Federal prosecutors will provide evidence at trial that Barry Bonds failed a steroids test in November 2001, weeks after the slugger hit his record-setting 73rd home run.
Fortunately SELIGISM no longer needs Barry* to be bigger, stronger and richer than ever!
We're of mixed minds about this. We don't think a media type should be fired for writing a blog without permission. On the other hand, if he knew he was blogging without permission, and didn't ask, and he works for a cable news annoyance other than the MESS, and he blogs for HuffPo -- and then he writes things like, "I wake up every morning baffled as to why America hasn’t thrown George Bush and Dick Cheney in prison", it becomes a little clearer.
A starry cast has been assembled for Centerstage's upcoming production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music....
Polly Bergen will head the cast as Madame Armfeldt with recent Company star Barbara Walsh as Desirée, Stephen Bogardus as Fredrik Egerman and Maxwell Caulfield as Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm.
The company will also feature Julia Osborne (Anne), Kate Baldwin (Charlotte), Josh Young (Henrik), Sarah Uriarte Berry (Petra), Jonathan C. Kaplan (Frid), Mattie Hawkinson (Fredrika), Whit Baldwin (Mr. Lindquist), Jacque Carnahan (Mrs. Anderssen), Amy Justman (Mrs. Nordstrom), Alison Mahoney (Mrs. Segstrom), and Joe Paparella (Mr. Erlanson).
We will admit this is an old trick of ours, oohing and aahing over names we've mostly never heard of (and the one name we have heard of will soon be 78), but oohing and aahing over such names is also an old trick of Playbill's.
We get exercised over this because for weeks after Halberstam's death there were posts EVERY BLASTED DAY in Romy with the steady drumbeat of news hacks DEMANDING JUSTICE. This was a terrible accident, and the driver has no doubt suffered much, but by DEMANDING JUSTICE the hacks all but insisted there was a willfulness to it -- which there may not always be with such accidents.
We also got exercised because this mighty obsession with the accident was just another flattering reflection of the hacks' mirror back at them. We may further wonder how many of those who got so angry have referred to the psychotic killer of our Marines in Beirut as a MILITANT.
Which MILITANT intransigence certainly has nothing to do with Rom's latest post:
“We generally expected that when the Democrats regained control of Congress, that they would closely scrutinize some of the industries that they believed had been particularly favored by the Republicans and unreasonably benefited in certain ways,” said Bret Koplow, a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist at Patton Boggs.
“There was the perception that certain industries, including pharmaceuticals, were getting away with a lot,” he said. OOPS!
“I don’t fault my former colleagues for looking into these cases. I’d be looking at them, too, if I was chairman, because they are such highly publicized cases,” said former Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who in 2004 stepped down as chairman of the House Commerce Committee to head the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
“We are not only anxious but anxious and willing to make some changes to these real or perceived problems.”
And the pressure is not just coming from Democrats.
The House Commerce Committee has had bipartisan cooperation in its investigations.
And in the Senate Finance Committee, the ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, has been leading the charge, continuing investigations that began when he was chairman.
Some foot soldiers resented the praise heaped on Mughniyah, but Lebanon's Shi'ite movement lost a fearsome fighter [Home-page squib]
Yes, the word "militant" pops up here too.
We make a lot of these little things, but in the accretion of the little things we get a lot. It is bad enough the TWXSTERS mourn this giant too; worse they mourn him with the sort of word-abuse Orwell never stopped blasting, but that we expect from a dying rag that never learned to tell the whole truth.
P. S. To its credit The Econowiz, the rag JonBoy made fun of last week, calls him a terrorist. It also raises "a theory" that the car-bombing was a ruse to drive him "still deeper underground" -- an altogether too likely story.
P. P. S. Judging from the funeral he appears to have been driven deep enough underground.
Facebook Loses Bill Gates as Friend Wall Street Journal After Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook last year, chief Bill Gates is said to have spent 30 minutes a day on the social-networking site. But Gates is no longer using Facebook after he started getting some 8,000 friend requests a day "and spotting weird fan sites about him." [From IWantMedia]
THE DEATH OF RADIO: Someone called Hear It Wow on WFMU's blog has posted a remarkable promo by an outfit called Jam Creative Productions that did (and still does) the ID jingles for hundreds of radio stations, and hearing it you know why radio is dying: with hundreds of stations sounding alike there's nowhere on the dial to turn, even from state to state -- it's all the same. This is from 1985, the age of the notorious Mark "Toaster with Pictures" Fowler, the FCC chairman who thought broadcasting was a mint and had no responsibility other than to make the mint-owners richer. That was a year before CHEAP CHANNEL began buying stations in earnest, and ten years before the BROADCASTERS' GOODIES ACT, but radio's downfall was in the cards even then, and here is the most pungent possible testimony.
