Posted 9:48 PM by Gene

Another of the earth-shattering dispatches for which THE UNIVERSE'S LEADING NEWS ORGANIZATION was founded 142 years ago:

Obamas visit aquatic park, eat shave ice on outing

Posted 6:42 PM by Gene

Could it be people have tired of shopping for shopping's sake?

Posted 6:20 PM by Gene

Lately The Hollywood Reporter ran an interesting roundtable with prominent film composers. Musicians rank with stuntmen as among the few Hollywoodians really serious about their craft; they're also among the fewer with any sense of the biz' history. Reading this one gets two impressions -- that, however good they try to be (we have no way of knowing, believing MOVIES ARE BETTER THAN EVER!!!!!), film scoring has taken a nosedive since the golden age (that we can believe); and the bean-counting hacks have largely supplanted music with SFX, and the SFX are getting louder, and all you have at your command is a pencil, which you must "keep moving" (to quote Howard Shore), if only to fill in the lulls between explosions.

Posted 2:21 PM by Gene

I'm sure we all feel very bad about this one:

Signs of the New Economy: 'The Private Jet Market Stinks'

Posted 1:40 PM by Gene

Speaking of GCI at $7.49, here is one of those inimitable USAOKAY!!!!! automatic typings whose sole purpose it to make the print front page look busy. It is an answer to a question no one but a USAOKAY!!!!! editor would ask, and only under the hot breath of a would be Neuharth: Was 2008 an HISTORIC year? Any hack with tired poor red blood coursing through his veins would say yes as any year's historic with HIM reporting it. That such stories are by definition asinine, that they are the ne plus ultra of asinine, would not occur to the hack trying to justify his job as the industry falls out from under him. So he writes useless stories that shovel ever more spadefuls of dirt from beneath his feet -- and help the former accent on NET!!!!! sell for $7.49.

Posted 12:03 PM by Gene

Reviving theaters is a central tenet of the RENDELLIST notion that the AHTS can restore a city economy, when it has proved all too obvious that no zillions in convention center/stadium/arts center building can help; and old theaters were located in downtowns because downtowns were once vital, and because entertainment was vital too -- and neither theaters nor entertainment are vital anymore, whatever table pounders like SUPERNIKKI!!!!! belch. That said, it is heartening that an urban palace like the Oakland Fox has survived long enough to be fully renovated, and even if it spends much of its time emceeing dust particles, at least it's there.

Posted 11:51 AM by Gene

Throwing your TV set away is environmentally BAD. Sending it to a recycling center where it gets carted overseas to pollute the local environment is BAD.

Maybe AL should reinvent the Internet.

Posted 11:45 AM by Gene

Another pressing question from America's First Amendment defenders:

Obama: Full-on geek or just 'nerd-adjacent?'

NYT at $5.75, GCI at $7.54, MNI at $0.65....

Posted 9:52 PM by Gene

Charming statistic from a supporter of The One's "infrastructure" dreams:

(Studies estimate that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the total time spent on the average American construction site is wasted.)

Really, just giving the money away to each of us would be more useful.

Posted 9:10 PM by Gene

The Three-Headed DOG thanked Uncle Sucker for his "investment" in a full-color ad. Any number of obscene gestures would have done just as nicely, and they wouldn't have cost so much.

Posted 6:32 PM by Gene

TRANSLATION: Chances are better that we'll get "a bureaucratic nightmare like the Homeland Security Department" for investments than that you'd lose money with BERNIE.

And we can call it the Homeland Securities Department.

Posted 6:27 PM by Gene

Claudia, whose last name we make fun of because she is one of USAOKAY!!!!!'s top flacks, has a home-page recommendation:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is worth seeing just for the superb makeup.

Which would probably make that the first such in movee history, but then ad-blurbists never praise movees for good reasons.

Needless to say we didn't follow the link.

