Reggie the Alligator: Cuz was a Watchgator

No wonder my desert cousin was so mellow. They were using him as a watchgator for their $1.5 million grow operation.

That should have bought a lot of alligator food.

Cheapskates.

Reggie the Alligator: Cute Cuz Captured

The size of a cocker spaniel? That’s what they said about my cousin, captured in Hemet in the low-rent desert, pockmarked with a few Florida-like artificial lakes. But he didn’t get out much; it’s a miracle he stayed as ‘healthy’ at four feet and 50 pounds as they claim he was.

They took him away and put him at ‘Forever Wild’, some kind of crazy alligator sanctuary in another desert shithole, Phelan. He’s going to join 70!!! of our cousins there that they took out of people’s houses.  I know we’re cute and lovable, but come on people–we grow up to be big gators with healthy appetites!  What part of that don’t you understand?!

The sanctuary worker, Joel Almquist, said “It wasn’t nasty, it was very well mannered.”  Good manners are certainly native to cunning gators, buddy.  And cocker spaniels are for eating, my friend, and a tasty snack they are.

Anarchy: LA Rules Again

Our beloved LAX led the nation last year. In flights? Passengers? Revenue?
No–in lasers pointed at aircraft! A whopping 102 reported incidents! Let’s hear it for LA–home of anomie, disaffection, and, like, whatever.

Parade Plays Softball with Queen Latifah

The January 2, 2011 issue of Parade featured a cover story on Queen Latifah, her life as a role model, her hosting the People’s Choice Awards and of course a plug for her cosmetics line.  What makes the 7-page (cover plus 6) story remarkable is what’s not there–any discussion of her personal life, beyond the vague comment that in 10 years, the 40-year old Queen expects she’ll have “a couple of kids under my belt…”

Latifah is widely believed to be a lesbian, not even that deep in the closet.  She’s been photographed hugging her reputed long-time girlfriend. 

So why didn’t Parade ask her about her personal life–the readers would certainly like to know.  Was it a ground rule established by Latifah’s ‘camp’–no questions about the “L” word?  Or a cowardly editorial decision by Parade–not to ask in return for access?  Would women stop buying her cosmetics if they thought Latifah was gay?

More importantly, did both underestimate their audience?  Americans have shown they can ‘embrace’ gay stars like Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John, or gay heroes like Daniel Hernandez.  Latifah isn’t a leading lady with romantic roles ’in danger’ if she comes out  (a fear that’s reputed to keep leading men like John Travolta and Tom Cruise in the closet) so why the fear?

It all reminds me of how the Enquirer and its ilk used to play ball with Rock Hudson, despite its muckraking reputation.  For almost 30 years, the tabs, the studio and Hudson’s people manufactured stories about his ‘latest romance’ (with women) to keep the readers happy, no gay revelation that would shatter reader illusions and kill the cash cow.

Everyone played ball–until AIDS brought out the inconvenient truth.

Publish and Be Damned

“Publish and be damned!”

 

 

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington,  when courtesan Harriette Wilson threatened to publish her memoirs and his letters

 

Yes, it’s funny that Bank of America bought up more than 400 “derog” (to put it in credit scoring terms) domain names.  And yes, it’s funnier that they can’t get them all, like this one or “BrianTMoynihanWetsTheBed.com.” Like the proverbial broken clock that’s right twice a day, even Henry Blodget (who probably belongs in jail, not influencing investors ) rightfully heaps abuse upon the hapless guardians of Bank of America’s ‘reputation.’

 

But it’s also sad, too, that Bank of America executives, who in any case seem to be running a single-minded bad publicity campaign (taking this person’s bird and the ashes of this one’s husband), are quaking in their non-Wellington boots at the threat of a WikiLeaks document dump. 

 

We know what the Duke of Wellington would have said to this third-rate Die Hard villain (if he didn’t challenge Julian Assange to a duel first).  Bank of America clearly doesn’t believe in the success of its own campaign to win back the hearts, minds and wallets of American consumers. 

 

Otherwise, they would have told Assange “Publish and be damned.”

 

 

 

Somewhere, Osama Bin Ladin is Laughing His Ass Off

For years, the idea of ‘flying naked’ to show security folks you weren’t a terrorist was a joke.   It’s not a joke anymore, as the TSA (and more importantly, the political powers above them) feels justified in invasive search, groping and near-sexual assault to ‘prove’ passengers aren’t carrying bombs stuffed up their body cavities.

I’m no Sarah Palin fan, but this tweet “TSA: it’s politically incorrect 2 “profile” anyone when natl second is issue?We profile individuals/suspects in other situations!Profile away” actually seems right on.

Asking people questions and watching their reactions seems much more sensible (and works for the Israelis) rather than what Bruce Schneir calls ‘security theatre.’

Joan Rivers is not 77

Last week, according to the local ‘paper of record’, the LA Times, on June 8,  “Joan Rivers turned 77, an age that makes her shudder. After all, for years, the comedian has put a lot of money and effort into trying to look younger.”

Certainly the latter half of this statement is all too demonstrably true, as Rivers has in her campaign to not become Phyllis Diller became the poster child for repeated plastic surgery.  But along with erasing lines, Rivers has erased her birthdate–and the Times is complicit with this.

For Joan Rivers to be 77, she would have been born in 1933.  This would mean she wasn’t quite 21 when she graduated from Barnard College in NY in May of 1954.  This is barely possible, but unlikely, especially as she was a transfer student.

More than 15 years ago, when I was employed by the National Enquirer, I did a ‘clip job’ on Rivers, going through printed clips on her at AMPAS, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library in Beverly Hills.

According to these aged clips, Joan was actually born in 1931, meaning she is now in her 8oth year, a prospect she no doubt finds far more insufferable than ‘turning’ 77 (again).

I have to hand it to her; she’s worked really hard to get the later date out for years, and short of pulling her birth certificate a la “Kenyan alien” Barack Obama, it’s hard to prove.

Does it matter if a woman shaves a couple of years off her age?  Probably not; I know someone who’s half-seriously attempting to shave 9 years off hers.  What’s not OK is for the Times to just print it.  What ever happens to “If your mother says she loves you, check it out?”

LA Times Brings Back TV Listings

Gary Scott reports that the LA Times, after three years, is actually bringing back the Television Times weekly listing section.  Cutting it was yet another bad decision for the Times, as with a universe of hundreds of channels broadcasting 24 hours a day, (and no Cable Guide for your $100 a month) one has little ability to determine what one wants to watch or record days ahead.

The Times seems to have realized that telling readers to create and print out their own listings was a non-starter.

The impenetrable prose of the press release claims that starting June 13, in a ‘tiered roll out,’”newstand and eventually subscription readers (wrong order of things, Times) will get a “44-page tabloid section…with 24-hour daily grid listings spanning morning, afternoon, primetime and late-night programming, four pages of alphabetized TV/cable/satellite movie listings, a full-page cover story, a TV-related crossword puzzle, episode highlights and synopses, and a dedicated sports programming page.”

Did they admit they made a mistake when they killed the section 3 years ago and left thousands of angry subscribers?  Nah…

But then, the barely alive print TV Guide apparently had to be shamed into putting back the daytime (“I want my stories!”) listings, so stupidity loves company.

Reggie the Alligator: My Cousin in Middle School

They caught my cousin Simple in middle school the other day, and disgracefully tied him up with a stick before they no doubt made a pocketbook and matching belt out of him.

Why would an alligator go to middle school?

Simple: The students are still young and tender.

Diary of Reggie, Alligator at Large, Post #6

So now it’s a state crime to buy a drink for an alligator?  Believe me, you’re sitting around all day in this oversized bathtub they call a zoo, you’d want a drink too.

Alligator apologies for such a long time posting, but between my failed escape attempts and just lying around depressed, haven’t wanted to say much.

But now, Ziggy’s here!  A friend! My kingdom for a friend! Or I’m hoping, anyway.

In LA, it seems like it’s everyone’s secret hobby to raise an alligator from a baby–guess between the showers, sprinklers and pools, no one needs their bathtubs.  Not to mention the lowlives with their shark tanks–now Bill Maher wants Barack Obama to have a shark tank in the White House? 

Watch out, man–we predators eat puppies.

So get me a friend.  Or a drink, at least.

Media Training Sarah Palin

How would I media train Sarah Palin?  First, I’d have to get over my objections to her politics; I don’t media train Philip Morris, for example, because I’m convinced their products killed my father.

But if I accepted the Palin assignment, I would radically change the approach the Republicans are using.

First, I’d lose the “My Fair Lady”/Henry Higgins approach of trying to school the eager backwoods lass in the ways of Washington.  It’s patronizing, it oozes sexism, and most importantly it doesn’t work.  Very few of us can successful cram and regurgitate hours worth of talking points; for Palin, the problem is clear in the Couric interview.  Less is more.

Second, I’d treat Palin as a real person (and a bright one) with a compelling story to tell, and get her using that story as a metaphor to promote her views in every interview, as Barack Obama did and still often does.  She did, after all, come from nothing to being elected Governor of the largest state; she is not a daughter of admirals, married to a former President, a descendant of a wealthy and powerful family, etc.

Third, I’d spend some time with her asking her what her most personal political views are and which of McCain’s talking points she finds most compelling.  Then I’d help her craft them (or the ones that the campaign finds most acceptable, at least) into key messages that she could actively promote going forward, and return to when the questioning got tough.  If her message was “lower taxes help working families”, for example, she could use her own family as an example.

Fourth, I’d give her some ammunition; two or three key facts and statistics, not a week’s worth of briefings.  And I’d make it clear that she should stick to the truth and not make up things, no matter how great the temptation or the media pressure.

Fifth, I’d spend our time doing videotaped one-on-one interviews, not cramming random facts into her head.  Give her a half-page of bullet points, have her glance at it, then throw the security blanket away.  My experience is that everyone is uncomfortable and unsuccessful in the first one or two ambush style interviews, but they gain mastery over time.  From there, move on to mock press conferences, shouted questions, etc.

So I guess I’m in reluctant agreement with the “let Palin be Palin” Republican camp.  It hasn’t happened so far, but she can be a powerful spokesperson for the Republican ticket.  But even trained, confident spokespeople can’t help you if you don’t have a compelling message.

Websurfing is Good For You!

Survey says “the Web-savvy group also registered activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of the brain, whereas those new to the net did not.” (These areas of the brain control decision-making and complex reasoning.)

Study leader Gary Small of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA said “A simple, everyday task like searching the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older,” Small said.

Of course, the survey didn’t say anything about the effect of websurfing on one’s s0cial skills, waistline, posture or self-respect.

Zocalo LA Sucks Ass: Paul Krugman Debacle

Sent email to Zocalo LA, “the intellectual life of LA”, to RSVP my attendence at Princeton Professor (now Nobel winner) Paul Krugman’s lecture “The Financial Meltdown and the Future of American Politics.” Particularly wanted to see him as my son now goes to Princeton.

But after driving 15 miles to attend, the wife and I were among dozens, perhaps hundreds of hipsters turned away, as their system didn’t return emails (“We were full since Oct. 7; it was on the website,” incorrectly claimed one harried organizer). Lots of people with confirmations were turned away as well.

As a long-time writer for Successful Meetings magazine and attendee of many lectures, concerts and conventions, this was one of the worst-organized events I have tried to attend. 

If you want to hear Krugman you can listen here; you’ll forgive me if I don’t bother.

It was a good thing I missed the lecture; I might have violated Zocalo’s “code of civility.”

Barack Obama: Is the Media Biased?

One of the most commented-on pieces on ABCNews.com is a long posting by Michael Malone on “Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline.”  If you wade through the 2295 words (yes, I counted), he makes some good points:

“What I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del…

“Why, to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media? “

Good questions–but Malone’s conclusion is from left field.  To editors “presiding over a dying industry: Obama “offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career…With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.”

it’s true that Barack Obama has gotten positive media coverage since the beginning of his campaign, when any honest person would say he was a long shot.  Back then (and really, for most of his campaign) he was the underdog, and certainly the media likes the underdog narrative.  Then there was his youth, his personal story (up from poverty through education and hard work!) and, not least, his race, however that’s defined.

To echo the technology journalism for which Malone is known, editors do like the ‘new new thing’–and that ain’t McCain.  It was Sarah Palin, until journalists did the vetting job the McCain campaign should have done.

On the flip side, as Kurtz says “Critics, including many conservatives, say the media have been too easy on Obama, and bias cannot be discounted as a factor. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from the end of the conventions through the debates, McCain’s coverage was more than three times as negative than Obama’s.”

Yes, the press is liberal: Slate magazine is voting 55:1 Obama over McCain, for example.   But the press used to love John McCain, when it perceived that he stood for something. 

As a media trainer, I would fault the McCain campaign with failing to put out a positive, detailed agenda about what they were running for and delivering consistent messages supporting it.  (Hint: Lower taxes and Joe the Plumber ain’t “Morning in America.”)

The Politico refers to this reality here (via Andrew):

“There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe. As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.”

Drudge Headline of the Day

COPS: HUFFINGTON POST writer stabbed lover 220 times with screwdriver…

Gotta give the tabloid love to Drudge…

LA Times Invents Ford Malibu

The Los Angeles Times, laying off yet another 75 journalists this week, is living in the past.  The paper is running a 7-part front page story about the good old days of “The Gangster Squad“, and how they illegally bugged and harassed gangsters like Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel in the 1940′s.

Meanwhile, in the same issue (Sunday, October 26, 2008) a staffer writing about Barack Obama’s outreach to Latinos in Las Vegas wrote that one of the individuals interviewed was “trying to make a living buying and selling automobiles” and “pointed to two Ford Malibus in the frontyard.”

The writer wrote me to apologize, but the accuracy of such an ‘insignificant’ detail (in a Sunday paper with a circulation of one million) means either the Times editorial staff  has zero knowledge about America’s auto industry and its products (it’s a Chevy Malibu, unless it was a Ford Mustang, Focus or Fusion) or that the factchecking and copyediting staff has been decimated in the cutbacks.  (Or maybe the Times took a Philip K. Dick-like look into the future, merging the struggling automakers.)

Either way, such obvious errors call into question the accuracy of the whole journalistic enterprise.  No wonder the Times wants to run a series on long-dead gangsters.  As with the ghost story my editor at the Enquirer urged me to embellish, they won’t be suing.

UCLA Snoops Shows No More Privacy

Some 1041 patient files were violated by peeping eyes at UCLA Medical Center–and that’s just the ones they know about.

While the files violated included those of California First Lady Maria Shriver, actress Farrah Fawcett and singer Britney Spears, we don’t even have 1000 celebrities in LA, even if you add 5 actors from each of the top 20 TV shows, another 5 from the top ten films, 50 musicians, the entire roster of the Dodgers, Angels, Lakers and Clippers (that last a stretch) plus comedians, politicians, artists and has-beens. 

So that means people at UCLA (and probably your local hospital) are snooping on their ex’s, their neighbors and ‘that guy they brought in today’ out of boredom and unwholesome curiosity.  More than 165 workers at UCLA have been disciplined; doesn’t seem to be working.  Maybe they should start actually firing and arresting people.

As CEO of workstation maker SUN, Scott McNealy was best known for his intemperate attacks on Microsoft (referring to Bill Gates and the current CEO as “Ballmer and Butthead”) and his uninspired leadership of the failing company.

But even a broken clock is right twice a day.  As McNealy told reporters back in 1999, “You have zero privacy anyway.  Get over it.”

20 Fired in Celebrity Privacy Violation

Violating patient privacy doesn’t just happen in Los Angeles, or to people like Farrah Fawcett.  Even in Jacksonville, FL, there are celebrities–and hospital workers anxious to violate their privacy. 

Twenty hospital workers — nurses, admissions workers and patient relations staff — lost their jobs this week, accused of breaking federal privacy rules by accessing the medical records of the (NFL Jacksonville) Jaguars’ Richard Collier.

Two weeks after Collier — who was shot 14 times — was well enough to be discharged from Shands-Jacksonville Medical Center, 20 hospital employees were fired for violating Collier’s medical privacy.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, (HIPAA) should not be a joke.  My medical condition is between my doctors and appropriate supporting personnel and myself–it’s not watercooler chatter for the bored and stupid.

While I admit that wheedling records out of hospital personnel is what tabloid reporters, as I used to be, are trained to do, doesn’t mean that it’s OK for medical personnel to sell or otherwise discuss a star’s (or anyone’s) medical condition.

And this will not stop until doctors are among those fired or otherwise disciplined.

