Posted 5:32 PM by Gene

TRANSLATION: The putative head of Cable Nuisance Network very politely tells Lou "The Formerly-CEO-Fanny-Kissing Populist" Dobbs to lay off the President's birth certificate, fully recognizing he's a PROFIT CENTER.

Posted 5:24 PM by Gene

Comic-Con: Empowering for patrons with disabilities

We know what they mean, and we know what we mean, so let us say NO FURTHER COMMENT.

Posted 1:02 PM by Gene

The man responsible -- or rather, who must be held responsible -- for the words to Herr Kubrick's last masterwork has written a piece for The JPOD Journal (only an abstract online), a mix of nostalgia and disgust, although you suspect he holds back when he says David Hare should be "in hiding" for having excreted that flick about the Holocaust and Kate W.'s bod. He wallops Douglas Fairbanks Sr. presumably because his movies are silent and old, and says The Producers is "in a word or three a radio show", then goes on dismayingly to trash Some Like It Hot, dismaying to me as I bought the deluxe DVD edition some time ago (I've never seen it), and I suspect he's right when he says it isn't funny. He also intimates ET stinks. He further implies mo-VEE cri-TICS and other such insects invented the listicle. The man's been writing movies for fifty years and clearly doesn't like it anymore; one must wonder why if he doesn't like it so much he keeps going -- maybe it's something to do like badminton at the senior center. He must know the movie world has ended in places like COMIC-CON, in the blinding flash of a thousand CGI explosions. And yet one thinks, if the movies are so bad, and the movies are so bad, why doesn't someone like this do more than whine about it? At least he has a WGA card. Then again having written Herr Kubrick's last masterwork he isn't in a position to reform them.

Posted 5:59 PM by Gene

The Best Movie at Comic-Con Is Kick-Ass [Home-page link]

Which we'd like to do to the fanboys who've turned the movees into their mirror image.

I'm sitting in Hall H again, watching footage and getting exposed to toxic levels of celebrity: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Cameron Diaz etc. etc. Sorry, this is getting episodic and disjointed. And what is up with my suddenly liking everything and everybody? God dammit, I used to be cool.

You work for PEOPLE WARNER. Liking everything and everybody IS "cool".

Posted 5:15 PM by Gene

Every time stocks go up oil goes up, which makes a lot of, say, Goldman Sachs people and other non-speculators very happy.

U.S. supplies of distillate, including both heating oil and diesel, are at a 24-year high. Dozens of tankers have been hired to store unwanted fuel worldwide. Slack demand through the winter would force refiners to cut back sharply on crude processing in order to relieve the fuel glut, which would in turn reinflate oil inventories.

All the more reason to BUY!!!!!!!!!!

Posted 2:40 PM by Gene

Exciting news!

Heidi Pratt is heading back to NBC.

The "Hills" blonde, who doubles as an aspiring pop star, will perform during the 2009 Miss Universe Pageant telecast next month, Access Hollywood can exclusively reveal.

Heidi treated fans to snippets of her singing while in the Costa Rican jungle earlier this summer on "I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!" and viewers of the Miss Universe Pageant will get to check out what Heidi sounds like on the big stage on August 23.

Heidi will perform the song "Turn Ya Head" off her debut album, "Unleashed," which came out in July.

Other stars who are set to take the stage at the pageant, which will be co-hosted by Access' own Billy Bush and "Celebrity Apprentice" star Claudia Jordan, include Flo Rida, Kelly Rowland and dance kingpin David Guetta.

Flo Rida will perform "Right Round" and "Jump" as a two-song medley during the pageant's swimsuit competition.

Kelly and David will perform the song, "When Love Takes Over" together during the evening gown portion of competition.

The Miss Universe 2009 Pageant airs August 23 at 9 PM on NBC.

Copyright 2009 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. (PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!!!)

Why do people think YANGDOM is still worth zillions?

And who wants to bet the NASDAQ still has another up day?

(We post this exclusivity because YANGDOM ran a link on its home page.)

P. S. at 5:20 p. m. Two more reasons for YANGDOM and GE BANCORP to have posted this: 1. She can't sing and 2. She has new appliances. But then we could have said that of a hundred other starlets. And that's the thing -- we keep having to say it.

Posted 10:36 AM by Gene

We have not paid much attention to the "stupid" flap and its antecedent as both seemed like mere excuses for pundit finger-pointing, but we would note His Omnipotence, much like his lackey Alexander P. Throttlebottom, has a way of running off at his omnipotent mouth, and that tendency may finally have come back to haunt him. Your Omnipotence, you're not a senator anymore.

