A federal court has ruled that ladies’ nights are not discriminatory. (Getty Images)
Stand aside ladies, this guy wants his free drinks too.
A lawsuit that tried to rid the world of ladies’ nights was rejected by a federal court on Wednesday, AOL News reports.
The court saved a ladies’ night near you, ruling that promotions at bars and nightclubs where women get discounts on admission and drinks are not unconstitutional.
In what was probably the worst dating strategy ever, Roy Den Hollander, a self-described “anti-feminist” lawyer, filed the suit against several New York City clubs claiming that ladies’ nights discriminate against men.
“The guys are paying for girls to party. I don’t think that’s fair,” Den Hollander told the New York Daily News. “It’s a transfer of money from the wallets of guys to the pocketbooks of girls.”
According to the New York Post, while Den Hollander alleged that the clubs engage in state action by selling booze using state liquor licenses, the court ruled that because “liquor licenses are not directly related to the pricing scheme,” the state’s licensing laws do not directly cause the nightclubs to hold ladies’ nights.
AOL News has also reported that Den Hollander’s crusade against ladies’ nights was profiled in 2007 in the New Yorker, and that in 2008 The New York Times blogged that he had filed suit against Columbia University over the school’s women’s studies program.
Den Hollander has vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court.
When asked by the Daily News about his odds with the high court, Den Hollander said, “about the same as some pretty young lady paying my way on a date.”
So ladies, go ahead and celebrate. The freebies are here to stay.
The Swedish drama over rape allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shows no sign of dying down.
Swedish Public Prosecutions Director Marianne Ny overruled Stockholm’s top prosecutor and decided to reopen the investigation into the charges. They are based on allegations by two women who are are represented by Claes Borgstrom, a well-respected attorney and a spokesman for the liberal Social Democratic party.
While exactly what is alleged is confidential, a Swedish newspaper reported that one women said she was raped, the other molested, in situations that began as consensual sex and gave police similar accounts.
Swedish director of public prosecutions Marianne Ny ordered the Assange case reopened. (Video capture via Getty Images
Borgstrom’s involvement perhaps makes it more difficult for Assange supporters to argue that the allegations are part of a campaign of dirty tricks by the Pentagon, which has been steaming since WikiLeaks in July published 76,000 documents about the Afghanistan war, and is believed to be planning to publish more.
The World Socialist Web Site argues that U.S. and British media are pushing a smear of the WikiLeaks founder to curry favor with Washington.
But Borgstrom counters that his clients have been “dragged through the mud through the Internet for making things up or trying to frame Assange.” The women are supposed to have met Assange through their involvement with the leftist Pirate Party, which agreed last month to provide servers to host WikiLeaks content.
Assange, an Australian-born physicist, has been seeking residency in Sweden, which has tough laws protecting whistle-blowers.
When an appraiser and group of photography experts delcared last month a batch of negatives discovered at a California garage sale to be authentic works by Ansel Adams, the debate over their authenticity quickly developed.
The Associated Press reported Friday that a planned screening of a documentary about the photographs at California State University, Fresno was canceled by the collector Rick Norsigian.
Norsigan bought the negatives ten years ago and has been pursing his claim they are actually long-lost works by the legendary landscape photographer.
But yesterday the New York Times reported that an expert hired by Norsigian is retracting his endorsement:
Robert C. Moeller III, a former curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and one of the experts hired by Rick Norsigian, a California man, to evaluate his find, said that after further review he had decided that at least some of the images Mr. Norsigian purchased were taken by an unheralded photographer, Earl Brooks.
“I made a mistake,” said Mr. Moeller, a former curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Boston museum, who was part of the team that in July announced the discovery of what it called Adams’s “lost negatives.”
The rest of the panel of experts, however, are standing by their original judgment of the work.
Ansel’s grandson Matthew Adams has remained doubtful since the claim arose. He told the LA Daily News last year:
“Mr. Norsigian has been claiming these negatives were made by Ansel Adams for many years,” he said. “I am unaware of anyone knowledgeable agreeing with him.”
The younger Adams, president of the Ansel Adams Gallery, has said several collectors come forward each year with what they consider original works by the legendary photographer.
According to the Times, the work will be shown Sept. 25 in Beverly Hills “where they will be on sale for $1,500 and $7,500, depending on the print’s quality,” a far cry from the initial boast of a potential dollar value of $200 million.
The sale is to take place at the David W. Streets Gallery — if the federal suit filed by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust seeking to block it is unsuccessful.
Roger Federer didn’t wait long to repeat his jaw-dropping shot from last year’s U.S. Open semifinal at this year’s tournament. Here’s the one in his first-round match Monday against Brian Dabul (it’s at the end of a long point.)
And here’s the one from last year’s semifinal against Novak Djokovic.
Note to Federer opponents: Both times, he hits the ball deep to your right side. He can’t see you, so after you lob to the center why not go over and cover that side? It should work at least once, unless he has eyes in the back of his head. Or maybe…
A “Jersey Shore” cast member with abs that rival Kelly Ripa’s, the most famous TV mom from the 1960s and Alaska’s best-known former fiancee to a Playgirl centerfold are among the dozen celebrities taking to the ballroom dance floor for this season’s “Dancing With the Stars.”
