Posted 5:49 PM by Gene

Here is my latest update of THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY, which I hope will explain (though it may not excuse) some of the loopy nicknames I give people and organizations. I've updated it to make some corrections and because several of the definitions were obsolete, or not sufficiently self-serving:

MICKEYMOUSE NIXON: Michael Eisner. So called because in recent years He's frequently been likened to Nixon, given His penchant for micromanagement and credit-hogging. Soon to wave bye-bye with both arms in the air.

ESPNCORP (pronounced espencorp): The "Walt Disney" Company, after its PROFIT CENTER, and for the simple reason it ceased being Walt Disney a LONG TIME AGO.

BUTTMAN INSTITUTE: The Cato Institute, the home of glibertarianism (qv). The producer of Buttman videos is a "major" benefactor.

THE BROW: Sumner Redstone, after the arch-nemesis of Dick Tracy, and also because He lost His in a hotel fire.

THE ZON (or ZONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN): Mel Karmazin, the broadcast tyrant and THE BROW's former rival, now the SAVIOR OF SATELLITE RADIO, who makes a big thing about the correct pronunciation of His name: it's KarmaZON, NOT KarmaZIN.

THE GLIBERAL: The late Frank Rich, killed in a fit of greed by THE LORD GOD PINCH.

ASWIA: The fictitious American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers, which isn't so fictitious; it's called the Association of National Advertisers and it's made a big PR stink about its "support" for "family-friendly programming" even as it's grown ever more indiscriminate in its sponsorships.

THE CLUNKER BROTHERS: GM and Ford, and honorary member DaimlerCorp (i.e., DaimlerChrysler), again for obvious reasons; and while I know The Big Two have made considerable quality strides, they always manage to undercut them one way or another, mainly through their bad PR and excessive advertising.

STERNO: Jeff Jarvis, former TV Guide "critic" and founder of the unreadable Time Warner rag Entertainment Weekly, and proprietor of BuzzMachine.com, formerly "Buzz T. Newhouse" for being a TWXster (qv), and for being employed by Si Newhouse, and who has a decided aversion to knocking people in big media, unless they make idiotic statements about blogging. The current nickname comes from his turning his site lock-stock-and-barrel over to THE GREATEST ENTERTAINER AND TRUTH TELLER OF ALL TIME, and though he is not as much the firebrand toward his savior these days, we are waiting for a reason to change his nomenclature.

RUPERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!: Any property run by News Corporation automatically gets at least twenty exclamation points after (or within) the name given the Founder's penchant for banging people on the head with them (hence FOX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!News, THE NEW YORK POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, etc.) This also applies to any right-wing organization or NEWS HACK who exaggerates the news, like NewsMAX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, WALTER "SPYWARE" WINCHELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, etc.

TWXSTER (pronounced twixter, as in Elmer Fudd): Anyone employed by Time Warner (TWX is its NYSE ticker symbol).

VIACON: Viacom: self-explanatory. Soon to be two VIACONS: VIACON and what I will call CBS Corp.

BUGMEISTER BILL (formerly "Bill the Entomologist"): The head wizard of Microsoft, after his company's penchant for creating some very ingenious software bugs.

SUPERHOOPER: Ibrahim Hooper, the tyrannical spokespoop for the hard-core-Islamist front group CAIR, who never met a Muslim he didn't like.

NEWS HACKS: I know I have what amounts to an obsession in using this term, but as I explained in one of my earliest posts,

I'm not calling them "journalists." That's like calling a garbageman a sanitation engineer (God knows they're in the same business). Besides, am I going to endow an AP drone with the same term as Boswell, Dickens, Hemingway and Orwell? Not on your life! Well how about "reporter," then? Because not all news hacks report; some are incoherent columnists, some are movie-ad-blurb copywriters, some are senior-citizen groupies, some are millionaire toadies, and so forth. No, the dictionary defines "news" as "new information of any kind" (never mind that most "news" writing is old as the hilburns), and "hack" as "a writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing." Hackwork is worse on a deadline. Hence -- NEWS HACKS.

HOWIE HAIRSHIRT: Howard Kurtz, for making huge sums beating his chest.

GE BANCORP: General Electric, because it seems increasingly to want to be a bank (and in similar financial scams like show-biz) and to uninvolve itself in grimy businesses like manufacturing.

ALTRIA MOTIVE: The former Philip Morris Companies, or as it must call itself now, Altria, the pronunciation of whose name suggests a double entendre -- and if the firm didn't provide it by sticking with its NYSE ticker symbol MO. (ALTRIA MOTIVE FOODS is Kraft Inc., 85-percent owned by ALTRIA MOTIVE.)

MOVIE-AD-BLURB COPYWRITERS: Again, I will not call them movie "critics" for the same reason I will not call NEWS HACKS "journalists." In a "notorious" column several years ago Variety's fawner-in-chief Peter Bart suggested calling them the same thing. All they write are ad blurbs for movies, seasoned with a big dollop of pretension.

WALTER "SPYWARE" WINCHELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!: Matt DRUDGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, multi-millionaire populist liar, known for wearing a hat to cover the hole in his head, and for having done his part to create the burgeoning anti-spyware software biz.

