Posted 10:31 PM by Gene

What's wrong with Rubenesque? So long as it isn't Nicolesque.

Kate Winslet's body transplant has come back to haunt her.

Posted 10:14 PM by Gene

If we don't fight sprawl, we get sprawl and the doughnut effect. If we do fight sprawl, we slow growth. Faced with real-estate Babbitts the public can't win.

Posted 10:07 PM by Gene

Just what the world needs: a hajj with a parental-advisory label.

Posted 9:36 PM by Gene

Here's something the Times buried: the president is thinking of ditching the income tax for a consumption tax. We'd probably replace one sort of unfairness (a confiscatory IRS, zillions of needless forms and documents) with another (the poor would likely pay the most taxes proportional to income). It's worth the debate, though.

Posted 9:17 PM by Gene

I do not feel sorry for the media clowns in their brief moment of distress. When the economy comes back so will the power lunches, and the power parties. And don't worry, you power lunchers and partiers can then condescend to us even more. Happy day!

Posted 8:51 PM by Gene

Here's why people don't trust news hacks: Drudge posted a link headed, "BUSH AND BLAIR TO GIVE SADDAM JUST 48 HOURS TO LEAVE IRAQ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (He didn't add the exclamation points, but he always does, figuratively.) The link was to a Telegraph story headed, "US and Britain give Saddam just 48 hours to leave Iraq." Its opening sentence reads,

Britain and America are drawing up plans to give Saddam Hussein as little as 48 hours to flee Baghdad or face war, if UN weapons inspectors report this week that the Iraqi dictator is still refusing to disarm fully.

That's a few qualifiers, if you ask me. Please guys, don't pull a Hearst on us. No wonder Sulzberger the Junior impersonated Rodney Dangerfield at KU.

Posted 8:36 PM by Gene

I was going to read this, and possibly comment, but guilt by association -- Richard Nixon's guilt -- impeded me. Still Leonard Garment's op-ed on the snuffed-out poets' hate-in at the White House came through with a really good line: That the cancelled righteous protest wasn't about Iraq, or even free speech, but it was "about bad behavior, the sort I have grown increasingly weary of over the last 35 years." We all have, Mr. Garment. But after 35 years it's too late for reason. The whole cultural redoubt is home to cry-baby loony leftists, and when the right responds, when it deems fitfully to respond, it's with the equivalent of cowboy poetry, or mawkish hymns like "AH'm praaaayoud to beee a caaaaaAAAAAAYN -- AmayriCAAAAAAYN!" Politics has so precluded excellence for so long it's hard to imagine where a new generation of Poes or Dickinsons or Frosts could begin. Not in academe, and not under the watchful Big Brother eye of Rupert and Sumner, either.

It used to be possible to create great art despite politics. Aaron Copland was an unregenerate leftist, and he took Leonard Bernstein under his wing (in more ways than one, I'm afraid), and both produced glories. But that was when art commanded more respect, and artists had more self-respect. It's just not possible now. Sloganeering always defeats the muse.

And speaking of sloganeering, anyone who can write "Jews who learned their comportment from storm troopers/ act out the nightmares that woke their grandmothers" is a candidate for an editorial job at a new Der Sturmer.

Posted 7:59 PM by Gene

If France and Germany could work out a compromise to prevent war, fine. Problem is, all they can do is compromise.

Posted 6:52 PM by Gene

Sulzberger the Junior sez the news media could do better.

The first thing you could do, Art, is to give Howell some Valium.

Posted 6:41 PM by Gene

Worshipping the Most Adored All-Seeing All-Knowing Imperial Mystic Twenty-Foot-Tall Pigmy Ruler of the Only Korea that Counts is at the top of my list of Living for Nothing.

Posted 2:54 PM by Gene

King Richard's going to turn TCM into AMC -- "slowly."

Having just won a big victory over the public in the name of perpetual copyright you'd think these morons would try to get some value out of their older properties. But no, advertisers have their ears, and that means age discrimination in the name of profits.

Hey Your Royal Highness, who's going to show all these old movies if you don't -- and if you keep your deathlock on their copyrights?

Posted 2:38 PM by Gene

Academia will be dragged into race-neutral practices kicking and screaming.

Posted 2:13 PM by Gene

More skullduggery from the Saudis: They've decided to "reform" themselves if we leave the country.

Five or ten years down the road, we may have to reform the country again.

Posted 1:59 PM by Gene

Another great moment in public-opinion polling.

Just like the last one.

Posted 1:16 PM by Gene

Isn't our ennui over space tied to our larger cultural deadness? The scientific and technological wonders that promised to liberate mankind are now so much our unyielding masters, and we their yielding slaves. Every computer crash and bug subsconsciously reminds us that we've become, in Thoreau's words, "the tools of our tools." In the process space has gone from dreaming and exploration to packing sardines in a can and sending them into a void at high risk of death. The race must think more boldly than this to maintain its sanity, but mankind's long-term future does rest in sardine cans.

Posted 12:57 PM by Gene

This silly article in Bill Gates's Brain Food magazine proves that the advertising departments of big business are insulated units whose sole purposes are self-gratification and wasting money. What is the point of spending hundreds of millions on pop tunes? At least music videos advertise something.