Some fun facts about online dating, especially all the liars, as reported in the New York Post and other places:
Men exaggerate their height by an average of two inches, women one. You can see the height lying clearly in the graph prepared by the dating site OkCupid published on Gizmodo, which shows how the normal height curve is skewed to the right.
Robinson Cano is the perfect age to touch all the bases (Getty Images).
People typically exaggerate their income by 20 percent. About six in ten women lie about their weight, slightly more than the 55 percent of the men. But men are more likely to lie about their age.
For every inch a man is below 5-10, he needs to make about $35,000-$40,000 a year more to appear equally attractive.
The ideal age for attractiveness is 27 for men, 21 for women. By that logic, the perfect couple could be Robinson Cano (who’s having a better season than Derek Jeter and A-Rod anyhow) and Vanessa Hudgens.
Vanessa Hudgens may be too old to appear in a real high-school musical, but she's at her online-dating peak. (Getty Images)
One of the strangest phenomena in the OkCupid study was that most people who report themselves as bisexual only date one sex. The men (but not women) tend to lie in opposite ways, depending on age. More than half of them send messages only to men if they’re in their twenties, and only to women if they’re in the fifties. The explanation may be that the younger gay men aren’t willing to fully come out, while the older straight men are trying to appear more interesting and open-minded.
And if you think all this proves online dating is stupid, consider this: 22 percent of heterosexual couples say they met that way.
“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”
With these words, Martin Luther King, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, opened perhaps the most famous speech in modern times.
But Glenn Beck has a dream too — and a demonstration to go with it.
Tomorrow, on the anniversary of King’s march on Washington, Beck and legions of Tea Party supporters will descend on these same steps.
It’s unclear if the chosen date of the “Restoring Honor” — or Beckapalooza as it’s been dubbed — rally was politically motivated, according to NPR:
Beck has repeatedly said that he was dumbstruck when he realized that he had requested his rally permit for the anniversary of King’s 1963 speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It must have been “divine providence” that he unwittingly settled on that day, he told his radio audience. He later said he was out to “reclaim” the civil rights movement. (NPR)
For some, this is a little too close for comfort. Decades after King’s dream, Beck has accused America’s first black president of having “a deep-seated hatred of white people” and as late as this week has continued to fuel speculation over President Barack Obama’s religious beliefs:
Tuesday night Fox’s Glenn Beck was riffing about how recent polls on Mr. Obama show that many Americans “don’t recognize him as a Christian.” The problem, Mr. Beck said, is that the president does not conform to “true” Christian values. (Christian Science Monitor)
Civil rights activists are mostly up in arms, the symbolism of the event not being lost on leaders like Al Sharpton:
“Glenn Beck and others are expected to push for the expansion of states’ rights – the exact antithesis of the civil rights movement and Dr. King’s legacy,” Sharpton said in a news release promoting his march. “The Tea Party and allied conservatives are trying to break that national stance on justice and, in turn, break the crux of what the civil rights movement symbolized and what Dr. King fought and literally died for.” (CBS)
But this isn’t about race, this is about Glenn Beck.
Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel and Giovanni Russonello explore the politics behind the politics of the Restoring Honor rally. They paint a picture of competing factions within the loosely established tea party holding differing views over Beck’s involvement, even as Beck and Palin (the keynote speaker) are collectively the pied-pipers of the movement.
“I call it ‘Beckaplooza’ because it seems to be all about Beck,” said Andrew Dodge, the Maine state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, a coalition of local groups that has helped stage several big rallies, including the seminal tea party rally on Sept. 12, 2009, that drew tens of thousands of people to Washington’s National Mall to protest what they saw as unchecked government expansion under President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress. (Politico)
While Beck is seen as an inspirational force — one with the ability to reach a massive daily audience — he has maintained that Saturday’s rally is non-political.
At the same time, Beck is feeling pressure to take on an even more overt and hands-on role and the rally tomorrow is a step in that direction.
Imagine for a second being Levi Johnston. You’re 20. You don’t have a high school diploma. But you do have a son.
You aren’t married. You were engaged. Twice. To the same young woman.
And, boy and howdy, do you have some potential in-laws. Heading the bunch is Sarah Palin, grandmother of his son and mother of Bristol, the young woman he was going to, not going to, was going to, not going to marry. And oh, Sarah Palin is sort of well known in political circles.
In for a dime, in for dollar, right, Levi? You get to appear on the cover of magazines, at the National Republican Convention and in a music video. And Johnston revealed his Johnson for Playgirl magazine.
Some might want to call it a career. But no, now he plans to run for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and use the experience as part of a reality TV show. Meanwhile, he will work on getting that pesky high school diploma.
All this – but no, that — was revealed Friday on “The Early Show.”
The headline is that being Levi means you never have to say you are sorry. His only regret, he says, is apologizing to Sarah Palin for telling lies about her.
”I don’t really regret anything. But the only thing I wish I wouldn’t have done is put out that apology, ’cause it kind of makes me sound like a liar. And I’ve never lied about anything. So that’s probably the only thing. The rest of the stuff I can live with.”
