Posted 8:41 PM by Gene

Anyone here remember Interference, Inc.? The company that orchestrated the CARTOON NETWORK BOMB SCARE IN BOSTON? Well, it's still in business -- and here are its clients, past and present, meaning some CEOs apparently DO spend every day playing GOLF.

Posted 7:26 PM by Gene

What's happening to Atlantic City is proof not only that sometimes the house can't win, but the bigger the house the smaller the win.

Nor does it help when you put a grand foyer on an outhouse.

Posted 7:07 PM by Gene

Keeping in mind a LOT come from con-SER-va-tive Web sites: "JOURNOLIST groupthink" = 935,000 GOOGLE LINKS.

Posted 3:26 PM by Gene

We've seen worse, Yahoo! -- MUCH worse.

Posted 3:20 PM by Gene

Typing like this irks us because as Prof. Shafer says the biz has this penchant for creating bogus trends. Also John A. Challenger is the PAUL DRECK!!!!! of the personnel office. There's a more important reason -- as JOURNOLIST showed us the hacks en masse try to socialize us into dubious behaviors. Why does the world need more blue-blobbed skin?

Posted 3:03 PM by Gene

Then there's appeared this article suggesting classical music's sprouting a "new golden age". In a very narrow sense this may be true. More people must be earning their keep from the music; collectively the standard of performance has probably never been higher. (Some classic orchestras of the past sound distinctly flat with today's ears.) And it is probably true that before the phonograph most people gave little heed to music of any kind. But classical music is a niche item where it ought not to be; that for all the Web's wonders precious little of the music is broadcast; that the world is on the verge of having one classical-music recording company -- and most important, nobody's writing Beethoven's Fifth anymore. And just because a lot of third-rate scribblers are writing "operas" should NOT mean anything. I'll believe we're in a new golden age for classical music when I hear it -- and that means new works speaking to us as well as the old. I do not expect that to happen.

Posted 2:39 PM by Gene

We regretted to discover someone writing under that tiresome nom de plume Lexington inspired himself into a self-administered gas attack on the subject of America's "greatness". The most gaseous outburst was this:

America still towers over rivals in scientific virtuosity, military power, the vitality of democracy and much else.

Aside from our not taking too much comfort from a rag published in a dead empire and read by a lot of high mucky-mucks who'd call themselves "internationalists", this line irks us because the first two things are largely technocratic and the third probably has a lot to do with people like THE GOLD BUG who inhabit its grafs, and we'd hardly call dueling screaming cable heads combined with Congress's high popularity democratic. We'd like the hack hiding under the pseudonym to tell us that culturally or educationally we've never been better. Talk of America's financial inequality rivaling Zimbabwe's may not do much good for the soul either. Thankfully the hack gets this much right:

America is indeed a great and exceptional country. But it isn’t talking about it that makes it so.

And the less we talk about it, whether we be bloviating hacks or zillionaire table pounders, the better.

Posted 3:09 PM by Gene

GE BANCORP quarterly dividend in 2008: $0.31.

GE BANCORP quarterly dividend after the REVENGE OF THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: $0.10.

GE BANCORP quarterly dividend today: $0.12.

HISTORIC DOW 5,000,000!!!!!

Posted 9:58 AM by Gene

Our favorite Branson East columnist Mike says THE GREATEST NETWORK OF ALL TIME is making a pilot for a series no one will see about a GENIUS COMPOSER no one outside Branson East pays attention to!

REVUERS!!!!! Get out your ADJECTIVES!

Posted 8:36 PM by Gene

When two acts as old as the hills join forces for a party devoted to celebrating great literature as old as the hills, and when NEWS HACKS try to sell it as the NEW! HIP! thing, there is a slight disconnect.

P. S. LALA must remind its turnips (with a plausibly deniable "Special" byline) that Matt Groening is a business bigger than DUNKIN DONUTS, only It used to be called ALTERNATIVE.

Posted 7:35 PM by Gene

Jeff Bezos's gift to man misses its targets.

THE LORD GOD STEVE IS NEXT!

“The companies that pulled back in the downturn are now accelerating their investments,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners LP. He has a sell rating on Amazon.com. “I don’t think Amazon is focused on any one quarter’s performance. They’re building for the future.”

With free books?

