Posted 11:09 PM by Gene

In his opening piece to the New! Improved!! ZEITGEIST JonBoy mentions all but the ever decreasing numbers. In short, his rag will be as shady as usual.

As we see it, NEWSWEEK's role is to bring you as intellectually satisfying and as visually rich an experience as the great monthlies of old did, whether it was Harold Hayes's Esquire or Willie Morris's Harper's, but on a weekly basis. [Emphasis added]

Hmmm, Zeitgeist as a monthly! There's a thought. Why not bi-monthly or quarterly or semi-annually while you're at it.

Posted 1:34 PM by Gene

Schwarzenegger tries to please the people, but they are anything but

But what -- people?

Posted 1:23 PM by Gene

It's a Good Time to Be George W. Bush

Yes, Abe -- OUT OF OFFICE.

Posted 1:18 PM by Gene

In other obstinance from The Daily Kaplan, MB2 says the "free market" will bring ticket prices down, just as it brought down the cost of oil last year.

IDIOTS!

Posted 1:15 PM by Gene

She had nothing to do with Bush's policies on torture, so why is she caught in the middle? [Home-page blurb]

For precisely the reason that when liberals like you find a villain you give it a choke hold like a pit bull. Maybe (maybe) she had nothing to do with Bush's EEEEEEEEEEEEVIL policies, but she has everything to do with her four left feet.

Posted 10:17 PM by Gene

I'd say if this picks up speed there's a pret-ty good chance Ah-NULT can go back to making movies.

I was about to say comedies but we're talking a long-running farce.

Posted 11:00 AM by Gene

Indications are the Obama administration intends to deal with the illegal drug situation as a public health issue requiring treatment more than enforcement. So, look for vaccinations against drive-by shootings and muggings.

HARDY-HAR-HAR!

Posted 10:43 AM by Gene

It's not just ARCHDaily: We have our own bee-you-tee-ful development in the HIP! HOT! Northern Liberties section, and of course the StinkyInky has its own ahkehtektyuh cri-TIC who calls it the cat's meow. Needless to say it looks like a HIP! HOT! version of an East German housing project.

Posted 9:03 AM by Gene

Simon seems to specialize in dorky writing. Oh he can call it ironic or edgy or some other code word, but it's always the same -- it says nothing brashly. Look Sime, if you're going to waste my time oohing and aahing over GODDESS why can't you stop with the table-pounding cutesy snideness and just write a press release?

Posted 8:58 AM by Gene

New ZEITGEIST.COM! Same as the old ZEITGEIST.COM -- but "DIFFERENT"!

What's the point, JonBoy?

Posted 8:49 AM by Gene

There are limits to one-party government?

Posted 8:38 AM by Gene

Speaking of angry, we're angry that Dave sells a doughnut-eating ZILLIONAIRE in 1,699 WORDS.



A NEUHARTHISM OF THE MONTH AWARD TO DAVE!

Posted 8:33 AM by Gene

Some of the same businessmen who gave us this wonderful depr -- economy are using MADAVE to tell people they're angry about the economy. Harley-Davidson can get away with it because it sells to a cult. I'm not so sure about the others -- especially when we've been so angry at them.

Posted 8:31 AM by Gene

"The Task Force played no role in deciding which dealers, or how many dealers, were part of Chrysler's announcement today," the administration said in a statement. "The sacrifices by the dealer community . . . are necessary for this company and the industry to succeed."

Hey One, an angel whispered in your ear that we've got to close hundreds of new-car dealerships. Now you're denying it. You're lucky the hacks are your first line of defense or people might start noticing how big and multifaceted your mouth is.

Posted 8:30 AM by Gene

Some good news from the depr -- ECONOMY:

Mexican Data Say Migration to U.S. Has Plummeted

Or is that bad news because now we'll have to do our own menial labor?

Posted 7:45 PM by Gene

GREAT:

Insurance Companies Approved for TARP Money [No formal URL yet]

Will the giveaway ever end?

(Link added 8:41 p. m.)

