Granted, this ckip of Late Night With Conan O'Brien star Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's trip to the Republican National Convention is a couple days late. But, hey, it just went up on Youtube yesterday. And besides, as NBC always says, if you haven't seen it yet, it's new to you! The Fox News/Ann Coulter strap-on joke alone is worth watching. Canine comedy after the jump.
"I saw this walking home from the train station after I was at the Speakeasy Illustration show in Toronto. The crosswalk box thing made this shadow on the ground and someone drew a most perfect Batman face on it! I laughed so hard when I saw it. So unexpected and awesome! Spotted near the corner of Iroquois Shore on Trafalgar road in Oakville Ontario." [flickr via Neatorama]
Well, the press can stop wondering when and where Sarah Palin's first post-nomination television interview will take place. A campaign adviser says they offered ABC nightly news anchor Charles Gibson the job days ago. That's the same Charles Gibson who was last seen being "greasily avuncular and patronizing" when he and his ABC cohort George Stephanopoulos were ruining the Democratic primary debate back in April. You know, the ABC-sponsored event about which a New Yorker scribe wrote, "Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time... If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come."
Nobu—the sushi restaurant chain co-owned by Robert Deniro that caters to celebrities like Madonna, Leo DiCaprio and Sean Combs—has been busted in an undercover sting for selling critically endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna while concealing it from customers. Greenpeace sent spies to three London Nobu franchises, where they specifically ordered the near-extinction fish, and were told that the restaurants didn't stock it. But the cunning Greenies took their sushi back to the lab, where DNA tests revealed that the restaurants were indeed serving bluefin to moneyed gourmands. It's legal to serve bluefin, but people who claim to care about the environment—like Deniro, DiCaprio, Combs and Madonna—would supposedly never knowingly touch the stuff, preferring instead the less endangered, but less delicious, yellowfin. Which explains Nobu's sneakiness.
John McCain, Sarah Palin, and their campaigners, just won't take a hint—or a flurry of cease-and-desist orders from all the musicians whose music they keep stealing for their nauseating "maverick" campaign. Last week, Van Halen had to tell them to STFU when the campaign started using the song "Right Now" totally without permission. Before that, Jackson Brown and John Mellencamp had to force McCain's minions to stop blasting their tunes on the campaign trail. So what did the McCain morons think was going to happen when they tried to make Heart's "Barracuda" Sarah Palin's theme song without getting the band's permission? Well, what has happened is that the psycho-eyed Veep wannabe now has a nickname based on a song she can never play at a public event again. Ha!
Diff'rent Strokes star Gary Coleman had just finished a wholesome evening of bowling with his wife and his bodyguard in lovely Payson, Utah, yesterday when 24-year-old punk Colt Rushton approached him in the parking lot and demanded that the actor pose for a cellphone picture with him. Coleman refused, Rushton would not back down, and it ended like it always ends when some fool steps to Gary fucking Coleman: with the perp flat on his ass.
A location can be as much the star of a movie or television show as the actors and actresses whose names top the credits. And New York is perhaps the biggest star ever (Yes, I know there are many other starry cities, but tonight we're doing NYC). So, what's your favorite movie or TV show where the Big Apple and its culture, sensibility, and aesthetic is intrinsic to the narrative? Mine is after the jump.
Aways handy with a dubious listicle, Forbes magazine is presenting us with its ranking of America's "Best Cities For Singles." Could Atlanta really be No. 1? Maybe! Dallas at No. 3? Perhaps! But there is no way in hell New York City should come in 8th place. Why? For the same reason this list ranks NYC as number one in the "Cool" category.
The latest salvo in the ongoing battle between 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin and My Name is Earl creator Greg Garcia is being waged right here on Gawker. Garcia sent us his response to Baldwin's early morning swipe, in which he goofed on Garcia for being a Scientologist. "Alec, I can't tell you how happy I am to once again point out that you are an idiot. I'm unable to answer your question about Scientologists because, although I respect anyone's right to their own beliefs, I am not currently nor have I ever been a Scientologist. Maybe you should have done some research that extended past the comments section of Defamer before you crafted your insult."
(1) The folks at CollegeOTR have designed this nifty "Caribou Barbie" Sarah Palin doll. But relax, conservative pervs and self-loathing liberals, it's just a prototype. (2) Wired is reporting that the VP hopeful has joined the ranks of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan with "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos," "Sarah Palin Nude," and "Sarah Palin Naked" fast becoming top Google search terms among our frazzled citizens. (3) Oh, and the blog LaProgressive.com is claiming that she called Barack Obama "Sambo."
Lovable madman Alec Baldwin has so many feuds going on with so many people that he can no longer attend to them one at a time. The 30 Rock star published a fine, blustering anti-McCain/Palin piece on today's Huffington Post ("We know nothing about Sarah Palin. Nothing. Which is not anywhere near enough information to elevate her to the position whereby she would succeed McCain if he died in office or suffered a catastrophic illness. At 72 years of age and in questionable health, McCain's fitness to coach a high school football team would be in doubt, let alone the grueling reality of the presidency of this country.") and then he took a post-script detour to get in a last minute shot at one of his enemies at NBC by making fun of the guy's celebrity religion.
Some little assholes used Digg and Wikipedia to spread the lie that teen actress Miley Cyrus had died in a car accident last night caused by "an unidentified black man"—and Yahoo News picked up the story. The hoax was short-lived, thank God. By this morning, it was hard to tell who, if anyone—aside from Yahoo—actually fell for it. One of the only mentions of it as anything but a scam seems to be this retarded Digg entry. So did anyone else actually buy it?
Robert Giroux, who helped build one of the most important publishing houses of the 20th Century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died in his sleep yesterday morning at an assisted living facility in Tinton Falls, NJ. He was 94. The legends that he published amount to a stunningly daunting list that includes T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Seamus Heany, Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, and George Orwell."'The single most important thing to happen to this company was the arrival of Bob Giroux,' [Roger] Straus, who died in 2004, once said."
"Fashion Rocks" is Conde Nast's big advertorial extravaganza pegged to Fashion Week, when the magazine company can sell extra ad space to all its fashion advertisers in a fluffy, profile-heavy special supplements. But we hear that the staff of the Conde-owned WWD is currently embroiled in a mini-revolt, after they were ordered to write the copy for the 48-page Fashion Rocks supplement that went out with yesterday's issue. There's no reason an editorial staff should ever be made to write advertorial copy. The most egregious line-crossing of all: a full-page interview in the supplement with Richard Beckman, Conde Nast's own head of marketing. Beckman, of course, would be the mastermind of the entire Fashion Rocks campaign, so what the hell is a fluff interview of him doing in a WWD-penned special supplement, posing as legit editorial copy? Staffers there are asking themselves the same thing. They feel that Mary Berner, who formerly led Fairchild and WWD before it was all absorbed into Conde Nast, would never have stood for such a thing. On MediaPost yesterday, Ari Rosenberg decried the whole ongoing degeneration of the advertising/ editorial line. "Today's media-buying demand for a 'big idea' required to earn a media commitment, combined with a softer and more competitive environment, all driven by a sales force that has no idea who Henry Luce is, have publishers doing things not done before," he wrote. Which leads to this:
Ha. The illustrious Columbia Journalism Review, stuck in the no-fucking-news months with the rest of us, tracked down John Quinlan, the Sioux City Journal reporter who wrote the most Onion-like real news story of all time, which will forever stand as our single favorite work of journalism. ("Olive Garden arrives" in Sioux City. That guy!). And he's very even-keeled about his newfound internet fame. "I wanted to have a little fun with the story," he says...
The New York Times is always looking for a way to save a little scratch, since the paper is losing revenue like a Bible store in a whorehouse, for lack of more time to think of a better metaphor. So today NYT publisher Arthur "Pinch My Moose" Sulzberger announced the paper is going to be combining the metro section with the main news section, and the sports section with the business section on most days of the week. This will save printing costs but will not shrink the news hole, they say. Full memo from Pinchy to the staff after the jump [UPDATE: And an even more detailed memo about the changes from Times editor Bill Keller]: From Sulzberger:
The Oprah story on Drudge was maybe a bit of a stretch! Does it matter? No! The "damage" is done. It's proof that we've finally reached the most maddening 2004-throwback part of the campaign: the bit where they (let us just say "campaign operatives") throw out absolute bullshit to the friendliest of sources and wait for it to bubble up. We didn't think this would work anymore, in this brave new bloggy future—but it does! RedState heard Palin's teleprompter broke and she soldiered on like a pro! A guy who watched the speech in view of her teleprompter says that is not true, at all, wtf. Too late! The story's already being repeated as gospel! Drudge says Oprah refuses to have Sarah Palin on her show! Oprah says there hasn't been any discussion, we only just heard of this woman a week ago, wtf, I'll have her on later. Who cares? Hell, on a macro level various people call Sarah Palin a "maverick" and "reformer" and then she is one. Democrats can't replicate this strategy because there is not a legitimate news organization in the world that would unquestioningly use Kos (or even HuffPo??) as a source. But if they want to try we'll happily post an item on that one time Martin Balsam and Robert Shaw hijacked Joe Biden's Acela and killed the engineer and he outwitted all of them and drove the train to safety. Now we wait for Chris Matthews to take the bait!
