With all due respect to Josh Fisher,, SuperXclusivo’s solemn treatment of the dispute between Roberto Alomar and Maria Del Pilar is exactly the sort of thing that could get me to start watching non-sports programming. If I’ve got a choice between the frizzy-haired puppet and Harvey Levin, I’m going with the former.
(above : former publisher Sun Myung Moon, shown lambasting Thom Loverro for his failure to make quota selling flowers by the side of the highway)
Less than a year after eliminating their entire sports section, the deeply conservative, Unification Church-owned Washington Times is preparing to cease publication write the Washington Examiner’s Katy Adams and Nikki Schwab :
DCRTV.com reported Monday that Preston Moon, son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon who runs the paper, planned to break the news via press release on Friday that he planned to shutter the paper.
In DCRTV’s report, the closure was halted due to a last-minute offer from an unknown bidder to purchase the conservative newspaper. Preston Moon and his family have long been fighting over the future of the former daily. DCRTV’s unnamed source told the Web site that Preston Moon has had it with the paper and isn’t interested in making a deal.
“It is now about showing Daddy Moon who has the bigger cajones,” the source told DCRTV. “If this offer — and it is a reasonable one — is rejected, the paper could close its doors this week, just shy of 30 years in the nation’s capital.”
The source continues, “The paper has large debt load but there is a buyer. Normally, this would be a good thing for a seller. In the zany world of the Moon family, and the son’s disregard for the family’s wishes, it looks like the final edition is imminent.”
Congrats to Bell Enviromental’s Roscoe — recently misidentified by the usually unflappable Jerry Seinfeid (perhaps recalling a Beefarino chomping horse) as “Rusty” – on making WABC’s evening news tonight. With production values not seen since the last season of “Tim & Eric”, Bell Environmental’s frequent spots on SNY Mets telecasts not only coincide neatly with New York’s current bed bug infestation, but without these commercials the paychecks of such hardworking professional athletes as Oliver Perez, Francisco Rodriguez and Jeff Francoeur might bounce!
Short of Dave Kingman organizing a bake sale to benefit the National Organization Of Women, could there be a case of stranger charity bedfellows than Barry Bonds cutting a check to The Fourth Estate? From NBC.com’s Greg WIlson :
Bonds’ foundation donated $20,000 to The National Association of Black Journalists to fund an “Entrepreneurial Spirit Award” to be named after longtime Bay Area broadcaster Ray Taliaferro. Rich athletes donating money usually is applauded, but this gift is sparking controversy. NABJ member Kenneth Cooper told The Associated Press Bonds is a controversial figure and journalists and their organizations should maintain their distance.
The donation comes as Bonds prepares for his trial on federal charges he lied to a grand jury about steroid use.
Despite largely regurgitating the same columns over and over again, every now and then the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick provides what I’d like to call a teaching moment. Who knew, for instance, that Phil’s family were U.S. citizens from July 4, 1776 onwards? Or that the bearded conscience of all things Sports Media’s favorite record was White Pride’s “Illegal Aliens”? These are the sad conclusions I’m force to come to after reading Mushnick denounce Phoenix Suns Robert Sarver’s recent “Los Suns” gesture as an instance where an owner has “exploited his public position for political purposes.” Phil claims his readers quickly identified Sarver’s actions as “hollow grandstanding”, and provides the following ugly sentiments, calling them “a composite”. As opposed to the dumbest shit ever foisted upon CSTB’s comments section.
What if the owners of the Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into Suns’ games without paying? What if the owners had a good idea as to who the gate-crashers are, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn’t be ejected.
Furthermore, what if Suns’ ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?
“Furthermore,” adds Brooklyn’s Tommy Mitchell, “what if one of those ‘fans’ gave birth? Not only couldn’t you eject them, you’d have to provide another free seat!”
I assure you, the passages above were genuinely culled from the New York Post website and not this one.
Whether or not you believe Gregg Doyel loses all credibility in calling Phoenix, AZ “one of the biggest and brightest cities in this country”, CBS Sports’ resident shit-stirrer is quick to offer a defense of SB1070, insisting “you’re not hearing about the creeping third-world kudzu spreading into Phoenix and throughout Arizona.”
It’s easy for George Vecsey, and for people like him, to urge MLB players and other rich athletes to make a stand against Arizona’s immigration law when people like Vecsey, and most of those rich athletes, aren’t the ones trying to live there.
People are dying in Phoenix. They are being yanked from their homes on a daily basis and tortured, mutilated, killed. Why? Because there are some bad people in Phoenix. Not the legal citizens of Phoenix, no. I don’t mean them. I mean the illegals. Not all of them or even most of them, obviously, but by and large illegal immigrants are responsible, according to police, for most of the home invasions and kidnappings and tortures.
I know that property values in Arizona are dropping faster than almost anywhere else in this country. And I know that Arizona has massive crime issues, particularly of the drug-and-violence variety. In recent years its murder rate has been two and even three times the national average, and police blame the disproportionate nature of those numbers on the influx of illegal immigrants.
Is there the possibility of racial profiling in Arizona, where police with “reasonable suspicion” can ask for verification that a person isn’t an illegal immigrant? Sure there is. Police aren’t looking for thieves or drug dealers, who by definition could be anyone. They’re looking for illegal immigrants. If you can remove the issue of “race” from the search for “illegal immigrants,” please tell me how to do that. Until someone figures it out, I’m inclined to let the police of Arizona do their job.
If there’s such a strong relationship between plummeting property values and illegal immigration, how is it that Forbes‘ January 2010 list of cities with the fastest falling home prices included not one Arizona burg? Sure, City No. 1, San Diego, is close enough to the border, but is immigration from Mexico really what’s plaguging property owners in No. 2, Salt Lake City?
MSG/Cablevision Fortunate Son James Dolan (above, middle) has long demonstrated he’s no fan of facing the music — not counting the sub-Swayze-Willis Band sludge offered by Dolan’s Straight Shot, of course — and if the Emperor of The World’s Most Dysfunctional Arena would sack Marv Albert for the latter’s measured criticism, how might he react to something more pointed? The Village Voice’s Foster Kramer has a pretty good idea (link courtesy Joe Gross)
Back in March, a blog post we published regarding a potential media acquisition by Cablevision, MSG Entertainment, and Rainbow Media owner James Dolan — compounded by a vaguely worded, ominous legal threat from Dolan’s corporate office, which was ignored and then published in a naive showing of cliched blogger belligerence — cost The Village Voice an advertising deal worth upwards of $20,000/year in revenue. And if you’re a blogger three weeks into your new job (or the editor who – now, possibly regretfully – hired him), you can only laugh. And we did. And that was that.
That same post has now resulted in all Madison Square Garden Entertainment advertising being pulled from the Village Voice.
Furthermore, LiveNation — one of America’s biggest concert promoters — has now pulled all of its advertising from all Village Voice Media properties at the behest of James Dolan, whose MSG Entertainment employs the services of Live Nation/Ticketmaster in their ticketing and promotions operations.
In toto, a mediocre dick joke about a media acquisition has now cost this company upwards of $1M in yearly advertising revenue.
(The Rev. Sun Myung Moon. sure, Ben Bradlee’s widely respected, but does he look this hot in a crown?)
Well, once the sale is complete, anyway. Just a few months after the Washington Times declared a daily sports section surplus to requirements, the 28 year old newspaper is on the auction block. On at least one occasion, someone from the Times’ defunct sports department took issue with my (repeated) characterization of his workplace as “a Moonie paper” ; if he’s still reading CSTB, he oughta feel free to take it up with the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira :
Current negotiations follow months of turmoil at both the 28-year-old conservative daily and the business empire founded by Moon, 90, whose children are jostling for control over the church’s myriad enterprises, which range from fisheries to arms manufacturing.
One of Moon’s children, Justin Moon, who was chosen by his father to run many of the church’s Asian businesses, has slashed the newspaper’s annual subsidy, forcing the paper’s executives, led by Moon’s eldest son, Preston Moon, to search for deep pockets elsewhere. Meanwhile, the newspaper has hacked its newsroom staff by more than half, from 225 in 2002 down to about 70 people, raised the paper’s price and deliberately shrunk its circulation to cut costs, shed its metro and sports sections, and fired or pushed out several top executives, including its publisher earlier this week. Several reporters said most of the staffers are seeking to leave.
The finances are so tight that the newspaper hasn’t paid some of its bills or tended to basic maintenance issues — such as hiring an exterminator to deal with mice and snakes sneaking into the building on New York Avenue in Northeast.
Self-styled journalism watchdog John Helmer absorbed Stephanie Humber and Yuriy Humber’s recent profile of aspiring Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov for Bloomberg.com and recognizes the pair for “the athletic feat of reporting Prokhorov’s all-win business career without detecting a single foul, penalty, or loss.” Somebody please forward this to Jeff Van Gundy (Dances With Bears link courtesy Ball In Europe)
– regarding Mr Prokhorov’s transactions with Mr Ratner for the Nets basketball franchise and the Brooklyn arena and real estate development, you refer to “Prokhorov’s love of sports [as] part of the reason he wants to buy the Nets. He says he originally went after the New York Knicks because of their Manhattan base.” You also claim that the Brooklyn arena part of the transaction has been “held up for six years because of legal battles with local residents opposed to the new development.” Is it your view that Mr Prokhorov has succeeded in acquiring both the team franchise, and the real estate project? Are you unaware of the reports that Mr Prokhorov cannot close his deal for the team and for his share in the arena with Mr Ratner, until Mr Ratner has vacant possession of the properties standing in the way of the arena. and he does not have those yet. Are you aware that the borrowings Mr Prokhorov has said he will undertake for the transaction are also contingent on this? Are these reports incorrect, and that is why you did not report them? What evidence do you have that Mr Prokhorov and Mr Ratner can close their deal soon?
