Awesome news out of San Diego Comic-Con. Spider-Man director Sam Raimi announced that he's getting back together with actor Bruce Campbell for a fourth installment of their stellar Evil Dead franchise. Though the zombie-filled series has been dormant since 1992's Army of Darkness, Raimi-who was promoting his upcoming flick, Drag Me to Hell-told fans that part 4 is "in the wheelhouse."
Yes, summer recreation is important, but be careful! There are some serious rip tides out there. "Four swimmers drowned and three were missing Saturday in two days of treacherous ocean currents at Long Island and New York City beaches, authorities said. At least three more had been rescued. The missing included a 10-year-old girl who had been playing in the waters off Coney Island. A 10-year-old boy who was with her was rescued, police said. Some authorities said the spate of swimmers being swept away seemed unprecedented. In the Long Island community of Long Beach, where two people drowned and another disappeared, Police Lt. Bruce Meyer said he 'cannot recall there ever being back-to-back situations like this.'" Update: Now it's five dead.
You tell me: Where will it end? "Villagers were shocked after a monkey-like piglet was born in China. Curious locals flocked to the home of owner Feng Changlin after news of the piglet spread in Fengzhang village, Xiping township. 'It's hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it!' Feng told Oriental Today." [Ananova via Neatorama]
For some reason, The Incredible Hulk star Edward Norton has apparently been telling fans that he wrote the screenplay for the superhero flick. This doesn't sit well at all with screenwriter Zak Penn, considering that he enjoys sole writing credit and says he'd been working on the story for more than a decade. Penn showed up at San Diego's Comic-Con 2008 yesterday and aired his thoughts to an appreciative audience of nerds.
For a certain kind of mommy and daddy-the kind you would see in a New York Times weekend feature-merely sending their precious little dumplings to some of the poshest, coddling-est summer camps in the nation isn't enough. They also supply their whimsically special bunnies with contraband cellphones and drive camp administrators insane by constantly demanding even special-er treatment for their holy spawn. "Their parents, meanwhile, were bombarding the camp with calls: one wanted help arranging private guitar lessons for her daughter, another did not like the sound of her child's voice during a recent conversation, and a third needed to know - preferably today - which of her daughter's four varieties of vitamins had run out. All before lunch."
Just when it seemed you couldn't possibly dig up another person to despise Paul McCartney's ex, Heather Mills, the lady's own publicist has just quit in a hilarious-and wordy-fit. Mills' former flack, Michele Elyzabeth, says the trouble started when Mills accused her of working on a tell-all book. "She was screaming and yelling, 'Is it true that you're writing a book about me?' I told her that it wasn't true, and she went bonkers... She was screaming so loud, she told whoever she was with to leave the room. She was yelling, 'I am tired of you, you're so stupid! You're so unprofessional.'"
The great big crap-ass democracy of blogs turns out to be just another smelly old boys club. "[W]hen Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 3 women on its list of 25. 'It's disheartening and frustrating,' said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee whose personal blog at www.lemonade-life.com is about living with Type 1 diabetes."
Just keep telling yourself it's not happening. Yesterday, a teen who got chomped on by one of the relentless hunters was the 15th victim of a shark attack in Volusia County, Fla, this year. "The boy was still in the emergency room early Friday afternoon, undergoing significant surgery. Hospital officials called it more than the average nip on the heel. They said the teen had serious cuts to the bottom of his foot, the top of his foot and his Achilles heel area."
I am deeply concerned that my weekday colleagues are now in league with the monkey threat to civilization, as they conveniently ignored this disturbing report of chimps easily disarming humans in order-I am certain-to stock their burgeoning monkey army with firearms. "A chimp in Japan escaped the sweltering confines of his cage, and a zookeeper with a tranquilizer gun proved no match for this feisty animal. The zookeeper can be seen peeking his head and rifle over the ledge of the roof on which the chimp was resting before quickly crouching down, sensing the chimp had noticed him. The chimp pounced on the ledge, grabbing the barrel of the zookeeper's tranquilizer gun and snatching it away, leaving the poor human defenseless. Score one for the apes." Score one indeed. Terrifying video after the jump.
The newspaper industry is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The biggest kiosk seller this month was a highbrow liberal weekly that featured a tabloid satire of a presidential candidate and his wife. The biggest newsmaker this month was a supermarket tabloid that caught a former presidential candidate visiting his extramarital baby mama, and the major journals of record won't even blog about it. Surely this is the End Times of big media. What is to be done? Where are our journalistic standards headed? And how long before what you see above becomes an actual New York Times Magazine cover? It may just be the economy, but all the apocalyptic chatter about the "death of the MSM" is starting seem prescient. For years, newspapers have been struggling to reconcile the Internet's up-to-the-second information spigot with old-fashioned standards of reporting. It's hard to keep track of how many "blogs" the Times now has, or how indistinguishable most of their substance and style are from what you'd find in the print edition. Apart from writing cloyingly and belatedly about the new media revolution and its cultural implications, what has the Gray Lady really done to ensure its continued relevance? Judging by its books, not much—it actually asks more of its shrinking readership. By close of trading Thursday, the stock of the New York Times Co. was listed at $12.48 per share, half the price it was a year ago. The paper then announced it'd be increasing its daily newsstand price by 25 cents, beginning August 18. Oh, the company also posted double-digit losses in ad revenue this quarter, citing the worst month so far as June, with July fast closing in. Circulation is down (profits here are only up because of previous price-gauging), 100 reporters were laid off this year, and everyone's wondering whether the Sulzberger clan will simply call it quits and switch to a small soy agribusiness in northern California. It'd be more wholesome than acknowledging that this century's Huey Long got his freak on. Other media empires are hurting, too. McClatchy Co., Lee Enterprises Inc. and E.W. Scripps Co. all claimed profit falls by almost half of last year's earnings. And most industry analysts expect the locust year to extend into well next. That must mean more bullshit trend pieces.
