Media coverage of the Balloon Boy incident follows in a long-standing tradition of bringing intensely personal, potentially deeply moving stories to a wide audience. In 1949, during TV’s earliest days, a little girl named Kathy Fiscus fell into a well. TV networks broadcast live-by-remote from the scene for 27 hours. The world watched with breath held and prayers recited, until heartbroken rescuers recovered her lifeless body.

I glanced at the paper the man next me on the train was reading this morning and I saw a headline about a very tragic car accident that read “Dad sez sad….”

WTF!??

Look, everyone knows that Michael Jackson was the first person perhaps in human history to elicit rapturous applause by walking backwards on a stage.

And believe me, I am just as saddened by his apparent suicide as every other Gen Y gay dude who took his first halting steps toward ridiculousness with a pair of aviator glasses, too-short pants and a heavily-sequined left-hand glove. (Oh, that was just me? Okay, whatevs.)

But honestly, American media, what the fuck? Are we or are we not fighting two wars right now?

Oh, and there’s also the small matter of the next Supreme Court justice, public health care, civil rights, and, well, I guess, Iran, just to round things out.

I like to tell my international friends that we’re not all a bunch of hysterical, celebrity-obsessed ever-children here in the States. That case got a lot harder to make as of tonight.

I trust you’ll pardon my Anglo Saxon when I tell you–and yes, I’m talking to you, Olbermann and Maddow–to fuck off. I will never again subject myself to humiliation by letting it slip in mixed or any other company that I watch your programs.

Australian-American gargoyle and anti-Christ media mogul Rupert Murdoch may have received a bump to his head, as The Guardian reports that the publisher of “The Sunday Times” in the UK is planning to charge for the newspaper’s content on the web.

Some barely literate reasons below as to why this may be incredibly stupid.

He’s awesome. There’s no other word. He spills his dreams out into the daylight and they walk free and unfettered, like golems. He hangs with rock stars, movie stars, literary stars, and then drops their names so matter-of-factly you feel like you were at that party too. He arose from the publishing realm where nerds learned to read, and now he dances adroitly between film, music, plays, poems, and novels. He is the hope of a generation of goths and geeks, and … well, he’s just so gosh-darn humble about it all.

He is Neil Gaiman. Neil. Fucking. Gaiman.

He must be stopped.

Yeah, so anyway – I saw this at the beginning of the week but because of all the sunshine and stuff I forgot to post it due to the sunshine. Sun. Shine. If you haven’t seen it yet – and you may have and now hate reading this – it’s what appears to be a Gawker promo reel or something like that.

In what I’m hoping is the first of a continuous flow of apologies from newspaper proprietors across the world, the London Evening Standard has started saying sorry for being – how can I put this? Eh – shit, basically. Yes – that’s the word – shit.

I’ve never lived anywhere near the ocean.  Now, instead of living twenty minutes away from the lifeless, polluted Great Salt Lake, I live forty-five minutes from the Oregon coast.  In particular, Heceta Head, which is pictured left.  I’ve been going there weekly.

We don’t have television in our place in Eugene, but it’s so much better that way.  There’s so much to do here in town, and so much more to do just a short drive away.  It’s been remarkable seeing how not having access to television has improved my quality of life.  No longer pumped full of advertisements all day (well, not as many, anyway), no longer wasting hours and hours of time when I could be out experiencing the world.  I only have so much time to do that.

On Thursday night, Barack Obama made history by becoming the first sitting U.S. president to appear on a late night talk show.

After host Jay Leno made the Commander-in-Chief sit in the green room while he made fun of cat muzzles, Obama came out to talk about – what else – the economy, Tim Geithner, and AIG, before launching into an anecdote about how his daughters love Starburst candies.

Then, Jay Leno asked the President if he was getting rid of the famed White House bowling alley.  Nope, Obama said, bragging that he bowled a “129″.  Leno politely applauded – quasi-mockingly saying “That’s very good, Mr. President” – to which Obama, under the audience’s laughter and applause, said “it was like the Special Olympics or something.” (Click for video)

April 29, 2009

6       GOINGS ON BEYOND YOUR PRICE RANGE

19     THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Where did all the Cartier ads go?; socialite jabber so unfiltered as to appear fictional; sure, NOW James Surowiecki tells us.

David Remnick    24     LETTER FROM RUSSIA

The Motherland

I should just move the magazine here.

An article about the health risks associated with online social networking was today linked to and shared on popular online social networking site “Facebook”.

Evidently Reuters has hired C. Montgomery Burns to write their headlines. Can’t you just see a knickerbocker-clad paperboy standing on a sooty streetcorner yelling “Extra! Extra! Rap mogul “Suge” Knight injured in fracas!”?

Other equally old-fangled words for “fight”:

commotion

dust-up

flap

hullabaloo

ruckus

rumpus

set-to

spat

squabble

tiff

I, for one, don’t smoke weed, and a recent pre-employment drug test can confirm that (in case you’ve all found this blog… hi, boss!), but many people do and enjoy it very much.

Making the internet rounds: an AIG executive accused of a 500m fraud was sentenced to 4 years. An eagle-eyed Reddit user found that the article describing the sentence was appearing just above an article showing that a homeless man had gotten 15 years for stealing 100 dollars from a bank. Finally! The perfect meme for the failings of our justice system! Uh, no:

Ex-TV reporter Carolyn Gusoff, who used to cover news on Long Island for New York City’s WNBC-TV, was recently fired by that station, along with other long-time on-air talent.