– there are two other omissions of the record of Mr Prokhorov, which your article reveals. Have you omitted recent statements by high-ranking Russian and US officials, casting negative light on Mr Prokhorov’s character and business practices, because you were intending to do, or had agreed with Mr Prokhorov, to do a promotion? Or because you were unaware of the officials and their criticisms? . The first of the criticisms of Mr Prokhorov came from the Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who criticized him for his management of the utility company TGK-4 for what might — in another country or in another medium than Bloomberg Markets — be called investment contract violations or cash stripping. Mr Putin made his statement on February 24. Also, according to Admiral Dennis Blair, the US Government’s Director of National Intelligence, Mr Prokhorov’s line of business in precious metals makes him susceptible to, or a witting party to, the “growing nexus in Russian and Eurasian states among government, organized crime, intelligence services, and big business figures. An increasing risk from Russian organized crime is that criminals and criminally linked oligarchs will enhance the ability of state or state-allied actors to undermine competition in gas, oil, aluminum, and precious metals markets.” Admiral Blair made this and related statements in testimony to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 2. Did you miss it?
It would be nice to think that in 2010 an athlete —- professional or amateur — could be judged on their performance (or the content of his or her character) rather than on something as flimsy as whether or not they’ve opted for a tattoo (or 8 dozen). For the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick — presumably tired of bitching about overpriced sneakers, cornrows and doo rags — said alterations indicate (gulp) a lack of smarts. (”I don’t care what your position is on this pop-cultural ‘advancement’ — whether you recognize that it’s another mainstreamed gift from our prison systems and street gangs — but you’ll admit that it seemed half the starters in this year’s tournament were covered with tattoos”)
Until biology and history majors can show and prove otherwise, the most susceptible to modern fashion seem to be on basketball scholarship to America’s most esteemed universities.
Heck, there were three guys who played for Tennessee yesterday whose exteriors looked as if they’d been held down and assaulted by a merciless mob of Etch-a-Sketches.
That makes me wonder. Having covered your arms, legs, chests, backs, hands and necks with permanent patterns and words — some fellas seem to have the Preamble of the Constitution (or Miranda Rights) inscribed down the length of their arms — how do they read what they had written, you know, to check for spelling?
If one is to look down at his tattoo, he sees it upside down. If he tries to admire it in a mirror, he sees it backward. Those grieving fellows who salute in skin art a deceased friend or relative may be startled to look into a mirror and read his memorial as “P.I.R.”
Anyone know, by chance, if Eric Hinske received a basketball scholarship? From this vantage point, it would either seem Phil’s not spent much time out of the house over the last two decades, or he takes special relish in mocking the intellectual capacities of a bunch of young people who just happen to be mostly black.
It’s been widely reported this evening that Cablevision’s Rainbow Media arm has purchased the Gothamist network of regional blogs — including, according to IndieWire, Austinist, a site staffed by several acquaintances of yours truly. If this is true, a handful of persons I think highly of are now in the unenviable position of working for James Dolan.
On the bright side — and I’m really struggling to come up with one — it guarantees that when Dolan’s band makes their long awaited Mohawk debut at one of Austinist’s sponsored events, TV Torso will no longer be the worst band on the bill.
Ailing film critic Roger Ebert (shown above, right, with Russ Myer) appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” yesterday, an occasion that inspired only slightly more emotion than the publication of Will Leitch’s “My Roger Ebert Story” at Deadspin. Our Man From Mattoon, as it turns out, was mentored by Ebert during the former’s tenure at the Daily Illini. Later, after arriving in New York and being encouraged to cultivate, uh, his snarky side, Leitch composed a hatchet job for Ironminds entitled “I Am Sick Of Roger Ebert’s Fat Face”. Though Leitch openly regrets the ill-advised piece (and Ebert has graciously forgiven him), the timing of the Deadspin entry is more than a little opportunistic. It’s entirely noble to call attention to Ebert’s work or to his habit of assisting young writers. It’s the height of narcissism, however, to flip the switch from Ebert’s writing or his courageous struggle with cancer to yet another clumsy bit of Leitch’s introspection.
The New York Times’ David Carr, not nearly as sickened as I, wrote, “who among us hasn’t fired the rocket, experiencing the atavistic glee of aiming something horrible at what we thought was some big, lumbering gasbag, and then come to realize that whatever the shortcomings of our target, we have just proved we are far more despicable?” That’s a fair enough question to ask, but not all of us would fire said missile at a target who’d gone out of his way to be a pal. And not all of us would use the occasion of said target’s major TV appearance to call attention to ourselves. And if you’re still wondering what would possibly provoke Leitch to have lashed out at a man he clearly considered to be something of a hero (watch your back, Rick Ankiel!), here’s his explanation.
The Web was beginning to emerge, and we young turks, swept in during the dot-com boom, all thought we were punk rock gods, ready to kill our idols. Ebert began to feel like the old guard: In the wake of Siskel’s death, he had become a ubiquitous presence on television, at the expense of his writing, I felt. In 2000, when I’d moved to New York and, like everybody else, was being paid far too much just to be told I was part of the next “MTV Generation” of Internet stars, I thought I knew everything. You had to burn down the past. These were the days of We Live in Public, of Pets.com, of bringing your dog in the office, of Webvan, of espnet.sportszone.com. We all thought we were hot shit.
I’m not sure Leitch realizes the absurdity of the claim “we all thought we were punk rock gods, ready to kill our idols.” You can rest assured Sonic Youth didn’t actually consider Robert Christgau to be an idol, but nor were they in his debt in 1983. But it’s a revealing paragraph just the same, and one that rings just as hollow as Alex Rodriguez’ talk of a loosey-goosey clubhouse climate. Leitch puts his rotten behavior into the context of the internet boom (nice work not citing Suck.com, Will) but maybe the real gist of it is something much more simple. I’ve called him “ethically challenged” in this space previously, but never before had the benefit of this intensely unpleasant social climber serving up the evidence himself on a silver platter.
On balance, I enjoyed the Super Bowl. You know, the football game from a couple days ago, the one with the commercials and that Tom Jones-looking guy (above) singing Who songs at halftime. I enjoyed it because I like NFL football games more than I am frankly comfortable with, and because the game itself was pretty interesting, and because the Saints won. I’m obviously aware that the last fact doesn’t in any way end or mend any of the myriad problems of still-suffering New Orleans itself, or do anything to justify the facile day-late/dollar-short super-sentimentalism of the sport-pundits who pretended that it could. And neither does a satisfying football game offer me much comfort in re: our broader discourse or commodified pleasures or the vexations of being a fan or whatever the hell it is that I’ve been on about the last couple weeks. Of course.
But there are times when it is nice to simply watch oneself some sports. Despite the Super Bowl’s primary purpose as a branding opportunity and a showcase for bleeding-edge misogyno-masochistic advertising innovations and all the issues I have with being addressed as if I am an aggrieved and learning-disabled sentient penis by advertisers — despite all that — I do enjoy a well-played football game. The last three Super Bowls have delivered on that (and of course on all the other stuff), and so I have generally enjoyed them.
And yet of course there’s obviously something pretty rotten about the whole thing. I linked in Sunday’s Daily Fix to Hunter Thompson’s 1973 “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” piece for Rolling Stone, and while I don’t necessarily like Thompson any more now than I ever have (not really that much) the piece is at least pretty funny and interesting in a time-capsule sense. What was fucked about the first post-Watergate Super Bowl — or what we might imagine as that, working off the druggy, malevolent, disaffected-unto-violence vibe of Thompson’s piece — just seems so much more interesting than the manufactured consent and dumb pomp and casual bile and rampant pissy childishness that defines the Super Bowl cultural experience circa now. I mean, this is what the game is, and as long as there are teams I’m at least vaguely interested in playing in the game, it’s what I’m going to watch on that given Sunday. But there remains the sense, despite the fact that I actually do enjoy watching NFL games despite all the above, that this just kind of isn’t for me.
All of which is to say that while I’m not simpatico with the perspective of Seth Colter Walls’ boycott-the-Super-Bowl diatribe at The Awl, I get what it is about the whole experience that bothers him so much. “Right now our TV bipartisanship is a lot like our political bipartisanship,” Walls writes. “It all takes place on the conservatives’ turf. It’s never a massive ‘come together’ television event when the National Book Awards are announced.” He continues:
If you only watch the Super Bowl because everyone else watches it and you feel like you ought to watch it, too, allow me to suggest that, next year, you give it a rest. If your interests have to do with anything other than sports or celebrities, at least know that the same courtesy of mass-interestedness will never be extended in your direction during peak moments of excitement related to whatever it is you care most about.
Meantime, there’s no need to inflate the numbers of Super Bowl watchers–and no urgency to make its ad time all the more lucrative for the proponents of cheap chauvinism to trade in on–unless you really want to be there. Personally, while I’m quite content to pay higher taxes in New York so that the rural dudes I grew up with can have some sort of subsidized health care available to them while they are increasingly out of work, I confess I’m somewhat weary of simultaneously having to listen to cultural products aimed at my male cohort proffer the casual suggestion that I simply must be a sissified queer for paying attention to a girl instead of that game where a bunch of dudes play grab-ass. Just saying.
Because of this, I’ll only ever watch football if I’m in the company of a friend whose excitement can have a cheering effect on me. And so it happens I didn’t watch the Super Bowl yesterday. Not because I’m more interested in “proving a point” than I am in having fun, but because even more than I don’t care about football, I don’t care about supporting the ludicrously out of date notion that this country hangs together in any manner save for geographically.