This video of John McCain acting like a petulant teenage girl toward a Wall Street Journal reporter is hilarious (best part: Lindsay Graham's "mee-OW" look at the end). And also telling! (TGIF, guys, we'll get through this.) John McCain's always been a favorite of the press, because of his insane availability. (Read Ana Marie Cox in Radar to learn more!) (Alex, call me!) He's affable and genuinely likes reporters. But we've reached a funny moment in their relationship. Because the media is in the tank for Obama. They love him! They cover him all day and all night and ignore McCain. But! The Obama campaign is totally, ridiculously press unfriendly. They're tight with information and generally try to control the message as much as Bush's people did. That's right, in his dealings with the press, Obama resembles President Bush! Some of the Obama faithful see this as a good thing. The media is the enemy. They distort and lie! No one trusts or likes anyone anymore, at all. So McCain is buddy-buddy with all his reporters but is now waging inept war on the media for ignoring him. Obama's beloved by the television people but is pissing off Adam Nagourney. So basically you can bitch about how the media keep painting McCain as a independent lovable American MAVERICK and they all play down his gaffes because they like him, or you can complain that the media are not even bothering to hide their gross man-crush on Barack Obama while ignoring his opponent and both are absolutely correct. So have at it, guys! R.I.P. observable reality!
We dislike giving any unnecessary PR to [bad designer], the L.E.S. twit who duped the free NYC paper Metro into putting him on its cover for a racist publicity stunt about a (probably nonexistent) attack by a pack of young black girls on a poor "victim" wearing a [bad designer] t-shirt that said "OBAMA IS MY SLAVE." But sometimes it's important to give coverage to those shining beacons of stupidity among us, so that we all know how not to act. Jewish Week tracked down [bad designer, who's Jewish] for an interview about his bad reputation. Sample: "'I've received death threats on the phone, especially from black people,' [b.d.] said. How did he know, over the phone, their ethnicity? 'They sound African-American.'" There's more!
CNN thought it found the perfect human face to put on MySpace statistics and voter registration numbers it tried to use, in an American Morning segment, to prove that the popularity of Barack Obama had campus conservatives on the run at American colleges. USC's Eric Perlmutter, identified as a member of the College Republicans, was quoted saying "we try to get people out to our college Republican meetings... but we can't seem to get the same amount of support" as Obama. After the president of the USC College Republicans spoke up to say he had never met this guy, CNN issued a fairly damning correction:
Sometimes it's the big mistakes that are the easiest to miss. Especially when half the editors are out on summer vacation and you've outsourced production to interns, who have outsourced it to drunken monkeys. The abject correction is after the jump.
The Wall Street Journal opinion section is truly off its rocker today. In addition to implying that John McCain has no shot of becoming president, it is also running a piece by a mystery writer who believes that the Batman series is part of a long line of fantasy genre movies that bring righteous glory to the conservative movement. Dark Knight, you see, is hugely popular because it allows Americans to embrace their true love for hugely unpopular President George W. Bush: "Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past." But wait, it gets better!
Hey, if John McCain, 71, had any hope of becoming the oldest person ever to ascend to the presidency next January, you know what would be important? The identity of the person who would replace the Republican and miracle of modern medical technology upon death. But all news outlets everywhere know McCain cannot possibly win this thing, since voters hate Republican candidates right now and besides Barack Obama is a tender angel of love and hope and also Change. This is why even the rabidly conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page just ran an opinion piece (headline pictured above) arguing that it just doesn't matter who McCain selects as his vice presidential candidate. The writer, senior Ronald Reagan adviser Ken Khachigian, concludes that talking about McCain's VP "is about boredom relief for opinion writers, political junkies and the media. It provides an escape from the fatigue of an 18-month nomination race — a new rabbit to chase" that soon "will be a distant memory." Harsh! [WSJ]
First it was young, elegant Carine Roitfeld, making Vogue publishing look slightly effortless and more-than-a-little spunky from her perch in Paris. Then there was Franco Sozzani, reminding everyone with her all-black issue that Italian Vogue "has gained a reputation for being more about art and ideas than commerce." Now, fashion blogger Bryanboy reminds us, Aliona Doletskaya is the latest editor of a baby Vogue to arguably upstage American editor Anna Wintour, having reached her 10th anniversary at the healm of the fashion title's Russian edition. "Month after month after month, she offers original content, she uses models for her covers and her editorials are very bold, strong and in your face," Bryanboy writes. Well, sure, but there's also the fact that she can fly helicopters! Also: In 10 years, she sees herself flying across continents on an airplane. Considered that fair warning, Anna. Click the video icon for excerpts of Russia Today's half-hour profile. [Byranboy]
