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.
Barack Obama topped a Clinton in another contest on Sunday - the Grammys.
The presidential candidate beat both former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter to win best spoken word album for his audio version of his book "The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream."
Clinton was nominated for his book "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" and Carter for "Sunday Mornings in Plains: Bringing Peace to a Changing World." Also nominated were Maya Angelou and Alan Alda....
Though Clinton and Carter lost, they both have won the category before (Clinton, twice). And Hillary Rodham Clinton took home a Grammy in 1996 for her audio version of the book "It Takes A Village."
According to the poll results only 24 percent of Pakistanis approved of bin Laden when the survey was conducted last month, compared with 46 percent during a similar survey in August.
Which is still an awful lot of volunteers for martyrdom operations.
ABOUT 30 PERCENT OF CONSERVATIVE ACTIVISTS WILL STAY HOME OR VOTE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE IF SEN. JOHN MCCAIN OF ARIZONA IS THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE, REPUBLICAN POLLSTER TONY FABRIZIO SAID YESTERDAY!!!!! (Tantrum-throwing overemphasis added)
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.
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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