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Well. Health care giant Bayer is advertising its new burn cream by reaching out to cannibal mothers, apparently. The tagline on these ads out of Egypt reads, "Heals their burn and your guilt, fast." Ha, yes, ummm, we'll just back slowly out of the room now and call the authorities. Even serial fount of outrage Copyranter is left speechless at these. Click through for the other, equally horrific cartoony ad. If you are some sort of monster:
[via Copyranter]
And you thought selling expensive, weird-tasting frozen yogurt was Pinkberry's biggest sin! The fro-yo chain, owned by Korean-Americans, is selling these Mandarin Juicers by Alessi that other Asians find offensive—they say they're reminiscent of so-called Chinese "coolies" and should be removed from stores. [Racked]
["Harry Potter" actor Daniel Radcliffe, who will be naked on Broadway this fall, out celebrating his birthday in London today; image via Bauer-Griffin]
A flack named Peter Shankman (who enjoys getting tased) has built up quite a little reporter-helping service! Through a free website, Helpareporter.com, Shankman takes in queries from reporters in search of sources for random stories, and then sends those queries out to the PR world, who—coincidentally—like to be featured sources. Everybody wins! Except for the other reporter-source website called Profnet, which does the same thing, but charges a big fee to flacks to participate:
Shankman tells me he heard from a source that ProfNet is so concerned salespeople have been issued talking points against him. With 14,000 "professional communicators" in its roster, ProfNet has a significant cash flow at stake, especially when your competition gives away its product for free.
Shankman says he'll never charge for his service and would never sell his mailing list — the hour and a half per day that he spends on his mailing list results in great publicity for himself — better than he could ever buy. Though, he does make some coin selling ads at "way over $100 CPMs" to advertisers like American Apparel.
Shankman's little service has been building slowly for a long time. By all outward appearances (not counting his service to American Apparel), he's giving away a valuable service for free, out of the goodness of his heart. Which is why I've always been so god damn skeptical of the whole thing.
What's your angle, Shankman? What's your angle? What's your angle? I fully expect this to turn into some sort of cult, or be revealed as a CIA plot to infiltrate the media. Until then, we're withholding judgment.
What's up with recently laid-off, fired, bought out, or increasingly squeezed print journalists—and what are they thinking as the newspaper business continues to nosedive? Columbia Journalism Review's website has invited them to rant. New parting thoughts—or shots—are being added daily. Most recently, 38-year newspaper veteran John Sugg writes, "...For four decades, newspaper owners consistently have sacrificed integrity and watchdog reporting in favor of one grab-the-cash scheme after another." Don't even think of blaming the Internet for all of this:
The other giant lie perpetrated by publishers is that they were bushwhacked by the Internet... For almost thirty years, the tree-killing, oil-wasting publishers knew the days were numbered for their manufacturing plants. Sure, they built Web sites, generally pretty awful. And they became excellent at portraying themselves as victims of Craigslist, Google, and the rest of the Internet. As the newspaper circulations plummeted, the advertising rates soared—what a deal for the publishers! Even better, they could fire (pick the euphemism) all of those non-revenue-producing, pesky journalists.
But at least some sacked journalists have learned from the experience, like the recently-fired Jim Spencer, formerly of the Denver Post:
I have learned a lot in the past year. I have learned that exemplary work at the Virginian-Pilot, the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia, and the Denver Post carries little weight where profit margins rule. I have learned that friends at other papers—even those with executive titles—are powerless to help me, because of the state of the industry. I have learned that being a columnist apparently keeps me from being hired as a reporter or feature writer, even though I was both before I took up commentary. I have learned that a six-month temporary assignment running a newsroom of sixty-three reporters and editors does not count as management experience.
(Frustrated journalists, take note—they're looking for contributors.)