Posted 6:06 PM by Gene

We must confess Eartha Kitt never appealed to us -- she uncomfortably straddled the border with camp -- but we more than understand why she appealed to others, and we definitely understand why there are no Eartha Kitts anymore, BRITNEYS notwithstanding.

Curious footnote: She co-starred with the unlikely Eddie Bracken in a flop musical adaptation of the great Don Marquis's* "archy" verse called Shinbone Alley, written by Mel Brooks before he became a GENIUS. (Some Llord Lloud Wubbish fan must have typed this.)

*Pronounced mar-KWIS. Lloud Wubbish fans can pronounce it mar-KEE.

Posted 12:29 PM by Gene

All I can say is AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Posted 12:13 PM by Gene

An AmSpec contributor comes up with the perfect line about what passes for political debate these days:

...a bad caricature of Fox News versus a bad caricature of NPR's "All Things Considered."

Posted 11:36 AM by Gene

The CEO of the British Vicarage and Tea-Time Club wants to take care of the economy, but despite his ambitions the politicians really have turned the practice of screwing it up into a fine art.

Posted 11:31 AM by Gene

Harold Pinter, the British Norm Mailer of playdom, better known to the public for his tantrums on America's EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL than anything else, has died. RIP.

His Paper of Re-CORD obit was co-authored by a man who died three years ago, and it says little of America's EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.

Posted 10:41 AM by Gene

And now for our annual Yahoo! news-photo links that will be disappear in thirty days without a trace:



A Christmas tree near the Bird's Nest in Beijing (Bird's Nest? What was that?);



The U. S. Capitol Christmas Tree;



The Christmas tree at Notre Dame Cathedral;



A Christmas tree in Lisbon;



A Christmas tree on "the hangar deck of the USS Iwo Jima, docked in Manama, Bahrain";



A Christmas tree in an Istanbul shopping mall;



A Christmas tree and a Santa at the entrance to Jerusalem's Old City;



"A statue of St. George decorated like a Christmas tree in downtown Tbilisi, Georgia";



A Christmas tree at Sydney's Taronga Zoo;



A Christmas tree in Hamburg;



A Christmas tree in Taipei;



A Christmas tree in Vienna (it's there someplace);



A Christmas tree in Monterrey;



A Christmas tree in Milan;



A Christmas tree in Lima;



A Christmas tree in Managua;



A Christmas tree at the Swiss federal palace in Bern;



A Christmas tree in Bethlehem;



A Christmas -- well, it's a "giant Christmas pudding", concocted by Roger and Valerie Holley at their home in Yeovil, England;



A Christmas tree in Honolulu;



A Christmas tree in Havana (!);



A Christmas tree in Dili, East Timor;



A Christmas tree in Sao Paulo;



A whole bunch of Christmas trees in Puchheim, Germany;



A Christmas "tree" of sugar candy sticks in a Bangkok hotel;



And finally, a Christmas tree in a Christian school in Baghdad.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Posted 8:19 PM by Gene

No one has to tell me $MA$ stinks, but it stinks precisely because it's $MA$, and has no relation to its putative reason -- something too many churches have raised a white flag over.

And it's not just liberal magazines and their Web sites.

Posted 8:09 PM by Gene

Celebrity press first with Obama photos

Perhaps if the hacks can think of The One as a Celebrity President...and maybe People and Us should have seats in the White House press corps.

Posted 6:35 PM by Gene

How apt that Frank DiGiacomo's story on the "LEGENDARY" Star Wars Holiday Special and Christopher Caldwell's history of the weak revolt against Brutalism appeared practically at the same time. Here are pernicious artifacts of the seventies in all their vain ignominy -- the "windowless façades, [the] human-repelling scale, [the] masses of dirty concrete and their self-conscious wish to shock", a cheesy glitzy variety show prompted by the "unfathomable" success of a "gee-whiz" space epic, the Brutalists and Luke Spielberg defining the age in tinsel and dreck, both embarrassments in innumerable ways, the former ripped by Tom Wolfe, the latter hidden away by its license-holding CONTROL PHREAK. And each has its eulogy -- first from Caldwell:

Modernist architecture does not give us new ways of seeing. It is an impoverishment, in fact. It ignores a varied cultural vocabulary accumulated over the centuries, because that vocabulary might endanger Modernism's political purpose. As a project, it resembles Kemal Atatürk's purging of the Turkish language to eliminate words with Persian, Arabic, or European roots.

