Uh oh! Everyone's poor and the holidays are coming up! How to get through the next few months, during which we all SIMPLY MUST celebrate the birth of God by spending money on each other, without inching even closer to the poorhouse? HERE COMES WAL-MART, BITCHES!
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Today, while all good Americans celebrate a menacing, imperialistic Italian who systematically murdered brown people, Google is wishing a happy 50th birthday to Paddington Bear. Slate was right about those gazillionaire bastards.
Friday was the national holiday one degree more meaningful than Flag Day: Talk Like a Pirate Day. You are sad that you missed this chance to show your patriotism by stealing things. Thus, you are invited to push this button to celebrate belatedly. [Open Salon]
Happy Fourth of July! May we suggest two ways to celebrate?
1) Visit DrudgeReport.com, where Matt Drudge has made his site all red-white-and-blue instead of its regular, uh, red-white-and-black.
2) Take a look at this "Signing the Deceleration of Independence" cheese carving in Times Square, created by Troy Landwehr (for Cheez-It, of course). "The cheddar has been pasteurized and will not melt," he says.
HOLIDAY MALADIES Whoever gave interim Early Show producer Rick Kaplan his own holiday … was probably Rick Kaplan. [TVN]
You know Passover is a'coming when … CONTINUED »
With April Fool's Day coming at you tomorrow, expect erroneous publicist pitches, misleading tips, and phony Facebook friend requests. History is filled to the brim with elaborate tricks, from Discover magazine's April 1995 story on the naked ice borer to PC Computing's 1994 article on legislation aimed at banning Internet use while intoxicated. So how to sort out who's pulling the wool over your Lasik'd pair? CONTINUED »
John McCain may have been terribly mistaken when he asserted Purim was the Jewish Halloween, but these photos taken at yesterday's Easter parade in New York show all religions will use any excuse to wear a costume.
[Photos]
At last, the end result of what we'll simply call "a stab at multimedia content": It's Vanity Fair's holiday card, popping up in the unprepared mailboxes of Vanity friendlies across town, starring Graydon Carter as Santa Claus. And Bono as … a leather daddy elf. Naturally, Annie Leibovitz is responsible for this.
In case you don’t have a Far Side off the wall calendar to remind you, today is Kwanzaa, which as Wikipedia describes it, is “a week-long Pan-African festival celebrated primarily in the United States, honoring African American heritage, It is observed from December 26 to January 1 each year.”
George Bush, who for the record, cares about black people, wishes you a happy one: CONTINUED »
Presents! Everyone loves presents! This year the PR team at Fox News and Fox Business are sending out a Fox-branded cell phone charger from fox news and Fox Business-branded wallet from Fox Biz. Ooh, and this cute card.
Who cares if everyone is getting canned? The PR team at Fox wants to wish you happy holidays! So before security escorts you, click play.
Money makes the world go round, and there's seemingly no limit to what an American Express Black card-carrier can accomplish. Until now, that is! Apparently, it seems the oodles and oodles of cash accrued (and then pledged to the church?) by Scientologist mega-couple Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes has nonetheless failed to "buy" them an innovative approach to dull seasonal mass-mailings. Case in point: This blah, unimaginative holiday card (obtained by Us!)
Where are the awkwardly staged Sears family portraits? The pictures of a rosy-cheeked Suri Cruise sitting atop Santa's knee? The adorable candids of mother and daughter frolicking in the snow (okay, fine, polluted Los Angeles beach) flashing matching smiles and and identical haircuts? The biological father grinning proudly, eyes wide with wonderment at the miracle of creation modern technology, arms wrapped firmly/protectively around his pretend-wife's waist?
In honor of the Festival of Lights (a.k.a. "Christmastime for the Jews") which begins tomorrow night at sundown, we've rounded up a few of the catchiest Hanukkah songs that, for some reason or another, never really caught on.
