Marketers sure are brilliant! Just when you thought you'd begun to really identify with a brand you've loved and faithfully used since childhood, Philip Morris became Altria, and Time Warner became AOL Time Warner, before becoming Time Warner again...so exciting!

7up "flipped it and reversed it" to become dnL, and next thing you know, twenty-somethings felt like skateboarding and reading "Thrasher" for the first time since junior high (and it surely didn't hurt that 7up, I mean, dnL, tastes way cooler than yesterday's extreme-sports soda, Mountain Dew).

Now, according to Adweek, the branding wizards at Mendelsohn/Zien are giving us another rechristening. Beloved second-tier fast-food chain Carl's Jr. is pandering to its Los Angeles base:

"With a simple display of the fast-food chain's smiling-star logo, a voiceover announces, "Carl's Jr. would like to extend a special welcome to the L.A. Lakers' Karl Malone," at which point a super comes up under the Laker-gold star, reading "Karl's Jr." The sound of a bouncing basketball concludes the spot."

Phew. Seeing that revised logo the first time, and given chain founder Carl Karcher's notorious background as an avid Southern California Republican, I initially feared far more insidious influences were at work.

Finally! Richard Rushfield and Stacey Grenrock-Woods (and their stellar contributors) are back with a second issue of LA Innuendo.

What you will find inside (or on the Web site if you don't live in Los Angeles):
Brett Ratner bashing, obligatory (but still funny) Gigli jokes, and more of those great Overheard Conversations like this beaut overheard at the Gold's Gym Parking Lot in Hollywood:
Two women in workout clothes argue before getting into the car.
FIRST: "Do you want to get something to eat?"
SECOND: "No, I just ate."
FIRST: "So what, you're fully bulimic. Let's go."

Makes me sad that there wasn't anything this good to read when I lived in LA.

Not since Virginia Slims tried to connect smoking with women's lib has an ad so offensively linked consumption with power as this new campaign from the white devils at A Diamond is Forever.
Since the Web site shortens the ad's text, here it is from the print campaign:

Your left hand says 'we.' Your right hand says 'me.' Your left hand rocks the cradle. Your right hand rules the world. Women of the world, raise your right hand. A Diamond is Forever. The New Diamond Right Hand Ring. Romantic, Modern Vintage, Floral and Contemporary Styles at ADIAMONDISFOREVER.COM

That's seriously fucked up. How about:

Our left hand says 'greed.' Our right hand says 'monopoly.' Our left hand held down the slave laborer working in the mine. Our right hand searched his ass for any contraband. Women of the world, raise your right hand in favor of exploitation.

Speaking of sparkly rocks of death, Black Table has an interview with Janine Roberts, author of Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel on the very same topic today.

White House Takes Credit for Surge in Economy by Richard W. Stevenson

Personally, I think it's because of the new $20s: they make spending fun!

[low culture kidz corner: Hey, kids! Want a new $20 of your own? Just download the image above and use your color printer to make as many as you like! It's easy, but you may need an adult's supervision.]

When two movies (one based on real events, the other on a Philip Roth novel) that have very little to with each other both turn out to hinge on lies and the lying liars who tell them, you gotta wonder just what about the zeitgeist puts us in the minds of deceptive prevaricators. Oh, right.

Earlier this month, Bernard Weinraub of The New York Times reported the astounding fact that Carol Mendelsohn and Ann Donahue, writers for C.S.I and its imaginatively-named spin-off, C.S.I. Miami (we accept no responsibility if you follow these links to the shows' incredibly bad Flash-intensive homepages) had signed a contract that would pay them each $20 million if the shows lasted through the 2007-2008. According to Weinraub, Jerry Bruckheimer, the shows' producer, called the writers "the backbone of the shows."

So, what sort of edgy, groundbreaking plots has CBS managed to get from Mendelsohn, 52, and Donahue, 48? How about episode the story of a murdered plushie tonight at 9PM EST?
While it is a somewhat original�and even a little radical�premise from the network that brought us Touched by an Angel and Murder, She Wrote, it's not nearly as original or exciting as the producers would have us believe.

Maybe they're trying to go after their closest competitor (in terms of cult following and franchise-growth), Law & Order, promos for which frequently boast the the plot was "Ripped from the headlines!" Only, the headline this episode of C.S.I. was ripped from is from March 2001.

Why should Ari Fleischer even bother writing his White House memoir when we have The Story of O? Based on the quotes Fleischer gave Anthony Violanti of The Buffalo News, it sounds like his experience wasn't too far from that of a certain young Parisian woman who gave herself over body and soul:
The Story of O:
"He had told Sir Stephen of O's request and,in her presence, asked him to punish her harshly enough so that she would never again dare even to conceive of shirking her duties."

The Story of Fleischer:
"I loved what I did in the White House. I found it to be intellectually stimulating, rewarding and enjoyable. But it was punishing, brutal, tough�"

The Story of O:
"O saw girls who were caught talking thrown to the floor and whipped �once in the hallway leading to the red wing, and twice again in the fectory they had just entered. So it was possible to be whipped in broad daylight, despite what they had told her the first evening�"

The Story of Fleischer:
"It's not easy to catch arrows thrown by the press every day, but that's their job, and it's my job to catch them."

The Story of O:
"You are here to serve your masters. During the day, you will perform whatever domestic duties are assigned to you, such as sweeping, putting back the books, arranging flowers, or waiting on table. Nothing more difficult than that. But at the first word or sign from anyone you will drop whatever you are doing and ready yourself for what is really your one and only duty: to lend yourself. Your hands are not your own, nor are your breasts, nor, most especially, any of your bodily orifices, which we may explore or penetrate at will."

The Story of Fleischer:
"It's a hard job. You have to serve two masters: the president of the United States, and you also try to help the Washington press corps do its job."

The Story of O:
"Was she growing weary? No. By dint of being defiled and desecrated, it seems that she must have grown used to outrages, by dint of being caressed, to caresses, if not to the whip by dint of being whipped."

The Story of Fleischer:
"I was pooped... It's the kind of job that grinds you down."

The Story of O:
"Your submission will be obtained in spite of you, not only for the inimitable pleasure that I and others will derive from it, but also that you will be made aware of what has been done to you."

The Story of Fleischer:
"It was a pleasure�answering questions from people who use their teeth to smile."

[Fleischer story via Romenesko]

"Hefner's two little black books from 1957 and 1958, include a who's who of celebrities and cultural icons of the day, ranging from Richard Avedon to Oleg Cassini. Christie's says the address books could fetch up to $12,000 apiece." Bunny Booty On The Block In Playboy Auction By Paul Tharp

Here at low culture, we have already speculated how agonizing it must be for members of the White House press corps to be subjected to President Bush's repetitive jokes and audaciously inane pet nicknames for his friends and peers.

Having taken a closer look at the full transcript of Tuesday's press conference, however, it became vividly clear: the president must be taking leadership cues from David Brent of BBC America's second-season hit television series, "The Office"). David (brilliantly played by actor Ricky Gervais) is the bumbling and deluded Regional Manager at a paper-supply company in an office park in the middle of nowhere.

Fans of the show can check out the uncanny similarities by looking at the lesson plan:

In an effort to better serve our dozens (give or take) of readers, low culture recently set aside $7000 to do some demographic research into what our readers (that means you, Dave, Mark, Felix, Patricio, Jon, Jen, and Kate!) want most from our site. We consulted experts (well, adjunct lecturers) from Harvard's Faith Popcorn Institute of Microtrend Studies and hired trend-spotters (okay, catty high school girls) from Pupik, a social forecasting firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Bucharest (�Look: It's All Inside The Pupik') to figure out precisely what you want (other than porn).

Amazingly, we learned that in addition to the usual criticisms of the Bush administration and The New York Post, hilarious Separated at Birth rip-offs, and love letters to Tracy Morgan you've come to expect from us, what people want most is insightful analysis of new oral hygiene products and gratuitous cursing. Well, let it never be said that we don't pander.

What the fuck is up with citrus flavored mouthwash and toothpaste?

Who the fuck thought people want to clean their teeth with something that tastes like Sunny Delight? You know that gross just-brushed-your-teeth-and-then-drank-orange-juice feeling? Apparently some people like it so much, they want to compress it into one simple step.

Seriously, are the makers of Crest Whitening Expressions and Citrus Listerine planning on putting out products flavored like crack? Because clearly, that's what they've been smoking.

Buried at the very end of Armond White's review of The Human Stain in this week's New York Press is this:
The moments are so especially erotic, it's clear we're watching Coleman's secrets and dreams. (Nakedness bathed in Jean-Yves Escoffier's amber light; Coleman snorfling a young Wasp woman's body with curiosity as much as passion.)

Snorfling? What the snorf?!? Curious, I snorfled over to the blogger's best friend, Google and tried to find this word. Here's what I got: What is my Greyhound trying to tell me?
The click/snap is actually a replacement for the lick; you will find that most of these dogs aren't lickers. Sometimes they yelp, bark, or make throaty noises while clicking. "Snorfling" might be a good description of this activity.
Snorfled that right up.

Earlier thoughts on Armond White from low culture.

Back in 1994, Douglas Coupland complained in ArtForum that the younger generation of artists and art critics had completely forgotten James Rosenquist. (The essay, on Rosenquist's F-111, a portion of which is above, is collected in Polaroids from the Dead.)
Not so anymore. Rosenquist is the subject of a big retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York (through January 25th) and pops up today in one of those mini profiles in The Times Metro Section. Here's a little bit of wisdom from an art world survivor to all you young turks out there:
We lived like kings in New York in those days on very little money. The younger artists today think they have to turn their fine art into cash to pay the rent. Now what happens is they show too early and the critics say they stink and they think they stink.
Keep at it, kids. This guy is 70 years-old.

Despite reports that jocularity was in the air during yesterday's 48-minute White House press conference, some quip-weary reporters seem to have tired of President Bush's notorious wit and affectionate name-calling:

"When the president called on Mark Smith, the Associated Press radio reporter thanked him for 'including radio folks' in the give-and-take.

To that, a slightly chagrined Smith replied: 'I wish I could say that was the first time you told me that, sir.' Amid the short bursts of laughter, the smiling president retorted: 'The first time I did it to a national audience, though.'"

This single moment in the press conference ought to inspire genuine pity for the poor "filtering" members of the press. I'd imagine that touring with Bush day in and day out would be comparable to being married to an exasperatingly bad stand-up comic who practices his or her routine on you each night, and then having to furthermore sit in and watch his or her stage shows every three months.

And I guess this explains why we haven't seen many outtakes from "Journeys with George".

Saw the trailer for The Last Samurai last night. What's the deal with Tom Cruise always wanting to be uglied up in his movies? In the Samurai trailer we get two shots of a badly bruised and swollen Cruise, his coverboy looks destroyed.
Reminded me of Vanilla Sky, in which he spent the majority of that film looking like Quasimodo.

Any shrinks out there wanna take a crack at this?

Today is the eighth anniversary of Terry Southern's death. Terry was co-author (with Mason Hoffenberg) of Candy (they were paid $500 for their retelling of Candide as a softcore romp through the sixties), co-screenwriter (with Stanley Kubrick) of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (he also tried to get the director to let him co-write A Clockwork Orange with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones as Alex and his Droogs), the true author of Easy Rider, and a journalist, to boot.

Terry was the knock you on your ass funny heart of the sixties counterculture and an astute slayer of pieties�right, left, center, everything in between.
Here's a letter Southern wrote to Ms. Magazine in 1972, from Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995 (edited by Terry's son, Nile):

Dear Ms.:
Since the letters you see free to print are so flagrantly and one-sidedly selective ("self-serving" is, I believe the expression), I doubt this will find its way into those columns; we shall see. In any case, during your own quest for the truth, libbywise, you might consider the following suggestion: namely, that it is na�ve in the extreme for women to expect to be regarded as equals by men (despite all lip service to the contrary), so long as they persist in subhuman (i.e., animal-like) behavior during sexual intercourse. I'm referring, as you doubtless know, to the outlandish panting, gasping, moaning, sobbing, writhing, scratching, biting, screaming conniptions, and the seemingly invariable "Oh my god ... oh, my god ... oh, my god" all so predictably integral to the pre-, post-, and orgasmic stages of intercourse...

According to Dick Holland of The Austin Chronicle, there's no evidence that Ms. ran the letter in whole or in part.

Let Terry's writing�and his utterly uncompromising, career-ruining antics�be a lesson to all of you safe, boring, self-styled "humorists" out there (you know who you are!) who's only ambition is to write an illustration-heavy quickie book about current events, land a New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs piece, get their own McSweeneys perma-link, or fill the once-a-month humor hole in The Times Op-Ed page. If Terry were alive today, he'd tell you exactly which hole you can fill and how. (Furthermore, Terry would never call himself a 'humorist': sounds too much like 'economist' or 'manicurist' and besides, it makes being funny seem like a job.)

To do today:
Visit Nile's site and and pay your respects.
Rent Candy and see Marlon Brando in his most insane (but intentionally funny) performance this side of The Island of Dr. Moreau
Remind yourself of how relevant Dr. Strangelove still is by checking out Operation Strangelove.
Read Terry's take on the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and get ready for the G.O.P. invasion of New York next Sept. 11.
Pray that Drew Barrymore's Flower Films never gets her proposed remake of Barbarella off the ground.
Be more funny.

Christine Hauser of the New York Times must have had to refrain from smiling to herself as she penned her account of Palestinian officials agreeing to form a new, permanent government in the wake of the impending November 4 dissolution of the current, temporary cabinet.

"The Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat asked the prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, to form the cabinet, Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said today, according to news agency reports from Ramallah in the West Bank.

'President Arafat and the Fatah Central Committee have unanimously asked Abu Ala to form a new Cabinet based on the current one,' Mr. Shaath said, using Mr. Qurei's nom de guerre."

Hauser's right, of course. Though she's ostensibly discussing the creation of a Palestinian government, using the more conventional notions of "pseudonym" or "fictitious name" lacks the ever-so-clever double entendre of the French nom de guerre, which is also used in a pseudonymous capacity, but literally means "a war name, or a name used in the course of fighting."

So, when does this government-creating end and the fighting resume? I was so busy quibbling over semantics that I forgot, whose turn is it?

Not sure how I feel about this: it appears the FOX Network (or at least their marketing people) has discovered this weird thing called 'meta'. How else to explain the ad for the soon-to-be cancelled new show Arrested Development with this phrase:

It's called heading off criticism at the pass, people. And when your show stars Jason Bateman, it's an absolute necessity.

Earlier FOX antics from low culture

Though we're still listening to EMF and several assorted skronk mixtapes, we knew that it would be a great disservice to the youthful upper-middle-class post-hipster community to blithely ignore the arrival of The Strokes' second album, so we had guest reviewer Guy Cimbalo review the reviews:

The Strokes release “Room On Fire” today, affording the dubious field of rock journalism an opportunity to plow through more self-same cliches than typical coverage of how difficult Thom Yorke can be. But why slog through countless articles headlined “Different Strokes?” when low culture lets you read them all in one sitting?

Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure
Anyone know when George Gurley's birthday is?

[Thanks, Madame J!]

Lock up your hermaphroditic daughters: The Chapman Brothers are back! Like a nasty case of herpes that pops up every few years to make the skin of the body politic crawl, Jake and Dinos Chapman have returned with their unique take on shock art, just in time for awards season.

Who can forget their adorable take on smushed-together pre-adolescent girls with penis noses? Or their enlightening take on the Holocaust involving miniature concentration camps. (The figurines would be right at home in a Bürger Führer Unhappy Meal™.)

Here's part of their latest bid for a little attention—and a lot of scratch—in the 20th annual Turner Prize in December. On the left, we see Death, (note the oblique, deep title) "a life-size bronze cast of two inflatable sex dolls engaged in fellatio." Oh, so that's what those two dolls were doing!

