Archive for July, 2008
The John Edwards Love ChildStory
July 23, 2008
The story no one wants to read (except everyone) about the politician with the brave cancer-stricken wife and departed son cheating with documentary film maker Rielle Hunter.
As an alumni of the National Enquirer, I have to hand it to them, running the stakeout in the wee hours of the morning at the Beverly Hilton, and actually having the cojones to confront Edwards.
&;Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of her baby.
Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.
Edwards did not answer and then ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel.&;
I&;ll bet that one or both of the reporters is a graduate of the esteemed Fleet Street school of journalism, where the qualifications are simple: rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. Or as I like to say, &;If you really want some shit, get a Brit.&;
Is it news? Oh G-d, who knows&;but the LA Times has covered it, even if they pooh-pooh it in their Opinion Blog. The Enquirer staked out Gary Hart 20 years ago and caught him making hanky-panky. Republican Senator David Vitter was named in a prostitution scandal, and of course &;wide stance&; Idaho Senator Larry Craig. (This one more than most is news, as he pled guilt to a crime.) And yes, the Kennedys did it and everyone kept their mouths shut.
Is this story relevant only to Edwards, his wife and alleged mistress? Possibly (see above) but everyone will have an opinion about how awful it is (either the story or the alleged infidelity.) Gawker says cheating on your sick wife is a hallowed political tradition, practiced by John McCain and Newt Gingrich.
Should it impact Obama&;s choice of a running mate? If true, it probably will; another depressing sign of America&;s political immaturity and hypocrisy. French PM Mitterand&;s mistress and wife both attended his funeral; Sarkozy divorced his wife and remarried his girlfriend in office.
Is it true? Sorry, Senator; my money&;s on the National Enquirer. They don&;t cover politics but they cover celebrities, and they wouldn&;t throw resources at this story if they didn&;t think they had something.
Tags:John-Edwards-lovechild, National-Enquirer, Rielle-Hunter, tabloid-journalism Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments &;
Portfolio Magazine Flunks JaguarReview
July 18, 2008
If you were reading a review of a new Jaguar, what is the first piece of information you would look for?
That&;s right, the price. Portfolio.com flunks this simple test (what editors have always called the wastebasket test; &;A press release without a price goes in the wastebasket&;), and misses so many other details anyone would want: size of the engine (V-8 is not sufficient; is it a 4.6, 5.0, etc?), 0-60 speed, rear seat comfort, etc. If Mercedes and BMW are target competitors, you might want to price those guys for comparison.
And when you talk about your &;conquest&; buyers&;people switching from another brand&;well, you might want to talk to one or two of them.
I hope their investing advice is better&;although raking the ashes at Countrywide isn&;t very ahead-of-the-curve.
Tags:business-journalism, death-of-journalism, Portfolio, pump-and-dump Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
94-Year Old Didn&;t SolicitHooker
July 17, 2008
In an ugly case of police entrapment, justice has finally been done, if late:
&;The undercover Manatee County Sheriff&;s Office detective on the street corner that afternoon in November took 30 steps to go chat with Milio&; The woman opened his passenger side door and leaned inside&;.&;Do you want to party tonight?&; the woman asked Milio.
Manatee County Judge George K. Brown Jr. ruled&;&;This particular 93-year-old man was encouraged and/or enticed to proceed with the police officer&;s direction of conversation,&; Brown wrote.
Now Milio, 94, can be admitted to the assisted-living home. He suffers from dementia and apparently they didn&;t want to take him if he was guilty.
The entrapment here is disturbing.
But what if he did actually solicit a prostitute? Honestly, why is it a crime to want to feel a sexual response at his (or any) age and be willing to pay someone to achieve it?
Photo courtesy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Tags:entrappment, misplaced-prioritiies, Sex and Society Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
Hybrid Price Gouging, or &;Market PriceAdjustment?&;
July 12, 2008
I looked at a hybrid car this week, but was immediately turned off by the &;Dealer Options&; white sticker. It wasn&;t like the dealer was over-pricing a kick-ass stereo or even Lojack. This one read &;Market Price Adjustment: $3000,&; which helped bring a $28,000 car to $38,000, along with the rims, the navigation system and the sunroof.
Don&;t call it gouging, just call it a response to the laws of supply and demand. Or the law of the jungle. Unfortunately, not all of us have Larry David f-you money to fuel our vehicles with self-righteousness.
Tags:hybrid-autos, Larry-David Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
KCRW Invites Anti-Semite to ObamaDiscussion
July 11, 2008
On July 11&;s &;Which Way LA?&; host Warren Olney invited Amiri Baraka as one of the talking heads to comment on Jesse Jackson&;s &;cut his nuts off&; comments about Barack Obama.
Olney identified Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones) as a &;poet and playwright.&; He failed to identify Baraka as one of America&;s most outspoken anti-Semites who in fact lost his title as Poet Laureate of New Jersey over his poem which claimed Jews were warned about the attack on the World Trade Center.
The irony of such a man being invited being invited to comment on the odious comments of Jackson, another anti-Semite boggles the mind&;and unfortunately fuels the suspicions of what many think is the &;liberal media.&;
Tags:Amiri-Baraka, anti-semitism, Barack-Obama, Jesse-Jackson, KCRW.ORG, Warren-Olney Posted in KCRW-FM, political-correctness, Radio | 6 Comments &;
Playboy: Who AreYou?
July 10, 2008
If the opening &;spread&; for your magazine is not a woman at all, but an ad for a game for a Sony PlayStation Portable (the handheld game favored by twitchy teenagers), what does that say about Playboy?
