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Sports
May 21, 2007
When Adjectives Hold Hands in the Desert
Baseball writers are notorious for overly dramatic writing. Within a genre that routinely attributes mythic qualities to even the most routine 6-4-3 double plays, Marty Noble, beat writer for Mets.com, stands out for audacity and entertainment value. As Noble himself might write, this is a man who never met a cliché he didn't like. He recaps Mets games like a WWII veteran recapping the Battle of the Bulge. The Mets did not move into first place, they reclaimed it. Jose Reyes is "electrically charged danger" on the base paths, while a losing rookie pitcher nobly "throws himself on the sword." His opening lines are consistently histrionic, and his signature move is a snippy one-liner at the end. Below are a few of Gelf's favorite Noblisms from the 2007 season.
Media
May 15, 2007
Turning Press Releases Into News
Monday is the typical day for reporters to unload non-perishable crap stories so they don’t have to work over the weekend. But it appears that the New York Times has decided to extend that practice to Tuesday, perhaps because of those Monday blues. For the third time in four years, an education reporter has taken spoon-fed, ridiculous PR from the ACT and tried to pass it off as news.
Media
May 7, 2007
Fun FOIA Facts
The Freedom of Information Act allows every citizen the right to view and copy any federal document, so long as it's not classified. It's a great tool for investigative journalists, but as a recent article in the San Francisco Examiner points out, backlogs of FOIA requests are piling up at many agencies due to bureaucracy and drawn-out disputes between requesters and agencies. Still, some facts are getting out; Gelf tracked down a few recent examples of some offbeat information journalists were able to wrangle via the FOIA.
Media
May 2, 2007
Bogus Blurbs Ban
Movie studios, take note: New legislation in Europe will ban the practice of extracting words and phrases from theater reviews, quoting them misleadingly, and stamping them on advertisements and billboards. At Gelf, we call this advertising practice the Blurb Racket, and run a regular column about its implementation in movie ads.
Media
May 2, 2007
The Food is Great, But You Suck
The next time you dine out in Manhattan or Brooklyn, beware. A New Yorker writer may be surreptitiously jotting down your mannerisms and bloviations in preparation for passing judgment on you in the front pages of his rag. That's because the magazine's relatively brief food reviews often devote as much space to eavesdropping on whoever happens to be in a restaurant the same night as the critic, as to the food itself. Here are a few examples from some recent Tables for Two reviews.
Media
April 27, 2007
The Next Bad Thing
If the creators of the new sci-fi premonition thriller starring Nicholas Cage could really see into the future, perhaps they wouldn't have named their film Next. Reviewers have taken the lame title for the equally lame movie and, predictably, turned it into a cutting criticism of the work. Here are a few headline samples:
Media
April 25, 2007
The Puns Slip Out
Biofilm, a company that makes the sexual lubricant Astroglide, recently leaked the names and addresses of 263,822 of its customers onto the web. A customer googled himself and was surprised to find a result that showed his personal information and his past Astroglide purchases. He reported the issue to Biofilm and now many more embarrassed customers want this information off the web. The company is rapidly trying to remove it from the Google search engine by going through correction procedures required by Google, with 500 files handled already. As news of the leak spreads across the Internet, bloggers, writers, and readers are having fun with risqué puns.
Media
April 23, 2007
Using the Dead for Publicity
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting that left 33 people dead, media outlets from around the country scrambled to bring their viewers and readers a local angle to the tragedy. In central Kentucky, this grief was personified by Laura Crews, who approached reporters at a candlelight vigil and sobbingly told them that her friend Mike Patterson was shot in the thigh and still in the hospital. It turns out that this was a hoax.
Media
April 13, 2007
'ATHF':'South Park'::Surrealism:Satire
It's a little bit unfair to contrast the new Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie with the South Park franchise just because both involve cartoon characters saying things that cartoon characters normally don't say. But if you're a movie reviewer who hasn't spent much time watching ATHF's closer kin on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block, such as Squidbillies or Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, a comparison of Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake to the foul-mouthed boys from a Colorado mountain town will have to suffice.
Media
April 13, 2007
They Fell Into a Ring of Puns
The late Johnny Cash's former lakeside home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, burned down last Tuesday. The lyrics to Cash's Ring of Fire include the word "fire" 19 times and "burn" or "burning" 20 times, creating pun potential that many news sources found irresistible.
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