Parting Thoughts [CJR]
You can do a lot in a 140-character Twitter entry, writes John Dickerson at Nieman Reports. And no, the online squib will not spell the end of long form reporting. Dickerson's right that Twitter affords weary political correspondents like himself the ability to share fun anecdotes from the field that would otherwise get cut from proper pieces. Example: "Weare, NH: Audience man to McCain: 'I heard that Hershey is moving plants to Mexico and I'll be damned if I'm going to eat Mexican chocolate.'" But old hack nostalgics have a legitimate point about how this new mode of digital diary-keeping can take its toll. It's the style, not the substance, of journalism that's at issue.
Dickerson:
The risk for journalism, of course, is that people spend all day Twittering and reading other people's Twitter entries and don't engage with the news in any other way. This seems a pretty small worry. If written the right way, Twitter entries build a community of readers who find their way to longer articles because they are lured by these moment-by-moment observations. As a reader, I've found that I'm exposed to a wider variety of news because I read articles suggested to me by the wide variety of people I follow on Twitter. I'm also exposed to some keen political observers and sharp writers who have never practiced journalism.
I thought everyone got their news from blogs, or is that a distinction without a difference now? The kinds of hilarious off-the-record set pieces Dickerson alludes to were once the stuff of shoptalk. There's something appealing about the secret-handshake quality of how a story gets written that is lost in the digital age of premature confession and on-demand tell-all. Who would want to read Gay Talese's memoirs, or any of Ron Rosenbaum's reminiscences about the old Esquire gang, if every professional writer began dishing his juiciest tidbits every five minutes?
Crackhead-turned Times reporter success story David Carr is loved by media types for being a cool guy, and is basking in the generally positive public attitude towards his upcoming memoir. But everything is not well in Carr's world. Oh no. Just as Carr has found the strength to open up to the world about his past drug use, an even bigger scandal threatens to overwhelm him: his incurable fondness for potatoes.
David Blum at the NY Press uncovers a disturbing pattern of ongoing metaphor abuse that makes Carr appear to be a man at the end of his rope. We can only hope that this moment of clarity serves as a wake up call to him and all those who enable his root vegetable comparison habit. Here are Blum's findings, all taken from Carr's own work—starting with his current book and stretching back four long years:
Describing himself:
“Far from clinically handsome, I have a face that looks like it could have been carved out of mashed potatoes, and my idea of exercise was running the length of my body.”
“….with a face made out of potatoes, the Photoshopped picture will have to go a long way to make me any uglier than I actually am.”
“With a face that looks as if it were crafted out of mashed potatoes and a voice that sounds like a trash compactor that needs oil, I’m not a natural for television…”
About Tim Russert:
“He had a face that seemed to be carved out of potatoes, but he worked on television by working harder than your average talking head…”
Describing actors:
“To the Bagger’s eye, [Daniel Craig] has a face made out of potatoes—although the rest of him seems to be made out of titanium…”
“Directors tend to focus on [Steve] Buscemi’s visage, shooting his face so it looks something like what might happen to a bowl of mashed potatoes if it were sculptured [sic] by an ax.”
“And Detective Sipowicz [Dennis Franz], with a face that looks as if it were carved out of potatoes and the body style of a greeter at Home Depot, was an unlikely hero.”
About author Joe McGinniss:
“[McGinniss] had an old cap set against the Sunday morning sun, a handsome Irish face that could have been carved out of potatoes, and a glint of tragedy in his eyes.”
SEEK HELP.