Posted 7:12 PM by Gene

[A] lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal. In addition to being partisan hacks, a lot of these guys turn out to be pedestrian thinkers. Disappointing.

Count us not surprised there either.

Posted 7:02 PM by Gene

CHOLLY will leave office before he can be "tried"; nonetheless we are hardly surprised, and it couldn't have happen to a more -- giving person.

Only why did he take it from us?

Posted 9:45 AM by Gene

I can think of one thing, TINA!!!!!, that's NOT.

Posted 9:37 AM by Gene

ON THE PROCEDURAL FRONT:

House GOP Leader John Boehner is pushing for reform this morning. In a new web video, he expresses his frustration with the Democrats’ bills and “the way they get passed.” Should Boehner win the Speaker’s gavel, he promises to prohibit the House from considering any bill that has not been publicly available for three days on the web: [Video excluded here.]

Cut the comedy, BANEHEAD: You'll do the same things the DEMS do -- THE SAME THINGS YOU GUYS DID BEFORE THEM -- THE SAME THINGS THEY DID BEFORE YOU.

Posted 9:24 AM by Gene

Weekly Claims Turn Higher, Keeping Jobs Outlook Fragile

DOW 2,000,000!!!!!

Posted 9:19 AM by Gene

North Korea sanctions: Are they meaningless?

This is TOO easy.

Posted 9:15 AM by Gene

And we have not spoken of WALTER WINCHELL!!!!! JR.!!!!!'s latest stunt because it's another bandwidth-hogging irrelevance, but the history of the news biz teaches us partisans should never be trusted -- and the history of the news biz teaches us partisans can be RIGHT AND LEFT.

Hence MURROW and WINCHELL!!!!! are both ASSES. One thing they have in common: BIG SALARIES AND BIGGER EGOS, neither of which they deserve.

Posted 9:09 AM by Gene

I go out of reach of internet-land for 48 hours, and the place blows up!

That's okay, MURROW -- you blow up today and we're all even!

An ASS should never try to confute another ASS.

Posted 8:56 AM by Gene

Though charging the same for a hybrid as a gas-powered car isn't quite on the level of the $5 day, it is proof outposts of American business may yet have the guts to do what should be done.

Posted 8:54 AM by Gene

For what it's worth, WOLFFMAN:

Tattoo removal

Posted 5:15 PM by Gene

We hope Ah-NULT appointed the lady because she's a good judge, but knowing Ah-NULT he did it for reasons he thinks will make him live forever.

When does this clod resume his fillum career?

Posted 2:54 PM by Gene

Ben TALKS -- the market WALKS!

Posted 9:21 AM by Gene

We've heard the "THIS STRIKE WILL DESTROY THE BIZ!!!!!" talk before, but we do have delicious memories of the writers' "strike", and we can hope for another lengthy disruption of our Hollywood superiors' never ending plot to STUPIDIZE America, although we don't expect it.

Besides, it appears these people who may strike actually work for a living.

Posted 8:44 AM by Gene

The superheroes of DC Comics Pictures are raising another COMIC-CON-approved tentpole. When do they finally learn the people who don't gather in San Diego in funny-looking costumes are tired of constant termite infestations?

"We're looking at DC as an untapped asset," he said, "since we need to find a way to fill some of the holes in our event movie schedule created by the end of Harry Potter."

And the end of JONAH HEX?

The biggest challenge for Nelson and Johns may be merging the cultures of the Warner lot in Burbank and the offices of DC, which are in Manhattan but may soon move to L.A.

TRANSLATION: 1. DC runs Burbank. 2. How can there be any culture clash with such self-lovers?

"It's no small challenge how few people have heard of these properties or understand their stories outside of fans of comic books," she said. "Sometimes the comic-book fans who love this stuff want us to get too precious about this stuff and if we do, we'll kill it off. We need to figure out how to evolve and grow it and bring it to more people."

You've already killed off the movie biz; why should catering to the mentally challenged comic-book nuts bother YOU?

Posted 8:40 AM by Gene

It might help Tucker if we had transcripts of the moronic bleatings of the super-secret God-chosen cabal JOURNOLIST rather than engaging in the sort of tweakings the JOURNOLISTERS engage in. Nonetheless they do expose themselves as our superiors, and thus beneath our contempt.