(l-r : persecuted Jew, guy with box office clout)
Actor/director Mel Gibson is “a born and raised anti-Semite” argues the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick, “What am I supposed to do, look past it, get over it? Enjoy his movies, anyway?” Only if they’re as much fun as “Payback”, Phil.
As TV commercials for Gibson’s new movie appear, and earlier this month, when Gibson appeared on NBC as a presenter of a Golden Globes award — host Ricky Gervais only poked fun at Gibson’s fondness for excessive drinking; Gibson’s anti-Semitism was politely indulged by all.
It got me to thinking about what it would have taken for Gibson to have genuinely suffered the slings, arrows and fortunes of race and/or religion-based hatred.
No wishful thinking here. Just the honest application of what you and I know about TV and modern American life.
Do you think that if Gibson’s father proclaimed South African apartheid and/or American slavery to be exaggerated — no big deals — and if Gibson then delivered a drunken, hate-filled spew about African-Americans, he’d have been invited, two weeks ago, to the podium at the Golden Globes?
If Gibson swapped Jews for blacks, do you suppose that TV networks would have accepted advertising for a new movie starring Mel Gibson?
It’s a legit enough question, though surely there are enough real life examples that Mushnick could’ve cited to disprove his own point. Drunkenly calling Ray Charles “a blind, ignorant nigger” wasn’t enough to keep Elvis Costello — one of the more critically feted musicians of the past half century — out of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Nor was Michael Richards dropping N-bombs in a semi-crowded theatre the sort of thing that precluded his participation in this past season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (which Richard playing himself and the show’s writers openly mocking said incident). One outburst may or may not be enough to sink a career — it all depends on the degree of contrition (Costello) or earning power (Gibson). But one thing is for certain ; whenever a public figure faces censure for racism towards black people, you can count on Phil Mushnick to suggest there’s some kind of crummy double-standard at work. We know plenty about Mel Gibson’s upbringing — what was up with Phil’s?
“I figure there is no opportunity to make fun of the Straight Shooter himself that you aren’t interested in,” guesses Charles Star, forwarding an item from The New York Observer’s John Koblin claiming fewer than 3 dozen persons have have opted to become paid subscribers to Newsday online since the Cablevision-owned paper retreated behind a pay wall. At least Neil Best’s Tweets are still free.
That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.
Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification.
“I heard you say 35 people,” he said, from Newsday’s auditorium in Melville. “Is that number correct?”
Mr. Jimenez nodded.
Of course, there are a few caveats. Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.
“We’re the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO,” sniffed one Newsday reporter.
Mr. Jimenez was in no mood to apologize. “That’s 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,” said Mr. Jimenez to the assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday staffer.
It must come as tremendous consolation to Newsday’s staff that their work is so accessible to Long Island residents….and virtually no one else.
“He was a part-time freelance contributor. The views he expressed on another site of course do not at all reflect our company’s views on the Haiti relief efforts. He will no longer contribute to ESPN.”
So reads the unattributed statement from ESPN Media Zone. And full credit to the widely-vilified Shirley — it’s awfully difficult to cause the network to disassociate itself nearly this fast from a person who’s kept his pants on.
The following is probably an old story for most of you, but between the Haiti telethon, Kobe’s return to MSG and Conan O’Brien’s farewell (can’t Billy Gibbons find a better band to play with?), I have to admit I missed out on what might be the most important story of our times.
It was a little more than 3 years ago that a blind item — not from a sports blog, but rather, CBS Sports.com — led to widespread speculation ESPN had suspended football analyst Sean Salisbury for sending phone-cam pics of his penis to female co-workers. There’s been no shortage of embarrassing incidents involving Salisbury since, and with the bullying blowhard’s career in a free-fall, he recently filed a civil defamation lawsuit against Deadspin’s parent company, Gawker Media. Salisbury’s prospects for winning said case and/or settling out of court with Gawker took no small hit yesterday with the following revelations, as reported by USA Today’s Michael Heistand :
Salisbury, 46, is admitting what’s already an urban legend on the Internet: that he took cellphone photos of his private parts and showed them.
Yuck. Salisbury says it only happened once — “a sophomoric mistake” in a Connecticut bar in 2006 — for which ESPN suspended him for a week for then-unspecified reasons.
“I was ashamed, and I didn’t want to say anything,” says Salisbury, who was an NFL quarterback for eight years and an ESPN NFL analyst for 12. “I thought it would go away and let my ego get in the way. Since then, I’ve beat myself up about it more than 10 baseball bats could. A stupid mistake can cost you, and this has really cost me. I should have been having this conversation a long time ago.”
Salisbury feels better from having had anger-management therapy — “I needed help. I had a lot of inner anger for years.” He says he’s trying to champion the cause of accuracy in online reporting in a lawsuit against Deadspin that he insists is anything but frivolous.
And the book he said he’d write about ESPN in an erratic e-mail exchange with Deadspin in September — saying “some major reputations” would be ruined — is now off.
“I’m not a tell-all guy and regret saying that,” he says.
Only the hardhearted wouldn’t see a chance for his redemption.
So true. Who amongst us wouldn’t give a second chance to a braying egomanic who insists sending unsolicted snapshots of his schlong to female colleagues is “not malicious”? Full credit to Salisbury, who somehow managed to top both Mark McGwire and John Edwards in the Unsurprising Public Confession Sweepstakes of Early 2010.
The planned appointment of Rod Liddle (above) as the Independent’s new editor had already attracted considerable criticism, and on the surface, it’s a curious move. Imagine, if you will, Sean Hannity being installed as the new host of “All Things Considered”. However, after revelations in Sunday’s Daily Mail that Liddle is a regular contributor to a Millwall F.C. message board under the handle, “monkeymfc”, the former “Today” producer might be a bit tougher to employ. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade digs a bit deeper ;
Since the story broke, more research has exposed several outrageous comments attributed to monkeymfc. Here are some examples, accepting that they may be the result of a person, or persons, posing as Liddle and also accepting that Liddle may even be unaware of their existence (the Millwall online site is not easy to navigate).
In November, one thread carried a monkeymfc comment that stated:
“Stupid bitch. A year eight sociology lecture from someone who knows fck all. You could equally say that we were similar to any group which disliked a certain aspect of society, felt estranged from it but were sure we were right.”
“The logical extension of her argument is that the status quo is always right, which is absurd, because if that were true nothing would change. Someone kick her in the cnt.”
In a thread entitled Visited Aushwitz on Saturday the monkeymfc comment is grossly offensive to victims of the Holocaust.
“I went a year or so back. Fcking outrageous that you can’t smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout. And the Polish guide kept lying about Polish involvement in the persecution of the Jews.”
“Also, I wasn’t convinced by the newish Auschwitz Burger Bar and Grill which they’ve got when you go through the entrance, near where all those shoes are on display.”
When I reached him by phone last night to ask what he had to say about the monkeymfc postings, he said initially: “Make up whatever you like”.
He then said he had spent some considerable time earlier explaining his hacking problems to a Guardian reporter, Vikram Dodd. Dodd said that Liddle had told him he was the victim of hacking due to other users of the site guessing his password, which he has since changed.
This may well be true. Someone may be trying to blacken his name. If so, perhaps he should have previously spotted the misuse of his username because the posts date back to October last year.
Liddle’s previous password was “millwall”. While this sort of thing is a widespread problem for allegedly educated persons, Liddle has since admitted the Auschwitz comments were his handiwork.
From Thursday’s Washington Post. Times New Viking, unavailable for comment.
OK, that’s not exactly what the Gawker Media proprietor had to say, but close enough. Along with crediting the recent “Miss Universe threeway” for a boost to the bottom line of Fleshbot, Nick Denton (above) is quick to hail Steve Phillips’ recent zipper issues (and A.J. Daulerio’s dramatic response) with boosting Deadspin’s traffic in a memo republished by Poynter.org :
From: Nick Denton
Subject: Nearly!
To: edit@gawker.com
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 12:36 PM
Just a shade off 400m pageviews in November. Damn. Close. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles Times is somewhere between 100m and 200m. New York Times is about 1bn. In web traffic, we’re somewhere in between. Not bad for a bunch of scrappy bloggers!
io9 sucked those Twilight vampires dry. The scifi site continues to run at twice the traffic of this time last year. It’s now twice the size of Boing Boing, the closest competitor — a site which has been around since the beginning of the blogs. io9’s growth means that we now have not a single site under 20m pageviews a month. (The threshold of success used to be 1m!)
The ESPN controversy and other stories seem to have left Deadspin at a consistently higher level than the summer. It’s also doubled in traffic. If you needed any more evidence that scoops are rewarded, here it is. Deadspin has largely abandoned the blog filler. The site is down to 20 posts a day. But they’re damn good posts.
(above, a possible alternative to ‘Going Rogue’, if you’re shopping at Building 19)
You might recall in June of 2008, the Associated Press revealed a controversial licensing scheme under which blogs would be expected to compensate the A.P. for quotes as short as 5 words. Compare and contrast the news organization’s stance with their zeal to share portions of Sarah Palin’s recently published ‘Going Rogue’, as reported by Talking Points Memo’s Christina Bellatoni (link h/t Rebecca Tushnet, Boing Boing)
Mike Oreskes, a senior managing editor, offers staffers a description of the AP’s own work tracking down and fact checking the book and it reads like a spy thriller:
“The AP was determined to get the first copy,” Oreskes wrote, detailing how the writers learned a store had “inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date.”
