Suzi Parker's Thin Skin

There is a 'Sarah Palin joining al Jazeera' spoof story which is making the rounds. The story originated in Onion manqué The Daily Currant. It's just truthy enough to pass a first glance. It did take in Suzi Parker, a freelance writer who contributes to WaPo's 'She The People' blog (and the patronizing sexism of that catchall is a rant for a different day). She wrote a whole article on Palin on that premise only to have to retract it. The defanged story with the embarrassing correction is still live but Parker has not contributed any new articles to the blog since that one.

This was back on February 12th, so I went to find out what and where she has been writing since. A google search for her is just flooded with results mocking her error so I went to her twitter feed which is at the bottom of her articles only to find out that I've been blocked by her. Now I understand her anger at some like Michelle Malkin who took this gaffe and ran with it with a hashtag game called #SuziParkerScoops. Even Sarah Palin got in on the mocking and that has got to hurt. As tempting as that was, here was the totality of all my tweeting on the issue:

@suziparker falls for a parody news story about Sarah Palin. washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-… In her defense, all stories about Palin read like satire.
— Yellojkt (@yellojkt) February 12, 2013

I set up the item, give a link, and then make a joke at Palin's expense. So why am I being blocked? Is Suzi Parker really that thin-skinned? I'm a nice guy. Honest. But when someone makes a gaffe that big they need to own up to and shake it off. And not block everybody who calls attention to it. That is no way to build a following.

Perhaps she needs to talk to Gene Weingarten about what a sweetheart I am in real life. I called him an 'asshat' and we buried the hatchet.

Gene Weingarten and his bête noire.

So what gives, Suzi? Give me another chance.

Incivil Order

As a Psuedonym-American I get nervous anytime that people start calling for Real Names as the catch-all answer for online incivility. For some reason people think that if people had to sign their names to online comments all will be sunlight and rainbows. Now as anyone who has waded into a Facebook political discussion, this is risible. And this assumes that people think that everybody on Facebook is a real person. Facebook has one billion users. And I'm three of them.

The latest person to wade into this morass in a attempt to drain the swamp only to find himself up to his ass in alligators is Patrick Pexton, the outgoing and final ombudsman for the Washington Post. In his valedictory he says this:

I think The Post should move, as the Miami Herald did recently, away from anonymous responses to a system that requires commenters to use their real names and to sign in via Facebook. It would reduce the volume of comments but raise the level of discussion and help preserve The Post’s brand.

This caught the attention of Hardball guest host Michael Smerconish who used that as a jumping off point for this piece:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you didn't blink you may have caught a pithy comment by yours truly. Here is the full unedited tirade of mine: 

 It's not the anonymity that creates the bile. It's the inadequate and ineffective moderation. Where standards are fairly and uniformly enforced people behave themselves.

Requiring 'real' identities (and many of us have long traceable histories under our online identities) of people only enables cyberstalkers and other malicious elements. 

 And since I just got quoted on MSNBC, I'm a little glad I do use an online alias. I have been a member of several online communities over the years and the key is engagement and reinforcement. When people genuinely talk to each other rather than at each other, hostility tends to evaporate. And it works whether people use their 'real' name or not.

As for how to eliminate the rancor on WaPo, there is little a massive purge wouldn't solve. I'm talking Biblical deluge. The system is broken and I am actually looking forward to the cleansing effect a paywall might have even though I am likely to lose a lot of good imaginary friends in the flood.

I am reminded of a saying that goes: 

If you take a barrel of sewage and add a teaspoon of wine, you get a barrel of sewage; if you take a barrel of wine and add a teaspoon of sewage, you get a barrel of sewage. 

And there is no shortage of sewage in the series of pipes that form the internet. It takes a lot of work to keep the wine unsullied. But it can be done without infringing on people's privacy and anonymity.

An Open Letter To Gene Weingarten

Gene,

I am highly flattered that in your latest column you still find the four-year-old post from my lightly-read now-dormant blog such a supreme irritant, although you seem to have missed my retraction of your ass-hatted-ness. I do find the claim that I am obsessed with you a bit overwrought. In 877 posts I managed to mention you perhaps a dozen times, in about half of them just parenthetically. They can all be found here.

Despite your delusion that harassing customer service representatives is in the least bit humorous, you were one of the most talented writers at the Washington Post. While I don't begrudge you either of your Pulitzers, I found your article about the Alaskan fishing village one of the most poignant and moving stories I have ever read and far more award worthy than a buskering stunt or a profile of a birthday party performer with a (SPOILER ALERT) gambling problem. I'm sorry you no longer write those excellent long form pieces and choose instead to spend your dodderage writing doggerel.

Frankly, I rarely get around to the Sunday WaPoMag now that it is thinner than the accompanying Parade insert unless I remember to read Dilbert. In my time as a boodler at the Achenblog I have declared that there is no level of celebrity too low to not have a cult of personality and with your newfound rivalry with FishbowlDC, you exemplify that principle (Not that I take their side. Taking weekly potshots at a Pulitzer-winning columnist past their prime is pretty low hanging fruit.).

While I don't throw virtual panties like the rest of your now defunct Yahoo fan group, I don't begrudge you your fame. Just learn to take the downside a little more graciously. Not everyone will always lavish praise just as some blogs will start a rap star beef with your Shalitesque face. But I am honored to remain your bête noire and I wish you many more oddly colored bowel movements to tweet about.

P.S.
Your father-son bonding experience of a comic strip is occasionally funny. Just don't let that smart-mouthed moppet grow up too fast. You would hate to break the rules of comic strip temporal dynamics.

WaPo Sells It Soul To FaceBook

I spend a lot of my waking hours with the Washington Post in my browser. Perhaps too many. Definitely too many. Anyways, I was startled yesterday to find a Facebook applet in the far right column where the ads would be if I didn't use AdBlockPlus on my work browser. I clicked around and found this press release touting the benefit of now being able to follow your Facebook friends' links to WaPo articles.

Today you will find a new home page feature, at the top right, that allows you to create a more personalized, social way to experience the news. We call it Network News.

The new box highlights the washingtonpost.com articles, photos, blogs and other content most popular with Facebook users, who click a "Like" button to indicate their interest. The feature will also allow you to log into Facebook from washingtonpost.com and see what your friends have enjoyed on the Post's Web site. Similarly, if you are already logged into Facebook and visit washingtonpost.com, you will instantly see your friends' recommendations.

Only I don't want to see what WaPo articles my friends are recommending. I go to Facebook for that. And despite the blurb, it's not just the WaPo home page. It's every damn article they publish.