The weird thing about Jake and Dinos' shocking, shocking art is that it’s really, really boring. I mean, what angry 10 year-old boys hasn’t doodled the same things in his notebook during a boring math class? It reminds me of the name (and the cover art) of an old album. And I didn't have to go to a museum to see it.

Presumably, those of you living in New York have by now been bombarded with these public-service ads from the American Legacy Foundation, founded in the wake of the tobacco industry's settlement with 46 states in 1999 and "dedicated to building a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit."

That's a fine and noble mission, and certainly warrants some form of applause. But they're making it so hard for me to get behind their message. First, they unveiled the truth® campaign, which utilized an uber-didactic narrative and "cutting-edge" filmmaking methodology to try to persuade the MTV generation that smoking is bad for you (natch) and the tobacco industry is run by a bunch of greedy, calloused motherfuckers who never saw a Michael Mann film they could really embrace.

Within the past year or so, the relatively austere tone of the original truth® campaign morphed into the "Crazyworld" campaign, which seemed to channel HBO's absurdist "Carnivale" television series, but populating the cast with hipsters rather than circus freaks (those terms are in fact mutually exclusive).

Now comes our very own New York-tailored campaign, "A Smoke-Free New York Works", which was ostensibly created in the wake of a vocal protest campaign by those who decried Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki's recent ban on smoking in bars and nightclubs. Again, a fine and noble mission. Anyone living in Los Angeles or California in general knows this can work just fine, despite many TimeOut New York cover stories whining to the contrary.

The problem, however, is that this new American Legacy campaign seems to throw out (alongside the didacticism, thankfully) the avant-garde pretense of its predecessors in lieu of pure and simpleminded idiocy. Here's the gist: whether sitting on a subway car, or waiting at a bus stop, or leafing through the Village Voice, a bold white ad with hand-scrawled red text leaps out at you, often bearing the most hilariously asinine phrases imaginable. Here are some real, actual samples, unlike our "absurd" headline:

"If they ban smoking in college classrooms, it will destroy higher education!"

"If they ban smoking in office buildings, no one will ever work again!"

"If they ban smoking in churches, it will wipe out all religion!"

"If they ban smoking at JFK, nobody will ever fly again!"

"If they ban smoking in stores, everyone will quit buying stuff!"

Bear in mind these are all actual ads you may have encountered. But I have to ask, who the hell would ever utter such stupid, contemptibly moronic assertions? And if these people really exist, are they really worth listening to, much less quoting?

So, once again, the lofty goals of the anti-smoking industry -- despite my being otherwise inclined to endorse any and all of their efforts -- have left me to consider supporting efforts and initiatives that would remove their funding. Well, not really, but...something needs to be done, because if I ever step into a bathroom and see this hanging on the doorway or near the stalls, I'll snap and ask someone for a light. Again, this is a real and actual ad:

"If they ban smoking in bathrooms, it will kill the urinal cake industry!"

Do I even care about the urinal cake industry? It's the tobacco industry that needs to be reined in, chumps, and ads like this are completely counter-effective.

Simon Reynolds goes prog crazy on his blissblog. Sort of reminds me of how the Smurfs talked only, um, more prog.

I saw this headline on The New Republic Web site and assumed it would be yet another piece on Gregg Easterbrook: When it comes to anti-Semitism, old habits die hard.

Instead, I found an essay on the Middle East by TNR's Cambridge Diarist and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz.

"The more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society." � President Bush on the attacks in Baghdad that killed at least 34 people and injured another 200.

Bush Says Bombings Will Not Deter Him by By Richard W. Stevenson and David Firestone

Happy Songs for our Cheerleader-in-Chief:
"Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"
"Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive"
"Shiny Happy People"

Let's see if the Teflon Hip-Hop Don can outrun this latest controversy:
A Hip-Hop Star's Fashion Line Is Tagged With a Sweatshop by Angel Franco.

I'm betting he'll flip this in his favor just like everything else in his charmed life.

Note: This was a review of Ang Lee's Hulk written around the time of the film's theatrical release for an online magazine. The article got spiked due to the film's precipitous decline in the box office during its second week and a general sense that the film didn't have the cultural impact people had anticipated. Hulk has just been released on a two-disc DVD. This article is pretty fucking long, so no one will blame you if you skip it.

"Green personalities want to help every one. They are nature's mothers... Nurturers by choice, they are the ones who take care of animals, humans and plants.

"Green personalities need to be careful not to make martyrs of themselves." - Da Juana Byrd, "Color Personality" Test from PsychicAdvice.com

I have seen the future of manhood, and it is green. Hulk green, to be more specific.

Tuning into last night's "Sunday Stew" lineup of new shows on MTV, one was treated to the moronic adolescent behavior we've come to expect from the network that contributed "Frog Baseball" and Chris Hardwick to the culture.

There were instances of taunting hyenas with meat, punching a jolly fat man in the face repeatedly, stomping around Las Vegas hotels in flip-flops and baggy basketball shorts, and taunting a 15-year-old until she cried. What was striking though, was that instead of all these antics being acted out by particularly destructive 13-year-old boys, we were treated to these delights from adult men, some of whom were over 30 years old. If Christopher Noxon of the Times' Style section hadn't already dubbed such men-boys 'rejuveniles' back in August, we might refer to them by the name of the show that spawned them: Jackasses.

Forget Ashton, and his nauseating shouting and mugging on Punk'd (seriously, try to forget him�it'll make it so much easier when he's on VH1's Where Are They Now in two years), the biggest Jackasses of all were Steve-O and Chris Pontius, or as they're called when they're stripped naked together, Wild Boyz.

The premise of Wild Boyz is simple yet strangely compelling: let's set two complete idiots loose in some wild terrain with some wild animals and see what happens. Ripping a page�or two, or three, or all of them�from the short-lived, but infinitely better series Fishing With John, the show combines totally uninformed animal husbandry with straight-faced nature program voice over: It's like a National Geographic special hosted by The Three Stooges.

Over a decade old now, Fishing With John was hosted by eighties downtown scenester and indie movie dude John Lurie with a revolving cast of grizzled hipster eminences like Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, and Dennis Hopper and brought some laid-back "cool daddy" cool to what was essentially a boring genre, the fishing show. (Highlights on the Criterion DVD include Tom Waits and John Lurie trying to catch a shark using Jarlsberg cheese and a gun and Willem Dafoe asking John very sweetly if maybe they should zip their sleeping bags together for warmth while camping on a frozen lake for ice fishing.) In contrast, the zingiest banter between Steve-O and Pontius runs along the lines of "Oh, man!" "Yeah, dude!" It's like MTV has gone back to square one.

Yes, a sure way to date yourself is to complain that MTV is stupid and juvenile and tell everyone you liked it soooo much better when Remote Control was on and Kennedy walked the earth, but seriously, I expect a little better from MTV. If they keep this up, I might have to start watching A&E and we don't want that, do we?

Buried within the larger reports of Al Gore's efforts to spearhead a campaign to introduce a "liberal" alternative to mainstream and conservative cable news outlets is this overlooked aspect of the current plan:

"Gore is keeping quiet about it, but he heads a group that plans to pay a reported $70 million to buy Newsworld International (NWI), a cable news network that's currently in fewer than 20 million homes."

I don't claim to be well-versed in the mechanics of establishing new cable networks and contractually arranging for their effective distribution, but replacing a network like NWI with this "liberal alternative" to other networks seems a bit narrowminded and foolhardy, to say the least.

I can geekily admit to really, sincerely loving NWI -- its motley assortment of news from Canada, Germany, the U.K., and Russia consistently proves to be a truly useful alternative to the nationalist (and often naive) perspective of much of the U.S.-based newsmedia. Where else can one see televised footage of U.S.-built Israeli Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers plowing through Palestinian homes, or uncensored broadcasts of the latest Osama bin Laden audio or videotapes? Where else can one see President Bush speak in all his soundbite-devoid, flub-worthy glory? And where else can television viewers get "man on the street" perspectives on international policy from citizens in Ottawa and Berlin?

As such, it would seem to be a less-than-ideal solution to remove this network from the airwaves merely to replace it with an "entertaining" platform for Al Franken or Bill Maher to put forth nightly punchlines about Bush's numerous lies.

Can't we have them both? And maybe we can give up the style network or even, if necessary, C-SPAN 3 (I'm not kidding, there are in fact three C-SPANs).

Setting the hearts of hipster geeks everywhere aflutter, The New Yorker offers up the delectable geek girl-on-girl pairing of the week: Virginia Heffernan and Tina Fey. Except maybe this might have been called the writerly menage a trois that never was; does anyone know what happened to Entertainment Weekly's Kristen Baldwin?

We ask only because Heffernan's profile of Fey seems to channel the spirits of Baldwin's coverage of Weekend Update co-hosts Fey and Jimmy Fallon, which originally appeared in the May 10, 2002 issue of EW. To wit:

1. Sit in on writers' meetings and/or SNL dress rehearsal discussions to convey the humorous give-and-take of Fey's job.

"[On a saturday afternoon] The writers were trying to come up with a joke about the Dixie Chicks, whose lead singer had slighted President Bush. Doug Abeles read the setup: “While in London on Thursday, the Dixie Chicks angered country-music fans when lead singer Natalie Maines told the audience, ‘Just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.’” Fey squinted, as if detecting a quip in the distance...“We apologize,” she suddenly declared. “We forgot that our entire fan base were hillbillies and idiots.” Everyone chuckled except Shoemaker, who pointed out that Dixie Chicks fans were people like his wife. Fey agreed, without apology, and the group moved on to a joke about a man who swallowed a diamond ring in order to ask his proctologist to marry him." (The New Yorker, 2003)

"Update cohosts Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon survey the patchwork of hilarity looking for stuff to cut, while simultaneously facing pressing challenges...And then there is the Captain Morgan problem. "A new study reveals that eyedrops work as well as eye patches to correct lazy eye. A skeptical Captain Morgan said, 'Yeah, I've heard that one before.'" Although it's not every day a person gets to work the swashbuckling mascot of a rum brand into a joke, an Update staffer has some bad news for Fallon: "The thing is," he says matter-of-factly, "Captain Morgan doesn't have an eye patch." In a room full of comedy writers, that's all it takes to provoke a riffing frenzy." (EW, 2002)

2. Invoke Fey's adulatory hipster fan base, and the discomfort this provides her.

"As we were talking, a man in his twenties, with wild tufts of dark hair, stopped by our table, which was near the soda fountain. Over the roar of a blender, he shouted to Fey, “Can I tell you that you are amazing? I don’t want to interrupt, but you are truly, truly amazing!” Fey thanked him, staring down at her plate." (The New Yorker, 2003)

"It would embarrass Tina if she knew how many people have told me they think she's, like, the hottest woman on TV," says [Weekend Update producer Michael] Schur. The sex-symbol issue is, in fact, one that makes both Fallon and Fey squirm uncomfortably and stare at their hands. "I just try to stay out of it," says Fey, who's married to theater director Jeff Richmond. (EW, 2002)

3. Mention People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" list in some capacity

"She lost thirty pounds in the year before she went on camera for “Weekend Update,” and she now works out with a trainer and counts the point value of each meal according to the Weight Watchers system. (Earlier this year, People included her in its annual list of most beautiful people. “Don’t mention it,” she told me. “Ride it out.”)" (The New Yorker, 2003)

"Brace yourself for some full-body blushing, buddy: Fallon just landed on PEOPLE magazine's 50 Most Beautiful list, and gossip columnists have spilled much ink linking him with such ladies as Winona Ryder and fashion designer Tara Subkoff." (EW, 2002)

I love Elvis Mitchell so much that if he were to review the phonebook, I'd read it just to admire his turns-of-phrase and character sketches of Aaron A. Aaronson and Aaron A Adams. Somehow Mitchell manages to be both cool and a major geek at the same time. Case in point, Mitchell's piece in this week's Times Arts & Leisure section, The 'Kill Bill' Soundtrack: D.J. Quentin's Recycled Mix in which Elvis waxes geekier than Harry Knowles, "Moriarty", and Quentin Tarantino in a three-way AOL chat.
Mitchell references movies and TV shows no one (not even the stars and creators) remembers like They Call Her One Eye and Codename: Foxfire.
It's a good article, but man, if no one outside of the smallest of Internet chatrooms will find it interesting. My hat's off to you, Elvis Mitchell, King of Geeks.

In a case of New York media ethnocentrism that would be shocking�shocking�if it weren't so damn predictable, spinsters flipping through this Sunday's Times Vows column were treated to a full-page story (with accompanying photo) about New York magazine's Amy Sohn's wedding to painter Charles Miller. What's so shocking is that just a page or two later, The Times reports on the wedding of New Republic editor Peter Beinart to Diana Hartstein with a teeny-tiny 2.5 paragraph story with no photos!

Are we really to believe that a sex columnist for New York has more glamour and appeal than the editor of The New Republic, America's foremost weekly journal of centrist liberal thought? Sure, Amy writes about her sex life without shame, but Peter knows Al Gore! Someone somewhere must've thought TNR was hot, because there's a little movie coming soon all about the magazine starring this sexy beast.

This is so unfair. And you know Amy's wedding will get optioned as a We movie starring that Jewish actress from Coupling (The Taming of Amy: How New York's Sexiest Sex Column Settled Down for Sex with One Man!) while Peter would be lucky to have his wedding mentioned on K Street. It's enough to make you cancel your subscription to all 20 glossy magazines you get every month.

The New York Times announced today that its "public editor" will be Daniel Okrent.
Jacques Steinberg, The Times' designated insider-outsider newspaper reporter lays out Okrent's qualifications for the job yet neglects to mention his acting role in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown in 1999. I ask you, in all seriously, people: how can we expect balanced, un-biased coverage of Woody Allen from The New York Times going forward!? I sure hope that Mr. Okrent isn't called upon to oversee coverage of Untitled Woody Allen Fall Project (2004) or any of its stars (including Will Farrell, Jason Biggs, Chlo' Sevigny, and Wallace Shawn�the latter of whom have a sex scene one person close to the project called "the hottest on-screen sex scene since The Brown Bunny)? And, more to the point, what about the review of Woody's book? Talk about bias in the media!

[via: Romenesko]

After yesterday's latest attack on American forces in Iraq, where a rocket was fired upon the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad and killed one U.S. occupier (I mean, officer), defense department officials were expressing frustration on Sunday at the increased bravado demonstrated by the strike. The hotel, where U.S. Deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was residing during his current visit to Iraq, had been serving as a makeshift American base of operations and was believed to be safe from such provocation by virtue of being ensconced in protective concrete barricades. By striking at such a seemingly secure building, the insurgents have more or less shattered any myth of security for Americans trying to restore order to the embattled nation.

Also of note was the well-nigh un-ironic adoption of last week's phrase du jour by sympathetic military analysts.

"Placed in the context of insurgent attacks on U.S. forces that are increasing in frequency and effectiveness, this particular operation -- notable both for its daring and for what it says about the enemy's intelligence capabilities -- that, yes, it really does promise to be a long, hard slog," said retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a Persian Gulf War tank commander who is a professor of international relations at Boston University.

I just can't get enough exhilaratingly bizarro news about Mel Gibson's upcoming The Passion of Christ, and I don't even believe in God. But I do believe in crazy movie-making antics!

First, there was last week's news that lead actor Jim Caviezel was struck by lightning while filming. OK, sure, I can buy that.

But then Variety's Army Archerd also reported last week that Gibson was using -- get this -- an animatronic, Jim Henson-esque robo-Christ to suspend from the cross for a number of scenes, since I guess being splayed out on behalf of sinners everywhere for extended periods of time made Jim "I'm no method actor" Caveziel uncomfortable. The virtual Jesus

"was created by Keith Vanderlaan's Captive Audience F/X company which allowed Gibson to shoot long exterior shots in Italy because "Jim Caviezel couldn't remain on the cross in that cold for hours with only a loin cloth." According to Archerd, "the animatronically controlled head moves, the bleeding and beaten chest heaves... [with] special bloody prosthetic makeup appliances to be CGI'd on the figure of Jesus which is stripped down to the bone resulting from the 'horrible instruments of torture.'."

