"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
I just got some spam with the subject header “‘Dancing’ with Billy Ray Cyrus.” The quotation marks intrigued me. What, exactly, was “dancing” a euphemism for here?
The spam is an advertisement for a penis enlargement. Oh. That kind of dancing.
No thanks, Billy Ray. To be honest, I’m not even too fond of your “music.”
Really? A 46-year-old woman gets carded when she goes to buy alcohol and this is news?
Mrs Burge has had more than £180,000 worth of cosmetic surgery and has been called The Real Life Barbie, reports Sky News.
Yup, she apparently even has her own website. I’ll admit, she does look pretty good for 46. But she doesn’t look under 18, not by a mile. And spending close to half a million dollars on plastic surgery does seem a little excessive to me. Still, if it allows her to feel excited and empowered whenever a clerk at the local supermarket is polite (or near blind)…well, who am I to argue?
It still doesn’t seem very newsworthy to me.
As a sociological experiment, the Associated Press’ recent decision to ban stories on Paris Hilton for a week is a really interesting idea. Ethically, however, it is maybe a little suspect:
It turned out that people noticed plenty — but not in the way that might have been expected. None of the thousands of media outlets that depend on AP called in asking for a Paris Hilton story. No one felt a newsworthy event had been ignored. (To be fair, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary happened in the Hilton universe.)
The reaction was to the idea of the ban, not the effects of it. There was some internal hand-wringing. Some felt we were tinkering dangerously with the news. Whom, they asked, would we ban next? Others loved the idea. “I vote we do the same for North Korea,” one AP writer said facetiously.
A world without Paris Hilton in the news would be a much better place, I agree, but I’m not sure that the AP is the one to make that decision, much less that an outright ban is the best way to accomplish it. Better, perhaps, simply not to run un-newsworthy stories than to effect a complete and total blackout. In Paris Hilton’s case, I think the AP might find that the results are essentially the same.
Link via Neatorama.
I’d just like to say that I’ve never forgotten any of the manuscripts I work on sitting at the train station:
Martha Oster, 27, said she was “amazed” when she found the 134-page manuscript lying on a bench at Balham station on Wednesday night.
Simon Prosser, of Penguin, said it was accidentally left by someone who works for the publishing house.
It’s simple human error, but imagine if this had been something like the upcoming final Harry Potter book.
Link via Ed Champion.