Posted 9:48 AM by Gene

...blinded by greed and a lack of common sense....

Could that not be said of most politicians these days?

Posted 9:25 AM by Gene

Memoirs of British Spy Offer No Apology

Happily he's been busy apologizing to the Devil the last twenty-five years.

How bad was it? Even THE PAPER OF RE-CORD refers to his deeds as "treachery".

Posted 9:08 AM by Gene

New GM! Same as the old GM, but better!

Posted 9:05 AM by Gene

It says something that it took Roy five days to come up with his reluctant iconoclasm on MOST TRUSTED (especially reluctant given the source). That, I'm afraid, is a tribute to the news biz' sieg heil.

Posted 8:56 AM by Gene

ST. WARREN says we're in the middle of a scary movie.

So why is it playing in the Wall Street Casino as a fantasy comedy?

Posted 8:48 AM by Gene

According to an author and PAGE SIX, the scum Bernie had Mob ties and was alleged "the dumbest man on Earth."

Seems to us $50 billion earned him a lot of other people's brains.

Posted 7:58 PM by Gene

ARCHDaily!



That...thing! It's growing...FIBER-OPTIC HAIR!!!!!

Posted 7:49 PM by Gene

Somehow it is quite fitting that the BUGMEISTERS, KING JEFF OF BEZOS and A PROMINENT GOVERNMENT-SUBSIDIZED BANK have riposted THE RALLY.

Posted 1:11 PM by Gene

"I could be indicted and still get 85 to 90 percent of the vote."

You mean you wouldn't need dead people?

Incredibly, included in the sting was a kidney salesman who allegedly, [sic] "enticed vulnerable people to give up their kidneys for $10,000. This man would then turn around and sell the kidney for $160,000," said the FBI.

Must have worked for his campaign.

P. S. I say there's a pretty fair chance Chris Christie has won the election.

Posted 12:53 PM by Gene

When last we left fast-food ads Burger King was laughing its way through an apology. Now some CEO clown named Puzder (whom the Ranceoids aptly identify as "PUDZER") has eructed: "We do not aim to exclude or offend any other group with our efforts, BUT...." That is precisely the aim. CKE is pulling a Conan on its customers, thinking if it drives out the older and more CONSERVATIVE types it will head to sales valhalla. We blame GanNETt. When USAOKAY!!!!! turned the Super Bowl ads into a contest it led to ads whose only content was outrage. Outrage gets talked about! So does a Ku Kluxer in his evening wear.

And -- need we have guessed it -- the ploy ISN'T WORKING. Pud -- PUZDER says it was last year's stimulus checks, which obviously negated the fantabulous sales gains from this year's ads. We have here a dictionary definition of MORON.

On the other hand maybe if all the fast-food chains run enough offensive ads enough people will stop eating fast food, which may make health-care reform less expensive.

Posted 9:01 AM by Gene

The presence of rabbis in this huge Jersey corruption sting would lend it a comic air but then we realize these pols are the guys that couldn't get away with it, and then we stop laughing.

Posted 8:18 AM by Gene

I'm all for second chances, but let's confront the possibility of Michael Vick returning to the NFL: Fans in dog costumes, throwing Milk-Bones onto the field, incessant barking, the insulting banners -- hey, I'm for comedy too, but this will follow him the rest of his career, no matter how brilliant he is. The only way he'll ever shut up the fans is with a Super Bowl ring, and that still doesn't wipe the jail time away.

Posted 8:16 AM by Gene

TRANSLATION: The movee biz is going to high-tech two-reelers.

FURTHER TRANSLATION: Back to the future for a business with no future.

STILL FURTHER TRANSLATION: With luck the BUGMEISTERS will lose money here too.

Posted 8:14 AM by Gene

At least six shot at TSU at event honoring rapper

Alas, that would seem an appropriate "honor".

Posted 10:39 PM by Gene

If a piece of junk like this is all men.style.com can offer the dullards SI deserves the biggest bankruptcy in the history of periodical publishing.

Unfortunately it appears the nooz biz is seeing a revival -- MNI is over a dollar -- but with luck this is a temporary delusion, though delusions aren't usually temporary in the Wall Street Casino.

Posted 10:18 PM by Gene

One thing's clear: abortion has a pretty good chance of tripping up this wonk juggernaut but good -- and if the Professor-in-Chief insists upon coverage for the liberal's favorite medical procedure that would be very good.