DOW 36,000: Jim Glassman, the smug glibertarian columnist and head of Tech Central Station, who confidently predicted at the height of the stock-market bubble in 2000 -- in a BOOK -- by THAT TITLE -- that's where the Dow Jones Industrial Average would go.

SNIDELY WHIPLASH: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for his comically villainous demeanor, and also because he'd look like Snidely if you gave him a handlebar moustache, a cape, and a stove-pipe hat.

CURLEY'S (Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!) STOOGES: AP hacks, affectionately named for their boss, Tom Curley, former publisher of USA OKAY!!!!!, who once insisted with a straight face most of the people who run the news biz are conservative. Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: The United Nations, like its forerunner, a wimpish, appeasing irrelevance.

TOENAIL.COM (formerly KINSLEY.COM): Slate.com, founded and once edited by Michael Kinsley, whose snide, smirky, smarmy presence radiates in every piece, since renamed because for days it (and its former sister site MSNBC.COM) gave prominence to an eerily appropriate ad about TOENAIL FUNGUS. We may rename this as the joke's gone stale. Aha! STALE.COM! No, we can do BETTER.

THE NINE FINGERS IN THE WIND: The Supreme Court of the United States, whose members frequently seem to rule that way.

GLIBERTARIANISM: Libertarianism. It combines (to quote from another post) "the worst of the knee-jerk liberal (laissez-faire morals) with the worst of the knee-jerk conservative (laissez-faire capitalism), mixed with a healthy dose of conceit."

SAMMY GLICKMAN: Dan Glickman, president of THE CONSPIRACY: The Motion Picture Association of America, so named after Sammy Glick, the anti-hero of the movie-biz novel What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg -- not that Dan's necessarily a heel, but the job may make him one, and at any rate the name's a PERFECT FIT.

JACK'S ALPHABET SOUP: "CARA," the MPAA's ratings system, named for its creator, SAMMY GLICKMAN'S predecessor, the evil Jack Valenti. Its supersecret cooks are SOUP NAZIS. The soup is an absolute disgrace, a big reason movie stink, and a problem no one seems of a mind to do anything about, for all the occasional REFORMING noises among news hacks. One suspects a reason the hacks are content just to make noises on the subject is that any positive change to mass media is a NEGATIVE CHANGE TO THEM. Hence the constant wave of denials of press bias, and the only recent grudging admission that something called the Web exists.

SOB: Al Neuharth, former CEO of GanNETt and putative founder of USAOKAY!!!!!, because He wrote a novel -- I mean, an AUTOBIOGRAPHY boasting that He was one. He was the DONALD of jerrrrrnalism.

NEUHARTHISM: An exaggeration for the purpose of selling. Frequently employed in USAOKAY!!!!!, but with the increasing popularity of SYNERGY (see THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY) NEUHARTHISMS can pop up ANYWHERE.

GanNETt: Gannett, the newspaper tyranny, so spelled because SOB always liked to say, "Gannett -- with the accent on NET!!!!!" That sort of hubris may not be apparent anymore.

USAOKAY!!!!!: USA Today, for having run so many NEUHARTHISMS, and for having been INVENTED BY ONE.

ST. WARREN of BUFFETT: Warren Buffett, so-called for the often exaggerated praise He has gotten from NEWS HACKS, largely for having invested in so much of MEDIA; although the shenanigans of His Berkshire Hathaway may have tarnished the halo over His head -- a little.

CAPITALIZED PRONOUNS: Applied to anyone who's a media capo, and especially to media capos who like to throw their weight around, like RUPERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and SUMNER.

THOMPSONISM: the womyn's-studies and black-studies movement of our time, "pop-culture studies," the incontinent praising of show-biz junk with multi-syllable words for the purpose of establishing tuition- and taxpayer-financed fiefdoms, named after "Prof." Robert Thompson of Syracuse, who's set Guinness Book records the last three years for getting his name in Nexus.

LITTLE JEFFY: Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of GE BANCORP, whom I call such because he will forever work under the shadow of the LEGENDARY (see again THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY) JACK WELCH, the most overhyped and overrated CEO who ever lived.

LEGENDARY DAVIS: Clive Davis, the infamous tone-deaf record exec, who officially cannot be mentioned in any newspaper article without being called LEGENDARY (see the previous entry) for all the Johnny and Janey-One-Notes He's inflicted on us.

TOILETBOWL RAG: Newsweek, formerly BLUNDER after its hyperventilating Harvard graduate and superpatriotic columnist Jonathan Alter made fun of Vice-President Cheney for saying the Iraqis would cheer us ("AN ARROGANT BLUNDER FOR THE AGES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"), renamed after it did a little investigative population control. The magazine tries to make up for being second to its competition by outzeitgeisting the zeitgeist, often with nauseating (or unintentionally funny) results. TOILETBOWL was home of the Hitler Diaries, to this day one of its finest achievements.

MR. MARK: Mark Whitaker, BLUNDER's editor, who judging from his rag's contents seems like the classic advertising executive and buck passer.