On the March 17 edition of Red Eye, a "comedy" show Fox News puts on for insomniacs and media narcissists, Gutfeld said Canadian soldiers do yoga and made fun of a Canadian lieutenant general's name (Leslie!) and said we should invade Canada because the country's military is contemplating a one-year "operational break" from Afghanistan.
Hey Stylista fans (how is the one of you?). I was busy watching Top Chef last night, so I didn't really get a chance to carefully eyeball last night's fashion editor competition mishmash. The last ep, about sad fat people who are sad and fat and the magazine editors who horribly abuse them, was such a gleaming trainwreck of an hour of television that, I gotta be honest, I was kind of relieved to not revisit it this week. But I will soldier on with recaps in seven days' time, I promz. After the jump is my brief, provisional recap of last night.
Truly Madly Icky: Alan Rickman is well-known for decades' worth of on-screen misdeeds, but the sex scenes in his new film Nobel Son appear to be the first for which the actor has actually felt remorse. "You show up at nine in the morning and you shake the poor woman's hand: 'Hi, nice to meet you,' and then you get at it on the desk," said Rickman, who portrays a college professor with a weakness for nubile grad-student flesh. "It's such a bizarre thing to do. You just move on as quickly as possible. I felt sorry for those women in the sex scenes." The denizens of Century City, meanwhile, are still awaiting his apology for that whole blowing-the-shit-out-of-Fox-Tower thing in Die Hard. At least the Nobel girls had a choice. [WENN]
Remember that column in the Murfreesboro (Tennessee) Post last week, in which the columnist rewrote the Jeffersons theme song for the Obama election? If you're a true music fan, you may recall the killer lyric, "Well we’re movin’ on up, To Washington, D.C. To a deee-luxe pimp pad, Painted whiiiite." Yes. Well that columnist is also, fittingly, a principal at one of the town's fine schools. And he's very sorry:
Jim Cramer is apologizing once again. No, not for recommending Bear Stearns days before its collapse, or suggesting investors buy stock in Wachovia just days before it took a tumble, too. He's saying sorry to the 115,000 AIG employees he insulted late last week, comments that led AIG's CEO to fire off a nasty letter to Cramer yesterday. [BusinessSheet]
It was quite an embarrassment for the nation of Spain yesterday when an ad surfaced showing their entire national Olympic basketball team posing in the "Slanty-eyed Asian" position, pulling their eyelids back. We imagine the photo shoot was followed by several minutes of mimed karate moves and Enter The Dragon reenactments, only adding to the awkwardness. So the entire nation of China has been waiting expectantly for an apology. And today they got...outrage that anyone would think Spain is racist! Why, some of their closest friends are from China or somewhere like that!
Today in Slate, writer Christopher Beam accepts full responsibility for the phrase "terrorist fist-jab" in reference to Barack Obama's exchange of daps with his wife. This characterization contributed to Fox blonde E.D. Hill losing her television show, only to be replaced by Laura Ingraham! (Is E.D. back? Can someone watch Fox and check on this?) How is this Beam's fault? Because he wrote an item about how a random commenter on a political blog used the phrase "Hezbollah-style fist jab," and then that item ended up on other blogs, and then E.D. kinda changed it and said it on TV without explaining it, making it sound like a common response to the harmless gesture. You see? All Beam's fault! And in other "kind of apologizing for other people's idiocy" news, Fox has apologized for photoshopping two New York Times reporters! Sort of!
At the risk of sounding earnest, there is simply no end to the incompetence and ethical failure at 5WPR, profane superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian's comically inept PR firm. FailedMessiah.com finds 11 more fraudulent, sock puppet blog comments, dating back to last month, that came from the IP address of the home computer of Juda Engelmayer, the 5WPR VP already busted for one earlier fake comment. I guess the evidence has now become overwhelming enough that Ronn himself has issued a statement-possibly the most laughable, inadequate apology-turned-sales pitch I've ever heard from a PR guy:
Having now spent two consecutive summers curled up inside frigid multiplex screening rooms with champion switchblade-twirler Shia LaBeouf, it was really starting to feel as if the hot young actor was becoming part of the family. Which made it all the harder to watch a leaked video of LaBeouf partaking in a very real round of Five-Fingered Mexican Roulette—an extreme subgenre of backyard fighting banned in 50 states, five territories, and several Maritime provinces—in which he was heard to drunkenly goad his bromantic sparring partner with a dropping of the dreaded rainbow F-bomb. A pink-faced LaBeouf has now dispatched his right-hand flack to deliver this apology! exclusive! to E! Online:
Mere days after scientists assured her that "karma tectonics" was most certainly not responsible for the devastating May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people in China, Sharon Stone revised her earlier geological lecture to include a direct apology to the Chinese people for suggesting as much in the first place. "Due to my inappropriate words and acts during the interview, I feel deeply sorry and sad about hurting Chinese people," Stone said in a statement released through Christian Dior, which is dropping the actress from its ads in China. "I am willing to take part in the relief work of China's earthquake, and wholly devote myself to helping affected Chinese people."
So, what's happening in Boston today? An outpouring of grief from the Boston Herald! The paper runs what may be the biggest correction of all time, size-wise: a front page splash apologizing to the New England Patriots for alleging that the team had videotaped an opponent's practice session. The original story ran February 2—the day before the Super Bowl, which the Patriots lost. Since the team obviously suffered morale failure from this traitorous blow by their hometown rag, this was really the least the Herald could do. (News of the apocalypse, P. 24). Click through for a larger picture.