Posted 7:32 PM by Gene

Today, thanks to something of a spinoff of that now-vanished soundtrack blog, I came across one of the most remarkable recordings I've ever heard: the great Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick singing demos of Tevye -- an early version of Fiddler on the Roof. To say Broadway songwriters are their own best interpreters is a commonplace but these two outdid themselves; this is the best rendition of the score there is, yes, better even than Zero, because the pair wear their emotions on their sleeves, and Fiddler is nothing if not emotional. One does not know where to start -- perhaps with the fact that eight of the fifteen songs were cut, and they were too rambling and ungainly to have worked on Broadway; Bock and Harnick were thinking things through in music. Although not all the music was cut: the opening, "We've Never Missed a Sabbath Yet", contains the germ of "Tradition", the Jerome Robbins masterpiece that made the show. Yet Tevye may have been a stronger, more nuanced work than the Hallmark card it became. Bock and Harnick tried to put a little too much Sholom Aleichem in, which might explain some of the ungainliness, but only in the songs that survived is there that lazy authorial contentment that ultimately does it in. Listening to "Far From the Home I Love" I regretted that a truly inspired songwriter did not create the achingly tragic number the lyrics deserved; the melody could have fit into one of their revues. (Their limitations helped end the partnership, which wrote only two more shows before splitting acrimoniously in 1970.) And the closing number "Get Thee Out" has a note of hopeful defiance and no tug at the tear ducts. Heroic Russian Jews wouldn't fit but the eventual ending is not merely "Tradition"'s antithesis but its negation. Fiddler on the Roof is fine Kosher comfort food; it could have been immortal. But then it might not have been immortal.

P. S. We discovered Sony tacked five of the team's demos onto the '67 London cast album (Goddard Lieberson wanted to record the Broadway show but Bill Paley thought it too much of a downer), but while they appear to be from the same tapes (and they both have rotten sound) they may not be from this source. Now that Sony owns the RCA catalog outright now's the time for the reissue Fiddler deserves -- including all these demo tracks.

Posted 7:26 PM by Gene

I wonder if, wherever he is, WFB isn't cursing himself for having unleashed Jo-NAH on his creation, for this is clearly his work, though it bears another's credit and none of his Frank Rich snark. I would let this pass without comment except the kind of high profile MENSA types who must obsess over this masterpiece are exactly the same types we dismissed after POLITICO ran that POLL. Even if FOUR MILLION AMERICANS watch this FOURTH COMING over 300 MILLION AMERICANS WON'T. The Greatest Pop-Culture-Achievement of the Last Quarter Century drew no more than TWELVE THIRTEEN MILLION. These obsessions speak to the disconnect of the ruling class as much as a love for His Omnipotence -- and they know no political bounds.

(Correction on 7/24/2010 at 7:00 p. m. It is hard to get precise numbers on Greatest but I gather the immortality seldom gathered more than ten million -- and we should not forget despite its immortality there's little evidence it helped THE GREATEST NETWORK OF ALL TIME gain subscribers, and if it did it was in the usual self-obsessed towns. Those who watched, watched, and most of America ignored.)

Posted 2:24 PM by Gene

Hiding behind green: The branding company Landor redesigned BP's logo in 2000, creating a green-and-yellow sunflower whose purpose, says Landor on its website, was to cast BP as "an environmental leader [with] a goal of moving beyond the petroleum sector." Oops. The fact that BP has for years presented itself as an environmentally friendly company "has made the oil spill even worse," says Kumar. "You talk green, green, green, but you are still a big oil company," he says. "It is almost as if they wished they were in a different business." The chasm between image and reality makes people question BP's sincerity, he adds. Strike three on commitment.

I REPEAT: GET RID OF THE FLOWER!!!!!

Posted 2:15 PM by Gene

I wonder: eighty-nine years from now will people be saying things like "this is one of the few cases in any Hollywood film where you literally watch a star being born on film" of...ADAM SANDLER?

This revival was in part a Kevin Brownlow production; he deserves great credit for restoring this. But why can't the biz MAKE them instead of RESTORING them?

Posted 12:52 PM by Gene

If SUMNER didn't have KEN FELATTA he'd be called SENILE -- or worse. Because he has KEN FELATTA he's called a GENIUS.

