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Sports
January 19, 2007
Are You Ready For Some Football ... Columns?
This weekend, the Colts and the Patriots are playing for a spot in the Super Bowl, and the game has been discussed to such an extent that not only has Manning-Brady fatigue set in, but there's been enough time for ESPN.com's Sports Guy to whine about that fatigue. He might well be most upset with a mocking fill-in-the-blank column penned by fellow ESPNer Patrick Hruby, who calls out fellow journalists (including Simmons) for their predictable hyperbole when it comes to this particular matchup.
Sports
January 17, 2007
Going Grade School
With less than half a quarter to play, the Patriots were in a jam. Down by eight points and sitting at fourth and five, their normally unflappable quarterback Tom Brady threw his third pick of the day, this time to Chargers safety Marlon McCree. But a great hit by Patriots receiver-and-sometimes-defensive-back Troy Brown jarred the ball loose, and the Patriots recovered the fumble and got a new set of downs. They went on to win, and sportswriters around the country got to talk about elementary strategy.
Media
January 14, 2007
Come See the Film That Rocked the Box Office Despite Bad Reviews
In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies—see breakdowns of blurbs for Notes on a Scandal, Freedom Writers, Children of Men, and more. This week's Bogus Blurb of the Week comes in an ad for Night at the Museum:
Sports
January 9, 2007
Kyle Williams, Loyal (and Distraught) Reader of Blogs
There's something about the contestants in last week's Rose Bowl that brings out the nastiest of imaginary blogging. After USC's rout, TV commentators predicted those mythical men of the typing machines would start calling for the ouster of Michigan coach Lloyd Carr (an overblown fear, as Deadspin pointed out). Now another questionable premise has gelled into media factiness, this one about USC offensive tackle Kyle Williams. Supposedly, the devoted blog reader was so devastated by the online writers' devastating critiques of his performance in UCLA's upset of the Trojans (three false starts) that he temporarily quit the team.
Sports
January 9, 2007
OSU Gets Meyer-ed in Gator Raid
Florida soundly beat Ohio State in the BCS title game, and it was up to the nation's legions of editors to turn the blowout into interesting copy for their sports-hungry readers. Since Gelf couldn't find anyone who went for the easy "Fall of Troy (Smith)" headline, perhaps feeling sorry for the latest Heisman winner-turned-goat, Gelf did some light reading to see what they did come up with:
Media
January 3, 2007
Biting Dogs
On the same day that the St. Paul Pioneer Press came out with a strong defense of the mainstream media, the San Antonio Express-News was forced to explain that the most recent plagiarism scandal to hit that same group came from a journalist copying from Wikipedia. It's what those in the business would call a classic "man bites dog" sort of story.
Sports
January 2, 2007
Old Balls, New Coke
The NBA's foray into synthetic basketballs is over. The old leather ball is back. "There will be some initial getting used to," Grant Hill told the Washington Post, "but in two months, it will be old news, just like New Coke is old news." Hill—perhaps showing that he has a future in sportswriting—is onto something. The New Coke analogy pervaded many types of articles about the switch:
Varsity Letters
January 2, 2007
Varsity Letters 1/3 Author Interviews
The authors of the three books featured on our front page will be speaking at a free Gelf event in New York on Wednesday, January 3. Come by the Happy Ending Lounge at 302 Broome Street at 8 pm to see writers Gus Alfieri, Carlo DeVito, and Cecil Harris read from and discuss their works. Also, Gelf is featuring interviews with all three:
Media
December 30, 2006
'An Entertaining—Yet Colossally Flawed—Freak Show'
In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies—see breakdowns of blurbs for The Good Shepherd, Night at the Museum, Rocky Balboa, and more. This week's Bogus Blurb of the Week comes in an ad for Eragon:
Science
December 29, 2006
Off-Key Primate Coverage? It's a Gibbon.
Gibbons, part of the so-called lesser apes, can rearrange the syllables in their mating duets to form alarm calls. If "bap-bap-be-bop" tells the world that they are in love, then "bap-be-bap-bop" says that they see something scary. (Actual gibbons sound less like scat singers and more like this.) This discovery is paper-worthy because it may mean that gibbons are the first non-human ape to use what are known as functionally-referential calls; vastly simplified, it suggests they possess a basic form of syntax. But if you look at the coverage of this discovery in the press, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the major finding was that gibbons sing when they are scared.
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