Jo-NAH's crew gets M-A-D for Boobs saying things like -- THIS:
SPIEGEL: Would you be willing to talk to people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
McCain: As long as Iran continues to announce its dedication to making the state of Israel extinct and as long as the country continues to pursue the use of nuclear weapons, I will continue to say that is not an acceptable situation. I will work with other democracies in order to find incentives and punishments for the Iranians.
SPIEGEL: Is war a legitimate instrument of politics?
McCain: Every nation has the right to defend itself. That is a fundamental right....
SPIEGEL: Your army has already been in Iraq for five years, and almost 4,000 American soldiers have died. What makes you so certain that an increase in the number of troops and the surge can actually have an impact?
McCain: I intend to win the war, and I trust in the proven judgment of our commanders there and the courage and selflessness of the Americans they have the honor to command. I share the grief over the terrible losses we have suffered in its prosecution. There is no other candidate for this office who appreciates more than I do just how awful war is.
SPIEGEL: But?
McCain: But I know that the costs in lives and treasure we would incur should we fail in Iraq will be far greater than the losses we have suffered to date. And I will not allow that to happen.
SPIEGEL: And what would happen if this were to happen anyway?
McCain: Al-Qaida would sound the trumpets to the world that they had defeated the United States. And the further we withdrew, the greater they would advance -- until they reached us in America directly.
So he's squooshy on Gitmo. Anyone for President Oprah?
NEW YORK (AP) - Britney Spears is out, Posh Spice is in - as a lyric for the Lady in the Lake in the Broadway musical "Monty Python's Spamalot."
Asked why the lyric was changed in the song "Diva's Lament,""Spamalot" author Eric Idle said Tuesday in an e-mail:
"Because we don't laugh at sad people. Mike Nichols (the show's director) requested it and he's right. We changed the lyrics in London, on tour, on Broadway and in Las Vegas. We think that it's now too sad. Britney Spears is being tortured to death and we don't want to be on that side."
The changes went into the various companies last week.
What the Lady in the Lady (currently played on Broadway by Hannah Waddingham) once sang:
"I am sick of my career
Always stuck in second gear
Up to here with frustration and with fears
I've no Grammy no rewards
I've no Tony Awards
I'm constantly replaced by Britney Spears
Britney Spears!"
It's been replaced by:
"My love life is a mess
I've got constant PMS
My career is about as hot as ice
They hate me there backstage
They say I'm too old for my age
They're trying to replace me with Posh Spice
With Posh Spice!!"
We'd say both versions are pretty sad. A special Waste-of-Bandwidth Award to an anonymous hack at the ASSPRESS, which is a parody of its own, and even funny on occasion -- unlike THIS.
Despite the glitz and glamour, economists don't believe the Olympics will fundamentally reshape the B.C. economy, which would chug along quite nicely without the 2010 Games. "The overall structure of the economy would not be much different," says Ken Peacock, director of economic research of the Business Council of British Columbia.
Do you ever get the feeling politicians live in a parallel universe -- far away from ours?
That good ol' Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Anger and Tantrums and Punishment is at it again: it's outlawed Valentine's Day:
"AS MUSLIMS WE SHOULDN'T CELEBRATE A NON-MUSLIM CELEBRATION ESPECIALLY [SIC!!!!!] THIS ONE THAT ENCOURAGES IMMORAL RELATIONS BETWEEN UNMARRIED MEN AND WOMEN!!!!!!!!!!" [Righteous overemphasis added]
Where the morality is in potentially subjecting a rape victim to 500 WHAPS or whatever is beyond us. Where the morality is in discouraging love in favor of scrunching up your face all the time and imagining all manner of martyrdom operations against the all-encompassing EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL of AMERICANS and ZIONISTS is also beyond us.
This will make the true believers unhappy: Speaker Babs and John "Greasy" Boehner are "talking". I'd guess that the con-SER-va-tive types will scream first as they're already at their wit's end with Boobs McKeating; Democrats have less to complain about. But what is wrong with seeing even some cooperation as a good thing, though it has already yielded one big bad thing in the Dubya money throwaway?
News hacks are in a mood again -- this time combining their arbitrary-anniversary mania with sweet memories of their youth to inflict us with odes to THE GREATEST MUSICAL ACHIEVEMENT EVER. Our only consolation is we can imagine what the hosannahs would be like if its only true begetter didn't look like a cross between a middle-aged Liz Taylor impersonator and a cow.
P. S. at 1:22 P.M. What does said cross have in common with Mozart? Why, he's a GENIUS! So LALA calls him on its home page. Thankfully this is only on its Web site but a paper that once employed Robert "Over the" Hilburn would happily put it in PRINT.
Veteran composers and songwriters who attended the bakeoff indicated privately that they were dismayed by the quality of many of the songs in contention. One attendee said he heard plenty of "guitar arpeggios, plain voice, no production" in many cases and found them dull and same-sounding.
