Media

September 19, 2005

2005's Best-Reviewed Steve Carell Movie

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, books, and more—see breakdowns of blurbs for 40 Year Old Virgin, HBO's Rome, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and more. While if you click through you'll find an outlandish claim in the ad copy for Virgin, this week's winner of the Bogus Blurb of the Week award comes in an ad for Indecision, a book by Benjamin Kunkel:

Media

September 16, 2005

Kaplan Rocks, Sez Kaplan

Metro, one of the Top 10 free commuter dailies in New York City, has a special section today about business school. An article about preparing for the GMAT, entitled "Countdown to test day," has exactly one quoted source, from Kaplan Test Prep. Her name, in a delicious coincidence, is Susan Kaplan. She delivers several candid, unbiased tips, like "It's such an investment to go to business school, so take the time to invest in prep."

Sports

September 16, 2005

Putting It In Perspective (III)

In earlier entries, Gelf pondered how sports columnists and coaches incorporate tragedy—lately, of course, Katrina—into their leisure-based jobs. But how do fans cope? We've been told that many were inspired or at least pleasantly distracted by the football wins scored by the New Orleans Saints and LSU Tigers last weekend, and undoubtedly some were. Not all, though: As Sports Pickle reported, "Non-Saints Fan Still Upset About His Destroyed Home and Dead Family."

Media

September 14, 2005

Google Images

Perhaps in an effort to burnish its reputation as the master of all things internet-related, Google today launched a website that allows people to search the content of blogs throughout the web. Given that there is still much confusion about how many blogs are out there (see Carl's WSJ.com column), as well as dissent about what defines a blog and how that content should be searched, Google may have some work to do before it reels in smaller competitors in the field like Technorati and Ice Rocket. But surely Google's blog-search tool doesn't deserve the picture the BBC assigned to it.

Media

September 12, 2005

Those Lucky Celebrities

New York's Metro newspaper, Gelf's favorite free commuter daily, had this hot scoop last Thursday:

Sports

September 12, 2005

Putting It In Perspective (II)

In an earlier entry, Gelf enumerated the ways in which sports columnists contextualize tragedy. To wit:

• Sports Are an Uneccessary Distraction
• Sports Are a Necessary Distraction
• Disasters Force Athletes to Have Perspective

This pretty much spans the range of columnist's responses. But what of coaches? For them, Disasters are a Great Motivator!

Media

September 9, 2005

What Would Sistani Do?

In this week's edition of Zooming In, Gelf's quasi-weekly round-up of undercovered local stories from around the world: Japan's Jayson Blair; robotic camel jockeys; the mobile phone throwing world championships; and China's newest pop idols. One of our favorite stories this week concerns advice given out by a certain Ayatolla.

Politics

September 7, 2005

Rehnquist on eBay

On Monday, shortly after the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a copy of the Bush v Gore decision, signed by the justice, was put up for sale on eBay. The nature of the posting, which in one place misspelled the justice's name as Reinquist and offered a money-back satisfaction guarantee, led Wonkette writer Holly Martins to question the document's authenticity. Gelf talked to the seller, Tim Miller of FlatSigned.com, to figure out what was going on.

Media

September 6, 2005

Putting it in Perspective

In the aftermath of great disasters, sports columnists are in a fix. They need to write about sports, but they don't want to seem so callous as to not address the national emergency at hand. Hence the "putting it in perspective" genre, in which the writers announce that, at a time like this, sports are pretty silly. Within the genre, though, there are subdivisions. Columnists can declare whether this silliness is a good or bad thing, and opine about how the tragedy has changed the sporting world. Gelf breaks them down:

Politics

September 6, 2005

I Knew the British Were Slow

But this takes it to extremes… From today's New York Times:

The 1953 storm also pounded Britain. Along the Thames, flooding killed more than 300 people, ruined farmland and frightened Londoners, whose central city narrowly escaped disaster. The British responded with a plan to better regulate tidal surges sweeping up the Thames from the North Sea. Engineers designed an attractive barrier meant to minimize interference with the river's natural flow. It went into service in 1982 at Woolwich, about 10 miles east of central London.