Dumbest Election Reactions

Ralph Nader called Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom” on Fox the other night, apparently because Nader thinks he’s a corporate tool. Perhaps Nader would like someone more authentic like Jesse Jackson (last seen sobbing for the TV cameras after the election) to “cut his nuts off?”

Then there’s this NSFW missive, from my erstwhile employer Larry Flynt, the auteur behind the eagerly-awaited ‘Nailin Palin’.

Meanwhile, NBA star Gilbert Arenas  was convinced both contenders would raise his taxes if elected.  Earning his “Agent Zero” sobriquet, he protested in the dumbest way possible: by not voting.

The Dread Media ‘Anniversary’ Story

If I ran the journalism world, the first thing I would ban would be the “anniversary story.”  Even though I won an LA Press Club Award for this LA Times piece about the Rodney King beating.

Basically, a media ‘anniversary’ is an excuse for journalists to write a little history, bring up some (generally lurid) event from the past or do some “Trivial Pursuit’ style follow-up (where is Kato Kaelin now?!) on half-remembered players. It’s a hook to write something that will get page views or blog hits, requires little actual reporting, and often gives the reporter the chance to play historian, draw parallels to our own time, or better yet, pontificate.

Certain dates are inevitable.  I’m sure November 22 this year (the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination) will bring both memories of that tragic day in Dallas and the death of Camelot, and sober comments on the threats against President-Elect Obama. 

A few guidelines: generally, anniversary dates have to be for events in living memory.  Hence, 9-11 will generate recaps of the events and commentary for at least the next fifty years, but April 14 won’t get much (the date of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 143 years ago).

Second, round numbers are key.  Like my Princeton reunions or wedding anniversaries, the big ones are 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40 and 50 years.  Thus, January 28 won’t be an important media anniversary date until 2011, when it will mark 25 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986.

Third, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’  Significant numbers of dead, or the notoriety of the incident, are sufficent reason for ‘celebrating’ the anniversary.

The last few weeks of October and early November have brought major looks back at the Jonestown massacres and even at the murder of Nancy Spungen by Sid Vicious (relived in New York Magazine’s Entertainment Section!), each taking place in 1978, 30 years ago.  Each of these stories fits the “anniversary story” criteria perfectly: In living memory, lurid, and a round number.

A fourth criteria for the anniversary story, importance, is highly subjective and thus easily ignored.  I was surprised and dismayed by the lack of update coverage on Los Angeles 15 years after the LA Riots last year.  And the 70th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms of Kristallnacht, the terror against Jewish homes and businesses that ignited the Holocaust, while commemorated in Germany, received precious little coverage in the U.S..

As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  But whether we remember or not, all of us are condemned to a lifetime of anniversary stories from the media.

Henry Blodget Belongs in Jail

Yes, you can make an arguement that the American car companies should go out of business. 

But not if you’re Henry Blodget, one of a pack of analysts with screaming conflicts of interests who contributed to the last financial meltdown, during the dot-com era.  He was fined $4 million dollars and permanently barred from the securities industries in 2003 for his deceptive practics.

Blodget was  the dot-com one.  A former managing director at Merrill Lynch and the senior research analyst and group head for the firm’s Internet sector,  Blodget was charged by the SEC with issuing “fraudulent research under Merrill Lynch’s name, as well as research in which he expressed views that were inconsistent with privately expressed negative views.”

Further, he “aided and abetted violations of antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws and violated SRO rules by issuing research reports on one internet company (GoTo.com) that were materially misleading because they were contrary to privately expressed negative views.”

Blodget is now the CEO of the financial news site Clusterstock.com, which I have to say is pretty good (and comments on the securities industry from which Blodget was supposedly banned).  Not bad for a pump-and-dumper who belongs with Dennis Kowzlowski–behind bars.

ABC’s Spelling Error: Journalism’s Decline

The copy editor and the fact checker are no more.  Also no more, sadly, is proper spelling, attention to detail and just basic accuracy.  Take today’s ABCNEWS.COM story about the Montecito fires–please. 

That’s Montecito, ABC–not “Monticeto.”  In October an LA Times writer referred to an interview subject keeping a pair of “Ford Malibus” in his front yard. There’s lots more of this every day.

After an outcry from the readers, they fixed the Montecito story, but as one wrote, “The town is Montecito, not Monticeto. Spelling matters. In a previous posting someone asked whether the line editor was asleep. Nope. Probably didn’t see that the spelling was incorrect. Watch the crawl on CNN or MSNBC. During the course of a day there are scores of errors. As a nation we’ve lost the art of paying attention to detail. That’s why our economy is in trouble. We didn’t read the fine print when we signed the mortgage papers.”

 

Thousands Flee Tony California Town as Blaze Rages

Thirteen injured and more than 100 homes destroyed in fast-moving fire in Montecito

By MIKE VON FREMD and JONANN BRADY
Nov. 14, 2008

18 comments

Flames that ripped through multimillion-dollar mansions Thursday evening continuing burning this morning in the upscale Southern California community of Monticeto, near Santa Barbara. At least 100 homes have been destroyed.

CES 2009 Cuts Room Rates: Signs of the Apocalypse

In another sign of the economic apocalypse upon us (thanks Henry Paulson, another parting gift from the Bush Administration and the ‘worlds most economically developed man’)  the Consumer Electronics Association notified preregistered attendees of significant price cuts on ten different Las Vegas hotels. 

No more the “biggest and best CES ever?”   With Best Buy swooning, Circuit City expiring and all the manufacturers suffering, even long-time CEA head Gary Shapiro will have a tough time putting lipstick on this pig.

Reggie the Alligator Post #7

My brother!  My brother!  Oh, you were lost and now are found!

If only someone had pointed you in the right direction, towards the canals!  There you could have lived a life of contented anonymity among the movie stars and the tattoed, snacking on the diseased ducks and the fish and the unwary poodle. 

Yes, you would have fit in.  Instead, they caught you, put you in a trash can and turned you over to the herpetologists. 

I just hope this isn’t you.

Facebook versus ACT!

In the 1990′s, it was common for professionals to “live all day in ACT!”, ACT! being a contact manager that also had a word processor, calendar, to-do list, etc.  ACT! was all about productivity. 

In fact, you were supposed to call people (remember calling people?) in your ‘tickler’ every 30 days, where you had listed some conversation-starter like “Saw your wife at the dog show.”

Now those professionals live all day in Facebook, briefly departing to do actual work.  Indeed, many IT types and other corporate drones would ban it if they could.  Facebook versus ACT!: an interesting contrast between packaged, stand-alone software and a widely-shared web application.

But are they really so different?  As the ACT! website puts it:

Keep important contact details in one place with ACT! so you have quick access to the information you need.

Be up and running quickly because ACT! is easy to learn and use.

Sound familiar, social networkers?

Things We May Have to Do Without

Things we may have to do without:  newspapers, American cars, television dramas, retirement savings, books.

Their replacement: PerezHilton.com, Twitter, Kias, unemployment benefits, five nights a week of Jay Leno.

It’s change, all right, but not change I want to believe in.

The Chutzpah of Henry Blodget

What is chutzpah?  The Yiddish expression means, roughly, a lot of nerve.   One example of chutzpah is the man who kills both his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

Another is disgraced Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget publishing an article called “Why Wall Street Never Gets It.”   He claims wearily “Our government—at our urging—will go to great lengths to try to make sure such a bust never happens again. We will “fix” the “problems” that we decide caused the debacle; we will create new regulatory requirements and systems; we will throw a lot of people in jail.”

That’s chutzpah from a man who could have gone to jail himself.  And the esteemed Atlantic Magazine should receive the red badge of dishonor for publishing–and paying–Blodget, and for giving him a byline which reads “Henry Blodget is the editor of Silicon Alley Insider, an online business publication.”  Omitted is the fact that he was fined $4 million dollars and permanently barred from the securities industries in 2003.

As you’d expect, Blodget goes for self-exoneration.

“By late 1998, I was cautioning clients that “what looks like a bubble probably is,” but this didn’t save me. Fifteen months later, I missed the top and drove my clients right over the cliff. “

And guess whose fault it was?  “Later, in the smoldering aftermath,  I was accused by Eliot Spitzer, then New York’s attorney general, of having hung on too long in order to curry favor with the companies I was analyzing, some of which were also Merrill banking clients. This allegation led to my banishment from the industry.” 

Blodget may call it an “allegation” but the SEC fined him a total of $4 million and as he says, banned him from the industry.  Why he is allowed to comment professionally on Wall Street, and indeed run the Silicon Alley Insider, is beyond me.

But hey–he’s got chutzpah.

Ruth Seymour’s KCRW: The State is Moi

Few general managers are as closely associated with a public radio station, for better or worse, than Ruth Seymour with KCRW-FM, beginning her tenure in 1978. So it’s not surprising that the 70+ aging lioness (or dragon lady, as many would have it) in winter still believes as King Louis XIV of France believed “L’Etat, C’Est Moi (The State, That’s Me)

At KCRW, no one is bigger than the station, except Seymour, as acclaimed writer/performer Sandra Tsing Loh discovered a few years ago. The latest to feel her wrath, perhaps stirred by various KCRW constituencies, is Claude Brodesser-Aker, who decried the forced resignation of Rich Raddon from the LA Film Festival for his donation to “Yes on 8″, the proposition which actually said no to gay marriage. Seymour, who is certainly old enough to remember the Hollywood Blacklist, said the

“The Business compared his resignation to the Hollywood Blacklist days when members of the film industry lost their jobs because of alleged Communist sympathies. The actors, directors, writers and producers who were targeted in the Blacklist never resigned their positions. KCRW regrets airing this out-of-the-blue opinion and has made it clear to those involved that it is unacceptable.”

But Seymour-as-KCRW is often curiously silent when other ‘mistakes are made’ on the station’s airtime. In June, I wrote and blogged about another KCRW program giving airtime to one of America’s most notorious anti-semites.

Queen Ruth never responded.

Mistakes of the Liberal Media

Yes, we know things are very bad now in the media; today’s Mediabistro bucket of cheer talks of layoffs at Newsweek,  NPR and the death of local newspapers. 

But that’s no excuse for making ridiculous, egregious errors like mispelling “Montecito” or inventing a new car, the “Ford Malibu.”  But those are innocent mistakes compared to not checking the background of spokespeople before they’re interviewed, or bowing to political correctness. 

Today, NPR’s Marketplace had a long interview with Henry Blodget about whether he saw this ‘bubble’ coming.  Yes, the same Henry Blodget who was fined $4 million and banned for life from the securities industry is now a respectable commentator, like notorious anti-Semite Amiri Baraka this summer. 

But when a host of a KCRW-FM show dares to compare firing someone for donating money to an anti-gay marriage cause to the Blacklist, he’s slapped down by the station manager.

Playboy Gives Skoal Happy Ending

I opened the mail today and got my new Skoal edition of Playboy.  Under the clear plastic wrap, a woman was posed naked on hundreds of cans of Skoal, smiling alluringly.   Skoal had the look, the goods guys like and most of all the official Playboy logo, if not the endorsement of the National Cancer Institute.

Turned out it was the back cover; the front cover is Carmen Electra, again. 

But there’s a fine line between selling advertising, and selling out to your advertisers, especially one selling so morally questionable a product.  Is Playboy so desperate that it doesn’t know who it is anymore?

Arianna is Right

I’ve often taken a critical look at the Huffington Post, because of their uncool policy of not paying contributors, which is bad in itself and can lead to horrible work like this.  Then there’s their habit of “borrowing” work on the Web. 

But there’s no denying the intelligence and wisdom of its founder, the eponymous Arianna Huffington.  Interviewer Choire Sicha recently asked her, “What was the most under-covered story of 2008?”

“I think the most under-covered story for me was: How did we get here? How did we get suddenly, or appear suddenly, in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? And exactly how did all these billions of dollars disappear? I think most immediately, the most under-covered story is how are the billions of bailout money being spent.”

She’s right.  Henry Paulson’s bailout ‘plan’ seems to be to fly a helicopter over Wall Street dumping out buckets of cash.

But the coverage problem rests with the news media, which seems unwilling and unable to cover the crash of home values, banks, stocks and jobs in ways America can understand and act on. 

One reason is that business desks are being slashed and the survivors are dispirited, wondering if their own jobs will be next, making for low-energy reporting.  A second is the “innumeracy” too common in the news media, which Yglesias notes has “almost no understanding of quantitative methods.”  Finally, you can blame our celebrity culture from Barack to Britney, whether it’s force-fed to consumers by editors or whether the media is responding to pressure for ratings from their own pressured bosses.

Say Sayonara to Steve Jobs

Although I am not an Apple fanatic, I do wish the best for Steve Jobs as a person.  Being sick and focusing on getting better is no picnic.

That said, I think he should make a final break with Apple, in the same way that Bill Gates receded from Microsoft.  Lost in the happy news about Apple beating estimates in a shitty market today was this news about an SEC investigation into Apple’s disclosure policies about his illness. 

The investigation and Apple’s non-disclosures (such as the ‘hormone imbalance’ sham)  suggest the company took a  ”Weekend at Bernie’s” approach to propping up the great man.  And as usual, the dwindling band of technology ‘journalists’/Apple syncophants didn’t ask the hard questions.

While the Woz is right that Apple can survive with Jobs, the company needs to go cold turkey now.

FyreTV’s Wireless Porn Server

There seemed to be plenty of leakage at the Consumer Electronics Show this year from the Adult Entertainment Expo.  (And vice versa; Fox Home Video was promoting the ‘legit’ release Choke, starring Angelica Huston and Sam Rockwell, by distributing faux anal beads at the adult show.)

A case in point is FyreTV (www.fyreTV.com) which used one of the press parties at the ‘legitimate’ show to demonstrate what it proudly called “the world’s first wireless IPTV set-top box (or BoXXX, as they would have it) for streaming DVD adult content.”

The wireless ‘BoXXX’ ships with any new subscription, which starts at $9.95.   The company signed to provide content from such stalwarts of the industry as Vivid, Wicked Pictures, Evil Angel, Seymore Butts and Sin City, among many others. 

Is there a catch?  According to one spokesman I talked to, it’s no ‘all the porn you can eat’ plan.  The $9.95 basic service offers just 100 minutes a month, giving users an incentive to limit their ‘viewing’ to 3 minutes a day. 

 Just don’t fall asleep…

Housing and Stocks Meet at the Bottom

In a little-notified confluence of misery, stock prices and the Southern California housing market each returned to their 2002 levels yesterday. 

The median price of a home in Southern California (LA , Ventura, Orange, San Diego, San Bernadino and Riverside Counties) hit $250,000, a 40% decline  from last year.  In LA County,  the drop was ‘only’ 35%, but numbers don’t lie; the current median price is now $300,000, down from $458,000 in January 2008.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones closed yesterday at 7465, its lowest level since–yes–2002.  The numbers echo what some wag once said about gambling, “The guy who invented gambling was smart, but the guy who invented chips was a fucking genius.”  The point–like chips, they’re not just averages, but real money, burning up.

So is this return to 2002, itself a recovery from 9-11, the bottom bottom we’ve been looking (and praying) for?  One can hope–but the smart guys we trust to run business and the government don’t seem to have a clue about what to do.  Even CNBC’s business cheerleaders and pump-and-dump squad have had enough.

Newsweek Sanctions Dubai Prejudice

When the Dubai government refused to issue a visa to Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer, the Tennis Channel refused to cover the tournament and the Wall Street Journal Europe revoked its sponsorship. 

Newsweek, the other media sponsor, did nothing.  Later they issued this statement:

“Newsweek shares the stated commitment of the Women’s Tennis Association and the Association of Tennis Professionals to “fair play” in Dubai and to assuring that tournaments are open to all qualified players in the future. If Israeli player Andy Ram is not permitted to enter Dubai to play in the men’s tournament, which begins Monday, Newsweek will withdraw from sponsoring the event.”

So discriminating against Peer is apparently OK with Newsweek.  But if Dubai does it one more time, they might do something.

Yet another missed chance for relevancy and courage for Newsweek.  There won’t be many more.

Judges Sell Children to Prison, CNN Late to Story

A story recently came to light that truly shakes our democracy to its core; a pair of Pennsylvania judges made a deal with a private prison operator in their state and  jailed almost  5000 minors  in return for over $2.5 million dollars. 

Trading the freedom of a child for money by a judge sworn to uphold the law is an absolute abomination.   I don’t care how jaded the public is by financial scandals, easy-to-blame boogey men like Bernie Madoff and economic disaster.