We mentioned it a while back but now there's video of GAY actor Neil Patrick Harris infiltrating the minds of our most precious non-oil resource, children, with his wicked gay shoe agenda. He plays the Shoe Fairy on the season premiere of Sesame Street and sings like a dream and magically puts shoes on people's feet. He does this all in front of poor, innocent little ones. Just terrible. Where's Jerry Falwell when you need him? Oh right. Dead. HAH. [via Towleroad]
White man Michael Tunison (the same white man fired by the Washington Post for having an outside blog—racism in action?) has written a column for TheRoot.com. Who cares? White people like us who control the media, that's who! That's because Tunison's point is that most young whites today have friends of different races and would hate to be called racist, which is true but not that revelatory. The real reason we're interested is that they've illustrated the piece with a photo of Stephen Colbert and his "black friend Alan," played by our close personal friend Jordan Carlos! We emailed with him a couple times, we feel like we know him! I guess having a multicultural cast of friends comes naturally to young whites like us. Actually, we just felt the need to point this out: Tunison's piece is called "Racist: The N-Word for White People." That should be "Nilla." We've been over this. [The Root]
My mom can't turn on a Dell laptop but a genocidaire has his own URL. Radovan Karazdic, the Serbian politician responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, was captured Monday after walking freely for a decade through the streets of Belgrade disguised as a Zen Karl Marx called Dr. Dragan Dabic. Karazdic is a trained psychologist and fancies himself a poet, so it makes sense, albeit in a sick, macabre way, that he spent a goodly portion of his time in non-hiding as an alternative medicine guru in a Serbian clinic and a contributor to a magazine called Healthy Life. Also, according to one young acquaintance Maja Djelic, bitching about his no-frills website. (Disturbing Chinese proverbs quoted on it include "The one who gives up his own, should dig two graves.") It's like happening upon Eichmann's MySpace or Saddam's Twitter. The inevitable "He seemed like such a sweet mass murdering revanchist" quote below:
"He was really friendly and really open and had a way of speaking with people," Djelic said. She said that he did not speak with a Bosnian accent, and seemed like a valuable member of the small alternative-medicine community here, not someone who could have been the force behind the notorious Srebrenica massacre and the deadly siege of Sarajevo.
UPDATE: DraganDrabic.com is likely bullshit (the Whois was registered yesterday — thanks, commenter!). But this page seems like it's the real deal. The International Herald Tribune did quote Maja Djelic mentioning Drabic's website.
[International Herald TribuneInternational Herald Tribune]
[Dr. Dragan Dabic]
The much-vaunted new issue of Italian Vogue featuring only black models has already been re-printed in New York to satisfy the city's creative chattering class. Of course, fashion magazines always allege that issues with black cover models don't sell well. While that's proven to be true, there's nothing like actually having an opinion and doing something interesting to generate some buzz. This reminds us even more of how staid and boring Anna Wintour's American Vogue is.
Right now, Wintour's Vouge has an overpaid hockey player as an intern, which was probably meant to be a publicity stunt, but mostly confused people. The cover girls are consistently bland, overexposed actresses (who have often graced the cover several times before) instead of fashion models. Plus, the aggressive airbrushing is almost an insult to readers' intelligence.
American Vogue's last bid for attention was its somewhat infamous Lebron James cover from April, in which the basketball player grabbed model Gisele in a King Kong moment. (Annie Liebowitz shot it.) People found this more offensive that not, however, so that sort of backfired. (The cover wasn't that interesting to begin with, and it was the worst-selling April issue since 2001. April is the month of their annual "Shape" issue, in which they pay lip service to different body types and usually get a sales boost in return.) The following cover, an over-airbrushed Gweneth Paltrow, didn't do much better.
Meanwhile, the French edition of Vogue (edited by Carine Roitfeld) is still kicking ass creatively! (Of course, it's a much smaller operation.) You remember the November 2007 issue, which featured model Carolyn Murphy with New York eccentric Andre J, bearded and in a dress. The brand-new August issue features a fashion spread of an anti-fur protest, with a fur-clad attitudinal model flipping protesters the middle finger. That's the kind of spunk we like to see!
[Just a regular college student before his gorgon mother MeDina (get it??) dragged him in front of a camera for her stupid reality show, Michael Lohan (brother of lesbo Lindsay) is photographed leaving the Beatrice Inn last night; image via INF]
tammyfey's new line beats the original, It Begins...
Robert Novak—respected conservative journalist/commentator and grim spectre of soulless walking death—ran over a guy in his black Corvette this morning. Hilariously, a Politico reporter got the story by walking by. Novak hit the guy and then continued merrily speeding along until a bicyclist stopped him and said "you hit someone." Novak allegedly threw his head back and cackled for a moment before shooting him. There are no details about the pedestrian's condition. Look, we need to share more details about this with you. Just click.