Posted 12:50 PM by Gene

Trekkiedom isn't just Star Trek fans; it encompasses obsessive-compulsives of every kind, though its ilk is most likely to be found overpraising pop culture. Here's a Phil Spector Trekkie quoted admiringly in Slate:

As Evan Eisenberg wrote in his marvellous book The Recording Angel: "[I]n its urgent solipsism, its perfectionism, its mad bricolage, Spector's work was perhaps the first fully self-conscious phonography in the popular field."

Hence Peter Bart makes fun of movie-ad-blurb copywriters; they write this way. Too many news hacks write this way. They call it eloquence.

Posted 2:20 AM by Gene

For the first time in years Viacom does a good thing: it's suing Mr. Liza Minnelli.

That's David with a "G."

Posted 1:13 AM by Gene

Can anyone doubt that if something like Dennis Kucinich's "Department of Peace" had become a reality in the Weimar Republic, it would have been the first thing to go under Hitler?

Posted 11:18 PM by Gene

I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but instead of running show-biz press releases, why don't news firms sell the space to the studios? One of Legendary Welch's few smart ideas was to propose the same thing for Today. If we're going to endure ads let's have the real thing. The presence of the megalomaniacal quote spouter Paul "Dreck" Dergarabedian alone ("A BEVY OF RICHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!") should slug this "Advertisement."

Posted 6:51 PM by Gene

The very glib Jonah Goldberg is wrong. I didn't detect overkill in the Columbia coverage (although I took pains to avoid the TV end). The disaster deserved banner headlines; it's hardly every day that astronauts voyage into space. I've found most of the reports to be, if anything, understated. That the foam-wing connection has not become a national frenzy owes to the fact that, even a week out, we hardly know anything about what happened, and must speak in the measured words of science. (I notice Jonah provides no specific examples of overkill. Glibness conquers all.) Which isn't to say the news hacks should rest easy over their reputations: The last decade has seen a series of frenzies that have utterly annihilated them, from Nancy and Tonya to OJ to Princess Di to the 9/11 anniversary, and it does not take much to provoke a flood of bad writing and specious psychologizing from these folks. It could have happened last week; thankfully, it didn't.

Posted 6:13 PM by Gene

What stands out in this report is not the "al-Qaeda's-ready-to-attack-us-again" rhetoric -- we've heard it before, many times before, which is why the terror alert system can't be taken fully seriously -- but this concluding sentence:

The Daily News reported last week that intelligence authorities were monitoring Iraqi spies crossing the Canadian border to stir up anti-war protests.

I didn't see that one. We shouldn't wonder: The anti-war forces have Stalin and Saddam on their side.

Posted 4:35 PM by Gene

When the Saudis want to lie, they do it bilingually.

Which is another way of saying, they speak with two tongues from both sides of their mouth.

Posted 4:08 PM by Gene

My question from last night -- "Why do so many professional college basketball coaches look -- dishonest?" -- answers itself: because they are dishonest. Or perhaps dishonest isn't the right word -- it's venal. Money and falsehood do go together, even in a world of amateurs. We can start with Lefty "Obstruction of Justice" Driesell ("Don't talk t' th' p'lice, Ah'm tellin' ya, DON'T TALK t' th P'LICE!"), then go to John "400 SATs are Fine With Me" Thompson and his sidekick Nolan "Five Percent" Richardson, and thence to Tark the Towel-Chewing Jark, who was so determined to hire dummies and crooks he took the NCAA to the Supremes -- and lost by one justice. Of course it doesn't help when Tubby Smith looks like a shifty-eyed cross between Ernie Ford and Yosemite Sam, or when Bob Huggins looks like a blend of Liberace, Jimmy Swaggart and Popeye, or when Gene Keady looks as if he's about to be arrested, perhaps for his combover. In any event, there's plenty of corruption to go around. Or as Dickie V (who knows something of ill-gotten gains himself, working for Disney) would say, "These are the giants of basketball, supersensational scintillating rrrrrrrr-in-a-soycle!"

Posted 3:46 PM by Gene

Where are all these pictures? I'd sure like to see them.

Posted 3:44 PM by Gene

Do we stoop for votes, or do we stoop for votes?

Posted 3:41 PM by Gene

Graydon Carter had a Spy flashback.

Gray, stick to advertorials.

Posted 3:28 PM by Gene

Our friend Blogger Guy must be having an impact; Jimmy Kimmel's show has (to quote this source) "whoopee-cushion wit."

I'd say it isn't long for this world, but they probably said the same thing about Alfred E. Neuman.

Posted 3:16 PM by Gene

As if news hacks aren't already the center of the universe, the Disney Sports Cable Channel entertainer Tony Kornheiser will be the inspiration of a comedy on the Viacom Network.

His life? His paycheck.