So what happens to this action-figure/son-of-god when shooting wraps? Does Mel Gibson get to keep his own, personal, Jesus? (That, by the way, is the second almost-unintentional Depeche Mode reference in this particular post, after the lead sentence. Won't happen again.)

Everyone knows that Lachlan Murdoch is filthy rich. But today he's merely filthy. Standing on the debris-strewn second floor of his new NoLita apartment building, covered in drywall dust and sweating like the proverbial pig, Murdoch exudes none of the international playboy scion charm we've come to expect from the eldest son of media baron Rupert Murdoch. To be completely honest, the only thing Lachlan is exuding at the moment is a rank, unpleasant odor.

Step aside, Vincent Gallo. Schlockbuster movie director McG has laid claim to the new monopoly on jaw-droppingly shocking interviews given in support of recent film projects. The Hollywood hired hand and former music-video veteran, whose public perception had seemingly been limited to knowledge of his single-word name, his sandy blond hair, and his surfer-dude appearance, is making an effort to transcend (or at least justify) his body of work, which includes the garishly awful (and thankfully short-lived) television series Fastlane and -- most notably -- the two Charlie's Angels films. In other words, the guy has exclusively trafficked in "wham, bam, glam and slam."

Or so we thought. In a recent interview for DVDFile.com given to support the DVD release of Charlie's Angel's 2: Full Throttle, McG has bestowed upon us his take on everything from philosophy to life in the digital age.

Some highlights, lest you continue to think the guy's a total dunce who produces films of little or no redeeming value:

"When I was younger and I was in school, I wanted to be a psychiatrist and I was studying philosophy very deeply and I found myself becoming increasingly unhappy. And just I was getting into sort of Locke and Hume and I was studying Nietzsche to a degree, the more I said, look, I'm really passionate about music, I like the way it makes me feel, I'm very passionate about film, I like how I lose myself and become immersed in a picture when I go to the theater for two hours. I got more and more excited about that and let go some of my philosophical dwellings and I've strangely become a happier person for it. And I mean it is just an approach to living, because I'm very cognizant of different philosophical takes on the life experience, but I've been unsuccessful in trying to unravel the mystery of life."

Well, then. But what are highlights without a few lowlights? After all, who doesn't love a good cliche every once in a while?

"Sometimes you capture lightning in a bottle and sometimes it eludes you, and you know, this one has just been a little bit of a bittersweet symphony."

And some bad cliches, or cliches that never were:

"With Drew Barrymore, the special moments outnumber the mundane. You know what I mean? She just has a way of making chicken salad out of chicken shit."

Erm...stick with the well-worn aphorisms, dude.

No excuses. Saturday Night Live presents The Best of Tracy Morgan Saturday October 25, 2003; 11:30PM EST on NBC.

Earlier thoughts on Tracy Morgan from low culture

Speaking of six months ago, Dateline has an interview with Elizabeth Smart tonight at 10PM EST on NBC.

Man, is she ever purdy or what? I mean, this kid's been through hell and come face-to-face (and worse!) with the devil himself and yet she still radiates that wholesome all-American, girl next door glow. Attention editors of Cosmo Girl!, Seventeen and Teen Vogue (or at least the editor of the next Revolve): Put down your chai skim lattes, pick up the phone and get this girl on the cover of your magazine post haste. (Katie Couric, optional.)

Prior to this week, I had always (naively, I suppose) thought the world of architectural criticism was filled with wild arguments between opposing camps of urban theory and clashes between supporters of different eras of architectural history. I salaciously imagined elderly geezers hurling wine goblets at one another as they verbally tore apart Frank Lloyd Wright's famed wooded house in Pennsylvania, or young M.A.-thesis-seeking neo-hipsters engulfing themselves in smoke and intellectual detritus as they bitterly debated the detriments and merits of Calatrava's bridges.

I was so, so wrong. Apparently, architectural critics can be in agreement, and about uber-post-post-postmodernist Frank Gehry, no less (who burst into the cultural limelight with his somewhat psychotic, but ever-so-fluid Guggenheim Bilbao museum). Everyone, from the San Francisco Chronicle to Slate to the New York Times to, well, the somewhat predictable cheers of the Los Angeles Times, is damned-near raving about this thing: its innovative acoustics, its stately presence, its compelling framing of Los Angeles' downtown.

"A Wonder of Sound and Magic," proclaims L.A.'s local paper. "Exuberant" and "a triumph," coos Slate. "Shimmering" and "undulating," proffers the Times' Bernie Weinraub. A "grand pirouette of swooping stainless steel facades and billowing curves," ejaculates the Chronicle in San Francisco.

And even I think I love it, and I've always tried so very hard to be contrarian. Please, someone, help me out and verbally rip this metallic masterpiece apart; shred its bold reinvention of concert-hall acoustics, excoriate its majestic manifestation of sound and space. Pleeeeeeease. Pretend we're discussing Richard Meier's ghastly marble Getty Center in Brentwood, if you must -- just let the decimation begin!

(Past discussions on blurbs from low culture)

VH1 concludes its I Love the 80s docu-decalogue tonight with I Love the 80s Strikes Back 1987, 1988, and 1989. If you're anything like me, you'll miss the potent mix of sociological trend-reporting and tossed-off riffing this series provides on a nightly basis. Also, you'll miss seeing those Daily Show correspondents go it alone without the aid of writers.

But, have no fear, VH1 has a new series in the works and your pals at low culture have an exclusive sneak-peek. VH1 presents I Love 6 Months Ago.

Before seeing Scary Movie 3 tonight, clip and save this incredibly helpful blurb from the movie's ad:
"It will leave you rolling in the aisle! Spoofs 'Signs,' 'The Ring,' 'The Matrix,' '8 Mile,' & everything in between!"� TV Guide Channel, Ken Taylor
Thanks, Ken! Your blurb left me retching up my breakfast! You spoofed 'Peter Travers,' 'Rex Reed,' 'Richard Roeper,' & 'Walter Monheit'!

On the extreme opposite end of the blurb spectrum, can someone explain what Stephen Holden meant when he wrote of Scary Movie 3:
This junk food orgy makes about as much sense as a tossed salad of lettuce, tomato and mustard vinaigrette drenched in a thick chocolate sauce. But that's the world, isn't it?
Who said what now?

Great news! Conflicts in the Middle East are over, the economy has recovered, and nothing bad happened anywhere in the world today! Yippeeeeee!

How do I know this? The New York Times devoted half of the below-the-fold frontpage to New Yorkers and their dogs.

Listen, Bill, I have a dog, okay, and even I don't care about this story. Save this stuff for the City section on Sunday and find something, you know, newsworthy to slap on the front of the paper.

Incidentally, many New Yorkers use the Times to pick up their dogs' shit, so I guess this makes some sense.

Keith J. Kelly (who's right more often than he's glaringly, egregiously wrong) reports in today's New York Post that former Bush administration press secretary Ari "I am Jeff Zucker's twin" Fleischer has inked a $500,000 book deal for his White House memoirs with William Morrow, a subsidiary of News, Corporation. ("It's The Devil Wears Prada without the Prada, but with the real devil!" the proposal may have read.) Keith's short on data, but we get this:
Fleischer did not circulate a book proposal, as is the norm for authors�especially first-time authors. Some thought that his former bosses may have encouraged him to put it out in 2005 to guarantee that nothing blows up during the 2004 presidential campaign.
What is not included, however, is the book's title. So, as a favor to my landsman Fleischer, I'd like to suggest these titles:
The Only Jew in the Room: My Years in the Bush Cabinet
White Fish on White Bread: A White House Memoir
The Art of the Spin: How to Lie to Almost Anyone about Almost Anything
Yes I Can: My Years as the Token Minority Among Open Racists (Woops, that's already the title of Sammy Davis, Jr.'s memoir.)
No, Sir, I'm Not Offended: How I Survived Repeated Anti-Semtic Jibes At the Hands of Some of the Meanest S.O.B.'s You Ever Met

Side bar: Hey, all you kids with lush, thick hair. You probably laugh at Ari's shiny pate, but this is how homeboy looked in high school.

Eric "What Liberal Media?" Alterman's favorite whipping boy, Howard "I was on K Street!" Kurtz at the Washington Post, writes today about a movement that is underway to revoke a 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to Walter Duranty of the New York Times.

According to Kurtz's piece in the Post (notably, the Times' chief competitor in the annual race for Pulitzers), the paper of record's new executive editor, Bill Keller, yesterday acknowledged that Duranty's reporting on Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in the early 1930s was egregiously in violation of journalistic standards and

"pretty dreadful . . . . It was a parroting of propaganda."

Columbia University professor Mark von Hagen said he found that the Moscow correspondent's 1931 work "was a disgrace to the New York Times. There's no one there who disagrees with me. They acknowledged that his is some of the worst journalism they ever published."

Good to hear it. Duranty's defense -- if not outright praise -- of Stalin's gulag (one of the most shameful events of the past century, though Howard Kurtz doesn't actually invoke it by name) was inexcusable, and perhaps indirectly led to the propagation of these forced labor camps and detention centers.

So, if the Times is looking to clean house and rid itself of potentially disgraceful awards given to those who "parrot propaganda," we humbly look forward to the revocation of op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman's 2002 award. Friedman, after all, received his award based largely on his passionate writing on the events of September 11th, and more specifically, his defense of the present administration's War on Terror™. Friedman's most recent book, Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), is a compendium of these award-winning columns, and includes his twice-weekly musings on topics as diverse as why the bombing of Afghanistan was a just act, to why the bombing of Iraq was a just act, to...well, you get the idea. If the Bush administration wanted a viewpoint put forward, Friedman spent the past year providing justification for their actions.

New Spy Gear Aims to Thwart Attacks in Iraq by Eric Schmitt... "Yellow Submarine" by The Beatles

UPDATE: Talk about topicality! Yellow Submarine for the super-rich. (Sorry merely rich and filthy rich: this one's for the super-rich.)

When then-Governor George W. Bush would canvas the Southwestern U.S. for votes during the 2000 Presidential Election, it was often noted that he would sprinkle Spanish aphorisms into his stump speeches when facing crowds that had any significant Latino presence.

Rest assured that that sort of pandering hasn't come to an end. In his visit to Australia yesterday (before he was effectively chased off the continent by unruly hecklers and protesters), President Bush spoke to the nation's joint houses of Parliament to express his gratitude for Prime Minister John Howard's support during the invasion of Iraq:

"Five months ago, your prime minister was a distinguished visitor of ours in Crawford, Texas, at our ranch. You might remember that I called him a man of steel," Mr Bush said.

"Prime Minister John Howard is a leader of exceptional courage, who exemplifies the finest qualities of one of the world's great democracies. I'm proud to call him friend."

If you're as baffled by that expression of praise as most non-Aussies are, the phrase apparently conveys a sense of being "the real deal" or some such cliched colloquialism. Of course, as Bush's speechwriters must have told him before writing his script, "fair dinkum" sounds so much cooler.

Today's journalism lesson from The New York Post: How to write an obituary entirely from the Internet Movie Database.

From '70s TV star 'Rerun' dies by Michael Starr
Berry, known for wearing colorful red suspenders and a jaunty red cap, was also known for his TV catchphrase "Hey, hey, hey!" which he shouted whenever he encountered his buddies on "What's Happening!!" which ran on ABC from 1976-79.
From Biography for Fred Berry from IMDb
Continually wears a red beret as his character did in "Whats Happening"

Post:
Berry, who recently had a cameo in David Spade's big-screen comedy "Dickie Roberts"
imdb:
Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star(2003) .... Himself
... aka Dickie Roberts: (Former) Child Star (2003)

Post:
After being canceled, the show returned six years later as "What's Happening Now!!" for a short-lived run with most of the original cast, including Berry.
imdb:
"What's Happening Now!" (1985) TV Series .... Freddie Stubbs (segment "Rerun") (1985-1986)
"What's Happening!!" (1976) TV Series .... Fred 'Rerun' Stubbs

Post:
Berry, who was married six times to four different women (he married two women twice), battled a severe drug problem in the 1980s and, in 1990, was diagnosed with diabetes.
imdb:
In 1990, when diagnosed by doctors with diabetes, he was told he had to lose weight or his life would be shortened. After placing himself on a strict regiment, he lost 108 pounds and 18 inches off his waist.
Has been married 6 times to four women. He married two women twice.

Post:
Berry later became a Baptist minister.
imdb:
A Baptist minister.

Earlier journalism lessons from low culture.

Just got my hands on a copy of MTV's Spankin' New, the new MTV Magazine. It's just like Pulse, the free magazine Tower Records used to give out (some overlapping writers, too). Only I had to pay $5.95 for SN. Talk about value-added!

Everyone and their mother has been heaping shit on Gregg Easterbrook for his now infamous Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and the Jews blog entry. Frankly, I'm bored with this whole thing (so bored, I'm not bothering to link to Easterbrook's original essay, his apology, or any of the excellent commentary out there on sites like Radosh and The Antic Muse or to The New York Times article), but all this talk of Gregg writing faster than he thinks, not arranging his thoughts well, etc. reminded me of something Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Confessions way back in the early, early days of blogs in 1782:
When I write, my ideas are arranged with the utmost difficulty. They glance on my imagination and ferment till they discompose, heat, and bring on a palpitation; during this state of agitation, I see nothing properly, cannot write a single word, and must wait till it is over. Insensibly the agitation subsides, the chaos acquires form, and each circumstance takes its proper place. Have you never seen an opera in Italy? where during the change of scene everything is in confusion, the decorations are intermingled, and any one would suppose that all would be overthrown; yet by little and little, everything is arranged, nothing appears wanting, and we feel surprised to see the tumult succeeded by the most delightful spectacle. This is a resemblance of what passes in my brain when I attempt to write; had I always waited till that confusion was past, and then pointed, in their natural beauties, the objects that had presented themselves, few authors would have surpassed me.

So, if Gregg had only waited for his thoughts to form properly (and cleaned the pipes regularly like Spanky Rousseau), he might not be in all this trouble now.

Dateline: Los Angeles, 2012
Speaking out publicly for the first time since he brought an end to Christ's reign on earth, the Spawn of Satan spoke candidly with reporters about his childhood and his plans for the future.
Just 8 years-old, the Anti-Christ spoke with surprising eloquence about his parents, filmmaker/actor/musician/chocolate muse Vincent Gallo and conservative commentator Laura Ingraham. "Both mummy and daddy instilled in me the value of hard work�and pure evil," the adorable little hellion said showing off the ever-present glint in his eye that has won over�and enslaved�all of mankind.
"They taught me right from wrong early on, showing me by their own example how to bring chaos, hatred, disease, and pestilence to the world. They also never let me eat my dessert until I finished my supper!" he said, in a fit of laughter that can only be described as demonic.
While details about how his parents met and conceived the pint-sized adversary vary, many point towards Gallo's 2003 appearance on Buchanan & Press, a program that ran on the MSNBC cable network during the 2000 year reign of light and goodness. During that appearance, Ingraham reportedly told Gallo "You are a man after my own heart, Vincent. Once you get a haircut we can talk." (Tapes of the broadcast, along with all video, printed matter, and magnetic transfer archives from the A.D. era were destroyed when the Anti-Christ was conceived in 2004.)
Looking ahead towards his�and mankind's�future, the misbegotten son of this unholiest union history has ever known said he was optimistic. "First, I'd like to figure out a way to make the burning embers of the earth less fossil-fuel dependant, and more renewable for our children's children's children. After that, I think I will implant devices in the eyes of every man and woman in my command and force them to watch The Brown Bunny 24-hours a day. Then, it's onto the third Charlie's Angels sequel! If I can do all that, I'll consider myself a most successful Anti-Christ, indeed!" With that, the adorable little demon disappeared in a puff of sulfurous smoke leaving behind only a feeling of unspeakable dread.