"Best original song is a song that was actually written for the picture and not just some piece of junk the producer found in the piano bench, you dig?" So the Big V quotes Bette Midler -- but now the producers can find their piece of junk under a park bench and still win!
We hear all the time about the death of book reviewing, the shuttering of many newspapers’ review sections, but the answer is always found in the growing philistinism of the mass media and the general public. Maybe the fault lies with the critics, many of whom turn out what seem like transcripts of writing workshops: to paraphrase Mencken, a cent’s worth of criticism wrapped in a bale of praise.
Many Americans will welcome the regulatory state. Many others will accomodate [SIC] it. Only a minority of us will oppose it. Somewhere down the road, as people see the indignity of the many intrusions and the adversity of the consequences, I hope that there will be a backlash. Otherwise, if the era of mandates emerges as I fear it will, then the engine of capitalism in America may run out of the fuel of competition.
AND he's worked for B. S. DEFENDER'S RAG, meaning it has every last pop-cultural cliché there is -- no doubt why it got the Paper of Re-CORD Cri-TI-cal Seal of Approval.
"I just think there are a lot of things Al Franken has said over the years that are going to sound harsh and they're going to sound in some cases outrageous," said Allan Spear, former state Senate president and a Ciresi supporter. "I'm afraid we're going to end up with a campaign in which the focus is on Al Franken's record rather than Norm Coleman's record."
What does it mean to be a great composer if nobody wants to hear your music?
OR, to summon the genius of HERR DOKTOR SONDHEIM:
The conundrum of Carter’s career is that while he may be, as the pianist and scholar Charles Rosen recently called him in the Times, “the most respected and admired of American composers,” that glow of approval is limited to a small, gold-plated coterie of musicians, critics, students, and pedagogues. He has composed enough works to fill innumerable college syllabi—works that the wider public has enthusiastically abhorred.
Who needs the public? But then by that measure, who needs composers?
We are sorry to hear Rep. Tom Lantos has died. On human rights few (if any) spoke with more passion and authority. It is hard to imagine anyone remotely taking his place. RIP.
ProPublica release They are: New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson; Boston Globe editor Martin Baron; Seattle Times executive editor David Boardman, historian Robert A. Caro; ex-Los Angeles Times editor John S. Carroll; ex-Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz; JFK School of Government's David Gergen; Atlanta Journal-Constitution director of culture and change Shawn McIntosh; Denver Post editor Greg Moore; Simon & Shuster editor-in-chief Priscilla Painton; Fortune columnist Allan Sloan and Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia A. Tucker. "ProPublica, when fully staffed later this year, will have the largest news staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting, with roughly 25 full time reporters and editors," says a press release.
"[The strike] has been very detrimental to the scripted television business," one studio chief said.
Another studio topper pointed to last Wednesday, when all broadcast networks offered original scripted series at 10 p.m. but none could crack 3 rating in the 18-49 demo.
"It speaks to the fact that viewers don't know that original programming is on the air, and to some degree, they don't care," the exec said. "Viewers are out of the habit of watching original scripted series, and it will take a long time for them to develop renewed interest and compulsion to watch again."
Some people just love the sound of their own keyboards. It's as if they play "The Typewriter" furiously in their heads, hoping for inspiration, and then find it in turn in their own mindless clatter. Well, Simon Flamenco (or whatever his name is) was so busy typetypetyping for the World's Greatest Ad Trade Review that he probably didn't notice what he was saying, or whether he even made any sense -- nor, we suspect, did he care -- but he did get linked by MediaBistro, and now the whole media world outside MadAve will know of his greatness.
As the world knows, Mr. My Business is My Business forever touts the virtues of FREE EN-TER-PRISE, a world without a vice. One of the vic -- virtues he touts most assiduously is unlimited campaign spending. Candidates can never spend too much! says MB2. WELL! Candidates may spend so much in the presidential race it's driving TV ad costs up for other advertisers. Of course there is a solution here -- merely spend more money on advertising! That's what the bozos of big business will do. That's what politicians will do.
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.
Victoria's Secret, the lingerie company that introduced the Very Sexy bra, the Fantasy Bra, and the Internet server-crashing fashion show, has become "too sexy" for its own good, its top executive says.
"We've so much gotten off our heritage ... too sexy, and we use the word sexy a lot and really have forgotten the ultra feminine," said Sharen Turney, Victoria's Secret's chief executive, in a call with industry analysts Thursday.
What the hell does this mean?
Sales at Victoria's Secret, like many clothing retailers, have been slipping. (Eighth graf)
One unfortunate byproduct of Linda Greenhouse’s imminent departure from the New York Times will be the generation of fawning articles like this one in the Harvard Crimson.
