Overexposed Overbiter Gets Underage Ovaries Overexcited [Open Caption]
Posted by CMAdmin
[ZOMG, it’s Robert Pattinson who plays the sexy vampire person in that sexy vampire movie “Twilight” that everyone is totally going to seeeeeeeeeeee; image via INF]
TedSez’s new line beats the original, If He Were A Real Vampire, He’d Be Signing Blank Pieces Of Paper. And, Um, This ‘Open Caption’ Would Be Blank, Too.
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Twitter Mom Power! Innocuous Ads Successfully Banned [Controversies]
Posted by CMAdmin
Haven’t we warned you people that Twitter and all of its attendant microtrends are nothing but trouble? That also goes for “the internet” and “bloggers,” and especially for “mom bloggers,” a particularly virulent and dangerous subset. Corporate America has now learned this lesson the hard way. The outrage of Twitter moms has forced the big bad Motrin corporation to pull its totally innocent ad campaign for aspirin. Power to the people! Detect the horrible offense here for yourself:
This ad campaign is outrageous, reportedly, because it makes light of motherhood in an unacceptable way. Now it’s been crushed and the company is grovelling in apology. Good taste has prevailed!
The beginning of the end for the Motrin push probably came Friday night, when Los Angeles blogger Jessica Gottlieb said she was tipped off to the ads and started expressing her outrage over the campaign on Twitter, where she has 1,018 followers.
“I am a satirist, I get humor, I talk about my vagina,” said Ms. Gottlieb, who works as a freelance writer for National Lampoon and writes for Silicon Valley Moms Blog and Celsias. “I’m just insulted. I’m not an activist. I don’t have an agenda, but I do have children.”
Psht.
[Ad Age. Mom protest video here. Ambient outrage goes in the comments. And UPDATE, Jessica Gottlieb responds here.]
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American Lawyer Media Falls Under Layoff Ax [Layoffs]
Posted by CMAdmin
Nine people have been laid off at American Lawyer Media (now called Incisive Media). The cuts are all in the company’s real estate group—about 15% of the total staff—including both editorial and sales positions. The company already laid off 42 people earlier this year.
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David Brooks Feels Bad for the Middle Class [Class War]
Posted by CMAdmin
We’re back from vacation and need to learn to hate again, so let’s check in with famous New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, shall we? Today, the last conservative intellectual in America is writing about this new recession we’re in, and how it will make so many people sad, and mad. There is no money! Where is the money? This thing called “the market” was supposed to make the money get bigger and bigger every year forever until Jesus came back, but instead it just ate all the money, but David Brooks doesn’t really want to talk about that. He wants to talk about The Middle Class! There isn’t one, anymore.
This recession will probably have its own social profile. In particular, it’s likely to produce a new social group: the formerly middle class. These are people who achieved middle-class status at the tail end of the long boom, and then lost it. To them, the gap between where they are and where they used to be will seem wide and daunting.
Yes, in David Brooks’ formulation, we are a nation of people who became middle class sometime in the 1990s, and have now lost it all, in the last month or so, spiraling back to poverty. We’re not so much a nation that became middle class during the big government industrial economy days of the post-war period, and one that then saw its middle class squeezed to the margins as the Reagan years ushered in the greatest disparity of wealth since the Gilded Age. You forgot about the greatness of our service economy and the fantastic prosperity retail jobs brought to everyone!
In the months ahead, the members of the formerly middle class will suffer career reversals. Paco Underhill, the retailing expert, tells me that 20 percent of the mall storefronts could soon be empty. That fact alone means that thousands of service-economy workers will experience the self-doubt that goes with unemployment.
It’s sure gonna suck to lose the job security, benefits, and legendary social safety net of the service economy, right?
It is remarkable that a man can write a column that is basically spot-on, if also 20 years out of date, on “the big picture” (hello, Fear of Falling fans!) while being so obstinately, intentionally incorrect in every detail. No, wait, “remarkable” is the wrong word, because it is a David Brooks column, and that is exactly what he does, professionally. (See also the last time we caught him doing this, here.)
R.I.P. the middle class, we’re sure the conservative intellectuals will have some great ideas for how to help you guys out come 2012. Maybe you’ll need tax cuts?