Posted 10:09 PM by Gene

The future of Zeitgeist...

— This article will appear in the print version of the Kaplan College Guide, which hits newsstands August 17.

...sounds a bit too much like the future of USELESS NEWS -- but we knew that already.

Posted 9:47 PM by Gene

And lately I've found it harder to run cogent blog posts. Where does one begin with health care? It's a thousand-page amoeba constantly changing shape, and whether it passes or not depends on amorphous forces who aren't lobbying as they are trying to shift stars in the universe. How does one talk intelligently on something with zillions of moving parts? One doesn't, and it is no accident the coverage of this has seemed like dueling lobbyists. At least five or six years ago during Iraq the choices were clear-cut, the fools obvious.

At times like these inadequacy does not begin to describe my self-attitude. I try consoling myself thinking folks will be perplexed or embarrassed by today's hot topics five or ten years hence, no comfort when you're looking at the public life from miles outside the stadium with the caps cemented on your binocular lenses. And there is no advancing in the blog system when the castes have been so rigidly set.

Posted 9:33 PM by Gene

How irritating: Some intern at Kraft Foods must have mentioned something to her supervisor about a Web site -- or more likely Nick Dorken's been screaming at Kraft five hundred times since the...ECONOMY began, so he gets some folks with marketing on the brain to concoct an inane Facebook page with a stupid APP!!!!! to which he can provide a link, which gives Kraft a way of sponsoring this vastly overrated blog without appearing to do so.

Of course Nick has been on top of publicizing a certain unintentional virus spreader, almost as much as SLIME, and really, reading his site is like reading TMZ, except that PEOPLE WARNER doesn't seem to take too much credit for it (understandable), while NICK (under the exquisite tutelage of the fool B. S. DEFENDER) has been spouting for years of the BIG PROFITS he makes -- or rather, is about to make, but somehow he's had this habit of firing people, which suggests his profits are mostly in the press releases he gets others to run for him. Meantime his alumni vanish into thin air. What happened to that woman who wrote for -- was it the TWXSTERS' newsrag?

All this is another way of saying it is extremely frustrating to feel you're on the outside looking in when it comes to news, and to lack a place or a way of being with the most in-the-know community, especially when you run a blog that no one reads, and no one ever will.

Posted 9:25 AM by Gene

Now Madam Silent is talking of an "umbrella" for our Arab friends, meaning even she and her omnipotent boss may be losing faith in wet noodles.

Posted 9:03 AM by Gene

Why am I convinced so many people think we must do something for the sake of doing something we're going to get the monstrosity called health care "reform" anyway?

Posted 8:57 AM by Gene

U.S. to cover pensions for Delphi workers

OBAMAMOTORS just got a bit more expensive.

(More on how expensive here)

Posted 8:44 AM by Gene

TRANSLATION: When professional college athuhletes finally get paid, it will be thanks to licensing. Here is one lawsuit the NPCPCAA will lose.

Posted 8:31 AM by Gene

What's Specter do now? Move to Ohio?

Excellent idea!

P. S. at 11:55 a. m. And if he takes George "Moo" Voinovich's place no one will notice.

Posted 8:31 AM by Gene

We take back our apology to SLIME.

Posted 8:21 AM by Gene

Now we know -- the Mafia has nothing on Wall Street when it comes to loan sharking.

Posted 8:05 AM by Gene

NO HEROES: I'm surprised the hacks haven't tried to make as big a thing of the Obama-birth-certificate malarkey as PROFIT CENTERS like Lou Dobbs. They could say the reason this fraudulent conspiracy-theorizing persists is because His Omnipotence is -- you-know-what skin color, and they can consequently blame the brouhaha on RACISM, and commission one of the those thirty-part special reports on RACE RELATIONS (i.e., why whites are completely to blame) that LORD KOPPEL specialized in. In a tantrum like this scoundrels live on both sides. PILLHEAD and The-Formerly-CEO-Fanny-Kissing Populist are good examples on the one, but when the hacks start in with their Ein-Volk-Ein-Reich routine they can do a pretty fair imitation of mob rule too. And those two frauds wouldn't get the face time but for BIGMEDIA's obsession with PROFITS to the exclusion of all else.

Posted 5:08 PM by Gene

The Wall Street Casino is trying to rebuild the old Gekko Kudlovian universe where bad news is good news and good news is great news, and every broker and sales -- ANALYST is Dr. Pangloss or HENRY HONEST touting Amazon.com. This is the way to prosperity?

