My old pal Rob Harrell—whom I wrote about in this post and this post and this post—is scheduled to be featured in a CBS Evening News segment tomorrow or Thursday, and it’s not just because he’s talented.

Rob and I have been friends since we met in the sixth grade at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, our hometown. Even in the sixth grade, he was a precocious illustrator and artist, and he went on to get two or three art degrees. These days he is, among other things, the creator, writer, and illustrator of Big Top, a daily comic strip from Universal Press Syndicate—the company that distributes Doonesbury, The Boondocks, and many other nationally prominent strips. Big Top appears in about 40 papers around the country, including the Boston Herald and the Detroit Free Press. In 2004, The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.”

Rob moved with his wife, Amber, to Austin last year, after having lived in Indianapolis since college. A few months ago, he was experiencing constant headaches and some unusual pain behind his right eye, so he went with Amber to have some tests done. Eventually the doctors determined that he had a malignant tumor behind his right eye. Did I mention he’s only 37?

[Continue reading "Something Cool Comes From Cancer"...]

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.

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.

A little shameless self-promotion: My Us Weekly-as-Harper’s cover from February is featured today in The New York Post’s weekly Hot List, coming in at number five. (The cover graphic appears in the paper’s print edition but not the online edition.) Also on this week’s Hot List, which is compiled and written by Maureen Callahan: The Daily Show: Indecision 2004, the first-ever DVD from that great show, and Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin, the latest book by Freaks and Geeks co-creator Paul Feig.

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?

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 the excellent artifact at left 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.

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:

From today’s Washington Post:

A Feb. 5 Names & Faces item on an Evite to Michael Saylor’s birthday party was based on a copy of the invitation that had been partially forged before it was sent to The Post. The original Evite from MicroStrategy’s CEO said the party will be “exotic, mysterious and ebullient,” but it did not say “erotic.” It said “Think ‘Alias’ (the TV show), but sexier,” but did not include “much sexier,” as was reported. The original also specified “cocktail dresses,” but did not say “the shorter the better.” And, the original did not end with — or even contain — the words “no one leaves alone.” Nor was there anything in the original invitation unfit for a family newspaper. The birthday celebration involved dinner and dancing at the Ortanique restaurant for about 200 guests.

[Via Romenesko.]