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Gigolos Doing Better than Mistresses During Recession [Sex Wars]
Posted by CMAdmin
Now that you’re just rich instead of super-rich, you’re gonna find out if your mistress really loves you. Will she stick around even if you can’t keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed? The WSJ cited a new survey [of 191 people worth over $20 mil] in which “more than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances… only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons.” The survey also showed that rich ladies are less likely to cut back or drop their lovers than rich men, even when they’re losing money. This is another example of What It Really Means In America As Told To Some Narrow Niche Of Society.
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Bill Kristol Not Long For This Op-Ed Page [Losers]
Posted by CMAdmin
Times columnist Bill Kristol went on Fox back in June and told the world that this governor from Alaska named Sarah Palin would be the best Vice President ever! He loved her, very much, because she was a maverick. Five months later, she is a national joke, and he is a sad, sad man, trying desperately to salvage his credibility. “I met her for the second time in my life. I know we’re supposed to be such great friends, but the truth is I’ve met her twice… I’ve spoken to her on the phone once. For all our great closeness,” he tells The Observer, “I barely know her.” Too late, Bill. You’re all washed up!
Since time immemorial the New York Times has kept its rich old conservative readers slightly satisfied with some token conservative voices in the Op-Ed section. For many, many years there was reliable old Bill Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, a member of the smart old educated class of Republicans who were able to write up support for disastrous policy implemented by the corrupt and incompetent with smart, almost plausible-sounding arguments. He left, replaced with John Tierney, a libertarian-leaning sort who didn’t last long on the op-ed beat and now writes “researchers say a counterintutive thing” features instead. And there is David Brooks, a quietly doctrinaire Republican who fancies up his usual party line with armchair sociology. But Brooks broke with the party this year, calling Sarah Palin a cancer, leaving only poor, dumb, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol, who tried to sell America on Sarah Palin, and ended up repeatedly embarrassing himself, over and over again, and losing John McCain his election.
Now he just mumbles about hating the mainstream media, to all his mainstream media friends, in the pages of the New York Times.Already the vultures are wondering who’ll replace him—you can be terribly wrong and stupid and remain a Times columnist indefinitely, but you must be terribly wrong and stupid in the service of the conventional wisdom. So Tom Friedman’s Iraq columns get a pass, as does Maureen Dowd’s constant stream of nonsense.
But Kristol is no longer merely just a hack, he’s a failed hack. No one bought his line this year. So maybe someone nutty and anti-Palin like, say, David Frum is next for the Affirmative Action Conservative Slot?
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Is The Hills Almost Over? [Recaps]
Posted by CMAdmin
Does anyone else feel like The Hills might be, gulp!, wrapping up? I mean, with Lauren barely in it anymore, Heidi and Spencer not even bothering to act like they don’t completely hate each other, Audrina all content, finally, with Justin Bobby… I mean, it feels like it’s almost over. There are still a couple of miles to go before they sleep, what with Heidi and Spencer needing to have some sort of spectacular meltdown (or, shudder, make-up), and Whitney needing to pack her steamer trunk and herd on over to New York City for good. But still… there’s a lingering late-summer feel to the whole affair these days, and last night’s typically melancholy proceedings were no exception.
Does anyone else feel like The Hills might be, gulp!, wrapping up? I mean, with Lauren barely in it anymore, Heidi and Spencer not even bothering to act like they don’t completely hate each other, Audrina all content, finally, with Justin Bobby… I mean, it feels like it’s almost over. There are still a couple of miles to go before they sleep, what with Heidi and Spencer needing to have some sort of spectacular meltdown (or, shudder, make-up), and Whitney needing to pack her steamer trunk and herd on over to New York City for good. But still… there’s a lingering late-summer feel to the whole affair these days, and last night’s typically melancholy proceedings were no exception.We were greeted, as always, with the swirl of mountains and late afternoon sun and the glittery title card that said “One Last Chance.” The goal of the episode, I guess, was to figure out for whom was there a last chance? Was it Lauren’s last chance to show the producers she still cared? Heidi’s last chance to work at SBE? Audrina’s last, best hope with grumbly Justin Bobby? Holly and Spencerina’s last chance to be characters on the show? Spencer’s last chance to not ruin his fake relationship’s slim credibility with his relentlessly unforgivable assholishness? I think, really, it was all of those things. An episode as quiet-yet-busy as life itself.
