Whoa now, magazines are fighting dirty! Advertising is scarce. Magazines have that hungry look. The rules are gone. So one title (Update: or someone pretending to be) is telling advertisers a competitor's folding. HARDCORE!
You know what's just infuriating? When you spend thousands of dollars on having big plastic domes inserted into your chest, and then men have the gall to notice them! "You can be at a club," marvels enhanced-to-a-C-cup Annabell Newell, "and a guy you've never met before will come up to you, stare at your chest and blatantly ask, 'When did you get them?' No 'Hi, nice to meet you.'" Outrageous! But in our brave new world of preponderant cosmetic enhancement, how does one inquire about the originality of someone's body parts without committing a faux pas?
Oh the Brits, with their breezy resolve and false good cheer in the face of obstacles! The FT needs some staff to take a pay cut. I mean, extra summer vacation time!
It sucks to find out you're getting laid off. It sucks a lot worse to find out you're getting laid off because a lawyer yakked about it at high volume on a commuter train.
Quiz: Some people you knew back in your hometown send you friend requests on Facebook. You don't really like them. Do you A) accept requests, B) deny requests, C) have an existential crisis?
In Japan, CEOs take shame seriously. They're expected to work late, dedicate their entire lives to the good of a company, and try to ensure that they don't work their employees to the point of suicide. And when Japanese CEOs make mistakes, they're expected to make a big show of tearily flogging themselves in public (figuratively). But here in America? CEOs get to screw up as bad as they want and walk away with millions, with nary a tear nor a nice tip to the bellhop on the way out the door. Stan O'Neal! Bob Nardelli! Dennis Kozlowski! CEOS in the USA need to STFU and get way better at public humiliation. They problem is that in this country, CEOs are only too happy to trade the scorn of the public for a pile of money. Most Americans would do the same! (Unless the revolution comes, in which case it's up against the wall with all of you). So you can bitch all you want about golden parachutes that can top $100 million for executives who didn't do shit except lose shareholder money the entire time they were employed, but that CEO will chuckle to himself, have his flack issue a statement, and then go enjoy his millions and millions of free dollars on a private island somewhere, full of untold numbers of prostitutes. So America has worked out its own ways to humiliate these CEOs without their consent. The media trumpets their salaries all over the place, hollering louder about them the worse their company does. Their kids are shunned and forced to go to special, expensive schools. Actually, nobody sympathizes with CEOs except for other CEOs, and politicians. Now, however, every company is doing poorly. So our system for determining what executives to focus our class rage upon is broken. The American public is spread too thin. That's why we need to import some sort of Japanese-style public shaming ceremony here. CEOs can apologize for their sins and wallow in misery, we can all enjoy the schadenfreude, and then we can all focus our allotment of hatred where it belongs: on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And the CEOs will join us. America is unity!
We received a celeb-stalker sighting this morning: "Ivanka Trump—5th avenue and 57th street - Her hair was a mess. Didn't bother to dry it before leaving her place. Other than that, she looked great." Wet hair? We've got news for for 26-year-old Ivanka, whose job with her dad comes with a fancy title (Vice President of Real Estate Development and Acquisitions) and an assistant: According to Megan Hustad's newish book, How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, she's just broken a cardinal rule for young twentysomethings in the workplace.
Even more on people not meaning what they say, but somehow saying what they mean. Toby Young, the buffoonish Brit who parlayed getting fired from Vanity Fair into books and a movie, writes about the social perils of fame. Now that he's known—and "knows" lots of people—"whenever I am introduced to anyone I make a point of smiling warmly and saying ‘good to see you’—a deliberately ambiguous greeting that leaves open the possibility that the person in question made a vivid impression on me first time round." Let's examine more coded cocktail-party industry-networking chatter."What are you working on/doing?" Translation: I'm working on lots of awesome projects. Let me tell you about them! Oh... well, don't worry. I'm sure things will pick up for you soon! "Call me!" Translation: Because I won't be calling you! If I was really so interested in getting in touch with you, believe you me, I would stab somebody's assistant to get access to their Rolodex. "We should have a drink soon;" "Let's get coffee sometime." Translation: I am exiting this conversation, but politely, in a way that makes you feel worse, because let's be honest, there will be no drink or coffee, "soon" or otherwise. Haha, that's just what I tell people. Isn't that clever? Makes them feel "included." "I'm going to get another drink/use the restroom." Translation: I am exiting this conversation. Also maybe: "cocaine"! (Not sharing/inviting.) "Here's my card." Translation: I am exiting this conversation. Oh, by the way—that card contains the e-mail address that I never check. "Yeah... yeah... yeahyeahyeah, I totally agree." Translation: I'm not paying attention because I'm scanning the room over your shoulder—OMG, George! HI GEORGE! So good to seeeeee youuuu! (Oh, you know what's the worst? When some fucking Patrick McMullan photographer or Mick Rock or whoever motions for you to "move over" because he doesn't want you in the picture.)