Earlier thoughts on Satan from low culture

[via: The Kicker]

For some reason, Yahoo felt the need to post 64 images of Scarlett Johansson today.

If you're a man, comfort yourself with the fact that Scarlett told The Times recently: "Men have no aid to tell them that they're getting older. They just see their bodies decaying. A young, fertile, fruitful woman can help you across that bridge."

If you're a woman, try not to hate her for saying, "For older women, death happens inside. What comes with that death is a kind of liberation."

Scarlett Johansson will turn 19 on November 22.

I've been a fan of George Gurley's New York Observer work for years now. I love his calculatedly tossed-off writing style, his relentlessly Gurley-centric approach to New York, and his transparent desire to talk to as many attractive women as possible every time he puts on his Press hat.

This week, Gurley continues his special brand of journalism by asking women (and some 'famous' men like Macaualy Culkin and Tad Low) about their vaginas.

In the past, Gurley has used his Observer credentials to talk to sexy female bartenders, talk to women about their feet, sit down with pseudo-actress Tiffany Limos, share some time with a b-movie actress, go out with 21 year-old socialite Elisabeth Kieselstein-Cord, talk with Ultra-V rocker Maggie Kim, look longingly into the eyes of digital pornographer Natacha Merritt, say "ahhhh" to some hot lady dentists, muse on women over 50 he'd like to nail, spend the day with gorgeous nobody Elle Eklund, go clubbing with Taylor Stein, explore Brazilian bikini waxing, approach random women and tell them how beautiful they are, and ask women why they love Manolo Blahniks.

But of all the girls he's loved before, none compare to his true dream girl, Republican pipe cleaner, Ann Coulter.

Every phone box and bus stop in midtown is smeared with the cartoon face of Robert Evans, so I feel it's my duty to inform you that Kid Notorious is on tonight at 10:30 PM EST on Comedy Central. I don't know whether the show's good or not, but the presence of a sassy Black maid and an anime-like cat called "Puss-puss" on the Kid Web site doesn't bode well.

Anyway, here's some advice for all you aspiring starlets from Uncle Bob's book:
Speaking to the ladies: If you're ever approached with the line 'You ought to be in pictures, I'm a producer,' tell the guy to fuck off. He's a fraud, and the picture he wants to put you in don't play in theaters. 'You ought to be in pictures' just ain't the M.O. of a legit producer. Quote me if you want.

Consider it done, Bob.

After yet another volley in the sadly commonplace back-and-forth of Israeli-versus-Palestinian violence, the New York Times has thrown together a rather slapdash "analysis" of the most recent round of deaths, and more specifically, the reporting and documentation thereof by the two respective sides.

How does author James Bennet conclude the piece? With this simple paragraph consisting of one short sentence:

"Hamas vowed to retaliate for the Israeli air strike."

He may as well have written, "Tune in tomorrow as our story continues." And to think that I'd always wondered what happened to the serial novels of generations past.

Not to steal thunder from Slate's Rob Walker, he of of the infinitely enjoyable Ad Report Card, but I just wanted to say, apropos of Kevin Smith's new commercials for Panasonic DVD recorders: better he makes commercials than movies. The slogan, however, should have been, "The Panasonic DVD recorder allows you to move the camera more than twice during a scene, which is more than you can say for any of my movies!"

Be sure to read all the responses to the ads in the link for some important fan insights into Smith's hair.

Let's say you've got a movie coming out with a lead actor who might be a bit of marketing gamble.

Maybe you've made a conventional narrative-flouting musical mystery, starring an actor widely considered to be among the most talented actors of his generation, but he's also a convicted felon and something of a recidivist? And what if your star is usually associated with rom-com fluff and bad plastic surgery, not gritty, erotic thrillers?

The answer is simple: you hide them!

The Singing Detective and In the Cut open this week. They each star... somebody.

Surgeon General's Warning: Looking directly at Bob Guccione may cause dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. You are strongly advised against using this image as your desktop pattern.

Today's journalism lesson from Page Six is how to out a public figure and avoid lawsuits: simply quote another media outlet (or another media outlet quoting a comic strip, as it were) and you're in the clear. Hey, The Post didn't ask if Condoleeza Rice is gay, Richard Blow did!
Read and learn: Rice Dish.

Coming soon to a development hell near you: Hooligans (or whatever they'll call it when it's changed two or three times), the touching story of "A wrongfully expelled Harvard undergrad [who] moves to London and makes friends with a man who introduces him to the violent underworld of football hooliganism."

Finally, something we can all relate to. Who wants to take bets that the school becomes something generic like "Worthington College," London becomes Brooklyn, the sport becomes boxing, the hooligans become wizened older Black men, and the undergrad becomes Amanda Peet. Oh, and that the script becomes a paper towel when some D-girl spills her chai latte in her cubicle.

Good luck with the movie, fellas.

Earlier thoughts on hooligans from low culture.

This week's Newsweek takes a look at Bush's new P.R. tactics, including the much-discussed new reliance on local TV reporters as disseminators of the adminstration's policies. Of note, however, is a mention of a newfound sort of stonewalling of which even the inestimable Ari Fleischer might have proven incapable.

According to the article, on October 9th, one day after 13 American servicemen were injured by an Iraqi grenade attack, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's daily press briefing made no mention of these developments.

"Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened.

In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city's hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day's dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren't accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters' questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis."

Here's hoping for a return to more politically expedient coverage of soldiers' woes. How is Jessica Lynch doing, anyway? I bet she can't wait to return to teaching kindergarteners from impoverished families again.

Gothamist takes a look at verbal and physical assault complaints filed against taxi drivers in New York today. What the usually eagle-eyed Gothamist missed (or deemed unrelated) was this nugget from The Times Metro Briefing column:

CABDRIVERS' GROUP THREATENS STRIKE... [citing] deteriorating conditions, higher gas and lease costs and a rate that sometimes pays drivers less than $2 per hour.

Two dollars an hour!?! I thought that people who did dangerous, unpleasant jobs were supposed to get paid more, not below minimum wage.

A few years ago, Might Magazine wondered on its cover if all local news was actually being broadcast from hell. Once again, Eggers and his merry band of pranksters were dead-on but suffered from being too far ahead of the curve.

In today's New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller tells us that President Bush is bypassing those biased White House press pool reporters in favor of some non-judgmental, down-to-earth interviews with local newsmen and women. Five newsmen and women, back-to-back (junket-style), apparently. Said the President:
There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth...I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people.

Right on, Mr. President! We the people, don't like our news filtered for us by opinionated people, do we? Hell, no! I mean, what kind of an ignorant fool would want their news filtered for them? Not us, that's for sure!

For the past month, residents of the Austrian capital city of Vienna have noticed a large contraption erected in the center of Karlsplatz, one of the city's historic plazas. Translucent but sturdy, and appearing to have originated from the mind of Stanley Kubrick's set designer, the two-story structure was prominently billed as the Nike Infobox, a "high-tech multipurpose container acting as display stand, open office, and lounge." In addition to featuring two Nike-clad staffers inside and being prominently adorned with the familiar "Swoosh" logo, information was printed on the structure's sides that proclaimed, "Nikeplatz (formerly Karlsplatz): This square will soon be called NikePlatz", as well as including an instructional phone number and URL, www.nikeground.com, presumably so that interested (or more likely, highly concerned) citizens could gather more information about the mysterious co-opting of the city's history and public space.

And what did they learn? "Nike is introducing its legendary brand into squares, streets, parks and boulevards: Nikesquare, Nikestreet, Piazzanike, Plazanike or Nikestrasse will appear in major world capitals over the coming years!" Furthermore, curious onlookers were promised, the square would soon feature a giant 36- by 18-meter monumental Nike Swoosh, coated in "special steel covered with a revolutionary red resin made from recycled sneaker soles."

Andy's back, Andy's back, Andy's back! After a long time in a Raines-enforced "time out" (during which he had to write "I will not blog against The New York Times" over and over again), Andrew Sullivan is back writing for The Times op-ed page.

Let it never be said that Bill Keller doesn't mend fences.

Another week, another Frank Rich column (nearly) juxtaposed with a conflicting ad. As reported here last week, The New York Times ad sales department should read Frank Rich's omnibus Arts & Leisure column before it places its ads. This week's Rich column, The Rush of the New Rat Pack goes a long way to put forth the thesis that with the Gropinator in the Governor's mansion in California and Bill Bennett playing the slots in Vegas, the staid old G.O.P. has absorbed some of the Rat Pack's ring-a-ding-ding mojo. Not a terrible idea, but when Rich searches for contemporary examples of Rat Pack revival, he comes up a bit short: Ashton Kutcher and P. Diddy calling each other "Dino" and "Frank" between reach-arounds? Dubious at best. That weird "Sinatra: His Voice, His Way" thing at Radio City Music Hall? A bit manufactured. Maybe if Swingers had just come out and people were still smoking cigars and drinking Martinis on the cover of Esquire Rich might be able to fill his three-times-a-trend quotient for the week. (Why Rich didn't mention the Japanese commercial director who urged Bill Murray to be more like the "Lat-a pack-a" in Lost in Translation is beyond me.)

But just as I concluded that Rich's case was too weak and licked my finger to change from page 19 to 20, there it was on the very next page: an ad featuring Frank, Sammy, and Dino for Live and Swingin' "The swingin'est 2-disc collection ever!" Ring-a-ding-ding, indeed.

My favorite professor from college has been profiled in the Times.
Class With the 'Ph.D. Diva' by Felicia R. Lee

No joke, during Professor Rose's class, I could literally feel my brain growing: the connections she drew between concepts and her amazing energy and accessibility made NYU's Africana Studies Department the place to be. According to The Times, she's currently heading up the American Studies Department at U.C. Santa Cruz, so that must be the place to be now.
Tricia Rose's new book is called Longing to Tell: Black Women's Stories of Sexuality and Intimacy

Georgie and Juni and Bob and Takashi

Thanks to the well-meaning (but completely idiotic) three-star Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, we're all going to hell, which is pretty ironic, given what the guy did. Or rather, said.

Lt. Gen. Boykin has been a frequent guest lecturer on behalf of his evangelical Christian faith, where, as a military commander active in the search for Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, he is invited to speak -- in uniform -- to church audiences, presumably to inspire them to serve their country through means other than paying higher income taxes.

News organizations have been having a field day detailing the full rancor of his remarks, including comments stating that "President Bush 'is in the White House because God put him there,' and that 'we in the army of God . . . have been raised for such a time as this.'"

Furthermore, Boykin said -- aloud -- that Islamic fundamentalists hate the U.S. "because 'we're a Christian nation' and added that our 'spiritual enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.'" Oh, and let's not leave out his thoughts on the Prince of Darkness, who may or may not be more evil than Muslims: "The battle that we're in is a spiritual battle. Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army."

Where do I sign up??!! Because we're nothing but hellbound with Boykin's framing of this "clash of civilizations" and the foolhardy perpetuating of this War on Terror™. And he's not even Mormon.

The FAA has embarked in a sweeping review of its security procedures and has ordered new inspections of the more than 7,000 aircraft in the nation's commercial airline fleet, officials announced today.

This is in response to a mechanical crew's discovery on Thursday evening of a small bag containing boxcutters and other potentially dangerous paraphernalia found on two different Southwest Airlines flights. Also included in each bag were notes that made clear that the bag's purpose was to highlight weaknesses in the current system of searching passengers before they board planes, and to show that weapons could still be brought onto commercial aircraft.

"In addition to the box cutters and notes, the bags contained bleach and modeling clay, according to a senior law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity. The clay was formed to mimic a plastic explosive, while the bleach could have been used to demonstrate how a dangerous liquid could be smuggled aboard an aircraft. It could also be thrown in a person's eyes to temporarily blind them.

The notes also included the exact date and location the items were placed on board the planes, the official said."

Following the description of the bag's contents above, a completely unnecessary (and very asinine) concluding element in the New York Times' reporting of this incident attempted to stave off fears of renewed terrorism:

"Government officials played down the possibility of a terrorist connection, though FBI spokeswoman Susan Whitson said members of the bureau's joint terrorism task forces are involved in the investigation.

Harbin said Southwest does not believe the items found were connected to a plot to hijack the airplanes."

Who would ever, in their right mind, suspect that this was anything but the work of someone clearly trying to help by revealing errors in the way we've been combatting terrorism, much like the unique breed of benevolent hackers who break into government websites and then alert site administrators of their security weaknesses?

It's reassuring to know that members of the FBI's terrorism task force are involved in finding whomever planted this terrorist "go bag". Let's hope this concerned citizen gets life in Gitmo.

Wielding what has to be one of the least coherent quips ever spoken by a member of the House, Democratic Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who at one time was thought to be the left's saving grace when Dick Gephardt resigned as leader, tried her damnedest yesterday to encapsulate Democratic frustration with Bush's willingness to spend $87 billion on nation-building (with a healthy $20 billion of that going to U.S. construction firms and part-time Republican party donors).

Her completely-not-soundbite-ready comment appears below:

The funding issue, like last year's vote to go to war in Iraq, split Democrats. Many supported the funding despite reservations about Bush's policy. But others joined with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who called the bill a "bailout for one-eighth Bush's three-eighths failed policy."

Good thing election year is approaching, because with clever and accessible retorts like that, every American voter can get on board with the Dems next fall.

It's so hard to say I'm sorry for "stumbling into a use of words that in the past people have taken as code for anti-Semitic feelings" but the "Jewish executives [who] worship money above all else" have finally prevailed upon Gregg Easterbrook to retract his ridiculous comments on Kill Bill: Volume 1.

Writer Takes Jews to Task for 'Kill Bill' by Bernard Weinraub

Now, will Gregg Easterbrook apologize for his other offenses?

Earlier apologies from low culture

In the very first issue of New York Magazine in 1968, Tom Wolfe penned a story called "Honks and Wonks" that attempted to explain�and gently mock, naturally�what he called "The New York accent." (You can find it anthologized in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine.) Wolfe writes:
The oi sound in toiiiiime, by the way, is not to be confused with the so-called Brooklyn oi sound comedians always use to mimic: "Da oily boid gets da woim," "She reads da New Yoik Woild," "She lives on Toity-toid Street." These are examples of dropping r's and substituting oi for the er sound. Today you are only likely to hear it from older working-class people, such as some old cab drivers.

I think of this every time I see Rachel Weisz attempting to wrap her mouth around an "American" accent. Today, she co-stars in Runaway Jury and if the trailer is any indication, she speaks her every woid like an old cabbie. Her accent was one of the worst things about Neil LaBute's execrable The Shape of Things, as well. Yes, Shape took place in California and Jury takes place in New Orleans: that's why her dead end kid accent is even more baffling. Which is sad, since she was wonderful with her natural accent in About a Boy. I understand American casting directors' desire to tap overseas talent to play Americans on film (if the choice is between Kate Beckinsale and Denise Richards, it's really no choice) but stick with the ones who can do a convincing accent, okay?

There's the aforementioned Beckinsale. Helena Bonham Carter's American accent is pretty good. Week-after-week, I watch Joely Richardson on Nip/Tuck and never think about the fact that she's Vanessa Redgrave's kid. Emma Thompson did pretty good in Primary Colors. You'd think Weisz could practice her accent a little, since her boyfriend is a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I don't know how Runaway Jury is gonna be, but as long as Weisz is perpetrating that accent, it just ain't woith my toime.

Movie Poop Shoot: Hollywood Elsewhere - October 8, 2003

Liberal "blowhard" Michael Moore (who is otherwise a very respectable fellow, save for that objectionable "blowhard" part...he ruined the Academy Awards!) has said his next film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," is due to be released in September of 2004. The tagline? "The temperature where freedom burns." The subject matter? The Bush dynasty's connection to Saudi oil magnates and the White House assistance given to Bin Laden's relatives in their efforts to leave the country in the waning days after September 11, 2001, a period of time during which all other planes were grounded by the FAA.