Security, the most basic public good a state can provide for its population, is a central element in the myth of Putinism. In fact, the frequency of terrorist attacks in Russia has increased under Putin. The two biggest terrorist attacks in Russia's history -- the Nord-Ost incident at a theater in Moscow in 2002, in which an estimated 300 Russians died, and the Beslan school hostage crisis, in which as many as 500 died -- occurred under Putin's autocracy, not Yeltsin's democracy. The number of deaths of both military personnel and civilians in the second Chechen war -- now in its eighth year -- is substantially higher than during the first Chechen war, which lasted from 1994 to 1996. (Conflict inside Chechnya appears to be subsiding, but conflict in the region is spreading.) The murder rate has also increased under Putin, according to data from Russia's Federal State Statistics Service. In the "anarchic" years of 1995-99, the average annual number of murders was 30,200; in the "orderly" years of 2000-2004, the number was 32,200. The death rate from fires is around 40 a day in Russia, roughly ten times the average rate in western Europe.
Nor has public health improved in the last eight years. Despite all the money in the Kremlin's coffers, health spending averaged 6 percent of GDP from 2000 to 2005, compared with 6.4 percent from 1996 to 1999. Russia's population has been shrinking since 1990, thanks to decreasing fertility and increasing mortality rates, but the decline has worsened since 1998. Noncommunicable diseases have become the leading cause of death (cardiovascular disease accounts for 52 percent of deaths, three times the figure for the United States), and alcoholism now accounts for 18 percent of deaths for men between the ages of 25 and 54. At the end of the 1990s, annual alcohol consumption per adult was 10.7 liters (compared with 8.6 liters in the United States and 9.7 in the United Kingdom); in 2004, this figure had increased to 14.5 liters. An estimated 0.9 percent of the Russian population is now infected with HIV, and rates of infection in Russia are now the highest of any country outside Africa, at least partly as a result of inadequate or harmful legal and policy responses and a decrepit health-care system. Life expectancy in Russia rose between 1995 and 1998. Since 1999, however, it has declined to 59 years for Russian men and 72 for Russian women.
At the same time that Russian society has become less secure and less healthy under Putin, Russia's international rankings for economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption all have fallen. The Russian think tank INDEM estimates that corruption has skyrocketed in the last six years. In 2006, Transparency International ranked Russia at an all-time worst of 121st out of 163 countries on corruption, putting it between the Philippines and Rwanda. Russia ranked 62nd out of 125 on the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index in 2006, representing a fall of nine places in a year. On the World Bank's 2006 "ease of doing business" index, Russia ranked 96th out of 175, also an all-time worst.
These fabrications have become so common in book publishing as to not merely erase the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, but as to turn the whole business into a mirage.
Yesterday on The Corner and on Wednesday in the Washington Post, I noted that WFB was a critic of the war in Iraq but that he had supported the troop surge. The former point is surely correct but the latter point I'm now less certain about....
If this idiot hyperbole is true -- and we could more credibly argue WALTER WINCHELL!!!! is the world's most OVERRATED jernalist -- will people like the Professor please justify a one-man SUMNERITE organization? We thought the whole point of the Web was Democracy! No, the whole point of the Web is to scream MEMEME! at the top of your lungs.
At Corning, the top executives made a conscious decision to keep virtually all of their R&D at headquarters. "We want to invest in creating a pool of expertise that is relatively stable here in Corning, N.Y.," says Mark A. Newhouse, senior vice-president for new business development. Adds David L. Morse, senior vice-president for corporate research: "This country is still the best place to do industrial research."
The 40-year-old studio behind such franchises as "Lord of the Rings," "Austin Powers" and "Rush Hour"....
In Hollywood they call it tradition. In the rest of America we call it DRECK.
"People start out with high hopes for these indie studios," said media analyst Harold Vogel, "But ultimately they encounter rising costs and difficulties in managing the businesses. At some point, the cash flow and balance sheets fall short of their ambitions."
On YouTube, more and more of everything The website is awash in video, few interesting. Anyone can watch, but the site proves that there is anonymity in numbers.
TRANSLATION: YouTube is video Blogger, only too much more so.
Yes, I can see Dubya apologizing for slavery. I can see it too as one of his last acts, as a kind of take-that! to con-SER-va-tives. Of course this isn't about slavery, it's about CAPITAL-R REPARATIONS, with half going to JE$$E, Rev. Al and their hand-rubbing friends, and an apology will merely get that superexpensive ball rolling.
"I'm happy the films are appreciated today, but when they were made, fantasy movies just weren't very popular. They were considered B pictures," Harryhausen says. "We had to do things like use stock footage from other movies to cut corners. In the beginning, we couldn't afford a composer. We couldn't even afford color."
The House of Representatives brushed aside threats of a White House veto today and voted 236 to 182 in favor of an $18 billion tax package that would rescind a tax break for the five biggest oil giants and use the revenue to boost incentives for wind and solar energy and energy efficiency.