I find it very disconcerting to see a sidebar of Facebook avatars when I'm reading a news story. Not all Facebook icons are in good taste. Take two-time Pulitzer Prize winning fart joke writer Gene Weingarten. He uses the mug shot of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the World Trade Center attack mastermind with whom he shares a passing resemblance. At least Weingarten isn't using his Twitter soft-serve turd icon where the similarity is only metaphorical.

I immediately dashed off an angry e-mail to Raju Narisetti, the managing editor under whose name this announcement was made. The story got quickly amended with directions on how to "opt out". Only the directions are really just how to adjust your privacy settings. I keep my privacy settings buttoned down to Friends Only already, so I'm not in danger of my recommendations being broadcast to the world. And if my FB Friends like this widget and don't mind my goofy avatar all over their news stories, who am I to complain?

What I want is a way to turn the damn thing off. It's ugly and obtrusive. I do not want to see the Network News widget on my WaPo pages at all. Even if you are not logged into Facebook it feeds a stream of "Most Shared" links. Good for them. Just tell me how to get rid of it.

This is all part of Facebook's relentless privacy-destroying drive to be THE primary social network. Part of the allure of Facebook over other social sites was that it was a walled garden where only your relatives, classmates, and invited friends could find you. That guiding principle has been steadily eroded as Facebook has become more ubiquitous and pernicious. And WaPo is just the leading edge on this. Expect to see FB feed widgets festooned all over news sites and web pages and in pop-up ads for all I know.

To paraphrase Howard Beale, "I'm mad as hell, and I can't avoid it anymore." WaPo in its desperate pathetic attempt to remain relevant in the digital age has sold its soul to Mark Zuckerberg for the price of a cheap ugly applet. I don't know if they realize that by doing so, they have already capitulated. But they will. Facebook, or one of its successors, will eventually swalllow the Post whole. And right now, WaPo, like the cow at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, is gleefully cutting off portions.

And while I am ranting about WaPo's shitty web design, in a complaint that smacks of "and the portions are so small", I have never gotten the comment applet on the news stories to work under Firefox on any platform, Windows or Mac. It so pains me to fire up IE just to read, let alone wade into, the festering cesspool that is the commentariat of most WaPo news stories that I avoid doing so as much as possible. Which is probably a good thing. But you would think that I am not the only one with this problem and that somewhere sometime some person in the bowels of WaPo's virtual sweatshop would want to fix this. But I guess not. When you outsource your web design to whomever with no concern over its functionality, you get what you deserve. Because as the Washington Post's radio ads ironically state, "if you don't get it, you just don't get it." And pretty soon the Post will be one of those things I just don't get anymore.

Weingarten The Twitter Shitter

The blog title is in credit to Demetrious-X who made me aware of this classic Penny Arcade.

Gene Weingarten thinks I’m stalking him. He ‘tweeted’ this on Twitter on Saturday:

Some po guy named yellojkt writes incessantly online about how all my writing is stupid, worthless drivel. He is now following me here.

He knew that I was following him since Twitter sends an e-mail any time some one ‘follows’ you. Clearly he recognized my nom de internet and was bemused enough to take a break from his day trying to find a rhyme for ‘poetry’ (I would suggest ‘toiletry' but that doesn't have the exact three syllable feminine rhyme a perfectionist like him would insist upon) and notify the world that his number one critic was now following his every tweet about the color of his bowel movements.

And yes, that is his real avatar. My Facebook friends think he created it himself, but I doubt he is that good a photographer. His poop fetish seems to be pretty deep seated, as it were. After all, his Washington Post online weekly discussion is called Chatological Humor. I really had no idea how large his unresolved Freudian potty training issues were, but it’s beginning to worry me.

But first a little backstory. About two weeks ago, I reacted perhaps a little too strongly to his weekly column where he told some mildly amusing tales about his dying dad’s descent into senility and then capped it off with a shout-out to his daughter graduating from vet school. I thought it was maudlin and sappy and well below his writing skills. I do have to take back comparing it to Mitch Albom. That was a little unfair. It's much closer to Chicken Soup For The Soul caliber.

I also called it a little pre-prepared, which he copped to in his chat. I just didn’t like it since it was such a departure from his usual take-no-prisoners approach. Judging from the reaction of my fellow Boodlers, who found it heart-warming and touching, I was in the clear minority here. Que sara, sara. To each their own.

Later in the week, I noticed a surge in hits on my blog from an obscure WaPo url. It seems the Style Invitational Empress on her discussion group had linked to my post and had this to say:

What I don't get is how the person is obviously acquainted with Gene's entire oeuvre ... yet claims to hate everything he writes. Why does he/she persist in reading his stuff?

The Empress (who is widely rumored to be Pat “the Perfect” Myers, a very fine copy-editor until WaPo decided (unwisely in my mind) they no longer needed that role) succeeded Weingarten, aka The Czar, at the Style Invitational so there is some professional and personal merit in her being miffed at my perceived attack, which I still insist can be seen as whatever the opposite of a left-handed compliment is. How she found out about my blogpost I have no idea, but hey, a link is a link.

One of the Losers, as Style Invitational devotees call themselves (Honestly, they do. In the words of Dave Barry, I’m not making this up), had an even harsher assessment:

I think the proper pronoun for that creature is neither "he", nor "she", but rather "it". Perhaps "it" is a masochist. In any case, anyone who posts bile like that is in desperate need of a large dose of lithium.

I good naturedly replied:

Thanks for the medical advice. Gene is a very talented writer who frustrates me when he is being infantile, patronizing or condescending, which is much of the time. I started reading Weingarten back when both he and Joel Achenbach had columns in the Sunday Magazine. In my opinion, WaPoMag dropped the wrong humorist. But then Joel has his solid reportorial skills to fall back on and I don't know what Weingarten could do for a living if he couldn't crank call people for column ideas or write sub-Ogden Nash poetry.
{blatant link-whoring snipped}
All in good fun. Gene needs some critics to keep him humble.

Which seemed to tick off a different Loser, who had this to say to me:

Please post several of your double dactyls with perfect meter and humor and let us judge who can and who cannot write poetry.

Well, I never claimed to be equal to the Great Pulitzer Prize Winning Master of Obscure Invented Humorous Poetry Forms. Heck, one of Weingarten’s double dactyls is so good that it’s in the Wikipedia article on them. Besides, my two favorite poets are Allen Ginsburg and Richard Brautigan. I doubt either of them could master the double dactyl either, which must make Gene better than either of them because he can rhyme and shit.

But this Loser didn’t stop there. He replied to his own rebuke and added this:

And you obviously have not read any of his features...like the one that won the Pulitizer (sic).

Au contraire! Not only have I read it, I blogged about it before the Pulitzer Prize Committee recognized its awesomeness (to abuse just one of Weingarten’s grammatical peeves). I suggested that if Joshua Bell wanted to increase his busking tips, he could take a few pointers in showmanship from The Naked Cowboy. I’m sure I am missing the point of this Pulitzer Prize winning article. Perhaps deliberately so.

That post is dated April 7, 2007. Which brings up the issue of the word “incessantly”. Between then and the post two weeks ago, I blogged about Weingarten in detail one other time, about a year ago. Now I admit that subtitling the post “Why Gene Weingarten Is An Asshat” could be considered inflammatory, but Weingarten was speaking ex cathedra about comics and was very, very wrong.

In the four years of this blog, Weingarten is mentioned even parenthetically in only ten posts out of over 750. A few of these used ideas of his (like this one or this one, both of which have far more to do with Sally Forth, my one true obsession, than Weingarten) as inspiration. And I wrote an especially sappy one modeled after his column celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary. So I hardly think I am the deranged stalker he and his minions are making me out to be.

So why did I ‘follow’ him? It may seem odd for me to confess now, but I like a great deal of his writing. His story about the daily lives of the Eskimos is masterful. Last week he wrote a hilarious column deconstructing and mocking Twitter. To do so, he joined the social networking site and deliberately tweeted the most banal non-sequitur drivel he could come up with that fit within 140 characters. They were awful, and I don’t mean that in the awesome sense. These were really bad. It’s a real hidden talent of his. I particularly like the ones where he writes a poem but the last line gets cut off because it exceeds 140 characters. Frickin' genius. I laughed really hard at the article, but it didn’t move me to follow him on Twitter.

In his chat that week, he lamented about how few followers he had before the article hit front lawns all over DC and how he vainly tried to pull some stunts to get more. I was still not motivated to follow him. Then over the weekend jambro, who is a long time reader of this blog, added me to her Twitter feed and out of courtesy I returned the favor. The top tweet of hers was:

@geneweingarten I'm done w you on Twitter. You come across like such an asshole. I want to keep enjoying your chats, which I love. So...bye.

That seemed pretty harsh, so I had to go and add him to my feed just so I could follow the train wreck that upset her so much. Which brings up an interesting point. The Washington Post Magazine has a press lead time of three weeks, so it had been over a month since Weingarten submitted his column about Twitter, but he was still inanely tweeting away and now had over 400 followers and is begging for celebrity ones.

(Note the chrono-synclastic infundibulum that puts Gene's post about me upstream of the
post that drew me to follow him. Typical Twitter FAIL on the server synchronization.)

Like a reporter that tries heroin just to see what it's like, he had taken a hit of Twitter and now can't stop. Sure, he's mocking the form in a very aggressively meta-way, but he is still tweeting up a storm nonetheless. At some point you become part of the phenomenon you think you are satirizing. Just sayin'.

Defenders of Gene (and they are legion) like to point out that his persona online and in print is clearly a schtick. Dave Barry (a protégé of Weingarten’s) can’t possibly be as obsessed with boogers and Good Names For a Rock Band in real life as his print avatar is. Gene’s fans say that nobody could really be as big a self-centered bloviating prick as that in real life. And I concur. Weingarten has a lovely wife, two successful grown children, and something I will never, ever have, a Pulitzer Prize. He can’t possibly be the jerk he plays on the internet.

But I have to take jambro’s side here. If it walks like an asshole, quacks like an asshole, and tweets like an asshole, it might be an asshole. In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut warns "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

I think that is advice Weingarten might want to heed the next time he is looking in the toilet bowl and is inspired to twitter about it.

Update (6/10/09): This was about the only Weingarten comment in his chat despite me submitting several pointed questions (from my pointy head):

Yoma, Ma: Nothing more needs to be said about Twitter.

Gene Weingarten: Yep, this is perfect. And the guy is perfect.

No new tweets from Gene since Sunday. Let's hope he's given up.

Sunday Mourning With Weingarten

Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten, excuse me, Pulitzer Prize winning features writer Gene Weingarten (whom I have previously called an asshat), has taken a break from his usual cycle of fart jokes, doggerel poetry and crank calls to customer service representatives to pen a touching heart-felt tribute to his dead father. You can read it here. I’m going to go back and reread it myself. Please take a break and do so too.

****pause****

I needed that break to wash the little bit of vomit from my mouth as I gagged my way through that diabetic-coma-inducing piece of maudlin sub-Mitch Albom drivel. It may be a little harsh to compare Weingarten to Albom since I have never read anything by the Mitchster myself, but my son was assigned The Five People You Meet In Heaven for high school English and he assures me it is truly awful. And it’s a particularly cruel comparison since Weingarten’s weekly online chat is presumably ironically subtitled ‘Tuesdays With Moron.’

In addition to his weekly scatologically tinged chat and his infantile column, Gene, like the constipated father in Portnoy’s Complaint, loudly labors over the three or four feature length articles he writes for the Washington Post Magazine each year. It was for one of these that he won his Pulitzer. He revels in taking the contrarian view and finding the twist in the story. A famous one is about a much in demand children’s party performer with a serious gambling problem. His most recent work was about parents that accidentally leave their infants in the back of cars until the baby dies from the heat. He took the pro-parent position.

Which is why I am so disappointed he went with the ‘aren’t old coots in nursing homes’ adorable route with this column. Now I bet a lot of you feel I am way off base here over a schmaltzy but benign piece of wistful nostalgia mixed with the bitter tragedy of watching a loved one’s mental decline. So I am going to have to deconstruct this and explain why this column is particularly nausea-inducing.

Having to institutionalize a parent is one of the most heart-wrenching decisions a child has to make. Dealing with the slow decay of a loved one’s faculties is tragic and Weingarten taps this vein as he details his father’s loss of sight, and eventually his memory. The first little anecdote is meant to be heart-warming, but I found it oddly disturbing as I could almost hear the ebony and ivory piano keys tinkling in the background as we hear about Gene's dad's lunch table partner.

One day my father told me that Mr. Williams had died. He was sad, but smiling.

"I read his obituary in the paper today, and I learned something about him I never knew. Everyone else here knew it, but I didn't." He wanted me to guess.

"He was rich?"

"Nope!"

"He was famous?"

"Nope!"

"I give up, Pop."

"He was black!"

Is his dad some sort of hero for having lunch everyday with a black guy? Would he have treated the guy differently if he had known he was black? Was the lunch time conversation so banal that no racially identifiable tales of Jim Crow or segregation or the civil rights struggle were ever mentioned? Just how is this heroic or touching? As a vignette in racial understanding it's a little troubling.

And then Gene finds it cute that his elderly dad finds an even older girlfriend.

Fifteen years a widower, at 85 my father found a girlfriend. Jeanette was another resident at his complex; her age and the thermostat setting in her apartment were both in the mid-90s.

