Fortune over at the always-excellent Bread, Coffee, Chocolate, Yoga bitch-slaps the New York Times for a stupid, shallow piece on how fair-trade coffee mainly exists to make Americans feel better about themselves:

no, what i find most comic about this coffee piece is its proud laziness, its light-weight refusal to take the subject seriously.

"the world-market price of coffee has fallen so low that, according to a non-profit called transfairusa, millions of third-world farmers are being crushed by unfair competition and cannot survive."

those readers who stop be here even on rare occasion can't help but be floored by that sentence.

the times has never apparently heard of the coffee crisis (and here), despite many mainstream articles on it, including one 2 years ago in the wall st. journal, of all places!

Yes, I've finally reached my limit on spam.

I use Apple Mail, which is a great little program: it "learns" what junk is and stores it in a Junk folder, which you can peruse at your leisure—although, with 300+ messages going in there per day, I didn't peruse it too often.

(Eventually we're going to get a more robust mail server, which hopefully will weed a lot more of this crap out, but for the moment I'm relying on other tricks.)

However, I was still getting 100+ messages in my In Box every day, most of which were spam but were, for one reason or another, not getting flagged as such. So I borrowed a trick from Darin's mail rules and said, If the mail's sender is not in my address book, put it in the box "Unknown Sender." I do have to check this box more often, but at least my In Box isn't quite as heavily burdened.

If anyone is sending me mail about this site (or the Calvin Klein Skirt) though, I may miss it, depending on what the Subject line is. (I suggest avoiding "Hi.") So I said to myself, "Self, you have as many e-mail addresses as you want. It is time to set up a dedicated e-mail address for people who actually want to talk to YOU but whom you don't know yet."

So: if you'd like to drop me a line, please mail it to:

Yes, you have to type it in, and yes, you have to figure out what part of the e-mail address gets replaced by the character found at shift-2. But if you really want to talk to me, this is the way.

Danny Gregory put up a post asking why there isn't more political art reacting to current events:

It's been three years since 9/11 and yet, (except for a couple of forgettable efforts from Springsteen and Bowie, a few made-for-TV movies, and Michael Moore's upcoming Fahrenheit 911) artists don't seem to have responded in a significant way that has caught on with the public. Where's the first great anti-war hip hop song? The Whitney Biennial was great but if any of it referenced 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, I missed it.

He's right: there hasn't been much in the way of war (or, specifically, anti-war) art. There are, I think, two reasons that we're not seeing a lot of art dealing with current events. One is that people are scared. And the second is, they don't really know what they're scared of.

Today's NY Times has an article about the death of the sitcom. This is the kind of article that could write itself every few years. We've had periodic deaths of the sitcom and deaths of the dramatic one-hour. Every entertainment rag toots about this every so often—Tamar laughed about Entertainment Weekly's eulogy to the sitcom not too long ago.

But this time, writer Bill Carter insists, it's really really different:

Inside the offices of television comedy writers last week nobody was laughing.

For good reason. Amid the hoopla of last week's presentations to advertisers of the broadcast networks' prime-time lineups for the fall, it became strikingly clear that the network situation comedy was in as bad a state as it has been in more than 20 years.

It is not just that "Friends" and "Frasier" have left their weekly homes. The trend across all of network television is sharply away from comedy as a staple of entertainment programming, pushed aside by an audience bored by a tired sitcom format, changing industry economics and the rise of reality shows.

No network added to its comedy total in the fall schedules announced last week, one season after ABC and CBS added to their comedy totals. And two networks, ABC and in particular NBC, cut back.

NBC, which built its dominance in network ratings on the backs of hit comedies like "Cheers," "Seinfeld" and "Friends" (and which at one point in the late 1990's had 16 half-hour comedies on its schedule), will have only four comedies in its lineup next fall. That total will be NBC's fewest since 1980, when it had only two, "Diff'rent Strokes" and "The Facts of Life."

The impact throughout Hollywood is already profound. "In the comedy writers' community, it's pure panic," said Sue Naegle, one of the heads of the television department for United Talent Agency, which employs scores of comedy writers and performers. She and agents from several other agencies said about 150 comedy writers would be out of work this fall. Those still working, they added, would be making much less money.

The article ascribes blame to the current sitcom drought to:

• the expense of running a sitcom versus a reality show and
• the tried-and-true sitcom format of "setup/joke and four-to-six characters sitting around a sofa on a Hollywood sound stage."

How true. God knows I had said often enough that I cannot stand sitcoms, which require people to act like idiots and have 22 minute conflicts based on some stupid exaggeration or misunderstanding. And if that were all there were to sitcoms, he might have a point.

However, Bill Carter wrote this entire very long NY Times article without ever once mentioning Arrested Development, Scrubs, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. And when you stack the deck, you can come to any conclusions you want.

I cannot stand sitcoms, and yet Arrested Development is my favorite show. It contains several laugh-out-loud moments per episode, and there have been a few times when we've had to stop the show in order to recover from laughing. Scrubs is one of Darin's favorite shows, and it manages to swing between the ridiculous and the sublime in a heartbeat, being both hysterical and affecting in the same scene. (If the Brendan Fraser episode from this year doesn't win an Emmy, there is no justice. So I guess it won't win an Emmy.) And I personally can't stand Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I couldn't stand Seinfeld either—and even I can tell that both shows are completely brilliant.

It's possible to make a great comedic show. It's just gotten a lot harder because the audience has seen thousands and thousands of hours of the stuff on their hundreds of channels, stupid. They've seen your stupid-ass sitcoms before with the stupid-ass one-liners and stupid-ass "Oh my gosh, Janie said WHAT?" variety of comedic setup.

It's quite possible that neither Arrested Development nor Scrubs has caught fire because they require the viewer to have an IQ slightly larger than their resting heart rate, but both shows have rabid partisans who actively proselytize for them. (Curb Your Enthusiasm is on HBO, which could care less if you like the shows, so long as you pay your monthly fee.)

As soon as the studios worry more about making shows that we haven't seen before that are, you know, funny and stuff, they'll have an audience.

What the hell: they cancelled Firefly, so screw 'em.

(Slightly edited for unclear language.)