Ironically, I became aware of this crime around February 14, which is when the Torah portion Yitro (Jethro) is read.  While that portion is much better known for Moses being given the Ten Commandments, it begins with Yitro, Moses’ father-in-law, watching how overburdened Moses/Moshe is with the people’s problems.

Yitro, seeing this, approaches Moshe and, speaking like a true father-in-law, says: “This is not good, this thing you are doing. You will surely be worn out, you and the nation with you, for this is too great a burden for you, you can not do it by yourself.” Yitro then goes on to outline a brilliant solution: he suggests that Moshe recruit suitable men–God-fearing, honest,–and appoint them as judges. Yitro proposes that a system of upper and lower courts be established, with Moshe at the top of the pyramid.

CNN finally picked up this troubling story more than two weeks after it was covered in an editorial in a major daily in one of America’s largest cities, Philadelphia.  Tellingly–and pathetically–CNN doesn’t even bother to post a dateline on this ‘news’ (if hardly ‘new’) story.  News isn’t just what the mainstream media says it is, it’s when the mainstream media decides to run with it.

Also troubling is that major outlets like CNN are reporting the outcome of a Federal investigation that began in 2006.  What happened to breaking news stories instead of Oscar fashion  ’coverage’?  Where was the crusading media for years while these children were locked up?

James Cramer Swears Off Stocks

So the king of the pump and dumpers (not to mention multiple possible conflicts of interest) has sworn off stocks.

“I say, patiently, and endlessly, and I’m on record on this, that if you need money for anything important, take it the heck out of the stock market.”

Thanks Jim.  Where were you 6000 Dow points ago?    He should have written Soviet history; massive ongoing revisions without shame.

CNBC likes to say his show is for entertainment value.  Perhaps we should think of him as Proximo, the rotund gladiator keeper and showman in Gladiator.

Proximo: I know that you are a man of your word, General. I know that you would die for honor, for Rome, for the memory of your ancestors. But as for me? I’m an entertainer.

Maximus: Do you remember what it was to have trust, Proximo?
Proximo: [unfamiliarly] Trust?

There’s always a bull market somewhere.

Are you not entertained?

Rocky Mountain News Closes, Another Eye Shut

A newspaper died today, as on February 27, 2009, after 150 years in business, the Rocky Mountain News shut down.

Yes, hundreds of journalists, press operators, deliverymen and others (at least two newstands in my upscale neighborhood have been closed for years) have lost their jobs.

But more importantly, another eye has been shut, whether it watched local news, government spending, crime, sports or politicians.  With the complex issues facing our country, from Obama’s enormous budget to Iraq and Afghanistan to the endless bailouts of financial institutions, we need more trained eyes watching, not less.  We need more readers, more questioning of the press, more dialog between media and reader.

Nobody loves the press.  But without the press doing their job, you get this or this.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman Proud Philistine

Although he’s been trying to bring world-class medical facilities to Las Vegas, Mayor Oscar Goodman’s civic boosterism doesn’t extend to the arts.

“I don’t see a museum for art as necessary downtown.  The masters are on the Strip.  There’s also round-trip airfare to Los Angeles.  It’s not necessary to have a art museum.  I want a mob museum.”  

The dismissiveness of this statement is reminscent of Hermann Goring’s “Every time I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver.”

Former mob lawyer Goodman (full disclosure: I’ve interviewed him and like him) does like to play the buffoon with his love of gin, showgirls and frequently politically-incorrect statements, like wanting to hang graffitti ‘artists’ by their thumbs or inviting Miss America contestants to a bikini party in a pool full of gin. 

But he’s not stupid; a mob museum would  be more unique, probably a better tourist draw and certainly a better representative of how Las Vegans want to see themselves and their founding fathers.

After all, what can you expect in a city where even the term ‘college girl’  (live to your room) is proudly pornographic?

KCRW Castrates Clash

KCRW, the radio station too afraid to rock, did it again this week, putting Lily Allen’s girly, breathy version of “Straight to Hell” in heavy rotation.  Not only will the revolution not be televised, but it will be sanitized.  She sounds as bored, self-hating and out of it as Bill Nighy in “Love Actually.”

This is not a new problem at LA’s ‘alternative’ public radio station, but the political correctness of KCRW is grinding.

Diary of Reggie, Alligator at Large, #8

Sure, the alligator set the fire.  Sure, the alligator burned down the school. 

He knocked over the portable heater.  He was probably cold–what do you expect when you keep a four-foot alligator with 70 other animals in your house?

Personally, I’d blame the ‘human’ behind all that–not the scapegator.

Jon Stewart Rips Cramer a New One

The self-important pump-and-dump crew are finally getting the respect they deserve, from a comedian, no less. 

Unfortunately, the only thing that will bring down the crowd of corporate CEO butt-kissers (until the advertising  completely collapses) would be if the clowns turned their cannons at the mismanagement at GE, which has fallen nearly 80% since I bought this ‘safe’ company at $39.7 a share in November 2007.

Oh wait–GE owns CNBC?  No worries–the public will still get the truth from CNBC’s crew of crack journalists.  “In Cramer we trust.”

Obama Kneecaps Las Vegas

Although Las Vegas workers were key to Barack Obama’s successful campaign to win the ‘battleground’ state of Nevada, so far he has repaid them with the back of his hand. 

At issue is Obama’s bluenose comment “You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s got to be some accountability and some responsibility.”   It’s not just banks like Bank America that have cancelled scheduled trips, which are typically eagerly-awaited rewards for top salespeople and marketers.

The Las Vegas Review Journal reports:

* The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported 340 event cancellations in the past 90 days.
* The situation has cost the local economy about $131.6 million in lost spending.
* The rampant flaking on Las Vegas business trips and the cancellation of conventions and business meetings has cost LV resorts 111,800 guests and 236,700 room nights

Rather than look bad, corporations would rather cancel and pay the cancellation fee.  The fleshpots of Las Vegas may not be professor Obama’s cup of decaffeinated tea, but a lot of unionized workers depend on the celebration of capitalism there for their income.

WSJ Goes Tabloid on Madoff

And it’s the right way to cover Madoff.  Today’s (March 13) six column story looked at the victims of the scam and the now-convicted scum–a reminder that there are real people being hurt, not just numbers thrown around.

Murdoch’s instincts are correct.  Although I hate the potitics of the editorial page, the newspaper is thriving in the most difficult media environment in memory.

Natasha Richardson Injury, Parent Trap Curse?

First of all, let me say that my prayers are with Natasha Richardson and her family.  I hope the ever-reliable NY Post and others are wrong and that she is not ‘brain-dead’ from a skiing accident. 

She’s a talented actress and a beautiful lady I’ve had the chance to see in the flesh a couple of times, performing in Cabaret on Broadway and in 2005 ago at a premiere party for her film The White Countess, which though well-reviewed was essentially dumped after the death of producer Ismail Merchant. She was the epitome of Hollywood glamour at the premiere in a tight-fitting skyblue gown.

Hollywood curses on films have about the same credibility as Hollywood ghosts, which I’ve written about for the National Enquirer, embroidering the tale of Ozzie and Harriet haunting their old Hollywood home.  But with Lindsay Lohan’s well-publicized troubles, the near-death of Dennis Quaid’s young twins and now this, perhaps the Parent Trap should join the list.   

Magazine Publishing Officially Dead

Not quite official yet, I guess.  I’m still awaiting the publication of some pieces I’ve submitted in the last few weeks and, of course, some checks.   And I’d love to keep selling my work, although that seems less and less likely.

But when the Western Publishing Association (home of the Maggie Awards) cancels their annual publishing conference because of low registration, that’s a pretty big nail in the coffin.  When my magazine won its one and only Maggie in 1992, the conference went on literally days after the LA Riots ravaged the city.

Not this time.

An annual event for the media publishing community in the western United States, the conference has, in prior years, drawn upwards of 230 people, offering more than two dozen educational sessions covering all areas of print, digital and event media. In addition, vendor tabletop exhibits were available as well as other vendor sponsorships.

“It was an extremely difficult decision to make,” said Jane Silbering, Executive Director. “We have a responsibility to our sponsors to deliver attendance worthy of their expectations and dollars spent, and to our speakers, to deliver an audience worthy of the time and effort spent in preparing their presentations.”

Twitter is for Twits

I do have a Twitter account.  I haven’t used it in more than a year.

Nonethess I constantly get emails that so-and-so is ‘following you’ on Twitter.  Why?  To see if I move or just continue laying there?

I just got a tweet announcing I’m being followed by, of course, someone I don’t know.  Intrigued (not), I went to his profile page to see what his answer to the burning Twitter question, in fact the only Twitter question, WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW?, was.

1. watching tv

Actually, twittering as the latest expression of our addled ADD age isn’t for twits.  John Cleese has it right.

Got Truck Balls?

What does it say about our society that ‘balls‘ are big, but you never see the Playboy bunny emblem on vehicles anymore?

Lonely Solid Tough Bad Ass

Of course, when you have an accessory like this, who needs Playboy?

Henry Blodget vs. Ken Lewis

Henry Blodget: Why does Ken Lewis of Bank America still have his job?

World: Why are pump-and-dump-style commentators like Cramer or Henry Blodget still making their living from the stock market?  Shouldn’t Blodget be in jail?

GM CEO Rick Wagoner’s next move

No, not Disneyland.  You’ll see him driving a

… armored Mercedes S600

or a

with a

hearty “Fuck you!” finger raised high.

And a pair of these dragging behind…

Octomom Made Me Do It: Snoop and Get Fired

Can you imagine losing your job over Octomom?  That’s what more than 20 Kaiser hospital employees are contemplating this morning.  Apparently they couldn’t contain themselves from looking at Nadya Suleman’s records.

Even if they were looking for “the frozen pop” (the best description I ever heard of a sperm donor) or the tabloids were behind it, this summary judgement and punishment seems riduculously harsh.  A warning would probably have worked for some of the curious.

By taking in this woman and deploying enormous resources (46 employees  in the delivery room) without asking questions or asking for supplemental payments, Kaiser already has a lot to answer for.  If I paid premiums there, I’d be screaming.

And considering how hard it can be for a company to fire someone, one wonders if this is an easy way to cut costs and clean house.

Playboy: So Out of Touch

Playboy has long pretended that it’s for the 18 to 30 year old male.  In fact, ever-youthful Kevin Bacon was rejected as an interview subject because he was too old, resulting in this wretched song.

The current issue (not the classic ’60′s cover above) continues the weird dichotomy of 19-ish models and elderly authors who could be their leering grandfathers–or great-grandfather, in the case of 83-year old Hugh Hefner.

The issue contains the first of a four-part James Ellroy meditation on “his childhood, [his mother's] unsolved murder and his teenage peeping.”  It also  looks at “how his mother’s death drove him to search for the perfect woman, to seek out both prostitutes and (fruitlessly) women of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, to pass notes with his phone number in coffee shops, to send literally thousands of dollars in flowers.”

Not creepy at all, the 61-year old  L.A. Confidential author says he “never masturbated on neighbors’ lawns — ‘That was just hyperbole!’ — but was a dedicated peeper and self-described ‘perv’ during his teenage years….when he stole pills, underwear, a turkey breast and ‘a five spot’ from this place he still thinks of as ‘Cathy Montgomery’s house.’”

Now that’s got to appeal to that cleancut college/military demo and the advertisers!  Or at least to Skoal.

Diary of Reggie, Alligator at Large, Entry #9

Oh my droogies, it has been a while between posting, but my WiFi access in this stinking zoo pond is, shall we say, intermittent.

While I’m online, I must warn you about an insidious threat to alligators everywhere: chicken.  Superman has kryptonite, we have chicken.  They play upon our weakness to capture us. 

Just as I was lured, brother Texas gator was thrown in the pit of iniquity, brought down by the scent of a chicken, that he was not even allowed to eat!  Now he lingers in a wildlife facility, held for ‘rehabilitation’.  For what? The crime of alligatorhood?

And in our Florida homeland, a young brother was broomed by a beast for smelling her cooking.  No chicken for him–but at least he got a nice big bite of redneck.

Ford Fusion Hybrid, International Supercar

Ford has been much in the news.  Unlike the other Big 3 automakers, it didn’t take government money and hasn’t been as painfully mismanaged or dismembered as Chrysler or General Motors, which no longer builds excitement.  Ford has retired debt, reached an agreement with the UAW and seen its stock more than quadruple in the past few months.

What’s missing from the equation? Cars.  But Ford’s comeback, to be successful, depends on building cars people want to buy.   Like the Ford Fusion Hybrid.  Which I watched hungrily at its launch at the 2008 LA Auto Show, and which I plunked down my hard earned money to buy six months ago.

I call mine ‘international supercar’ because it’s an American Ford, is a 5-seater based on the Mazda 6, is assembled in Mexico and includes a Japanese gas/electric hybrid system and navigation system.

After six months, I hardly see it, as my wife has decided it’s her favorite car of all time.  She loves the heated leather seats, the Sync Bluetooth handsfree phone system, the hard drive where Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen reside–and most of all, the 36.8 miles per gallon we’ve averaged on gas over the 6500 miles we’ve driven the car.  Doesn’t hurt that a friend says our silver Fusion “looks like a Lexus.”  Or that my wife looks good in it, either.

One of my favorite features is that it goes up to 45 mph on electric power alone, so I can be crusing Ventura Boulevard in stealth mode. It runs on regular gas, too, unlike our Lincoln Aviator, which greedily (13 miles per gallon) drinks only premium.

As a techie I love all the electrical gadgets, from blind spot detection to being able to pick a restaurant or a cheap gas station (as if I needed one) on the screen or command it via Blackberry.  It’s basically a voice-operated computer on wheels–without Microsoft’s ‘blue screen of death’ so far.

I’ve had my disagreements with Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Neil of the LA Times.  But not when he says of the Fusion, “Wait, so somebody invented the car of the future and didn’t tell us?”

 

L.A. Film Noir not: The Black Dahlia

I love LA, and I love films set in Los Angeles, from Bladerunner to perhaps the most typical genre, film noir. 

I finally saw Black Dahlia today on HBO, and it was as bad as they say.  Worse, even.

It was one big acting lesson for the wooden juvenile leads, Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johanson.  Watching Hartnett struggle to show grief and shock when his partner plunges to his death was a painful movie moment indeed.

The director was in love with mood shots and voiceover, both of which can be overdone. Then there’s the father daughter make out scene, not too much of a homage to Chinatown.  Not a surprise to learn that it was an over-the-top but past his prime Brian DePalma, bhind the violence and leering sex.

“She looks like that dead girl.  How sick are you?”  The line reading was so great that it repeated in the voice over.  “You’d rather fuck me than shoot me.”

And the script…well, the real Black Dahlia, of the dead woman found cut in half in 1947, is considered an iconic LA crime, although who know why compared to the thousands killed in ‘gang-related’ violence over the last   There’s not much to hang your hat–or the script-on, so a plot has to be invented, so the filmakers tapped the James Ellroy novel.  But the A and B lines about a mob tie-up, girls reading for Hollywood screen tests and a Hollywood gothic family don’t make much sense or cover incoherence with screaming and overacting and grand guignol.

LA Confidental still rules, for three reasons: 1. Actual great acting, particularly the way under-utilized Guy Peerce, but also the world-weary Russell Crowe and Oscar-winner Kim Basinger.  2. Curtis Hanson, really a great, understatted director who can work in any genre and make you care even about a chick flick, In Her Shoes.  3.  A well-written script that uses noir elemetns and period cars, sets and costumes but is not overwhelmed by them–and deals with a continuing Los Angeles problem, our ambivalence with the LAPD.

Lakers and Clippers, A Tale of Two Cities

Like many in Los Angeles, I became a Clippers fan because I could no longer afford Lakers games.  But the Clippers were also, a couple of years ago, a promising team–I had $15 seats with my sons the night the Clippers beat the Nuggets and vaulted into the second round of the playoffs!

Sadly, things have changed, and only for the worst.  I tried to buy Laker playoff tickets today, and they sold out in minutes, even the $215 American Express seats that were too rich for my blood.  (That’s nothing; seat prices go up to $3500.)

And the Clippers?  I just received a 0.10 offer from the Clippers for the last few games of this lost season.  Of course there’s a catch, but still, check out the un-NBA-like cheesiness of the dime photography.

Fast Break Friday: One Deal. One Chance. Right Now.