In 2001, the longtime political columnist cursed at a pedestrian on the corner of Pennsylvania and 13th St., NW, for allegedly jay walking.
"'Learn to read the signs, [bodily orifice]!' Novak snapped before speeding away," according to an item in the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column.
Or he will run you over, [intercourse enthusiast].
If recent history is any indication, Judy Miller will get jail time for this.
Ruh roh. The dreaded Real World: Brooklyn is on the move again. The Brooklyn Paper reports today that due to slow renovations at the BellTel lofts, the downtown BK building that MTV had originally eyed as housing for the seven vodka-infused strangers, the producers have settled on a new spot. Now the cast will likely be housed at Pier 41 in Red Hook, already the home of the legendary Fairway grocery store and the new, megalopolis IKEA. (IKEA has furnished the RW houses for many a season. Easy moving for the pre-production crew, at least!) “I’d rather have another Ikea,” said a resident when asked about the impending storm of camera crews and drunken braying.
Reportedly the exact address of the building is 204 Van Dyke St., so if you live nearby, shutter your windows and blood your doors, because the Lord's wrath is on its way. Luckily, though, you ought to get a pretty clear idea fairly quickly of where the gaggle of idiots will be hanging out, because MTV usually signs preemptive filming waivers from one or two bars/restaurants before shooting so they don't have to worry about getting clearance at a bajillion different places. So find out which two bars those are, and avoid them like the plague for the next six months or so. Come on up to Park Slope in the meantime. We have strollers! And a park! And, uh, a slope!
We have Olympic fever! But not as much as Beijing-ians. The Chinese government is like an overanxious mama, worried her kid might start picking his nose on stage at his preschool graduation. So they're bombarding the wayward citizenry with propaganda posters directing them how to act when all the weird foreigners get to town. The oddest thing is that they go to great lengths to explain how to make pale Westerners feel at ease, when in fact much of the etiquette advice seems totally unrelated to American life. It's a culture clash that will make you chuckle! Below, actual instructions to the Chinese: Whatever you do, don't ask what someone does!
Advice on "Chatting with Foreign Guests":
Don’t ask about income or expenses, don’t ask about age, don’t ask about love life or marriage, don’t ask about health, don’t ask about someone’s home or address, don’t ask about personal experience, don’t ask about religious beliefs or political views, don’t ask what someone does.
Advice on "Interacting With Handicapped Athletes":
1. You should use polite and standard forms of address for handicapped athletes.
2. Try to keep as light as you can with handicapped overtones.
3. Pay attention to how you congratulate handicapped athletes.Pay attention to avoiding taboo subjects, quit using bad platitudes, and do not use insulting or discriminatory contemptuous or derogatory terms to address the disabled. Say things such as, “You are amazing,” or “You are really great.” When chatting with the visually impaired, do not say things like “It’s up ahead,” or “It’s over there.” When chatting with athletes who are paraplectic in their upper body, do not say things like “It’s behind you.”
And finally, how to walk when the foreigners are around:
When men and women are walking together, men should generally walk on the outside, and the person carrying things should normally walk on the right. Men should help women carry things, but must not help women carry their handbags. When three people are walking side-by-side, elderly should walk in the middle. Where there are many cars around, men should walk on the side of the sidewalk closer to the street. When four people are walking together, it is best to walk two-by-two.
Yes, it's just like New York!
[Peaceful Rise via Coudal]
John McCain's frequently cited gaffes have been a source of amusement or concern, depending on your perspective. Either (ha!) he's a doddering old fool who might be president, or (shit) he's a doddering old fool who might be president. The availability of his many flubs and missteps on the Internet, a medium with which he doesn't even pretend to be acquainted, haven't helped combat McCain's image as a sufferer from Early Onset Reagan Mind Mush. And yet if you want to get technical, his gaffes are like breakups, orgasms and Woody Allen films — some are palpably worse than others. After the jump, a brief catalog with commentary.