As usual, what Playboy says about men (or perhaps about its own irrelevance) is far more interesting than how it shows women, overloaded on top and shaved for action, or with tiny, non-threatening &;landing strips&; down there that perfectly match the &;coffee tea or me&; ambiance of the Brazilian stewardess spread.
Month after month, Hugh Hefner is surrounded with the usual &;bevy&; of beauties.
The girls remain 20 and pneumatic, but the hair of three of the writers featured, like that of Robert Stone and Pat Jordan, has gone from gray to white. The third isn&;t even alive (Kurt Vonnegut.) In the schizophrenic world of Playboy, 2008, those &;real writers&; bookend a scolding lecture by Susan Jacoby about how America doesn&;t read anymore&;plopped dead center in the midst of a stroke book.
And I swear I saw the punch lines for the cartoons and the laugh-a-century Playboy Party Jokes 30 years ago.
In the current issue, she&;s supposed to be a MILF [Mothers I'd Love to Fuck], but the thought of winning a date with siliconed, dyed and war-painted 42-year old Cindy Margolis is downright scary:
OK, I know that Kevin Bacon and I aren&;t the right demographic for Playboy anymore&;but who is? Videogames, MILFs, bewhiskered authors and an 81-year old figurehead; the Playboy lifestyle is looking pretty incoherent these days.
Tags:Cindy-Margolis, Hugh-Hefner, Kevin-Bacon, Kurt-Vonnegut, MILF, Playboy, Secrets of Men's Magazines Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments &;
Philip K. Dick: HowTalented?
July 9, 2008
Philip K. Dick led a Hollywood life and life after death. &;Dick had five failed marriages, wrote most of his novels while gobbling amphetamines and in the grips of paranoia or religious visions, felt always the outsider&; before his death at 53.
The troubled visionary thing is very romantic. It&;s convenient for his legend and the PhD. student-like acolytes that Dick is dead, gone more than 25 years now. One of the greatest writers America has ever produced, Ray Bradbury, is still around and kicking, even outliving his favorite bookstores, but he&;s not appreciated in the same cultish way as Dick.
A hack science fiction writer, Dick is best known as the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became the film Bladerunner just after his death in 1982. Hollywood loves Dick, &;His ideas turned out to be pitch-perfect for a Digital Age that wanted science fiction not just about aliens but also about the alienated.&;
So Dick has had a Hollywood resurrection, with Steven Spielberg&;s Minority Report, Paul Verhoeven&;s (and hilariously, Arnold Schwartzenneger&;s) Total Recall, John Woo&;s Paycheck, the crummy Nicholas Cage movie Next, the equally crummy Screamers and one of the best, A Scanner Darkly, the unhinged and drug-addled rotoscope masterpiece by Richard Linklater, starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson.
Kurt Vonnegut was probably Dick&;s true contemporar. Both for years were struggling sci-fi writers hacking out story after story. Vonnegut, who died only last year, (no cult for him, then) suffered from a problem opposite to that of Dick. Vonnegut&;s books were critically acclaimed and mainstream successes, but the films made from them have left little impact.
A debate rages about the quality of Dick&;s writing and the depth of his ideas. John Brunner, writing in 1966(!), said Dick&;s ideas included &;The empty world; the use of power; illusion substituting for reality; the malleability of externals under the influence of psychosis or drugs; the conflict between chance and determinism.&; To which I would add &;What is consciousness?&; and of course &;What is human?&;
I&;ve been reading Dick&;s collected stories. Many are memorable, often with a visceral twist worthy of O.Henry. But the characters are often just stereotypes, particularly the women (at least they&;re usually big-or conical-breasted).
Even the memorable Roy Batty only really came to life in the movies, thanks to Rutger Hauer and Ridley Scott. So Dick would probably have been the first to appreciate the irony of his posthumous popularity in an era when the &;average 15- to 24-year old&;reads 8 minutes a day.&;
Tags:Blade-Runner, Kurt-Vonnegut, Philip-K-Dick, Ray-Bradbury, Roy-Batty Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments &;
LA Times: The Ship BeSinking
July 2, 2008
The above quote, attributed to former Knick star guard Michael Ray Richardson, applies both to the mainstream media and the LA Times. (Unfortunately, it could also apply to the car industry, the housing market and the stock market, but let&;s stick to what I know.)
And what I know today is that the LA Times announced today it will cut another &;250 jobs, including 150 from the newsgathering staff. In a further cost-cutting step, the paper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%.&;
I hate to read this shit for lots of reasons, but here&;s three:
People who only wanted to do journalism are being thrown out on the street.
The paper will only get worse as it continues to cut off more fingers and toes.
Selfishly, it&;s just what I need as a writer&;another 150 more competitors pushed out there.
Tags:death-of-newspapers, LA-Times Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
LA Times Reaches NewNadir
July 1, 2008
Today&;s lesson: Nadar Nader = Nadir.
LA Times sports columnist Bill Dwyre wrote a column today about the NBA&;s perception problem. Unfortunately, it also confirmed the perception of the LA Times as a paper in a tailspin.
He wrote, &;Ralph Nadar, consumer watchdog, presidential candidate and frequent critic of [Commissioner] Stern, calls him &;imperious.&;
Ralph Nadar is not on my radar. You would think that the LA Times would know who Ralph Nader is, but apparently they&;ve fired all the copy editors and fact-checkers. Or the sick-out started early.
Update: Although no correction was posted, the Times fixed the typo. That&;s what distinguishes the mainstream media; even under assault from so many directions, it still tries to get the story right.
Tags:Commissioner-Stern, death-of-newspapers, LA-Times, NBA, Ralph-Nader Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment &;