The building next door to the hardteaching staff’s office at Boston University has a sign announcing that coming soon is Insomnia Cookies, which delivers fresh baked goods in the wee hours of the morning.
Website:
The hardteaching staff looks forward to seeing Insomnia Cookieniks in the morning next semester.
Yes we do.
Boston is blessed not only with two daily newspapers, but with two very talented editorial cartoonists: Dan Wasserman at the Boston Globe, and Jerry Holbert at the Boston Herald.
(You can count on two hands the number of daily newspapers nationally that employ editorial cartoonists. And yes, technically Wasserman may be a syndicated cartoonist rather than a Globe staffer, but his drawings still have a Globe identity.)
In Thursday’s editions, the two coincidentally visited Six Flags Over Anthony Weiner.
Holbert . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
New York Yankees cancer Alex Rodriguez is engaged in another slapfight with the ballclub over his return to the mothership, detailed in this New York Times piece:
Rodriguez and Yankees Clash Again Over His Status
ARLINGTON, Tex. — No one is exactly sure what will become of Alex Rodriguez in the next few days, months and years, but in the interim he continues to anger and mystify the Yankees for what they see as his ham-handed challenges to the team’s medical evaluations.
The latest incident occurred Wednesday when Rodriguez had a doctor go on WFAN, the New York-based sports-talk radio station, to state that he had reviewed a recent magnetic resonance imaging test of Rodriguez’s left quadriceps muscle and saw no strain, contrary to the evaluation of the Yankees’ team physician.
But whatever Rodriguez intended by having a second opinion broadcast on the airwaves, the effort appeared to backfire, and not only because it again raised the ire of the Yankees’ front office.
The doctor who went on the radio, Dr. Michael L. Gross, the chief of orthopedics at Hackensack Medical Center in New Jersey, was reprimanded earlier this year by the State of New Jersey’s Board of Medical Examiners for offenses relating to prescribing steroids.
Oops.
The rest of the story:
Yack yack yack Rodriguez: I’m okay yack yack yack Yankees: No you aren’t yack yack yack Rodriguez: For the love of God, get me out of Tampa yack yack yack Yankees: You wish yack yack yack . . .
As a Made Yankee Fan in Boston we say: For the love of God, make him go away.
It’s no use decrying the Babypalooza surrounding Kate ‘n’ Bill’s Blessed Event. (Links? Roll your own.) The corn is off the cob on that story.
But we can certainly decry this full-page ad that appeared in Wednesday’s Boston Herald (and undoubtedly multiple elsewheres):
Really, who would pay $150 for that, even if it is “backed by [a] 365-day guarantee,” whatever that means.
Then again, the “commemorative baby doll . . . is limited to 95 firing days, with orders being filled on a first-come, first-served basis.”
Better yet, it’s poseable!
No wonder the hardworking staff fears for the Republic.
So it turns out Google’s not just reading your gmails, it’s sorting them too.
Here’s the message Google has sent to all its Gmailers:
Of course, lots of people are Gpissed about it, as Winston Ross’s piece in the Daily Beast noted . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Legendary boxer Emile Griffith (85 victories, 24 losses, 2 draws, multiple championships) died this week at the age of 75. The cause was kidney failure and complications of dementia according to this New York Times Page One obituary (headline from print edition):
Manhood Challenged, Boxer Unleashed a Fatal Barrage, and Lived with Regret
It was the night of March 24, 1962, a nationally televised welterweight title fight at Madison Square Garden between Emile Griffith and Benny Paret, known as Kid. Griffith was seeking to recapture the crown he had once taken from Paret and then lost back to him.
But this was more than a third encounter for a boxing title. A different kind of tension hung in the Garden air, fed by whispered rumors and an open taunt by Paret, a brash Cuban who at the weigh-in had referred to Griffith as gay, using the Spanish epithet “maricón.”
Fighters squaring off always challenge each other’s boxing prowess, but in the macho world of the ring, and in the taboo-laden world of 1962, Paret had made it personal, challenging Griffith’s manhood.
