Free-associating on the official poster for Mad Men's sixth season: Draper crosses paths with Draper (maybe the embodiment his Dick Whitman persona?) as they head in different directions (past! Present! Future! A spring suit and a winter suit!); we have entered the fashion era of bad sheer sleeves; the moral or actual police are on to Don for either going the wrong way down Madison Avenue or for being a cad or maybe for some new secret crime yet to be unearthed; granted, this is a sketchy illustration, but I don't see a wedding ring on Don's left hand. Time to get out the magnifying glass. It's going to be a long three and a half weeks.

US Weekly

Kate Winslet & Ned Rocknroll: Kate Winslet married Ned Rocknroll, a.k.a. Richard Branson's nephew with the incredibly dumb (self-chosen) name. "Call her Mrs. Rocknroll!" I will but I won't like it! The couple of a year wed before "a small group of friends and family." Perennial bachelor Leonardo DiCaprio "walked the bride down the aisle" and shattered/stoked the dreams of a trillion Titanic fangirls. Ned is "really attracted to her mind. She's mature, and he feels he can learn so much from her. It's sexy!" Is it just me or does that sound a little bit like shade? Oh, well, wishing all the best to the Rocknrolls.

• Two brave souls take the Denny’s Hobbit-themed menu for a spin, finding that its items “tasted good in a way that only the worst food can.”
• Carmen Electra and Simon Cowell find each other “adorable.” They have some things in common, I guess.

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. They now realize the show is never going to end, and they're slowly coming to terms with their hilarious fate.

Tate Stevens

Lisanti: Check it out, L.A. Reid wore a cowboy hat! And that is the most interesting thing that happened during either of Tate Stevens's songs. "We don't have flashy cars or big mansions," Tate explains about his social circle's financial situation. Say good-bye to those old, poor friends, dude. If America keeps voting you no. 1 every week, pretty soon you're going to have the flashy car, the big mansion, and a gold-plated jackhammer you use to break up your driveway just for fun, and all your former pals are gonna start whispering about how you went "all Blake Shelton" on them overnight. (You should see how many gold-plated jackhammers Blake Shelton has. It's amazing. Never worked a road crew in his life, he's just really into jackhammers.)

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. It's not an abusive relationship, it's just a very complicated one.

Last night, America’s third-favorite singing competition dragged itself to the Final Six. For the first time this season, YOU, America, had the opportunity to pick one of the contestants' songs in the Pepsi Viewers' Choice Supermax Dragon Fire Contest. Well, America, on a night when 4Chan trolls could have forced Tate Stevens to sing 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Coochie,” you somehow out-boringed the show’s producers, who seem to believe that the best way to improve “music” is to glue sparkly shit onto everything. The X Factor has become pretty hard to watch as of late, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, think back on the literary ambitions of my youth, and start sharpening the ends of random Q-tips in the hopes that maybe one day there will be an earthquake here in Los Angeles and tectonic force will just take care of what I can’t do myself.

Anyway, Pepsi onward and Pepsi upward. — Kang

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. It's their favorite singing competition show ever — don't let the deadness in their eyes fool you.

Carly Rose Sonenclar

Kang: I can’t really figure out a good anagram for her name. Every time I look at those letters, I just get COORS and RACECAR (a palindrome!). If she had another E in there somewhere, she actually could have CeCe Frey IN her name. Petition to make it Carles Rose Sonenclar?

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. Come, stay a while. They aren't going anywhere; there are still some off-key versions of Celine Dion songs they haven't heard.

It was “diva" week on The X Factor, a word we are all too familiar with here at Grantland. And because we have already determined that none of these contestants can reach those grand heights, I will be rating the chosen contestants this week based on just how badly they butchered their Diva moment. — Kang

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. Yes, they get paid for this, but someone also pays the people who scrape skull fragments from the walls at murder scenes.

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. Take their hands as they escort you to a magical world of singing, dancing, and laughter, and then leave you to die there, just as they did.

TEENS

Arin Ray

Kang: I don’t remember much of his performance because I ate a grip of M&Ms last night and an entire Reuben, both of which put me on the brink of a food coma. What I do remember about the beginning of the show was that all the girls had done something absolutely insane with their hair. Fox, you can trot out ZoZo to sing the national anthem at the World Series to cross-promote New Girl, but do you really have to give everyone on The X Factor her haircut? Poor Jennel Garcia looked like someone had taken to her head with a weedwacker and then opened up that weedwacker’s oil tank and dumped it on her head. Demi, who had wowed us with her mermaid hair, now looks like Punky Brewster.

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. This is where things get hairy. You're going to tell your kids about this one. (You are not going to tell your kids about this one.)

Last night, on the October 23rd of our Lord, we finally reached the edge of the tundra. How many frozen bodies we left behind atop the frozen ground without the decency of a good Christian burial! How many strong horses we lost to the unrelenting snows! Only 16 soldiers lived through the ordeal.

Here are their stories. — Kang

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. Like Monet, Van Gogh, and so many great minds before them, the importance of their work will not be recognized until long after they’ve left this world, but there will be at least one straight–to–On Demand biopic once it is.

Last night The X Factor’s Cliffside Concert Series continued with the Over 25s and the Under 16s serenading L.A. Reid and Britney Spears, respectively, with glacial-tempo, plodding-piano-ballad versions of your favorite Nicki Minaj dance floor hits. (The location of Cliffside Concert Series was chosen for its convenient proximity to where you might want to throw your body after said performances.) Will.I.Am and Justin Bieber’s sunglasses were on hand to help steer the course of these people’s lives, and your passionate X Factor correspondents were on hand to document this pivotal point in America’s 16th Major Sport and Second-Favorite Nationally Broadcast Singing Competition. — Yoshida

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. No, you shut up, YOUR job is ridiculous.

The X Factor death march trudged along last night from the frozen tundra of Boot Camp to the verdant paradise of the “judges' homes,” a land where Simon Cowell unbuttons his shirt to the fourth button, a land where Demi Lovato pours salt in her bathwater and unleashes her mermaid tail, a land where the beleaguered X Factor stylists can say, “Maybe we can make Britney wear sunglasses so America doesn’t have to look at her batshit-crazy eye makeup anymore.” But to reach this Land Before Time, where Littlefoot, Cera, and Spike re-unite with their Jurassic family, we had to kill off some cute little dinosaurs like Freddie Combs, the wheelchaired inspiration who apparently couldn’t heed Simon’s command to lose 200 or so pounds before the show started.

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. It’s a tough job, and honestly, nobody really has to do it, but — shhhhh — don’t tell them that.

I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure what’s happening on The X Factor anymore. My girl Jessica Espinoza was unceremoniously dismissed last night, a nasty strain of viral aphasia is running rampant in the Mondrian, and CeCe Frey’s Animorphs journey is almost complete. Today was “Task 2” of boot camp, a series of head-to-head duets among the remaining competitors, but for the life of me I could not figure out what function these battles serve. They’re clearly not pitting contestants against the competition in their own category, and it doesn’t even seem like one person in each battle definitely moves on or definitely goes home.

For reasons still not entirely clear to them, Grantland editors Jay Caspian Kang, Mark Lisanti, and Emily Yoshida have decided to track the second season of The X Factor. Abandon all hope, ye who mistakenly inter-navigate to here.

The X Factor began its Thunderdome stage last night. 120 tweens, olds, and groups converged in Miami to see which 24 would make the semifinals. Britney made like 15 weird faces in the first three minutes, L.A. Reid brought back the “totally inappropriately timed head shake,” Demi put that great sea foam ponytail into a French Braid, and for the first time on the show, we actually saw some decent competition!