And this one from DiGiacomo, from, a writer who worked on the Luke Spielberg bomb:

“I think in a bigger sense, it’s nice to know that Star Wars does have feet of clay,” he says. “Ultimately, when all is said and done, it’s an outer-space movie. It’s not sacred. And what has amused me the most is that somehow people think the special discredits the image of this sacred text.”

In short, architecture and movees have their deadly-obsessive adherents, with feet of clay and brains the match, who inflict visual pollution of all kinds, and whose cultural despotism the Republic can never rid, except perhaps through the passage of time, which can't come soon enough.

Posted 11:27 AM by Gene

But there is this bit of good news:

Crisis widens appeal of Islamic finance

Posted 11:23 AM by Gene

New York University....

Bernie knew institutions too.

Posted 9:45 AM by Gene

FedEx not advertising in the Super Bore, FedEx Bowl tickets going for "less than $10" -- are CEOs taking themselves too seriously?

Posted 9:31 AM by Gene

PlaxPlex had enough guns to shoot himself in three or four legs.

Ooooooooooooooooooh! Thahyt smaaaaaaaaaaarts!

Posted 9:14 AM by Gene

Shucks, the Screen Actors Guild may not shoot itself in the foot after all.

It's already used all its ammo on the audience.

Posted 9:06 AM by Gene

SEC Chair Defends His Restraint

Yeah but Chris, did you have to straitjacket yourself into your chair?

Posted 8:59 AM by Gene

A L'Oreal heiress....

Bernie knew a lot of people, didn't he.

Posted 8:56 PM by Gene

This would seem counterintuitive: BMW's raising prices (slightly) because its sales have tanked.

Oh well, its customers can afford it.

We think.

Posted 8:25 PM by Gene

A neat juxtaposition on Politico.com:

Paparazzo snaps shirtless Obama

...which is right above:

The top ten media blunders of 2008

Add number eleven: Spending more time on the Shirtless Hulk than on his governing philosophy -- which is also less time than we spent on his prospective DOG.

Posted 8:22 PM by Gene

Somewhere, somewhere in The One's new government, there will be a malevolent idealist who believes cities have no right to force vagrants from sleeping on the street. And someday, someday, said idealist will get The One in trouble -- although the way most news hacks report they are honorarily sleeping on the street too.

Posted 8:15 PM by Gene

Talk about Hahvahd Mutual Fund -- how many KOLLEDGES does the depr -- DEEP RECESSION put out of business?

Posted 8:07 PM by Gene

Whenever we'd see Elaine Garzarelli on TV we'd think, this lady looks and sounds like a stand-up comic.

Which just goes to show most stock "analysts" earn their real money from moonlighting.

“Garzarelli is advising investors to buy some of the most beaten-down stocks, including those of giant financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch. What would cause her to turn bearish? Not much. ‘Our indicators are extremely bullish.’”

In the words of Fred and Ira, madame, who's got the last laugh now?

Pffffffffffffffffffffffft!

(Via Seeking Alpha)

Posted 8:05 PM by Gene

And in another...Understatement of the Day:

After 50 years, Cuba's economy still isn't self-sufficient

Posted 8:00 PM by Gene

OH oh, yesterday NewsMAX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! praised The Daily Kaplan for its fairness -- and today ROMY finds out, which means half the SEVENTY-FIVE-CENTS-A-SHARE news biz is fuming, and he's thinking, why couldn't Ben Bradlee clone himself?

