Thanks to something Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes created, the October issue of Vanity Fair has gotten a little bit of attention. The issue also contains something I created: a fake cover flap you can cut out and attach to a newsstand copy of The Weekly Standard. It’s on page 272, in the Vanities section. More details are here.

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Magazines, News and Politics, The Magazine Covers

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In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t go so well: The taping was disrupted by a group of angry activists who were seated throughout the audience. A visibly rattled Limbaugh was unable to regain control of the show. “He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man,” a CBS executive later said. “I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.” Eventually Limbaugh made it to the first commercial break, and then, barely, to the next one; when the show returned from the second break, the activists were gone—along with the rest of the audience. A demoralized Limbaugh then delivered self-serving closing remarks to an empty studio.

This is from one of my Media Shower tapes (hence the phone number and other graphics that are occasionally superimposed over the video). Yesterday I figured out how to embed a YouTube video on a web page, which will allow me to put up stuff like this without worrying about bandwidth. You’ll need the Flash plugin. The clip is about 11 minutes long, and it’s fricking awesome.

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Earlier this month, Britain’s Channel 4 aired The Root of All Evil?, a two-part exploration of religious faith hosted and narrated by Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford ethologist and author who is one of the world’s most outspoken proponents of the theory of evolution. He’s also an aggressive critic of religion. The Root of All Evil? follows Dawkins as he travels to some of the world’s religious centers—among them Jerusalem, Lourdes, and Colorado Springs—to observe services and to interview leaders and followers of various faiths.

Tipped off by a thread on Echo, I bittorrented both episodes a few days ago. From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins’s narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it’s as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, “I’m surrounded by IDIOTS!” The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.

In the seven-and-a-half minute clip linked through the image below, Dawkins visits Colorado Springs to attend a sermon by an influential but proudly ignorant pastor. In a conversation with Dawkins after the sermon, the pastor likens the event to a rock concert. Dawkins suggests that it was more akin to a Nuremberg rally—a comparison that the pastor appears to be too uneducated and ignorant to be offended by.

[I found the two torrent files on a members-only site. You can download the torrent for the second of the two parts here; the first episode is surely available on other torrent sites, too. For information about bittorrenting files, see this item I posted in July.]

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Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.

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Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

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John Tierney’s New York Times columns are filled with willfully obtuse justifications for selfish behavior, not to mention lots of cherry-picked data. But until last week his columns were fun to read online, because the photo that accompanied them was so hilarious. Here’s the photo, which must have been taken a few years ago during Tierney’s tenure as dean of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College:

The hand-stapled-to-chin pose: so sexy. It turns out that this guy also loves to pose that way, which should tell you something about Tierney.

Alas, the above picture has apparently been abandoned in favor of this perfectly normal one, which accompanied the online version of Tierney’s Times column yesterday:

Perhaps Tierney finally realized that he’s not much of a thinker after all.

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I had no idea how bad things had gotten for Judith Miller until I saw the Ethicist column in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine. When is the Times finally going to rein in this crazy woman?

(Here’s a link to this week’s Ethicist column.)

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…but what if we change a few letters and add the empty noggin of a dangerous but determined man?

(In January, I posted a great Absolut riff by my pal Rob Harrell.)

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There are so many people on the Gulf Coast who need help right now. I’m sure most of you have already given money to one or more relief organizations. Here’s another organization you might consider donating to. The website of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, one of the city’s great music institutions, is raising money to help New Orleans musicians. Go here to give.

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categories: Music and Audio, News and Politics

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In 1986, at the peak of the PMRC’s prohibitionist campaign against all pop music it judged to be insufficiently banal, Frank Zappa appeared on CNN’s Crossfire to talk about obscenity and censorship with three other panelists. One of those three other panelists was Mr. Douchebag of Liberty himself, co-host Robert Novak, who has learned a thing or two about obscenity in recent days.

Zappa is so great in this. The clip is about 20 minutes long, and the whole thing is worth watching.

Novak is actually the good cop in this exchange. The bad cop role is played with great gusto by a pharisaical right-winger—is there any other kind?—named John Lofton.

Zappa appeared on Crossfire again the following year, but that clip isn’t quite as rewarding.

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Check out this totally gratuitous and inexplicable pop-culture reference buried in a mostly sober article by Melanie Warner in today’s New York Times. The article is about one Rick Berman, an amoral jackass who propagandizes for food-industry interests through a well-funded front group.

About a third of the way into the piece, Warner refers to Michael Jacobson, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as “a tenacious Ph.D. in microbiology.” I’m sure Jacobson is both tenacious and a Ph.D., but it seems likely that the two-word phrase is a punning reference to a certain Jack Black side project. It’s possible that the reference is to the traditional meaning of the phrase, but that’s not as amusing to contemplate. Regardless, the phrase is clearly a pun, and it’s totally gratuitous. What the hell is that pun doing in there? Is Melanie Warner a Jack Black fan? Was the pun inserted by a rogue D-ciple on the Times copy desk? When did the paper start allowing Entertainment Weekly-style wordplay into news copy?