Luckily (it says here) the Senile Chamber won't go for it, let alone Dubya, meaning greed -- er, reason will prevail.
Having read (or attempted to read) these "satires" of THE GREATEST SCREEN COMEDY OF ALL TIME we wonder just how great it was. Given that the ad-blurbists' idea of wit has included nearly every grossout comedy of the last four years we can especially question it. Yes, the razzing is based on jealousy; but yes it's likely to be based on WIDE-EYED ARM-WAVING ENTHUSIASM too. If these "satires" reflect the original we'd say in ten years the efforts of THE GREATEST STRIPPER WRITER OF ALL TIME will be as incomprehensible as the scribblings in the bowels of the Pyramids -- and at least they have archaeologists.
Not likely, however non-partisan the source: criminals tend to be on the lesser side of the bell curve, and so are illegals. Their willingness to do anything to jump our border (not to mention a number of prominent auto accidents caused by illegals) makes us further wonder just precisely how patriotic before the fact they are.
Another reason not to listen to sports on the radio: We are sorry to hear that Myron Cope, inventor of the Terrible Towel and the Immaculate Reception, and one of the most gleefully imitable of all football color men, has died. We discovered him rather late and still could not stop mimicking him. The world is a sadder place without such.
NR's Ms. Travers has just announced that "WFB" has died. He was a conservative stalwart, that is true; there was also something opportunistic about him, something weaselly, that we can't quite pin down; that we will forever associate him with Bach's B-Minor Mass and "Roll Over, Beethoven" may have something to do with it. Perhaps it was that odd, patrician way of speaking of his, with his six-syllable words and his nose always turned upward, and the voice the stuff of David Frye's dreams. (Who was David Frye?) On the other hand he leaves behind a monument, an imperfect monument, a magazine that at its best has taken courageous stands against Communism and our moral rot, and that at its worst (and that more recently, and through its Web site) stands for Gekko Kudlowism and stupid pop-culture obsessions. Certainly the modern conservative movement would not quite have been the same without him. Well, we'll judge him by the best of what he left behind, which is an achievement worthy enough.
But in fairness he does link to a story (albeit in his kind of Web site) about the style changes at Moo -- that other Washington paper. We understand why the knee-jerk con-SER-va-tive may be upset; there is a soundness to that old NR truism that any organization not expressly right-wing will turn left over time. And God knows there are enough people in the press who want to say "Hi mom!" to their fellow newsies. But maybe this former WaPost typist would not have had to do these things if his bosses hadn't engaged in certain self-parodies in the first place.
I was in little mood to post today -- especially after reading this one from TNR.com. The Messiah said something about Israel that appealed to two liberal blogging bigmouths who are opposites on the matter. I guess that means he knows how to talk, said the poster. Oh no, said somebody, he's a Rorschach test. Besides, said another, one of said bloggers is an anti-Semite. The anti-Semite is Jewish, said another. His mother's Jewish, said another, but he sounds like an anti-Semite. And so on. And so on and so on. And so on and so on and so on. Too much of the Web is like a convention of mothers-in-law. There is not one unspoken opinion on the whole wired universe, except the unspoken word of the truth, which surely alights on a few of us; but to find it alighting one goes blind before a monitor. I am tired of the wild goose chase that has become consuming news on the Net, and am more tired still of having to make snazzy remarks when so much of the news doesn't even merit an ape's grunt. That's why I was in little mood to post today.
Enguhland's aw-shucks-we're-the-people paper the Daily Mail has posted this picture and others from a Web site devoted to Photoshop manipulation (and which it's very careful to misidentify) whose denizens engaged in a "contest" to devise a new Hollywood femme fatale, and of course (if we're to judge from the other entries) they all look a bit weird. Perhaps that's why pixel celebs in movies won't work; they're human like a Scientologist. But aside from the compulsion many have for idle mouse clicking said contest points to the lack of true media femme fatales, which helps explain why going to the movies isn't a mandatory behavior anymore.
And those who think that corny statuette means something may want to ponder this cavalcade of Os-CAR one- and two-hit female wonders. Why the author doesn't mention men is strange except for one thing -- as Seymour Martin Herschel or whatever proved, the male winners needn't rely on their looks.
I throw a tantrum in part because of what Michael "Ninny" Medved said a few days ago in his two-club-footed manner: the Os-CAR®s, whatever their stink quota, were part of the cultural commons, as were the movies they celebrated. Take them out of the commons and we have far less in common. The Founders adopted the motto E PLURIBUS UNUM for a REASON.
Also this piece of typing has David "Non" Germain all over it. Another blithering bozo.