I got news for you. Any guy in a nursing home with a pulse can get a girlfriend. The demographics at that age group are so skewed, every man there becomes the cock of the walk. Senior post-menopausal hook-ups are so common that some nursing homes are Petri dishes of what used to be quaintly called social diseases.

This is all build-up to the big finish that is supposed to make you just weep.

My father was an uncomplicated man; in a way, that was his genius. He taught me that only a few things are important in life, and that those are the only things that matter at all. I never really got a chance to thank him for that.
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My father's last coherent words were: "My grand-daughter is going to be an animal doctor."

She graduates from vet school today, Pop.

Aww, ain’t that sweet? Somewhere up in heaven, a grandfather is watching his grand-daughter get a diploma. Clearly the value of an education is one of those “only things that matter” that so deeply touched Gene. Not that it kept Gene from dropping out of college three credits shy of graduation, a decision he regrets even less than his heroin addiction. He frequently berates journalism school as a waste of time and money. So big points for the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrisy there.

Gene is also a pretty notorious and vehement atheist that can’t possibly believe his father is really hearing his shout-out. And that is where the emotional manipulation is most blatant. He himself doesn’t believe in an afterlife, so this touching vignette can’t possibly be real, but he trusts that his readers will fall for this superstitious claptrap and get all misty eyed.

And while Weingarten deserves to be proud of his daughter, he has milked her tenure in vet school endlessly. He has repeatedly explained how vet school is tougher to get into than med school (and I say good for that, otherwise, every girl that once had a pony fetish would enroll and there would be more vet clinics in this country than tanning salons). He’s posted pictures of her with her arm up to the shoulder in a cow’s nether regions. He has used her as an unpaid expert when his readers write in with pet related questions. Molly’s career choice has hardly been a state secret. But his dad made the “My granddaughter is going to be an animal doctor.” comment back in 2006 and Gene has saved it for the most maudlin moment possible. I bet some version of this column has been sitting on his hard drive for years, just waiting for the right time to hit the submit button.

It must annoy this very talented writer to see other former newspaper columnists like Abrom and John Grogan hit the Oprah show powerball lottery and become famous and fabulously wealthy. Millions of people have visited nursing homes or had a beloved pet die on them. Only a few get to milk the experience into movie deals.

Gene himself is a pet lover and has ridden the dying dog driven publishing juggernaut with his own entry into the ‘isn’t that cute and sad at the same time” niche with a book of photos and essays with the admittedly punctuationally atrocious title Old Dogs: Are The Best Dogs. Right now it’s a respectable 10,473 on the Amazon sales charts, only four thousand spots below the hardcover edition of Marley and Me.

Writers are supposed to manipulate your emotions. Romance novels get the blood flowing. Horror books pump the adrenaline. Comic novels make you howl with laughter. Weingarten is a craftsman able to work words into playing into the reader’s hearts. He knows the tricks and how to hit just the right tear-duct opening notes. It’s just galling to be played so pitifully like this. Gene, you are a better writer than that and your father should be ashamed of you. Wherever he is.

Comic Strip Temporal Dynamics

or Why Gene Weingarten Is An Asshat


In what seems to a prescient rebuttal (since strips are written weeks in advance and the Hilary Forth for President post only happened last week) to Gene Weingarten’s continued wrong-headed theories of temporal dynamics, today’s Sally Forth directly states that all comic strip continuity dates backwards from the present. Otherwise the accumulated anachronisms would become unbearably limiting and characters created in the 80s or earlier would be unable to make jokes about anything contemporary like cell phones or internet surfing.

Gene Weingarten styles himself as some sort of comics expert but he continually spouts completely ridiculous assessments of comics. His opinions are colored by his pals in the industry. Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine frequently contributes to Gene’s online chats, but nobody is a bigger asshole buddy of Gene than Jef Mallett, creator of borderline-disturbing independently-wealthy elementary school janitor Frazz. While the comic is all aboveboard, no real school employee would be allowed to be as cozy as this Calvin-haired custodian is with prepubescent kids.

Now Gene Weingarten and current Sally Forth writer (and longtime indulger of my solitary obsession with the Forths) Francesco ‘Ces’ Marciuliano have butted heads in the past. In a 2002 chat about comics, Gene Weingarten had this to say:

I knew the guy who started Sally Forth 15 years ago. He was a lawyer who could not draw. His early cartoons were just TERRIBLE. And because they were terrible, they were sort of charming. Then he hired a slightly better (but not good) cartoonist, and things went downhill rapidly. Sally Forth is one of those comics that is listless because it is no longer drawn by its creator.

The Washington Post online comics site credits the strip as "Sally Forth
by Steve Alaniz & Francesco Marciuliano; drawn by Craig MacIntosh" despite the fact that Steve Alaniz hasn't had anything to do with the strip for years. That Ces writes but does not draw the strip has also befuddled Gene for a long time. Here is a direct exchange between the two from 2003:

Francesco Marciuliano: Can you keep the comic strips where the author didn't so much give up the ghost but simply writing duties and royalties, like my job at "Sally Forth"? I need the money, people! Where else am I supposed to get that kind of cash?! Cockfighting? The chicken will beat the living crap out of me.

Gene Weingarten: Howdy, Francesco. I was a friend of the first guy who started Sally Forth. Whatsizname. The lawyer. Funny man. Couldn't draw. He was right to get out of the drawing biz You draw better. I know that's not saying much, but I think you draw well.

"Whatsizname" is Greg Howard. Not that tough to remember for someone you claim to know. This led Ces to make the following life-changing realization:

*No matter how many emails you send him, no matter how often you post on his Tuesday discussion board, no matter how frequently you point him in the direction of your syndicate's Web site, Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten will never get that you only write "Sally Forth," you do not also draw it.

But Gene began to come around. In 2005, Sally Forth was named as his Comic Of The Week, drawing this reaction from Ces:

Shocked! Shocked I am to find that The Washington Post's resident (or at least self-appointed) humor expert Gene Weingarten chose the above "Sally Forth" as his "Comic Pick of the Week"! This almost makes up for the three years in which he more or less equated the strip with an unsuccessful bowel movement.

See, in Gene’s world everything revolves around him. One of his tired bits is his hatred of the name Madison, so when someone else makes a joke about the ubiquitous moniker, the only possible explanation is that it was inspired by him.

Madison, Wis.: Was yesterday's Sally Forth a shout-out to you?

Gene Weingarten: Could be!

The thought that the name Madison is equally annoying to other comics escapes him. This is a little self-absorbed from a guy about to steal Dave Barry's booger schtick because his jokes about underpants are played out.

All this is just to lay the groundwork on the thesis that Gene is an Pulitzer Prize-owning asshat that wouldn’t know a good comic if it hit him in the face. Nonetheless, he is an influential pompous prick and perhaps dozens of panty-flinging groupies hang on his every word. That doesn’t make him right about comic strip timelines. Most comic strip characters don’t age for very good reasons. Nobody wants to read jokes about Linus’s prostate exam instead of the Great Pumpkin.