Posted 3:06 PM by Gene

Leftists are in an apparently war-related offensive to label the media conservative. Leading the pack is Eric Alterman, a Michael Moore without the attitude. His argument (here excerpted from a book) trips up and falls head-first when he cites the "success" of The Wall Street Journals' "editorial page" as proof of their rightward tilt. Which I guess explains why Bob Bartley ran his own reporting on Whitewater (the very conservative Al Hunt and Gerry Seib sure weren't going to do it), and why half the Washington bureau staff are alumni of the very conservative Washington Monthly, once run by the very conservative firebrand the Rev. Charles "Noble Cause" Peters, and why the very conservative Pulitzer-winner Susan Faludi became a raging feminist, and why the very conservative persecution of Clarence Thomas was led by two Wall Street Journals reporters.

Posted 2:59 PM by Gene

Speaking of The Washington Times, it first disclosed this story yesterday. What is the terror alert system but a national tap on the shoulder?

Posted 2:54 PM by Gene

What a surprise! The same textbook publishers who refer to "Eve and Adam" and have banned "dogma" as "ethnocentric" paint a "rosy" picture of Islam under pressure from a lobbying group. That this story appears in the conservative Washington Times confirms my belief that the educators who disseminate this drivel will be immune to chastisement.

Here's a link to the Islam study, from the American Textbook Council (note: a .pdf file).

Posted 2:43 PM by Gene

What the network execs call "innovation" -- shows that don't start on the hour, staggered schedules, shows that premiere any time of the year -- is the shell game of a dying industry, an industry that has run out of talent and ideas, and that stays alive only through the infusions of our media tax dollars, paid through advertising and cable bills.

Posted 10:04 PM by Gene

Why do so many professional college basketball coaches look -- dishonest?

Posted 9:55 PM by Gene

Just what we need: Korean War II. We should win this one fairly easily -- unless the Chinese join in, like the last time (racial solidarity? It can't be politics), then all bets are off. I can see Kim and his syphilitic toadies launching a preemptive strike when we start on Iraq. Slick and The Cleaning Lady helped with the missiles. I hope George and Rummy and the General know what they're doing.

Posted 8:58 PM by Gene

In the March Atlantic which I cited yesterday there's also an article on Wynton Marsalis's busted career and what it portends for jazz. Hard to believe that jazz once occupied the pop-culture mainstream; born in the distant past of slave quarters and raised in dives, jazz should have figured to be little more than a wail and a beat, but Satchmo brought it opera, and in its symbiosis with the musical stage it produced imperishable music. Jazzmen were stars of radio and film, and their sound was everywhere; it boosted morale incalculably in our worldwide victory over Fascism. Then the vets and their wives made households and babies, which took up free time, then the big bands folded and that ended dancing to the music, then TV and room air conditioning came along, which eliminated a big reason people socialized, then the great Duke started writing "tone poems," then Miles came along and turned his back to the audience, then the PROFESSORS found it, and one of them, who must surely burn in Hell, coined the lethal phrase "America's Classical Music," which made people think jazz was classical music, something for the classroom and the dead, something you listened to as an obligation and against your will. Ask people what jazz is and their first mental image is a bunch of scraggly guys in porkpie hats and goatees scrunched in a broom closet, surrounded by dope addicts, trying to out-Ornette Coleman. The music is so steeped in cliches and has grown so apart from any audience it can't overcome it. Too many folks believe the falsehood that if some high powered genius came along and magically revived the music jazz would come back, and for too long that hope rested on Wynton's narrow shoulders and his very fine but self-limiting talent. But a confluence of forces -- Emancipation, European immigration, an age of invention, the big post-Civil War economic boom -- created so much of our mighty commercial culture, and though it was long-lasting, when the total force was spent, so was the culture. We see it everywhere: in theater that's little more than idle experimentation or public embalming; in movies made for teens, with a mentality for infants; in television that's little more than an improvisation on real life; in a popular music rapidly imploding from its lack of inspiration and appeal. If the rest of our culture is so mortally ill, how can jazz ever be in the bloom of health?

Posted 7:47 PM by Gene

Raise the white flag: Big Internet retailers are collecting state sales taxes, all in the name of pork, makework jobs, and "legacies" -- and so thousands more people can chant the great mantra of bureaucrats everywhere: "Sorry Can't Do That."

Posted 6:55 PM by Gene

More ignorance from the Society: The Disney Network -- or rather, its many surrogates -- boasted that its Wacko special will do "$10 million" in business. True, this could be one of those made-up numbers beloved of show-biz news hacks, and if the Saudis had access to Disney's PR people we'd nominate Osama for the Nobel Peace Prize, but it may not be too far off the mark.

The IDIOTS in the advertising departments know they can get away with this because they know their CEO bosses watch only golf, football, the Sunday-morning gabfests, and Nightline. They know they're too busy hunched over spreadsheets to see their ads cuddled up to Michael mewing, "I sleep with little boys." Woe be unto the unlucky soul who ever tells a CEO to his face what he's financing.

Corporate America does not know what it sponsors, and it doesn't care, and it's set itself up so it won't have to care.

(That these same morons went in a panic withdrawing ads after Columbia fell to earth means nothing; they just bent their deaf ears to equally sense-challenged public-affairs types in red-alert cave mode. Disasters and complaints from politically-correct special interest groups are the only causes for incontinent advertisers to cease their pitches.)

