[The "tough new mandatory face mask order" is one that other states have been doing since March.]

The pandemic has hit restaurants hard, but, we were naïve enough to think that maybe GarfieldEATS, a Toronto pizza place that pays homage to everyone’s favorite cartoon tabby, would survive this terrible year. We were wrong. Earlier this week, The Garf’s marquee restaurant was forced to close in a dispute over rent payments and allegedly shitty landlords. Nothing is sacred. Everything ends.

A cluster of far-right extremists including neo-fascists, white nationalists and militia members are expected to descend on Washington D.C. Saturday, amidst President Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Far-right turnout could be significant. Pro-Trump protesters have already arrived in the thousands at so-called Stop the Steal events, even those staged in smaller cities like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Pro-Trump figures have been promoting the D.C. event for over a week. The Saturday event also coincides with Trump and his allies espousing increasingly anti-democratic views about his loss. The D.C. protest appears to have three titles, all of which appear to represent the same protest: “Million MAGA march,” a name bastardizing Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington; “Stop the Steal;” and “March for Trump.” “Stop the Steal” is a reboot of a 2016 project launched by convicted felon Roger Stone to dispute votes in multiracial neighborhoods. “March for Trump,” is a brand for the event which was promoted by FOX News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday. Twitter users retweeted Hannity’s post advertising the event over 11,000 times in less than 24 hours, offering an indication of the potential enthusiasm for the event.

The dramatic impact of the virus on the Secret Service’s presidential protection unit comes as growing numbers of prominent Trump allies and White House officials have fallen ill.

But, apparently believing it would be too cruel to cut Trump off from his institutional support base completely, conservatives decided to arrange for him a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation version of Bush v. Gore. Before he is out of his misery, everyone will expend a lot of energy creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president. ... To sum up the current situation, the U.S. is experiencing a fake self-coup that requires the administration to do exactly the things a regime would do if it were attempting to stage an actual self-coup, with millions of people sincerely believing the stated justifications for the strongman’s consolidation of power and with the regime’s legislative allies playing along, under the apparent belief that eventually the courts, which are stocked with unqualified loyalists, will soon say the game is done.

The last cool place I went before everything shut down was Death Valley National Park, which in addition to all the famous parts also includes one non-contiguous, 40-acre parcel within the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. The site is called Devil’s Hole. It is a deep underwater cave system nestled in the crag of a scrubby hill whose name I don’t know offhand but in my opinion should be called Devil’s Hill. The Mansons thought the cave was the entrance to underworld, which is not true, but not so wrong that it requires changing the name. According to the National Park Service, the water in Devil’s Hole is 92-degrees year-round—pretty hot!—and the bottom of the cavern “has never been mapped.” Dun dun dun. Devil’s Hole was protected by the park because it is the only remaining habitat on the planet for a tiny little cyprinodontidae, about the size of a silver dollar, called the Devil’s Hole Pupfish.

It’s not exactly a secret that Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, self-proclaimed Thai pedophilia expert, and designer of death race trucks, doesn’t give a flying fuck what other people think about his actions. To wit: Musk has endorsed a sex cult’s system for ranking news organizations based on “critical thinking,” regularly railed against media orgs, and angrily cut off journalists on earnings calls. According to a new piece in Vanity Fair, sources say that after Musk’s December 2019 win in a libel lawsuit brought by a Thai cave diver he had smeared as a pedophile, Musk decided in Trumpian style that he would stop pretending to play nice with his perceived enemies. Thus he severed ties with his external PR firm, stopped hiring for openings on his comms team, mass-blocked journalists, and this month disbanded Tesla’s PR department. One longtime employee told the magazine, “Elon is his own communications director now.”

At the height of the pandemic, the city issued $1.4 billion in emergency, no-bid contracts for crucial medical equipment — and got the wrong masks and lost track of deliveries, records show. “Stop this s—t!” one bureaucrat cried during an online meeting.

After 35 years in Australia, the last plates of cheese toast will soon be served at Sizzler's nine remaining outlets across Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia. The family-friendly restaurant, famous for the all-you-can-eat salad bar and cheesy TV ads, was once a suburban dining stalwart. But Sizzler's closure on November 15 isn't just another consequence of COVID-19. Australia's food values and tastes have changed since the chain's heyday of the 1990s. Today, food is much more important in our everyday lives. An era of casual dining Sizzler began in the United States in the late 1950s, opening its first Australian restaurant in 1985 in the Brisbane suburb of Annerley. A novelty of the chain was its salad bar, which the Canberra Times in 1992 described as: 15 metres of salad choices, two soup choices and croutons and rolls, a potato casserole, savoury rice, two types of pasta (with the usual unfortunate consequences for pasta left sitting) with meat, tomato and cream sauces, and four or five desserts. Optional steak, seafood and chicken offerings could be served to your table. When the chain reached its Australian peak in the mid-1990s, our food culture was very different. Cuisine of the era was increasingly multicultural — as food author Cherry Ripe notes in her book Goodbye Culinary Cringe — but food was more often spoken about in utilitarian terms. Sizzler positioned itself as food that was cheap and fast, but not "fast food". Most of those who dined there, alongside the dine-in all-you-can eat Pizza Huts, earned under $60,000 (approximately $110,000 today). But over the past 25 years, the way Australian families dine has dramatically changed. Instead of a large "family friendly" diner, we are more likely to frequent a range of small, culturally diverse eateries.