Hip hop mogul and sophisticated ball waxer Puff Daddy got a little embarrassed this week, when some journalist-for reasons still unknown-decided to fact check something that came out of Puffy's mouth. Specifically, a rant that the millionaire bad rapper spit on YouTube about how he had to stop flying on his own private jet due to high gas prices. Then a gossip guy at the Palm Beach Post actually combed the records and talked to secret sources and discovered there is no private jet registered to Puffy or any of his companies. But there is an explanation!
Ah, yes, the age-old question: Should I bring my entourage of armed bodyguards with me to dinner tonight, or leave them at home and play it more low-key? Fortunately, W has the answers to all your bodyguard-related etiquette questions: "Ehud Olmert faces threats from terrorists and political enemies the world over. Tara Reid need be saved only from herself. Unless you're likely to be abducted, slugged, pawed or rushed by a camera phone–wielding fan, lose the entourage." [W]
What fun would the Internet be if we let socially awkward people onto it? Here are five things that everyone does on Facebook even though they're awkward or annoying. These rules are more nuanced than "don't add me to your zombie game;" I assume we've all added those people to a special friend group labeled "MySpace orphans."
Would the downtown Manhattan nightspot Beatrice Inn like to shed its reputation as a coke den where insiders say that two of the Six Rules For Getting Laid are to flout the rules, then flout the rules some more? There should certainly be no rule-flouting in the presence of these small paper signs warning against sex and drugs, which are posted in the bathrooms, where they can do the most good. Of course, they might make an exception for Josh Hartnett and friends.
Shia LaBeouf stars in the upcoming revival of the Indiana Jones franchise, and the young Hollywood star has twice made the cover of Vanity Fair. At Manhattan's babe central, the Beatrice Inn, he should have as much certainty of romantic success as a Sultan in a harem. And yet, according to Page Six, the spurned actor was overheard whining: "How do I get a girl to go home with me?" Well, first of all, not by whining. But LaBeouf's is still a valid question, so we tapped some regulars at the West Village nightspot for advice. Here are the six rules.
Here is a prime candidate for immediate cloning: John Clifford, a 6'4, quick-tempered former police officer and a lawyer whose greatest pleasure in life seems to be riding the Long Island Rail Road and aggressively screaming at jerks who are talking too loud on their cell phones. Clifford was just found not guilty of charges stemming from his latest enforcement action, when he cussed out an obnoxious cell phone user he described as "a 19-year-old nitwit waking up one girlfriend after another." But this isn't even close to being the first time he's had to regulate on some yapping nitwits on the train:
Hey, everybody in the coffee shop: do you mind? This is actually my personal office here! A writer asks Dr. Joyce Brothers for advice: "I am a freelance writer who has contracts with several major magazines that publish my work. Since I wasn't getting a whole lot done at home (with all the distractions of the phone and TV), I recently decided to bring a laptop to the local coffee shop to bang out some pages. The results so far have been great, with one exception. Since I told one of the employees there what my job was, he has taken to talking to me incessantly. How do I tell him to back off a bit without hurting his feelings?" Her response, and ours, after the jump.
A reporter at the Beatrice Inn was asking random people whether they had any drugs last night. That isn't all that surprising: he was a reporter, after all; and Beatrice Inn is a (classy) coke den. But my editor was shocked. "On a Sunday?" he asked. This, apparently, is the functioning professional's coke-taking code: a bump or two is socially acceptable, so long as it doesn't interfere with productivity. My unthinking response: "Hey, it was Oscars night." So many exceptions! So let's propose some common standard: coke is acceptable only on Friday and Saturday nights, and at the Beatrice Inn on cultural holidays. And, S, don't ask a gossip columnist you hardly know whether they're holding.
You wish you were cool enough to have mob bosses after your head, like GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. Two out of five mafia bosses wanted to waste Giuliani in the 80s, when the future mayor was all up in their business. "The reality is, I've dealt with this all of my life," Giuliani told Fox last week. "If you've got to live with threats, you live with threats." Oh, what a badass. But where oh where does this moxie disappear to when Judith calls him in the middle of a major political event? Earlier this month, Giuliani took his wife's call smack dab in the middle of a televised speech he was giving to the NRA. "If he wants voters to respect his privacy, he ought to show some respect for basic manners," wrote John Fund in the Wall Street Journal. In all fairness to Rudy, Fund isn't exactly the arbiter on etiquette—we hear the columnist has absolutely terrifying table manners.
"Um, hey, this is really awkward, but I actually only accept friend requests from other Muslims. Allah commands it. Sorry, man." That's Slate's recommended way of deflecting unwanted friend requests on social networking site Facebook. Nice, except if you're a Muslim! More advice: "What about work colleagues whom you don't want in your personal business? There is no easy answer to this. Basically, you're screwed." Seriously. Related: people, I do not want to be a fucking pirate or vampire or your "tickle friend" OK? [Slate]