Posted 6:32 PM by Gene

You're running their foul-mouthed no-talent, but you won't use our foul-mouthed no-talent! That's not fair!

Such are the travails of a charter member of the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers, and a former supporter of Hezbollah TV.

Posted 4:32 PM by Gene

Prisons are a breeding ground for holy cockroaches. It took a story in The Wall Street Journals (and being better than anybody else in the biz, they won't share) to get one of their inspirations benched from a preachin' position. There must be others.

Posted 4:11 PM by Gene

Well, if you need a baby sitter, Michael comes equipped with an excellent reference: Johnny Mathis.

"Chances are...."

Posted 4:05 PM by Gene

They play golf in Alaska?

Hey folks, can we switch weathers?

Posted 3:45 PM by Gene

Forbes plugs its financial ranking of NBA teams, and already fourteen taxpayer-financed boondoggles are in the works.

Thank you, Little Malcolm!

Posted 3:30 PM by Gene

Sly Stallone going straight to video? Hey Roger, most films should go straight to video these days.

You can say this: Sly was a pioneer at it.

Embarrassment of the week: One of Sly's videos was co-produced by Merv Griffin.

Posted 2:05 PM by Gene

Hmm, first we grade the students, now we grade the parents! So if a child comes home with a D, flunk the parent!

Assuming we're still judgmental on these things, that is.

Posted 2:02 PM by Gene

Here's one for you, Michael: "10 Steps to a Successful Facelift from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery."

Is your face an honorary member?

Posted 1:55 PM by Gene

It appears the Grand and Noble Eternally Holy Through the Guidance of Allah Excellent Royal Mighty Poobahdom named for a persistent sinus problem or El-Kabong's instrument does not have a government Web site, so we'll put up the state petroleum company instead. Same difference.

Didn't Exxon stations (in the Esso-Humble days) have a slogan -- "Happy Motoring"? Here's one for you: Happy Terrorism!

Posted 1:22 PM by Gene

It astonishes me why some find Martha Stewart the embodiment of evil. Perhaps it's jealousy; few women have been more successful and ubiquitous. It can't be the insider trading: by Wall Street's standards she's a piker. It can't be the Bossy Broad routine; Carly Fiorina's bossier -- much bossier. I think she's a stand-in for all people hate about big media -- that someone, largely from luck, can be everywhere, oppressively everywhere, lending her name to so many things she has nothing to do with except in royalties and profits. She's like Kathy Lee without Regis or the singing.

Posted 1:11 PM by Gene

Isn't Qatar the old name for a persistent cough?

Posted 1:08 PM by Gene

We're supposed to cynically chortle over a story like this, or smirk like the show-biz flack, without a hint of morals. It's deja vu all over again. What right do you have telling Woody Allen how he can live his life? Who cares if he buggers his adopted daughter? You're so passe. But after all of the Michael's masks and dangled babies, we must finally ask, as Linda Stasi does, why isn't the man in jail?

Or perhaps I should say, why isn't the surgically-modified android confined to his hyperbolic chamber?

Posted 12:59 PM by Gene

Air rage, I'd guess.

One wonders why we exchanged trains for flying aluminum bombs. Trains were slow, but they were civilized. Now we have long lines, searches, delays, box cutters, peanuts, and air rage. Life has gotten better in some ways. In some ways, it hasn't.

Posted 1:04 AM by Gene

Qatar has aided and abetted the holy cockroaches.

Ka-BONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted 7:07 PM by Gene

Don't you hate it when Bill updates your computer automatically?

Posted 6:50 PM by Gene

The latest Star Trek sequel failed because it didn't excite the core audience: the folks who speak Klingon.

And now the franchise is in doo-doo-doo-doo-deeeeeep-doo-doo....

That's Sheila Jackson Lee's theme song, by the way.

Posted 5:17 PM by Gene

I don't think the guy had the sense to say, "I should have seen a doctor, not an amateur veterinarian."

Posted 5:10 PM by Gene

Talk about the old saw "You get what you pay for." At The Wall Street Journals, you don't get what you overpay for.

I'll bet one reason the staff's ticked is that someone yanked Al Hunt's editorial page from the back of the A section to make room for display ads.

And now I know not to read the news equivalent of Certs: The Journals' staffers want Ken Auletta to do an expose of Peter Kann. Expose? He'll write a VALENTINE! You want DRUDGE!

Posted 3:02 PM by Gene

Judging from the two-page excerpt in the March Atlantic Monthly (not online), when Diane Ravitch's book The Language Police hits the bookstores the waste matter will surely hit the aerator. It's a simple list of words and "stereotyped images" banned by textbook publishers. "Adam and Eve" is replaced with "Eve and Adam" ("to demonstrate that males do not take priority over females"), "huts" is out as "ethnocentric"; "polo", "regatta" and "yacht" as "elitist"; "Chief Sitting Bull" is verboten, say "Tatanka Iyotake" instead; a "heroine" must be called a "hero" regardless of his/her/its sex; even "senior citizen" (itself a euphemism) is a no-no for "demeaning older persons." And of course we must avoid describing "African-Americans in crowded tenements on chaotic streets; in big bright cars; in abandoned buildings with broken windows and wash hanging out; or living in innocuous, dull white-picket-fence neighborhoods." I could go on. I mustn't; I'll get sick. As preposterous and offensive as the list is Prof. Ravitch's book will no doubt preach only to the converted, in the usual Rush-Hour sanctuary, which would be dreadful because we're all hurt by dishonesty of speech and thought -- the kind of dishonesty only big media and big education can promote.

