This dude: Facebook-approved.

It's pretty frequent these days to experience Impotent Facebook Rage (IFR), in which the social media giant does something so profoundly irritating or angry-making that you immediately vow to get off the site altogether. And yet, you don't cancel your account cold turkey (or at least I don't), probably because Facebook is basically a blue-and-white, pixelated version of crack cocaine. Today in IFR moments: According to campaign donation data from several sources, Facebook and its employees donated between $12,000 and $15,000 to Ted Cruz in the last election cycle.

Back in 2011, Facebook formed a PAC; a spokesperson told the Washington Post at the time that the body would "give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

That's an amazingly wordy sentence that manages, at the same time, to say absolutely nothing at all. It's never been clear how the PAC chooses candidates to give money to; in 2012, Mashable found that they donate to Republicans at a slightly higher rate than Democrats (although, according to campaign donation tracker Open Secrets, they gave some $95,000 to President Obama's re-election, compared with just $20,000 to Mitt Romney).

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When the New York Jets pushed Tim Tebow overboard sans parachute earlier this week, the quarterback had no shortage of suitors. None of them were with NFL teams, which all seem to have concluded that his miraculous 2011 season was a fluke and that he's not very good, but they were at least pigskin-related. The Lingerie Football League offered to take him on as a quarterbacks coach. If Tebow still thinks he can play at the professional level, the Omaha Beef of the Champions Professional Indoor Football League are offering $75 per game.

That's gotta sting for a guy who just last year commanded more than $1 million. Tebow himself has remained silent, but Billy Back, head coach of Allen-based indoor club Texas Revolution, has taken umbrage on his behalf. "We thought the $75 offer was insulting," Back told the Morning News on Wednesday. "We could offer him $225 per game and the $25 win bonus."

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@ZooeyDeschanel

We somehow missed this in the chaotic aftermath of last week's Boston Marathon bombing, partly because we don't watch the news with closed captioning on, partly because we don't follow Zooey Deschanel on Twitter. But local Fox affiliate KDFW seems to have labeled the 33-year-old actress/indie songstress/Apple pitchwoman as an alleged terrorist.

"Whoa! Epic closed captioning FAIL!" she tweeted when she saw the above screenshot, in which the surviving suspect in the bombing is described as "19-year-old Zooey Deschanel."

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In the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death last week, the Morning News took the opportunity to plumb its archives to remind us of the British prime minister's surprisingly strong ties to Dallas. She was something of a regular here, making frequent trips to Highland Park to visit her son Mark and her two grandkids.

The British media is currently fawning over one of them, 19-year-old Amanda Thatcher, a product of Highland Park High School. She delivered a reportedly moving tribute at her grandmother's funeral today, quoting a decidedly Thatcher-esque passage from Ephesians that speaks of the struggle "against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

The Guardian says she spoke with a "Texan twang," though, given her Highland Park upbringing, the Daily Mail's "pronounced American accent" is probably a fairer description.

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You wouldn't know it from glancing at his bank account, but Mark Cuban used to be poor. This isn't exactly news. Cuban embodies the modern version of the peculiarly American up-by-the-bootstraps fairy tale, in which a hard-luck young person, through hard work and business savvy, transforms himself from struggling peon to billionaire tech entrepreneur. He even wrote a book about it.

It's a good story, though, satisfying both in its adherence to the familiar rags-to-riches archetype and because it provides hope to other would-be entrepreneurs that they, too, will strike it rich. Cuban recounts a portion of the tale for Forbes this month, the second Dallas billionaire in recent months to recount his hardscrabble beginnings for the magazine, though T. Boone Pickens' beginnings were decidedly harder scrabble.

He came to Dallas at age 24 at the behest of college roommates driving a 1977 Fiat X19 with a hole in the floorboard that constantly hemorrhaged oil.

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It's possible that there exists, somewhere, a human being manlier than former Cowboy Darryl Johnston. Maybe some real-world version of the Old Spice guy. But Johnston, a legendary fullback with a square jaw, three Super Bowl rings and the uber-masculine nickname "Moose," is certainly a close second. Johnston all but oozes testosterone.

And that right there might be his problem. Johnston went on WFAA yesterday to reveal his long-hidden secret: His testosterone levels are chronically low.

"Fatigue became an interruption in the things that I did on a day-to-day basis," Johnston told health reporter Janet St. James. "First, I had the conversation with myself, 'Is this what life is going to be for me moving forward or is there something else there?'"

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Why one would feel the need to seek Mark Cuban's advice, seeing as he doles it out readily on his blog, his reality show, in a dirt-cheap e-book, and via whatever other medium happens to be at hand, is beyond me.

But if that's not quite enough and you're still looking to pick his brain, you now have a direct line. It'll just cost $166 per minute, or roughly 300 times what those ladies in the back of the Observer charge for their advice.

Cuban is one of some 7,000 experts who have signed up to give advice through Clarity, a startup web app that connects aspiring entrepreneurs with established ones.

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Yesterday, Mark Cuban joined the rest of the universe in parsing the presidential election, putting on his media-critic hat and taking to his blog to assess the state of political coverage on cable.

Turns out, Cuban loves Fox News. He watched it all the time during the election cycle, though not as a source of objective reporting or nuanced analysis, neither of which exist on the network in any measurable quantity. Instead, he watches Fox (and MSNBC) as studies in branding.

"Neither truly was reporting the news. They were telling us how they believed a negative brand could be built," he wrote. "And not only did they tell us how negative the other brand was, they were relentless in trying to create confirmation of that negative brand by bringing in 'experts' to confirm their brand bias."

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Armstrong at 2008's Tour de Gruene

In the latest bit of fallout from the doping allegations against him, several news outlets are reporting that Lance Armstrong will step down as chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, better known as Livestrong, the Austin-based cancer-fighting charity he helped found in 1997. It was also reported this morning that Nike will be terminating its endorsement deal with the cyclist.

In a statement on Livestrong obtained by the Associated Press, Armstrong said: "This organization, its mission and its supporters are incredibly dear to my heart. Today therefore, to spare the foundation any negative effects as a result of controversy surrounding my cycling career, I will conclude my chairmanship." Vice-chair Jeff Garvey will take over for him, although Armstrong will remain on the 15-member board.

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Wikipedia

Before T. Boone Pickens earned his fortune as an oil company executive and corporate raider, before he became a sagacious elder statesman of the business world and made his home in Preston Hollow, he was a geology student at Oklahoma A & M with a wife and daughter and a desperate need for a job.

He found one at Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, making $290 per month.

"I don't want to be too critical of Phillips," Pickens writes in a folksy, even charming essay in the September issue of Forbes Life. They didn't come looking for me. I went looking for them, and they gave me a job. But I was amused by some of the things they did."

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