Get ready! At 2:00pm (PT) the clock starts ticking! Today’s limited-time Fast Break Friday offer features 10-cent tickets! Buy one center section seat for $12 ($23 off!) and get the second ticket for only $0.10! This Dime Deal is only available from 2:00-4:00pm so sign up or log in to myClipper NATION to take advantage of this exclusive low-price deal. Two hours only!Link: Click here

Fast Break Friday Now! Previous Week’s Fast Break Friday Offers

Another Day, Another Massacre

Today’s shooting: Binghamton, New York. 13 dead  April 3, 2009

Monday’s shooting: Santa Clara, CA. 6 dead. March 30, 2009

Sunday’s shooting:  Carthage, NC 8 dead in a nursing home. March 29, 2009

March 10, 2009:  Samson, AL 10 dead in two nearby towns.

January 27, 2009: Wilmington, CA 7 dead in one family

December 24, 2008; Covina, CA, 10 dead in ‘Santa Claus’ massacre

October 6, 2008; Los Angeles, 6 dead in one family

That’s seven U.S. mass killings of 6 or more people in six months, not to mention this year’s international leader, the massacre of 16 in Germany.  I may have missed some.

Are people spinning out of control?  Is economic despair the trigger for the trigger?

What’s going on?

Olympic Heroes of the Bible

Now appearing for the Unified Team (Canaan, Judah, Israel, etc.):

Javelin: Pinchas

Single Scull Rowing: Moses

Wrestling: Jacob

Weightlifting: Samson

Shooting: David

Track: Adam, as he was first in the human race

The End of Tolerance for BS

Things are rough for a lot of people, including me and Sam Zell, facing the publishing precipice.  But if there’s a silver lining, America may have reached the end of its tolerance for bullshit. 

Consider:

Instead of placating the pirates of Somalia, the Navy shot them on President Obama’s order.  And few weep for the tragically early demise of these teenagers.

Although they love illusionists, they’re not big on bullshit in Nevada.  That’s why OJ Simpson was convicted of robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas and immediately remanded to prison, where he is serving what could be a 15-year sentence.

Texas legislators are getting sick of creationism in the public schools.

Despite his millions (billions?), Bernard Madoff was immediately put in jail after he pleaded guilty.  He remains there today, even though his lawyers argued he should remain free before sentence is pronounced in June.

Even celebrity Phil Spector was found guilty by an LA jury of murdering Lana Clarkson and, again, sent immediately to jail while awaiting sentencing.  This jury didn’t buy that Clarkson killed herself on her first date with Spector.

Jackie Robinson Reality Check

It’s great that baseball is honoring Jackie Robinson with a rather surreal day where all players (thanks to Ken Griffey Jr.) wear #42.  But Jackie Robinson never got to play in his hometown. 

Probably the greatest 4-sport athlete that Pasadena and UCLA ever produced, he was a Brooklyn Dodger through the winter of 1956.  They then traded him to the hated Giants and he retired, missing the team’s move to Los Angeles at the end of the 1957 season.

Most likely, it wasn’t racism. As they say in The Godfather, “it’s only business.”

 

Famous Jewish Sports Legends

The tribute to Jackie Robinson (and the inane coverage of baseball’s ‘progress’ in getting more American black players) got me thinking about how much each ethnic group cherishes its athletes, although all too often they are malefactors.

Jews are as guilty as any other ethnic group, although Airplane the movie claims “Famous Jewish Sports Legends”  is only a pamphlet.

Still Jews  obsessively obsess over ‘their’ athletes, like the one and only Jew in the NBA today, Jordan Farmar (does he ‘look Jewish?’)

Sadly, Jews like other ethnic groups seem much more interested in even the vaguest athletic connection rather than that much more important ‘hall of fame’–Jewish Nobel prize winners, of whom there are at least 178.

Columbine and the Dread Media Anniversary Story

Here we are, ‘celebrating’ ten years since the maniacal shootings at  Columbine.   And last week, “20 years ago today Sergeant Pepper” didn’t teach the band to play, but 96 people were killed in a soccer stampede in England.  And today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing; time to wallow in the people’s grief.

Perhaps this is one reason people hate journalists, not just asking victims how they feel at the scene of the disaster, but revisiting it 10, 20 or more years out.

As I said last year,

“If I ran the journalism world, the first thing I would ban would be the “anniversary story.”  Even though I won an LA Press Club Award for this LA Times piece about the Rodney King beating.

Basically, a media ‘anniversary’ is an excuse for journalists to write a little history, bring up some (generally lurid) event from the past or do some “Trivial Pursuit’ style follow-up on half-remembered players.”

And the big one is coming up this summer.  No, not 40 years since the moon landings.  I’m sure we can look forward to an interview with Roman Polanski, on his thoughts on the 40th anniversary of his wife and the others slaughtered in the Manson killings.

LA Times All-Access Next Step to Doom?

As a loyal subscriber, I got an email from the LA Times yesterday offering me an ‘all-access’ subscription for no additional cost.  The all-access plan–pitched as a celebration of Earth Day–would give me full access to the electronic version of the Times on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, days I don’t get the print edition.

GO GREEN NOW! the ad screams.

Sound good (if little different than just reading the paper online)–but my take is that it’s leading down the road to what the Detroit Free Press is already doing–cutting out home delivery during the week and only serving subscribers on weekends. 

Or maybe this is the first step in trying to charge for content again.

Either way, newspapers can’t grow by cutting off fingers and toes.

Gambling on American Idol

When I interviewed Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, he took several important cell phone calls in his office–from his bookie.  His wife told me, “If two cockroaches were racing across the floor, he’d bet on one of them.” 

But now I’ve found even more degenerate gamblers–people who bet on American Idol. 

Anything to get straight guys to watch the show.

Roseanne Barr Applauds Suicide

Why I don’t usually listen to KPFK or Pacifica radio: Roseanne Barr at 5:08PM PST 4/22 applauded the suicide of Peter Kellermann, CFO of Freddie Mac.

Will Esquire Drop Dead?

So 24/7 Wall Street is claiming.

The collapse in print advertising has pushed revenue at most of Hearst’s large magazines down by double digits after a bad year in 2008. …Hearst is going to have to cut some of its anemic magazine titles. Esquire is among the weakest of the major men’s magazines on the basis of advertising page performance. Through April, ad pages at the magazine dropped 27% to 206. Men’s magazines are one of the most crowded categories in the industry. Esquire is up against GQ, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, and a number of men’s fitness and health publications. The men’s magazines which are performing the most poorly will not last long.

Understandably terrified of being teabagged by a tag-team Maxim/GQ combo, Esquire denies that they are an endangered species.

To that list I would add Playboy.  The current issue, with Lisa Rinna (who?) on the cover and nekkid inside, is an anemic 118 pages. Combined with the size shrinkage of the magazine and thin cheap paper stock, it’s an unprepossessing half the size of my Dad’s Playboys from the early 1970′s, when I developed an interest in the genre.

While Playboy the magazine doesn’t know who it is either,  at least their Bettie Page fixation is harmless, if gay. 

But I have an active dislike of Esquire, partly based on their ever-snobby attitude.  (And just who are their real readers, anyway?) But I mostly dislike them because of the  ‘investigative obituary’ (investigating her sex life, I recall) of Judith Resnik, the Challenger space shuttle astronaut, right after she was tragically killed.  Way to go, Esquire.  We won’t miss you when you’re gone.

Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have A Buick?

No.

Technology Lifestyle Mags Disappearing

And a good thing, too. I have before me a copy of CE Lifestyles, the February 2005  issue. The cover photo is a bodacious babe smiling a come-hither smile at her digital-camera wielding boyfriend. To further convince the fickle consumer, the cover price reads $5.99   $1.99.   Now apparently called First Glimpse, you can subscribe for just $29 a year.

For years, publishers thought the combination of fetishized cool consumer electronics and hot cover babe would turn people men onto the so-called “CE Lifestyle.” 

Why do these publications never take off?  Now, of course, advertising is a memory, as are freelance, photo and model budgets.  But that’s not the real reason.

A long time ago I went to a presentation by some of the editors of Entertainment Weekly.  EW itself is in trouble now, but not because it didn’t follow the editors advice.  In terms of coverage, he said, “Movies are best, then music and television.  Then sports.  Last is technology.”

Bristol Palin: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Somehow, Bristol Palin has become a spokesperson for teenage abstinence on behalf of a foundation started by the owner of Candies shoes for teenage girls.   And I’ll bet you didn’t know that today, May 6, 2009, was National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (apparently by talking about it.)

Give Palin a little credit for at least addressing the inevitable charge of hypocrite.

“”Regardless of what I did personally, I just think that abstinence is the only … 100 percent foolproof way to prevent pregnancy…if I can prevent even one girl from getting pregnant, I will feel a sense of accomplishment,” she said. 

And one assumes she’s getting paid as a spokesperson, so at least she won’t be like OctoWelfareMom. 

But my father was a smoker, two packs a day, and with love and irony, he would constantly lecture my brother and I about smoking.  “Do as I say, not as I do.”  

So it was only a miracle that we didn’t become addicted and die of lung cancer like my father. 

“You did and you’re telling me not to?” will be the response of most teenagers to Bristol, who is certainly paying the price for doing what teenagers do.   Her failed relationship and her child (at least no one calls it her “shame”) have been tabloid fodder for months.  Meanwhile, college, career and marriage have all receded a little further towards the horizon for her.

My son and his girlfriend had an intimate relationship at Bristol and Levi’s age, but that awkward talk about contraceptives seems to have had more of an impact than admonishments about abstinence.

The Missing Marines of Tarawa

The Princeton Alumni Weekly just published my cover story “Issue in Doubt.” 

It’s about how the U.S. military lost track of hundreds of Marines killed at Tarawa in World War II, including Medal of Honor winner and former Princeton student Alexander Bonnyman—and how despite the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), whose motto is: “Until they are home”, depressing political considerations usually mean that the search for Vietnam-era remains get priority over missing WWII or Korean vets.

Due partly to battle conditions, but largely to a series of screw-ups during and after the war, only 49% of the 1000 Marines killed over three days in November 1943 were ever found and repatriated to the U.S.

Can Bonnyman and the other ‘missing’ Marines be found and returned to their families?  I don’t know–but I do think the U.S. owes them a better effort.

 

 

 

Twelve-year-old Fran Bonnyman accepts the Medal of Honor awarded posthumously to her father, Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman Jr. ’32, from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal ’15 in 1947.

Playboy Experiences Shrinkage

Blog readers know I have an ambivalent relationship with Playboy, the magazine that no longer knows who it is.  It reported today it lost money, which in the real world means losing readers and advertisers.  If you can’t make money selling sex anymore, you’re really in trouble.

The magazine has already been cut in size, both page count and in the smaller, thinner paperstock with pages that stick together on their own.

Now it’s being cut in frequency, with the July and August issues combined “in a move it says could be a precursor to a permanent curtailing of frequency.”  More good news for readers; when they raise the price to $5.99 an issue, you’ll be paying more for less.

The Playboy ‘empire’  tries to minimize the magazine’s importance, saying it compresises “less than a quarter” of the company’s revenues.

Playboy needs truck balls.  It needs to get more outrageous and pneumatic and bodacious like Pamela Anderson—not less.

PR Pros and Press Lists

For public relations pros, their press contacts are one of their most valuable assets.  Yet in packing up my office today, I threw out dozens of press lists and threw out an old Bacon’s.  Why?

Because:

• Multimedia Systems Design,
• Network Magazine
• Electronic News
• Electronic Buyers News
• Internet Week
• PC World
• InfoWorld and the rest have been trashed, and their editors and writers with them.

Another thing I threw out: a note from a client on “Long lead publications with a two to four month lead time. ”  The web has killed that concept too.

It makes keeping that press list constantly updated a challenge, but a challenge that’s more important now than ever.  Then there’s the question of who is actually a reporter or editor these days…

Being inclusive is best.  I admired an old client who always treated the press equally, even the guys who’d make up their own newsletter so they’d be ‘legit.’  Unlike many PR pros who obsessively make and police A, B and C lists, he understood that today’s C-lister could be tomorrow’s Perez Hilton.

Pfizer Makes Hard Times Happy Times

Just because you’re out of a job doesn’t mean you have to give up sex.  That’s right, among the drugs Pfizer is offering free to the jobless is Viagra.

Obama Picks Jon Huntsman as Ambassador to China

As something of a China hand myself, I applaud this bipartisan selection to one of the most important U.S. ambassadorships.  And congratulations to Politico, who beat both CNN and the Washington Post to the story and apparently even the news conference.

It goes without saying that the appointment puts one of the GOP’s rising stars far away and presumably unable to build a campaign organization

But Huntsman will gain valuable experience in dealing with a rigid, calcified party bent on ideological purity–the Republicans  Chinese Communists.

Bye-bye Black Card

I just shredded an ‘exclusive’ invitation from Visa to accept their Black Card. 

They insisted it was the card (made of highly desirable carbon graphite! limited to 1% of the population!) that would get you noticed.  But what I noticed was the $495 annual fee.

Drew Peterson, Maniac Cop

“I guess I should have returned those library books,” laughed accused double wife murderer Drew Peterson.  He nodded at his handcuffs and added, “How do you like my bling?”

The humor of a maniac cop.

Cartoonists Squeezed by Newspaper Demise

Lalo Alcaraz

Lalo Alcaraz did the above cartoon about cartoonists being squeezed out of newspapers.  As a freelance writer struggling to [continue to] find paying work, I hear you, man.

LA Times: John Lennon Buying in Hancock Park

No, it’s not a descent into the world of the Weekly World News, merely a copyediting error in Hot Property  (below.)  In other words, not deliberate, just incompetent.

When does the newspaper as public trust become a public joke?

Hot Property

‘Reno 911′ actor John Lennon buys Hancock Park-area house for $2,175,000. Hot property photos

Life Magazine Visions of Yesterday

Cleaning my office, I’m slowly going through a mound of obsolete papers (aren’t they all obsolete?), my very own time capsule.

 The cover is gone, but it’s instructive to look at a 1989 Life magazine.  Although the theme is “Visions of Tomorrow”, it tells much more about yesterday.

First, there was a Life magazine.  It’s had many incarnations, but I don’t see it coming back no more.  Maybe on the Web–but that’s not the same thing, is it?

Second,  it was a time of abundance;  the magazine was printed in full color, 12″ x 10″ format, and the issue was nearly a half inch thick.  Four pages of Oldsmobile ads helped make it possible.

Third, they were right about many things, such as  “replaceable you”, on switching body parts, and noting “drivers will avoid gridlock by checking their routes on a computer…dashobard navigation system…”  There’s the usual prediction that tourists can book flights to Mars (this time by 2050). 

What they predicted: the death of typewriters. 

What they didnt’ predict:  a future without Life Magazine. and probably the death of all magazines.

WSJ Ignoring Advertiser’s Illegal Behavior?

Is the editorial side of the Wall Street Journal ignoring illegal behavior by LifeLock, one of the few full-page advertisers it can claim these days?  (LifeLock is best known for its CEO putting his social security number on display as a hacker’s delight.)

A judge recently ruled that LifeLock’s fraud alert service is illegal.  But you wouldn’t know it from the WSJ. which missed much about the financial crisis and where the often-porous ‘Chinese wall’ between editorial and advertising appears to have been breached again.

KCRW Broadcasts Word “Bullshit”

The usually profoundly boring “The Politics of Culture” on KCRW got a lot more interesting today, as artist Ed Moses used the word “bullshit” in response to a question posed by the indecipherable Edward Goldman and station queen/dragon lady Ruth Seymour. “I used to say 98% of everything is bullshit,” was his exact, on-air quote, which KCRW seemed to like so much that they podcast it unedited.

The irony, of course, is that Sandra Tsing Lo got fired for saying a magic word, possibly threatening the station’s license with the wrath of the FCC, according to mama Ruth.  Perhaps Seymour should have fired herself?

News Media Illiteracy and Idiocy

Here are three headlines from June 11 (today) and June 10, 2009. The first two are from NBCLosAngeles.com, the third from the San Jose Mercury News.

Tim Donaghy Kneecaped By “Mobster” in Prison

Is that like a prison hookup thing, when your beloved makes you a nice cape for your knee?

 

Miss Califonia USA’s Firing Deja Vu All Over Again

Now the phone companies are running beauty contests?

Skelton near Tahoe is man missing since 2006

I can’t do any better than a SF Chronicle poster, who asked if it was “Red Skelton.”

 

The truth is that this isn’t funny anymore.  There’s no excuse for not running a spell check before posting a news story or headline.  The reality is that we get the news media we deserve; how many viewers (‘readers’) these days would spot these errors?