Many strips get around this by being as non-topical as possible. Nancy and Sluggo would look very weird dressed emo or goth. Red and Rover deliberately stays very fluid in its setting so that it can make both topical and nostalgic gags.

When comic strip characters age, they tend to do so VERY slowly like in Baby Blues or Marvin. The exceptions that prove the rule are For Better Or For Worse and we daily see what a trainwreck that has become and Gasoline Alley where half the most beloved characters should have taken a dirt nap a decade or two ago. Others like Opus and Funky Winkerbean jerk forward in time at awkward intervals that destroy the pace and rhythm of the strip.

Hi and Lois has been in print for three centuries now and the clothes and lingo have all kept up with the times, more or less. Thank God. The strip is unfunny enough without having to be stuck in some sort of 1950s timewarp because Gene Weingarten says you are limited to the the era it started in.

Weingarten is constantly hinting that he and his son are working on a syndicated strip that, of course, would be the funniest gift to the comics page ever. Let’s see what he does in a decade or two when the characters need to keep up with the times. Until then perhaps he should back off on the people in the trenches putting out amusing strips on a daily basis rather than pontificating with his weird theories that would suck the life out of the funnies page so it fits his warped misconceptions.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Should comic strip characters age and should the settings stay contemporary or reflect the era they started in?

Update (1:35 p.m): In his chat today, Weingarten took credit for the Sally Forth gag at the top of the page despite the two week plus lead time for newspaper comics.

Gene Weingarten: I meant to add this to the comic picks. It's terrific. I am pretty sure I was the inspiration for this. Last week, in the Gene Pool, I noted Hilary's real age. Marciuliano mentioned this in his blog. I think he got that strip in in a hurry.

The prosecution rests.

Another Update (2:20 p.m.): Ces explains the time warp much funnier than I can.

Yet Another Update (7/31/08): In an update to his chat, Weingarten admits that he didn't inspire the strip:

I was wrong in guessing that Francesco Marcuiliano's sudden, startling mention of Hilary Forth's true age (36) was in playful response to my having done just that six days before The Gene Pool. I contacted Francesco to check: It turns out this was an amazing coincidence.

He doesn't say what exactly prompted him to contact Ces, but I would like to believe that my blog post gnawed at him and he decided to set the record straight while ignoring my very existence. It's no less presumptuous a theory than his that a July 23 post of his would cause someone to scramble out a comic strip by July 29 in rebuttal.

WaPo Gets Fünke

Ending weeks of speculation, the Washington Post named Tobias Fünke as its new managing editor. The surprise announcement stunned veteran press watchers because Tobias has no previous publishing experience other than his vanity press edition of The Man Inside Me, a recent featured selection of the Provincetown Library Book Club. His first action as editor was to extend health benefit coverage to include treatment of severe gymnophobia.



Fünke replaces veteran editor Gordon Downie who is retiring to spend more time touring with his band, The Tragically Hip Replacements.



The announcement was made by Katherine Weymouth, niece of aging bass guitarist Aunt Tina of The Talking Heads. K-Wey, as she is referred to by former WaPo National Enterprise Reporter Joel Achenbach (aka A-Bach), took time from her busy schedule filming romantic comedies to welcome Tobias to the family saying that despite recent downturns in circulation, there is always money in the banana stand.

Photo credit (all left side images): Joel Achenbach

Pundits on Parade

A few days ago I laid into Bill Kristol pretty bad. I accused him of being a partisan untalented hack, which tends to be the general opinion of blogosphere pontificators not employed by The Weakly Standard. On the other hand, I wear my admiration for the Red Head of the Grey Lady on my sleeve. But in between these two extremes, there are a lot of pundits out there grinding out a lot of good work week after week even when there is nothing to say and nothing to say about it.

Let’s look at some of the syndicated newspaper and magazine columnists I love to read. This past week was a target rich environment for the talking class, so I’ve included sample quotes about Hillary Clinton to compare the styles and perspectives.

Michael Kinsley	Kinsley is the only columnist I would cross hot coals to read. And I have had to. His career has zig-zagged everywhere. Like many writers I admire, he did a long stint at The New Republic before he got sucked into being Bill Gate's lackey at Slate. His tenure at the LA Times was rocked with conflict and he briefly parked at The Washington Post before landing at Time for the time being. He always brings a fresh perspective to the table and tells something new. And rather than delve into the trees, he is always finding the forest. But being the president's spouse has to be very helpful for a future president. It's like an eight-year "Take Your Daughter to Work Day." IF it’s a question of “experience” versus “change,” change will win every time. Hillary Clinton, of all people, should have known that. Doesn’t she remember 1992? That was when her husband made “change” his mantra and chanted it all the way to the White House. "Stirred, Not Shaken", January 6, 2008
George Will	George is a little past his prime, but at one point he was the face of conservativism that dared to be intellectual, a style that like his bowties is long out of fashion. Over the years he has had some controversies like commenting on debates he coached, relying too heavily on assistants for research, and mis-explicating rock lyrics. He is now the elder spokesman of the sane Republicans. He also remains defiantly independent and steers clear of the groupthink that has plagued the latest generation of right-wing wordsmiths. Sixteen years ago, the Clintons advertised themselves as generational archetypes. How right they were. Led Zeppelin's recent reunion concert in London exemplified a tiresome phenomenon — geezer rock groups catering to baby boomer nostalgia. Speaking of the boomers' inexhaustible fascination with themselves, Bill Clinton has transformed his wife's campaign into his narcissism tour. "Start of a Marathon", January 10, 2008
Ellen Goodman	After Jules Witcover was cruelly put out to pasture, Ellen Goodman was the only columnist carried by the Baltimore Sun I missed. She looks more Erma Bombeck than Maureen Dowd, but she has a clever wit and a down to earth perspective. Her annual Equal Rites Awards column is one of the best of the year. How many women had a change of, well, heart? How many women-of-a-certain-age who've lived through vast social change remembered being told they could lead or be liked? How many had their wrinkles and cleavage and cackles and feelings dissected at every move? For that matter, do any of them still work with men like the one in Salem who yelled at Hillary: "Iron my shirt!" Status quo? Same old, same old? I don't think so. Hillary said she found her voice in New Hampshire. But she also found that very narrow line that women still have to walk. Hillary got her groove back. "Hillary's Fine Line, January 11, 2008
Charles Krauthammer	Another New Republic alumnus, Chuckie K used to be fresh and contrarian. Lately he is just the loudest and most off-key of the neo-con chorus. Only slightly less strident in his defense of war in Iraq than bandleader Bill Kristol, the Krautmeister still occasionally says something smart and fresh, but he has long dry spells. His column often comes out the day after Will's and frequently bears suspicious similarities. Check out his boomer "solipsism" with Will's "narcissism" above. Eyes on your own paper, Chuck. Was it the tears in the New Hampshire coffee shop? Whenever there is a political upset, everyone looks for the unscripted incident, the I-paid-for-this-microphone moment that can account for it. Hillary Clinton's improbable victory in New Hampshire is being widely attributed to her rare display of emotion when asked how she was holding up. The baby boomers in their endless solipsism now think they invented left and right -- the post-Enlightenment contest of ideologies that dates back to the seating arrangements of the Estates-General in 1789. "A Sneer, a Tear, a Comeback", January 11, 2008
Robert Novak	Another guilty pleasure, The Prince of Darkness is frequently infuriating but never boring. Not content to report news, he often makes it. His role in Plamegate is particularly fiendish. He starts the fire and then gets to report on the flames. He is an old school investigative columnist that has connections everywhere. You may not agree with him but he what he says reveal more about who he knows and what message they are trying to spin than anyone else in Washington. With that background, Sen. Clinton's lachrymose complaint in New Hampshire on Monday that "this is very personal for me" was widely compared to Muskie's crying jag in Manchester 36 years ago, which began his downfall. But whereas Muskie's tears were involuntary, only the naive can believe Clinton was not artfully playing for sympathy from her sisters. It worked. "The Clintons' One-Two Punch", January 10, 2008
E. J. Dionne, Jr.	The Washington Post has a whole stable of suitably liberal standard bearers, but they all tend to be far less interesting than the conservatives. David Broder is considered the pinnacle of punditry and his Clinton hatred is second to none, but I prefer the milder E. J. Dionne who seems to be a fun guy with a reassuring tone. If only he would loosen up and show more personality. Perhaps Hillary played the same trick on her critics that her husband, Bill, did in his epic State of the Union addresses that went on and on about one specific policy after another. Those speeches often got bad reviews but good poll ratings. At one campaign stop last week, as Hillary Clinton droned on learnedly about health care, family and medical leave, and global warming, a colleague in the press section leaned over to dismiss her for offering nothing but "a laundry list of wonkery." "A Shocker, in Hindsight", January 9, 2008

