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Cee Lo Green, famous Gnarls Barkley singer and coach on NBC’s The Voice, tweeted a seemingly homophobic comment at a critic but insists he is not homophobic and that the tweet was “all in good fun.”
Following Cee Lo’s performance in Minneapolis with Rihanna, music editor Andrea Swensson wrote that she was “kinda creeped out and generally unimpressed with the show,” evoking a response from Cee Lo via Twitter.

“I respect your criticism but be fair!” the singer tweeted according to the NY Daily News.  “People enjoyed last night!  I’m guessing ur gay? and my masculinity offended u? Well f—k U!”
Later, Green deleted the tweet but defended himself telling Us Weekly, “I was being a little outspoken that night, a little outrageous. I always expect people to assume that everything I do is part of my character and sense of humor.”
Green also insisted, “I most certainly am not harboring any sort of negative feeling toward the gay community.  I’m one of the most liberal artists that I think you will ever meet.”
“I shouldn’t have to apologize for speaking my mind,” he told Us Weekly.

There’s been a surplus of blood-curdling science news this week. Let’s get coagulating.
This Week in Your Terrifying Brain
First, we’ll head straight into your very own cerebral cortex.
There were two different studies released this week that suggest that if you’re reading this article, you might be a little bit stupider.

To get back to the studies, they indicated that your mind might be a tad less honed to razor sharpness if you’re reading this article online as a part of your massive online habits, including search engine use.
If you had someone print this out, read it on paper, and then went for a jog in the fresh air while solving a crossword puzzle with one hand and playing a castanet solo with the other, consider yourself exempt.
The first study showed that teenagers who spent – holy WoW – 8 to 13 hours a day online gaming might actually be causing chunks of their own brains to atrophy. Researchers said the “Internet addicts” may have trouble with memory, concentration, and handling social interactions appropriately.
So instead of worrying that your gamer nephew is going to snap one day and pull your spine out through your ear, you can focus on a far more realistic concern: that your nephew’s waiter will snap and demand that he shut up about gold-farming and order his meal like a human being, confining himself to requesting food items derived from plants and animals that currently exist on this planet, and without any acronyms.
Really, you’d better just go ahead and bow out of all family birthday extravaganzas now, because that is when the spine-yanking happens.
Oh, or your nephew’s teachers might have one or two things to say before then. So if your nephew really is allowed on the Internet for 13 hours a day, be the responsible adult in his life and buy the kid a sun lamp and some of that marathon food goo.
That goodwill could buy you precious seconds one day – enough for him to dimly remember who you are and let go of your vertebrae while they’re still mostly contained inside your skin.
The second study, by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, indicated that search engines are affecting our memories.
Those of you who grew up before cell phones will already be familiar with the basic concept: Unless you’ve been gaming 8 to 13 hours a day, you may recall that at one point in your life, you used to just know the phone numbers you used a lot, right off the top of your head, without having to look them up.
In fact, with just a moment’s thought, you may be able to rattle off your childhood best friend’s phone number.
Quick quiz: If you have one, what is your current land line number? How about your own phone number at work?
I thought so.
Your brain realized that it doesn’t need to know phone numbers anymore because they’re stored in cell phones now, so it stopped learning them. Kaboom.
Sparrow’s study hints that search engines do the same thing to your memory on a much larger scale – you know that you can always find that tidbit you need again, so your brain doesn’t bother to learn it. It just puts that information right out with the recycling without even asking you.
While your brain is dropping facts like they’re shares in Newscorp, however, it seems to be more likely to remember where to look for the information should you want to find it again, even as it’s refusing to remember the information itself. Sparrow suggests that we’re not so much losing our memories as outsourcing them.
To the Internet. An increasingly non-neutral network of servers that can be shut down or blocked by governments or simply obliterated by sunspots at any time.
Maybe write a few things down, just in case.



