Remember Jessica Sporty? She is the enterprising Murray Hill twentysomething written about in November by Business Insider, which first published her name, after which it was picked up by various media outlets (us included); then changed it to another, similar name; and then changed it again, to the name of a Harry Potter character with the note "We have changed the name of the woman in the story because people were taking it waaaay too seriously." Because, briefly, the internet had been set aflame by Sporty, who confessed to using Match.com to get guys to buy her dinner, a financial plan that made her $1,200 a month. So sated by dinners provided by the funds of strangers that she had no interest in actually taking seriously as romantic propositions, this became a full-fledged gambit involving roommates and spreadsheets and other machinations. More >>

​Today in news you can use to remind yourself that you're not in college anymore (unless you are, in which case, hooray!), MSNBC reports that the cursed, vile freshman 15 is actually not true, at least, so says a new study, which found that most college students don't actually gain 15 pounds in their first year at school. More accurate would be a freshman 3, but what happened to the old college try?

"The 'freshman 15' is a myth," said Ohio State research scientist Jay Zagorsky, co-author of the study that is believed to be the first nationwide look at the purported phenomenon. "There is no 'freshman 15.'"

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"It's like the Crying Game."

​ Remember the lost chicken, found by kind soul Steve Chung on the mean streets of Brooklyn last week? Chung posted a notice on Craigslist in hopes of finding the chicken's owner. Brownstoner wrote about that, and so did we. Then, Chung got in touch to tell us that some crazy stuff had happened. Did we want to hear? A chicken story with a twist? Oh, yes, please!

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This Kissena Park duck is not dinner.

​A crew of Prospect Park squirrel and bird poachers was nabbed earlier this summer to much media fanfare about the city's hunter-gatherer "trend," pitting conservationists against urban foragers of all stripes. This particular band of hunters stirred a small debate among our commenters: Were the poachers victims of our harsh economic times, homeless and hungry and fending for themselves in this unforgiving city, Survivor-like? Or were they cruel hicks, with raw squirrel meat stuck in their fangs as they littered willy-nilly?

Writ large, to higher questions of the relationship between human and what passes for nature in New York: Why would you do this? As in, eat anything from a New York City pond or field that has been peed on by countless dogs, or hunt adorable animals, or help yourself to or destroy public property? On the other hand, why would you not? What could be more "sustainable" and locavorish than making a salad from young dandelion greens harvested from a nearby park?

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This is what happens when you google "hipster chicken."

​Via Brownstoner, there's a chicken lost in Brooklyn that's been located by some kind soul who is trying to help it find its way back home. (Home, we hope, is a place amenable to chickens, as this story would go very differently if it were an escaped, gonna-be-food kind of chicken.) Their tipster, who is fostering the chicken, writes, "I found a chicken last night around Downtown Brooklyn and am trying to find its owner. This is not a joke. Since she likely would have been run over and killed and looked like someone's pet, I brought it home and am now trying to locate its owner. BTW, I already have a rabbit and for the record, the rabbit is not afraid of the chicken but the chicken is terrified of the rabbit."

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A celebratory dance.

​Justice! The woman who in April of this year entered a Victoria's Secret in White Plains and, seeking revenge for an alleged "earlier shoplifting incident," poured a container of chili all over 65 pairs of panties, which cost $750 dollars, a woman who had been on the lam ever since, has been caught. We may now sleep just a little bit easier knowing that our frilly pink things have been to some extent vindicated. The woman, Lauren Jackson, 19, hails from Yonkers, and she was busted by doing the thing that more sophisticated criminals tell you never to do: She returned to the scene of the crime. But, how can one resist, when the delicious smells of orchard peach and white raspberry hand lotions waft from the open doors of the shop and lure you in, sultrily? Not to mention, all of those silky, lacy underthings! Is any human woman impervious to such charms?

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No one seems to have taken us up on our challenge to fry a sidewalk on an egg, and frying eggs on sidewalks is ever so heat 1.0, so we'd like to share this image of how hot it is, via Reddit. People are using their car dashboards as easy-bake ovens. (See also: Heat Dome.)

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This also happens to be exactly how we feel after eating Atomic Wings for lunch. Yes. That happened. Carry on, sloths, and sloth-like humans! In the competition for most adorable, sloths will always win.

​Our good friend science has made another groundbreaking discovery about human relationships. This time it's that "marriages are more satisfying when the wife is thinner than the husband." What? Yes. Actual researchers followed actual newlywed couples for four years, checking up on them every six months to gauge happiness in accord with size. Men with a higher Body Mass Index than their wives were "a little happier" to start with than those with the same or a lower BMIs. This stayed the same throughout the four-year period analyzed. Meanwhile, while wives weren't really affected by the BMIs of their husbands at the beginning of their marriages, by the fourth year, "the wives whose BMI was lower than that of their husbands were significantly happier than those who had the same BMI, or a higher one."

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​Today the New York Post has the heart-warming story of single New Yorkers who have uncovered the secret to romantic happiness in the city. Confident that people who live in Brooklyn will never travel to the West Village, nor vice versa, these lovely representatives of healthy relationships are dating people in various boroughs while claiming to be exclusive with each of them. This seems a tremendous idea, no?

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