This list is heavily WaPo weighted because it’s my daily driveway litter, so I tend not to see other voices unless someone on the web makes a big deal of something. I hope I have proven that I am open minded and enjoy a wide range of opinions no matter how wrong they are.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Who is your favorite print pundit?

Kristol Klear

Little Billy Kristol is getting a part-time job at the New York Times and there is a lot of teeth gnashing in the blogosphere. I say part-time because he will be writing only once a week instead of twice like most Times columnists (Frank Rich only appears on Sunday, but his drivel is super-sized). He also gets to keep his day job editing The Weakly Standard which he cofounded because existing conservative opinion mags, including The American Spectator, were insufficiently rabid.

He will be taking the empty William Safire Endowed Chair For Conservative Folly. This will be a fiasco and an embarrassment for the Times, as if the Kristol-inspired WMD reporting wasn’t humiliating enough. And I predict this not out of any liberal sense of schadenfreude because I don’t view myself as particularly partisan. I like good writing from any position. My fear is that Kristol who has never been right (as opposed to right-wing) about anything in the past decade is determined to turn the Grey Lady into a bully pulpit for his petty politics.

If Poppy Bush was born on third base thinking he hit a triple, then Billy Boy was born in the owner’s box and thinks he should be batting clean-up. He is the son of Irving Kristol who pioneered the philosophy of lying to the public for their own good. Kristol the Younger is clearly a smart guy: prestigious prep school, Harvard magna cum laude, UPenn professor, yadda, yadda, yadda. One of his first forays into public service was as chief of staff first to noted moralist and blackjack loser Bill Bennett and then Vice President Quayle. It was while working for VP Potatoe that he earned the sobriquet “Quayle’s Brain”, a notably low bar for distinction. He has since then bounced around various think tanks and neo-con welfare positions. He was a principle architect of the theory that invading Iraq would bring never-ending peace and stability to the Middle East. We see how well that is going.

I first ran into Kristol when he was a frequent fill-in during the waning days of David Brinkley’s tenure on ABC's This Week. Streaming a river of flop sweat, he made Albert Brooks in Broadcast News seem as cool and collected as Peter Jennings. Since then Kristol has bounced around the Sunday morning screamer circuit until finding a home on Fox News Sunday where he can pass as a moderate somewhere between Brit Hume and Juan Williams.

Party apparatchiks like Kristol love to ridicule the Liberal Mainstream Media until it’s time to find a safe harbor when the rats start deserting the sinking ships of state. Karl Rove is taking his brand of crazy to Newsweek. Look for other disgraced conservative mouthpieces, lackeys, and fellow travelers to find refuge in the print media, the only industry falling faster than the Dubya Administration approval ratings. According to Radar Magazine, Kristol’s sweetheart deal was negotiated by fellow neocon scion Andy Rosenthal.

My point, and I do have one, is that Bill Kristol has never uttered a word that wasn’t complete horseshit in service of a political talking point. He has no legitimate journalistic experience and the concept of unbiased assessment is completely foreign to him. I’m sure he goes to bed every night with his smarmy grin, chuckling over the coup of infiltrating the paper of record as a Bilderberger fifth columnist. For at least the next fifty-two weeks you can judge for yourself whether he is still a front man for the “we will be welcomed with roses” crowd or whether he will eventually develop a spine or an independent thought.

His laconic and lazy first article is online and it is tepid material indeed. He mostly damns Mike Huckabee with faint praise. Here is pretty much the thesis:

Now it’s true that many conservatives have serious doubts about Huckabee’s positions, especially on foreign policy, and his record, particularly on taxes. [That pretty much sums up what usually concerns conservatives. - yellojkt] The conservative establishment is strikingly hostile to Huckabee — for both good and bad reasons. But voters seem to be enjoying making up their own minds this year. And Huckabee is a talented politician.

As a card carrying member of the conservative establishment, it’s hard to tell if his praise is genuine or if he is polishing apples for when he can influence policy again instead of just policing it from the sidelines.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you like your pundits fair and balanced, or from Fox News?

Update: For the Maureen Dowd/Bill Kristol connection, read this post by Mo MoDo.

City Paper Circle Jerk

National Blog Posting Month Day 8

I’m a real writer! I’ve been published in City Paper! Let me explain.

One of my many obsessions is free alternative weekly newspapers. I can’t pass one of those gimme newspaper racks without taking one. It makes me feel bohemian and hip without ever actually having to give up any of my sedated suburban lifestyle. The Baltimore version of these counter-culture leftovers is generically called City Paper, as opposed to the much more hallucinogenically named Atlanta rival Creative Loafing.