“They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched,” he wrote. “A NewsNow moved within 40 minutes, followed quickly by multiple leads as details were gleaned from the 413-page manuscript.”
Suffice to say the following item from Sunday’s News Of The World takes just a bit of the shine off Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat of Manchester United. Is it fair to say Chelsea centre back / England international John Terry (above) might be the only prominent athlete who looks at Joba Chamberlain’s mom and feels just a bit jealous?
As he handed over three wraps of coke in the toilet of an Essex wine bar, Ted Terry trousered £40 profit and told us: “The stuff’s all right. I get off on it.”
Ted heaped SHAME on the England captain by fixing a secret drug deal – then asked an undercover News of the World investigator not to mention his famous son.
After selling three grams of cocaine to our man, who pretended to be buying for his wealthy boss, Ted insisted:
“This is just between me and you. DON’T tell him that I’m John Terry’s dad. I can’t have this going back, I’m not saying that they’ll say anything, but you never know.
“You CAN’T tell them I’m John Terry’s dad. I’ve just got them a load of gear.”
A bunch of readers have asked how singer Ronan Tynan can be booted from Yankee Stadium for making an anti-Semitic remark in private, one for which he apologized, yet days later singer Jay-Z, who in public calls black men “n – - – - – s” and degrades women as “bitches,” performs before a World Series game in Yankee Stadium. Good question. Ask Bud Selig – Phil Mushnick, NY Post , November 1, 2009
No need to trouble the Used Car Salesman, Phil. I’d love to tackle this one, and it’s a great double standard to raise given your almost pathological insistence that all modern claims of racism against African-Americans are wild exaggerations. Tynan was booted because anti-semitism is usually considered less socially acceptable than Jay-Z operating within the time honored artistic practice of writing in character. Despite an overwhelmingly negative portrait of Italian-Americans as thugs, cast members from “The Sopranos” are welcome guests in sporting venues across America. Not once have we read a word of protest from Mushnick, whose cultural wading pool is so dangerously shallow, he’s likely to still be bitching about hip-hop in 2025, if he lives that long.
For New Yorkers of a certain vintage, shots of a manical Penny Crone cackling away in front of celebrating Yankee fans were a big a part of the local TV news tapestry, right up there with regular Freddy “Sez” sightings. The exploits of the former WNYW reporter — now selling real estate for a tony NYC agency — are remembered fondly by the New York Times’ James Barron.
Early in Derek Jeter’s career, she took a look at him in street clothes, and wondered about the fit of his slacks.
“I walked right up to Derek Jeter and I said, ‘Derek, why don’t you wear tighter pants?’ ” she recalled. “And what did Derek say? Not too much. He looked at me like I was nuts.”
“Gatorade man”? She yelled that at someone who walked into the stadium with a large barrel of — well, you know. He was blocking her shot, which ruins everything in television news. The man turned out to be Willie Randolph, a Yankees coach at the time and later the manager of the Mets.
There was the day she went to a bagel factory and the anchor introduced her as “an industrial accident waiting to happen.”
And there was the time she interviewed Yogi Berra and called him “Yogi Bear.”
“My husband told me that Yogi Berra was named after Yogi Bear,” she said, “so I thought his name was Yogi Bear. So we’re sitting in his living room, me on one side, Yogi Berra on the other, the fireplace, and I said, ‘Good evening, Mr. Bear.’
Would it have been so difficult for someone at the Post to properly research what a traditional Hawaiian skirt really looks like? And surely the persons responsible for this front cover of today’s paper are aware once you go down this particular road, there’s no turning back?
(back when Phillips actually worked in New York. With apologies to the Rotters)
Given the New York Post’s exhaustive coverage of Steve Phillips’ sex life this week, you might be mistaken for thinking the disgraced ESPN baseball analyst’s face actually sold newspapers. As such, it’s curious with all the coverage of Phillips’ zipper issues, few have wondered why a major New York tabloid would devote nearly as much time and attention to a person not nearly as famous to the general public as Michael Jackson or Balloon Boy. That Phillips’ embarrassment would be grist for Deadspin and countless other sports blogs is no surprise. Via his shoddy broadcast work and/or tenure as Mets general manager, Phillips became a widely mocked figure long before he was accused of getting busy in a Target parking lot. But even assuming half of the Post’s readers are Mets fans, how many of them were aching to see Phillips take a spectacular, personal fall?
A case like the Phillips/Hundley affair doesn’t make the front page — even in a slow news week — without authorization from the top. And the higher you go up the ladder, the more this seems like an arm of NewsCorp has gone to deliberate lengths to publicly humiliate a major competitor. Is Fox going to win future bidding rights to the NBA because Steve Phillips was horny? Probably not — and they might not want said rights, anyway. But every little revelation that proves hurtful to ESPN is making someone in Rupert Murdoch’s organization smile.
So with all that said, congratulations to Phil Mushnick for towing the company line this week. “The only time ESPN indulges — even encourages — sexual insensitivity from employees is as a matter of commerce,” lectured Phil in today’s paper, “while in public, on ESPN, ESPN Radio, in ESPN the Magazine or ESPN.com.” As opposed to Fox TV, Fox Sports, NewsCorp’s movie studios and newspapers, none of which ever stoop to pander? By all means, kick Phillips when he’s down. If baseball fans are lucky, when he gets back up he’ll be doing something far quieter. But don’t pretend for a minute that ESPN is any more or less a corrupting, degrading societal force compared to their competition.
“Tubby temptress”, “Cuckoo for coco puffs”, “geek”, “portly production-assistant”. A smattering of rude remarks about Steve Phillips’ ESPN colleague/mistress Brooke Hundley from Deadspin commentators? Nope, instead, it’s a cross section of insults delivered by the dedicated news team at the New York Post, who’ve apparently decided the only person more deserving of scorn than Richard Heene is a young woman who didn’t take kindly to being dumped faster than Marco Scutaro. The remarks about Ms. Hundley’s weight are slightly curious in that the Post doesn’t supply full body shots of any of their columnists (and you’ve been dying to see a full-frontal of Phil Mushnick for years). Mo Vaughn was in far worse physical condition than Hundley, and Phillips didn’t catch nearly as much grief over that relationship.
Finally, the Post supplies a written statement to police prepared by Phillips’ 16 year old son, in which Hundley is accused of using the handle, “riotgrrl4life” in her stalktastic correspondence. At the risk of piling on even further, I’m gonna out on a limb and presume Fifth Column weren’t on the tape deck when Phillips allegedly hooked up with Hundley in the parking lot of a Target on I-84. Really, Target parking lots. Boston Market. Never let it be said that portion of Connecticut is without glamor.
At the risk of making light of a very sad situation for Steve Phillips’ family, I think i speak for baseball fans across the country when upon learning of the former Mets GM’s suspension from ESPN, the first thing I thought of was, “why are the network’s interns and production assistants so resistant to the charms of Joe Morgan?” While you’re wondering if ESPN isn’t an acronym for “Extremely Serious Penis Needs”, the New York Post’s Jeane Macintosh and Dan Magan provide many sordid details.
ESPN analyst Steve Phillips had a fling with a 22-year-old production assistant, who, after being dumped, taunted his wife with “Fatal Attraction”-like phone calls and a letter that bragged about her sexcapades with Phillips while taking pot shots at their “loveless marriage,” The Post has learned.
The former Met general manager, whose tenure with the team was rocked by admissions of infidelity, confessed to his wife and local cops that he had slept with ESPN assistant Brooke Hundley several times this past summer before dumping her.
Hundley’s desperate actions included accidentally smashing her car into a stone column while speeding away from the Phillips’ home.
You can (and undoubtedly will) read the full piece if you want more dirt, and there’s plenty to sift thru, including Hundley allegedly harassing Phillips’ 16 year old son via Facebook and a very precise physical description of the Baseball Tonight analysist’s crotch that most assuredly falls under the category of more than anyone wanted to know. With any luck, we’ll be spared similar revelations someday concerning John Kruk. Until then, however, perhaps the only really funny portion of this story is The Post crediting “additional reporting” to one Phil Mushnick. Never let it be said Phil isn’t a team player.
I’d heard in passing last week that former Mets starter / current SNY broadcaster Ron Darling was being chased by the IRS and the states of New York and California over back taxes and penalties. Said tibdit, while slightly newsworthy, places Ronnie in a pantheon of Americans that one time or another has included Willie Nelson, Chuck Berry and uh, Leona Helmsley.. There could be any number of mitigating circumstances in Darling’s case, but that’s tough fuckin’ luck in the eyes of The Detroit News’ “Tax Watchdog”, Robert Snelll, who preaches, “every year, about $345 billion in federal taxes are either late or unpaid, , ripping open holes in budgets and shortchanging schools and public safety. That forces taxpayers to cough up more than their fair share.”
Snell failed to get an explanation from Darling why a guy who earned nearly $18 million in his big league career couldn’t pay his taxes, but perhaps Ronnie can’t comment if there’s pending litigation? The place to negotiate a settlement or fight a dispute with a powerful government agency isn’t in the pages of the Detroit News. That said, so long as we’re shining a bright light on the importance of paying one’s share, perhaps Snell would be kind enough to upoad a PDF of his 2009 federal and state returns? (Thanks to David Roth for the link)
Gawker’s John Cook reported earlier today that CityFile issued a retraction and apology earlier today over a July item headlined, “”Jim Dolan To Kill Christmas In July?” In said post, CF suggested Cablevision/MSG chief Dolan was contemplating shutting down the Rockettes’ annual Radio City Xmas revue or replacing the legendary troupe with another act (the Knicks City Dancers?). Apparently, out of all the disparaging things that have been written about Dolan over the years, THIS was the one deemed worthy of Dolan filing a defamation suit.