Posted 11:36 AM by Gene

As WALTER WINCHELL!!!!! JR. threatened yesterday, we're starting to get dribs and drabs from the effete-snob state-secret e-mails of JOURNOLIST, and they aren't pretty. (TRANSLATION: We'll never hear of this outside CONSERVATIVE Web sites.)

Posted 9:11 AM by Gene

Back in the days when RENDELLISM encompassed an unquenchable belief that SUPERUPSCALE CONDOS would help create the jobs for waiters and janitors and bellhops and maids to fuel the 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMY, some developers started putting up this hoity-toity tower on SUPERDELUXE Rittenhouse Square for all the people commuting from Wall Street, not to mention some of the hundreds of thousands of city denizens with vast estates. Unfortunately, developers put up hundreds of thousands of other such towers, and putting up hundreds of thousands of such towers led to -- inconveniences, and now even our StinkyInky's resident real-estate Babbitt admits in typically sideways language that the hoity-toity building's essentially been foreclosed by a pension fund that's owed a LOT of hoity-toity money. Don't you just hate it when our saviors the megarich don't come through?

P. S. We might add that's not the only largely empty superduper condo on the Square; a rehab of a twenties highrise social club facing 18th Street has been occupied by spiders for two years. Maybe if we moved the Wall Street Casino to OUR stock exchange....

Posted 8:47 AM by Gene

IPAD GAMES ARE GOING TO BE CRAZY AWESOME!!!!!!!!!! [Crazy awesome overemphasis added]

WHERE ARE ALL THE CRAZY AWESOME IPAD GAMES?????????? [Further crazy awesome overemphasis added]

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!!!

Posted 8:19 AM by Gene

Brauchli, who came to the paper in July 2008, just as it was in the midst of its third round of buyouts in five years, said the Post will continue to pursue such ambitious projects, regardless of the tough financial picture for newspapers.

“The Post remains firmly committed to accountability journalism,” he said. “We understand that in some cases it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of resources to do it well, but we will continue to do it.”



SURE!

Posted 10:04 PM by Gene

Lindsay Lohan Never Showed Up for the Interview, But Complex Put Her on the Cover Anyway



I smell a new editor!

Judging from the site, if YAHOO! doesn't own it, it will. That's CLOSE ENOUGH to GanNETt.

Posted 8:39 PM by Gene

The Companies Hiring The Most Right Now

Microsoft is the only large company on the list that isn't in the defense or health care industries. [Fifth and last graf]

DOW 500,000!!!!!

Posted 8:30 PM by Gene

Cameron Snubs Lockerbie Probe

The prime minister? The senators should have talked to Britain's real boss -- TONY!

Posted 8:25 PM by Gene

Stoopid magazines are BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

But where does the SCHMOOZE factor come in, reverse Robin Hoods?

Posted 8:19 PM by Gene

ARCHDaily!



Mom! That building winked at me!



A permanent Christo!

Posted 9:30 AM by Gene

Our Eccentric Uncle Joe came out of the attic yesterday:

"We have two, three times as many highway projects going! We have significant investment in broadband for the first time now!!" [Significant overemphasis added]

And we can SEE IT!

"Broadband" = THE NEW RENDELLISM.

Posted 9:05 AM by Gene

The Daily Kaplan's P-ULITZER-WINNING EXAMINATION of intelligence is the sort of thing any well-read news consumer could have guessed at. Do we need a 100,000-word snail-darter expose to tell us our nation's private eyes basically don't know their fat fannies from a hole in the ground -- because so many fat fannies are working the hole?

Posted 8:21 AM by Gene

So our ruling class can't stand us. Who knew?

WE CAN'T STAND THEM.

Posted 9:04 PM by Gene

In the World of Blogging, from far better bloggers than I:

Potrzebie (yes, comic books) has posted the cover from this SUPERMEGARARE Superman from '78 that PEOPLE WARNER's reprinting -- in two editions! -- in which he fights against Muhammad Ali for what I'm sure was a very good PC cause. Here's the back cover. Can YOU spot the celebrities watching the greatest fight of all time-and-space?



I got three, without the code: President and Mrs. Ford -- and BILL GAINES. (Where's JIMMAH?!?!?) All those faces could have been drawn with a rubber stamp. I don't care WHAT people say about the GENIUS of comic books, this is GODAWFUL CARICATURE.