Lauren and Audrina went for drinks at a noisy bar (lots of annoying dubbing in that scene!) to talk about how they should talk more, now that Audrina has abandoned her little hermitage at Conradshire to live in a sprawling apartment of her own. They chatted about Holly, Heidi’s chipmunkish sister who was crashing at Lauren’s for the time being, and Audrina seemed vaguely surprised but mostly just happy that she no longer had to deal the protracted silliness of the whole feud. She had the sorta-frustrating but mostly charming serenity of someone contently in love. Nothing could phase or upset her. Well, save for her beloved. Who was nice in this episode!
They went to Venice Beach and Audrina marveled at how it was sooo different from the little enclaves of Hollywood that she usually rattles around in. It’s true! It’s like Los Angeles is a big city with lots of neighborhoods and different kinds of people or something! Justin Bobby said that this was his jam, this is where he wanted to be, because being here made him feel like he didn’t need to be the asshole that he is when he’s in Hollywood. So I guess that’s some weird, sideways way of saying that you’ve grown up a bit, and the same petty trappings no longer concern you. They lay on a little mound and spoke of happiness and it was, as staged and camera-adjacent as it may have been, a genuinely nice little moment. They walked off into the sunset and I wish they’d stayed there for all time.
Not that anything got ruined! They had dinner later and he presented her, in charming fashion, with a little gift. It was, I guess, a shirt she’d seen in Venice and he’d gone back to get it. Which is nice and means he was paying attention! What was sad, though, was how ridiculously happy she seemed about it. I mean, yeah, it was cool. But, erm, it was just a little shirt, not an engagement ring. I guess it’s testament to how resoundingly shitty JB has been in the past. Then they made plans to go on a trip, a Cabo do-over!!!, and you kind of realized that maybe they weren’t all that changed and grownup. But still, there’s something there. I think we’re almost ready to give them our blessing and send them off into the great unknown.
Meanwhile, at Crappington Corners, those two hideous vulture creatures were cawing and pecking at each other ceaselessly. Well, OK, it was mostly Spencer who was doing the antagonizing, but Heidi glumly played along. They’re both complicit in this misery. She was cleaning her closet because she doesn’t have a job and Spencer came in and asked if she wanted to see a movie. She said she didn’t, because she was mad at him for getting her fired. He snipped back about her crazy moms and stuff and they went back and forth for a while and eventually Heidi looked like she was just going to pass out from all the agony of having this conversation once again, with this dreadful person, in this sad blue room.
Later Lauren dropped the bomb to Spencerina that Holly was shacking up with her, so of course Spencerina immediately gopher-tunneled over to Castle Dracula to tell the bickering harpies. Heidi just looked shocked and hurt (well rehearsed!) while Spencer was, of course, nasty and said things about Heidi’s sister, and about his sister, and about Heidi’s mother, and not about his mother. The only nice little thing came from Spencer making a little noise behind his sister, she turned, and he had made up a little plate of food for her. That was like, natural-seeming and comfortable and not aggressive, but the teeny tiny moment quickly disappeared and we were back to Starship Troopers, in which the couple plays both incredibly stupid Denise Richards and Casper van Dien wannabes and the bugs that regularly try to devour them. I just want Neil Patrick Harris to come out and do some mind bendy stuff and make them calm. Or I want one of the big-brain sucking bugs to show up and just end it once and for all.
But alas we got no relief and the, well, big brain-sucking bug gave us a glimpse of what it has in store for us next week, which looks like more of the same tired, sun-splashed agita. If it does end soon I’d like the last shots to be:
Lauren: Wanders down crowded street and disappears, a la Carrie B. at the end of the Sex and the City series. Or she’s at some big fashion event and has had a success and the camera slowly pulls back and out the door, leaving her alone at the party forever.
Audrina: She and Justin Bobby on an airplane, going somewhere. They grab hands and hold tight, smile. She stares out the window. Then a look of slight panic crosses her face. Like at the end of The Graduate. That’s all we get from her.