“We now realize that we could have done more to ensure that all relevant facts were included in the article,” sputtered CF, despite the original item including attempts by their reporter to contact the relevant Cablevision subsidiary for comment (they declined).
So there you have it. Not only is Dolan the saboteur of one of the NBA’s most glittering properties, he’s not merely one of the most horrible Blues Hammer tribute artists known to man, but he’s also a bona fide enemy of free expression.
Food and architecture critic Jonathan Meades’ recent BBC 4 series “Off Kilter” concluded with the narrator’s journey through what the Beeb describes as “towns only known from football coupons.” The Guardian’s Martin Kellner found the grim 3rd episode, “a stunning film, but one unlikely to be streamed on visitscotland.com.”
Where there was a choice between focusing on a row of wheelie bins in an urban wasteland or a troupe of bonnie tartan-clad Scottish lassies skipping through a field of bluebells, guess which Meades chose. In fact, the only tartan that appeared anywhere in the film illustrated a typical Meades diatribe against the 50 million Scots who live elsewhere, whom he called “lachrymose believers in this land of tartan shortbread, mail order cabers and bagpipe glens”. Their beef with the English he dismissed as “a 200-year-old PR stunt, the world’s longest-running exercise in victimhood”.
Over archive footage of fierce pit-head picketing Meades talked of “the human cost of efficiency, and adherence to the bottom line”, and “tens of thousands rationalised into involuntary idleness”. Fife, he said, was where we see “the social and environmental effects of the initially attritional and consequently violent coiffeur clash between the free-trading ideological helmet modelled by iron steel girder Margaret from Finchley and the smug warm-over worn by King Arthur of Stalindale, South Yorkshire”.
The programme was full of fine fancy writing like this – like Michael Moore with wit. Comparing Scotland’s part-time footballers with their counterparts in England’s top division, he characterised the Premier Leaguers as “a bespoke cast of gladiatorial yob-gods, wag-roasting Croesus kids, who once a week descend from their Parnassian blingsteads to run around for 90 golden minutes of bravura vanity”. I cannot remember when I have enjoyed a TV programme more but I doubt there will be much dancing in the streets of Raith.
Former ESPN football analyst Sean Salisbury recently left Dallas radio outlet 105.3 The Fan, an incident yours truly headlined with “It Is Possible To Lose A Broadcasting Job Without Sending A Single MMS Of Your Cock”. Said unwieldy headline was of course, inspired by earlier allegations Salibury had sent phone-cam pics of his penis to “numerous, uncomfortable women”. A subsequent Deadspin post on the end of Salisbury’s tenure in Big D suggested more “cellphone hijinx” were to blame, a claim the former QB’s representative angrily denied.
Fast forward a week later, and S.S. has engaged Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio in the most ill-advised offensive since The Bay Of Pigs. In a series of rambling e-mail missives, each including the signature line, “sent from my iPhone”, Salisbury insists “ur guys lies and carelessness about CBS and espn stories has not only ruined my reputation but has cost me jobs so prepare urself for a lawsuit so big I will own deadspin.” Much as I love to think Salisbury as Deadspin owner/publisher would result in, y’know, more than 2 links a year to CSTB, I’m gonna guess the mooted legal action is about as likely to scare Daulerio and Nick Denton as Sean’s threat to publish a book entitled, “espn exposed. The truth inside the r rated company” has Disney executives quaking in their boots.
Further messages from Salisbury are equal parts delusional (”u guys are about to revitalize my career and bank account”) and vengeful (”so you know I got some pics and smut on you that are gonna give you a taste of how it feels”). Stadium Insider is amongst those who’ve had enough of the car crash, tweeting, “it was newsworthy when he showed people his thing. It was newsworthy when he got fired multiple times….But now it has gotten to a point where the constant updates need to stop and someone needs to provide help for a mental breakdown of a human.” I’m not sure I agree — there’s clearly a time and place for this kind of outburst, though I don’t know if Salisbury is registered to comment at Deadspin.
Top that, Ted Baxter. It’s been said that local news programs cannot possibly compete with the the internet, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. And that’s usually correct, but in this instance, Ernie’s accomplished the near impossible — he might actually cause a few dozen more persons to watch Fox’s NYC affiliate’s evening newscast, just on the off-case Anastos might once again say the first thing that popped into his head.
At present, subscribers to Cablevision are denied access to the Tennis Channel ; Dolan Inc. would prefer the Tennis Channel being offered as part of their Sports Pak. Much like the NFL Network in years past, the Tennis Channel would naturally, rather be available as part of a basic package. A protest advertisement aimed at Cablevision customers ran in a number of newspapers this weekend, but not Cablevision-owned Newsday. Tennis Channel chief exec Ken Solomon tells the New York Times’ Richard Sandomir he’s surprised the ad was rejected, “The newspaper industry is not doing all that well, so it’s a surprise they turned down this amount of money.” No kidding, that might need that dough to sign Ramon Sessions.
“Thanks for nothing Cablevision,” says the ad, which shows a tennis racket smashing a cable box.
It adds: “You’ve dropped the ball by preventing your subscribers from seeing Tennis Channel’s round-the-clock coverage of the U.S. Open.” It invites Cablevision customers to switch to DirecTV, Dish TV or Verizon FiOS to get access to the coverage.
The channel said that the ad was accepted by all the newspapers it was offered to — the New York Times, New York Post, Daily News, Westchester-Rockland Journal News and the Record of New Jersey.
Newsday’s decision not to carry the ad raises questions about the paper’s independence from Cablevision and whether it would have accepted the ad under its previous owner, the Tribune Company.
Bob Steele, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, said, “There are times when a newspaper says no to an ad because they find it objectionable on taste grounds, or find it filled with hatred for a particular group of people. But this one doesn’t measure up in terms of protection because they’re protecting themselves.”
Howard Schneider, a former Newsday editor who is dean of the journalism school at Stony Brook University, said, “It’s not a felony to protect your economic self-interest unless it influences your news coverage.”
Imagine if you will, NFL commish Roger Goodell “casting a wide net” in seeking advice on how to handle the reinstatement of Michael Vick. In the creative minds of “Tank McNamara” creators Jeff Millar and Bill Hinds, a certain former Vice President has some rather unique advice for Commissioner Goodell. Readers of the Washington Post, however, will have to live with a “Tank” rerun today, writes the paper’s Michael Canva, describing his employers’ decision thusly (links courtesy Paul Lukas)
Post Managing Editor Raju Narisetti says the decision was a no-brainer: The original strips were deemed “inappropriate.”
If today’s strip proves controversial, I believe it’s because the satiric point wasn’t sharp enough; in which case, some readers are left wondering why “Dick Cheney” would order that “Mike Vick” be iced. Without a clearly, commonly accepted truth to rest the satire on — no matter how exaggerated — readers are left to scratch heads or drop jaws. And editors are more likely to be the ones to decide that someone needs to be “killed”: “Tank.”
With all due respect to Mr. Canva, I’m not sure it would be such a huge stretch to envision Cheney making such a comment.
In June of ‘08, the Associated Press unveiled a new licensing scheme in which rank & file blogging scum would pay as little as $12.50 or as much as $100.00 to quote from an AP story. At the time, Making Light’s Patrick Neilsen Hayden warned, “welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.” A little more than a year later, headline writers at the New York Times suggest they consider such blogging, “pirated journalism”, with the Gray Lady’s Saul Hansell reporting on one company’s plans to track activity between newspapers and “even the tiniest sites that copy their articles.”
The plan faces many technical and legal hurdles. Attributor wants to take some of the ad money that would have been paid to the pirate site and give it to the copyright owner instead. To do that it needs the cooperation of big advertising networks like those run by Google and Yahoo. So far those companies have reacted coolly to the proposal.
Still, Attributor has been able to attract many major publishing companies to what it calls the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is exploring its ideas. These include The New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast.
For now those companies have committed only to receiving data from Attributor about how widely their content is being used on Web sites that don’t pay for it. Later they will decide whether to proceed with the revenue-sharing plan.
Attributor co-founder Mr. Pitkow said a study in January of 250,000 articles from 25 publishers showed that on average, each article appeared on 11 unauthorized sites. Looking at traffic data, Attributor calculated that five times as many people read each article on pirate sites as on the site of the publisher. And it estimated that collectively the publishers were losing $250 million a year from unauthorized copying.
Steven Wells aka Swells aka Seething Wells, the Yorkshire spoken word artist, author, music journalist and sporting critic, has passed away at the age of 49 following a long battle with lympathic cancer. Wells’ columns for the Guardian —- written from his subsequent Philadelphia home — have been quoted at length in CSTB, and perhaps some enterprising person will compile a stack of them into a book of some sort. To call Wells a contrarian is only skimming the surface of his skills. There have been few scribes on either side of the pond — in the music or sports spheres — who could match his wit, or maintained bullshit detectors so finely attuned. He’ll be sorely missed and our thoughts go out to his family, friends and colleagues.
[What Does a Guy in That Hat Know About Baseball Anyway?]