"Fahrenheit 9/11"? If you're going to politically riff on Ray Bradbury titles, wouldn't some pun related to "Something Wicked This Way Comes" have worked better? Anyway, it's better than the neo-dadaist "Bowling for Columbine".

Here's the shocker: the documentary is being co-produced by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions, the same company releasing the action star and director's uber-biblical (and possibly uber-anti-Semitic) "The Passion" next spring. This, you may recall, is the supposedly literal reading (even down to the Aramaic-language dialogue) of the bible's documentation of the last days of Christ, complete with Christ-killing Jews. Because, you know, that's the way it really happened. I mean, it's in the book, even...

Now, take another gander at Moore's film's projected release date, September, 2004. The same month of the Republican Convention in Manhattan, mere miles from Ground Zero, on the event's three-year anniversary. September, 2004, a little more than one month before the presidential election. Prime influence-peddling time.

I guess it's a little early to speculate about Fahrenheit 9/11's potential for incendiary content, but expect some topical punches to be pulled. It's a sure bet that in any fistfight, Mel Gibson could so kick Michael Moore's ass.

You know why? Because Michael Moore is a fat motherfucker, and overweight to boot! He is so easy for rightwingers to make fun of!

Earlier this week, it was announced that President Bush had raised $49.5 million in just the last three months alone for next year's campaign. At this rate, he is expected to surpass $200 million with which he can soundly trounce whichever mediocre candidate the Democratic Party nominates to run for president next fall.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish the President much success with his "fuzzy math" endeavors as he gleefully counts the 54 electoral votes handed to him by Governor Schwarzenegger (as well as some very shortsighted voters) in California, as well as the 25 "bonus brethren" points afforded him by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Incidentally, regarding his Iraqi victory of yesteryear, one of the choice quotes uttered by the President at his appearance in San Bernardino this afternoon included the liberal-angst-inducing line: "I acted because I am not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman."

There is still something gawky and virginal about [Quentin] Tarantino. There's almost no sex in his movies. He says that's because he can't deal with becoming yet another sleazy Hollywood director talking a girl into taking her top off...
From The Movie Lover by Larissa MacFarquhar in this week's New Yorker (article, sadly, not online).

You mean like "Q.T.," the character Tarantino played in Spike Lee's Girl 6 in 1996?

The New York Times' John Markoff tells Online Journalism Review that "it's not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio."

If his quip sounds familiar, that's because professional friend-loser Toby Young said the same thing about the Internet (in general) in Vanity Fair way back in 1995.

[OJR link via Romenesko]

My all-time favorite online time waster? Easy: FilmWise's Invisible Quizzes. Can you identify your favorite actor or actress by posture only? Did you pay close enough attention to spot your favorite movie by the costumes and sets alone?

I've lost weeks on this site.

In other circumstances, the following legal case might have sent shivers of terror down the spines of American military leaders and their elected superiors. Alas, we live in an era where the nation with the world's largest economy has forced its hand and more or less exempted itself from war-crimes prosecution. Through economic bribery, of course.

Yesterday, a court in Germany began arguments in a case seeking damages against the German government by Serbs whose relatives were killed in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, when a handful of jets dropped bombs upon a bridge in a small village "far removed from the breakaway province of Kosovo where Slobodon Milosevic’s Serbian army was brutally suppressing ethnic Albanians and fighting off NATO air raids."

The result of this particular bombing run? 10 civilians were killed on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

The families of the victims are seeking $4.1 million from the German government, though neither the pilots nor the jets themselves were German.

"They claim that Germany, although not directly involved in the attack, knew of and approved the bombing despite the bridge’s obvious civilian usage. Germany is in this case representative for all of NATO, explained the Hamburg lawyer Gul Pinar, who also criticized the government for sanctioning an attack without warning on a civilian target on a church holiday.

The lawyer for the relatives, Ulrich Dost, says the 35 Serbs are suing on the basis of a 1977 protocol added to the Geneva Convention which calls on signatories, including Germany, to distinguish between civilians and the military and "direct their operations only against military objectives." The bridge in Varvarin, he added, had no military significance."

10 people on a Sunday afternoon in a remote Serbian village? Why, that's nothing! I mean, it's not like the war crime that ensued when American bombers killed almost 30 Afghans, and wounded many more, at a wedding party in July 2002.

I'm sorry. Did I just say war crime? I meant "tactical error." Good luck suing the U.S. for that, chumps! We're immune from the impact of cases like your supposedly precedent-setting German lawsuit.

Thomas L. Friedman gets in a pretty good jab at Dick Cheney today in his New York Times column called "On Listening":
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein issue messages from their caves through Al Jazeera, and Mr. Cheney issues messages from his bunker through Fox. America is pushing democracy in Iraq, but our own leaders won't hold a real town hall meeting or a regular press conference.

Then he takes a chomp out of the hand that feeds him by saying:
Out of fairness, my newspaper feels obligated to run such stories. But I wish we had said to the V.P.: If you're going to give a major speech on Iraq to an audience limited to your own supporters and not allow any questions, that's not news � that's an advertisement, and you should buy an ad on the Op-Ed page.

The LA Weekly claims something called Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee is the best video store in LA? Talk about East Side snobbery! Everyone knows that Vidiots rules. Totally worth the forty minute drive on the 10.

After snapping up some staff picks, drive the two blocks (15 minutes) to Cha-Cha-Chicken for spinach quesadillas with dirty rice and beans.

Last year Slate's Clara Jeffery's wondered Can a Dog Be Racist? Today's Times World Briefing answers her question, sort of:

GERMANY: ADOLF, NEIN! A man who taught his dog to raise its right paw in a Hitler salute will not be prosecuted for the pet's trick but he faces other charges of violating the country's anti-Nazi laws, prosecutors in Berlin said. Germany has strict laws banning Nazi symbols, slogans and salutes. The dog, a German shepherd crossbreed named Adolf, is said to have performed the trick at its master's request � "Adolf sit. Give me the salute." � in front of policemen. The man, identified only as Roland T., is accused of wearing a T-shirt with Hitler's picture and shouting "Heil Hitler!" on various occasions. If convicted, Adolf's owner faces three years in jail.

Roland T.'s favorite movie? Samuel Fuller's White Dog

When letters containing anthrax began arriving at certain offices with the depressing regularity of the J. Crew catalog or solicitations for low interest credit cards, there was much talk of whether or not the spores had been "weaponized" or not.
Weaponized. It was a neat neologism that hinted at both intent and maddening randomness: something banal had been made into a weapon, and like a handgun or a hunting knife, it could accidentally kill you. But the term was also falsely ameliorative: it suggested that anthrax (or planes and buildings three months before) don't kill people, weaponized anthrax kills people.

With yesterday's awful Staten Island Ferry crash, we're on the verge of a new term as we see everything that was once banal turned implacably, irrevocably tragic. The Staten Island Ferry is something a joke to New York snobs, a means of transporting the type of stereotypical "white ethnic" proles mocked in Working Girl each morning and discreetly returning them to "wherever they're from" each night. Now, like so many things before, it has been tragedized.

Think about it: is there any aspect of life anymore that hasn't been tainted by some sort of tragedy in the recent past? High schools? Bridges? Rock clubs? Hip-hop clubs? It seems that whenever enough people choose�or are forced�to be in the same place at the same time, there's this inevitable pull towards tragedy. It's scary. And it's enough to make an agoraphobe gloat.

While all these tragedies are piling up, only a fool thinks he lives in unique times. Check out the story of The General Slocum.

Quick! Which photo is an official promotional image of FOX's new Joe Millionaire and which one did I find by going to images.google.com and typing gay+cowboy?

Answer: Joe Millionaire is on the left, like it matters.

From the Washington Post's Battle Over Iraq Budget Begins by Jonathan Weisman and Dan Balz:

Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who said he probably would have voted for the war resolution and later said he would have opposed it, has joined other Democrats in criticizing the administration's current course in Iraq. But spokeswoman Kym Spell said Clark had no position on the $87 billion request. "He's not in Congress," she said. "He's running for president."

The LA Weekly's Harold Meyerson, writing in today's Washington Post, details a recent series of findings on the public's perception of news, released by the "Program on International Policy Attitudes", a presumably uber-wonkish collective of academic research centers and polling firms from Maryland and California.

Here's the (sadly predictable) one-two punch, a veritable qualification of American egocentrism in statistical form, with relevant facts in bold:

In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.

The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get their news. The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were "the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions." Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all three.

In other words, odds are that if you get your info from the television, you're not quite getting reality. While the numbers make painfully obvious the extent to which Fox News viewers are a deluded mess of pre-packaged assumptions, what really stands out is the fact CBS News viewers (with Dan Rather et al hardly considered a mouthpiece of conservative propagation) were still 100 percent more likely than the average American, who may or may not get his or her news from television, newspapers, or water coolers, to be just as deluded about a realistic understanding of events.

True, the PBS viewers seemed to have a better grasp of things than "the average American," but, well, you knew that already, didn't you.

What pre-packaged assumptions does Sarah Vowell's fan base bring to the table?

John Kenneth Galbraith, 95 years young today.

Why is he in the shallow column? Because he told Esquire in 2002: "I've always thought that true good sense requires one to see and comment upon the ridiculous," which is a pretty good motto for the left side of this page (right in the UK). Then again, he could just as easily go in the grave column for inadvertently writing the epitaph for the Bush administration when he said "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." Tonight, he will be saying something else: "More cake, please."

I've been a fan of Armond White's writing ever since James Wolcott endorsed his book The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World in The New Yorker by saying the critic plays the race card on every page. I used to read White when he was the arts editor of The City Sun, a now-defunct African-American paper out of Brooklyn, and I'm glad that he's maintained his spot as part of The New York Press' film crit dyad with Matt Zoller Seitz.

While I find some of White's assertions ridiculous (for example, every turd put out by Steven Spielberg is not worthy of your praise or my ten bucks, and all roads do not lead to Morrissey), what I like about him is that he makes connections between and among disparate things, that he can see beyond the Todd-AO screening room into the culture-at-large. (Try getting Peter Travers to set aside his exclamation points for a second and do that.)

This week, White begins his slam of School of Rock in The Press by pointing out the following:
The week that School of Rock topped the weekend box-office, Billboard/SoundScan's top-ten-singles list belonged to: Ashanti, Beyonce, Fabolous, 50 Cent, Ludacris, Black Eyed Peas, P. Diddy, Nelly. Clearly, School of Rock doesn't teach audiences what they need to know: that today's predominant youth culture no longer moves to a "rock" beat.

Very smart, and dead-on. Next, he tells us:
[Jack Black] browbeats his [students'] personal taste with idolatry about Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Mot�rhead-he instills the rockist ideology that, in standard pop publications, has turned popular music into a sinecure for cultural racism. School of Rock perverts the radicalism imputed to rock in the 60s, pretending All-American exuberance and liberation when it is actually only selling hegemony.

Nice, but the obvious joke White misses is that playing on the soundtrack beneath Black's first day as a sub is the chorus to The Who's "Substitute," that fades out before the line:
Substitute your lies for fact/
I can see right through your plastic mac/
I look all white, but my dad was black

School of Rock was written by Mike White: does that make this a case of White-on-White critical violence?

One more thing on Armond White: his second book Rebel for the Hell of It: The Life of Tupac Shakur had a blurb on the back that said "Soon to be an HBO film!" To cite the title of another Morrissey fanatic, how soon is never, Armond?

A reader alerted us to the existence of MacUpdate: Macintosh Software & Games and, well, we laughed.

The lesson to be learned here is that if you know, when using cliched design cues like arrows and such, that they are in fact just that, i.e. outdated cliches, you're better off not using them. But we like to think our more runic (and almost donkey-esque!) logo is a lot less elephant-like than theirs. Something about partisan politics, perhaps.

Although, the whole left-right, blue-and-orange thing is so, so weird. Our lawyer agrees.

"Many such devices end up stuffed into a bottom drawer, on the high shelf of a closet, or in the back of a garage�or offered for sale online through eBay."
From a caption accompanying Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten by Katie Hafner

Please excuse the two geographic-pun-based grave headlines in a row. Won't happen again, unless Bush decides to cower at the heels of Iraq's neighbor to the east. In which case, get ready for something awful, along the lines of "And Iran, I ran so far away..."

So, getting serious: James Ridgeway at the Village Voice (whose weekly "Mondo Washington" column is an excellent, must-read synopsis of national events) details the apparently increasing consensus that, much like we rather flippantly made note of a few weeks back, Syria is next in line to bear the wrath of administration neocons.

This includes the possibility that, rather than engaging in yet another annual American attack on Muslim nations, the U.S. may indirectly sponsor Israel's own efforts on this front:

Israel is becoming more and more active as a U.S. military surrogate in the Middle East. Last weekend Der Spiegel reported that Israel was ready to launch an attack against Iran's nuclear sites to prevent them from becoming operational. And, basing its reports on U.S. government sources, the Los Angeles Times claimed that Israel could fire nuclear-modified U.S.-made Harpoon cruise missiles from its submarines. The Israeli nuclear arsenal is believed to include 100 to 200 warheads that can be delivered by missiles, planes, and submarines. The Israelis claim there are no restrictions on converting Harpoons so that they can deliver nuclear warheads.

Maybe it's just a commonplace fear of annihilation, but...attacking nuclear sites that may or may not be operational, with nuclear weapons no less, seems, well...neither "neo" nor "conservative." Just stupid.

Good news! Rupert Murdoch will never die: Murdoch delays retirement 'forever'. And neither will this guy.

[via Mediabistro]

Dear Mom:
All I want for Christmas this year is a Don Zimmer doll with soft, pinchable cheeks and kung-fu grip. Pleeeeeeeeease! I promise that I will clean my room, walk the dog, and never, ever pick fights on my blog if you get me a Zimmer. Pretty, pretty please! With sugar on top!
Love, Matty

Anyone else get a real Capricorn One feeling from this quote:
The launching took place about 9 a.m., according to the state-run television network, CCTV. At about 9:30, the network showed a videotape of the rocket soaring to the heavens. China Sends Man Into Orbit, Entering U.S.-Russian Club by Jim Yardley

Can this guy be any more of a hypocrite? First Bush condemns sex tourism at the United Nations, and now he's going on a sex tour!

Buried in the piece is one un-named official's description of the trip as "the trip from Al Qaeda hell": isn't that what N.W.A. called their reunion tour?

What Bush will be reading on the plane: Platform, by Michel Houellebecq.

"Coupling," NBC's great hope to become a hit comedy for its soon-to-be "Friends"-less Thursday-night lineup, received a vote of no-confidence yesterday when the network announced that it was pre-empting tomorrow's night's episode.

NBC executives had no official comment, but they said the network wanted to give some extra attention to another new comedy, "Whoopi," which has been just holding its own against difficult competition on Tuesday nights."

NBC's Affection for 'Coupling' Cools as Thursday Night Viewers Wander by Bill Carter

Earlier thoughts on Coupling from low culture

From The New York Post Sports Section, page 97:
Fox has been cutting it mighty close throughout the postseason, returning from half-inning commercial breaks with the pitcher in mid-windup. This squeeze-in-every-moment commerce finally caught up with all of us in yesterday's ALCS Game 5.

From The New York Post Television Section, page 107:
THE Boston Red Sox-New York Yankees duel for supremacy in the American League Championship Series kept Fox on top of the primetime pack Monday... Reliable estimates for Fox's live game coverage weren't available, but the network was projecting that the game would lead the network to its highest-rated Monday since the "Joe Millionaire" finale in February.

