An email from a friend:

So, you've probably heard that the infamous NYT reporter wants to write up his experience of lying and fabricating.

My suggestion for a title:

You Can't Spell Blair
Without L-I-A-R

So back when I was working at the American Spectator, the editor of that publication got it in his head that it would be a good idea to have Ted Nugent as a regular columnist. I thought the editor, who was very visonary and smart guy was off his rocker. I was right. The resulting article was probably the most ridiculous thing piece of magazine journalism published that year, "Xtreme States of America":

"I want to be extremely happy. My balls are Xtremely [sic] sensitive. I want to be extremely free... I am extremely alive. I sleep extremely soundly... Homosexuality is extremely weird. Jerry Garcia is extremely dead. Pimps, whores and welfare drudges are extremely disgusting."

...And so on for another 600 words. Of course, Ted probably won't like this comparison, but at least it answers the question "When is Homosexuality is extremely weird?" When Rosie O'Donnell, former publisher of McCall's-cum-Rosie gets her own column in The Advocate and the latest installment is titled "The Yellow":

"So Michael Moore and Eminem won Oscars because the art they make is pure yellow... No one knows where the yellow comes from... Fame stole my yellow... I filled my craving with food--getting madder still with my expanding girth and my inability to make more yellow."

...And so on for another 600 words. Feel free to email me with suggestions of words that could be substituted for "yellow" that would either make this column more amusing than it already is, and having said that the column contains the most unintentionally hilarious line in the history of journalism. "You're alone in the dark watching Michael Moore make yellow but to scared to admit you saw it there. Shame on you."

link via the indispensable Gawker

I just bought a new gee-tar:

.

New piece by moi on the web. A review of Neal Pollack's new book, Beneath the Axis of Evil. So far the reception by Neal's loyal fans has been understandably mixed.

Well, I almost submitted this as the review. Which is really more of tribute than it sounds like...

Oh also, in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young includes a list of words that Graydon Carter has forbidden from being used in Vanity Fair, adding more legitimacy to Bunnie's ongoing crusade against 'journalism words' like 'Snarky' and 'Toney'. They are as follows:

aka
bed-sitter (for apartment)
boasted
boite (for restaurant)
chortled (for said)
chuckled (for said)
cough up (as in spend)
doff
donned
eatery
executive-produced and such like
flat (for apartment)
flick
freebie
freeloader
fuck (okay for exclamation, not for having sex)
funky
garner
glitz
golfer
graduate (v)
honcho
hooker
joked (for said)
moniker
opine (in any form)
paucity
pen
plethora
quipped
row (meaning fight)
sleaze
no diminutives for titles of movies, books etc., i.e. not Prince for The Prince of Tides
tome (for book)
wanna
weird

Okay, 'paucity' and 'opine' are excellent examples of journalism words, but what's up with 'golfer'? What's that make Tiger Woods? A 'duffer'? 'Linksman'? That's just weird. Oh wait, sorry...

So I'm reading a fantastic new book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a memoir of an upper middle class Brit who had a brief but spectacular career flame-out at Vanity Fair, a few years back. In fact what caught my attention was the blurb on the back--I knew I had to read it:

"Toby's a piece of gum that stuck to my shoe five years ago and that I still can't get off... I basically forgot to fire Toby Young everyday for two years."
--Graydon Carter, Editor-In-Chief, Vanity Fair

For any hack out there who's ever dreamed of being put on retainer by a New York glossy, this book is a must read. Awfully self-deprecating and down to earth for a book that should really be bitter and gossipy, it paints a pretty unkind picture of the upper echelons of NYC's social circuit and journalistic circles.

But there's an interesting blog-related tidbit about Charlotte Raven, everyone's favorite America-hating Guardian columnist/blogosphere punching bag. It seems she got her start in journalism by having an affair with Julie Burchill, a rather famous and notorious british journalist (who also happens to less-than-coincidentally be a Guardian columnist).

As soon as the two started sleeping together, Charlotte and Julie began plotting to turn the magazine that Julie had been editing with with Toby Young (The Modern Review, which along with Might was one of two oft-missed pop-culture magazines that had brief moments in the sun during the 90's publishing bonanza) into a radical feminist rag. Rather than let this happen to his beloved magazine, Young convinced the staff to help him scuttle the magazine's final issue to press without Julie knowing, including an editorial in which he said that the magazine was closing up shop because Burchill was having a lesbian affair with a contributor. The cover read "That's All Folks!" (So you can clearly see how Young's memoir lives up to it's name).

