Bad: a 17-year-old mother was arrested on Friday after surveillance cameras caught her trying to smother her four-month-old to death to "make life easier." Worse: she admitted to attempting it three previous times. Worst: she's barely being charged. More inside.
Today is the 45th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, the subject of a new novel and unending, inconclusive debate. We may never know the real answer about what happened that day in Dallas, although the coming years will see more and more declassified documents released to the public, finishing with Jackie O's oral history about JFK that enters the public domain in 2044 if all her children have passed on. The photos and footage of that day tells a grave story that eclipses mere words. Click for images that will still move you 45 years after the fact:
You only get one chance at a 30th anniversary — much to the dismay of Dallas fans who last weekend paid as much as $1,000 to be essentially shut out of their favorite nighttime soap opera's cast reunion. Reports today cite a surge of gatecrashers at the show's famous Southfork Ranch last Saturday, when a barbecue and meet-and-greet with Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, Linda Gray and others deteriorated into a near-riot of confused, angry ticketholders and sobbing protests that Falcon Crest would never do its fans like this.The anguish persists into this week, with many attendees outraged at promoters who failed to honor their tiered ducats — $100 for the basic, "Corn on the Cob with Charlene Tilton" package, we hear, all the way up to the $1,000, "Who Shot J.R.?" VIP access featuring all-you-can-eat burgers and three attempts at the Larry Hagman dunk tank. In their defense, organizers argued that ranch officials allowed in 2,000 walk-ups in addition to the 2,000 ticketed guests, all of whom fought for vaguely enforced access once inside the ranch. But whomever is to blame, heartbroken fans who waited three decades for the chance to pray at the altar of Jock Ewing (God rest his soul) want answers now:
The Times let embittered and oft-inaccurate tv critic Alessandra Stanley write about something a little more weighty than Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles in today's paper. She gets to review the President's "State of the Union" speech, which happens on TV, yes, but it doesn't involve explosions and there are not really commercial breaks. Thankfully it's often transcribed and distributed beforehand, so Stanley doesn't have to sort of half-remember bits of dialog she wasn't actually paying attention to. But only the real journalists get to write about the bullshit in the speech itself, so Stanley instead babbles some sub-sportswriter-by-way-of-David Broder nonsense about "Dynasties" playing themselves out in some grand Wagnerian opera just behind the scenes (and also in front of the scenes, on stages and behind podiums and such). Because the Bushes and the Kennedys and the Clintons were all sorta there, in Washington, DC, where all of them spend most of their time.
More bad Dallas-remake news: they're still going to remake Dallas. Also, John Travolta is no longer in it. I guess that's more like bad news and irrelevant news. (Yes, that last line was lifted directly from the British Office, so look for this site to win a Pulitzer soon.) Page Six is reporting that the in-his-umpteenth-career-renaissance actor is heading into his umpteenth-plus-one career turnaround with the news that he's been dropped from the coveted role of J.R. Ewing, with Ben Stiller opting to take the bullet instead. Reps for both both actors quickly went into denial mode, refuting that Travolta was fired and that Stiller has any attachment to the doomed project:
Today brings wild fake-person news from the land of big hair and Neiman-Marcus: A woman named Elizabeth Albanese became head of the Dallas Press Club (ooh, a press club! How quaint) and used it for her own nefarious ends, such as awarding herself several coveted (in those parts, apparently) "Katie Awards" for outstanding journalism over the course of several years. This, even though she worked for the Bond Buyer and wrote "dull and forgettable stories on municipal finance," according to the Dallas Observer, which has the great blow-by-blow account of how she handed out the Katie Awards at random and used the Press Club's credit card to pay for her personal vacations. Also, she'd been arrested a couple times before and told everyone she went to Harvard Law School, even though she hadn't graduated from high school. Which of course raises the question: What took the Dallas journalists so long to catch on?