Posted 5:49 PM by Gene

ARCHDaily!



The world's biggest corkscrew -- OR the world's biggest designer ALLEN wrench!

I thought Dubai was broke!

Posted 5:40 PM by Gene

Sony does not lead in anything. In TVs it's bested by Samsung (and lately by johnny-come-latelys); in portable audio by Stevedom; in games by Nintendo and the BUG and a whole army of geeks; its "entertainment" unit is a synergistic accident, a second-place irrelevance. There is no reason for the Sony premium anymore. Lord Stringer may not realize that, other than through firing people.

Posted 5:27 PM by Gene

And NO, con-SER-va-tives, Empress Babs is NOT resigning. It's not as if public officials haven't lied before. (Indeed it is more spectacular when they tell the truth, often inadvertently.) But Babs is the equivalent of four left feet and six mouths, and she is smart enough to be a politician and stupid otherwise. She does not deserve to resign just for lying. But what whim of fate decided she deserved her high office?

Posted 3:06 PM by Gene

There is something irritating about this stunt -- and something disconcerting. Let's come right out with it: Blue without his voice is a Mafia figurehead. Perhaps THE GREATEST DIRECTOR EVER plans to make another crime masterwork, The Story of an Underboss or something. That might not tell the whole story, but it would be very flattering to THE GREATEST DIRECTOR EVER. Never mind when LEONARDO DEPP opens his mouth and Blue's notes come out there may be a slight disconnect; we're talking such a level of imputed artistic brilliance only the ad-blurbists wouldn't notice; just by being THE GREATEST he'll so comprehensively deke out the cri-TICS the raves will sprout raves. One thing's certain: this masterwork will be as egregiously violent and foulmouthed as Blue's singing was soulful and haunting.

And it's not just a question of who plays Blue. Anybody (we suppose) could play Harry James, or Tommy Dorsey (presuming GREATEST is interested); the underworld characters will be easy as GREATEST will put his ALL into them, and half of Hollywood seems to be Mob character actors. But who plays Ava? Who plays Betty? Who plays Marilyn? Or Bing, or Jack Kennedy, or SAMMY, or the rest of the Rat Pack? GREATEST may paint himself into a corner; if the actors are too much their parts it's caricature; if not it's pointless, and worse, serves to show how one-of-a-kind Blue and company were. But since this IS a MOB picture GREATEST won't worry.

In a dream world this would be near perfect: larger-than-life people in a larger-than-life time. In the best of circumstances GREATEST is using pygmies. And we don't want to live in the dream world of the direc-TOR of TAXI DRIVER. We repeat -- how irritating.

Posted 3:04 PM by Gene

I somehow don't buy this gag that The One's popularity will decline if the economy fails. I wonder whether he and his propaganda machine haven't effectively disconnected the man from his position. Many leaders have maintained office despite being incompetents. The hacks have done too much cheerleading for their anointed one to fail.

Posted 5:54 PM by Gene

More ARCHDaily:



Skid Row just won an ahchitectyuh award.

No wonder that PHILISTINE Prince Charles spoke.

Posted 3:45 PM by Gene

AP source: Obama has more than 6 people for court

He needs that many wom -- people to think alike?

And they include the candidate TNR trashed. So much for TNR's power, but then I guess it's neocon.

Posted 2:43 PM by Gene

For now though, it's enough that President Obama seems to be growing in office.

NO con-SER-va-tive should EVER say that.

Posted 1:43 PM by Gene

We know how Congress plans to pay for health-care "reform": it won't.

So how does that make this Congress any different?

[T]here's also a truism in Washington that legislation produced quickly is often produced poorly.

Huh? Howzat?

Posted 1:33 PM by Gene

As Mr. NeoCon predicted, The One has changed course on those torture photos. With anyone else this would be flip-flopping; with The One, it's LEADERSHIP.

Posted 11:52 AM by Gene

Gallup smiles: It has encouraged people to say they'll vote to re-elect The One. NewsMAX!!!!! screams back:

POLL: OBAMA STILL FAILS TO BEAT REAGAN'S NUMBERS!!!!!!!!!! (Beating overemphasis added)

Some days you can't trust anybody.