Elsewhere, Buster's very fine Big 10-Inch Record site posts an album by Xavier Cugat's once vocalist and wife Abbe Lane. As Curly would say, WOOWOOWOOWOO!!!!!!!!!!

And no, you're not supposed to notice the mole, but that's a pretty good spot for one, n'est-ce pas?

P. S. FOUR -- Alfred E. Neuman.

P. P. S. on 7/21 at 2:58 p. m. I spotted three others -- Tony Orlando and Donny and Marie Osmond. That's seven. But there are over a hundred faces here, and they all look like distant cousins of Clark Kent. Again, THIS IS GODAWFUL CARICATURE.

Posted 6:05 PM by Gene

One book I have gotten around to reading in fits and starts from our apartment's "library" is a Truman Capote anthology featuring "Breakfast at Tiffany's". Capote won't last because he was an observer, a JERNALIST, and he hung around with too many society airheads before forcing the Paleys to evict him, but he did create one indelible character. Capote wanted MM for the film version. She was too brash for it. But Audrey wasn't quite right as she was too sophisticated. In my eyes Holly Golightly is a smart but very naive blue-eyed blonde of an exceptionally flirtatious mien and a lilting soprano, so no actress could ever be quite right, but I place her closer to Audrey's size than MM's, so maybe Blake Edwards didn't miscast her that much. To put it another way she is as very close to my idealized woman as mortals can come. The one disconcerting thing is that you can't escape the notion you aren't reading all of Truman's frizzy debutante friends talking, you're reading Truman, and really a man shouldn't talk that way. But talk that way he did, and he got away with it.

CORRECTION at 9:35 p. m. I meant shorter. Audrey was taller than MM. Who was looking? I was thinking the proverbial "five-foot-two, eyes of...hazel?" But no one could be hypercritical around Audrey or MM.

P. S. on 8/31/2010 at 7:52 p. m. Judging from this zinger (qv) I never started reading it. I'm not a fiction guy. I still stand by my notion that Truman grafted a lot of himself on the character. I've never seen the film, and am not interested.

Posted 4:41 PM by Gene

"A great American Novel." [SIC!]
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Does anyone here remember several years ago -- when the nation's book revues were being DESTROYED!!!!!?

"...[A] powerful and brilliant book. By turns outrageously funny and deadly serious, it is always breathtakingly entertaining. It should be on everyone's shortlist."
--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Today in our apartment building's "library" I found a paperback edition of a supposed comic novel.

"Well-written and almost [SIC] always amusing, [the novel] is an entertaining book from a terrific writer."
--(Toronto) Globe and Mail

It contains four-and-a-half pages of blurbs.

"A riotous good time. [The author] tells one entertaining tale."
--People magazine

Four-and-a half pages of sound-alike blurbs may convey an unintended message, a message of defensiveness, a message of making something from the nothing there -- but those four-and-a half pages certainly are.

"[The novel] reads like Richard Ford meets Carl Hiassen."
--New York magazine

And they further highlight the dangers of obsessive blurbthinking and blurbmaking -- even a merely descriptive (and possibly dismissive) one can be thrown in and can sound like a rave.

"Bittersweet (with the emphasis on 'bitter') and hilarious."
--Harper's Bazaar

Four-and-a-half pages of blurbs translates into God knows how many thousands of words, thousands of unnecessary words, thousands of advertising words, words the public doesn't need and the author will squinch at for their sniveling flattery -- but several years back the DESTRUCTION of book revues was a MORTAL THREAT to the REPUBLIC, to be prevented at ALL COSTS!!!!! The republic survived, and so did the book biz, churning out more junk than ever. If this episode proves anything it is that NOT ONE BOOK REVUER IS WORTH READING. Only Jonathan Yardley was, and he appears to have effectively retired. What's left is advertising, and we have enough of it of all sorts from NEWS HACKS, and true literature will never benefit from it. Let the sleeping dog of book revuing lie -- in a different sense.

I have not read the book and probably never will. Thank you, book revuers, for your REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY.

P. S. 3.5 stars and #375,578 in Amazon.com.

Posted 2:26 PM by Gene

The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.



GIMME FIVE!!!!!

Although to be BI-PARTISAN about it....