"Czechoslovakia." McCain has on many occasions referred to the Eastern European country and former Soviet satellite as though it still existed. Q.E.D., he’s an antique, right? Yes, but not because of this trifling betise. McCain isn’t exactly going around referring to the dreaded "Hun” or slain archdukes – Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993 (even Obama was alive then!), and plenty of tuned-in, reasonable people still make the unconscious linguistic mistake of reunifying the country. The Czechs and Slovaks may not love McCain for it (and the former used to have a neon heart atop their version of the White House), but then, his lifelong political opposition to the Soviet Union, and his current tough talk about the new Kremlin leadership outweigh in geopolitical terms an annoying slip of the tongue.
Iran Helps Al Qaeda. McCain’s also repeatedly said on the stump that Iran is suborning the Bin Ladenists in Iraq, to which the Obama camp and every correct-thinking liberal in cyberspace replies: “Aha! If you don’t know Al Qaeda is Sunni and the ayatollahs are not, you don’t know Shiite.” Even longtime companion Joe Lieberman at least once whispered into McCain’s ear that he was mistaken about this terror nexus, and the candidate might very well have not known hawk from handsaw (he apologized for it once). But the interesting thing is this: according to intel captured by the U.S. in Iraq over a year ago, there is evidence “that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups,” including Al Qaeda. Gen. William Caldwell testified to the fact before Congress. Also, it’s naïve to assume that Sunni-Shiite terrorist collaboration is axiomatically impossible because of theological differences. The 9/11 Commission reported that Iran was in contact with Al Qaeda before the 2001 attacks; a recent Pentagon study showed that Saddam was pretty undiscriminating in his sponsorship of all sorts of militant Islamic groups; and, as Amir Taheri pointed out in the Wall Street Journal in March, there’s a long, bloody history in the Middle East of how shared hatred of the United States eclipses sectarianism. Iran helps Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad (both Sunni), just as it did the Sunni Hizb Islami of Afghanistan. Still, as far as gotcha politics goes, this “gaffe” must be counted as a net loss for McCain, too quick to capitulate and too slow to set the record straight. In the public American imagination, Sunni is Sunni, Shiite is Shiite and never the twain shall meet.
The “Iraq-Pakistan” Border. On Monday, in the midst of Obama’s much discussed tour of the Middle East, McCain went on Good Morning America and referred to the “Iraq-Pakistan” border – clearly a gaffe defined. McCain laughed off his mistake, but not before it made the rounds in ye olde blogosphere with the implied message that he's the one in this race with no real foreign policy savvy.
The Sunni Awakening Happened “After” the Surge. Another screw up, amplified by the fact that Katie Couric and CBS evidently tried to erase it from the public record. McCain was interviewed Tuesday by the pert news anchor and asked about Obama’s comment that the surge can’t take all the credit for improved security in Iraq – the Sunni or Anbar Awakening laid much of the groundwork. McCain responded: “I don't know how you respond to something that is as— such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.” He was wrong. The Anbar awakening preceded the surge, and to make matters worse, it was MacFarland himself who heralded this development – in September 2006, four months before Bush sent the additional troops into Iraq.
McCain’s more valid point might have been that, like administering a drug to an already recovering patient, the surge quickened and guaranteed the efficacy of the awakening. But no points are distributed for what you should've said in this game.
Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty just might be our next Vice President! If McCain pulls this thing off. Which would be, wow. Pawlenty holds all the advantages as a running mate of a Charlie Crist—young, inoffensive, kinda popular, governor of a potential swing state—without the "probably gay" thing. He's just possibly gay. Now let's lay out the problems!
The GOP hasn't won Minnesota in a long, long time. Minnesota is, in fact, the only state in the entire US to not go for Reagan either time. The last time the state went Republican was in 1972—before that, 1956. So if the Republicans want to recreate that Eisenhower magic, they could do worse than to pick a Minnesota politician.