Posted 11:50 AM by Gene

A new trick for newspaper hackdom -- tax breaks.

Guys, just give them the money. They're getting it sideways now.

Posted 8:16 AM by Gene

In my view, the Financial Times’ Chris Flood delivers it straight: Prices are rising because of various types of trading gambles. Flood quotes Mike Wittner, a senior oil analyst at Société Générale saying the following: “Recent price strength is not based on fundamentals, but on financial flows.”

B-b-b-b-but it c-c-can't be sp-sp-speculators! J-J-John St-St-Stossel said they do lots of g-g-good!

Posted 8:14 AM by Gene

Chrysler LLC’s bankruptcy might take as long as two years, not the two months President Barack Obama suggested as a target, an administration official said.

It is not enough for The Miracle Man to engage in hype; he must engage in reverse hype.

Posted 8:51 PM by Gene

Greenspan Sees ‘Seeds of a Bottoming’ in U.S. Housing

TRANSLATION: The National Association of Real-TORS® paid him to say....

Knock it off, Alan. You've gone from the man behind the curtain to the emperor behind the curtain with no clothes. Besides, someone else invented the term "green shoots".

Posted 6:30 PM by Gene

A big thank you! to HONDA!!!!! and USAOKAY!!!!!.com for putting a VIDEO AD in front of an NTSB animation of that dreadful plane crash in Buffalo.

A NEUHARTHISM OF THE MONTH AWARD (SPECIAL GHOUL EDITION) to HONDA!!!!! and USAOKAY!!!!!

Posted 6:04 PM by Gene

Have you ever known a sociopath? Lenny Dykstra is a classic. Why would anyone do business with him? He is the slob of slobs. I can never forget the obscene things he did to chewing tobacco. He and the GREAT SELIG REVOLT OF '94 and Whitey Ashburn's death pretty much put well paid to baseball; THE GREATEST SEASON EVER!!!!! was the last exorbitant spadeful. Somehow he made money with car washes only to become the sort of scamster you'd expect of one who always says "DOOOOOOD": constantly begging for money, constantly shafting people, constantly being sued. How apt he "worked" for Jim "BOOM! BOOM!" Cramer, both apparently eager to learn at the feet of a master. With luck one boast he will share with that other Phitin' Phil Pete Rose someday: jail.

Or to put it another way, DOOOOOOD is SELIGISM's perfect ambassador.

Posted 6:01 PM by Gene

TRANSLATION: The Pope pulled a BARACK in Israel -- meaning he was very, very, very sly about something he didn't want to forthrightly acknowledge.

Posted 5:47 PM by Gene

I bought a used album from Wherehouse.com. Some dolt affixed mailing labels to both discs of the set, the kind you lick on envelopes, and after mightily removing them they left a gooey mark. Wherehouse.com has no toll-free number, just online customer "service". Its parent is at eighty-one-point-nine cents a share and claims to have a code of ethics, which online-only customer service would seem to negate.

P. S. on 6/21/2009 at 5:28 p. m. I got a refund, so please disregard this thundering.

Posted 3:44 PM by Gene

And if he'd bought this blue diamond Mr. Satirist would still have had enough left over to razz Uncle Joe.

Posted 3:31 PM by Gene

HISTORY'S GREATEST SATIRIST sells a...HOUSE:

[T]he Buckley listing was introduced with a bang last June, when a fete for the couple turned into a coming-out party for the Holmes’ listing, according to The Times. Gift bags included a fact sheet mentioning the $10,077 monthly maintenance fee; guests huffed; Ed Koch left after 10 minutes; The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball offered that the place had been “effaced by the ministrations of the real estate agents.” [HHMPH!]