An irony: Two of the biggest educational book publishers are McGraw-Hill, owner of the S&P indexes and Business Week; and Pearson, half-owner of The Economist, the self-styled "iconoclastic" (and very conventionally wise) news rag (and once the owner of the TV production company that churned out the very politically correct The Price is Right and Baywatch). We should not be surprised.

Posted 1:38 PM by Gene

Another holy cockroach -- TRAPPED!

Thank you, Singapore.

Posted 1:31 PM by Gene

First it was the notorious Action News with its motto, "If It Bleeds, It Leads." Now some broadcast outfit that shares a name with a gasoline company whose logo is a dinosaur announces "Rip 'n' Read News."

Bleeding, leading, rip 'n' reading!

Posted 1:26 PM by Gene

Oooooooooooooooh! Aaron "I Think I Have the Willies" Brown spent $13,000 on a private jet so he could feel miserable.

Aaron! You could have banged your head against a wall for free.

Posted 12:56 PM by Gene

I see the high-school hoops phenom LeBron James (I love these names) can play after all (it took a judge). The NCAA and its ilk can't see the forest of corruption but they sure can make out the saplings of gifts. Professional college (and high-school) basketball is rotten to its empty air-inflated core (and you know that every time Dickie V screams out one of his registered-trademark slogans or his Woody Woodpecker tones). Will a couple of jerseys, bequeathed in all innocence, really corrupt a young man who knows he'll be worth zillions next year because he can run and dribble? Better to concentrate on those eight-percent graduation rates. I wonder what sort of courses LeBron is taking.

UPDATE: I wasn't aware of the Hummer, or the entourage, or the two cell phones, or the $1,000 suit. The sports hacks have come down hard on LeBron, but while the kid may have shown poor judgment, he won't be paid millions for his judgment, and the fault lies less with the young Mr. James than with the leeches who created the whole problem with professional college (and high-school) sports in the first place.

Posted 12:41 PM by Gene

Already I fear, a word is wending its way into the shuttle debate: conspiracy. I must say it again, no one wanted the astronauts to die. If there was a conspiracy it was a conspiracy of Dilberts.

Posted 12:38 PM by Gene

I understand why those genuinely afraid of war (as opposed to A.N.S.W.E.R., whose members are genuinely afraid of Trotsky) might balk at fighting Saddam. Who wants war? But the holy cockroaches (with whom the secularly self-worshipping Saddam may be in league) tell us why we have no choice. I didn't see it, but I hope the General's evidence before the UN Security Council was better than the evidence leading to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I needn't be convinced Saddam is no good, and that we'll have to get him, sooner or later -- the sooner the better with his nasty WMDs. Two things in our favor this time: Smart bombs, and, we're not fighting the Chinese and the Russians by proxy, just as members of a worthless debating society. And even they seem agreeable.

Posted 8:22 PM by Gene

Someone had better tell these assorted Hollywood nuts and fruitcakes the more they talk politics in public the more they subvert their careers. One reason we can still regard the Old Hollywood with affection (whatever its demerits) is that the stars' many handlers were wise enough to tell their charges to keep their bouches fermezed away from them. Some didn't need telling. Mary Pickford, who had great intelligence, style and sense (and beauty), told the film historian Kevin Brownlow, "I will not have anything to do with politics. The minute a politician walks into the room, I'm finished." It was only when the biz got the same disease of self-importance as the press (and as new-line reactionaries replaced the old-line reactionaries, just like in the press) that every thespian had to "speak out," more often than not voiding the compressed air in his skull. And it is hurting their careers: Witness the ratings fall-off in The West Wing or George Clooney's directorial-debut bomb. Even those who've avoided economic fallout cannot escape judgment: Jane Fonda's first name will always be Hanoi. The Nose can yap words from "Shakespeare" because her career is effectively over. Fame is fleeting enough. Open your mouth and you displease half your audience -- and given the high regard most have for show-biz nowadays, maybe more. Is it worth the risk of being called an airhead, even if you literally are?

Posted 5:20 PM by Gene

I know it's fashionable to dismiss Robert Fisk as some sort of wingnut -- Andy S. and Professor InstaPundit do it all the time -- and at times, yes, he's a pompous ass, but sporadically there's the reporter in him, and if he's right our situation in Afghanistan isn't so hunky-dory. An al Qaeda radio station? One hopes we didn't win the war to lose the peace.

Posted 4:39 PM by Gene

RUPERT ADMITS HE'S NOT IMMORTAL?!?!?