But Pawlenty is not actually particularly loved in Minnesota. He has a 54% approval rating, which is great, but Crist is at 60% with Florida Democrats. He won the governorship twice, but couldn't manage to get a majority of votes either time. Also he made a bridge fall down!
Pawlenty vetoed transportation funding bills and ignored reports that massive infrastructure repairs were needed. Then the part of I-35W that goes over the Mississippi river just sort of fell down, right in the middle of the day. A Minnesota legislative report recently indicated that a lack of Minnesota's Department of Transportation may have contributed to a lack of maintenance at that bridge, but Pawlenty insists that bridges just fall over sometimes for no reason. More importantly, he's rushed to complete the new bridge, months faster than he should, so that it will be finished in time for the GOP National Convention, which will be held in St. Paul.
Perhaps most importantly, Pawlenty would be the very first American Vice President to have attended school with a member of Husker Du, but drummer Grant Hart probably won't endorse him: "'I knew the guy for years,' Hart once told columnist Jim Walsh, 'and it’s still like he’s a cipher. He’s Chauncey Gardener'—the idiot philosopher in the comic novel and film Being There—'with a lot less Zen.'"
The gays are back! The gays are back! I mean, they've always been around, but lately New York's new crop of gays has seemed a bit... anonymous. Too comfortably folded into the general sea of hipsters in tight pants and v-neck white t-shirts, swaying at MGMT concerts in abandoned swimming pools. Why, they're just like every other pipsqueak traipsing around Bushwick with bemused yet surly looks on their faces. Where are all the fabulous young gays, the burgeoning theatre queens (princesses?)? Luckily Gawker alum Doree Shafrir did some investigative work and found The New Old Gays, alive and well and living in Chelsea (or, at least, drinking there):
To be classified as a New Old Gay requires more than an appreciation of Patti LuPone, though love of somewhat tragic, just a tad grotesque, totally fabulous divas is a requirement. In some ways the New Old Gay can be read as a reassertion of a gay identity that had all but been given up for dead: If gays can be married and have children and live contentedly in the suburbs, or on the other end of the spectrum, do the same drugs at the same loft parties as their Oberlin classmates, and if everyone thinks AIDS is no more serious than diabetes, then, really, what’s the difference between the gays and the straights? By dialing back to and reinventing the old gay stereotypes, they may have the best shot at reclaiming gayness as something actually different.
Project Runway Season 1 contestant Austin Scarlett is New Old Gay, Project Runway Season 4 winner Christian Siriano is New Gay. The Scissor Sisters are New Gay. Rufus Wainwright flirts with being New Old Gay, but he’s really New Gay in a Judy Garland costume. New Old Gay is The Golden Girls; New Gay is America’s Next Top Model. New Old Gay is putting together a reading of a Wendy Wasserstein play and singing show tunes around the piano at Marie’s Crisis, the West Village bar with colored Christmas lights arranged in a rainbow pattern on the ceiling; New Gay is karaoke at Sing Sing after a birthday party at Primorski’s in Brighton Beach.
Oh Marie's. That basement bastion of teary-eyed warbling and jangly piano playing. May she be a welcome home to the New Old Gays.
A new scientific study has determined that Alcoholics Anonymous members drink more coffee and smoke more cigarettes than the population at large. Now that they have that one taken care of, can someone please find out whether baseball fans like Cracker Jacks? [Reuters]
Bedposted, the newest unnecessary social-networking scheme, is about sex. Yet, somehow they've made it boring, because you're essentially supposed to create, like, an Excel spreadsheet: "Simply log in after every time you have sex and fill out a few simple fields. Before long, you'll have a rolling history of your sex life on which to reflect." Well, some people will! Others will just have a huge void. [via Boinkology]
Former New Yorker editor and Princess Di grave-dancer Tina Brown has been working on a big new internet venture over at Barry Diller's IAC building for a few months now. So how's it coming along on the recruitment front? Well, she'll have the cruise ship beat covered, at least. We hear that Nicholas Wapshott, currently a columnist with the NY Sun, has been telling people at parties that he's going to join Brown's startup. Wapshott's claim to fame: when he came to America in September of 2001, he decided to sail over in style on the gaudy QE2—causing him to completely miss the 9/11 disaster, which had to be handled by a junior reporter he was supposed to be managing. Heh.