The Decline of Style in the NBA

I’m a big time pro basketball fan and I coach basketball to children at my local recreation center.  I love the Lakers, even though I can no longer afford to go to the games and think Kobe is a terrible role model to youth.

As a coach, I preach the team game, particularly defense.  Nonetheless, I enjoy the style of the game, which is sadly declining.  From Kevin Porter (the “Little Drum Major”) to Darryl Dawkins (“Dr. Dunkenstein”), who named his dunks, to the incomparable Dr. J and Clyde “The Glide” Drexler, players played with style in the past.   Even Earvin Johnson got his nickname Magic for the things he could do with a basketball, like no-look passes.

Before he was Earl the Pearl, people watching the young Earl Monroe at Philadelphia playground games chanted “Black Jesus” as Monroe pulled off one of his signature moves.  In high school, teammates called Monroe “Thomas Edison” because of the many moves he invented.

Now, it’s just about effectiveness, not entertainment; Kobe Bryant is celebrated as the killer ‘Black Mamba” while LeBron James is the king of power.  Style hardly appears in the All-Star game or even in the slam-dunk contest.  Dwight Howard showed some style last year, style he failed to show against the Lakers in the Finals. 

But this time, they let the little guy win.

Today’s race to have the most tattoos, or the fastest car, (driven by a gawky Polish center) is hardly about style.

So does style equal selfishness?  Perhaps–but Earl Monroe and Walt Frazier, two of the most stylish guards ever to play together, combined for a pair of NBA Championships 35 years ago.

British Airways An Accident Waiting to Happen?

In a company designed to defy gravity and send hundreds of passengers hurtling at 500 miles per hour 30,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, it’s never a good idea not to pay your employees.

Similarly, Terminator Salvation or no, I’d be a little leery of riding the roller coasters at the bankrupt amusement park.

Park Packed with Jobless

Balboa Park in Encino was packed this morning.  No special events; just mothers, children, families, single women, groups, you name it.

Not really the homeless, either; their recreational vehicles were parked in the lot across the street, camping out for the 77th consecutive day.

Jogging around the park, I counted over 200 people before 9:45AM.  I don’t think they were going to work, either. 

It was the reserve army of the unemployed, on the march  jogging strolling biking dog walking fishing.

Foreclosure Porn

“Bank owned home!” screamed the sign.  I turned the Mustang up the street and joined dozens of other lookie-loos staring at the (mostly) empty Studio City house.

The search for a REO has become the new status symbol.  It’s also pornographic in the voyeuristic allure of going through  a very recently vacated home and staring at the left behind possessions of the former owners, while fantasizing about their lives and what brought them to this.  Sometimes its pretty clear; the Tarzana house I looked at last week turned out to have a $596,000 mortgage–and a $251,000 second! The banks were still fighting over what they would recover while the moving truck came.  

The Studio City house (at least with REOs realtors dispense with calling them ‘homes’) seemed to not only satisfy people’s pornographic fantasies of the absolute lowest price, but may have belonged to porn people as well, judging (and I’m not judging) by the framed 8×10 theatre cards of “Desire” and the like, showing a pair getting down.  (Perhaps the home’s female owner?)

At least they managed to break out of the Canoga Park/Van Nuys porn ghetto, before they crashed back down to earth. 

I found a Guess watch in the yard and thought of putting it in my pocket.  My son said, “I wouldn’t touch anything here.”  He’s smarter than me, and it also seemed like bad karma to swipe abandoned foreclosed possessions, so I left the watch, the porno placards and a burned copy of The Joy of Sex sitting there.

Visiting the Jacksons

The long-time home of the Jackson family on Hayvenhurst Avenue is less than a mile from the Encinoman family compound, so my son and I went over there last week.  We had to abandon our vehicle, as despite California’s $14 billion dollar budget shortfall,  LA police and parking agents are manning several roadblocks outside Gelson’s. 

I hope to post pictures later this week.  However, visiting the florid floral display and signs saying sayonara to the Gloved/Loved One, I can say that just as the Republicans have a base, Michael Jackson did/does too.    It’s about the exact opposite of the Republicans, though, as MJ’s base is composed of women, black people and gays.

Copy Editing Error of the Day

ABC News: Ethics Riots in China Leave 156 Dead

Ethics, ethnics, (they’re talking about Moslem Uighurs, an ethnic minority) who cares as long as it passes the spellcheck?

Michael Jackson on ice

As his ‘friends’ send him off, the whitewash  cover-up continues for this great man.

Is Britney a sincere convert?

Unlike many other religions, Jews don’t proselytize, which is why there are only about 14 million Jews in the world.  However, ‘sincere converts’ can be and are accepted as Jews, with a long list from Ruth the Moabite to soul singer Jackie Wilson, Ivanka Trump, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Connie Chung, and Campbell Brown, but of course I like Elizabeth Banks best.

Often, the conversion process requires up to a year of study with a rabbi, immersion in a mikva for women or circumcision for men, and many other signs of  dedication.  Lindsay Lohan seems to understand the importance of sincerity in conversion; asked if she was converting, she said “I’m trying.”

Does Britney, who wears a Jewish star in the picture below, understand?

But if she become Jewish, she would be far from the blackest of black sheep.  I’m not even talking Tom Arnold here.  Historically the worst would be Nero, who supposedly converted to Judaism to avoid God’s wrath, but Liberian dictator Charles Taylor can certainly give him a run for his money.

LA Crime Story: Mortgage Fraud Beats Bank Robbers

Used to be California/LA led the nation in bank robberies, with 357 in 2006 alone.  Perhaps Point Break’s Presidential bank robbery team (that’s Patrick Swayze as Bodhi as Ronald Reagan) wasn’t such a fantasy.

We’re still up there with these desperate people (A former policeman and Little League coach known as the “Polite Bank Robber?” The 180 pound ‘Starlet Bandit’ in movie star sunglasses? A father/son bank robbery team, anyone?) but there’s more people robbin’ with a pen and a calculator these days.

According to the LA Times Peter Hong,

“The FBI’s annual mortgage fraud review says L.A. leads in mortgage fraud, measured by reports from the agency’s field offices.

“The Los Angeles field office received 9,971 “suspicious activity reports” in 2008; second-place Miami had 5,155. The report says fraud schemes include builders offering secret incentives to home buyers, such as falsely inflating a purchase price to make it appear as if a buyer has made a down payment when none was made. If the home forecloses, there is no home equity for the lender to recover.

Other schemes the report identifies are scams in which a group uses a straw buyer to intentionally default on a mortgage, then buys the property at a discount from the lender through a short sale; and foreclosure rescue schemes in which perpetrators offer to help a borrower in foreclosure and surreptitiously take over the deed to the property.”

We may not have a football team–but hey, we’re number one!

What Will Finally Kill Newspapers

Newspapers have been taking a pounding. 

Display advertisers, following the lead of the depressed car companies, department stores and furniture stores, are dying, drying up or disappearing.  Craigslist.org has hammered away on the classified ads.  And subscribers and newsstand buyers are dropping off, politically offended or just angry at the reduced product they’re being asked to pay more for–when they can get it for free on the Internet.

Only one thing keeps local papers publishing.  On a foray to Beverly Hills, I picked up a copy of Beverly Hills Weekly from someone’s lawn, saving it from the gardener’s throwing it in the trash.  The free weekly is a rag of the first order, featuring random interviews with local non-entities and a boosterish write-up of how well the Beverly Hills High School touch football team played in a 7-on-7 tournament.

What keeps this compelling read in business?  In the 20-page issue I perused, there were 5 pages of service directiory ads for truly local businesses; rooters, roofing, plastering, maid service, trainers and the like, lured by the un-Beverly Hills price of 10 weeks for $250.   But the real money-maker for this rag and so many like it has to be the legal advertising and public notices.  They should supply a free magnifying glass with every issue; one page had more than 80 fictious business statements and public notices!

When public notices can be published on the Internet, newspapers will themselves be a ‘fictious business’, and the publishing game will finally be over.

Contraband Lightbulbs

I went to my local dealer and picked up 24 contraband 85 and 100 watt floods today.  The man had what I needed in the back; a few precious boxes of incandescent bulbs manufactured more than a year ago, before Philips and the rest stopped making them in a paroxysm of political (and ecological) correctness.

The CFL and halogen “long life” floods I’ve purchased at Costco have offered neither savings or long life, usually dying in my down cans within four months. They do deliver the cold dim light that smacks of diminished expectations, of Jimmy Carter and ‘freezing in the dark.’  Ask not for whom the fluorescents hum, they hum for thee.

So I’m hoarding.  I got your incandescent floods right here.

NY Post Screws Erin Andrews

The NY Post is in its accustomed place, frolicking in the gutter.  As everyone on the Internet knows by now, Erin Andrews of ESPN was violated by some scumbag videotaping her in her hotel room without her knowledge.  Now the Post has piled on, actually publishing three naked pictures of her from the video.  (I’m not linking; find it yourself.)

Confronted by ESPN, which banned Post reporters from appearing, the Post’s gossip sleazebags posted the following ‘defense’; “No one would have known that a sick voyeur had secretly videotaped ESPN reporter Erin Andrews nude in her hotel room, if the Mickey Mouse sports network hadn’t sent a letter to an obscure Web site demanding that it take down its link to a fuzzy video of an unidentified blonde.”  In other words, ESPN created the ‘news story’ by sending a cease-and-desist order to the scum posting the video.

I’ve defended Rupert Murdoch here before, but not now.  In its own way, this is as bad as the Obama monkey shooting cartoon.  Erin Andrews is not a Page 3 girl.  This is a criminal violation, and the Post has made itself a party to it.

 

The Dead: So Over

Sadly, it probably is for The Dead and me, after 30-something years.  Some friends insisted on our getting tickets with them for The Dead at the Forum in May.

I had last seen the (then) Grateful Dead in 1994, at a show at the execrable Sports Arena that was nonetheless memorable.  The concert was great, but I got moved none too gently by the LAPD because for some reason the area I was ticketed for was closed.  Later, the Sports Authority that runs the Sports Arena and Colisseum apologized and gave me a pair of LA Raiders playoff tickets–fun, but the second scariest experience of my life after the LA Riots.

Fast forward to 2009, when admittedly it would be hard for the Jerry-less Dead to compete with the spectre of the past.

We got stuck in hellacious traffic for an hour and a half, and arrived half an hour late–this version of The Dead, apparently, goes on and off promptly.

The aisles were jammed with jamming twirlers, so we had to force our way to our seats.  Once there,  further force was necessary to remove the uncool people who had bogarted our seats.

I wouldn’t agree with DivinePossum’s Tweet “Fuck, the Grateful Dead are sooooo bad”,  but I didn’t feel transported, or even involved.   At least it wasn’t a really bad scene–and we didn’t end up dead like this poor guy 20 years ago.

Further observations:

• Sadly, the Forum, home to Laker glory and so many great events, has become a dirty, run-down aging facility
• The Forum that night was the only place in Inglewood with no black patrons.
• Probably no connection, but they didn’t bother to mix bass into the audio mix.
• I have no patience for rich kids begging for a ‘miracle’ free ticket.
• The Dead is a guy thing; at least twice as many males.  Is it the stoner vibe or the lack of truly danceable tunes?
• There is nothing like a Dead show, perhaps, but I am not writing a set list.
• Every other concert venue has TV screens to see the ‘action’ on stage.  Not the Forum; the picture below is a much better view of the concert than I got for my hundred fifty.
• Run by a church, the Forum is filthy and has enormous lines for the toilets.  I didn’t appreciate the 20-something throwing up in front of us either.  High-end indoor concerts are not Woodstock re-creations.
• Call me old, but I like my fire exits unblocked.

The Dead, formerly the Grateful Dead, perform at the Forum in the Inglewood section of Los Angeles, Calif. on Saturday May 9, 2009

Michael Vick may have visited strip club!

Shocker…

Sometimes I feel despair at the puerility and sexual hypocrisy of the American media.

Whatever you think of the guy, (dogfighting sucks) he’s a guy, a guy who’s been surrounded by swinging d**ks in the federal pen for the past 23 months. 

Go see some naked girls dancing?  “I dunno, Allen, I want to catch up on this CSI rerun…”

Death Panel for My Dell

I submitted my seven-year old Dell 4400 to a death panel last week, and the verdict was thumbs-down.  Perhaps there are some packrats out there who will grieve for this $1300 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 system with 256MB of RAM and 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 video card, but I doubt it.  Even the charities wouldn’t take it.

Business was slow, and only I would know what was worth keeping from it.  So began the disappearance of four days of my life.

I excavated the old computer to find the files I wanted to transfer, only to find that USB flash drives didn’t work on the damn thing, due to the difference between USB 1.0 and USB 2.0, which apparently (I tried) is not updatable by downloading drivers.  The damned Dell also wouldn’t support my handy-dandy portable hard drive, for the same reason.

Better yet, it wouldn’t write to the CDRWs I tried to use to download data either.  After days of this (and use of the old ‘sneaker network’ of 3.5″ floppy drives to transfer data), I had a sudden thought and ran off to Office Depot.  CDRWs didn’t work–but the Hawaiian pattern CDRs I bought ten for $1.99 did! 

Hallelulah, almost ready for the dump!  Just need to format the hard drive and….  Wait, can’t format the hard drive?  Need to reinstall XP in order to wipe out the existing version? What?

The nightmare continued, through two phone calls to Dell tech support (end-of-life-support in this case) in the Phillipines, I believe.  Each asked the same question, “Where’s your original Dell XP disk?”  Who the hell knows?  I found manuals for Windows 98 and XP in the man cave, even Windows 95 disks, but not the Dell XP disk.  Without it, they couldn’t help me, and of course my Acer XP disk wasn’t recognized.

Choices? I could buy another Dell-flavored XP disk for $12 and wait for it to arrive, or download some of the dubious disk erasers out there.

The PC never ran very well, but its stubbornness in holding onto to its operating system and data was heartwarming.

Ultimately I got sick of the time sink spent dealing with it.  I found a recycling yard full of dead PCs, televisions, fax machines, tape drives and the assorted flotsam of Western civilization, for the Dell to spend its days in squalid purgatory before its inevitable journey to the Third World for its final destruction.

As for the 80GB hard drive, I pulled it out and let my 10-year old take it apart.  Once torn to pieces, it went into the trash and off to the dump.  If you want to find it and dig out my old invoices and stories, knock yourself out.

ProPublica: The Scandal Journalists Won’t Touch

At a recent CORO seminar, journalist Joe Mathews (author of a definitive Arnold Schwarzenegger political biography)  noted that though he now works for the New America Foundation, he didn’t trust non-profit journalism sponsored by foundations–”They have more of an agenda than advertising supported newspapers ever did.”

I pounced on his point and asked him about one of my pet peeves: ProPublica.  ProPublica is one of those nonprofits.  It funds investigative journalism to the tune of many millions of dollars–but where the money comes from is always worth knowing. Maybe the newspaper ‘ad goons’ the LA Times James Rainey remembers weren’t so bad after all.

ProPublica was founded by Herb and Marion Sandler, a husband and wife team Time Magazine listed in their exclusive round-up, “25 people to Blame for the Financial Crisis” due to their ‘pioneering’ use of option ARM loans at World Savings.  They sold World Savings to Wachovia for $2.3 billion dollars, walked away and watched as Wachovia imploded from the weight of all the bad loans.

Will the journalists of ProPublica rake this very prominient muck?  No, and certainly not when Paul Steiger, ex editor of the Wall Street Journal,  made $570,000 in 2008 at ProPublica.   Worse, with the desperate straits of journalism, other journalists (with the exception of Slate’s Jack Shafer) seem very unwilling to question what they see as a liferaft to the drowning.

I wrote a letter to the editor at the LA Times after this glowing pro ProPublica story and another to Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) which devoted four (four!) articles in a recent issue about the exciting future of non-profit journalism.   Neither was published; perhaps CJR was miffed when I told them to go sell some ads (they had a page and a half paid in the issue I looked at.)  As for the LA Times, they use ProPublica stories, (provided free to participating publishers) so apparently they’ll brook no criticism.

Meanwhile, these high-minded philanthropists follow the lead of the dynamic Ariana Huffington, a pioneer of progressive unpaid journalism.  A non-profit startup will use 120 unpaid Berkeley journalism students as “slave labor” to cover the area.

I could use some (paid) work but I’ve probably blown my chance at a ProPublica job.  So here’s the letter I wrote to the LA Times:

To the Editors:

 

As a long-time journalist struggling with the economy and the ‘secular decline’ of print (read ‘paying’) media, I’m glad nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica exist.  However, this “new phenomenon of philanthropically supported newsrooms” bares some uncomfortable similarities to the often self-censoring journalism practiced by what Stephen Engelberg calls “the big corporations.”