Posted 3:05 PM by Gene

"Sue me, sue me, what can you do me...."

He's just a no-goodnik!

Posted 2:37 PM by Gene

UPI is reporting that a former South Korean intelligence officer is accusing his government of bribing North Korea's Supreme Exalted Intrepid Maximum Holy Poobah, etc., Kim Jong Il, to a "historic" reunification conference to the tune of $1.7 billion (!!!!!), which he then spent on you know what. It also won the briber, South Korea's president Kim Dae-jung, a Nobel Peace prize -- after some heavy personal lobbying, the officer asserts. Koreans in office have an uncontrollable tendency to crooked dealing. If true this could shake our ally's government down to its roots.

We've already given up on the Nobel Appeasement Prize.

Posted 1:49 PM by Gene

A correction on that Israeli shuttle "wing" photo (and why I have no business blogging): It wasn't a fake, but it wasn't a picture of the wing. The way it looked, with that splotchy color, made me think it was fake.

Posted 1:37 PM by Gene

It's official! It's the Tinkertoys and the shards.

Sic 'em, Larry!

Posted 1:09 PM by Gene

Have the Muslims finally come to their senses? The venomous, psychopathical bigot and likely terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri has been tossed from his preachin' post in England. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Sigggghhhhhhhhhhhh, it wasn't the Muslims, it was a British government body. Here's its press release. (I must read before I post.)

Posted 12:46 PM by Gene

Keep piling on the debt, King Richard!

Posted 12:35 PM by Gene

Theatrical producers, perhaps the only people dumber than TV executives -- although book publishers may also be in the running -- are churning out a slew of musicals (most probably not off the drawing board yet) based on movies. "'There is a poverty of ideas, a dearth of invention afoot,' sighs critic John Simon of New York magazine, who called the late The Dance of the Vampires - a musical rendering of a Roman Polanski film - 'a new low.'"

IS? Don't you mean has been, Mr. Simon?

Posted 12:29 PM by Gene

Aren't there times when rank amateurs do better than "the experts"?

Posted 12:21 PM by Gene

And it figures the LALA Times is paying intense attention to this story: While the space shuttle burned, Aaron "The Charm of an Undertaker and the Voice of Dilbert" Brown was playing golf at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, and now he's letting people know that, honestly, he really didn't want to be there.

These guys are A-1 SAPS.

Posted 12:17 PM by Gene

Pauline Kael had just as much intellectual verve in her 60s as in her 30s, something I would also say about Times pop critic Robert Hilburn, who, like Kael, is a hugely influential figure among younger critics.

--The mogul-friendly Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times, writing in the LA Times.

We can never hope for cultural change so long as news hacks' principal activity is backscratching.

Posted 9:54 PM by Gene

Mi-chael! MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-chaelllllllllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!

Posted 8:17 PM by Gene

Another story to make conservative eyeballs roll: Daimler Corp. is accused of redlining. Conservatives will say, it's blackmail. To which one can say, what do you call threatening to move your HQ from downtown to the burbs if you don't get zillions in tax breaks? Conservatives will say, liberals are always seeking excuses. Which poses the question, how many Wal-Marts do you see in urban areas? Conservatives will ask, why should Wal-Mart locate in expensive, crime-ridden, Demo -- dangerous blahblahblah. Which poses a further question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? When it comes to business serving urban areas, that's easy. The chicken -- who then lays an egg when his untoward clucking gets in the press.

Posted 8:07 PM by Gene

There is now no good reason to subscribe to a newspaper. Period.

Posted 6:42 PM by Gene

Gee! Two Arab news channels! Two slants on the news: "The great and glorious fighter for Allah, Osama bin Laden, said today in a letter...." "In the latest perfidy from the evil, bloodthirsty, hook-nosed vermin of Zionist-occupied Israel...."

Can't wait for it! How 'bout you, PepsiCo? P&G? Kraft Foods? You game for more Arab TV? All RIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!!

Posted 6:36 PM by Gene

Hmmm! Thirteen posts in ninety minutes. I guess I can do it. Thanks again, Blogger!

Posted 6:32 PM by Gene

Just what we need, David Shaw, another Scotty Reston -- an insider suck-up who wrote incomprehensible articles.

Hasn't the career triumph of Ken Auletta taught these clowns the dangers of schmoozing?

Which prompts me to this: Here's what a well-informed cable subscriber might ask of King Richard:

"Mr. Parsons, I've been a Time Warner Cable customer for ten years, and every year I've seen my rates go up and up and up, and every year you have excuses: first you were going to upgrade your 'infrastructure,' then it was improve your customer service, then add channels, then add Internet service, then add broadband, then you had to pay for rate increases from, say, ESPN. I've already ditched HBO because I couldn't afford it, and, to be honest, I did like what I saw, and I didn't want my kids to see it. Mr. Parsons, how do I know you won't use America Online and your shareholders' resentment as two more excuses to hike my rates?"