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God, Tom Tomorrow’s strip this week couldn’t be more right-on. Some of it is below; go here for the rest. If you’re not a Salon subscriber, you’ll have to watch an ad first, but it’s worth it.

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I’ve been watching MSNBC for the last two hours, and it’s kind of disturbing to see all the old Nixon thugs come out of the woodwork. With numbing predictability, Pat Buchanan has been ranting like the odious brat he is, insisting over and over again that Deep Throat was a traitor and possibly a criminal. And now Chris Matthews is talking to that upstanding citizen Chuck Colson. I’m sure that if Ehrlichman and Haldeman were still alive, all the networks would be giving them the elder-statesman treatment—instead of the public whipping that they, and all the others, deserve. This is why I almost never watch TV news.

This seems like a perfect moment to post one of the best publication covers in my personal collection. I acquired this excellent artifact in 1997, during a year I spent living and working in D.C. One day in the late spring or early summer, I was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle during my lunch hour when a homeless guy walked over to me with the complete Washington Post from August 9, 1974—the day after Nixon stepped down. This guy didn’t just have the front page or the front section from that historic day—he had the whole paper. He offered to sell it to me for $20. I offered him $10, and we had a deal.

Oh, jeez, I’ve still got MSNBC on, and I’m starting to get a little terrified. At the moment, the panel consists of Al Haig, Gordon Liddy, Joe Scarborough, Monica Crowley, and Pat Buchanan. Of course all these people are going to criticize Felt for what he did. Why not elicit the opinions of some prominent Nixon antagonists from the Watergate era—the Republicans and Democrats and independents who actually worked hard to ensure that a reckless, criminal administration was held accountable for its crimes? Oh, wait, I know the answer: Because it’s TV news.

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In 1992, The Atlantic Monthly published a classic article by James Mann that laid out a convincing theory regarding the identity of Deep Throat, the famously anonymous Woodstein source who helped bring down the Nixon Administration. Mann believed there was a good chance that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 or No. 3 man at the FBI during the Watergate years. I first read Mann’s article in about 1996—near the beginning of my long and enduring obsession with Watergate—and I found his case far more convincing than most of the other Deep Throat theories that had been bandied around since 1974. (Kissinger? Come on. L. Patrick Gray? A bumbling functionary who was totally out of his depth at the FBI. Al Haig, William Rehnquist, Diane Sawyer? Shut up and stop wasting my time.) Partly because of Mann’s article, and despite the existence of a handful of other strong candidates, I’ve spent the last decade believing that Felt was Deep Throat. As it turns out, he was.

Until not long ago, the Mann article was freely accessible on the Atlantic’s website. But sometime in the last year or two, the magazine began hiding the article behind a subscription wall. Now, for obvious reasons, the article is public again, and you should go read it.

In a series of articles for Slate since 1999, Timothy Noah had also been a strong proponent of the Felt theory.

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For a feature package on the tabloidization of many broadsheet newspapers, Poynter Online runs an illustration showing what The New York Times might look like if it shifted to a tabloid format:

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Apropos of pretty much nothing: I was 10 or 11 years old during the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis. I distinctly remember some kids at my elementary school doing an anti-Ayatollah singalong a few times at recess and on the bus. It was set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands”:

If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah and you think he’s assa-hole-ah
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands

Does anyone else remember this? Was it just a Southern Indiana thing? A Google search pulls up nothing.

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It seems almost silly to single out one James Wolcott post, because his blog is so consistently excellent. But his Saturday post about the Terry Schiavo case is particularly good:

One of the side-effects of the 2004 election revealed by this despicable exploitative schmaltzfest is that the media has to tippytoe around making any disparaging remarks about religious fervor and its pathologies. Compare how little ink and airtime is given to the fact that the accused BTK serial killer is a prominent member of his church (and a registered Republican) to all the inspirational uplift being wrung out of the Atlanta hostage case, with CNN devoting a whole kabob to The Purpose-Driven Life. The positive side of religious faith is hailed to the rafters while the sadism and mastery over others seething in the negative side is now considered impolite to mention, as is the willful, retarded ignorance of those who cling to their Bibles and reject reason and science. “It is true that the rules of civil discourse demand that Reason wears a veil when she ventures out in public,” writes Sam Harris in The End of Faith. “But the rules of discourse must change.” Especially when the alternative is a sordid circus like we have now with those prayer vigils and cro-magnon conservatives in Florida. … Call me a pessimist, a proud Eeyore, because I don’t think America will smell the fine aroma of Gevalia anytime soon, if ever. This country is wearing a blindfold, staggering backwards, and slitting its own throat in slow motion. Watch the cable news, listen to our elected leaders: there’s no more urgency about the economic decline in living standards dead ahead than there is about addressing global warming or loosening the chokehold of military spending. A country where “evolution” is becoming a bad word is not a country interested in facing reality. Instead, as the passage of the bankruptcy bill shows, corporate-political power is going to grind every last dollar out of the desperate and destitute rather than confront the difficult macro decisions. The elites in this country have never had it so good, and as long as they’re prospering the distress will smothered under the surface, kept under a lid.

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