All you want is to have fun with your friends while school’s out, but you’re stuck inside flipping burgers, scooping ice cream or collecting movie tickets, all the while getting yelled at by some insane manager or customer.

As the U.S. economy recovers, teenagers are getting hired again by the hundreds of thousands. Even wealthy parents such as Barack and Michelle Obama, David and Victoria Beckham, and Sting (and…um…Mrs. Sting) are encouraging their teens to work minimum-wage gigs. Because you can’t always sell the movie rights to your blog.

If you’re stuck behind a counter, look at the bright side: You’ll make a lot more cash over your lifetime than the slackers who sit around playing video games from June ’til August, according to a new study of 250,000 15- to 25-year-olds from the University of British Columbia. We called up lead researcher Dr. Marc-David Seidel to explain how even a crappy summer job can potentially make it rain down the road.

It seems a little obvious that people who are workaholics in high school will be workaholics as adults — or is there another explanation for your findings?
That’s part of it, but the more important part is time-management skills — being able to balance between work, school and family demands will make them ready to succeed later. The other aspect is even if they have jobs they don’t like, they’ll know to look for jobs that suit them better; they’ll find jobs that they like better. ...

Nobody ever accused baseball of being the fastest-moving sport, and a guy’s liable to doze off after a few innings, especially when beer is added to the mix. But we’d NEVER imply that Andrew Robert Rector enjoyed a sip of any adult beverage before slumbering at the April 13 Yankees-Red Sox game, ’cause this dude is lawyered up.

When an ESPN cameraman noticed Rector catching some Zs at Yankee Stadium, announcers Dan Shulman and John Kruk poked fun at him for a couple minutes:

Rector is now suing the network, its announcers, Major League Baseball and even the Yankees themselves (maybe they should’ve played more thrillingly?) in Bronx County Supreme Court for $10 million, claiming defamation and emotional damage. The legal complaint argues that the broadcast led the public to assume Rector is a “symbol of failure” and furthermore:

“Plaintiff is [an] unintelligent and stupid individual.
“Plaintiff is not worthy to be fan of the New York Yankee[s].
“Plaintiff is a fatty cow that need[s] two seats…
“Plaintiff is [a] confused individual that neither understands nor knows anything about history and the meaning of rivalry between Red Sox and New York Yankee[s].
“Plaintiff is so stupid that he cannot differentiate between his house and public place by snoozing throughout the fourth inning of the Yankee game.”

Maybe the ESPN commentary was a little harsh — who hasn’t fallen asleep in public? — but $10 million is a ridiculous amount of cash. George Constanza could’ve been a rich, rich man:

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Guys, let this be a lesson to you: Always use protection — or else you could face some painful consequences.

Pyros, a 26-year-old brown bear in the Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France, was living large by mating with every female bear around. Unfortunately, he’s now related to the entire next generation — and if he keeps breeding, it would threaten the colony’s genetic diversity through incest (and we all know where incest leads). So, for the good of his species, Pyros’s furry balls must be chopped.

“If he keeps up this sexual vigor and dominant attitude for a few more years, the other males in the mountains have no chance of mating with any of the females,” a wildlife official told Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

None of those other males have fathered a single cub in over 20 years, because Pyros is just too much of a stud. Brown bears normally lose their libidos around 19, but Pyros’s thirst just can’t be quenched.

However, officials are considering two other possibilities: 1) leaving Pyros alone, because he’s reaching the age when females will find him less attractive — losing his teeth and slowing down (unless he is like Jack Nicholson, in which case that will never happen)– and 2) exiling him to a bear sanctuary to live a sexless, lonely existence, because, even decrepit and sterilized, he may be too much of a c*ck-blocker for his species’ own good.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Even if you don’t normally associate Microsoft founder Bill Gates with intimate thoughts of sexy time (and if you currently do, who am I to judge?), that could soon change. The tech CEO-turned-philanthropist gave $100,000 to the University of Wollongong in Australia to develop a “next generation condom…made to act and feel more like real skin,” as project engineer Dr. Robert Gorkin describes it in this unveiling (“unrolling”?) video from earlier this week:

Instead of latex, the technology uses a “hydro-gel,” which looks suspiciously like Saran Wrap but would “preserve or enhance pleasure” during intercourse.

It’s all part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s initiative to fight the global spread of HIV by designing a condom that men are more willing to wear. As Gates said in a Reddit AMA back in February:

“This is a sensitive topic. The idea was that men don’t like the current design so perhaps something they would be more open to would allow for less HIV transmission. We still haven’t gotten the results.”

Even if this hydro-gel stuff doesn’t wind up replacing current-generation condoms, Gates still has 10 other prophylactic prototypes in development, all winners of a grant competition from last year. Bravo, sir! Now if only he’d find us a way to join the Mile-High Club in our flying cars.

Marty Beckerman