Posted 4:58 PM by Gene

I think we've discovered another reason entertainment's in a SUPERMEGAPLATINUM AGE:

One problem with capturing the same look and feel as a classic beach movie was casting. "In doing the casting, we had to make sure to be true to the early '60s look and body type," Ms. Romney said. "Actors are so ridiculously in shape these days, especially in L.A., that we had to cast for people who were trim but looked normal and natural -- not like they're in the gym five days a week. Tattoos and piercings also had to be avoided."

Can you imagine Bogie in shape?

Posted 4:51 PM by Gene

ARCHDaily!



Usually we make fun of the ARCHDaily starchitects for designing uninhabitable buildings. This one's different: it dares to be BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORINNNNNNNNNNNNNG.

Posted 3:51 PM by Gene

We didn't bother clicking after reading this squib:

"American Idol" and Disney are the two strongest pop machines in music today.

Posted 1:59 PM by Gene

Who's Better Informed, Newspaper Readers or Web Surfers?

It may not matter; they may merely be misinformed in different ways.

Posted 1:48 PM by Gene

We just came across this graphic showing "jobs lost and gained during the recession." Of the categories of jobs lost many are industrial. Of the categories of jobs gained all but four are health-care or government-related.

RENDELLISM LIVES!

Posted 11:26 AM by Gene

Well, I couldn't help thinking -- does anybody remember THIS one? (See lower-right corner)

And what of this line:

RCA Victor has more experience in Color TV [sic] than many manufacturers have in making black-and-white sets.

A lot of good experience did RCA -- or SUMNER NEWS.

Posted 9:44 AM by Gene

Iran Turmoil May Cost Hezbollah, Hamas Amid Retreat

Your Excellency the Professor, which side are you on?

Posted 9:00 AM by Gene

Where will all the Wall Streeters running up stocks go to shop?

Posted 8:52 AM by Gene

Does this make SLIME a peeping Tom too? Or is He using special software to capture criminals?

P. S. at 1:50 p. m. Our apologies to SLIME: This waste of bandwidth has been on the Web at least a day and we hadn't heard about it. God knows what else we haven't heard about. In the comments for several stories people have mentioned they never heard of the lady or dueling lawyers. In short, we haven't missed anything, despite not living under a rock.

Posted 8:42 AM by Gene

One last word (we hope) on MOST TRUSTED: Thanks to this tiresome think piece we learn a pollster named Oliver Quayle did the survey. We cannot find out much about Quayle except he appears to have been an independent pollster who worked with or for Lou Harris. We further learn "somebody" (hint hint) suggested MOST TRUSTED be included in the survey. Who "somebody" was we don't learn as this is from SUMNER NEWS before the superscripts. The rest is the first rough draft of history and the CBS publicity department.

How apt too that the SUMNER NEWS piece suggests GEN. LEAK TWOFACE deserved the title as well, which says a lot about our superiors and public opinion polls.

And all right, we get the message, MOST TRUSTED was a nice guy, but lots of nice guys do not-so-nice things, and sending untold southeast Asians to their deaths might not be such a nice thing, especially when we were proud of it.

(First link via the usual Romy)

Posted 5:29 PM by Gene

Speaking of dreaming, we would say the Wall Street Casino's kind can be very profitable -- but dreams also inspired what people will never call a depression even if John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman came back from the dead to say so, and lately the illusion of still more pleasant dreams.

Posted 4:58 PM by Gene

One must almost fake excitement at the thought of a new moon landing, or a voyage to Mars. The whole purpose of space exploration, some voice tells us, is to further man's grasp, but the notion of homo sapiens on the forever ascendant was pretty well shot to pieces long before Apollo, and the first moon landing, coming during The Great National Nervous Breakdown, smacked of anti-climax. I can recall watching it but did not find myself giddily screaming out of my skin like MOST TRUSTED. It should have been obvious even then that moon exploration was good for men hopping around aimlessly in spacesuits and playing golf in near-zero-G. We are told the moon is rich in energy in its soil, but then we are told there's a reason we must travel to Mars, at untold human and financial cost, and not just lives lost but possible virtual mental wards in tin cans. Some far distant future the race must explore the cosmos if it is to preserve itself, and then it may be little more than a galaxy-spanning energy pipeline, with vast fleets primed in the intergalactic art of self-preservation. God knows what kind of race will so propagate itself -- most likely an untenable combination of machine, electronics, fake flesh, and whatever is left of real human flesh, assuming what has become of the race doesn't immolate itself first. To say we can use space flight to dream is fatuous, as we can dream on earth, too, and it doesn't cost so much. I am no technoparanoiac but the mobocracy of the Web and whatever this thing is people will not call a depression are among the pernicious indirect results of the hypertechnology brought on by the space program. And yet, if nothing else, Apollo has a place for all time by making us realize the uniqueness of our experience, and the beauty of the orb we inhabit, in the glowing earthrise captured on Apollo 8 and the words of Frank Borman that all the idiots screamed in despair over. A footprint is mundane even on moon soil, but the Bible does begin with a beginning, and in this picture we see if ever we can see that not any old force created life, and the heavens.

