Stories Worth Talking About by 9 a.m.

BOWING OUT GRACEFULLY Carey

• The lady vanishes: Porn star-turned-California gubernatorial candidate-turned-porn star again, Mary Carey has dropped out of the upcoming election race after her mentally ill mother injured herself jumping off a building.

• This, too, is Sudan: Just a few hundred miles from war and destruction, the New York Times reports "young, rich Sudanese, wearing ripped jeans and fancy gym shoes, sit outside licking scoops of ice cream as an outdoor air-conditioning system sprays a cooling veil of mist. Around the corner is a new BMW dealership unloading $165,000 cars." Disturbing? Undoubtedly. But it does confirm many of the claims made in that controversial ad supplement the Sudanese government placed in the Times in March.

• Soft cell: The Daily Mail reports that a new study links cell phone use to infertility in men. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, users who spent more than four hours a day on the phone had lower sperm counts. Of course, there is a bright side: Brandon Davis is frequently photographed on his phone.

• "Weird" at the top: "Weird Al" Yankovic, who just celebrated a birthday, finds himself at number ten on the Billboard top 200 chart for his latest parody album, Straight Outta Lynwood. How does the king of nerds celebrate such a milestone? "I literally danced a little jig," Yankovic told a Billboard reporter.

• Lovely and amazing: John Spencer, Hillary Clinton's opponent in the midterm elections, denies calling Clinton ugly. Or formerly ugly. Or, presumably, future ugly. In what only could be an attempt to upstage others Clinton-killers, her G.O.P. opponent John Spencer went ahead and let fly the L-word when talking about Clinton. "As long as I don't call her a lesbian, I'm okay," he joked while chatting with a reporter about debate preparations. He was right, though. And now he's not okay.

• Draining The Source
• Kazakh Attack