The ongoing quest to make personal finance interesting to average schlubs is not just confined to the internet or television; the Daily News gets into the act today with its own celebrity-infused financial advisory articles that may or may not contain sound advice [NYDN]. First, the paper lets us know what to do with our upcoming national tax refunds: Splurge! They come to this conclusion by asking the most obvious personal finance experts: Rich people!

WARNING: An unauthorized butt enhancer may be on the loose in Manhattan. The Post breaks an EXCLUSIVE story this morning about Kimberly Smedley, a wanton, unauthorized woman with no medical training who offers black market silicone injections out of an East 39th St. hotel. For $1,600, Smedley promises women "J.Lo butts." But if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The preponderance of outstanding evidence has finally and inexorably built up to the point that no reasonable person can avoid coming to the conclusion that "Alternadad" author Neal Pollack, who enjoys both chronicling and defending his decision to chronicle his young child, is just not much of a writer at all. Despite his background as a professional writer with the Chicago Reader, McSweeney's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and other respected outlets—as well as his ability to convince publishing houses to pay him money in order to write books—it is now impossible to deny the fact that Pollack is just not cut out for this whole writing thing. The scale-tipping work is his new Men's Journal profile of Woody Harrelson, in which the sheer lack of insight, or even cleverly redeeming turns of phrase, has us vowing never to read anything by this fucker again.

The Times' "Editorial Notebook" section is the box on its Op-Ed page that invariably contains a pointless, grating rumination about life on the farm in Connecticut or something equally inapplicable to NYC life, written by someone who should be unemployed but is, instead, rich and a member of the Times editorial board. Today the section offers the opinions of a Harvard man. Kudos to the Times for luring an Ivy Leaguer into the dirty, ink-stained corridors of journalism! So what important topic is Philip M. Boffey, '58, so eager to explain to the nation? Harvard, of course!

Sure, the Times has a reputation for tending to offer jobs to young writers with the right pedigree, but the paper's NFL writer Karen Crouse proves that a reporting job at the highfalutin' paper can still be earned the hard way. Crouse said that, prior to a surprise call from the Times in 2005, she felt "as if I was flying so far under the radar I was practically invisible. I've never been a shouter or a self-promoter, and in a profession rife with both, I thought that being conscientious and doing good work would only get me so far, that to ascend any higher required politicking or some secret handshake or both." Crazytalk! Here's the list of all but one Crouse's nine different newspaper gigs over the course of nearly 20 years, cribbed from a very good interview with the writer on the Big Lead:

The tabloid frenzy over Richard Martin, the crazy old Bay Ridge super who enjoys posting crazy signs insulting his tenants, continues to escalate. The Daily News gains the edge today by breaking the story that the cranky old man is letting his building's lobby fill up with garbage. To teach those dirty tenants! The city's other media outlets are surely deploying crack investigative teams to Bay Ridge at this very moment, intent on uncovering all the serpentine twists and turns of this developing, inconsequential matter. After the jump, an actual photo of the abrasive sign that the coot posted warning his tenants of his rotten scheme.

Now that lying author Margaret Seltzer has made the New York Times look like useful idiots for printing a fawning profile of her in which she spouted her stock lies about her ties to the hood, the paper is pushing for some changes. Standards Editor Craig Whitney emails the newsroom today that they shouldn't run any more single-source profiles of people who aren't well known, because they could turn out to be lying schmucks like Margaret Seltzer and make the paper look stupid all over again. Makes sense. Points to the Times for doing some kinda thing, at least! The full internal email, reprinted below.

Times South America reporter Alexei Barrionuevo has been basically pasting other journalists' copy into his stories since at least 2005. Last week, the writer was caught by Slate's Jack Shafer lifting and barely rewriting two sentences from a 2006 Miami Herald article for a front page story on the drug "paco." Now Shafer has discovered a 2005 story on cattle import restrictions that borrows five sentences from a Bloomberg wire story published the day before. The Times responded with a shrug:

The LA Times is trying to slow its inevitable decline with a bunch of futuristic digital billboard ads across Los Angeles, which will show a series of news, sports, and entertainment stories, along with promos for local events, on an eight-second rotation. When drivers rubberneck at the new billboards and crash their cars, the paper will cover that, as well. [Ad Age]

George W. Bush has a special relationship with the press: he threatens them with prosecution, pressures them to withhold damaging stories, and accuses them of treason in order to drum up anti-media sentiment among the masses. But he also gives them funny nicknames, so they like him. John McCain, the Republican nominee for President, enjoys taking the press to barbecues and having friendly chats with journalists about how much he hates "gooks." And as this clip from Bush's endorsement of McCain earlier today shows, once he is elected he will not suffer their "questions" bullshit either.