 

The “California philanthropists” he works for, Herb and Marion Sandler, were founders of World Savings.  They were named to Time Magazine’s exclusive list, “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” in 2008, due to what Time calls their “misleading” promotion of the option arm loan, which led to the implosion of Wachovia after the Sandlers pocketed $2.3 billion in the sale of their bank.

If ProPublica practices investigative journalism to “hold powerful people accountable”, Engelberg doesn’t have far to look for his next story.

 

Michael Goldstein

Hypocrisy Detector Set to High

Contrary to popular belief, most journalists do not have an agenda, unless you consider skepticism of what they’re told an agenda.  Many, however, like myself, have a real aversion to hypocrisy. 

Obviously, politicians who legislate public morality while–ahem–falling short personally are high on this list, like South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, and former Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig.

But we are equal opportunity scourges of hypocrisy.  Some examples I find distasteful:

Non-profit journalism groups with hidden agendas or built in conflicts of interests, like ProPublica, which can never really independently investigate one of the biggest stories of our time, the financial collapse of 2008, because its founders made their money in option-ARM mortgages

‘Progressive’ publishers who don’t pay contributors  (although since you handed me my LA Press Club Award, I do have a soft spot for you, Arianna Huffington)

Right wing pundits who blast Obama for huge deficits and government takeovers of business–and ignore GW Bush’s drunken spending

Left wing pundits and Hollywood types who call for the release of Roman Polanski so he won’t miss his Swiss lifetime achievement award–without doing his time for the sex charge against a child he pleaded guilty to.

Unfortunately, there are many more examples of ‘do as I say, not as I do.’  This is just a taste.

2012: Sick with CGI

The Mayans are coming!  The Mayans are coming!

Or at least the supposed Mayan prophesy about the end of the world in 2012.  As the website for the movie 2012 states, “With the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, a large group of people must deal with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, typhoons and glaciers.”

Personally I’m more concerned with the Iranians getting the H-bomb, but then I’m not trying to sell a movie overstuffed with computer-generated imagery (CGI) and Hollywood hooey.

Saw the 2012 trailer before  Zombieland last night, and was repelled by the overuse of CGI. 

• Fake cars falling off the fake freeway. 
• Santa Monica’s palisades crumbling into the sea. 
• Fake meteorites hitting the fake highway where John Cusack is driving his RV.  
• The arms falling off the Brazilian statue of Jesus. 
• Michelangelo’s Last Supper, cracking. 
• St. Paul’s Basilica, topping over.
• Fake floods toppling a fake monastery. 
• Planes flying over a digitally crumbling city.
• Cusack, usually a great actor, trying to scream on the green screen.

 ”Find out the truth.  Search 2012.”

The truth is that 2012 may make Armageddon look like a classic.  CGI is becoming so horribly overused in action movies that only the exceptions stand out.   District 9 looks so impressively/depressingly ‘real’ that the audience is happy to accept people in ‘prawn’ suits. 

And Gladiator  won the 2001 Visual Effects Oscar, even though it had only 90 special effects shots, as opposed to the 350 in the favored Perfect Storm with its monstrous tidal waves.

Unfortunately, filmmakers have not learned from Ridley Scott’s judicious use of CGI in Gladiator, which he used to enhance the Colisseum and even bring Alan Bates (Proximo), who died during filming, back to life.

When will filmmakers learn that with CGI, less is more?

John Cusack in 2012

KCRW Broadcasts Obscenity Again

At 9:17AM today, Thursday, October 8, 2009, during the “Morning Becomes Eclectic”, KCRW 89.9FM broadcast a rap song with the word “Motherfucker” proudly unbleeped.  Jason Bentley I believe identified it as Clint Eastwood by Guerrillaz

The arrogance from a national public radio station holding a government license is unbelievable.  This is the second time within four months KCRW has broadcast an obscenity during daytime hours when children could be listening.  Artist Ed Moses said “Bullshit” on a “Politics of Culture” show, no doubt waking up the somnolent crowd.

This time, I filed a complaint with the FCC.  I haven’t subscribed in two years because of this, but it is time for longtime station manager Ruth Seymour to go.

Playboy Puts Marge Simpson on Cover

And straight men continue to flee.

Playboy continues its descent into complete irrelevance.   Putting naked Marge on the cover is sure to be a big newsstand seller–not. 

New CEO Scott Flanders (no, not that Flanders) says the idea is to attract readers in their 20s to a magazine where the average reader’s age is 35.   While one should give him points for facing the Kevin Bacon problem, pulling a character from a tired 20-year old cartoon sitcom isn’t going to tear 20-year olds from their iPhones and XBoxes.

Playboy remains out of touch.  I have a modest proposal–why not a ‘spread’ with the ‘real’ Marge Simpson, Julie Kavner–you’ll get a threesome with Patty and Selma as well?

Update: here it is courtesy of TMZ.  

A turn-on, no?  Playboy has become Mad Magazine.

Time Capsule of a More Prosperous Era

Cleaning out my office I found some “sacred artifacts of the past”,  as Leonard Cohen sang in another context (about the loss of the  “naked man and woman”).

What did I find?  I found a Family Computing Magazine from 1999, talking about the best computer and printer to buy, how to set up your home office, fight viruses, etc.  At the time, people would pay $2.99 for a magazine that would impart such wisdom.  And writers and editors would actually get paid for their expertise in technology.

I used to say, “If you can write about tech, you’ll always eat.  You may not want to live, but you’ll always eat.”

No more.

In a related development, I found a NY Times classified ad page that had no less than ten (10) columns offering editorial jobs, from managing editor, puzzle editor, editorial/idea shaper, reporter, development editor, producer editor at Times Mirror  for hunting and fishing websites, music editors, editorial assistants, and even a copyeditor!

Rather than save these depressing time capsules, I tossed them.

The paperless era appears to be the payless era as well.  As Everybody knows…

LA Times Flunks Copyediting Test

A September 25 story in the  LA Times noted that DNA evidence  showed that a suspect who spent five months in jail was not guilty.  In the print edition, the Times wrote:

The victim told police that her attacker licked her naval area…But the state’s crime lab found that the only DNA consistent with saliva in the woman’s naval area belonged to her.

All together now–naval means having to do with the navy.   Innie or outie, navel refers to your bellybutton.

I know–it passed the spell check.  But not the intelligence test—or the copyediting one.

Update: the Times fixed it in the online version.  So never mind…

The Dodgers and the Navy

Now that the Dodgers have gone down the drain, again, I can share my highlight of their season.

OK, it’s a fat guy’s delight, but my son and I enjoyed sitting in the All-You-Can-Eat right field section for the first game of the National League Championship Series at Dodger Stadium.

Getting to our seats was a bit difficult, not because larger-than-life LA characters were blocking the aisle, but because a huge group of sailors and Marines were lined up outside the entrance. They held up their burden and made a gateway for us.

Later, they unfurled the flag they brought.

My dad was in the Navy.  My mother lived in a Brooklyn apartment building and frequently saw Dodgers Pee Wee Reese and Ed Head, who lived there too.  My son wants a #42 jersey, to honor Jackie Robinson (and the Dodgers who broke the color line.)

Just wait til next year.

Playboy Lied About Marge Simpson

Save your pennies at the newsstand, if you can find one.  Marge is not on the cover of my subscription copy of the November issue.  Pneumatic Alina Puscau is, in leather.

Only Marge’s name is on the cover of my copy, despite this publicity shot.

She’s inside, posed rather chastely in nylons and garters, and in the fake centerfold, posed with the inevitable stack ‘o donuts.

Her turnoffs: Slim men who work out regularly and take care of their bodies…

My turnoffs: Dying magazines that don’t tell the truth in their publicity stunts, relentless cross-promotion with an equally aging TV show (“Watch The Devil Wears Nada, Sunday November 15!”), credulous news outlets that will print anything.

Columbia Cuts Environmental Journalism Program

Is the force of gravity finally hitting journalism schools?  Unbelievably, as newspapers and magazines make cut after cut (incidentally also hurting freelancers like me) journalism school enrollment keeps going up.

I understand the romance of journalism, but what are these people thinking?

Now one of these pricey programs has bitten the dust.   The Columbia School of Journalism announced the ‘suspension‘ of the two-year, $89,000 environmental journalism program.  The program directors “cited falling employment in the field, the rising costs of education, and a lack of financial aid for students.”

The program actually sounds quite valuable, offering graduates two master’s degrees, one in environmental science, the other in journalism. These would be ideal tools to investigate critical issues of our time, like global warming, carbon emissions, rainforest deforestation, the decline of the fisheries and the persistence of radiation from the Cold War, just to name some ‘top of the head’ topics.  Graduates could also take on the appalling anti-science movement of groups like the anti-vaccination crowd.

Unfortunately,  in the Darwinian struggle for news outlets to survive,  only two of 9 recent program graduates have gotten journalism jobs.  Meanwhile,  “many newspapers with reputations for strong coverage…from the Sacramento Bee to the Columbus Dispatch, have let go of talented specialists.”  Of course, if Rush Limbaugh had his way, there might be an opening at the New York Times.

Music for Guantanamo

I wonder if the Pink song the government used to torture inmates was “Dear Mr. President.”  Nahhh…

And which is worse torture, the Barney song or Neil Diamond?

As for Bruce Springsteen, what could be a greater perversion than blasting Empty Sky, from The Rising?

I want a kiss from your lips
I want an eye for an eye
I woke up this morning to the empty sky….

Gay Undergoes Successful Groin Surgery

Yep, definitely the Headline of the Week.  But at least it appears that the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow has not only given world-class runner Tyson “Homosexual” Gay his name back, but is actually using the word “gay” and “hate crimes” together.

Axl Rose on Diversity

October 25 I went to the U2 show at LA’s Rose Bowl.  It can be summed up in two words: hypnotic and inspirational.

But when Slash took the stage with the Black Eyed Peas, it reminded me of the Rolling Stones/Guns n’ Roses concert I attended exactly 20 years ago, October 18, 1989 at LA’s historic Coliseum.

Axl Rose could probably be described as the anti-Bono, and he wasn’t exactly auditioning for the part of UN Goodwill Ambassador, played unofficially by AIDS-fighter Bono and officially by Angelina Jolie.

In fact as soon as Rose took the stage he offered this impassioned defense of himself and his song “One in a Million” against criticism that he was a racist, just because it was about “police and niggers and immigrants and faggots.”

“I don’t give a goddamn fuck what color you fucking are, as long as you’re ain’t no goddamn thief drug selling piece of shit.

“I used the word fucking nigger but that don’t mean every black man is a fucking nigger, that means if you go downtown and some fucking asshole wants to charge you fifteen dollars for free parking kick him in the fuckin nuts.

“I don’t give a shit about gay people either but I don’t need some faggot trying to rape me.

“Immigrants? I don’t care what goddamn fucking country you’re from, you’re in America just act like it.

“You want to call me a racist shove your head up your fucking ass.

Either the audio cut out early, or my aging memory is going, but I remember his stirring conclusion: “Anyone who thinks I hate niggers can suck my dick.”

Fairey and Fair Use

Use, unfortunately, is an anagram of ‘sue’.

Charlotte Allen makes some good points about Shepherd Fairey’s ‘expropriation’ of the image he used to ‘create’ the now-ubiquitous red-white-and-blue Barack Obama image.  (She also credits Photo District News, which has clearly been on the case.)

And Fairey  hasn’t helped his own case by lying to his attorneys about which image he used, or by his  15 arrests for graffitti.

He probably should have asked for permission, or if he’s made any money on the use of Manny Garcia’s photo, pay something to Garcia and the AP (which I’m sure is why the AP is suing, rather than ‘the principle of the thing.)  Speaking as a writer whose work has been used without permission or payment,  I certainly sympathize.

But the reality is that artists over time have stood on the shoulders of others, ‘borrowing’ work to make something new.

My favorite ‘borrowing’ is Mona Gorilla, by Rick Meyerowitz, which I ‘borrow’ below.  (I will take down these images if asked, but I use them to make a point–and to create something new, this blog post, for which, alas, I do not get paid.)

I’ve ‘borrowed’ myself from press releases for news stories.  “I used to be a writer, now I’m a cut-and-paster,”  I joke.

My least favorite borrowing? Peter Benchley’s Jaws–modernizing Moby Dick for the money.

LA Times Kills Las Vegas Blog

Another day, another bad decision at the Los Angeles Times, this time killing their Las Vegas entertainment blog, A Movable Buffet, the only LA Times blog I read every day.

Las Vegas entertainment journalist Richard Abowitz had contributed his informed, well-written observations on the likes of Perez Hilton, Paris Hilton, (who he wrote was popular among Las Vegas club workers because she brought the crowds),  Playmate Holly Madison (below), and his bete noire, magician Criss Angel of Believe.

Las Vegas was built on millions of people from Los Angeles coming to the casinos to gamble in the desert, and more recently to sample the fine dining and the many entertainment options there.  Historically this has been a huge source of advertising to the Times as well, with many pages in the Travel and Entertainment sections.  There’s also a major crossover with the Hollywood lamp the Times is trying to steer its sinking ship by.

Obviously, the paper couldn’t find a way to monetize The Buffet, so the handful of dollars the Times paid Abowitz and his photographer, Sarah Gerke, were seen as a cuttable expense item.  Especially on the Internet, a newspaper won’t grow by cutting off its fingers and toes.

Me, Medical Marijuana and the LA Times

Another media blog recently took the LA Times to task for having “at least three” of its columnists write expose columns about how easy it is to get medical marijuana.  Make that four LA Times writers.

I wrote this piece for the LA Times Magazine in 2007, before any of the other three.  And unlike Sandy Banks or Steve Lopez, I actually smoked the stuff and commented on its power.  Perhaps in these days of layoffs they’re afraid of peeing in a cup?

More likely, they (and their editors) suffer a paucity of imagination.  The tone of each article was the same; “Wow, it’s too easy to get a recommendation for medical marijuana. Now almost anyone can buy some.”

Yes, like it’s difficult for anyone to buy marijuana from a dealer.  As I wrote in the story,

“I forked over $50 for an eighth of an ounce.  Later, when I told a friend about my purchase, he laughed and delivered the ultimate insult:  ‘You paid more than street value.’”

Las Vegas is Los Angeles

So why did I read The Movable Buffet so religiously? Because having gone there at least once a year since 1988 for the Consumer Electronics Show (and for the late, unlamented COMDEX) I’ve come to love Las Vegas, although my wallet and sinuses could probably not handle it for more than a week at a time.  Like the ice caps melting, I’ve watched the casino gaming pits where I play blackjack shrink, with the real estate taken over by an army of slot machines for a generation of Americans who prefer to interact with screens rather than a boisterous table of degenerate gamblers.

Las Vegas was built on millions of people from Los Angeles coming to gamble in the desert, whether they stayed at the palaces on the strip or did a Las Vegas turn around, gambling all night and driving back without sleeping. (The first time I drove to Las Vegas I saw five dead bodies on the side of the I-15 from two separate accidents where the drivers fell asleep).

Las Vegas and Los Angeles share a lot, including thousands of former Angelenos ‘native” Las Vegans are always begging to go home.  Meanwhile the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” encourages tourists to treat the city as their toilet, although it contributes to some surprising local industries.

Las Vegas and Los Angeles share a temperate to boiling climate and a sprawling aesthetic, but with magnificient parks just a few minutes away.  Then there’s  In ‘n Out Burger, minimalls, a love of bling and money, a sprouting of magnificent cities out of nothing, jammed freeways but troubled real estate markets, entertainment stars and wanna-bes, luxury and poverty almost side-by-side, gangbangers and pointless violent crime killing the best of our youth (here here, there there), insane people, and both Bugsy Siegel and O.J. Simpson!

 

 Las Vegas holds up a mirror to Los Angeles.  But it’s not a funhouse mirror anymore.

No Terrorist Attacks Since 9-11?

No, not according to the FBI, not in the USA.  Both Republican defenders of George W. Bush and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi want to prop up this story, and for whatever reason, the press doesn’t press them on it.

Yup, move on, nothing to see here, no terrorist attacks in the U.S.  Except maybe:

Naveed Haq, who shot 6 women, killing one, at the Seattle Jewish Federation in 2006 was found guilty today

Major Nidal Malak Hasan, who ‘allegedly’ shot 13 people to death at Fort Hood

The 5 “wholesome” American kids arrested in Pakistan for trying to link with extremist groups to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan

In June 2009, two soldiers were shot, one fatally, in Arkansas by a suspect who the FBI delicately noted had “political and religious motives”

John Muhammad, a Muslim, the 2002 Beltway Sniper, and Boyd Malvo, who claimed they killed for jihad.  Muhammad said he was a fan of Osama Bin Ladin, but surely he was just crazy.