Why shouldn't people shop around for churches? Some of our forefathers left from England because they didn't like the state religion. That so many can engage so freely in church swapping should nonetheless provoke what passes for our religious leaders into asking why; but as such clowns as the head of the British Vicarage and Tea-Time Club are the rule they may not have the brainpower to ask -- nor, we dare say, may they know WHOM to ask.
Mogul's Friend is at the top of the list of colyumnists who deserve the heave-ho. Today he provides a raging excuse for dark, brooding, angry, DISGUSTED movies. Sorry Mog, but ol' A. C. just said that disgust can cut BOTH WAYS. Our best advice though, Mog, is that you further encourage your mogul friends to keep making such dark, brooding, angry, DISGUSTED movies and free the public from the need to watch ANY movie EVER AGAIN.
Despite a 100 rating at Rotten Tomatoes and some critics virtually begging audiences to see it (The New York Times called it "essential"), Taxi to the Dark Side opened Jan. 18 to mostly empty theaters. The film, which explores the death of an innocent Afghani taxi driver tortured to death by U.S. soldiers, may not even hit TV screens: The Discovery Channel, which purchased the film's broadcast rights, recently informed director Alex Gibney it had decided not to air it. Gibney said he believes the cable station found it too incendiary.
K-C's marketing spending was up $50 million last year (from a reported $438.4 million in global ad spending in 2006) despite the pressure of rising commodity costs, Mr. Falk said in the company's CAGNY presentation. K-C plans to keep using restructuring savings to raise spending ahead of sales this year and next.
What that doesn't translate to for either company, however, is more TV ads. For Unilever, in fact, it means creating fewer ads, even if each ad gets more spending behind it. Knorr, Unilever's biggest global brand, with more than $5 billion in sales, has cut the number of TV ads it produces from around 130 in 2005 to around 30 projected this year.
Just because they're producing fewer ads doesn't mean they're using them in fewer places; it just means they can make a dollar go further on JUNK TV.
In place of TV, K-C is focusing more a variety of other things, including packaging design, which Mr. Falk said "was not on the radar screen to any extent for any of our brands" a few years ago. "Today packaging design is a marketing channel and is one of the top channels in five of our six [top brands]."
You mean these idiots are finally realizing they can sell at the POINT OF PURCHASE? And that their packaging can SELL?!?!?
Sorry to make such a big thing of this but it seems every damned consumer products firm is solely in business to finance junk TV and INSULT US WITH ITS ADS.
A PREDICTION: One of the first things The Messiah does is to very pretentiously announce He will make a jaunt to Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Whether there's any practical difference to Dubya's incompetence is questionable. What's starting to strike us about The Messiah though is that at best He's naive; at worst He knows what He's doing.
Another prediction: His inaugural speech is almost as long as Tippecanoe's. He'll deliver it without a prepared text. Jeff "Mensa" Greenfield will call it "brilliant."
By the way, SUPERNIK!!!!!, could it be the lack of "Triple-A presenters and performers" tonight mirrors the lack of Triple-A talent in the BUSINESS? And since you mention it we further hope Diablo (!) has the chance to repeat her performance tonight, which will send the whole American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers contingent into such delirium they'll pay twice as much next year for a thirty -- not that anyone has to coach them. Ub Iger! Better get another couple of million ready!
We may ask of this story, so what? Ralph isn't 46 anymore, and politically religious types want -- and have -- a real messiah, not one whose face bears the scars of a man who's walked on water a bit too often.
I did not post yesterday because I had nothing to say -- and more to the point, as I've noted too often before, I'm weary of typing into a void. I've long doubted blogging's value, and when even the self-selected leaders are getting fewer hits we may wonder if blogging's become simply too much of a bad thing. For what it's worth I'm e-mailing PajamasMedia.com to ask for inclusion onto its blogroll -- and my only solace is that it appears many of the listed blogs haven't added new posts in quite some time. Nor have I given up the thought of e-mailing HuffPo -- indeed I'd be comfortable linking to both; I view them as the ASCAP and BMI of blogging; and while the analogy's far from perfect at least it might reduce my chances of being typecast were I to type for more than wearing out a keyboard. Oh well, onward and sideward.
"Get lost, stop filming," one of them shouted, so laden down with booty that clothes and bags dripped to the ground amid the broken glass below emptied storefronts.
"But you are the heroines of this protest for me," the cameraman replied sarcastically above the din of burglar alarms.
We should remember, before the very dubious piece on Boobs, there was the dubious piece on the Messiah. It appears The Paper of Re-CORD is totally off its rocker.
WHY WE DO NOT NEED NEWS HACKS, PART TRES: ATTABOY STUART continues to lobby Pinch to create a special section that does for the Os-CARs'® ads what the NEUHARTHIANS did to the SUPER BORE's. This lip-smacking résumé-building obsession is getting to be almost as plain as the warts on the Gray Lady's face.