As this screengrab from the Times' feed this afternoon shows, anecdotal evidence indicates that three out of every four news stories in the US are now just useless tripe. Click to enlarge.

Tomorrow, primary elections will be held in Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island. This is basically the last important contest in the race for the Democratic nomination until late April so journalists, exhausted by covering the same story for so long and eager to get to the next chapter they all have more or less written out already in their heads, will be praying for a quick, painless end to Hillary Clinton's campaign. And Bill said, a few weeks ago, that if Hillary loses tomorrow, she can't be President! Unfortunately tomorrow's contests will probably end up being as decisive as Super Tuesday (remember that? the night everyone won!). Then there will be more than a month of treading water and rehashing the same storylines over and over again. And the storylines likely to be advanced and debated every night on cable and blogs and in magazines are pretty likely to resemble these Hillary-friendly narratives:

AngryJournalist.com, the rant-based site that is the most accurate window into the journalism profession, now has some competition: HappyJournalist.com! The happy site has been up and running for less than a week, but so far the results are not encouraging; it has 14 total posts, compared to more than 1,300 at its angry brother. A helpful point-counterpoint comparison of the two sites' content reveals that, hey, you can both be right:

"Newsweek galvanizes readers with several hard-hitting stories. The editors manage to eulogize William F. Buckley Jr. without lionizing him, making the case that the New Republic founder leaves behind an important political legacy." Most important legacy: founding the National Review, not founding the New Republic. The Post is supposed to know all this stuff about fellow conservatives. We expect more from a paper founded by William Kunstler. [NYP]

The formal final word on the Northwestern University J-school scandal that rocked the world has arrived. As you'll recall, the scandal arose after Medill Dean John Lavine couldn't snappily produce hard evidence of the origins of some anonymous student quotes he used in the alumni magazine. This led to an uproar, which was inane. Now, the formal investigation of this serious matter has concluded. The letter from the Provost has a satisfying undertone of prickliness: the investigative committee said Lavine "could not reasonably be expected to have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter; nonetheless, the committee advised that in the future such meticulous archiving might be desirable given the heightened awareness of the problems that can result." FINE, we'll save all the paper scraps for you annoying students! Lavine has also promised not to use any more unattributed quotes in "Medill publications," thereby obliterating the small chance that some newsworthy investigation would ever be printed therein. Truly a step forward for journalism. The Provost's entire note is below.

There is a charming story that Malcolm Gladwell has told over and over again about how he used to try to sneak funny phrases into the newspaper he worked for, back when he was a journalist and not yet a personality. Turns out everyone's done it! Michael Scherer, currently with Time, explains that when he was working at an unnamed newspaper bureau in Easthampton, Mass, he and his "colleague" would try to sneak "obscure 10-dollar word[s]" into their copy. The best he ever did was "dun." But the dude who wrote noted Scrabble champion William F. Buckley's obit for the Times got his Roget's on and used "Sesquipedalian" in an A1 headline. Jesus, journalists need hobbies. What happened to drinking and fucking again? [Swampland]

Trashy tabloid The Globe ran that photo of Obama in a turban and SCARY MUSLIM APRON last May. And no one noticed! Ha. Everyone thought it was photoshopped, apparently. Drudge: still more powerful than our nation's old people. And Ed Anger is madder than a Beatnik at Perry Como concert! [PalmBeachPost via Romenesko]

• Amy Winehouse may have lasted up to nine days clean of drugs before she called herself a "zombie," burned herself and did "cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis and booze." Of course the sensationalist Sun spins it negative and says she's "back in drug hell," typical. (Check out the sidebar from their "Bizarre Editor.") [Sun]

Professional doom-sayer and enjoyably shrill press critic Bob Somerby says he's been at this whole "internet political writing" thing since 1997 and he's kinda distressed that not only hasn't nutty original blogger Matt Drudge gone away, but he still holds sway over campaign narratives! Which he sorta does, though we'd argue not to the extent that he used to, but it is amusing to see all the liberal bloggers taking him so seriously after spending so many cycles trying to discredit and marginalize him. It's sad but true: when Drudge types, we listen. How else to explain the media's non-stop coverage of adorable kitties and killer robots bent on the destruction of humanity? [DailyHowler]

Our nation's supermarket rags are tentatively dipping their toes into political coverage (with about the same amount of dignity and substance as you'll find on most 24-hour news networks, ZING), proof either that America's celebrity-industrial complex has grown so unwieldy as to demand that everyone in the public sphere be covered in the same inane fashion or demonstrating that people care nearly as much about the fate of our nation as they do about Spears fetuses, and the tabs need to cash in on this new "politics craze." Who knows!