Posted 4:14 PM by Gene

Why was I almost rooting against Tom Watson at the Open today? Certainly not him; the man all but invented the terms "gentleman" and "sportsmanship". Perhaps because I sensed in its default mode The Media-Industrial Complex roots for The Golfing Machine; but it broke down and we needed a consolation prize, and Tom was certainly it. But something happened: THE PROFIT CENTER and MOST TRUSTED happened, and I foresaw a flood of bad puns, and the fake hearty congratulations from boomer editors congratulating their late middle age -- hate to repeat myself, the whole sleazy Our Town routine, PGA edition. I'm sure Stewart Cink got a deafening round of lukewarm applause for being younger than Tom. But we've come to a pretty pass when we even feel slightly compelled to harbor bad feelings towards as truly a decent man as Tom Watson -- and it isn't his fault.

Posted 1:55 PM by Gene

From a con-SER-va-tive rag, alas:

[W]hen Bonnie and Clyde was released and soared, following an initial few weeks of failure, the Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko launched a mini-crusade to restore Clyde and Bonnie to their actual dimensions, as vicious murderers, no matter that (as the ad copy said) they were young, they were in love, and they robbed banks. The only thing that mattered about them, Royko said, was that they killed, and killed a lot of people. The critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, then the oldest, whitest guy in New York, also dared to denounce the film; he not only felt the lash of social ostracism and contempt, he may have even lost his job as a consequence.

I thought they were both idiots. I know better now.

Heroism and villainy among news hacks will always out. Thus with Mike Royko (and, we'd argue, Bosley Crowther); thus with Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews -- and (in time) UNCLE HHHHHWWWWWALT.

Posted 1:23 PM by Gene

The bad news: Enough lemmings still go out to see the tentpoles.

The good news: Despite ROWLINGCORP, because more lemmings came out last year we've got a bad year-to-year comparison, which one hopes will keep up the rest of this year.

The best news: Very Very Littler Jeffy has a neat excuse to get out of show-biz!

(Although if we know JEFF ZUCKS he's congratulating himself for getting people to run screaming from the popcorn restaurants.)

Posted 10:36 AM by Gene

TRANSLATION: Gee whiz aw shucks, I'd love to call Ted the greatest, most noble politician who ever lived, but dammit if NAZI...conservatives keep harping on this one little thing -- I mean, the guy had an accident; aren't we all entitled to mistakes in our lives? But geez, he'll live on and on and on for reforming health care, and that's what counts.

Oh yes, and I probably wouldn't recognize my predecessors in my grand and noble office -- who came before me, Clark something or other? But they were all good men, noble men, unless they were conservatives, which fortunately isn't likely.

Posted 9:35 AM by Gene

Dick Cavett's in a bind: either he throws political tantrums and makes an ass of himself, or he delves deep into his memory of when he emceed a talk show, which was thirty-odd years ago, and interviewed guests who died twenty-five years ago. Given his limited options he is wise to stick to the latter, though he reminds us the world has been without Richard Burtons lately.

Posted 9:10 AM by Gene

The ein-volk-ein-Reich stuff about that most trusted man in America has quickly and mysteriously vanished, meaning the hacks got the message from upstairs -- or possibly out of fear of whatever's left of their audience.

By the way, who called ST. HHHHHWWWWWALTER that? Was it Bill Paley's publicity department?

P. S. The best we can do is Frazier who cites in his hagiography "a 1972 'trust index' survey in which he finished No. 1, about 15 points higher than leading politicians, and a 1974 survey in which people chose him as the most trusted television newscaster." Frazier, being a good old ASSPress hand, is careful not to identify who did the polls. We wouldn't be surprised if Bill did the first, thus setting up the second.