A CO-NEUHARTHISM OF THE MONTH AWARD TO ATTABOY STUART!
WHY WE DO NOT NEED NEWS HACKS, PART DOS: Tony at USAOKAY!!!!! has devised a lengthy and elaborate excuse for his industry (movies, news, what's the diff) that proves no one can be more stubborn and boneheaded in his prejudices than a news hack. To wit: For the Os-CARS® to honor ever more hermetically sealed, ever-less attended masterworks is a GOOD thing, so Tony says, because it means we get to honor all these "small, quirky" immortalities -- in short, we get to do the public-be-damned routine while basking in our own superiority. Unfortunately, as you folks angling for an industry job refuse to realize, once upon a time movies could be good and popular. That they're now only CRTICALLY-ACCLAIMED OR popular attests to the stranglehold idiot typists have on the movie biz in the fall season, and stupid teens and bean counters have the rest of the year, and why, with luck, the upcoming Os-CAR® ceremony will set a new --- high in viewership. Ah, but we don't need viewers, right Tony?
A THOROUGHGOING-EFFETE-SNOB NEUHARTHISM OF THE MONTH AWARD TO TONY!!!!!
And he seems to have cribbed from THIS moron, who is not Effete Edelstein but obviously pines for his influence:
The very fact that bodes ill ratings for the 2008 ceremony—that this year's nominees are mostly dark and difficult movies that few Americans have seen—is a draw for those of us who really love the medium.
WHY WE DO NOT NEED NEWS HACKS, PART UNO: Lenny decided to play a practical joke on his readers today:
OPINIONS Surging for an Answer Charles Krauthammer: Why can't Democrats admit the obvious and agree that the surge is working? Michael Kinsley: Because it's not.
In other words, whether something's true depends on your politics. But see Lenny, that's why we have reporters -- they're supposed to ferret out the truth. Of course you wouldn't realize, Lenny, that hacks can't be trusted to tell the truth, only their truth. So we have these extremely irritating gimmicks in which truth becomes the proverbial first casualty.
A STICK IT UP YOUR WAZOO AWARD to LENNY and his Web boys!
Kurt Andersen Now Officially a 'Visionary' (Portfolio) Author, editor, columnist, radio talker: Kurt Andersen's worn a lot of hats. Now he's getting fitted for a new one: visionary. The Spy co-founder and Studio 360 host has accepted an invitation from the Art Center College of Design, a Los Angeles school, to serve as its "visionary in residence" during spring semester 2009. "It's embarrassing to say, although I should be flattered," says Andersen. [MediaBistro squib and link]
Yes, anyone from the Gray-DON and SUPERADAM!!!!! school should be embarrassed.
How apt that the same proud members of the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers who come up with a thousand excuses to finance junk television also managed to find room for fourteen different shapes of pretzels in their snack mixes (General Mills) and 100 different sizes of cans (CONAgra). Now that they have to eliminate much of this absurdity in the name of squeezing their turnips -- customers does not mean they will be any less self-indulgent, it just means they'll have to be more "creative" about it.
[W]ith our politicians acting like a bunch of crude, narcissistic adolescents, is it any surprise that our political commentary is following suit?
Which we're perfectly certain means that when someone at an ALTERNARAG (?) like The Bos-TON Phoe-NIX wants to jump up and down in the sandbox it's perfectly okay.
(Via MediaBistro, which links to too many such effusions)
Elsewhere The Paper of Re-CORD, America's most exclusive media outlet, scratches its head how inclusive Muslim student organizations should be, a question for which we feel assured America's most exclusive media outlet would have no easy answer even if there were one.
The size of the debris is smaller than the Pentagon had forecast and most of the satellite's intelligence value was likely destroyed, Cartwright said. Though the Pentagon has played down that aspect of the shootdown, analysts had said one of the reasons for the operation was that officials worried that without it, larger chunks of the satellite could fall and be recovered, opening the possibility of secret technology falling into the hands of the Chinese or others.
"As marketers embrace the richness of new advertising avenues outside of the traditional TV format, the TV industry is working to address marketer's issues related to ratings and the changing TV landscape," Bob Liodice, ANA president-CEO, said in a statement. "Marketers, in collaboration with the TV industry, will continue to find the most effective and innovative ways to reach their customers through the TV medium, utilizing the emerging technologies available to them." TRANSLATION: We'll NEVER have to stop shmoozing!
I have not posted much today because I'm disgusted with single-digit-hit days and I was busy at work and I didn't have much to say regardless. Also G000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000GLE has messed up my home page. If only I weren't so blasted shy at least I could publicize myself, but then I think of the loudmouths on the keyboard, and I wonder.
A peculiar tizz is brewing amongst the pundit class because JFK apparently has a history of lifting things from others' speeches. What especially get us scratching our head is that all he's lifted is platitudes. And that's all he could lift because most political speechifying these days is nothing but platitudes. We're not certain where the crime in this is but if JFK is so desperate as to steal platitudes that says maybe he really is an empty suit after all.