Because videogames, let's be honest, have so far mostly appealed to only half the population (the one with doodles), videogame makers have long been racking their brains trying to come up with a way to attract that other half (the ones with hoo-has). It's that eternal dance of nerds trying to woo ladies and failing miserably. But now they've got a new plan that's sure to work! Video games based on girly movies like Mean Girls, Clueless, and Pretty In Pink.
Paramount is developing all of these as so-called "casual titles." We don't really know what that means (maybe our brother site Kotaku does), but we like to guess challenges include fighting all the junior girls in a hallway battle royale, running around the Valley dodging muggers and the sleazy Elton's car, and trying to do the Duckie prom dance while dodging Bolo tie projectiles. Squeeeeallll doesn't it sound fun? So much better than those games where you just indiscriminately kill people. Right?
(OK, am I crazy or are there different scenes and takes in this preview than what made it into the movie? I'm pretty sure there are).
With all the billions of dollars that pour into the Olympics, you'd think that the least the host committee could do would be to come up with a decent mascot. But no! In a classic case of overthinking something into oblivion, cities obsess over the stupid mascots for years, until they create some sort of awful mutant-by-committee. This year is no different: the WSJ reports that the Beijing mascot (five assorted weird animal-like creatures, pictured) is disliked even by the artist who created them. Throughout the 70s and 80s, mascots were fairly normal: a tiger, an eagle, a bear, a beaver, a gay dachsund. But in 1992 abstraction took over, and the whole enterprise went off the rails. After the jump, pictures of the Olympic mascots from '92 onwards. They suck:
Barcelona 1992: "Cobi." WTF.
Atlanta 1996: "Izzy." No.
Sydney 2000: "Syd, Ollie, and Millie." Why?
Athens 2004: "Athena and Phevos." God.
[WSJ. Learn more about mascots here!]
British authors go on camera to confess the classic books they're embarrassed to have never read. Middlemarch? Wuthering Heights?! [Telegraph]
Rupert Murdoch and his deputy Robert Thomson are eager to get the Wall Street Journal's new magazine off the ground. The publication, WSJ., is to get the Journal in on a consumer-glossy bonanza that now nets the Times' T magazine $46 million in annual revenue and helped it grow 12 percent last year. Murdoch and Thomson are so keen on this concept that they're racing ahead with WSJ. even though it was conceived under the Journal's prior owners, the Bancrofts' Dow Jones. So convinced are the News Corp. executives of the magazine's future success that, the Observer reports in today's paper, they are making staff sign a "code of conduct" to ensure they will not be swayed by the inevitable mob of overeager advertisers. But to hear one reliable inside source tell it, WSJ. will be lucky to launch without embarrassing itself on the editorial side, to say nothing of selling ads.
Presumably eager to reach what WSJ.'s publisher has described as the "top top consumer," the magazine's editors planned a debut splash: Kate Moss on the cover in an exclusive article about her supposed emergence as a business juggernaut. The entire staff knew of the plan and spoke freely about it, we are told, which may be how Anna Wintour stole the story out from under the nascent publication. August's Vogue, you may have heard, features Kate Moss on the cover beside the headline, "How the Supermodel Rose from Bad Girl to Business Tycoon." Whoops.
That sad incident hardly alleviated staff skepticism toward another major piece, a profile of PETA's Ingrid Newkirk. Set aside the question of what's left to say about Newkirk. Then set aside that the assigned freelancer turned in copy deemed disastrous and unsalvageable. There's still this: The story in the newsroom is that the freelancer has convinced Newkirk not to cooperate with the assigned staff writer. Ugh.