Here's what a well-informed Internet subscriber might ask:

"Mr. Parsons, I've been hooked up to America Online for two years, and it's one problem after another. I get disconnected no less than four or five times a day. Recently I had trouble with the hookup and I called customer service, and they thought I was speaking Greek. I'm paying $23.95 a month for a service that's worth half that, and that ranked at the bottom of Consumer Reports' ratings. And now there's talk of you folks spinning off America Online. I'm seriously thinking of going to another ISP. How do I know that you haven't given up on America Online, that you'll just let the service languish, or get worse and worse?"

Now, here's what Ken Auletta would ask:

"Dick, what does the recent slowed growth in America Online do to synergy, and how will it affect your strategy of cross-platform promotions, particularly with franchise pictures, which, as I needn't tell you, have formed much of the growth in the entertainment side lately? And what sort of opportunities will you have in putting some of your magazine content behind the wall and selling to AOL's captive audience?"

It's this sort of nonsense that has led to complaints about news hacks' disconnects with their audience, most recently with the Columbia reporting. Si, time to give Ken his gold watch, a big bonus and a kiss from Tina in absentia, and send him off to Capri for a well-deserved, permanent retirement. The man is a walking cliche, the bad news hack personified.

Posted 6:29 PM by Gene

Something tells me the authorities may have to expand the debris field -- all the way to California.

Posted 6:23 PM by Gene

I wonder: Should it be Oscar® or Osca®?

Posted 6:12 PM by Gene

The poet Gerry says Steve did it.

Merging with a bubble didn't do it.

Posted 5:58 PM by Gene

The hacks at the French newspaper Liberation have published an editorial entitled "Humility" (my French having flunked for years I've had to go by Slate's translation) that says we proud Americans had one coming and that Columbia is a precursor of war in Iraq.

Sure! I'll take moral instruction from France: A country where nearly the whole population joined the Resistance -- and half of them were collaborators.

Posted 5:35 PM by Gene

Michael Wolff has run a scintillating article about that Random House cause celebre much like Peter Bart's j'accuse on movie-ad-blurb copywriters. In so many words (which he does not mince) he calls the people in the book biz dummies and declaims that (well, let him speak)

[B]ooks suck. Most books are dopier than television or movies or even advertising (many books tend to be just collateral promotions or the lesser offspring of dopey television, movies, and advertising). Even if there are precious exceptions, the overwhelming number of big-money, industry-sustaining books are incontrovertibly dum-dum things. More cynical, more pandering than any other entertainment product. Calling them books may be a substantial part of the problem with the book business—it provides undeserved and unfair dignity (perhaps there should be a way to certify something as an actual book). Working at a magazine where every day random books come flying in by the bushel (along with the calls from sluggish book publicists), you get a sense of the magnitude of the wasteland. Books may be the true lowest-common-denominator medium.

No doubt Wolff will get much angry mail, and possibly a bit of retribution; but these clowns should first look at themselves in their mirror-shiny dust jackets.

Posted 5:23 PM by Gene

And thank you, Andrew Sullivan, for posting Gregg Easterbrook's astounding article on the shuttle -- from 1980. Here's a line for you:

The [heat-resistant] tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)

I would say Mr. Easterbrook foresaw the Columbia disaster. He already foresaw the Challenger's. This is muckraking at its finest -- and no one paid attention.

Posted 5:15 PM by Gene

Well, this is a might fine time to be havin' Joosh relatives.

Posted 5:14 PM by Gene

Some low-life Israeli publication (and if anyone should be admonished for this, it's an ISRAELI publication) has run something along the lines of those infamous faked photos of Bernarr MacFadden's in the old New York Graphic showing "damage" to the left wing of the space shuttle.

First off, morons, it wouldn't be that obvious, second, there's an unlikely doohickey sticking from the "wing," and third, I believe the investigators are looking at damage on the ship's underside, which was almost totally black.

A more complete explanation is here.

Posted 5:09 PM by Gene

WELL! My blog is back! It was only down, what, twenty hours! Thanks Blogger!

I shall be paying very close attention to the FTP log from now on.

Posted 5:09 PM by Gene

The "legendary" record producer Phil Spector has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

I suppose I could come up with the appropriate song title, but I can't.

Maybe one of these days I'll let out with my Johnny Cash-style ballad, "The Story of Legendary Welch."

I wonder if Spector's arrest makes Roman Polanski's Oscar® slightly less likely.

Posted 5:07 PM by Gene

That great sex symbol of years gone by, Jane Russell, has declared herself a "right-wing Christian bigot."

Lady, if there's any right-wing conspirator I'd want on my side, it's you.

P. S. I've no doubt your moral principles are -- er, well-founded. But I'll bet you made a lot of young boys' puberty start early with The French Line.

Posted 10:28 PM by Gene

On top of my not knowing what I'm doing, I see Blogspot isn't cooperating; I can't edit posts after I've published them and I can't create new posts. I hope this won't last long.

Posted 8:10 PM by Gene

We'll probably be reading about this for a while, sigh: If Roman Polanski isn't the major-league perv the Woodster is, the scarlet A remains: He had sex with a minor, he was convicted in a court of statutory rape, and he fled the country to escape imprisonment. Don't worry, he'll probably win his Oscar®, thanks to industry types and news hacks who think morals are an old wives' tale from Red Country.