The Sisters: Spencerina is shown pregnant and smoking a cigarette on some dreary corner of Sunset, sipping a Big Gulp. Holly is shown disinterestedly working the boot and ski rental at a mountain in Colorado. She checks her cell phone to see if anyone’s called. No one has.
Heidi & Spencer: Spencer is shown by the side of the road. His car has broken down. For some reason, he doesn’t have his wallet with him. He realizes he has no one to call to come help him. Finally he swallows his pride and calls Heidi. She sees the phone ringing on the seat next to her, but she doesn’t answer it. She’s got a head scarf on and she’s driving in a convertible on the highway and she’s off for somewhere else. She floors it and her scarf comes flying off. The camera follows it for a second, dancing in the breeze, then pans up to the twirling sun and then credits roll, like at the end of The English Patient.
Anyway, that’s how I see it.
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Diamond Sales Set To Skyrocket In Opposite World [Marketing]
Posted by CMAdmin
Here’s a preposterous contrarian strategy: Evil diamond merchant De Beers is more than doubling its marketing spending this holiday season, because they have “new research showing diamond jewelry will be the number-one gift for the holidays in 2008.” Oh really? Diamonds made out of compressed spam, boiled into a thin soup and served with watery Kool-Aid, maybe. De Beers says their ad campaign will be “philosophical.” That philosophy is egoism with a touch of apocalypticism. [WWD]
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How Hard is Janka’s Wood? [Because We’re Immature]
Posted by CMAdmin
Imagine our delight when we found this sentence while reading a New Yorker story about gourmet beer: “Wood experts rate a species’ hardness on the Janka scale—a measure of how many pounds of force it takes to drive a half-inch steel ball halfway into a board.” It sets up perfectly a lowbrow joke: of coursesuper-aggressive date-a-holic Paul Janka would have a last name that refers to measuring the hardness of wood, right? So we did some research to estimate where on the Janka scale Paul’s personal wood would actually be.
Balsa—the thinnest, softest wood—rates at about 100. Eastern White Pine’s a 380 and Hemlock is a 500. Those are all fairly soft woods.
Brazilian walnut is one of the hardest woods, at 3684. Ebony rates a 3220, and red oak is at the low-middle end, with 1290. Which wood would compare to Paul Janka’s hardness most accurately?
We’d guesstimate—a very uneducated guess—somewhere around the hardness of sycamore. Look it up.
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LA Times Makes Fun of Variety for Losing Oscar Ads They Covet [Hollywood]
Posted by CMAdmin
LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein used his blog yesterday for the entertaining purpose of viciously mocking Variety and its Hollywood fixture editor, Peter Bart. Mocking them for being poor! This column is awesome for the following reasons: because media outlets don’t usually air their dirty laundry like this; because Peter Bart and Variety certainly deserve the mocking; and most of all because Patrick Goldstein seems totally unconcerned that his own paper does the same exact thing he criticizes Variety for, and that that very thing keeps him employed. Ha:
Peter Bart wrote a column of his own (Headline: “Will fiscal funk trip kudo contenders?” WTF) bitching about the lack of Oscar-related ads from the studios in Variety. Patrick Goldstein appropriately tells him to shut it:
Anyone paying attention to the outside world knows we’re in the midst of a hideous global economic recession, with corporate profits plunging, the biggest U.S. carmakers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and tens of thousands of everyday Joes being laid off from their jobs. But Bart, like most Hollywood insiders, lives a life of privilege, putting those nice Campanile lunches on his expense account. So when he hears that GE’s hurting or Sony’s having a tough time, his reaction? “Hankies, please.”
Ha ha! He just told Peter Bart to shut up. And also told him his magazine is poor. Goldstein even gets a quote from Harvey Weinstein about why studios should buy lots of Oscar-related ads, then goes on to dismiss it:
Imagine how you’d feel if you were one of the hundreds of employees that’s been laid off at a media conglomerate, only to see that your company’s film division still has plenty of dough left to run Oscar ads in Variety or the New York Times or my newspaper.
Of course, the LAT started its section “The Envelope” for the same exact purpose: to get Oscar ads. But whatever. Dude has balls! He can go into porn when he gets laid off because his newspaper didn’t sell enough Oscar-related ads to pay his salary. [LAT]
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