One of City Paper's columnists is the astoundingly unfunny Joe McLeod. But then somebody has to fill the space between the ads for strip bars and head shops. His rambling stream of consciousness blathering is amusing about one time of ten. A frequent column topic is how he deserves to be able to mindlessly babble weekly instead of every other issue.

Somehow Gawker got wind of his schtick and linked to a column where he channeled the prototypical trashy mall rat. Being a semi-Baltimoron familiar with his style, I found it to be hilarious once you got the joke. Not everybody did.

Part of the fun of the whole Web2.0 interactive model is getting to be an amateur commenter and provide big websites with quality snark for free. Being a blogger is passé. As this article describes, the real road to fame is to become a minor celebrity as a fixture at a bigger blog. Under my Pop Socket The Sock Puppet alias (I lost yellojkt in a disturbing lost password snafu, but that’s no big deal since nobody can spell it right), I am a frequent contributer the Gawker Media sites like Wonkette and Defamer.

With my homeboy McLeod being ridiculed by a big outfit like Gawker, I had to rush to his defense and show off my inside knowledge of who he was and how he rolled. Here is what I had to say:

BY POP SOCKET AT 10/25/07 11:24 AM
Mad props to my homeboy, Joe MacLeod. A link from Gawker may be the big break that lets his column finally go from bi-weekly to weekly.

Now Joe being the meta-comic genius that he is uses his newfound internet fame as a springboard for another column (which of course gets picked up in Gawker) where all he does is reprint the comments made about him. This was his ouroborosian response:

The last time my “column” ran in this weekly newspaper and/or World Wide Web thing, it got linked to by this other WWW thing called gawker, and then “commented” on, and then commented on the comments, and then commented, etc., and like that. A lotta people who look at my junk on newsprint might not have seen the commenting, so I’m gonna run as many, uh, salient comments from gawker.com as I can fit, plus this fucking gawker gets people to click on their shit and they make money on that, with ads, so that’s, like, stealing from me, so even more-plus, I don’t have to write anything this week, har!

Let’s recap the circular twist this episode has: My proudest moment of the past year is getting one sentence printed in a freebie newspaper because some poorly paid writer filled a whole column with comments that people left on a website that made fun of said writer. Which included me. That makes me published about five times removed.

And best of all, I got to milk a blog post about it to complete the circle.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Have you ever been really published? Like paid and everything.

Pitt Joins ACC

I know the ACC has been poaching teams from the Big East on a regular basis, but I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I opened the paper today. The following article appeared on page D11 of The Washington Post:



The headline writer didn't even make it to the end of the first paragraph where Kathy Orton correctly identifies Pittsburgh as a "Big East foe." The story was continued to page D14 where the headline was:

Cavs Score 27 Points in the First Quarter to Go 4-0 in the ACC

One of my regrets in dropping my subscription to the Baltimore Sun was the poor college sports coverage of the WaPo. It seems my fears were justified.

Fisking The Achenblogger

This blog is longtime big fan of both Joel Achenbach and the Achenblog. Joel used to write a humor column for the Washington Post Magazine, the glossy insert where the really long articles go. But it seems that a downturn in advertising from plastic surgeons and high-end furniture stores, made the powers-that-be realize there was only room for one Dave Barry derivative humorist and Gene Weingarten won that sumo-match.

Joel got shuffled off to the Sunday Outlook section where this week he personifies the navel-gazing and deck chair shuffling that has afflicted the dead tree media conglomerates as they become this century’s buggy whip industry He wrote the tongue-in-cheek lament titled “I Really Need You to Read This Article, Okay?”

Let’s lightly fisk this cry for help and see if we can see where the problems are.

Newspaper journalism is different these days: Suddenly everyone is obsessed with eyeballs, page views, "stickiness," "click-through rates," and so on. No one shouts "Stop the presses!" anymore, but they do whimper "Why aren't I on the home page?" The noble product that we manufacture and distribute throughout the metropolis -- the physical thing so carefully designed, folded and bagged -- is now generally referred to in our business as the "dead-tree edition." It gets little respect.

I’m trying to remember the last time what we commonly refer to as fish wrap got respect, but I’m pretty sure it was back when Cary Grant was chasing Rosalind Russell around the copy desk. After all, newspapers got us into a ill-thought out war of imperial expansion. And that was in the 19th century. It's called yellow journalism for a reason. Journalism got a minor ego boost during Watergate but that was back when Carl Woodward was the president’s enemy instead of his stenographer.

Our future is on the Web. This is the mantra in newsrooms. And the Web lets us discover how many readers each article attracts. The data can be scrutinized in real time, moment to moment. Inevitably, this is going to change the way we do business -- excuse me, I mean the way we do journalism.

As opposed to television ratings or box-office grosses. Why is instant feedback a bad thing?

The classic slander against people in my profession used to be "You're just trying to sell newspapers." It wasn't true. We were much too pretentious to worry about the crass concerns of the bean counters. The business model for a newspaper seemed secure. Newspapers were cash machines, with profit margins routinely hovering around 25 percent.

It’s the big fat lazy industries that never see it coming. Detroit in the 70s and 80s never realized that efficient well-made cars would eat their lunch. I have a brother-in-law who has never read a newspaper classified ad. He has furnished his house entirely off of CraigsList. The dead trees were too busy charging ten bucks for the first 25 words so that I could sell a $50 lawn mower that they never saw the truck that hit them. If legal classifieds ever go virtual, every weekly lawn litter paper in the country will go away overnight. Overcharging when you have a virtual monopoly is always a prescription for long term disaster.

The most important Web site for mainstream news outlets is the Drudge Report, once mocked and derided as a tabloid operation with low journalistic standards. But Drudge, which has millions of readers, is the No. 1 source of readers coming "horizontally," via links, into newspaper Web sites.

This is one of Joel’s hottest buttons. His little boutique blog is on the exact opposite end of the erudite versus “linky” scale as Drudge. I never go to Drudge Report to read the flashing light headline, but rather to find the fifty or more opinion makers he has linked to in a clean concise quick loading format. If I want to find George Will, or heaven forbid, Charles Krauthammer, it takes six clicks and two pull down menus to find him on the garish WaPo homepage. Google rode a white screen to search engine dominance but most newspaper webpages look like someone spilled a box of HTML crayons on the screen. People go to Drudge for ease of use, not because they agree with his moronic opinions. God I hope not.

Mackenzie Warren, who runs the online edition of the Fort Myers News-Press in Florida, told the Los Angeles Times that he would use a fake e-mail address to lobby Matt Drudge and his associates to include a link to stories on the News-Press Web site. "I'd say, 'Great story down there in Florida.' Then I'd throw in some incendiary adjective, and next thing you know our story would be at the top of his site and our traffic would be on fire," he said.