Posted 7:55 PM by Gene

We're not sure what quite to think of The Lord Goddess's OPRAH's latest problem in self-improvement. It doesn't sound like James Frey making things up for literary history, and "living" in a concentration camp can warp a man's memory as well as his mind. But the one thing to know about the Lord Goddess, the one thing that gives the claims of falsehood credibility: She spells everything with an $.

Posted 7:47 PM by Gene

JOSSIP has said about the three race-baiting stooges what most news hacks have not said in their whole careers -- which has nothing to do with, say, MNI at SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS.

Posted 7:44 PM by Gene

Meanwhile, con-SER-va-tives are surely annoyed because Walmart has to PAY UP because it cheated its help.

How did they expect to grow the economy?

Posted 7:41 PM by Gene

BANEhead Boehner gets some economists together...BUT:

...critics say eight years of the Bush administration’s economic policies have damaged the Republican Party’s credibility to contest the claims of big government.

That's putting it -- MILDLY.

Posted 5:44 PM by Gene

Our favorite PR guy Rog seems to be the only show-biz writer who believes there are far more bad movees than good. We wonder that he hasn't censored himself given his BOSS.

Posted 1:44 PM by Gene

GASP! The One is asking all those Pentagon warmongers to stay!

MoveOn.org MUST stage a protest rally!

Posted 1:40 PM by Gene

The scum Madoff has now claimed a suicide atop the mere financial victims, not to mention all the people who should wear a dunce cap for the rest of their lives.

Posted 1:39 PM by Gene

Blogging and YouTube are proof enough the long-tail theory is BUNK.

Mr Anderson named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people....

NUF SAID.

Posted 9:07 PM by Gene

Microsoft again extends Windows XP drop-dead date

At this rate XP may have eternal life.

Posted 11:35 AM by Gene

The ideological pretzel of Hollywood: Show-biz is disgorging more dreck than ever, but at least it's environmentally-friendly dreck.

Posted 11:19 AM by Gene

Who wants to bet all this blather about FIFTY MILLION attending The One's accession will do a GAMES-style number on the Beltway -- and turn lots of hotels into ghost towns?

Posted 11:18 AM by Gene

ROLL THE EYES: USAOKAY!!!!! has just played another trick on its readers. More churches now use more drums than ever! And worship is more informal and enthusiastic! But go down to the TWELFTH GRAF of a fourteen-graf story and you find both priests and congregants are older than they were a decade ago, meaning either 1. the young have learned to live without church or 2. maybe all that hand-clapping and shouting and drum-beating isn't drawing customers. (No mention of total church attendance, by the way.) This is precisely the kind of story (like OKAY!!!!!'s endless show-biz-RECORD fables) that graphs would tell better -- and more honestly.

When USAOKAY!!!!! makes a trend, do a full-nelson on your wallet.

Posted 9:53 AM by Gene

Elsewhere CuteLittlePinkPaper.com boasts of Hillary's former communications director's (and current cable bobblehead's) "tastes" in music, which makes us a little relieved she didn't win.

Posted 9:53 AM by Gene

Hmm, maybe Jay Carney will be headed to the think tank sooner than he -- thought.

Posted 9:51 AM by Gene

And now the Babbitts are asking for money.

Did Hank conjure this up on purpose?

Posted 8:48 AM by Gene

It wasn't long ago when people got in a tizz because Toyota was about to beat our seniormost Clunker Brother as the world's biggest automaker. You have to wonder if all those excess SUVs helped bring the whole market down. Call this The Revenge of GM.

Posted 8:47 AM by Gene

China Cuts Key Rates for Fifth Time in Three Months

Gadzooks! Even the World's Economic Engine isn't immune.

And here some people thought the Chinese charity buying our debt would save us.

Posted 8:40 AM by Gene

Kendra Turns Conservative Since Engagement

Jo-NAH! Time for one of your pop-cult extrusions!

And "she doesn't flash anymore." Presumably she got rid of the bulb on her nose. (Sorry.)