[Thanks, Dave]

Today's New York Observer contains a long article by Frank DiGiacamo on Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and his human companion, Robert Smigel. Some great details in here about Late Night's breakout star (the dog or Smigel?�you decide) like these lyrics to Triumph's first single, "I Keed":
"Avril Lavigne, punk queen? Now there's a kidder / Go back north, C�line needs a baby-sitter," Triumph raps. He sniffs "Elton John's tush, just for all the history," takes on Philip Glass� "Atonal ass / You're not immune / Write a song with a fucking tune"�and Snoop Dogg: "There's room for only one dog, putz / And I can rap. Can you lick your own nuts?"

How many songs can you name that take swipes at Avril Lavigne and Philip Glass? (The new Eminem single doesn't count, he was referring to the Kronos Quartet.) Anyway, get ready for a full scale Triumph moment (a veritable "Moment of Triumph") when his album Come Poop with Me is released November 14th. The article hints at a video, non-Conan talk show appearances, and (let's hope he passes on this) commercials ("The only thing I like better than doing The New York Times crossword puzzle is actually pooping on eet!"). Read all the way to the end of the article for a great cameo by Jesse Camp, whom Triumph suggests is "turning tricks at the Lincoln Tunnel."

Time for another round of "Who do you trust: your government, or your government?" After last week's debacle concerning Donald Rumsfeld's supposed cluelessness (wherein he challenged press reports from one day prior indicating that he'd been left out of the loop on a key Condoleeza Rice-led development in the occupation of Iraq), we've got yet another instance of government spokespeople contradicting one another a day after the fact. From within the same agency, no less.

The gist of this (admittedly, smaller-scale) story:

On Monday, there were several press reports detailing that a U.S. Army commander had received numerous intelligence reports indicating that Saddam Hussein was likely hiding in or around his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq.

Tuesday afternoon? Turns out that was "inaccurate".

We do not have intelligence that he is and has been specifically in Tikrit," said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, which controls a large swathe of the country's north. "Because if we did, we would have the capability to act on it."

Phew! If there's one thing I'd hate to lose (including civil liberties and/or other constitutional rights), it's my confidence in the U.S. government's ability to locate tyrannical despots, and then obliterate them with cannons, tanks, and rockets.

The prize for today's Tuesday Trivia Tournament goes to Cindy, who correctly identified the phrases as the slogan for FOX's new Joe Millionaire series kicking off next week. Congratulations, Cindy!

But, given the close ties between the G.O.P. and FOX's parent company, News Corp., the slogan First we lied to America. Now we're taking on the world! could just as easily be inscribed (in Latin, maybe) on Karl Rove's stationery. I don't know about you, but I'm not looking forward to the international fall-out from the new Joe Millionaire: we haven't exactly been endearing ourselves to our Old European friends of late, and pulling a mean prank on their lovely daughters probably won't make us any more popular at those Friday afternoon ice cream socials at the United Nations. How will we look Kofi Annan in the eye when we ask for more sprinkles?

The old maxim holds: if you want a friend in the blogosphere, get a dog. No one ever said posting your half-cocked opinions on matters great and small for the sixteen people who read blogs would win me any popularity contests. But I must respond to Elizabeth Spiers' counter-attack on my ever so polite suggestion that her New York Magazine colleague David Amsden's pants are on fire.

Buried deep within an article in today's New York Times documenting the growth of Shanghai's skyline throughout the 1990s, and the subsequent backlash that has resulted, is this gem of a factoid:

"...the skyline — the pride of local officials — became more formless as residential towers cropped up in every corner of the city. With increasing frequency, residents are filing complaints based on an obscure law mandating that every home or apartment must receive at least two hours of sunlight a day."

For all those who have ever suffered economic hardship, or, at least, have ever lived in first-floor/subterranean apartments (which often implies economic hardship), let it hereby be known that there is a better way! The Red China way!

From:� "newswarrior"
Date:� Tue�Oct�14,�2003� 4:33 pm
Subject:� Editorial Page Writer for USA TODAY
At least five years of national reporting or editing experience. Strong writing, reporting, editing and leadership skills. Experience covering business and health care is helpful as is previous experience on an editorial or op ed page. Looking for a conservative who ca work to achievie consensus with a diverse editorial board.
Send clips and resume to Lynn Wascak - Coordinator, Editorial Page,
USA TODAY; 7950 Jones Branch Drive; McLean, VA 22108.

The funny thing is, this was posted on the American Copy Editors Society job board!
[via, Romenesko]

Hey, Gavin, give 'em a call!

Paging Donald Foster: Form Letters From G.I.'s to the Editors by Jacques Steinberg

Who knew right wing whack-jobs could be such big softies? Rush "Big Fat Idiot" Limbaugh's tragic�oh, so very tragic�transformation from King Dittohead to disgraced crackhead has brought on an outbreak of bleeding heart conservatism not seen since the death of Eric Breindel. It seems that if a drug addict is well-educated (though Rush, it turns out, dropped out of school after a year) and has the fine fortune of being white and rich (that means you, Noelle Bush), then they deserve our support, sympathy, and respect. If they're some sort of poor ethnic type, well, they deserve to have their kids taken away and get the stiffest sentence the law allows.

Today's New York Post features an op-ed by John "Norman's son" Podhoretz bending over backwards, tying himself in knots, and bouncing off the walls in a fit of overly-compassionate conservatism for Rush (not an easy task given the Pod-man's doughy frame). Here are some samples of Podhoretz laying it on thicker than... well, something thick:
Brilliant� Limbaugh has built and kept his phenomenal audience� The reason Rush Limbaugh has been one of the defining cultural figures of our time - the man who singlehandedly brought an entire dormant medium, AM radio, roaring back to life - is that he has brought a spirit of fun and high good humor to the social and political controversies of our time. His show is punctuated by often-hilarious song and commercial parodies� he is some kind of genius, capable of explaining complicated ideas in ways understandable to enormous numbers of people� significantly more polite�engages his callers with unfailing courtesy, and he always affords those callers with whom he disagrees the respect of an honest debate�Limbaugh has made ideological battle fun, and given heart to many millions of people who think their opinions have been ignored�

With friends like these, who needs enablers?

Good morning! Today I'm trying something new. I'm gonna call this The Tuesday Trivia Tournament (nice, right? took me an hour to come up with it). Answer the below question in the comments area and at the end of the day, I'll tell you the answer. The winner will receive the First Annual low culture Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of... Excellence! Here goes:

The following statement appeared last week in a magazine (either in an article, headline, or advertisement). Tell me what it refers to and, if possible, who's behind it:

Get those thinking caps on. Bonus points for creative incorrect answers.

Last month The East Bay Express, a Northern California alt-weekly, ran an article called Black Like Me, one of the best pieces I've read about "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. Written by James Best, the article is weak on original reporting but impressively rich with exegeses of Lindh's postings on various usenet newsgroups (alt.rap, rec.music.hip-hop, and alt.religion.Islam) back in the early- and mid-nineties. What emerges is a an autobiography-in-progress of a very unreliable narrator: a conflicted white teenager in love with hip-hop, embarrassed by his own privilege, curious about Islam and the Five Percent, and moving with surprising ease from Public Enemy fan to Public Enemy number one.

Right off the bat: no photo-alteration software of any kind was used in this photograph.

This means that the more than fifty percent of Americans who consider themselves "born-agains" can rest assured that the U.S.-led War on Terror™ is, in fact, a mission from God. Or His son, at least.

All you heathens and Jews, meanwhile, better start repenting. You really don't want to see Tom DeLay's depiction of Israel after the Rapture.

(with thanks to Javier)

The New York Times' William Safire, not so very long ago, seemed more or less able to straddle his two designated tasks for the paper (serving both as its conservative conscience and its premiere linguist) while keeping a bit of respectable distance between the two roles.

Until he decided to take down Howard Dean, that is. Using the Democratic presidential candidate's words against him, of course. How ironic!

This prospect should have left any self-respecting Freeper shivering with excitement...Ann Coulter crossed with the Master Orator! Finally, conservativism balanced with level, accurate reasoning!

Straight from the slangin' mouth of Whatevs' Uncle Grambo comes this possibly unintentional critique of LA in the guise of a rant against trendy "white trash chic" boutique Von Dutch:

i know that VD is trendy in Los Angeles, but shouldn't you be following the rest of the civilized world and realizing that Los Angeles fashion trends are nothing more than leftover hand-me-downs from NYC?

Yep, VD sure is trendy in Los Angeles. Even Beck says in a creepy voice, "I can smell the VD in the club tonight" on "Milk & Honey" from his LA-centric 1999 album Midnite Vultures.

Added incentive to link: Britney Spears showing off her VD

There's a running joke in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan that whenever Chris Eigman's character gets caught telling a lie, he weasels his way out of it by saying, "Okay, so that person wasn't real: she's a composite, like in New York Magazine." Apparently, everyone just knows that when you see those stories in New York with someone's name and a little asterisk next to it that says "Not his real name," chances are, the person, the quote, and the social phenomenon cited are complete horse shit. Is it really possible that a writer can find an interview subject who fits perfectly within the magazine's target audience (usually described as someone "attractive" and "Ivy-educated") and who manages to articulate the central point of the article in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Is it possible that writers from the same magazine find these people every time they do a sociological trend piece?

As my grandfather used to say, C'mon, I wasn't made with a finger.

So, as New York area men prepare to explain themselves to their wives and girlfriends this week as New York's expos� of the new trend (circa, oh, 1998) of Internet porn hits newsstands, they can rest easily knowing that writer David Amsden probably just made the whole thing up. How else to explain this:
Jonathan uses the university's high-speed connection to download pornography onto floppy discs, he says, because �my dial-up at home is monstrously slow.'

Come on! I don't know anyone who even has a floppy drive anymore (Apple, for example, stopped shipping them at least three years ago) and with their 1.5 meg capacity, you'd be hard-pressed to fit even one movie�pornographic or otherwise� on a disc. Maybe "Jonathan" is lying, but did I mention that he's "an attractive, Ivy League- educated musician and adjunct professor"?

Clearly New York isn't held to the same journalistic standards as, say The New Yorker. Here's another story from the New York archive that sent up a red flag: Pill Culture Pops in which similarly attractive, well-educated "real" New Yorkers shared their experiences with mood-altering drugs in perfectly expository sentences.

Today's award for making very good use of an unlimited MetroCard goes to The Times' Lola Ogunnaike who filled this report from every part of the city:

Jae Song, who caught "Kill Bill" at the Loews 19th Street East Saturday afternoon, came expressly for the film's much discussed brutality... Mr. Sheikh, a college student, stood outside the Loews Kips Bay Theater Saturday evening smoking a cigarette... Billy Hemmans, a self-professed samurai movie expert, stood outside the Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem Saturday evening... "It was an average action film," said Jolynn Krystocek, an art student who saw "Kill Bill" on Saturday afternoon at the Kips Bay theater in Murray Hill... The gore bothered Kristi Tucker, who caught the film with her brother at the Loews on 42nd Street on Friday, opening night.... "I liked the music," said Ang Phurba, a sherpa breathing from an oxygen tank outside the Regal Entertainment Theatre atop Mt. Everest..."
Okay, that last one was fake.

Gory 'Kill Bill' Tops Weekend Box Office by Lola Ogunnaike

Buried in today's Times article on HEEB Magazine's expansion fantasies is this analogy from new editor Joshua Neuman:
I'm trying to emulate Vice in that this is more than a magazine, but a lifestyle. As Vice is to cocaine, we are to chocolate layer cake.

What's so Jewish about chocolate layer cake? Might I suggest a more apt analogy?
As Vice is to anonymous butt-sex (warning: dirty, dirty link), we are to speed dating and settling down with a nice doctor in the suburbs in your thirties.

A Sardonic Jewish Magazine Expands Its Ambitions by Bill Werde

Comedy Central's been calling Knee High P.I, "our pint-sized original movie." I can think of at least one thing wrong with that phrase.




Apparently, some ideas never get old or unfunny. For Your Height Only is a 1979 James Bond parody from the Phillipines that starred Weng-Weng a small, but suave secret agent. Copies are hard to come by but Amazon has two copies on VHS and can set you up with two used on DVD. Or you can watch Knee High P.I. tonight at 9 PM EST on Comedy Central.

[Thanks to the Boing Boing brain trust for originally alerting me to Weng Weng]

Sitting through the credits of Kill Bill, I noticed one name that stood out from the rest: Perrystrong.com. Ruling out the possibility that somewhere, some parents gave their kid an URL for a name (maybe he's a relative of The Times Jennifer 8. Lee?), I checked out the dude's site. Here's what I learned:
Perry was born in 197X! (Since he graduated college in 2001, I gotta assume he was actually born in 1980: he's one of those November babies.)
Perry is 6'0" tall!
Perry is Black, German, Jewish, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and was raised by Italians!
Perry went to Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn and then Hampshire College in Massachusetts!
Perry is currently looking for representation for both Directing and Acting!

Hey Hip-hop, Fashion, and Marathon fans*:

Do you want to share an intimate dinner with P-Diddy and 12-15 members of his personal entourage? Would you like a dinner companion who changes the location four times, shows up late, answers an endless succession of cell phone calls, talks about how much money he makes, drops the names of his more famous friends, doesn't ask you so much as what you do for a living, ducks out before the check comes, and probably won't acknowledge your existence if you should run into him again? Yeah? Then sign up for The New York Post's Win Dinner with P. Diddy plus autographed gear Sweepstakes. (Never the innovator, His Diddiness is merely sampling My Dinner with Andre.)

Topics to discuss: The war in Iraq; Will he wear tape on his nipples during the New York City Marathon? What he thinks of the brutality of the African diamond trade. Does he know that Gatsby was shot execution-style at the end of the book? Where the hell is Mase? Also, try not to blush when you see Farnsworth Bentley patting the edges of Diddy's mouth with a napkin between bites.

*Also fans of really bad Flash openers on Web sites

Apparently inappropriate ad placement isn't only endemic online.

This week, Frank Rich (AKA, "The Butcher of Broadway") takes his cleaver to that bloody hunk of wurst, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his weekly Times Arts & Leisure column. Rich uses the ersatz aesthetic of Disneyland (and Disney generally) to critique the image-over-substance election results in California. Some classic Rich vitriol (richtriol?) follows:

It's Disneyland, not Colonial Williamsburg, that prefigures our future, the action-packed recall ride was nothing if not the apotheosis of the Magic Kingdom. It was fun, it was instructive, it was expensive, it was hawked relentlessly on television, it starred an Audio-Animatronic action figure...

The original notion of Disneyland lives today not only in the first park, its satellites, and its many imitators; its influence can be found in planned and gated communities, in Rouse-developed downtowns, in the carefully-scripted 'reality' programs of network television, in the faux-urban ambience of a shopping mall near you.

And what ad shares the page with this excoriating critique? Why, an ad for Disney's Brother Bear ("Featuring original songs from Academy Award-Winner Phil Collins"). Whoops! Guess that wall between church and state isn't quite so impenetrable.

On a related note, Rich's Disneyland analysis owes everything to Jean Baudrillard's "Precession of Simulacra" (though, oddly, he never mentions the text in his essay: Rich must have missed The Matrix). Here's what Mean Jean (Theory Machine) had to say 20 years ago: "Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real..."

Just saw Kill Bill Volume 1 at BAM. (The only reason I bother to mention where I saw it is because BAM is the sort of theater that attracts cinema know-it-alls who audibly guffaw when they see fake ads for Red Apple Cigarettes in the Tokyo airport and run home immediately following the credits�gotta watch the full credits: respect�to blog.)

Here're my thoughts very quickly: this is Quentin Tarantino's darkside version of Charlie's Angels, complete with over-the-top stylistics, deadly badasses with great asses, crazy quilt pop culture references and soundtrack cues, and the type of editing that allows actors to defy Newton's basic laws of motion. Oh, and Lucy Lui. Did it kick ass? Much. Did it make sense? Little.