The British press had a field day, and Burchill and Raven moved on to the greener, but heavily fertilized, pastures of the Guardian.

Okay, so maybe Ted Williams really did want to be frozen.

Still, I can't help but paraphrase Tom Hanks here: "There's no cryonics in baseball!"

(FYI: I've been mildy annoyed during the whole Ted Williams hoo-ha because people keep using the words cryogenics and cryonics interchangably. They're not; cryogenics is the the legitimate medical science behind freezing and preserving things like tissue samples, whereas cryonics is the kooky Uncle-Walt's-head-in-the-freezer-until-we-find-a-cure-for-what-killed-him-a-hundred-years-from-now nonsense.)

Think I'm going to call up my father, the retired colonel tonight and say, "You think you're tough cause were in the 'Nam? Well, big deal, I live in Washington, D.C."

On the plus side, despite the rise in blowgun attacks, the city is finally on top of the the transvestite prostitute epidemic. One thing at a time people...

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but Friday was my last day on the job. My computer situation has been spotty since then (damn dial up connections)... I start writing my book in earnest in the fall, but until then, if anyone asks, I'm doing "freelance and consulting work," in the great euphemistic tradition. But you, gentle reader, know better than to believe such an obviously mendacious statement, so I present--

My Typical Day As a Semi-Employed Writer in Washington D.C.:

0930-1000hrs: Wake-up. Slowly.

1005hrs: Scratch chin in bathroom mirror. Think about shaving. Don't.

1010hrs: Put on flip-flops and stumble downstairs to coffew shop half a block away.

1012hrs: Stub toe on curb. Wish I'd worn real shoes.

1015-1100hrs: Buy large coffee, bannana and Washington Post. Sit on sidewalk patio of coffee shop reading Post before it gets too hot. Marvel at how many good looking girls work in nearby Senate office buildings. Also, make a point of saying things to complete strangers like "Boy, how bout this heat? Of course, it's the humidity..." just to remind them that I'm not working and they are.

1110hrs: Return home, and turn on TV. Start watching The View. Normally, I know better than this, but I've just spent almost a year at a Think-Tank working primarily on National Security and Mid-East issues. Today's guest on The View is respected terrorism expert Steven Emerson.

1115hrs: Realize all your work is for naught when ditzy host (which one? Hah!) asks Emerson "What's a jihad?" causing such astonishment I spit coffee all over the place.

1130hrs: Hosts on The View begin taunting producer/den mother Barbara Walters about her age with an insincere jocularity that can only be learned in broadcasting school. They ask the septuagenarian if she'd date a younger man, prompting one of them to say "I bet you'd date a 68-year-old." Which is immediatedly followed up with the comment "I bet you'd do 69." The reaction to this, is as you can imagine, horrifyingly summed up by three simultaneous events 1) the audience groans and catcalls, 2) in a flash of pure anger rarely seen on TV, Babs throws something at the offending host and 3) this sums up a mental image that causes me to regurgitate whatever coffee I didn't just spit out.

1131hrs: Turn off TV, need to get out of house. Decide to go to the gym.

1200hrs: Hit the treadmill and throw some weights around. Complain bitterly to management because the only magazines they have laying around are back issues of InStyle and American Cheerleader.

1300hrs: Take extra-long shower after working out. Still thinking about Walters. Can't... get.. clean...

1330hrs: Walk a few blocks over to Bunnie's house to wait for exterminator to come. She's busy working, and the reasons for doing her this favor are summed up in a tri-valent nutshell 1) I genuinely feel sorry for her as she's got flea bites on her legs the size of the moles on Abe Vigoda's back, 2) this might indebt me to the three attractive, savvy women who occupy this particular townhouse, and 3) she knows I'm just laying around and can't give her a good reason to say no.

1430-1830hrs: Try and write something, for-the-love-of-all-that's-holy, anything. Why am I such an untalented hack @#$%?!

1830hrs: Get distracted by Simpsons rerun that I've seen a zillion damn times already so why don't I really just turn the damn thing off and do something productive already...

1900hrs: Eat.

2000hrs: Drink.

2400hrs: Sleep... and resolve to be more productive tomorrow.