I’m pretty sure I saw that fight on a black-and-white TV at 89th and 3rd in New York where I grew up (more or less). Regardless, in 2007 I wrote this WGBH radio commentary (you might find the audio here, although I think I’ve been disappeared):
It was one of the few things my old man and I agreed about when I was a kid: Emile Griffith was one sweet fighter. During the 1960s, the stylish Virgin Islands immigrant – who had shoulders, one boxing writer said, that you could serve dinner for six on – captured the welterweight championship of the world three times, and the middleweight championship twice.
But Griffith – if he’s remembered at all – is remembered for just one thing: his trio of fights against fellow welterweight Benny “Kid” Paret, a busy brawler who, it was said, would take ten punches to get in one, fifty to get in two. True to his aggressive nature, Paret twice called Griffith a “maricon” at their pre-fight weigh-ins – a homosexual slur inspired, no doubt, by Griffith’s known frequenting of New York’s gay bars.
But Griffith was in the closet, the way any boxer would have to be, and he was not amused, as he recounted in the 2005 documentary Ring of Fire. “He didn’t know that I understood a little Spanish,” Griffith said of Paret. “But at that time I knew maricon meant faggot. And I wasn’t nobody’s faggot.”
Almost as if to prove it, in the rubber match – Griffith had won the first fight, Paret won the second – Griffith essentially beat Paret to death in the 12th round, when the ref didn’t stop the fight and Griffith didn’t stop punching. Here’s how Norman Mailer described it, as documented by Ring of Fire.
“Griffith, making a pent-up whispering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.”
[New York Times: “Griffith delivered 17 punches in five seconds with no response from Paret, according to Griffith’s trainer Gil Clancy, who counted them up from television replays. Griffith may have punched Paret at least two dozen times in that salvo.”]
Griffith later admitted that it was not just another fight to him. “When I had him in the corner in the 12th round,” he said in the documentary, “I was very angry in the ring – nobody ever called me a faggot.”
Paret left the ring on a stretcher and died after spending ten days in a coma, which haunted Griffith for years. The next time Griffith fought in Madison Square Garden, he backed into the ring so he wouldn’t see the corner where Paret went down, as Mailer said, like a large ship that turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. Griffith later said, “After Paret, I never wanted to hurt a guy again. I was so scared to hit someone. I was always holding back.”
Regardless, Griffith won three more championships after the fatal Paret fight. But he’s never answered the bell about his sexuality.
Flash-forward 35 years to this summer when Griffith resurfaced as vice president of the gay-rights Stonewall Veterans’ Association and rode in last month’s Gay Pride parade. Even so, Griffith continues to rope-a-dope the issue of his homosexuality.
In an interview with the New York Times, Griffith came close to coming out. “Yes, I’m gay,” he told the Times reporter. “I don’t see anything wrong with being gay. If that’s what I want to do? If that’s what I want to be?”
Right after that, though, Griffith said he had just been joking. Odds are Benny “Kid” Paret would have said he was just joking, too.
Special Campaign Outsider Bonus (well worth watching):
As the hardworking staff previously noted, New York Times Op-It Girl Maureen Dowd has been hanging out at the James “Whitey” Bulger trial and dispensing her trademark PoMoDo reactions to the proceedings.
Gangsta Guilt Trip
BOSTON — Even the loathsome Stephen Flemmi was loath to see a picture of the skull of Debbie Hussey.
“I don’t want to see that,” the man who murdered for a living said, turning his head away from the macabre remains of a beauty he raised from the time she was a toddler as his own daughter, then molested when she was a teenager, and then helped kill when she was 26.
Jurors stared at the skull of Debbie, who grew up calling Flemmi “Daddy.”
“Do you remember how many teeth you pulled out of your stepdaughter’s mouth?” Whitey Bulger’s tart defense lawyer, Hank Brennan, asked Flemmi, Whitey’s old partner in killing, ratting and womanizing who is now the star witness against Whitey.