Then, in October, the Buckleys’ only son, Christopher, whose memoir Losing Mum and Pup was released this month, complained to The Times about the co-op’s “absurdly inflated price.” Ms. Holmes told The Observer that month that Mr. Buckley wasn’t being serious, and added a dig about his Obama endorsement: “It seems to be the popular thing to do now.” [Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!] Another Times article came in December, when Mr. Holmes said the building was looking for a buyer with “quiet money,” though he and his wife had been on a local real estate TV show to introduce the house.

Now the poor boy will have to settle for an absurdly uninflated $18 million, the proper remuneration for telling us in The Daily Beast that his candidate made a lousy president.

Posted 3:01 PM by Gene

SLIME's needless reworking of Marketwatch proves the best sites may not be the prettiest ones. The old Marketwatch was never the prettiest but it was useful. Now SLIME has made it balky and harder to use -- a winkwink and a nudgenudge to get people to subscribe to the JOURNALS, perhaps? If so, SLIME may want to write off more of His assets.

Posted 6:20 PM by Gene

GREAT CATCH, NOMOTOWN:

General Warranty Services, a Salem, N.H., firm that sells extended warranties to cover car repairs, is close to announcing that it will open a call center in Detroit’s central business district.

A person familiar with talks between the company and city and state officials said the call center could employ 1,000 workers within a year and more in later years.... [Second and third grafs]

The extended-warranty industry has come under considerable criticism from consumer watchdog groups who said the industry is guilty of high-pressure sales tactics and failure to pay claims.

The Better Business Bureau gives General Warranty Services its lowest grade of “F” due to consumer complaints about unwanted sales calls and other issues. [Seventh and eighth grafs]

Posted 5:29 PM by Gene

What is this HACK COMEDIENNE but the LIBERAL ANN COULTER? And what is ANN COULTER but a CONSERVATIVE HACK COMEDIENNE?

One thing they demonstrate: knee-jerk lock-step sieg-heil partisans of both sides will gladly endorse the psychoses in their respective ranks.

What is the difference between political psychoses except the other guy should always be shot?

Posted 11:48 AM by Gene

NO WINNERS: The ORIGINAL TVNEWSER!!!!! tells us a story about how Chevron tried to spin a 60 Minutes exposé by hiring an ex-CNN newshead to produce its own PR puff piece. ALAR and AUDI should tell us 60 Minutes cannot be trusted; but Chevron is even less trustworthy given its business. The same for the ex-CNN reporter, who conveniently shows that the truth depends on who pays for it -- which in turn says no reporter can be fully trusted because the news is inherently fungible. Even if Chevron is right (extremely doubtful) it's total PR incompetence to think you can counter a network news story with a YouTube factoid (even if the 60 Minutes piece was a factoid too). But this is the same idiot oil company that launched into a fantastic waste of corporate resources painting a smiley face on its behind. No, between SUMNER and CHEVRON, definitely no winners, but one bigger loser.

(Via MediaBistro)

Posted 9:41 AM by Gene

TRANSLATION: The ad biz is about to launch 30-second spam.

(Via Henry Honest)

Posted 9:36 AM by Gene

White House: Budget deficit to top $1.8 trillion

Time to spend some more money!

Posted 9:05 AM by Gene

ED MURROW'S MAKING A DOCUMENTARY!

You know, it wasn't that long ago that Ted Koppel retired. Ted who? And he had Ed's reputation.

Posted 8:45 AM by Gene

Elsewhere The Daily Kaplan has invented another new cliché, that the fanzoids' obsessions have swamped the tentpoles. The fanzoids swamped the popcorn restaurants in the seventies when Luke Spielberg led their Visigoth charge, so this is nothing new. And it begs the point; since no one but fanzoids will watch these tentpoles it shouldn't concern us adults. Rather, we adults should mourn that when the Visigoths took over the popcorn restaurants they permanently evicted everyone else.

Posted 8:33 AM by Gene

RUMBLING: Now a professor suggests "replac[ing] life tenure" in the Nine Fingers "with a single, nonrenewable term of 15 or 20 years." Something is broken with the set-it-and-forget-it culture of the Fingers, especially when we have to endure these appointed brainiacs acting as mini-gods. They're not gods, they're justices, and often not very good ones at that.