This Week in Terrifying Research
Brace yourselves, people who want the future to be now right now and a lot like the one in The Jetsons, for this week we were introduced to the Terrafugia Transition.
A flying car.
The Daily Mail estimated that these little babies could be zipping around the skies of the U.S. and U.K. within the next five years.
Which marks the first time I’ve hoped that those stupid books about how the Mayan calendar equals the world is ending in 2012 are right.
I realize that I’m a huge science geek and flying cars are the shiniest emblem of The Big TechLife Dream and all, but NO.
NO FLYING CARS.
I don’t want flying cars at all, ever ever ever.
You don’t want them either, if you really think about it.
What you want is a flying car, for you. Just the one.
But “flying cars” means other people get to have them too. You know those jerks who realize that, whoops, they didn’t really want to be in this right-turn-only lane, so instead of waiting a few seconds and dropping into the space behind you after the light turns green, they GUN IT GUN IT GUN IT and cut you off, often flipping you the bird as they do so they can pretend that you were wrong all along for being in the correct lane when you should have known they felt like screwing up?
Those people get flying cars.
The same people who throw lit cigarette butts out of car windows because those somehow “don’t count” as litter? Flying cars.
The dungmonsters who form rolling blockades because they are far too involved in their important cell phone conversations to notice that they’re getting slower and slower and ten miles an hour below the speed limit is just the beginning and, OK, ha ha, yes, it will be fun to watch those people fail to maintain speed and suddenly drop like rocks out of the sky.
But still: Those people will think they are perfectly qualified to get flying cars. And somehow they will obtain them.
People are not going to magically become courteous and responsible and drive in orderly flight paths if flying cars happen. They are going to add another entire dimension to their potential life-threatening jerkitude.
And once you brake hard for that fender bender, gravity is re-introduced into the flying car equation with surprising rapidity. Before you demand your flying car, make sure you want people above you to have them when you’re out hemistrolling along your ground-level moving sidewalk.
Me? I’m going to live with the Molemen.
But don’t worry about Death from Above just yet, because genetic engineers have just perfected an even speedier way to facilitate Death from Within.
OK, technically, what they’ve done is come up with a quick and inexpensive way to reprogram the genetic code of E. coli – one article even described it as a “find and replace” function.
So it’s an easy way to create populations of bacteria that churn out new proteins, spontaneously form into disco balls, or, I don’t know, grow really big and start absorbing us as food, schloomping along after us faster than we could ever hope to run.
The E. coli world is the geneticists’ oyster now, only way less endangered than actual oysters are.
Researchers will be able to use the new, cheap technique to rapidly create life forms completely unlike anything that has ever existed on this planet. Oh, goody!
And then, presumably, they will endow them with the capacity to feel love, searing disappointment, and rage.
You may be wondering, since invasive new species tend to, ah, invade and throw off the ecological balance just a tad, whether this sort of tinkering is worth it.
I mean, even if we develop E. coli mutants that can produce crude oil and still other E. coli mutants that can clean up all the oil we’ve spilled, is it really worth it if they somehow get loose – like maybe one bacterium doesn’t get counted one day – and start turning into E. coli mutants that we hadn’t quite planned on?
Not to worry, say researchers! They’ll just build in a code to keep the little dickens from mixing with the locals. Problem SOLVED! I mean, really, when has something overcome incredible odds in order to try reproducing before?
I think the most comforting thing about the whole project is that attitude right there: We’re doing the coding ourselves under controlled conditions, so nothing could possibly go wrong.
For crying out loud, people manage to have fatal accidents putting shelves up under controlled conditions.
Please, scientists, tattoo this backwards on your corneas so you can always read it: SOMETHING CAN ALWAYS GO WRONG.
I’ll leave you with this thought from Frederick Blattner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who, while not involved with the research team, commented enthusiastically on the study to New Scientist and seemed really eager to roll up his sleeves and start monstercrafting:
“We can manipulate the fundamental aspects of life.”
The first ingredient in creating a great new life form is love.
The second ingredient? Hubris.
This Week in Terrifying Food
And last but by no means least troubling in an impressive field, the reliably disturbing Science Daily offered up a heaping helping of “No thanks, I’m full” this week.
I don’t even know where to begin with this. It’s one of those articles I kept second-sourcing to make sure the scientific community hasn’t started flat-out messing with me.
Let’s ease into this.
First, whatever you’re drinking, put it far out of reach. There may be flailing. Whatever you’re eating, just throw it away right now. Trust me.
So. We all know that some people have a problem eating, for example, beef.
Some don’t like the practice of eating another thinking, feeling animal; others have a problem with the cruelty and chemicals of factory farming.
Still others have concerns with the potential for species-jumping diseases, such as mad cow disease.
And yet, you really want strong, supple nails and luxuriant hair, right? Who doesn’t?
That – as far as anyone can figure out once they stop panic-vomiting and settle down enough to think about it – is why scientists at Beijing University’s College of Life Science and Technology have developed a different kind of gelatin.
The gelatin is safely and humanely produced. Not so much as a ticked off cow in sight.
And all they had to do was add human gelatin gene sequences to yeast.
Human gelatin.
Congratulations: You lived long enough to see a world that can produce Cannibal S’mores.
Stop screaming “WHY?!” to the deity of your choice and come back here. He or she has clearly abandoned us anyway.
The researchers explained to reporters, presumably in an attempt to get them to stop retching onto the floor and start laughing with a bitterness that encompasses all the salty tears of a failed species, that the human gelatin should be more appealing to vegetarians.
I’m guessing there was some sort of a translation error there, and what the researchers really meant when they said “vegetarians” was “horrific luminous-eyed swamp monsters.”
Another advantage of the unholy human-yeast forging is that it “can produce gelatin with controllable features.”
Presumably they mean controllable features such as taste and consistency, not blinking, fear-blasted eyes and a silently screaming mouth.
I can see that we’re going to need new etiquette books for the world of the future, and fast.
Just as a stopgap: It is never acceptable to put human-based gelatin in another human being’s dessert, witting or unwitting. It will never be OK.
Even if you float banana slices in there.
Be afraid.
Ali Davis is running her own personal Books Against Bachmann campaign. Through the end of July, she will be donating all the royalties for her book, True Porn Clerk Stories, to Truth Wins Out.