The July 4, 2002 shooting by an Egyptian national at Los Angeles International Airport.  A young woman killed in the attack lived not far from me.

In March 2006,  Mohammed Reva Taheri-azar rented an SUV and drove it into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina.  He carried out the attack, which injured nine people, due to “the treatment of Muslims around the world.”  At his arraignment, he told the Judge that he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.”  He is currently serving a 33-year sentence.

You can read more about more of these non-existent attacks here.  And even leftist KCRW feels pushed to explore this issue.

ABC News Finds Ft. Hood Killer Captivating

Doesn’t anybody around here understand writing or usage?  I know I sound like grammarian schoolmarm, but ABC’s story on ‘alleged’ mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan was even more poorly written than usual.  The first sentence reads:

“Days after a mass shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Killeen, Texas, details of the gunman’s life have captivated millions looking for motives behind Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous rampage.”

Yes, captivating.  Not.

To captivate means to capture attention in a positive way, as in ‘Miley Cyrus captivated her tween audience.’ 

Captivating=delightful.

What’s next for ABC’s incompetent news writers?  Why not ’the antics of the terrorist murderer captivated the public’s attention’?

Magazine Death List from Ad Age

Ad Age recently updated its magazine death list, and from the point of view of a reader, freelance writer and technologist, it’s pretty sobering. 

As a continuing trend, it’s not a surprise, but the casualties are adding up, as Gourmet joins Vibe, PC Magazine, (which once sent my old publication, PC LapTop, a threatening letter for putting “PC” in a red box on the cover) Portfolio, Blender, Electronic Gaming, even Nickelodeon–which I subscribed to for my son.

Doesn’t anyone read anymore?  Or at least look at the pretty pictures?

I used to envy people like Rich Stengel, who I knew a little at Princeton, with high-powered publishing careers.  This is why I no longer envy Rich.

I had to laugh when I saw Forbes current cover story on AT&T and Verizon quaking in their boots about free phone calls.  Meanwhile Forbes can’t admit how scared it is about free content on the Internet, that means no one has to buy a magazine. 

Business magazines in general are dying, not just because of the economy and the ‘secular decline’ of publishing and journalism, but because the hero worship of those with feet of clay has gone away.  As David Carr puts it, it’s no longer about “the shiny, happy people striding boldly across the pages of magazines with names like Fortune, Money, Fast Company and Wired…nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered.”

For writers (and others) as my friend Cliff Roth says, as long as what you do can’t be replaced by user-generated content (UGCX) on the Internet, you’re golden.

Ruth Seymour Retiring from KCRW

The ageless doyenne of ever politically-correct KCRW-FM is stepping down. (Even the LA Times can’t find or won’t dare print her age.)

And somewhere Sandra Tsing Loh is singing “Ding dong the witch is dead.”

Boys Will Be 86-Year Old Boys

It got little attention even on the sports pages, but Bud Adams of the Tennessee Titans was fined $250,000 by the National Football League for his on-the-field outburst against Ralph Wilson and the Buffalo Bills.

Is Bud Adams a criminal cornerback or gay-baiting running back?

No, Adams is the owner of the Titans.  He got the fine for flipping the bird at Buffalo Bills fans, players and fellow owner and WWII veteran Ralph Wilson, 91, after the Titans defeated the Bills 41-17 in a Toilet Bowl match up of 3-6 teams going nowhere.

You can see this low point on video here.

Adams, who is both an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a U.S Navy veteran, should know better.  But hey–why own a football team if you can’t tell your rivals to fuck off?

Car of the Year Baby!

I couldn’t have predicted this when I saw the Ford Fusion Hybrid at the LA Auto Show press days last year, or even when my wife and I bought the first Ford Fusion Hybrid off the Galpin Ford lot in March 2009.  But Motor Trend just recognized our ‘international supercar’ as the Car of the Year.

I had originally wanted to buy a Cadillac CTS when it was named the Car of the Year a couple of years ago, but its high price, questions about GM’s survival and a feeling it wasn’t time to celebrate success/excess with a Caddy steered me away.  Averaging over 38 miles to the gallon over 8000 miles (on regular gas) is just one reason I’m glad we went with Ford.

Although I can rarely wrest the Fusion away from my wife, who loves it, I’m still a proud papa.

 

Oprah Winfrey to End World in 2011

Forget 2012.  Clearly that’s why her talk show ends then.  Her power is awesome.

Vegas Gambling Goes Hollywood

I know, I know, they call it ‘gaming’ rather than gambling, or more properly, losing.  As I noted after 20 years of tradeshow gambling in Las Vegas,

“Like the ice caps melting, I’ve watched the casino gaming pits where one plays blackjack shrink, with the real estate taken over by an army of slot machines for a generation of Americans who prefer to interact with screens rather than a boisterous table of degenerate gamblers.”

The slots are bright and attractive now, not just one-armed bandits spinning oranges and black bars.   At the gaming expo in Las Vegas, the new ‘slots’ (that take only green money, credit cards or casino player’s club/loser’s club cards) offer “high-definition animated characters and 3-D graphics, touch-screen technology and Xbox-type or similar video game features.”

Just as Hollywood now makes ‘films’ stripmining our collective past, from “Bewitched” and “Land of the Lost” (Will Ferrell has fallen far from “Anchorman“) to, G-d help us, Mr. Potatohead,  gaming companies will bring images, characters and situations from “The Lord of the Rings” and, for the distaff crowd, “Sex and the City” to the casual slot player.

A Hollywood/Vegas hook-up promoting gambling directly from couch potatoes can’t be far away.

Playboy’s Absurd Advertising Outsourcing

If a magazine can’t sell advertising, it should probably just throw in the towel.

But after losing $13 million in 2008 to be followed by losing an estimated $8 million this year, Playboy went in a ‘different direction’ contracting with David Pecker’s AMI publishing to sell ads–and essentially outsource all business functions but editorial.

Most magazines have two key revenue streams: advertising and circulation.  Playboy has both and adds a third–licensing of the venerable Playboy name.   But apparently only the licensing part is working (and is not part of the AMI deal).  NY Post media reporter Keith Kelly says Playboy newsstand sales, which once topped 7 million copies per month, have deteriorated to a pathetic 150,000 today.  I’ve written before about Playboy’s incoherent content (and cookie-cutter plastic girls) which hardly makes it a compelling impulse purchase.

Contracting with Pecker’s AMI is no panacea for advertising either.  According to Keith Kelly, Pecker boasts that when Playboy’s total circulation of 1.1 million is combined with that of AMI titles such as Flex, Men’s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness, there will be a combined ad buy of 11 million men in the prized 18-to-35 demographic.  “That’s bigger than the men’s networks of Time Warner, Jann Wenner’s company or Hearst.”

I don’t believe a word of it for three reasons:

1. Flex, Men’s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness have ten million readers?!

2. A more apt display of the work AMI does selling ads can be found in Star and my old rag, The National Enquirer.  If you actually pick up a copy, they’re very low on the quality national ads like the Sonys that Playboy has traditionally had, and high on commemorative plates and catalog crap.

3. The dirty little secret of men’s magazines is that they’re read by old guys like me and Kevin Bacon; the ‘prized 18-to-35 demographic’ is more interested in Call of Duty than ‘call of p***y’ on glossy paper stock.

Soon enough, Pecker will want to take over editorial and do it cheaper with the reporters he has already.  Maybe they’ll sell him the rest of the magazine.

More likely it will go out of business.  The only thing keeping this money-losing relic of the 60′s alive is the fear that killing it will kill Hugh Hefner.

Barack, Tiger and American Amnesia

The day after: today’s top story was Tiger Woods’ ‘transgressions.’

Not Obama’s nationally-televised speech on the surge sending 35,000 men to Afghanistan. 

I may have a hard-to-treat case of Internet addiction.  But America’s addiction is to trivial pursuit–and willful blindness.

The press, too, must get some ‘credit’ here.  Twenty years ago, I was vilified for working for the Enquirer.  Now the rest of the press has jumped down in the gutter with it–and no one says a word.

Daily News Gets Narrower

The Daily News (motto: “Serving the San Fernando Valley”) is getting narrower. 

No, not culturally or politically; it’s hard to imagine a newspaper more parochial in its worldview and outlook.  For example, the AP stories that dominate the sports and news section are edited only to reflect its quaint home town focus/bias: “Dodger Randy Wolf (El Camino Real of  Woodland Hills) denied arbitration.”

It’s getting physically narrower; the trim size is an inch narrower and an inch shorter than the Wall Street Journal.  Written on a fourth-grade level, the Daily News is a broadsheet in name only.

No more calls for Valley secession for this rag.  One more round of editorial cuts should finish it off.

James Cameron, Closet Feminist?

As a film maker, Cameron is associated with action/sci-fi films that skew male (and fanboy) like Terminator, Aliens, the upcoming Avatar, and of course his ‘classic’ first film, Piranha Part II: The Spawning.

But Cameron has also included some strong roles for strong women in his films, from Sigourney Weaver as 6-foot ass-kicking Marine Ripley in Aliens (which some call the best of the Alien quartet)to Oscar-nominated Kate Winslet in Titanic.

My personal favorite female Cameron role is Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2.  Her bulked up arms and steely/insane determination to protect her son appealed to both male and females.

Avatar will bring three strong females to the screen including Zoe Saldana and the ever-feisty Michelle Rodriguez.

Then there’s Sigourney, 9-feet tall and blue in the movie–and 6 feet tall in red in Hollywood.

Cameron may be an action director, but thankfully, when it comes to women, he’s no Michael Bay.

The Last Pontiac

The last Pontiac, a non-wide-tracking G6, rolled off the assembly line just before Thanksgiving.  After 82 years, the company that ‘built excitement‘ went out with a whimper, not a bang, run into the ground by the geniuses of GM.

Will Page Views Pay for Journalism?

Not likely, according to Brett Arends in Marketwatch today.  His math is worthy of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, saying that at 2 cents per page view (apparently the advertising value) a reporter would need 11,000 page views per day in order to be paid $40,000 a year, hardly a princely sum.  To earn $100K a year, you’d need 27,000 page views.

“So long as news tries to live off online advertising alone, the future for journalists is not bright. Journalism may become like acting or being a musician: There will be fewer full-time jobs, and they will pay poorly. A lot of news writing will end up being done by amateurs, those with day jobs or by kids just out of college, sharing rooms in Brooklyn, N.Y., before they go on to “real” careers.

“What that may portend for the quality of reporting is another matter. If we end up living on a content diet of propaganda, celebrity gossip and free blogs, too bad.”

LA Auto Show Notes

I attended the LA Auto Show’s Press Days last week.  The show had a focus on environmentally-friendly vehicles, and I got to drive three different ‘green’ cars.

Porsche Cayenne ‘D’–Great to drive a Porsche, as even the SUV has lots of pick-up and style, once I figured out that the ignition key goes to the left of the steering column.  Downer: the car probably won’t come to the USA, as the representative told me that they’d sell 1000 Cayennes a month with little positive impact from having a diesel.  The implication was that even with ‘clean diesel’ the pain-in-the-ass factor was too high for their market.

Chevy Equinox fuel cell–handles like what it is, a mid-size Chevy SUV with the extra weight of fuel cell technology.  Felt good to drive, but clearly still an experiment–only given out to 100 customers who live within short driving distance of a hydrogen filling station, of which there are apparently only two in LA. The car gets about 150 miles on a hydrogen fill-up.  Not a commercial vehicle, yet.

Ford Focus BEV (battery electric vehicle)–Based on a relatively old stripped-down Focus, the BEV was clearly a prototype.  It had a big red button that looked like the nuclear war ‘football’ between the seats.  Its purpose  was to completely shut down all systems if it had a techical problem; “Don’t push it!” the engineer on the ride-along shrieked.  Yet this car had the most potential of the three I drove; currently it gets 80 miles from its giant lithium-ion battery pack, and Ford is shooting for 100 before a commercial release sometime in 2010.  And unlike the fuel-cell cars, alls you have to do is plug it in overnight.

Another interesting trend at the Show: Japanese cars, once famous for their fuel economy, are heavy, expensive and deliver poor gas mileage.  A poster child for this problem is the 2010 Acura ZDX–a 4,462 pound hatchback for $56,045 in the ‘advanced’ configuration, it delivers 16 miles to the gallon in the city–Escalade territory.  I also think it’s ugly, but you can decide.

Another Publication Down

Actually two; Editor and Publisher and Kirkus Reviews, one of the few publications today still wholly devoted to reviewing those quaint things called books.

But Editor & Publisher is probably even a greater loss, not just for the job advertising it offered but for its justifiable boast, after 125 years, “America’s Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry.”

Pageviews or paper, journalism–and journalists–are in trouble. No newspaper industry=no Editor & Publisher.

Tiger Woods is Happy About One Thing

Tiger Woods is no doubt thankful that his father, U.S. Army officer Earl Woods, is not around to see and sound off on what a mess he’s made of his life.  As Earl put it in 2000, “I wanted to raise a good person.”

UrbanDaddy.com–Get Lost

What’s an UrbanDaddy?  Although I am, in fact, an urban daddy (of two) after two years of emails from UrbanDaddy.com, I’ve decided they are not me.  Here’s their self-description:

We start from the premise that there’s a lot of noise out there when it comes to your city [they 'cover' New York, Los Angeles,  Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco]—poor recommendations, shills, plants, promoters, liars, enemies, and exes. Our goal is to be your friend. The kind of friend who knows everyone—the maitre d’s at all the right restaurants, the bouncers at all the right clubs, the addresses of all the great parties. And the kind of guy who lives to share the wealth. And that’s what UD does—once a day we’ll send you a short and quick email with the latest piece of need-to-know information on underground opium dens turned cocktail lounges, brilliant advice from supermodels and how to spend a night at the Guggenheim.

If this kind of pretentiousness turns you on, well, knock yourself out.  Here’s my email to their site:

Dear Urban Daddy:

1. Many hundreds of thousands of us live in the San Fernando Valley or Pasadena and will never go drinking in Beverly Hills, Culver City and the like; it’s not just the distance but the DUI. If you think that makes me geographically undesirable, then take me off your email list.

2. Many more of us regardless of where we live will not be purchasing the silver-enlaid martinis with encrusted gold olives and the overpriced like.  That’s so…2006.  A serious financial crisis is upon us, if you haven’t noticed.  Yes, Thorstein Veblen is long dead, but when millions are losing their jobs and houses, so should be the conspicuous consumption you advocate in every post.  If you think that makes me financially undesirable, then take me off your email list.

That is all.

No Terrorism Attacks Since 9/11 Update

Last week (December 8, 2009) FBI Director Mueller called for an independent review of the FBI’s handling of information about the suspect in the Fort Hood shooting, such as Major Hasan’s contacts with a radical imam in Yemen.  “It is essential to determine whether there are improvements to our current practices…that could make us all safer in the future.” 

Translation:  Maybe we screwed up by not sharing this information with the Army.

But how could we possibly be safer, as there have been no terrorism attacks since 9/11 in the U.S.?

Playboy: Bring on the Real Girls!

So the Playboy sale has fallen through, largely because of Hugh Hefner’s insistence on living at the Mansion until his death.

Sad, but even incoherent and out-of-date as it is, this great American brand can still be saved.  I’d love to consult on it or edit the new version, but I’ll provide the first of my modest proposals for free:

Bring on the real girls!

Yes, I understand that Playboy is supposed to be full of fantasy females as part of its quaint ‘Playboy philosophy,’ which philosopher-king Hefner says “is very, very connected to the American dream…that we indeed did and do own our own minds and bodies.”

But right now, the girls have been completely Barbi-cized, between the plastics surgeon’s knife and sacks o’ saleen, the airbrush and the aerobics and the soft-focus photography.  Fake boobs, fake girls.

Instead, why not make it, at least partly, an instruction manual for the impressionable male?  Maybe some girls are a bit chubby, others a little nosy, hairy or otherwise quirky.  For when the one-hand reader of today’s magazine (and website) encounters a real girl, they won’t look like this–especially down there.

Why Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods Should Golf

Bill can take pointers from Tiger on upping his score. 

Perhaps Newt Gingrich and Silvio Berlusconi can join them for a foursome.  No cheating—on the course.