Meantime E. J. admits that "[t]o pretend that these judicial fights are about anything other than the court's philosophical direction is a form of willful dishonesty", which we will take as definitive from a man very adept at less than the whole truth himself.

Posted 8:20 AM by Gene

The Iranians are finally freeing our imprisoned national after all this time, meaning saying to the world we're sorry might not have helped.

Posted 7:05 PM by Gene

Today in a very very used book and record store we saw an album cover of a certain stinkbomb authoress at 29. She was cute at 29. Today she is not that far away (ten years precisely) from where Mae West was when she recorded Way Out West. Big boobs may be sexy at 29 but at 63 they may be -- well, matronly -- and her appliances are becoming the moral equivalent of Mae's grunts. Let us not forget Mae ruined Raquel Welch's career just by standing next to her. That was the opposite of sex.

Posted 6:53 PM by Gene

The exzzzzzzzzzzzzzciting finish at the Players (Henrik who?) makes us wonder how much longer The Golfing Machine will be a prime force. There are lots of ballwhackers as technically proficient as he, and younger. Showing off the busted knee last year didn't help long haul. Let's not pity TGM for his monopoly on corner-office friends, but now's the time to start looking ahead -- and given its scintillating new personalities The Always-Capitalized TOUR®!!!!! may not want to.

It also hasn't escaped our notice that there've been a lot of not-so-close games in the ATTITUDE LEAGUE playoffs. But then it hardly bothers the show-off CEOs who take up most of the seats and sit on most of the hands. Question: How do you know you're at an NBA game? When it's tied with twenty seconds left -- and there's no crowd noise.

Posted 6:21 PM by Gene

If it's Sunday it must be Big-Double-A-Scribble Time:

1. Nobody is blaming the KFC disaster on Goddess. She has unleashed a number of disasters lately, starting with the liar James Frey. Yet Her uncritical fans plant more diamonds on Her tiara. When will even they wake up and behold the sanctimonious fraud She is?

And then let us not hold our breaths about Her biggest bet -- Her PRESIDENT.

2. Is The One sure he wants to cut FiatChrysler's ad budget? The MadAve frauds helped hosanna him into office. He's already ticked off the bankers.

3. TRANSLATION: The INBEV-Anheuser-Busch merger isn't working. Despite its stock price going upupUP lately most beer drinkers seem to know INBEV's not an American company, and Bud is no longer an American beer. (Nor does it help that it wasn't that good in the first place.) Tugging at the heartstrings will not tug at the geography.

4. TRANSLATION: Religion gets a high-tech version of Elmer Gantry. He was a marketer too. The MadAve types could spend a whole week making jokes about religious types. Preachers who think they can appease folks with flashy ads may have nothing religious to fall back on. It appears not to be working anyway.

5.

In Times Like These, the Best Bet Is Winning Ugly

KFC lost ugly. Does it win its bet?

6. This should be branded on the forehead of every clown who lives and dies by his computer and his electronic appendages:

A Digital Myth: Technology Doesn't Make Life Easier

As some people in Southern California and Boston have discovered.

7. We've saved the best for last:

Broadcast Upfront Could Be Down as Much as 20%

The bad news is most of it goes to cable, or to replicate junk TV on the Web. But finally perhaps making a profit insulting your viewers is not the sure thing it used to be.

And again: Why should the Dow be at 10,000?

Posted 1:51 PM by Gene

It takes Columbia Jernalism Revue 4,215 WORDS to tell us why The Big C is a joke, 4,215 reasons enough why CJR is equally as much from out.

Posted 1:45 PM by Gene

One of America's great news hacks huffs and puffs over Dullard's "attitude":

"I take it he won't miss Washington, but my guess is Washington will hardly miss him."

And believe us Bob, if and when you finally decide to retire, we won't miss you either.

Posted 10:15 AM by Gene

Why We Need Tabloids

For one thing, to do the dirty work respectable rags like The Daily Kaplan won't -- often FOR POLITICAL REASONS.