THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
AMERICA'S MOST UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY WEB SITE!
Blogroll Me!
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
But there are times when you just can't stop the bones from showing through. All Elvis-heads, for example, remember with sorrow the night of June 21, 1977, when the King, opening a show in Rapid City, S.D., got lost in the spoken word section of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" A ghastly piece of footage: Elvis is six weeks from death, heavy-faced and desolate in his white sunburst jumpsuit. A choir croons behind him, repeating the song's melodic motif, bearing him aloft on soft pulses of seraphic cheese even as his eyes close and his sweat runs like tears: "You forgot the words, they'd been changed, you fool. ... Honey? Who'm I talkin' to?" Elvis is in deep, deep trouble, dying on his feet. Fumbled jokes, an abortive sense of interior monologue—the colossal solitude of the man seems to thicken the air around him. "And now the stage is bare, and I'm standing there, without any hair. ... Huh, huh. ... Ah, the heck with it." As if from a mile away, the audience titters.
Heck we just watched the (pirated) video, Mistuh Crrri-TIC, and to our layman eyes The King didn't look "six weeks from death", and we doubt the audience sensed imminent death either, and they seemed to laugh along, however reflexively. Yes he's plump, and he sweats like a mule in a heat wave, and he makes painful contortions with his face, and he screws up his lines, and yes we can see why it's a general embarrassment -- but what strikes us is he still mostly had his voice at the end. If only he'd taken better care of himself -- but I guess then he wouldn't have been ELVIS.
And rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrock crrrrrrrrrri-TICS of the Bos-TON Phoe-NIX couldn't have ERUCTED.
One neat think about being a rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrock crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrri-TIC for the Bos-TON Phoe-NIX: you get to use four-letter words next to ADS FROM AMTRAK! (Heck if they don't care about their trains, do you'd think they'll care about that?)