Although with Susan MacDougal apparently joining Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers, with allegations by Paula Jones, the President is proving quite the player himself.

Give the National Enquirer a Pulitzer

As an alumni of the then-Lantana-based tabloid, I was tickled to see that the editor of the National Enquirer, Barry Levine, had nominated the mag (rag) for a Pulitzer for its role in outing John Edward’s infidelities and lies.  As we noted back in 2008, any journalist could learn how to do a story from the Enquirer.

Although Edwards has been exposed as a truly empty suit and his wife as a shrew, the real scandal here is how the so-called “mainstream media” held its nose and studious avoided the story, which we were on top of a year and a half ago, for months and months.

The Enquirer nominated themselves for “distinguished investigative reporting by a team, presented in a series of articles, and for a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs. “  As Emily Miller puts it, “The story has led to a grand jury investigation of Edwards’ use of campaign funds and the political downfall of a two-time Democratic presidential candidate. “  She says editor Levine told her, “Our Enquirer reporters do deserve to be nominated for a Pulitzer, but you know the mainstream media would rather see the Earth explode first!”

Sadly, if not surprisingly, the Pulitzer committee found technical reasons to disqualify the Enquirer’s bid before it ever really got started.   It’s ironic, too, because the Pulitzers were founded by a founder of yellow journalism, Joseph Pulitzer.

Now the beleaguered priests of the press are too good to dirty their hands with the muck-raking Enquirer.  As Gawker’s Ravi Somalya adds:

If the Washington Post, or the New Orleans Times-Picayune or any paper really, had broken a story of this magnitude their Pulitzer nod would barely be in doubt. Edwards called the Enquirer, while trying to disparage its claims he was cheating and had fathered a child “tabloid trash.” That stigma is the only reason its investigative reporters will not be considered.

Somali Pirates Smart PR Move

It had to happen.  The Somali pirates have apparently been huddling with a public relations advisor, who must have advised them to mix their kidnapping, ransom and occasional murder with charitable tithing.  “It’ll show another side of you,” I’m sure he advised.

Touched by the depths of the human tragedy in Haiti, the pirates will reportedly donate some of the millions they have ‘liberated’ from shipowners and ‘fat cat’ corporations to Haitian relief.  While I don’t believe a word of it (if they actually cared about relief, in Somalia charity can certainly begin at home)  there is a literary tradition in the West of the pirate with a heart of gold (not to mention Robin Hood) going back hundreds of years.

But the pirates won’t get their full PR bang for the buck, as they will use “connections in various parts of the world” to deliver aid without detection.  While I’m sure the pirates are familar with Maimonides’ belief that anonymous giving is the highest form of charity,  it’s also convenient for them, as there will be no “accountability” for the supposed donation.

CBS News Bloodbath: A Modest Proposal

CBS News staffers are freaked out that at least 90 positions will be eliminated in the latest budget ax-fest, including shutting the Moscow bureau and reducing Tel Aviv to one producer.  They say it’s not just fears about their own jobs; “One news executive said, ‘We were covering the news with one arm tied behind our back. Now we’re going to do it with two arms tied behind our back.’ ”

Modest proposal:  They could put back 75 news people earning $150,000 plus $50,000 in benefits (sounds good to me at this point!) for the $15 million they pay Katie Couric for a year.

Will it happen?  Naaaah.

UPDATE: (8:15PM Eastern Time)

Maybe it will happen.  Drudge says the CBS natives are revolting…

Yay Saints!

OK I’m a sucker for a comeback story.

But it’s also easy to pick a Superbowl team to cheer for if you live in LA, not La.  We’re not bound to rooting for a hometown team. As the football gods don’t like us as we won’t appropriate a billion dollars for a stadium, we’re Free Agent Nation round here.

Toyota Dealers Compound Public Relations Disaster

News flash: Toyota doesn’t know what they’re doing.  And apparently, not just in terms  of making safe cars, but in terms of communicating.

If the company’s slow disclosure, foot-dragging, lack of responsiveness and weak apologies aren’t bad enough, Toyota dealers are engaged in classic blame-the-messenger behavior, pulling ads from ABC, which has displayed a rare pair in fully covering the crisis.  The 173 Southern dealers in five states cited “excessive coverage of the Toyota issues.”

Telling, Marcia Owens-Reder, senior vice-president at 22Squared, the Atlanta advertising agency that handles the account for Southeast Toyota, “tried” to talk the dealers out of the move, but they insisted on “punishing” ABC for their own company’s problems. 

This is a textbook example of when you’re in a hole, keep digging with a backhoe. 

Just as bad: Jack Fitzgerald, a Washington, DC, dealer, told the AP, “I can’t wait for the village idiot to dump his Toyota for nothing. I can certainly make money on it.”

Good to see that the classic American car dealer, far from being a dying breed, is still providing the ethical service that has long distinguished them.

ABC News Hangs Tough on Toyota

Bravo to ABC News, hanging tough in the face of Toyota’s shameful attempt to intimidate, control coverage and ‘punish’ ABC by pulling their advertising. 

Instead, ABC News went full throttle (sorry) on Toyota again, running an exclusive interview with Dimitrios Biller today. 

Biller worked as managing counsel for Toyota’s American operations from 2003 to 2007.  His comments? “You have to understand that Toyota in Japan does not have any respect for our legal system. They did not have any respect for our laws.”  Unhappy ex-employee? Sure, but one who says the company made a practice of not revealing safety issues.  

“They were hiding evidence, concealing evidence, destroying evidence, obstructing justice,” said Biller.

The Toyota recall(s)–and coverup–is a big story.  It’s not just how many Toyota owners there are in the United States.  How many vulnerable children travel in Toyotas every day?  How many of us shares the road with a Toyota at any given time?  ABC is right to stick with this story like a terrier cornering a rat. 

And when Toyota finally puts its house in order, the advertisers will come back to ABC.

Toyota Scapegoating Supplier?

Is Goliath-sized Toyota scapegoating their David-sized supplier, CTS Corp?

It’s hard to count the ways Toyota has turned what should have been a simple product recall (several years ago) into a snowballing PR disaster.  Now it appears they are scapegoating a supplier–in addition to slow disclosure, stonewalling investigators, denial, failure to get out in front of the issue, non-availability of corporate leadership, uncoordinated and negative actions by stakeholders (the dealership attack on just one of the messengers, ABC News), to name a few.

The angry dealers might also want to cancel their subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal. 

In addition to noting Congress doesn’t buy Toyota’s pedal and floormat fix, the Journal is questioning Toyota’s putting the blame on CTS Corp.  The WSJ checked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who confirmed that CTS-built gas pedals get stuck only at low speed and aren’t “believed to make cars accelerate out of control.”  According to CTS, the sticking pedals have occured in fewer than 20 cases and have never been linked to any accidents.

Many suspect possible software issues with the electronic control system in the vehicles.  Toyota may not even know what the problem is.   Whatever the real fix is, blaming a supplier only makes Toyota look worse.

LA Times Links to Enquirer for John Edwards Coverage

If you can’t beat them, link to them.

The LA Times actually printed a story today not only ‘crediting’ the National Enquirer with the scoop that John Edwards has supposedly proposed to main squeeze/girlfriend/homewrecker/babymama Rielle Hunter, but actually put a link in the Times story taking you directly to the Enquirer piece!

Perhaps the Times also has a dented Pulitzer or two lying around it can mail to the Enquirer to acknowledge its Edwards coverage, since the Pulitzer committee won’t do it.

UPDATE: Here’s the Times linking sentence: “For the Enquirer’s full article on the Edwards’ engagement, click HERE“

Enquirer Eligible!

A great injustice has been addressed!  The National Enquirer is now eligible for a Pulitzer for its John Edwards coverage!

I highly doubt they’ll win.  Old battleships like the Pulitzer Committee (itself named after one of the greatest ‘yellow journalists’ of all time) don’t turn around so fast.  But hey, even the LA Times links to the Enquirer now.

Quite a change from when I was ostracized at dinner parties for writing for ‘that rag.’

Newsweek is Pathetic

Newsweek can’t bring itself to call Joseph Stack, the murderer who crashed his plane into a government office in Austin, Texas and killed a decorated veteran, a terrorist.  Their internal debate is here.   Managing Editor Kathy Jones: “Here is my handy guide:

•  
  • Lone wolfish American attacker who sees gov’t as threat to personal freedom: bomber, tax protester, survivalist, separatist
  • Group of Americans bombing/kidnapping to protest U.S. policies on war/poverty/personal freedom/ – radical left-wing movement, right-wing separatists
  • All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov’t: terrorists.”

As Glenn Greenwald puts it, “So according to Newsweek‘s Managing Editor, only a foreigner who “protests the American government” can be a Terrorist.  Americans cannot be. ”

If you indiscriminantly murder (or attempt to murder) innocent people you don’t know in the service of your ideology, you are a terrorist.  This includes Timothy McVeigh and partners in crime, Major Hasan, Theodore Kaczynski, and the scumbag who shot two people to death at LAX in 2002 that the FBI still refuses to call terrorism.  And Joseph Stack.

Jail for Whales

Twitter has its ‘Fail Whale’.

Seaworld has its jail whale.

Yesterday, Tilikum the orca killed his trainer at Seaworld in Florida.  It’s the third person he’s killed in 20 years of captivity.

In most states he’d be a locked-down lifer, like Thomas Silverstein.  Both have killed three humans, and this American Museum of Natural History expert called this a premeditated attack.

But convicts are judged and convicted by other humans.  Tilikum has been a locked-down lifer for 20 years.  Who makes the decision to enslave whales for our entertainment?

Imagine a conversation between Tillikum and his captors.  (One of my former PR colleagues had the Seaworld account; part of her job was to take journalists out on the ‘capture boat’ to show them how humane the Shamu-capture was.)

“We’re going to take you out of the ocean and put you in a tank.”

“What?”

“No more freezing in the northern seas.  You’ll be in Florida.”

“Where?”

“You won’t lead the pod and the females anymore.  You’ll occasionally have sex to provide new whales for Seaworld.”

“What?”

“Best of all, you’ll be trained as an entertainer.  We’ll feed you salmon as a treat and you’ll get to play with a ball in front of crowds!”

“What?”

“But you can’t kill anyone.”

“Really?”

White Woman Rides LA Bus!

Shocker!  Only in the LA Times.

Enquirer Loses Pulitzer

Stop the presses! Despite scooping the mainstream media on John Edwards and his (I always want to say ‘space alien’) lovechild, the National Enquirer loses in Pulitzer race.

I’m sure the winners were worthy, but it’s clear the fix was in…

New Media Publishers as Scum

The publisher-writer relationship has always been loaded with antagonism.  Publishers think writers are greedy, flaky, unable to understand assignments (or deadlines) and above all, lazy.  Writers think publishers are exploitative.  As my father-in-law (a publisher of what were called ‘pennysavers’) used to say, “Writers are a dime a dozen.”  Or as the publisher of a marijuana publication put it, “You’re just a writer.”

Unfortunately, in the world of the Internet and new media, the rapacious nature of publishers is more true now than ever.  Now even once-respected news organizations are SYSTEMATICALLY devaluing the worth of a writer’s work.  “More major media companies are looking for ways to find cheap content…Thomson Reuters, Cox Newspapers and Hachette Filipacchi have run articles supplied by Associated Content, one of several companies, such as Demand Media and AOL’s SEED, that mines reporting from masses of freelancers for as little as $5 a story,” notes AdAge. 

Five dollars a story!  As a writer I’ve been paid a dollar a word, sometimes more.  Even at 50 cents a word, writers weren’t getting rich.  I used to say that if you wrote two 500 word stories a week, at 50 cents a word, at the end of the year you’d have made $26,000. 

These shameful ‘partnerships’ in devaluing the contribution of the writer (content creator) can be blamed on exploitative new media ‘publishers’ like Associated Content’s Patrick Keane.  And indeed, note this loathesome comment, “The evolution of the content cycle has cheapened,” said Associated’s CEO Keane.

But just as much blame attaches to editors who should (and do) know better, as in Reuters publishing Associated stories on the economy or  “USA Today’s recent deal with Demand Media, which is using its network of freelancers to supply pieces for a new Travel Tips section on USA Today’s website.” Particularly craven is Keith McAllister, global online editor for Thomson Reuters. “This was not a business decision, but entirely an editorial one,” said McAllister. “We want to fill out the online offering as much as possible. We’re building Thomson Reuters to be a content candy store.” 

He should have said “We’re building Thomson Reuters on the backs of less-than-minimum-wage-paid-freelancers to be a content candy story.”

The AdAge ‘trend’ story notes, “Associated Content boasts more than 350,000 freelance contributors who have supplied more than 2 million articles. Associated pays its contributors anywhere from $5 to $30 per article, sometimes upfront — and in some cases pays a performance fee of up to $2 for every 1,000 impressions the story generates within Associated Content’s site. ..anywhere from $75 to $120 per article. Full-time staffers or even traditional freelancers working directly with publishers cost considerably more.”

Yes, perhaps even a living wage. 

Patrick Keane 

Reporter Self-Censored Tiger Woods Story

Reporters these days are often accused of being ‘stenographers‘.  It’s a dying art but a good analogy; here it means just taking down verbatim what a source and his handlers have to say.

Actual ‘reporting’ (the kind of stuff the Enquirer did with John Edwards) doesn’t come into the picture.  The big fear is loss of access–getting kicked out of the White House press room, the campaign bus, the locker room, the gravy train.

People Magazine reporter Steve Helling is a case (or coward) in point.  As the Daily News quotes him, “Over the years, I had heard rumors of Tiger’s partying – drunken nights at the clubs, dirty dancing with other women, phone numbers slipped to pretty blonds – but I didn’t follow up on the tips,” the, er, reporter admits…Helling didn’t want to be cut off from the golden golfer.  “Negative coverage of Tiger – or even positive coverage that wasn’t approved and micromanaged – would often result in swift, permanent excommunication from the Tiger Woods camp,” he writes. “It was in everyone’s best interest to sweep the rumors under the rug.”

But don’t feel too bad for Helling–he got to cash in with a new book on Tiger and his skanks.   Just another example of why they call it ‘content’ and page view bait now, instead of news.

Elena Kagan: Lesbian Softballer According to Journal?

Why did the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) put a photograph from 1993 of Elena Kagan, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, on its cover on May 11?  Was it to show her athletic ability?  Her ‘aw-shucks’ Americanism?

Or was it a gay-baiting smear to firmly tie her to the ‘lesbian softball player‘ meme for their readers?

The Problem(s) with Newsweek

Newsweek has changed.  Mostly, they’ve given up on covering news, and now just have long, occasionally reported, think and profile pieces.

Now they’re getting unwanted publicity for being the news, not reporting it.  One of their writers says being gay and out is a career killer for actors, as no one will buy a gay or lesbian making out with someone of the opposite sex.  Entertainment Weekly (which won’t admit that it’s slagging a competitor) describes it as a journey “back to 1952.”  Indeed, when I was at the Enquirer, we played ball with the likes of Rock Hudson to buttress his straight reputation for our {largely female} readers and his {largely female} fans.  But as Lily Tomlin once said, you don’t have to be straight to play straight.

On the other hand, another Newsweek writer says we should stop talking about Elena Kagan’s sexuality.  Back to the 50′s, indeed.

And sadly, that’s their audience.  I didn’t buy my Newsweek, get it from the library or read it at a newsstand (another dying breed.)  Instead, my 82-year old mother insisted on giving her subscription copy to me.

Their advertising problems track their demographics.

I counted 12.5 pages of advertising in the comic book-sized (not graphic novel sized) 56 page Newsweek (60 pages if you count the covers) of May 3.  Of that, the msnbc.com ad was obviously a house ad, my guess is the ABC Good Morning America ad was a trade-out (perhaps they use Newsweek reporters or give Newsweek a shout-out) and the half-page SPDR/WSJ ad was probably one too.  So we’re left with 10 pages of advertising in a 60 page magazine.

That’s weak.  The type of advertising is even weaker; would anyone under 40 ‘brew’ up a cup of Folger’s instant coffee?

It’s no wonder that this once multi-million seller is for sale.   Each magazine’s death diminishes me, to paraphrase John Donne, but when it goes, people won’t miss it very much.  The 50′s are long over, and the people who still remember them are going fast.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Congratulations, Obama.  Killing Osama Bin Ladin is truly an impressive accomplishment.

Not to personalize it, but putting his head on a pole on a bridge above the Potomac would be a worthy fate for this enemy of America, the Jews and humanity in general.