While I don’t have much of an opinion yet on SCOTUS nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor (outside of my knee-jerk rubber stamp approval for Obama), of note to baseball fans is the Obama Administration touting her as the judge who “saved baseball.” In 1995, Sotomayor ruled in the baseball strike that stymied everyone from MLB, the players union, and President Clinton. Given Obama’s South Side sympathies, he’s always on thin ice when talking baseball. However, there’s a long list of baseball observers who think she did save that season. The National Review’s Ted Frank quickly tried to shoot down that notion here:
That’s nonsense. Judge Sotomayor ruled on a NLRB petition seeking an injunction against the owner’s 1995 lockout of the players. As I noted at the time, the court hearing the matter would be making a straightforward ruling on labor law: and the owners were plainly in the wrong legally by their conduct in the labor negotiations. Any judge randomly assigned to the case would have made the same ruling. Indeed, a three judge panel of the Second Circuit, in an opinion by conservative Judge Ralph Winter, unanimously upheld Sotomayor’s grant of the injunction.
To say that the judge in the case saved baseball (or expressed sympathy for highly paid baseball players, as Kathryn snarks below) is making the very mistake that separates conservative viewpoints on the role of the judiciary from Obama’s view of the judiciary as activist. A judge acts as an umpire, making the calls of balls and strikes: neither the judge nor the umpire is supposed to decide that one party is more sympathetic than the other and deserves the benefit of the ruling.
Presidential hyperbole or not, 90% of life is showing up, and she made a competent ruling – not to be taken lightly in post-Bush America – so, yeah, she gets credit for moving the season forward.
I quote Frank, though, as yet another conservative making that tired umpires = Supreme Court Justice equation. They apparently have no idea what umpires do for a living. It’s the Court’s job to rule on the Constitutionality of laws — they invalidate or uphold them via decisions of lower courts. Umpires don’t invalidate or validate baseball rules – they are the lower court. Umpires don’t strike down the infield fly rule or shift the score in a game to help a team disadvantaged by a smaller payroll over a big city team (except in the case of the Pirates and Cubs last night – WTF!?!?!?). It wasn’t the umpires who invalidated “seperate but equal” in baseball and let Jackie Robinson play. It was the Court, in Brown v Board of Education, that desegregated schools. Umpires didn’t even decide the recent Milton Bradley 1-game suspension dispute. Disputed decisions are settled by MLB, a higher authority, that also determines which rules go into effect each season. Whatever you think of the “activist judge” debate, Justices are not umpires. It’s an intellectually dishonest argument, if politcally savvy, in the bumper sticker mentality of talk radio. Feh.
If the New York Times ownership fails to bully the 4 unions representing the Boston Globe’s workforce, the latter paper could be history within 60 days. In the eyes of longtime Boston radio hatefucker Howie Carr, dictating to someone at the competing Boston Herald, this is unquestionably terrific news.
They can’t brag enough about their Pulitzer prizes, like they’re on the level or something. Seriously, the limousine liberals who pass the Politically Correct Pulitzers around among themselves every spring ought to rename them the Olbermanns and run the awards ceremony live on MSNBC. Truth in advertising.
Belatedly, the Globe has been trying to present as its public face the salt-of-the-earth types in the backshop, guys who live in towns like Weymouth and went to work at the paper out of high school.
These are the same blue-collar Massachusetts natives that the bow-tied bumkissers upstairs alternately disdain or despise as mean-spirited bigots who can’t be trusted to vote the “right way.”
Outside the employees themselves and a few limp bloggers, nobody cares about the Globe’s demise. Let the epitaph be: Smug Is Not a Workable Business Plan. These pampered poodles assumed they had a monopoly. Nobody ever has a monopoly, at least not for long.
I’ll miss the old Globe. It was a laff-riot – remember in 2006 when its crack sports columnist previewed the Final Four matchup between George Mason and LSU, except there was no such game. They were in opposite brackets.
One last thing to all my dear friends on the Boulevard.
We’re not hiring.
With a daily circulation roughly half of the failing Globe’s, that’s not really a surprise. Or anything to brag about.
(Denim’s Lawrence Hayward – anyone leave any messages?)
“Never has a single fabric done so little for so many.” So proclaimed the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Akst earlier this week, opining that denim “looks bad on almost everyone who isn’t thin, yet has somehow made itself the unofficial uniform of the fattest people in the world.” Calling denim, “the SUV of fabrics, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a hulking Land Rover to the Whole Foods Market”, Akst’s anti-Levi’s baton is snatched by the Guardian’s Philly-based scribe, Steven Wells, who confesses, “ I am afraid that the conservatives have us by the clearly outlined (by too-tight denim) balls.”
Years of gig going has provided me with the invariably correct rule of thumb that if a band amble on stage dressed in blue denim we are certain to be subjected to a dope-fogged aural sludgefest. Can’t be arsed to dress properly usually means can’t be arsed to write music properly. Which is why, of course, indie is awash with denim. And why one of the worst bands in the world was, in fact, called Denim. Actually, now I’ve researched it, there are loads of bands called Denim and they’re all dreadful. Go ahead and google them, but keep the sick bucket handy.
On the other hand there are bands who wear denim but are not shit. Motörhead and Status Quo spring to mind. But then these guys also rock ponytails. Which suggests that they are, for some reason, beyond criticism. Probably because they’re best mates with really scary bikers.
From now on all bands must wear leather, gold lamé or fake tiger (or leopard) print trousers – no exceptions. Or shark-skin or two-tone suits. (No shorts under any circumstances, but total nakedness is, as always, perfectly acceptable. Especially if you’re really fat.) U2, on the other hand, must wear jeans at all times. So that people can see just how much they suck.
A more responsible sportsblog would have something or other to cut & paste add regarding Roy Keane’s appointment as manager of Ipswich, however, as you already know, you’re not reading that blog. Rather, let’s consider the age old question “who the heck listens to James O’Brien on LBC?”, which can finally be answered with “Frank Lampard’s sister”. From The Independent’s Mark Hughes :
Stung by press reports that his ex-girlfriend had labelled him “heartless”, the Chelsea and England midfielder telephoned a radio station yesterday to defend his personal conduct following his split with Elen Rives, the mother of his two daughters.
The story was discussed by LBC presenter James O’Brien on his morning phone-in show, prompting the Chelsea captain to call the radio station and berate him. Lampard, 30, said: “My sister just called me and said she was distressed by your comments calling me weak and scum. Is that right?”
O’Brien tried to explain his comments, but Lampard, clearly upset at the intrusion into his private life, said: “You don’t even know me.” The Premier League star was particularly incensed by O’Brien’s suggestion that he was a bad father and added: “Every penny I earn and every yard I run on the football pitch is for my kids. The hardest part of this whole break-up for me is not waking up with my kids every day.
“I hope that one day your wife or girlfriend doesn’t come to you and say, ‘I don’t want to be with you anymore, and unfortunately that means you won’t see the kids for a few days a week.’ That will hurt you.”
O’Brien admitted that it would “break my heart” and the footballer responded: “Yeah, and it’s breaking my heart. Do you think I’m happy?”
Lampard went on to say that yesterday was the first anniversary of his mother’s death. Pat Lampard died of pneumonia aged 58. He added: “That’s had a huge impact on my relationship at home. Today the only reason I ring you is because my sister is distressed. Do you think my sister needs to hear idiots like you … on the radio?”
The presenter said he was unaware of the date’s significance and “apologised unreservedly”. Lampard added: “Sometimes you should think about things before you speak about them.“
Salutations to Smackcaster for remembering that Billy Crystal’s first-person (first-building?) guest NY TImes editorial in-the-voice of Yankee Stadium was far inferior to a similar concept executed last Autumn by Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci. That Crystal (above) might not have seen Verducci’s earlier effort is somewhat believable — after all, who reads Sports Illustrated anymore? That Crystal’s editors at the Times couldn’t be bothered to research something as simple as “has anyone tried this yet?” is kind of staggering. Had they known, it’s doubtful they’d want to expose a guest contributor to so much ridicule.
I don’t like to blow smoke, but my death is unlike any loss seen before in America. I am tangible Americana, like Independence Hall, the Alamo or Graceland. I have been about more than baseball. The first papal mass ever celebrated in the Western Hemisphere? That was me. The first overtime game in NFL history? Me. The birthplace of the “DEE-fense! DEE-fense!” chant? Of the Bronx cheer? Of the triple-decker ballpark in this country? The electronic scoreboard, the replay video board, the “Win one for the Gipper” aphorism, what it means to get Wally Pipped, the standing applause on two-strike counts, the running leap onto home plate to punctuate a walk-off homer? Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me and me.
It’s not only the Babe and the Mick and Derek Jeter who played inside my walls. It’s Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, John Philip Sousa and Pink Floyd, Knute Rockne and Vince Lombardi, Billy Graham and Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush. – Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated, September 18, 2008
People used to pay to walk through me, just to see what it felt like. They wanted to see where the Babe played, where Lou cried, where Thurman dressed, where we won, where we lost, the black. They stood in the middle of me, just like the Coliseum in Rome, and silently imagined what it was like.
I had a good life, not just in baseball. How about my Giants and the greatest football game ever played? Joe Louis beat up Schmeling here; we packed it for the popes, and it wasn’t even bobblehead day. Nelson Mandela became a Yankee here. When the Towers fell, the city came to me to mourn.
So what did I do to deserve this? It’s no fun getting old. You start losing your friends. No Eddie at the organ, no Phil, no Mel, the Red Head, no Bobby. I hear Shea is gone. Too bad. I mean, it’s not a real loss, but too bad. Long history, short memory. Aw, maybe it’s time. New, bigger, better. That’s what people want, they say. Sometimes, that ain’t the answer. – Billy Crystal, New York Times, April 19, 2009
Indeed, the demoliton of Shea Stadium was no great loss, but neither would be never hearing again from a Steinbrenner-suckup whose artistic achievements plateaued when playing the part of Jodie Dallas 32 years ago.