Posted 7:58 PM by Gene

This NFL Pro Bowl is BOOOOOO-ring. Has the league ever thought of scheduling it mid-season, like the other all-star games? Might give it a little more zip. Although I did watch the concluding shootout at the NHL's affair and that was boring too.

Posted 7:48 PM by Gene

Two things we do know, and don't require a physics or EE or computer-science degree to know: NASA and the shuttle program are woefully underfunded, and these Model Ts have stayed in orbit too long. Perhaps that's all in the end that counts.

Posted 7:16 PM by Gene

Having tried to follow this FreeRepublic thread of the most recent NASA press conference, I now know what we mere laymen are up against in comprehending the science and technology of space flight. Things have to be explained in such a way that they may not make full sense on the telling, or retelling. And I'm somehow not surprised that so many of the news hacks asking questions work under a similar fog of ignorance. (Of course they have no excuse because they're supposed to know what they're doing.) What's more, people are disagreeing on everything. Several thread participants have worked at NASA, I gather in very responsible positions. I wonder if a fully satisfactory account of what happened on Columbia will ever be possible.

All I can glean from this thread is that a) on-board computers may have overcompensated for problems on Columbia's left wing, b) a switch to "environmentally correct" materials may have caused a problem with the insulating foam that fell down the vehicle's left side during liftoff (assuming it was insulation, that is); and c) remains of all the astronauts have been found.

The more I read about this disaster, the less I understand.

UPDATE: It now appears c) was false, but I expect it's only a matter of time.

Posted 5:07 PM by Gene

Continuing with Nobels, I remember when I could still stomach Nightline and Ted Koppel was jabbering with the newly unimprisoned Nelson Mandela. "Here is a future Nobel winner," one future fatuous gasbag could say of another, "and so am I."

Mr. Mandela has returned the favor in spades. But we should not be surprised that The Conscience of the World has made so many idiotic statements lately. Take Ted Koppel, add communism and pigment, and you have Nelson Mandela.

At least his parents took care not to make him look like Alfred E. Neuman.

Posted 3:06 PM by Gene

Did Illinois's own Nobel Peace Prize nominee ape Slick with a pardon machine?

Posted 2:31 PM by Gene

There has been a big explosion in Nigeria.

Holy cockroaches again?

Posted 12:58 PM by Gene

eBay prospects the dark side of humans again: Since yesterday there has been fierce trading on any memorabilia (not debris; Meg [pronounced "mug"] Whitman's goody-goodies would never permit that! ha ha) connected to Columbia. The shuttle astronauts aren't even buried and the sound of KA-CHING!! rings over their dead bodies. There have been many disallowed (read fake) bids. One coin with a listed price of $25,100 is going for $2,025. Meg will insist, we can't stop every unscrupulous seller, or buyer, and she'll point once again to the fig leaf in the Community page, that outrageous statement that "all people are basically good." She forgets eBay people. The site suffered a grievous blow to its reputation after 9/11, when anything and everything did sell, and it took weeks to get all the offensive listings off, and Meg started a PR charity fundraiser that she suspended when it didn't bring the requisite money. eBay can do nothing wrong now, but enough scams and trading off the dead and it will be in the same boat as porn sites -- which are sometimes, compared to eBay, respectable.

Posted 12:43 PM by Gene

Newsweek is reporting Columbia could not have docked with the space station because it didn't have the required equipment. Apparently it was the only shuttle that couldn't do so.

And according to that LA Times piece, at twenty-two years the shuttles have "been flying for twice as long as its builders first envisioned."

Posted 12:23 PM by Gene

No one has mentioned this, nor do I want to, but for all the talk of sonic booms and explosions we're stuck with the horrible possibility that the shuttle crew may have been incinerated alive. I pray to God that didn't happen, that they died instantly, and went peacefully to their Creator.

Posted 12:07 PM by Gene

A revealing choice of words: On the open of an interactive feature the Times calls the Columbia "venerable." That makes it sound like a Duesenberg, or Mt. Vernon, or an iron horse, or a buggy. "Venerable" space shuttles should not go into orbit. They should be retired to museums, or the scrap yard.

Posted 11:54 AM by Gene

Yesterday -- and I'm glad I didn't post this initially -- the moronic movie flack sheet Ain't It Cool News (which has a following the way many Web sites have a following: for no good reason) ran a story that smelled of "plant" in which Sumner Inc. announced it was withdrawing a trailer (I won't mention the film's name) because it contained a scene of a space shuttle blowing up. I didn't see a thing on the Apple Quicktime version. A poster at FreeRepublic intimated there may be two trailers. I'm not surprised that Sumner should want to exploit the shuttle for comedy. He may have no choice; judging from the trailer, Sumner, your movie STINKS. (It's already been delayed from last fall.) Or in the parlance of the unbridled jackass who runs the site, it's "way cool!" Add Ain't It Cool News to the ever-lengthening list of reasons Jack and his co-conspirators won't make movies for adults.

Posted 11:45 AM by Gene

Twelve hours later and we still don't know. Nor will we, for a while.