There’s been a lot of criticism about the new League of Legends champion Seraphine. From her (now reworked) seemingly-genocidal involvement with the Brackern, to critiques of the parasocial advertising that her Twitter and other social media have employed, she’s not without her fair share of controversy. My problem with Seraphine is much more personal. My problem with her is that I think she’s based on me. And not without a pretty good reason — I actually had a brief relationship with a Riot employee last year in early 2019.

Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them.

Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter is known as the most visible marijuana advocate in the band, and clearly the dude has had plenty of seshes where he's gotten deep into conversation, because Carpeneter has some thoughts on things. During a recent interview, he admitted that he is a flat-earther, he doesn't think any vaccine has ever worked and he put doubts on how serious the coronavirus pandemic is.

Forging or buying negative coronavirus test results is the latest bad tourist behavior.

In an all-caps tweet on Thursday morning, the president claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the software provider that local governments around the country use to run elections, “DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE”.

More than 1.3 million New Yorkers statewide are at risk of eviction. Remember the state’s emergency rent-relief program? The one whose rocky rollout shot up red flags for tenant advocates? Well, more than three months after the deadline to apply, a new state report reveals that tens of thousands of New Yorkers have learned they are ineligible — and of the 94,000 people who sought relief, only 15,020 were approved. That means less than $40 million of the $100 million will actually be doled out to New Yorkers in dire need of rent relief. The reason for this is exactly what housing attorneys and community groups had worried about: Too few people were able to meet (or prove that they meet) the program’s strict eligibility requirements.

A top health department official in Wisconsin says the state is nearing a point at which some patients who need lifesaving care will be unable to receive it due to overcrowding in hospitals resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak. Ryan Westergaard, chief medical officer for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, said during a discussion hosted by Wisconsin Health News that the state was nearing a "tipping point" in terms of the number of hospitalizations caused by the virus that could result in hospitals being overwhelmed. "In terms of the number of cases we're finding, this is as bad as that early, severe wave in New York City," Westergaard said. "We're very close to a tipping point, and I think right now all the hospitals are strained, and it's causing a lot of stress on health care workers and leaders, but the case fatality rate has remained kind of low," he continued.

Inside Detroit’s absentee-ballot-counting center, one Republican poll watcher complained that workers were wearing Black Lives Matter gear. She thought one of them — a “man of intimidating size” — had followed her too closely. Another Republican poll watcher complained about the public address system. Workers were using it to make announcements. It was loud. “This was very distracting to those of us trying to concentrate,” he said. A third poll watcher noticed that when absentee ballots came in from military personnel, many showed votes for Democrats. He found that odd.

Louisville Metro Police concealed at least 738,000 records documenting the sexual abuse of Explorer Scouts by two officers — then lied to keep the files from the public, records show. The Courier Journal last year requested all records regarding sexual abuse of minors by two officers in the Explorer Scout program for youths interested in law enforcement careers. Police officials and the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office said they couldn't comply, insisting all the records had been turned over to the FBI for its investigation. But that wasn't true, according to records The Courier Journal recently obtained in the appeal of its open records case.

On Monday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows gathered senior aides on a call. One of his goals: to plot the conservative policy moves they could push through in their final 10 weeks on immigration, trade, health care, China and school choice. Even as President Donald Trump refused to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, Meadows was asking aides on the call to give him three goals by the end of the week that could be accomplished by Biden’s inauguration, according to two people briefed on the conversation. Since then, staffers have compiled a list of roughly 15 moves they could make through executive orders, executive actions or finalizing agency rules that they plan to pursue in the coming days, according to interviews with three administration officials. On immigration, they are seeking to finalize a rule related to making the standards stricter around H-1B visas, which allow U.S. employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in specialty occupations. And a potential school-related executive order would seek to give Covid-19 relief money to parents in public school districts shut down by the coronavirus, allowing them to use the funds for private or parochial schools.

If Biden intends to run his administration as a third Obama term, we can expect that big tech will find numerous friends to do their bidding.