The 79-year-old Flemmi replied that he had been “in a semitraumatic state” and on a “guilt trip” during the murder. Whitey nicknamed Stevie “Dr. Mengele,” because extracting identifying teeth was his specialty.
This is all refried tough beans, with Dowd reduced to interviewing Boston journalists to flesh out her coverage.
Yet, as Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe columnist, told me, “Debbie Hussey might be the saddest case of all.” Cullen co-wrote the compelling chronicle of the Winter Hill gang, “Whitey Bulger.”
“I think the most interesting thing about Whitey and Stevie was their obsession with women,” Cullen said. “They could never have enough of them. They kept very tangled domestic situations, with common-law wives and girlfriends on the side. Their domestic lives were more complicated than their criminal lives.”
There’s very little in Dowd’s coverage that New York Times readers couldn’t get online from the Boston news media.
It’s the Internet 3.0 era, Timesniks. You need to think about New York Times 3.0.
Send Dowd elsewhere.
Well, the Boston mayoral candidates released their campaign finance reports for the second quarter and darned if the local dailies didn’t notice the same thing: No bucks yet from the big-bucks set.
Business elite wait for the herd to thin
From businessman Jack Connors to developer John Fish to Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, Patriots owner Robert Kraft and concessionaire Joseph O’Donnell, many of the city’s top power brokers are playing it safe in the mayor’s race — but leaving the crowded field of candidates hanging in the balance at a crucial time in the election.
A Herald review of the latest campaign finance reports found that Connors, Fish, Lucchino, Kraft and O’Donnell have yet to contribute to any of the dozen candidates running to replace Mayor Thomas M. Menino.
Also sitting on the sidelines so far are . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two Daily Town.
The White House press corps has revolted against the Obama administration and it’s about time.
From MediaBistro’s FishbowlDC:
WHCA Throws Photos in Administration’s Face
A small thing, but a loud gesture. The White House Correspondents’ Association is stripping all official White
House photographs from the WHCA website in support of news photographers getting shut out by this administration. They put the news in a letter to all their members this morning from President Steve Thomma of McClatchy. He wrote, “This symbolic gesture is a statement of our belief that journalists should be allowed to cover the president as often as possible and that journalists should not be excluded when the White House is covering the president with its own photographers or video crews.”
This has been a persistent problem throughout Barack Obama’s presidency: An increasing number of events that used to be open to the press have been closed, with the administration substituting its version of events for actual coverage.
ABC News pointed this out two years ago:
Obama’s Media Machine: State Run Media 2.0?
As the 2012 presidential campaign kicks into gear, President Obama’s White House media operation is demonstrating an unprecedented ability to broadcast its message through social media and the Internet, at times doing an end-run around the traditional press.
The White House Press Office now not only produces a website, blog, YouTube channel, Flickr photo stream, and Facebook and Twitter profiles, but also a mix of daily video programming, including live coverage of the president’s appearances and news-like shows that highlight his accomplishments.
“Advise the Adviser: Your Direct Line to the White House,” the administration’s latest online program launched last week, encourages viewers to offer “advice, opinions and feedback on important issues” and promises a response from a senior administration official in return.
“We’re striving to not just have a passive website where people can read about what’s happening but create a method of interaction and feedback,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
(Josh Earnest? Really?)
Actually, what they’re striving to do is replace the news media as a source of information for Americans.
One small example: “West Wing Week [is] a magazine-style show featuring the president behind the scenes, and other live-streaming events . . . intended to more directly disseminate the administration’s message.”
West Wing Week from April, 2010 (see 1:45):
That’s not a big deal, but other stuff is.
So let’s hope the White House press corps continues to press the Obama administration on this issue.
P.S. If George W. Bush had adopted this practice, we would have been at DEFCON 2 years ago.
Detroit is under siege.
Bankruptcy! Ruin porn! Motorpocalypse!
Yikes!
But here’s a ray of hope, via a full-page ad in Tuesday’s New York Times.
Body copy:
Apparently they do know shit from Shinola in Detroit.
Click to subscribe to RSS
Campaign Outsider 