Anyway, a thought occurred to me while watching that had also popped up when I saw The Italian Job earlier this year (yes, I admit it, I saw The Italian Job): what kind of benefits do evil henchmen get? I mean, these guys throw themselves into danger time and time again and frequently die gruesome deaths for their bosses and never, ever seem to hesitate for a second. I've contemplated quitting well paid jobs (with full dental coverage!) when my boss asked me to stay late on a Thursday night. There's no way I'm not gonna go head-to-head with some crazy bitch hell-bent on revenge just because some jerk with a corner office tells me to. Are there bonuses for successful completion of the task at hand? (Read: walking away alive.)

How do these bosses breed such loyalty in their charges? Is there some sort of Outward Bound-type retreat where they develop teamwork and commitment? Do employees' families get huge insurance pay-outs if their child is disemboweled by a samurai sword in a Tokyo nightclub? Seriously, after seeing half your coworkers cut down (in really, really nasty ways, I might add), what could make you want to keep at it? Surely not the 2% yearly raise and the occasional Friday pizza party at the office.

As the field of 2004 Democratic Presidential hopefuls continues to combatively whittle itself down to a final result of what will probably be one forlorn, battered candidate, the contenders kept at it in last night's debate, paying particular attention to their dogged pursuit of General Wesley Clark, the supposed pseudo-frontrunner.

Clark's rivals were primed to attack the man who jumped to a lead in some national polls within days of his entry into the race last month. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards took turns criticizing Clark, attacking him as a late convert to the party who can't make up his mind on the war.

"Wes Clark, welcome to the Democratic presidential campaign,'' Lieberman said sarcastically.

Next time, Wes, we suggest you shoot back with some rejoinder akin to, "Well, Joe, I'm still waiting to welcome you to the Democratic party, myself."

Zing! Time to pile up on the "centrist" Dems!

[via Fark]

Okay, last one: Is Dick Gephardt the scary old dude from Poltergeist II: The Other Side?

Howard Dean does the Running Man ten years late while Joe Lieberman throws up a Black Power salute 35 years late.

Schoolgirls swoon as Bremermania sweeps Iraq.

Crikey! Does Col Allan, the Australian-born New York Post editor, even speak English? (I know that Australians in general don't speak English: for example, in Australia, they don't say "beer," they say "Foster's," mate.)
How else to explain this totally inappropriate headline on the cover of today's paper? According the online Phrase Finder, to tie one on means to get drunk. (All roads lead back to Foster's, mate.) Does that even make sense in this context? And don't even get me started on KNOT TO WORRY...

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has filed another excellent dispatch from the Bush frontlines, documenting the president's two speeches to businessmen and military reservists in New Hampshire today.

The subject matter ("Bush Says Iraq Is 'Better Than You Probably Think'") is fairly amusing in and of itself, using the classic Bush methodology of lowering his audience's expectations (anyone remember that tactic as used in the October 2000 Presidential debates?). But the real kicker is the unfortunate double entendre spoken by our commander-in-chief this afternoon (paying special attention to the word in bold type):

President Bush told Americans today that the situation in Iraq is "a lot better than you probably think," as he sought to rally the flagging support for the U.S. occupation.

In twin speeches here in New Hampshire, the president kicked off an effort to revive determination to remain in Iraq, saying "Americans are not the running kind."

Now, is that "running" as in "to run away from something," or "running" as in "running or governing a nation which we conquered"?

Forgetting everything we all know about crabs in a barrel, David Poland has picked a fight with his fellow online movie and celebrity bottom feeder, Roger Friedman. Here's the tale of the tape:

Battle of the Online Junket All Stars

In the Left Coast corner, weighing in at 155 lbs.: David "Hot Button" Poland.

And in the Right Coast corner, weighing in somewhere north of 225 lbs., Roger "Fox 411" Friedman.

Poland comes out swinging at Roger the Dodger, throwing the first punch:

There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there are lies posing as statistics, brought to life by stunning professional ignorance, whether intentional or coincidental. Such is the province of Roger Friedman, internet gossip and a suck-up of the highest order.

In rapid succession, he lands the second:

Friedman goes to town with his unsubstantiated, but "there is no question" analysis of the wins of Oscar screeners past. He starts with Sony Classics, citing Talk To Her, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Winged Migration. Can you spot the spin?

And then, he hits below the belt with a phantom punch:

What were the other fat, bloated studio films that dominated the Oscars before Friedman's indie heroes saved the world?

Did he just call Friedman fat and bloated? Tune in tomorrow for Roger's rejoinder.

It's hard to miss the way that some people hate on Chuck Klosterman. Yes, the guy wrote a book with a bad title, is ubiquitous to the point of saturation, and he somehow managed to convince Virginia Heffernan to buy a Billy Joel CD with her Times corporate Amex. That can be grating. But think about the positive things he's done, like making it possible for the Brady family to play the Keystone Kops at the amusement park. See, Chuck isn't such a jinx!

The coffee achievers over at The Stranger put out a great cover this week. I'm jealous because New York's alt-weeklies have two very lame covers this week. (How lame? They're not even online.)
Also in The Stranger, an article on the enduring appeal of Death Metal.

We all love puns�especially in headlines�but, c'mon people, practice some restraint: POSTMAN ONLY DIES ONCE.

We're guilty of making a pun, too, but that one is just terrible.

Earlier thoughts on headlines from low culture

When Charlie LeDuff, The Times resident Joseph Mitchell manqué was pried away from the Hell's Kitchen barstool where he bent countless elbows, there was talk that it was against his will or that he was being moved to the minors. He filed a few lackluster stories on yawn-inducing topics like rats in Beverly Hills, made some enemies in Los Angeles media circles, and generally acquitted himself like the slightly snobbish East Coast transplant he was. (This role is now being filled by The New York Observer's Alexandra Jacobs, who has filed hard-hitting but condescending stories from the West Coast on screenwriters, celebrity stylists, and the farmer's market.)

But, whaddaya know, the LeDuff man appears to have lucked into the gig of a lifetime out there in Cal-ee-fornia. LeDuff's been doing some heavy-lifting on the recall and election and today files this on Governor-Elect Schwarzenegger (no matter how many times I say that, it still sounds like I misspoke). Suddenly, being sent out to the Times' avocado bureau doesn't seem so bad, does it? Now if we can just do something about Bernard Weinraub...

American soldiers continue to die of violent causes in Iraq, as do Iraqi citizens and other foreign aid workers. Oh, and something about there being massive power outages and unemployment or whatnot?

Bear this in mind when you consider that news earlier this week of another three American soldiers' deaths in Iraq ran on page A18 of the New York Times, and was more or less tangentially mentioned in another longer article about U.N. relations.

How we pine for the good old days of the early summer, when news of American deaths peppered the early morning papers' front pages each and every day! Now all we get to hear about and discuss with our co-workers and family members is "$87 billion this, CIA leak that."

"I said I don't know. Isn't that clear? You don't understand English?"

Rumsfeld demonstrating the results of his court-ordered sensitivity training.

Rummy, might I suggest a movie for you to watch after church this weekend?

Certainly one might throw out some captions here like "I call Rummy...you guys get Lewis, the closeted gay rations chef," but on a more topical and news-related note, we're going with, "Don't worry, Donald, you may have been willfully left out of the Iraq Stabilization Group, but we have faith in your athletic skills."
(with thanks to Danny for the source)

"I will [Govern California]�nothing else... I will work as much as I can . . . so there will no time for movies or anything else."
IT'S HASTA LA VISTA H'WOOD by David K. Li

What happened to Thursday night on NBC? Time was, the whole family could sit in front of the TV and enjoy Bill Cosby doing his fluttery jazzbo dance moves with his wife and kids and follow that up with Dwayne Wayne flipping his shades up at every attractive Hillman College girl. Once the little ones got sleepy, mom and dad could enjoy some Sam and Diane sexual tension on Cheers. It was all very clean and tidy and if ratings were any indication, a success.

Then, at some point, Thursday night was re-branded "Must See TV," which was more of a command than a description, and everything got a bit screwy.

...Just some advice we thought it prudent to share with Republicans who steadfastly hate the "limousine liberal" crowd. Seriously, Governor Arnold can readily attest to the inefficacy of that (and so can Gay Davis! Har-har, you loveable residents of San Diego!)

After the GOP-led redistricting plan passed in Texas (the battle over which featured all those intra-state flight accusations and hotel hideouts over the past few months), Governor Rick Perry's flack Gene Acuna snidely tried to dismiss the outspoken behavior of Alec Baldwin:

"Mr. Baldwin's political views against President Bush and Republicans in general are well known and documented. I have no doubt that Texans will give the comments made by the star of 'Beetlejuice' all of the attention they are due."

Come on. At least "Beetlejuice" was an OK film, directed by Tim Burton in his prime, no less. Go after "Mercury Rising" next time, and you'll have us all on board.

Best evidence that The Village Voice doesn't copy edit its "Best of New York" issue, by Matt Haber

best subway line to spot someone reading white teeth or the corrections - L TRAIN
Capturing the NPR zeitgeist of the L TRAIN, these discursive tomes are daily removed from vintage satchels and displayed accordingly. On a recent Brooklyn-bound excursion, a guy with a bunny-eared copy of Franzen's Saul Bellow-styled smarminess surreptitiously scoped an asymmetrically coiffed woman equally unwrapped in Zadie Smith's pre-Autograph Man shaggy dog. If the faux literati were pretending to read the Marquis de Sade with their morning coffee, rush hour would be much more interesting. -Brandon Stosuy
"Bunny-eared"? I think the phrase Brandon is looking for is "dog-eared," right?

Big dilemma here, for those attuned to the details of election red tape (you know, x number of voters needed to get a measure on the ballot, y number of dollars to lobby for its passage). We're assuming the New York Times, when it prepared this handy chart about the 2003 California recall "election", used official data from the state's registrar or other relevant election official.

So, then...pay close attention to the detail we've provided of the accompanying graphic which appeared on the Times' website this morning: Are we really to believe that Peter Camejo, the Green Party's candidate for governor in both this and the last statewide election, is a Financial Investment Advisor? That is so fucked up.

RIP, Neil Postman, philosopher prince in the Empire of Signs.

Turn off your TV tonight and read Amusing Ourselves to Death
[Thanks, Dave]

First Jesse, then Arnold... then Carl?

Actor Tom Arnold extended his congratulations by phone and told Fox News that he wished he could have attended the victory party. Actor Gary Busey spoke to the crowd and defended Schwarzenegger from the sexual assault allegations that had dogged him in the last few days of the campaign.

...from Foxnews.com

Depressingly accurate lede from The Los Angeles Times:

Californians have never known more about a new governor. We've seen him naked on screen. We know about the Nazi father, the celebrity journalist wife, the bodybuilding titles and the crude behavior toward women. We have seen him in theaters, fallen asleep to his voice on television and imitated his accent.

Californians have never known less about a new governor. We've never seen him hold office. We don't know what programs he'll cut, how he'll balance the budget, how he'll negotiate with recalcitrant legislators or how he'll manage the state's bureaucracy.

THE NEW GOVERNOR: So Familiar Yet So Unknown, by Joe Matthews (requires registration)

How can you not love this guy?

Mr. Yates, 37, said yesterday that he thought Ming was crying one day last week because he was lonely. So he ran to Ming, and engaged him in one of his favorite games, a playful, mock-fighting routine that he called "Buddy-Buddy." That's when Shadow the kitten, another of Mr. Yates's feline charges, showed up � and Ming suddenly looked very hungry....As Ming was about to pounce on Shadow, Mr. Yates said he jumped between them, and Ming's teeth sank into his arm... "I'm not mad at Ming; I still love him... I feel heartbroken," Mr. Yates said. "I miss him a lot. He's like my brother, my best friend, my only friend, really."

Does Sharon know?

"We can only prosecute if there is sufficient evidence to justify the charge, but there is not enough evidence," said Chris MacAdam, a lawyer for the National Prosecuting Authority.

Five Policemen Won't Be Tried in Biko Killing, by The Associated Press

Suggested slogan: Sightly less nauseating than Vanilla Coke.

This just in from the public interest journalists at Page Six: Woody Allen is shopping his memoirs to publishers . According to suspiciously unnamed "publishing sources," the book "will lay open the secrets of his affairs with Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow and his current wife, Soon Yi." (Not exactly the most alluring list, but you work with what ya' got.)
Great! Just what we need. More shitty writing wavering violently between self-aggrandizement and self-pity, intellectual name-dropping, pathetic rehashing of jokes that were funny 30 years ago, glorifying of a lost social-climbing New York lifestyle, and a naked grab for immortality. Basically, his last 10 movies only without the pretty young things for eye candy. Can't wait!
Besides, didn't Woody already write a book called Getting Even? Maybe this one should be called Without Morals.

50 Dollar bet: Blurb from David Remnick.

Can you simultaneously buy and steal an election?

What happened to you, California? You used to be cool.

1. Rice to Lead Effort To Speed Iraqi Aid

"President Bush announced yesterday that the White House will take a stronger role in overseeing the struggling effort to rebuild Iraq through a new group intended to speed the flow of money and staff to Baghdad and streamline decision-making in Washington...

The new group, to be led by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and drawn from more than a half-dozen Cabinet agencies, is intended to remove a bottleneck in decision-making by identifying and resolving problems faced by the U.S.-led occupation. Responsibility for running postwar Iraq will remain with the Defense Department, and civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer will retain considerable autonomy."

That's like having the fox guard the henhouse!

2. Sharon Threatens to Hit Israel's Enemies Anywhere

"President Bush insisted on Monday that Israel should not feel constrained in defending itself but said he told Sharon: 'It's very important that any action Israel take(s) should avoid escalation and creating higher tensions.'"

Do as I say, and not as I do!

3. Consumer borrowing surged in August

"The Federal Reserve reported Tuesday that consumers increased their borrowing by a seasonally adjusted $8.2 billion, or at a brisk annual rate of 5.2 percent from July to August. That pushed up total consumer debt to $1.96 trillion."

That's biting off more than you can chew!

3.6 earthquake hits Southern California.

[Earthquake data via the ever-fruitful Fark]

Dear Headline Writers at The New York Post and The New York Daily News:

Please resist using the headline "LOST IN TRANSLATION" when reporting this story tomorrow. The lazy use of this headline was already thoroughly trashed in The New York Observer two weeks ago, so it's not like you can still find it orginal or clever.

Thank you,
Your friends at low culture

So, Senator Bob Graham (D- Fla.) has withdrawn from the race for the 2004 Democratic Presidential Nomination. Hopefully, this will enable him to start working on shoring up some support for a shot at the V.P. position, allowing the Dems to maintain some degree of limited relevance in the New South (I mean, seriously, Sen. John Edwards is so gone and Gen. Wesley Clark is a "barely-there" Arkansan, which sounds suspiciously like some sort of designer undergarment).

One of the sadder elements of this withdrawal, however, is not the loss of a veteran politician with relevant international experience, but the manner in which the withdrawal occurred, as per the Miami Herald:

In an anticlimactic finale, the 66-year-old Graham made his announcement during an interview on CNN's Larry King Live, keeping much of his own senior staff in the dark about his fate until the end of a 52-minute segment on the show examining the future of Las Vegas duo Siegfried & Roy.

Thinking it was another one of those mean "Morning Zoo" radio pranks, Nobel Prize winner Peter Mansfield doubted his wife when she told him he'd won.

[link via the tireless Fark]

I'm gonna put this in print so that I can say that I said it first: Ginny Hunt is the next George Stephanopoulos. Who's Ginny Hunt? Well, she makes a brief cameo (in a photo) in today's unfortunately-titled Times article You Go, Dean! Babies of Boomers Find a Candidate. (Sidebar: Who says, "You go, [blank]!" other than Ricki Lake or the women on Sex and the City "jiving" with drag queens?). Ginny is the photogenic 23 year-old coordinator of Generation Dean, the younger, (relatively) hipper outpost for all things Howard Dean. The photo shows a focused young woman with her hair in a bun, wearing glasses, and poring over documents with candidate Dean and his campaign manager Joe Trippi looking on with awe at her precocity and seriousness. The photo (which, sadly, is not available on The Times Web site) reminds me of another young go-getter we met a decade ago. Every campaign�at least every campaign that hopes to bring in the youth vote�needs a spunky, "groovy" young person to reflect the youthfulness and vitality of the candidate. Ginny fits the bill. We'll be watching to see if she can parlay this gig into a full-time White House gig, book deal, and swank media job (not to mention a celebrity partner!) like boy wonder George did.

