Our Jezebel friends found this while looking for paparazzi photos. They were kind enough to share it with us! It is from Orange Country, Florida. It was, obviously, just paid for by some crazy local businessman. We appreciate how concise and polite it is. So much political debate is so strident these days, don't you think? This is a nice corrective. [Splash]
It turns out that "ladderlike horizontal rods that form an exterior curtain surrounding the floor-to-ceiling windows"—while a neat architectural feature—present a small problem: someone might use them as a ladder! Or two people might use them as ladders! Our only question: When the Times says, "Reporting was contributed by Charles V. Bagli, Russ Buettner, Sewell Chan, Glenn Collins, David W. Dunlap, Jason Grant, Christine Hauser, Corey Kilgannon, Eric Konigsberg, Jennifer 8. Lee, Trymaine Lee, Patrick McGeehan, Colin Moynihan, William K. Rashbaum and Paul von Zielbauer," do they just mean that all those people have offices with windows? [NYT]
Buzzword watch: "bloody shirt." It means 9/11 and it's shameful when a Democrat brings it up. Because only Republicans are supposed to! The term, which refers to invoking martyrs to stave off criticism, dates back to the Civil War, and no one has used it since. Until Keith Olbermann tried to shame Hillary Clinton with it and she laughed and laughed and laughed. Now, in today's remarkable New York Times un-dorsement of Hillary Clinton: "On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11." So: "bloody shirt." Try it out this week on a friend or co-worker!
The FCC just announced it wants to partner with your mobile phone company to deliver critical text messages in times of emergency, like terror attacks, imminent hurricanes or child abductions. The phone companies are all totally into it. The best part is that, in a basement somewhere, there's going to be some federal bureaucrat guy who actually gets to send these things:
How much chaos can two knucklehead filmmaking students (can anyone confirm NYU? It's a hunch we have.) cause on a quiet Tuesday afternoon? Plenty if they're on top of Kate Hudson's house with "sniper rifles" for some reason! Police helicopters hovered over King and Varick in the Village and terrified office-workers emailed us. Even after Us Weekly reported the arrest of these three idiotic future Uwe Bolls your tales of bravery continued to roll in. Like this one, from an architecture firm, with a subject line simply reading "BEWARE":
The cops brought in one of those criminal profiler people like you see on the tv shows to figure out just who was mad enough to toss a tiny bomb at the military recruiting station in Times Square at 4 a.m., injuring no one, before speeding off suspiciously on his bicycle. "'He feels comfortable on the bicycle,' Mr. Pierce said of the bomber, suggesting the person could be a bike messenger." You fools! It was Owen Wilson. [NYT]
Surveillance cameras captured fleeting, blurry images of the man who dropped the bomb on Uncle Sam this morning and Police released clips to the media this afternoon We know the terrorist rides a bicycle ("in a suspicious manner") and wears dark clothing. We must insist you turn in any friend, neighbor, or relative who matches this description to the police for questioning. Watch the video for yourself, after the jump. (Also please click to see this loving illustrated tribute to the victims of today's attacks from Gawker reader and patriot Ryan.)
Did the TIMES SQUARE I.E.D. affect the Conde Nasties? Did Anna Wintour make it to work today? Any MTV or Viacom slaves want to weigh in on the confusion and terror that have surely overtaken their studios? Send me your stories of heroism. [Photo: Reuters, who are also headquartered right around the corner from this morning's TERROR.]
In Great Britain earlier this week, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals stumbled upon a veritable horse death camp—"dead horses everywhere," according to one rescuer, with 32 bodies "as well as emaciated survivors, many covered in excrement, mud, scrapes and cuts at Spindles farm, at Hyde Heath, near Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Three more had to be shot because of their condition." It gets worse!
Pirate attacks are up 14% this year, notes the Post. Somalia and Nigeria were reported as having the biggest increases in attacks in the Third Quarterly Piracy Report. "If this trend continues, the decline in piracy attacks begun in 2004 will have bottomed out," the International Maritime Bureau says. We'll all be bottoming out too when the pirates finally take over!
Lynn Hirschberg unloads in this weekend's Times' T mag on how all the moguls dress terribly nowadays; she lumps in the sometimes-bad dresser Barry Diller with the frequent offender Harvey Weinstein. "Scientists should stop investigating the links between fat friends, fast food and obesity and concentrate on the pernicious impact of stretch fabric. When a waistband can give and give, why should anyone stop eating? When a shirt does not need to be tucked in, who cares about the belly beneath?" Well... true! But she goes on to note that if lady-moguls dressed this poorly, their business choices would get seriously questioned. So did she miss the last two years of everyone asking if Harvey had lost it, having thrown an empire in the trash and all? And also that thing a couple weeks ago, when her fashion critic colleague Cathy Horyn called Harvey a "bearish hetero"?
Last night our new favorite TV show "TMZ" sent a correspondent to the hotspots of L.A. to see how well Angeleno clubgoers remembered the terrible events of September 11. The results will not surprise you in the least, unless you think Angeleno clubgoers are some sort of species of meth-snorting Einsteins.
Sometimes we like to pretend we're doing sophisticated media analysis. (Maybe sometimes we even are! On accident!) But today, it being 9/11 and all, I can confess that we nearly crapped ourselves laughing over this one: "Boston Globe Media Introduces 'Lola' - a Boston Women's Lifestyle Magazine from a Boston Woman's Point of View." I'm sorry, but Lola is A WHORE'S NAME. Your magazine is for whores! Why not just name it "Showgirls" and be done with it? Or maybe "Skanks of Boston"? [NYT Co]
With Yom Kippur around the corner, it's that time of year where we admit sins, beg forgiveness and stand by mailboxes waiting in vain for apology letters that don't arrive from high school classmates who cruelly mocked certain other high school classmates who at the time had clear braces, a nose, a face oil problem and only five shirts but who now have a nose job, are exceedingly wealthy and have the oil problem under control through the use of astringent. So in the spirit of candor, I admit that when we received a Gawker Stalker email (I'm one of the hardworking behind-the-scenes Stalkettes who handles such things) revealing that Mystery from The Pickup Artist was filming at Prohibition on fun on the Upper West Side, my instinct was to race uptown and shamelessly throw myself at him. Because I AM IN LOVE WITH MYSTERY and I don't care who knows it.
"FLASH: Ted Olson becomes frontrunner for Attorney General, top sources tell DRUDGE REPORT; announcement could be imminent..." You may recall Olson as the former Solicitor General who argued George W. Bush's case in Bush v. Gore. But his wife Barbara, a conservative TV personality, was a passenger on one of the planes that crashed on September 11, 2001. So if this is true, and they announce it today, that's clearly what the White House wants you to focus on. [Drudge Report]