So the next time all you good for nothing son-in-laws start kvetching about those "Eight Crazy Nights" of family time? Be thankful that you won't be singing along to such modern classics as "Schlepping through a Winter Wonderland," "Deck the Halls with Balls of Matzos" and, of course, "Silent Night? I Should Be So Lucky."
Know what every newspaper needs now and then? A pep talk. In print. From one of its own.
Baltimore Sun staffers received just that yesterday, when ombudsman Paul Moore congratulated colleagues for, uh, doing their jobs over the holidays.
This holiday season, The Sun sparkled with its coverage of news - some of it late-breaking, some of it "enterprise" reporting and some of it the result of careful preparation and sharp execution.
Most notable was the reporting and presentation of the death of former President Gerald R. Ford in the Dec. 27 and Dec. 28 editions. The bulletin announcing Ford's death hit The Sun's newsroom at midnight - right in the middle of the first-edition press run. Editors quickly notified the newspaper's printing plant to slow the presses so that the news desk could remake the front and inside pages to accommodate the story.
Moore goes on to say that, just like other newspapers, the Sun had a prewritten obit ready for Ford — but that it needed a lot of updating on deadline. How come? We'll guess the newsroom had been lax in updating their obit roster. Which is always worth congratulating.
Donny Deutsch's holiday party wasn't the only NBC Universal soiree to go awry. While a party bus break down kept CNBC's bridge-and-tunnel staffers from boozing in the city, we hear Stone Phillips and Ann Curry's crowd had an equally miserable experience.
While it was easier for NBC's Dateline staffers to find the party – at the Ted Turner Bison Restaurant – we hear staffers were charged $20 each to attend. And what's they get for their cover charge? A "disturbing" performance by Dateline executive producer David Corvo's 12-year-old daughter singing "Desperado." Ahem.
Jeff Zucker promptly sent top brass a memo, heralding the entrance fee as a brilliant cost-cutting measure that saved the bottom line untold hundreds of dollars.
• Rape charges dropped against Duke lacrosse players; kidnapping, sexual assault charges prevail.
• As of today, Tower Records is no mo'.
• Life & Style reports Oprah and Stedman are moving in together; no word yet on where "special friend" Gayle King will sleep.
• Nicole Richie recovers from Hilary Duff's snark attack by stuffing her face at Johnny Rockets.
• As every girl (or, um, transsexual) knows, you can never have too many shoes.
• Christmas purists rise up against hideous, inflatable Santas. Because the birth of Christ has soooo much more to do with pine trees, twinkling lights, and mistletoe.
Sure, they may not get delivered in time, but what better way to say "Merry Christmas" to someone than with a stocking stuffed with … really expensive shit. Women's Wear Daily has teamed with a series of designers it's supposed to be uninfluenced by to create a series of top notch stockings for that special someone under the mistletoe, now available for purchase on eBay. (Proceeds go to charity, yey!)
And no, the Heatherette stocking does not include Amanda Lepore.
Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake may have the hottest viral video of the week, but "Dick In A Box" as a Christmas gift has nothing on this homoerotic send up to, uh, we're not really sure what. But this video probably belongs on Queerty much more than it does here, but Thursdays are the new Fridays, and we'll post the conversation between your multiple personalities at this point.
A holiday note from NYT public editor Byron Calame, explaining why the Grey Lady is unloading gobs of serious journalism on your front page this time of year:
During just the first three days of this week, seven long stories from various series appeared on the front page of the paper, my assistant Joseph Plambeck has found. Readers who move along at 250 words a minute would need to spend an average of 20 minutes each morning just to get through the approximately 15,000 words from those articles in the past three days.
Why this deluge of fine journalism just when many readers are already busy with holiday activities? I’m fairly certain it’s because Dec. 31 is a deadline for the most significant journalism contests. Editors at The Times, like those at many other newspapers, probably are rushing out the final installments of important series so they can be included in the entry package in various contests.
And also, as any good publicist knows, it's always best to unload the most damming and important news at the precise moment nobody is going to give a crap.
Editorial Director