I’m astounded that Joel found a quote where a Real Journalist admitted to sock-puppetry, a vile, despicable practice. People get fired for that kind of subterfuge.

There's a favorite saying in the news biz: "Nothin' but readers." Meaning: That's a story that readers are going to devour. A water-cooler story. We used to discern such articles through gut instinct. The best editors had a "golden gut" for news.

They also used to call those “Hey, Martha!” stories. Stuff so whacky you just have to share it. Only nowadays sharing involves everyone in your Outlook Contact list. Nobody knows what is going to be the next YouTube sensation and chasing it is a fools game. Now if you could find that e-mail where Karl Rove says “Fire all those loser lawyers” you would get plenty of links.

There's one hitch in all this: The numbers are squishy. The page-view metric is easily gamed. You may notice that many stories online "jump" to a second page (or third, or fourth, or 25th, etc.) for no obvious reason. That's just an attempt to up the page-view stats. And a page that automatically "refreshes" will have more page views even if it's minimized at the bottom of your computer screen.

One more thing: Good writing remains good writing regardless of platform. The Web tends to be a chattier place, more off-the-cuff, but it is still a place where readers appreciate a well-crafted sentence, a nuanced thought, a fully elucidated thesis and commentary undergirded by fact, honesty and a generosity of spirit.

How about some numbers then? This article is completely fact free. According to Editor & Publisher, WaPo.com is the third most visited online newspaper as measured by monthly unique visitors. Compare those to the audited circulation figures of the dead tree editions.

NYTimes.com -- 14,149,000
USATODAY.com -- 10,611,000
washingtonpost.com -- 9,157,000
LA Times -- 5,267,000
Wall Street Journal Online -- 4,487,000

Those circulation numbers are two years old, so subtract about 25% across the board. In another year only people with exotic birds and incontinent puppies will still get a paper. WaPo is actually a major player in the online game. It’s just that eyeballs don’t sell as much as ink stains at the breakfast table. Until the metrics pay, there is plenty of jostling for position to do.

For a much more detailed primer on web traffic and funny numbers see this Gawker article about rival gossip site PerezHilton.

For example, look at the most-viewed list on any Web site: Opinion dominates. But opinions are worthless without facts to support them. You know the saying: Opinions are like ax handles, everyone's got one. (Substitute something else for ax handles.)

Still looking for the facts in this article. Of the top ten blogs at The Truth Laid Bare, six are rabid political sites, two are linkdumps, one is entertainment gossip and one is a mommyblog. The WaPo most read and e-mail lists seem to be a mix of hard news, opinions, weather and exposes. Your article is 18 most e-mailed as I write this, so you are getting some recognition.

Also on the web you get to swear and shit, unless the use of “ax handle’ was a subliminal allusion to the joke about George Washington’s ax, thus mentally associating with someone’s only temporarily out of print biography. If that was your goal, well played, sir.

My strong hunch is that most readers -- even those crazy Internet people! -- will gravitate to news sources that provide solid reporting and analysis. Get it right and be fair -- these principles are good ones regardless of the platform.

People go to be informed AND entertained. Looks do matter. The only thing keeping Joel from greatness is the ability to insert an “img” tag. Get that protégé of yours to give you some tips. He’s young and tech savvy. He sure knows his way around month-old cross-promotional astroturfed memes.

Citizen journalism, commentary, rants, recipes, travelogues. Readers can produce all this stuff for a newspaper Web site. The professional journalist can be an instigator of a micro-community of readers, but the readers themselves really run the show. And by the way, they do it all for free.

Hey, he’s talking about the Boodle now. Not only do we do it for free, we get our bosses to pay for it. Citizen journalism is fine, but we still need people that with the big rolodex that can meet sources in dark parking garages.

Some of you may disagree with the preceding. I invite you to post a reaction on my blog. And, um, if you don't mind, please "refresh" the page frenetically.

And feel free to link to the people that bother to talk you up and link to you. This New Media backscratching goes both ways.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you still read a hard copy newspaper?

Celeb Closet Watch Update

In Sunday's Washington Post, Hank Stuever, the Post's ambassador to all things queer, writes about the whimpering end of Will and Grace titled 'Will & Grace' And Gays: The Thrill Has Been Long Gone. Stuever lays on some very heavy dollops of faint praise. It's hard to belive W&G was once the daring risk-taking post-Ellen show that was going to bring gay culture into the mainstream. Maybe it did and that's why it jumped the shark somewhere near the end of year 2 of its seven year run.

Hank Stuever has never seen a closet door he didn't want to yank off the hinges, as I have discussed before. Near the very end of the Will and Grace article he gets off some fish-in-the-barrel shots at, of all people, Sean Hayes.

Jack: FYI, most people that meet me do not know that I am gay.

Will: Jack, blind and deaf people know you're gay. Dead people know you're gay!

Another sore point for those who had the energy to feel let down in a political sense by a sitcom was the elusive refusal of "Will & Grace's" breakout star, Sean Hayes, to discuss publicly whether he is gay. This made him essentially unavailable for the marshal's float at the June pride parades, even though his logic for keeping his sexuality private would strike almost anyone as somewhat sound: Hayes said over and over again that he didn't want any role he was playing, now or later, to be overshadowed by the perception that the actor is gay.

In my Celebrity Closet Watch post, I listed Sean Hayes as the lowest of the hanging fruits to be picked in a list of potentially closeted actors. His very inclusion induced eye-rolling and moans of "Oh please, girlfriend." That Stuever takes umbrage at any gay celebrity that doesn't wear a pink Speedo on the cover of The Advocate is becoming a very weary diatribe of his.

Since this is an update post, I do have to note how many blog-hits I get from people Googling® "Bradley Cooper gay". To set the record straight, so to speak, I said I was gay for Bradley Cooper. Kitchen Confidential was a show killed before it's time and Cooper tends to get more favorable reviews than the rest of the Three Days of Rain cast. About his romantic life, I have no clue one way or another which side of the plate Bradley stands on. Obviously someone knows more than me or there is a lot of wishful thinking going on.

I missed Cooper's surprise return to the also ending Alias when it aired a few weeks back. I did catch the ABC TV streaming archive of the episode. I think it's great that Alias is trying to wrap up their astoundingly complicated plot line and giving some air time to old stories like the under-used Will Tippen character. I wish more networks had online archives. It definitely was worth a few Toyota and ATT ad screens to fill me in on everything that has happened in the past three seasons since I quit watching.

CommentWhoring™: What ending television series are you sad to see leave the air this season? And which shows are you surprised lasted this long? Here's a list of other shows ending this season to refresh your memory.