Maybe, if the competing paper has their facts straight. From WBZ.com :
According to the Boston Herald, Henry told the New York Times – which is trying to sell its 17-percent stake in the Sox – that if he bought the Times piece of the Red Sox, he would also take the Globe “off their hands.”
There was no official offer made, the paper reported.
In an email to the Herald, Henry said:
“Baseball fans rely heavily on newspapers. No one wants to see a newspaper with a great, long-term history go away. Losing the Globe, the Herald or any New England paper is a big loss for the Red Sox.”
The Times has demanded a total of $20 million in savings from the Globe’s 13 unions within a month, or it has threatened to shutter the newspaper
Last June, the Associated Press unveiled a scheme in which blogs would have to pay a licensing free ranging from $12.50 for five words quoted, up to $100.00 for 251 words or more. Presumably, this licensing program isn’t bringing in enough revenue, as the AP would now like to see other media paying to use the same You Tube clips the Google-owned entity invites all users to embed. From PaidContent.org’s Rory Maher :
According to a blog posting by the manager of WTNQ-FM, the AP contacted the station after it had embedded a video from the AP’s official YouTube page on its website. It asked the station to immediately take the video down. The manager, Frank Strovel, was surprised to receive an email from a regional radio rep at the AP that said: “I noticed you are posting our video content without a license and have to ask you to remove the AP video content from the site ASAP. If you would like to know more about our web services, please contact me.”
It is the exchange that followed the initial takedown notice that suggests the AP may not be as well-versed in the web world as it should be. As is fairly widely known in the digital-media circles, when an official YouTube partner (and the AP is likely one) posts a video to the site, any other publisher can take that video and embed it on their own site. In return, the creator of that video (in this case the AP) gets a cut of any ad revenue that YouTube reaps from the video. This is spelled out pretty clearly in the paperwork YouTube provides its partners.
But when Strovel pointed out that the video was taken from the AP’s official YouTube page, the AP rep continued to insist that Strovel take it down. Ironically, after much back and forth, the AP told the station that it could use a player it provides to show AP videos—and may even be able to share some of the ad revenue. Strovel, understandably, was left scratching his head as to what the difference was between what the station had originally done and what the AP later offered as a solution, and why the AP was making such a big deal of this. (In the unlikely event the AP is not a YouTube preferred partner, it should know its videos can be embedded on other sites anyway without advertising when its creates a page on YouTube.)
“If I want to find out what’s going on in this city, I’ve got to go to a fucking bar and talk to a police lieutenant and take notes on a cocktail napkin,” moans “The Wire” creator David Simon (above, third from left) to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman. “That’s what passes for high-end journalism in Baltimore these days.” Lest you think Season 5 settled all of the old scores for Simon, “The Wire”’s recent UK success has afforded him another opportunity to take a shot at the American news media.
Simon doesn’t respond well to the criticism that perhaps things aren’t entirely bad – that his shows’ unremitting pessimism distorts a world where some people do defeat the crushing force of social institutions. Last year, the journalist Mark Bowden made that charge in the Atlantic magazine, and Simon hasn’t forgiven him. “This premise that The Wire wasn’t real because it didn’t show people having good outcomes in west Baltimore … I don’t know what to tell him. We didn’t spend a series in a cul-de-sac with people barbecuing; it was the story of what’s happening at the bottom rungs of an economy where capitalism has been allowed free rein. And if he’s telling me it’s not happening, I want to take his fucking entitled ass and drive him to west Baltimore and shove him out of the car, at Monroe and Fayette, and say, find your way back, fucker, because you’ve got your head up your ass at the Atlantic.”
Behind Simon’s general disillusion is a disillusionment with journalism, the only work he ever wanted to do. Raised in a secular Jewish household in the Washington suburbs, he wrote for his school magazine, then was so busy editing the University of Maryland newspaper that it took him five years to graduate (”with terrible grades”). In his final year he began stringing for the local paper, the Sun; his wife, the novelist Laura Lippman, is another former Sun reporter. The way he tells it, the central betrayal of Simon’s life is the gutting of the Sun by profit-obsessed owners and Pulitzer-obsessed editors. One of those reviled executives, Bill Marimow, gets an obnoxious police lieutenant named after him in The Wire; Scott Templeton, the weaselly fabricator of season five, is modelled on a Sun colleague. (Other former staffers describe Simon as a perpetual picker of fights.)
The collapse of the US newspaper industry has left politicians free to pursue their unethical schemes unscrutinised. “The internet does froth and commentary very well, but you don’t meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse,” he says. “Oh to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model. To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”
Who was the bow-tie wearing economics reporter that was like a sex machine to all the chicks?
I’m in Los Angeles this afternoon, where there are a few things that never seem to change. Seeing a sign that reads “Flynt Aviation” always makes me wonder if I’d really trust Larry Flynt to run an airline. The jukebox at Barney’s Beanery still plays Dramarama (hard enough to understand the first time around) and Bill Plaschke (above) is still pretending he said something to an athlete’s face that would provoke physical assault in most cases. Former Dodgers OF Andruw Jones, currently toiling at Rangers’ spring training, “seems to sense that no matter what happens, last season will follow him like a swatch of toilet paper stuck to his cleats” writes Plaschke in Tuesday’s LA Times. Perhaps Jones feels this way because he’s (allegedly) being subjected to “20 minutes” of Plaschke interrogation.
Are you saying you’re sorry?”
Are you sorry for showing up at spring training looking like a blue manatee? Sorry for not working hard enough to fix that weight? Sorry for ripping the fans who booed you for that weight? Sorry for asking to be put on the disabled list so you could disappear from those boos?
The Dodgers gave you $36.2 million, and in exchange you gave them a batting average of .158, three home runs and 25 extra pounds, and so you’re finally sorry?
Andruw Jones pauses. He looks down. He wraps his fingers tight around the handle of a bat. He nods.
“Yes, you could put it that way,” he says. “Yes, in fact, put it exactly that way.”
“Put it what way?”
“I am sorry I didn’t stand up to my reputation,” he says. “I am sorry for what I put everyone through. I am sorry I did not make it work.”
A couple of hours later Monday, upstairs in a spartan suite, I convey this apology to Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti.
Now it is Colletti’s turn to pause, to look down, to tighten his grip.
“Humbleness is a nice trait,” he finally says, and leaves it at that.
In Monday’s Guardian, TV Go Home / “Nathan Barley” creator Charlie Brooker (above) considers the results of a recent survey that revealed nearly two-thirds of the public have lied about reading such tomes as “War & Piece”, “Ulysses” and “The Bible”. “Reading is more trouble than it’s worth, and lying about reading is even more pointless” concludes the Screenwipe host.
Apparently people lie about having read all these books because they think it’ll make them appear sexier. Which begs the question: who the hell earnestly believes that claiming to have read the Bible from beginning to end is going to get them laid? Mention your love of the New Testament on a date and you might as well stick a fork in your face and start screaming about ghosts. Potential partners who genuinely adore reading the Bible on a daily basis traditionally don’t mention it until later, when they’ve invited you back to their place to unexpectedly nailgun your hand to the wall while loudly reciting a selection of their favourite parables from memory.
Of course, whenever two people meet, literary fibs are just the tip of the iceberg. As potential partners initially circle one another, a full 98% of their conversation consists of out-and-out falsehood. The remaining 26% is wild exaggeration. It’s an unnecessary game of bluff in which you both claim to be into the same bands, hold the same political viewpoints, harbour the same dark secrets and so on. Assuming it works and the pair of you get together, the rest of the relationship consists of either a) both of you slowly discovering what the other one’s actually like, or b) one of you grimly maintaining the fiction that, hey, you’re really into Bruce Springsteen, fell-walking or sex parties too, until the facade finally crumbles or you die of sheer despair.
Chelsea’s 2-0 defeat of Coventry earlier today put the latter into the FA Cup Semi-Finals, a feat accomplished with the assistance of Ashley Cole despite the defender’s mid-week arrest on charges of, uh, swearing at police. Cole had the misfortune of making headlines at roughly the same time his wife, Girls Aloud’s Cheryl, was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for Comic Relief. In the eyes of the Guardian’s Russell Brand —himself, no stranger to a media lynching — it’s all a bit much.
It’s interesting to see how these events are reported as the press dislike “Cashley” whilst adoring his missus, Cheryl. Thus a distinction between them is consistently maintained in print, the Sun even going as far as to contrast Mr Cole’s arrest with his wife’s simultaneous charity work.”Fundraiser versus Hellraiser” their headline opined. While she’s out raising funds that bastard is raising hell. Literally. He is literally summonsing up the condemned undead, like in the Thriller video and dancing down the Kings Road swearing at tramps.
That poor woman. Although for all I know she could be raising funds to arm terrorists while Ashley is essentially having a bit of harmless fun. No. I’ve just heard she was doing a charity climb for Comic Relief and her husband was swearing just for the fun of it.
No charities benefited from Cole’s profanities and at one point the air turned so blue with his cursing that a children’s hospital had to be closed down. He is destroying charity while his canonised wife is the new Diana.
(a particularly uncouth collection of soccer fans, hellbent on ruining a journalist’s quiet afternoon in the fresh air)
Middlesbrough’s recent attempt to hush up a particularly raucous section of the Riverside has met with global ridicule, but the Independent’s DJ Taylor has considerable sympathy for the club’s attempts at improving the matchday atmosphere (”what are seats there for, if not to be sat on?”).