Attention Dakota Fanning: If you ever leave California, move to New York. According to today's New York Times, Albany passed a new law forcing parents to put at least 15% of their perfmormer children's money in a trust fund to be turned over to the little darlings if and when they reach 18. This is good news for child actors everywhere. If only this law had been in place sooner, Jonathan Lipnicki might not have descended into a Lick-'em-ade and OxyContin addiction and turned to rodeo clowning to make ends meet.

Gothamist, Sept. 19: Angle Grinder Man*
New York Times, Oct. 7: Car Owners' Hero Dressed for the Job

* Yes, I know that Gothamist was linking from CNN, but she did it first.

Imagine that there is a Highlander for precocious, home-schooled authors from rural areas. That means that Jed Purdy is in the fight of his life now that Christopher Paolini is on the scene! Check the text, people:
� 15 when he wrote his fantasy novel Eragon
� loves Wagner and holds forth learnedly on the "Ring" cycle
� keeps Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf" by his bed
� invented three languages for his characters of dwarves, elves and humanoids, some based on Old Norse, some from scratch
� never kissed a girl
Okay, that last one was bullshit, but I was reading between the lines. I say, good luck challenging J.K. Rowling's hegemony, Christopher, but you might want to be careful not to wind up like some other young geniuses.

Out today: RZA's Birth of a Prince. I guess medical school didn't work out for The Abbot, but I'm glad he's back to what he does best.

RZA doesn't have a Web presence anymore (the mighty Wu empire is, sadly, in decline), but you can swing on over to rza.org home of Religious Zionists of America.

Robin Williams, what happened to you? You were doing so good there for a second or two. You almost made me forget about Patch Adams and Jakob the Liar, What Dreams May Come and the other syrupy sweet pieces of crap you put out in the last decade. And now I hear about House of D the new movie you're shooting. According to one of your fansites, House of D is the story about a long time friendship between a young [David] Duchovny (Anton Yelchin) and his retarded Elementary school janitor (Robin Williams). This description does not fill me with confidence. Please, Robin Williams!

Now, David Duchovny, what happened to you? I was never an X-Files fan, but I like your droll, intelligent persona (and your awesome cameos on The Larry Sanders Show and creepy role in Full Frontal). You wrote and are currently directing this movie (in Brooklyn, no less), so I'm sure it's autobiographical, but David Duchovny, please resist the temptation to make anything that can be described as "touching," "shot-through with emotion," or "ringing true with pure sentiment." I expect better from you. Please, David Duchovny!

Don't even get me started on you, Shia LeBeouf! Get a haircut already. Please, Shia LeBeouf!

Still waiting for "Nummer and H-Bomb" of Whatevs to do their Saturday Night Live wrap up for this week's season premiere, but I've been thinking about it and I have a couple of opinions. Mostly opinions about what's missing, more specifically, opinions about how Tracy Morgan is missing.

It's all going according to our master plan, sirs!

Stage 2 (or is this Stage 3? We've lost count) of the Bush Administration's expiration-date-devoid War on Terror™ is now officially underway. Thanks, Israel! You're doing those of us at Boeing and Lockheed-Martin proud!

This, by the way, per half-assed Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark's recently revealed knowledge of the current administration's master plans:

"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark adds, "I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."

Sigh. It's time to start boning up on the Lebanon Factsheet. TIP: next time, boys, please alphabetize your plan-of-attack list.

First, there was that stupid broom, and now this. Will someone please elect this guy before he gets ahold of a falcon or an adorable kitten? Please.
Incidentally, here's a little Californian who clearly resents being (ab)used as a prop by a megalomaniacal Hollywood hypocrite with schnitzel breath. You can practically see her on the shrink's couch bitching about her parents in 15 years.

Our Man Palast strikes gold yet again. After reports covering everything from the August 2003 blackout in the Northeastern U.S. power grid, to the November 2000 "black"out of the Southeastern U.S. voter rolls, Greg Palast now documents the insidious effort by several power utility companies to work around a $9 billion recompensation plan due the State of California after all the 2000-era state energy crises, paying particular attention to gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger's involvement in this malarkey.

You say you owe us one dollar? Let's help you out, here -- why not pay back one cent instead, after ensuring that your Republican candidate gets elected to manage the world's fifth-largest economy? Wait a second, that makes this scale much larger: you owe nine billion dollars? Pay back nine billion cents! All's fair in politics!

"But we're running a deficit!", you say. Well, we can cut state social programs, because there's no way we're taking money from the utility companies! Let's deregulate!

Bah, humbug.

It's more than likely that this is, by now, a familiar image to Los Angeles-area residents and commuters, which can only be a good thing, given the circumstances. If Andre the Giant has a posse, why can't Arnold the Bodybuilder have a budget deficit to call his own? (By "Arnold the Bodybuilder," I mean "Pete Wilson 2: The Sequel," and most definitely not "Cruz the Bustamante".)

I've been waiting for Gil Cunha and Ben Fritz, the writers behind the Hollywood satire site Dateline Hollywood to hit their stride, and I'm happy to report that this week, they did.
TED DANSON OUTRAGED OVER LIMBAUGH RACIAL REMARKS- funny!
CBS SHOCKED TO DISCOVER KILBORN STILL ON AIR- funnier still!
JACK BLACK SIGNS MULTI-SLACKER/ROCKER PICTURE DEAL- I'm jealous!
�THE MULLETS' SITCOM UNDER FIRE FOR ALLEGEDLY STEREOTYPING MULLETED AMERICANS- three outta four ain't bad.
Dateline Hollywood
Previous entries on Dateline Hollywood on low culture

I'm sure my less blog-ative partner will object to my categorizing this entry as grave, but in my world, this is just about the worst thing possible. The editors of The New Yorker somehow saw fit to assign David Denby to review Kill Bill�Volume 1. Why, why, why?
I don't even trust Denby's take on The Fighting Temptations, so why would I want to read him on the one film I'm waiting for like the Lubavitch community awaits the Moshiach?

I have a friend, James, who once told me that every week when he gets his New Yorker he flips to "The Current Cinema" and if he sees it's a Denby week and not an Anthony Lane week he gets depressed. James, I'm sorry to tell you, this is gonna be a bad week.

Buried after the jump in David Carr's piece on the Michael Wolff's quixotic bid for New York Magazine is this amazing fact: Although Mr. Wolff, 50, makes more than $450,000 as a columnist for the magazine and received an advance of more than $500,000 for a book, 'Autumn of the Moguls' (HarperCollins), he does not have the $50 million or so it will take to walk away with the weekly magazine franchise�which made all of $1.5 million lasy year, according to executives at Primedia, the magazine's owner.
Okay, I take it back: two amazing facts. First, Wolff makes a shit load of money (enough, practically, to double New York's profits). But what's with Carr's vagueness? What does "more than $450,000" mean? Does he get merit bonuses for being linked from Romenesko? And then, there's that advance of "more than $500,000." Why can't we get an exact figure on that?
I'm too polite to even comment on New York's anorexic profit margin, but needless to say, it sort of re-combines and inverts the old maxim that you can never be too rich or too thin.
Before sipping the Primedia Kool-Aid, Elizabeth Spiers hilariously described Wolff as looking like Mike Myers as Dr. Evil at Gawker.com.
Previous Wolff entries on low culture.

Further proof that Hollywood is high school with money: Limp frontman Fred Durst wooed Halle Berry with a totally personalized mix tape! Well, a mix iPod (I hope he downloaded all those MP3s legally!). According to GQ (here quoted by Page Six), the iPod contained such heart string tuggers as "True Colors" by Cindi ("I saw her in concert when I was 8") Lauper and "Night and Day" by Al Be Sure! (note to Post copy editors�you have copy editors, right?�this is how Al spells his name, not 'Al B. Sure.')
Wow! Can Durst be any more of a tool? I mean, does he actually think that could work? What? It did? Fuck.

More information continues to be released about Antoine Yates and his 400lb Bengal tiger in Harlem. (For a great round-up of coverage, swing by Gothamist where Jen Chung does all the heavy summarizing.)

The story of a tiger in a tiny New York apartment reminded me of Yann Martel's Man Booker Award winning Life of Pi. Here's a bit of practical tiger advice from Pi Patel, a teenage boy trapped on a life raft with a tiger named Richard Parker:
What you don't realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals�domestication it's called�but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will. When wild animals fight us, it is out of sheer desperation. They fight us when they feel they have no other way out out. It's a very last resort.
[Buy Life of Pi at Amazon.com]

On Friday night, the police found no one home, but talked to a neighbor who complained of large amounts of urine and a strong smell coming through the ceiling. - Alan Feuer and Jason George, "Police Subdue a Tiger in Harlem Apartment"

This just in: Howard Dean leaves Presidential run to work for Klinger's, a Burlington area supermarket. Reports indicate the former state Governor did not ask customers their bag preference and neglected to place a bottle of bleach in a separate plastic bag to avoid risk of poisoning. At press time, Dr. Dean was unavailable for comment as he was mopping up baby vomit in aisle three.

Ripping a page out of the Coen brothers' canon, Arnold Schwarzenegger made an appearance this weekend brandishing a broom and promising sweep Gray Davis out of office.

Not bad, but where's his "little man"? To wit, here's Candidate Homer Stokes speechifyin' in O, Brother Where Art Thou?

STOKES
And I say to you that the great state
a Mississippi cannot afford four more
years a Pappy O'Daniel - four more
years a cronyism, nepotism, rascalism
and service to the Innarests! The
choice, she's a clear 'un: Pappy
O'Daniel, slave a the Innarests; Homer
Stokes, servant a the little man! Ain't
that right, little fella?

The midget enthusiastically seconds:

MIDGET
He ain't lyin'!

STOKES
When the litle man says jump, Homer
Stokes says how high? And, ladies'n
jettymens, the little man has
admonished me to grasp the broom a
ree-form and sweep this state clean!
[Script via Script-o-Rama]

The Antic Muse takes one for the team and sits through an agonizing meeting full of corporate double (and triple?) speak.
Question: Have the speakers been frozen in ice since 1999, or are they like those Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender after WWII?

As noted earlier, I'm a bit fixated on insensitive/unimaginative headlines for The Station Agent and its star Peter Dinklage. Entering the fray yet again is The New York Post with the worst headline I've seen since the days of my high school newspaper, The Southerner.

GENTLE MISFIT FRIENDS ARE FIT FOR FINE FILM

I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker. - Future Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in a book proposal by George Butler

Yet another reason for single New York women to feel embittered:

Political prisoner Lori Berenson got married from her jail cell in Peru and it got written up by The New York Times. According to Reuters: "The groom, An�bal Apari, a 40-year-old law student recently freed on parole after serving 12 1/2 years of a 15-year sentence as a member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement." A law student, even! Some girls have all the luck.
The happy couple are registered at Cell, Block & Beyond.

(Sorry, Daniel. It was just so easy.)

Formerly hard-hitting, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jimmy Breslin once again takes on one of the most important issues... well, ever: why he hates dogs:
"[W]e know that dogs walked by their hideous owners on city streets are repugnant. They turn the place where you walk into an outdoor bathroom. They should be curbed, which means they could be out there among the buses. That is no loss as dogs have no souls."- "Those Bad Dogs," Newsday, Sept. 21, 2003

Breslin fans may remember he said something similar earlier this year:
"Out on the streets of the city there is the revolting sight of people walking along with their dogs and then bending and picking up after them. They humiliate themselves in public, and I cannot understand why a person, having done this, can walk with his head up and even look you in the eye if he catches you staring...On the same sidewalk, a woman dressed for the business day was bent down and picking up after a dog so small that he deserved to be crushed and the woman, after making such a sight of herself, should have been shunned."-As quoted by Gawker
It should be noted that Mr. Breslin has had extensive surgery to his brain in the last decade, as if you couldn't tell.

The NY Times revealed that the U.S. military has been practicing the craft of shooting down airborne civilian flights, should that ever become necessary, in case, well, you know.

Included is this one line, which seemed a bit more casual than perhaps it ought to have been:

"[The general] said pilots and ground controllers were screened to make sure they would not refuse an order to shoot down a suspicious airliner packed with civilians..."

Yikes. Just imagine how callous and, well, military-esque these people who made it through the selection process must be.

Further proof that all DJs are losers. Tasting the Foie Gras, Listening to the Jam, by Glenn Collins

I fantasize about being married to Jennifer Garner, too, but I don't tell The New York Friggin' Times:
"Mr. Wilson proudly showed off photographs of Ms. Plame, calling her a real-life Jennifer Garner, the actress who plays a spy on 'Alias' on ABC-TV and whom the C.I.A. has enlisted as a spokeswoman to appeal to recruits."
Life imitates art which is also imitating life. Is the whole world a big Charlie Kaufman film?

I blame Rupaul:

"As soon as they arrived in Anshan, however, the problems began. They were asked to sign a contract that offered monthly pay far below the advertised level, initially just $24, minus a $13 charge for room and board. Bonuses were promised, but only for those who produced eyelashes above quotas." - Chinese Girls' Toil Brings Pain, Not Riches by Joseph Kahn

Coupling once again temporarily fills the 9:30 PM timeslot tonight on NBC. This is like one of those nightmares where you wake up only to find you're still in the nightmare. Memo to Zucker: Super-size Friends and Will & Grace and drop this thing before we lose more of the world's esteem.

George Will shows off some unsurprisingly corny pop culture knowledge (what does Maureen Dowd think?) by wasting his opening paragraph with a drawn-out references to Witness. Are we to believe that Witness is the only way Will can discuss integrity? Why not The Indiana Jones Trilogy?
George Will, film buff and closet Harrison Ford fan. Who knew? I guess now we know posted all those Hollywood Homicide raves on Ain't It Cool News.

Knut Royce.
Huh, huh, huh. I said "nut."

From this week's New York Observer: "People out here [Los Angeles], they really don't know anything about the military unless they were in it. Before, if someone thought, �Hey, isn't that guy's dad the head of NATO?', they'd think it was the North American Theaters Association." - Screenwriter and possible Presidential son Wesley Clark, Jr. quoted by Lizzy Ratner

It's a truism that you can tell everything you need to know about a publication from its choice of headlines and sub-heads. (What? It's not a truism? It is now.) With that in mind, let's look at a couple of magazines' and newspapers' coverage of the same thing, namely, actor Peter Dinklage and his breakout role in The Station Agent.

"He's taken small roles to great heights -- and now with Sundance fave The Station Agent, this up-and-coming actor is livin' large"
Does your magazine like to use multiple, overlapping puns in their subheads that signal irreverence and a willingness to make nice to celebrities and their handlers? Hello, Entertainment Weekly! (requires subscription)

GET SHORTY AN OSCAR
Does your newspaper pride itself on looking out for the underdog yet have an unhealthy affinity for crass humor? Greetings, New York Post!

THE BIG TIME
Did your magazine agonize over whether to make a pun about your subject's size and then decide to do it anyway? The New Yorker, you rock!

Actor Peter Dinklage lives large
Is your publication Canadian and therefore exempt from coming up with anything even remotely clever? Oh, Canada.com!

"[I]f there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.

Quiz time: George W. Bush or Tony Soprano?

"Still, the awkwardness passes, and the sight of Joe wandering cheerfully into the shot, munching a bowl of cornflakes, or whatever, and hailing the baffled husband without concern, is my favorite encounter in the movie."- Anthony Lane, The Current Cinema October 6, 2003