“Before, after and during the strike, we really look to keep the integrity intact on what was bought in the upfront. That hasn’t really changed,” said Ed Gentner, senior VP and group director at MediaVest. “The bottom line is you want to make sure that, when you look at your schedule as a whole, you are getting what you paid for and the integrity is intact.”
Titanic? I caused a bit of a ruckus by reviewing the film a few weeks before it opened and declaring it, at least artistically, "dead in the water." (Matt Drudge later claimed that I was put up to my pan by Time Warner boss Gerald Levin. Not true! I disliked the movie all on my own.)
EVERYTHING at PEOPLE WARNER has an ulterior motive -- and vets like Dick have worked long enough to know how to do others' favors while making them seem their own handicraft. PEOPLE NEWSRAG can't fold fast enough.
And how many are sad outside of Cuba? Probably more than inside. In any event Fidel will rule Cuba figuratively until the Cubans get a little backbone.
Yes, it's a loaded word. But then, so is BANKRUPTCY. That's the nice thing about being a news hack, though: you can always play Russian roulette and know the gun's never loaded.
[W]here most journalists just talk about seeing both sides of a debate, Bart really does. His publication depends on advertising from the studio and network bosses. And Bart is also a member of the Writers Guild. (LAST GRAF)
Which means what, Romy? You've complained for several weeks about how JFK has secreted himself off from the hacks. The last we heard he wasn't losing. Or look at the EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL Dubya (who blathers more with you typists than you let on). He's served for two terms. I don't think flattering news hacks is the key to eternal life anymore.
We wouldn't do that if we were you, hacks -- unless of course you'd like to see Col. Zell immolate his bonds and MNI go to $2 a share, which wouldn't bother you one way or the other.
The only thing that would make this perfect is for the late Lord Koppel to start intoning, but alas, he stopped intoning a while ago.
1. Media employment is at a fifteen-year low. This means, of course, that the people who are out of work don't deserve it -- and those earning the usual seven and eight digits don't deserve it either.
This fellow started collecting coins like the handsome one above around the time St. Warren started collecting stocks. If he'd collected stocks instead we might call him St. Walter.
We weren't too fond of gym in school but we can still appreciate this:
A friend of mine went to high school with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
"He was a nice enough fellow," the friend told me in his lyrical Welsh tones. "But whenever we had rugby or gym he seemed to have a note from his mother saying that he was ill and couldn't do sport."
Which we found after clicking onto this "porn" (via Mark Steyn, who at least has taken a brief vacation from worshiping FREE EN-TER-PRISE). P. S.
McRae is founder of the Elvis Sighting Society headquartered at Moe's World Famous Newport Restaurant in Ottawa. It has raised more than half a million dollars for local charities. He also remains good friends with its owner, Moe Atallah. He has appeared twice on television's Jerry Springer Show to make his case that Elvis is alive and well and living in Tweed, Ontario, Canada. And without question a brilliant columnist, and probably one who couldn't do sport either.
We thought yesterday of all the diseases Americans once died of -- polio, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid. Perhaps our solace must be that as we took care of those other unknowable diseases were bound to pop-up. AIDS spread in no small way because we'd taken such control over disease that we assumed the hubris that we could now live however we pleased. Bullet epidemics are low IQs and mental illness unleashed to take their place. Low IQs certainly show up in this story. But it is no solace, as we could control polio, and we can't control the minds of idiots and psychos.
And in other senselessness, con-SER-va-tives RAGE!!!!! over the expiration of the FISA act when we'd guess in all practicality it won't mean much; most likely it wouldn't hinder us from making mistakes nor help us avoid them, which, as 9/11 definitively showed, is the best we can hope for from our cross-eyed sunglassed blinkered spies.
How condescending. The hacks are still tripping over one another to give him immortality. All manner of screaming to stop the practice hasn't ceased the publicity. And the hacks continue to numb our brains, insisting their hero was some sort of "normal", when ESPNCorp Network News's Website posted a picture of him with his arms full of tattoos. The public could stage mass rallies before every last luxury news suite and it wouldn't stop them.
Which gets us further to thinking there may be a slight connection between news hacks celebrating psychos and calling terrorists MILITANTS.
Which brings to mind United 93. Aren't college kids vaguely aware there are psychos on the loose? Did anyone try to stop this latest psycho? Or are they powerless in more ways than one?
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.
Lessons have been learnt since [the Virginia Tech massacre]: a security plan was implemented, the campus was locked down, students in dormitories were told to stay in their rooms, police were on the scene in minutes and within 20 minutes the presence of a possible gunman was announced on the university website. Before that the news flashed around the campus as students texted and phoned each other to warn of the shooting.
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