You can get the book in paperback or on Kindle, or just donate to Truth Wins Out directly. As long as someone is irritating the Bachmanns, she’s happy.

If you’ve read this far, you have moxie. You deserve a treat.
I present The Discovery Channel’s Shark Cam. You’re welcome.

During a HIV/AIDS conference in New Delhi on Monday, India’s health minister called gay sex “completely unnatural” and said it should “not exist.”
Ghulam Nabi Azad blamed countries like the United States for spreading the “disease” to India.
“It is a matter of concern that, unfortunately, in the world and in our country this disease has arisen, where men are having sex with men, which is unnatural and should not be happening,” Azad said, speaking in Hindi.

There are approximately 2.5 million HIV-positive people living in India, the highest rate in Asia.  A problem Azad blames on the LGBT community.
“There’s a substantial number of such people in our country, men who have sex with men, but it is difficult to trace them so we haven’t been able to make much progress in identifying them,” he said.
During a news conference Tuesday evening, Azad said his words were taken out of context.
“My reference was to HIV as a disease,” Azad said.  “As health minister, I know is not a disease.”
UN officials and activists worry Azad’s comments could set back the gay rights movement in India.  They’re urging Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to fire him.

New York public hospitals are helping develop a training program for employees to increase sensitivity when working with gay patients.
The New York Times reported that “gay, lesbian and transgender patients were more likely than others to avoid medical care” for fear of unsympathetic hospital workers. The program, designed with the help of the National LGBT Cancer Organization, will teach employees to be more sensitive to the needs of gay patients by using gender-neutral language and asking open-ended questions.
Al Aviles of the Joint Commission, the national organization that accredits hospitals, said that the training seemed a natural extension of the system’s sensitivity to racial and ethnic minorities.

If you missed the even-gayer-than-usual Tony Awards, then go visit our brother site AfterElton, which has a full recap .
The highlight for me?
First, Ellen Barkin’s fiery speech after winning for best actress in a play for her performance in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which itself won the Tony for best play revival.
Ellen Barkin Acceptance Speech Tony Awards 2011 by KD5EY
Second, Neil Patrick Harris’ hilarious opening number “It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore.”
Neil Patrick Harris Tony Awards 2011 Openning… by KD5EY
AfterElton has the full lyrics, but here are some choice lines:
“If you’ve seen a show, then you already know
“how magical theater can be!
“It’s a two-hour, live-action, barely affordable
“un-lipsynced version of Glee
“So this song goes out to the rest of you,
“those who’ve never seen theater before.
“Because Broadway has never been broader…
“It’s not just for gays anymore.
“If you feel like someone that this world excludes,
“it’s no longer only for dudes who like dudes!
“Attention to the breeders, you’re invited to the theater
“It’s not just for gays anymore!”