Journal managing editor Thomson is surely familiar with the Financial Times' successful How To Spend it section — he was a longtime veteran of the British newspaper, and in fact is remaking the Journal in FT's image across the board. But it takes some hubris to try and recreate How To Spend It via WSJ., a project Thomson has not only kept alive but put his own stamp on. There are only so many ultra-wealthy readers to go around, and one wonders how many are still not locked up by either T, the U.S. edition of How To Spend It or the many niche magazines detailed in the Observer story.
It will be an especially tricky challenge if Thomson continues to insist on quintessentially British coverage. It does not escape WSJ. staffers that the PETA story reflects a very British fascination with animal rights — a topic of interest to wealthy Americans, sure, but not to the same extent as on the other side of the Atlantic. One is reminded of the front-page story on Ireland's European Union vote a few weekends ago.
If it doesn't sound too Yank to their Commonwealth ears, perhaps Murdoch and Thomson might consider the bold step of re-re-forming WSJ. as something experimental, unproven and at least nominally unique, rather than as a pastiche of T, the FT and whatever other proven examples they've reflexively reached for.
Or, failing that, at least come up with a truly "exclusive" cover!
Drinking outdoors is fun. One of the best things about the summer. But drinking vodka while walking around during the day seems kind of depressing. Even so, it seems to be a habit for one lady celebrity. Her tale, plus a drunken reality TV star, a threesome-having couple, and a drugged-out talk show host, after the jump.
1) "Which reality TV has-been can't even go to paid appearances anymore? His manager is too worried about how trashed he gets when he's on the payroll. " [NYDN]
2) "Which celebrity hides her booze problem by pouring vodka into a Starbucks coffee cup when she's out shopping?" [Mirror]
3) "A certain Northwest city - Several weeks ago this not married actor who is involved in a relationship with an A list actress was staying at a hotel and he was all alone or so everyone thought. The concierge got a call from the gentleman in the room asking if the concierge could get him some company for the evening. Well the concierge asked some preferential questions and arranged for someone to be sent over. The woman was only there for a few minutes and was sent away, but with a little cash in her hand. The concierge receives another call and then another as this act plays itself out over the course of five or six women until finally one stays. And stayed all night and left the hotel with the actor and lo and behold his actress squeeze as well." [CDaN]
4) "A certain Southwest city - This male talk show host had just a few too many to drink or to smoke or to snort but was crazy out of his mind, and made his big eyes even bigger. Well the talk show host decided that at 2am he was going to make a raid on the lobby furniture because it was moving. Oh yeah, it was moving and trying to surround him. So, our talk show host spent about an hour taking a fire ax to various pieces of the furniture. When management was notified they said they didn't care since no other guests were awake and they would get paid for it anyway. After an hour, the talk show host said the furniture was dead and fell asleep right there in the middle of the lobby." [CDaN]
The "direct mail marketing" industry, also known as the people who bring you junk mail, is "going green." In related news, the hot dog industry will be going vegetarian. It seems patently ridiculous that a coalition of junk mailers is going to end pollution, but don't worry—they're not going to strain themselves too hard. “You don’t want to scare companies away from joining because they fear some stringent regulation," explains one member. The general public is mired in environmental apathy these days, too. But maybe that's a good thing, considering what the alternative to "direct mail" is:
“We know that the guidelines need to evolve into specific recommendations and goals,” [coalition member Tom] Berquist said. “And yes, we know that eventually, we have to get paper out of the equation altogether.”
MORE SPAM. Huzzah! And there's always this creative tactic:
There is also support for “list hygiene” — that is, cleaning out direct-mail lists to remove the names of dead people and others unlikely to respond.
ONLY SEND MAIL TO THE LIVING. We'll have this crisis solved in no time.
[NYT]
You know what's "funny" about John Edwards getting busted (pretty damn convincingly) by the National Enquirer while meeting his mistress and love child in a Los Angeles hotel? Edwards' cover story was that he was in LA to meet with the city's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa — and Villaraigosa, like John Edwards, cheated on his wife right after a primary election! And also, wouldn't you know it, Villaraigosa's wife Corina was battling thyroid cancer at the time, sort of like how Elizabeth Edwards is now battling breast cancer. Isn'
