand Illusion'' ultimately defines war by indelibly showing how much it can destroy.

A brand-new digitally restored version of Grand Illusion shows tonight at 7 p.m. More info at loftcinema.com.

We'll have more on writer-turned-musician Sylvie Simmons and her forthcoming album in a future issue of the Weekly, but here's a track from her recorded-at-Wavelab debut (coming out on Light in the Attic Records on October 28), featuring Giant Sand's Howe Gelb and Thoger Lund. It's a sweet song that borders on quaint (in a good way) and well worth a few minutes of your time.

It's possible that our offices have been washed off Mona Lisa Road and into a wash by now by an Odile-caused torrential downpour, so we've left this post here just in case.

No idea where on earth this song came from (other than something called Stayna Records which seemingly involves these same dudes lip-synching an One Direction song), but we spent twenty minutes or so looking for a Spanish language cover of the most famous Scorpions song (Odile's coming from Baja California...it made sense at the time) and this is the best we could come up with.

A Facebook video posted by Daniel Thews on Saturday, Sept. 13 (since removed or with changed privacy settings) has been shared more than 850 times from Thews's open page, most likely because it allegedly shows two Tucson Police Department officers tackle and cuff two autistic boys or young men to the ground in the Peter Piper Pizza parking lot off Broadway Boulevard across the street from Park Place Mall.

We called Sgt. Chris Widmer, TPD public information officer, who told us he and others in his department had just seen the video and had no comment until they understood the context of what was taking place. We've filed a public records request, and Widmer said he's get back to us when they had additional information on exactly what took place.

While in the autism community, it is understood that TPD officers have taken a training on how to work with autistic children—many kids on the spectrum, high or low, have difficulty in public and sometimes run off. Having a police force that knows how to work with kids on the spectrum has always been a concern to parents and caretakers of autistic children to make sure their safety is understood and cared for.

We're waiting to hear back from Thews to better understand what he saw and why he was compelled to videotape what took place. But here's what he said on his thread:

Last year, we lamented the fact that the University of Arizona has generally failed to make the various lists of "best party schools", generally at the expense of Girls Gone Wild University and Casino in Tempe, but HELL YEAH TUCSON LET'S DRINK DIRECTLY FROM A HANDLE OF SOCO BECAUSE WE'RE BACK:

4) UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
School of the wet and wild

Zona students are experts in that wonderful combination of hydration, inebriation and sartorial minimalism otherwise known as the pool party. The king of them all is the annual Sigma Alpha Epsilon Jungle Party, which features a 65,000-gallon pool, a faux waterfall and a massive tree house. But you need not go Greek to go hard: Tucson’s Fourth Street bar scene teems with partying Wildcats whose hangovers can be mitigated with some of the best Mexican food in the country.

Thanks to the most certainly dedicated party analysts of Playboy for putting the U of A back on the party map (even if they confused Fourth AVENUE for Fourth STREET), knocking off GGWU&C off the top ten in the process. Surely, there are pages of analytical research that went into this monumental accomplishment for our hometown outpost of higher learning (I believe sales of Four Loko, Instagram photos of girl-on-girl kissing, and cases of syphilis are involved), but it's also possible they just made a list up while high one afternoon.

Either way, congrats to the "students" of the University of Arizona. NEVER SETTLE.

While social media campaigns didn't capture Kony or bring back the girls of the Chibok boarding school, at least Facebook Nation can claim one victory, convincing a giant corporation to sell a soda you probably forgot about in a very limited manner:

Coca-Cola Co. newest social-media campaign reaches back to a time when even MySpace didn’t exist.

Surge, a citrus-flavored Mountain Dew knockoff that was discontinued by Coke about 12 years ago, has reappeared in limited supply today. The only place to get it: Amazon.com.

Billed as the company’s first ever e-commerce reintroduction, the news was announced by the Facebook Fan site “Surge Movement,” whose 128,000 members lobbied for its return and paid for a billboard in Atlanta. Coke gave the drink a Twitter account, too, so loyalists can “follow the brand’s journey.”

“Surge is back,” the Facebook page’s organizers said, urging readers to buy and spread the word. “The Movement does not end here!”

If you're interested, Amazon is selling 12 16-ounce cans for $14, but it appears they're out already, which makes me worry about humanity a bit.

Personally, I'd be far more excited to get my hands on some OK Soda, which reflected the ironic ennui of my 90's experience more than the aggro Dew-like aesthetic of Surge, but hey, I might be a Facebook group and 127,999 like-minded nostalgists away from making my retro-dreams come true.

• P. Marenfeld & NOAO/AURA/NSF

The Arizona Republic ran a frightening article over the weekend about light pollution and the greater Phoenix area. The basic premise? In ten years, there will only be a few places in America where you will be able to see the Milky Way in the night sky and Tucson won't be one of them:

That's why Tucson, among other Arizona cities, implemented dark-skies-friendly lighting codes decades ago. Tucson hasn't gotten brighter in 30 years even though the population has increased 59 percent since 1980, said Katy Garmany, an associate scientist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory outside Tucson, which just completed a study of Tucson's skyglow.

But scientists at the National Observatory on Kitt Peak estimate that if the Valley continues to brighten, they've got about 10 years left, said Garmany.

Then astronomers will have to travel to Hawaii or Chile to do certain research, such as trying to spot planets outside our solar system.

"It keeps getting brighter and brighter," Garmany said. "It's just really hard to do the cutting-edge stuff, and you have to go ... where it's darker. (Scientists) have ways of eliminating extra scattered light in the sky, but there's only so much they can do."

I don't generally like to get into grammar wars - after all, in this business, there's generally someone willing to send me an email every time I commit a sin against the English language and I'll probably still screw something up in this post - but gosh, it feels like someone should have caught the fewer/less error in one of the hundred or so (seemingly) Martha McSally ads running right now.

In the ad titled "Time" (above), the narrator kicks into a general list of complaints Southern Arizonans might have with Congress...a lack of border security, sad senior citizens and this:

Certainly, the argument should probably be about the veracity of McSally's claims (and next week's cover story by Jim Nintzel does a great job of looking into McSally's plans to fix Washington and America), but every time I've seen and heard the ad, I block out everything following the error, which might as well be a cymbal crash adjacent to my ear.

As mistakes go, this is a common one, mostly because the meanings of the words are the same, but their usage is different. From the New York Times' After Deadline blog:

The basic rule for precise use of “less” and “fewer” is simple (though we slip often). Use “fewer” with countable, individual things, and “less” with uncountable amounts, volumes, etc. So: “I should drink less coffee,” but “I should eat fewer doughnuts.”

But it’s not as simple as plural (fewer) vs. singular (less). Sometimes “less” is correct even with a plural noun. The Times’s stylebook says this:

Also use less with a number that describes a quantity considered as a single bulk amount: The police recovered less than $1,500; It happened less than five years ago; The recipe calls for less than two cups of sugar.

So, yes, "less" can be correct with a plural noun, but since the number of jobs lost (sigh) can be counted and isn't a singular, bulk item, fewer should be correct.

These things happen, but how did this ad slip past the dozens of people who must have watched this ad before it was sent off to seemingly every network and cable channel? Didn't someone say "Wait, 'less jobs' just doesn't sound quite right...maybe we should check into that"?

Again, I realize this opens me up to a distinct amount of criticism regarding my own use of words, but hey, if you're spending a ton of money to run ads, it might be wise to double-check the language used on them.