And all we know of her is she's another Barbie Doll of the Moment. (Judging from the photo I'm afraid I mean that a bit literally.) Oh well, PEOPLE WARNER does have a way with "news".

Posted 8:23 AM by Gene

"Gross negligence" at The Paper of Re-CORD, gross incompetence at the White House.

Six of one....

Posted 8:15 AM by Gene

Only in the movies, they say. Too bad. We could all use a little fantasy right about now.

Who says? Fantasy lives in USAOKAY!!!!! and the heart of its NEUHARTHISM OF THE WEEK AWARD WINNER CRAIG!

GCI AT $7.71 -- NEARLY $83 OFF ITS HIGH.

Posted 7:20 PM by Gene

We're not con-SER-va-tives when it comes to mass transit, but this story shows what could happen to some of The One's stimulus money: it could go into salaries.

Posted 6:39 PM by Gene

An idealist channels Ike:

MJ: It's fascinating that Eisenhower was a critic of the military system. He's seen as such a Republican "man's man," for lack of a better phrase.

EJ: It's no wonder members of the Eisenhower family, namely John Eisenhower, his son, and Susan Eisenhower, his granddaughter, have felt compelled to leave the Republican Party in recent years. That's not so much a statement on the GOP as it is on the American political system per se. Eisenhower would be significantly to the left of today's Democrats.

Does that mean he's still one of our greatest presidents? Or does that depend on which party you're in?

Posted 5:29 PM by Gene

TRANSLATION: Ireland's nationalizing a bank because its chairman had a bit of the MADOFF in him.

Posted 5:12 PM by Gene

GORDON BROWN IS HITLER!!!!!

So the head of the British Vicarage and Tea-Time Club says.

I wonder -- who would Hitler be like?

Posted 5:08 PM by Gene

Well, The Paper of Re-CORD does have much happier tidings to report: Seymour Philip Whatshisname has become THE GREATEST CHARACTER ACTOR OF ALL -- OUR TIME!!!!!

Please Pinchians, stick to bias.

P. S. It's worse: The Pinchians copied their CW from THE WEEKLY STANDARD!

Posted 5:01 PM by Gene

TRANSLATION: The outgoing "administration" having proved it can waste money on bankers, the incoming administration intends to waste at least as much money on spending projects for the sake of spending, regardless of what Larry Summers says.

[The "stimulus" package] would most likely grow as it made its way through Congress, although Mr. Obama has secured Democratic leaders’ agreement to ban spending on pork-barrel projects.

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted 1:30 PM by Gene

Somebody at ASSPress must be in a bad mood because he didn't quote Paul Dreck today.

It should give the movie excreters pause when the biz' two alleged biggest names can't come up with enough for one. Dreck would say, "Well it's timing and snowstorms and no big tentpole this year and people are still going to the movies and...." I'd like to think even the hard core is starting to get some sense into its heads that movies won't get better, and believing ad-blurbists won't make them so.

P. S. at 3:25 p. m. Oops! David "NON" Germain had a change of heart; neither rain nor heat nor slush nor SNOWSTORMS will keep movies from being BETTER THAN EVER! A NEUHARTHISM OF THE MONTH AWARD TO NON!

Posted 10:35 AM by Gene

Speaking of air fresheners, good news for the Internet's inventor: The global depr -- DEEP RECESSION has shut down a stinky Russian paper mill, "a feat that ecologists, trying to preserve Lake Baikal from pollution, had been unable to accomplish."

Breathe deep, Al! The air will smell pretty clean for a while!

Posted 10:31 AM by Gene

Forgive us but the scum Bernie seems to have inflicted far more damage on the reps of the people who "invested" with him than on Bernie -- although with him there was nothing to damage.

Posted 10:22 AM by Gene

Sometimes it's hard to believe the people who write the editorials for The Daily Kaplan share the same newspaper with everyone else. Of course Slick's multinational bank account smells. But pardon us for thinking whenever there's a Democratic money smell there's always an accompanying pungent masking odor of the news hacks' GLADE.