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A Much More Interesting Story

Dec

14

2009

I was watching a documentary in ESPN’s excellent 30 for 30 series about the University of Miami’s football program in the 80’s and early ’90s, and like many documentaries, there were a few shots of newspapers of the day, with the stories related to the program highlighted. In one instance, however, I was much more ...

Pretty Pictures 2

Dec

6

2009

The first, both pretty and telling, comes courtesy of the New York Times’ photography blog’s feature on Dubai. Lauren Greenfield, who had mostly been documenting the way the recession hit here in the States, went over to Dubai and snapped this telling shot: The juxtaposition of the impotent palm tree next to an empty McMansion, ...

Fun From My Hometown Paper

Dec

4

2009

The Washington Post has came up with a couple of doozies – the first being one of my personal favorite corrections of all time, which has already made its way around the internets a couple times for its sheer ridiculousness. The second contains one of my favorite kicker quotes in a while: “I’ve been on ...

The Oddest News Item Of The Last Few Days

Nov

11

2009

There have been quite a few odd ones, but nothing tops the L.A. County Board of Supervisors naming Buzz Aldrin the county’s Honorary Consul General to the Moon.

Marine Life Rebels

Feb

26

2009

An octopus managed to flood some of the small aquarium at the Santa Monica Pier today by opening up a valve inside the tank. Joel pointed out when I sent him the story that perhaps inside an octopus tank is not a great place for a valve that can be turned by, say, an octopus. ...

Plane Crazy 1

Jan

16

2009

I was completely mesmerized by the insane events in New York today, with the plane that ditched in the Hudson after BOTH ENGINES got knocked out by bird strikes and somehow managed to get every last person out alive. I’ve been reading and reading and reading coverage, and I think I found one guy whose ...

Televised Sea Change

Dec

9

2008

As someone working in scripted TV production…holy shit, this is bad news: NBC is replacing its entire 10pm hour with a nightly prime-time hour of Jay Leno. If you look purely at the numbers, it absolutely makes sense for fourth-place NBC, whose ratings have completely tanked this year due to the fact that they put ...

A Tempest In A Teapot – On Ice! 2

Dec

4

2008

Laz brought the extent of this situation to my attention, and the mind-boggling stupidity of it really floored me. Sean Avery is a hockey player, something of a ladies’ man, and kind of a charming jackass, if that’s not a complete contradiction in terms. He said the following to some reporters before a game against ...

Fun With Contextual Advertising 1

Nov

2

2008

The L.A. Times ran a brilliant editorial today, picking off one by one the arguments for Proposition 8, which seeks to amend the California state constitution to ban gay marriage. However, they should probably consider turning off their context-based advertising on their editorials. Because with contextual advertising, you end up with screenshots like this (click ...

A Tale Of Two Verdicts

Oct

4

2008

October 3, 1995 I was in the student lounge of my high school in D.C., where they’d dragged a bunch of TVs so we could all watch the O.J. verdict. They knew people would cut class to go find TVs elsewhere and watch it anyway, so the administrators just threw up their hands and let ...