As to the specific point that was being made about Middlesbrough’s vocal and increasingly desperate home support (the team are in free fall and haven’t registered a league win in weeks), this particular fan is with Ms Watson. Like many a season ticket-holder, I suspect, faced with last month’s renewal form, I am in my usual quandary: relish of the game contending with a lurking awareness that soccer grounds are deeply unpleasant places. One wouldn’t perhaps go as far as the friend of mine who, observing the rows of contorted faces at the last Chelsea-Man United match, remarked that you could solve most of the country’s social problems at a stroke by locking up everyone present, but even my thrice-monthly stake-out at Norwich City’s Carrow Road ground is less of a pleasure than once it was.
Norwich, it should straight away be said, has one of the friendliest stadiums in the Championship. There is rarely any crowd trouble, and the locale positively seethes with Football in the Community initiatives and groups of embarrassed eight-year-olds being brought on to the pitch to wave to the crowd. On the other hand, you do get slightly tired of the sound of high, treble voices yelling “You’re shit … aargh!” whenever the opposing goalkeeper steps up to kick the ball, the assumption that any opponent who falls over is simply shamming, the male voice choir of the Barclay End chanting “Who are the fucking hell are you?” at the visiting fans, and those choleric middle-aged butterballs for whom a poor refereeing decision is evidence of a kind of cosmic conspiracy. None of this, the game’s apologists always explain, is soccer’s fault: it is, that ever-reliable culprit, “the culture’s”. Thirty years ago, while the soccer grounds of my youth could be extraordinarily violent places, the violence was usually confined to certain parts of the terraces. These days sporadic hooliganism seems to have been replaced by a uniform, low-level boorishness. In the meantime, hats off to Ms Watson, in what is likely to be a long and remorseless struggle.
Though chanting “Taylor’s from Norwich / he eats a lot of porridge” is rather tempting (with great apologies to Robyn Hitchcock), it’s even tougher not to fantasize how much lower the Independent’s circulation would drop were the paper to devote fewer column inches per day to football. It would be horrible to think Mr. Taylor’s salary is being subsidized by pandering to morons and scum.
Who would’ve thought, however, that someone would be James Dolan? During the same week in which the Rocky Mountain News ended nearly a century and a half of publication, Cablevision revealed plans to charge a fee for online access to Newsday. From Reuters :
Newsday, which covers the New York suburb of Long Island, was bought by Cablevision in a $650 million deal last May that was widely criticized on Wall Street as a puzzling move into a troubled newspaper market.
Cablevision had to write down Newsday’s value by $402 million on Thursday, pushing its fourth-quarter results to a loss, as U.S. print advertising sales and circulation have dropped with more readers seeking free news on the Web.
But Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge said the cable TV company was aware of the difficulties faced by the traditional newspaper business.
“Our goal was and is to use our electronic network assets and subscriber relationships to transform the way news is distributed,” he said on a conference call with analysts.
“We plan to end the distribution of free Web content and make our news gathering capabilities a service for our customers,” he added.
Rutledge’s comments could raise speculation that the paper may seek cost cuts by reducing print operations. It could also look to cross-promote Web access as part of the Cablevision programing package.
Jeff Johnson’s Saturday Op-ed entry for The New York Times, “Bouncing Baby Bailout”, is humbly described by the author as “my modest (and moronic) bailout proposal”, though I’m sure everyone will agree at the very least, it could be a windfall for “adoption agencies, fertility specialists and surrogates.”
Many Americans have children. Most of these children will one day command a decent salary. So let’s permit parents to pre-emptively tap into those future earnings in the form of loans payable now. These loans can then be spent on perms, basketball sneakers and American-made vehicles; and they’ll provide much-needed capital for small businesses like laundromats and hoagie shops.
How would this work, exactly? Well, I have a 4-year-old. An expert from a federal Department of Reverse Inheritance Policy, or D.R.I.P., would subject my son to a series of physical and standardized tests and determine that there will be, say, a five-year period in my son’s adulthood when he’ll earn $100,000 a year.
I, as the boy’s parent, would then be entitled to a Reverse Inheritance loan of $50,000 (or 10 percent of the earnings from the aforementioned five-year period). And my child will simply earn $10,000 less per year (plus interest) over that same period, which is thankfully much, much, much farther down the road. (If he has children by then, he’ll qualify for a Reverse Inheritance loan, of course, and his wallet won’t feel a thing.)
This isn’t just about money. Expect to see stronger familial bonds and fewer single-parent homes. After all, what parent would leave, when there are loans to be taken out on children?
I certainly expect my family to grow closer. My 4-year-old and I are stuck in the archaic roles of child and daddy. But with the prospect of a large R.I. loan, we’ll become partners — him acing his D.R.I.P. exams, me spending his future earnings. Perhaps Reverse Inheritance will be the elephant in the family room, but it’s a kind elephant in a very nice family room with a new sofa and flat-screen high-definition television.
At the risk of making light of a serious dispute, I think it is safe to say that no longer are Dwight Gooden nor Ambiorix Burgos having the toughest time of any former New York Mets.
(a man named Craig Robinson)
In Portland, last week’s presidential inauguration was completely overshadowed by the mayor, his (apparently) 18 year-old ex-boyfriend and far too many journalistic conflicts. In Corvallis, it was ruined by Brian Williams.
From the Oregonian’s John Canzano:
The cameras caught Oregon State coach Craig Robinson early and Williams identified Robinson as Reggie Love, Obama’s personal assistant. Oops. It got worse. Because Williams waxed on and on about how Love become Obama’s personal assistant, and what a personal assistant does… according to one OSU fan who emailed me, “evidently one shaved head tall black guy looks about the same to Williams.”
Eek.
So later, the cameras are again on Robinson, who is wearing his Oregon State scarf, colors orange and black, and Brokaw says Robinson is wearing “Princeton” colors. Robinson attended Princeton, and the school colors are indeed orange and black, but it was a little shortsighted, no? to miss the the obvious angle. No mention from Brokaw that OSU’s colors are orange and black and that Robinson is the Beavers’ coach.
One reader, from Independence, wrote:
“To NBC: Go (bleep) yourselves. You are elitist pigs. If this is your idea of ALL THE facts, what am I to believe on your newscasts?”
Another wrote:
“I am still pissed about OSU stopping Pitt and holding them to zero points, and have it characterized as a boring game…. and all (Robinson as coach) gets them is their basketball coach first misidentified, and later, lauded for his Princeton education. Elitest (bleeps).”
(Sic)
Now, being a Penn State fan, I like a titanic defensive struggle as much as anyone, so let me suggest that some may have thought the Sun Bowl was a boring game not because of the 3-0 score but because it featured two mediocre teams, the better of which was coming off perhaps the most humiliating home loss of the college football season.
But I digress. Canzano concludes that “NBC’s coverage made the Northwest feel a little insignificant.” Said insignificance would also be why Sam Adams is still not nearly as well-known as Elliot Spitzer.
The ever-unflappable Williams later apologized.
“Whatever you have called me over the past few days can’t be any worse than my own anger over my mistake. I made an inexcusable error when I confused the great OSU coach Craig Robinson with a friend of mine, the personal assistant to President Obama, Reggie Love. I am sending personal apologies to both men, and this is my apology to all members of Beaver Nation. It was a mistake committed during 9 hours of live programming – I was distracted and watching many incoming video feeds, but that’s no excuse for the error, which was no one’s fault but mine. I have felt awful about it since I forced myself to read the coverage of it on OregonLive.com, and I hope that someday you can find it in your hearts to forgive my error.”
Heh. He said “Beaver Nation.”
Incidentally, Coach Robinson’s team is not so bad (0-18 in the Pac 10 last year, road wins over Cal and Stanford this year).
“TV Go Home” mastermind Charlie Brooker surveys 2009’s bleak economic state (”The worst recession in 60 years. Broken windows and artless graffiti. Howling winds blowing empty cans past boarded-up shopfronts. Feral children eating sloppy handfuls of decomposed-pigeon-and-baked-bean mulch scraped from the bottom of dustbins in a desperate bid to survive. The pound worth less than the acorn”) and suggests the best means of frugal entertainment is popping round the neighbors’ house and inviting yourself to share a bubble bath with them (”assuming you have attractive neighbours”). From Monday’s Guardian :
Actually that whole bath scenario might represent the way forward. It sounds quite romantic, and authentic romance has been in short supply of late. Authentic romance makes life more enjoyable, but more importantly it costs nothing. Buying flowers and baubles and Parisian city breaks – that’s not authentic romance. That’s lazy showboating. Authentic romance could flourish in a skip. Prove this to yourself. Invite someone on a date and spend the evening sitting in a skip making each other laugh with limericks or something. Get through that and you’ve bonded for life. Or maybe a week. It’s hard to tell when you embark on a new relationship. Still, if you split up: time for more romance with someone else. Everybody wins.Mark my words, you’d be wise to practice your romancing skills now, because when, circa October, we’re huddled together in shelters sharing body heat to survive, the ability to whisper sweet nothings could prove useful. Come the dawn, you’ll need to pair up with someone to go hunting for supplies with, and it’ll help if you’ve been cuddling all night. The world outside will be dangerous, so there’ll have to be two of you. One to root through the abandoned Woolworth’s stockrooms and another to stand outside warding off fellow scavengers with a flaming rag on a stick.
Obviously if two is better than one, it follows that three is better than two, especially in the thick of a food riot. Rather than forming boring old duos as per tradition, polygamous unions involving up to 30 or 40 participants will emerge victorious, roving the landscape in packs by day, writhing around in obscene configurations in their papier-mache huts by night – strictly for the purposes of generating heat, of course. We can all do our bit. I, for one, am fully prepared to take on 50 wives if it’ll help make the world more manageable, provided I don’t have to talk to them and I get to wear a crown and issue decrees and everything.
