Self-deprecation and crazy sex teases, together at last. Anyhow she says she could be getting out of jail any day now, and you better believe we have big plans for her when she gets out. We haven't thought them up yet, though. Read her entire long-ass letter, as always, at Animal NY.

• Posting Calorie Counts on All Restaurant Menus: NYC Overseer and Lord Michael Bloomberg has tried this, but a new study says people are actually eating more at fast food outlets since the calorie postings went up.
• Banning Fast Food Restaurants Altogether: They want to do this is South Los Angeles, at least until enough health food stores open up to even things out. Researchers say it won't accomplish anything.
• Fewer Junk Food Snacks in Schools: The CDC now says fewer American schools are selling candy and soda! Nevertheless—although the American school system produces more NBA players than any other nation's—American kids are only fit in their video game avatars. In real life they are not fit, but rather unfit.
• The Biggest Loser: It's not just a disturbing television show any more—now it's a franchise with cookbooks, a Wii fitness game, and even a god damn "Biggest Loser Resort" weight loss spa where you pay money to go live the life of a loser. Unless 300 million of us can fit in there, it's just a tiny chocolate chip on the vast sea of frosting that is American obesity.

According to Fox, the exercise took place "moments before President Obama and his motorcade crossed a nearby bridge."

Hey that's a great idea—a training exercise in public in our nation's capital close to the president on the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Maybe they could fly some planes really low over the city, too, just to train on how to do it?

UPDATE: CNN says "there were reports on police scanners that the Coast Guard fired 10 rounds of ammunition, but those reports could not immediately be confirmed. It was not immediately clear from the reports whether they referred to warning shots." The incident took place near the Memorial Bridge, in part of the river that was closed to boat traffic as a security precaution during 9/11 memorial ceremonies.

UPDATE: Washington news-radio station WTOP explains—the Coast Guard conducted a training exercise this morning that included radio instructions to fire 10 rounds. But the rounds were not actually fired, and there was no suspicious boat. CNN picked up on the radio chatter and reported it, causing a minor panic. According to Drudge, departures at National Airport were halted briefly as a precaution.

The Observer caught Lebowitz at a Graydon Carter-hosted book party last night and asked her what she thought of the McKinsey consultants descending on Condé Nast:

"Well, I don't think it's anyone working there who hired them!" Ms. Lebowitz said. "The thing is, everyone seeks a lot of advice now. People who make $40,000 a year have financial consultants. 'How should I deal with my money?' Don't spend all of it! It's just common sense."

Annie, you should listen to Frannie.

Radios are old, right? Get rid of that 'Radio' anchor weighing down your valuable forward-thinking brand of the future, by all means! But for god's sake, replace it with something. Otherwise you get this:

[Our] tipster says that in-store signs will reflect the change this week, and storefront signage will begin to be reworked as "The Shack" sometime later this year.

Forget the old "Radio Shack." The new home of sophisticated electronic retailing is "The Shack."
With everyone broke, this should go over well.
[Endgadget. Pic via]

GOOD: The updated stash box, by Base. People already like their own stash boxes so they'll probably like these. Keeps weed dry!


BAD: Corny ass stickers, by The Heads of State. Weed is cool. Slapping corny stickers with slogans like "Uptown Schwag" on your weed package is not cool. Why would you do such a thing? Narcs.

See all the designs at Print Mag [via Fast Company]

We'd like to put together a guide to Surviving McKinsey, for the beleaguered Conde employees who want nothing more than to make it out of this thing with their jobs intact (expense accounts be damned). So we're asking you: Have you ever survived a McKinsey visit to your company, without getting canned or otherwise screwed? How'd you do it? Send us your brilliant tips for making yourself invisible to job-hungry outside consultants, and we'll incorporate them into our handy survival guide. Do it for the love of gloss.

Subject line: "McKinsey survival." Email us now!

"...the Tribunal accepted Mr Gasquet's plea of No Significant Fault or Negligence, on the basis that he was able to demonstrate on the balance of probabilities how the cocaine entered his system (through inadvertent contamination in a nightclub the night before his scheduled match)"

He said he kissed some girl in a club and she had, like, cocaine all over her lips or something, and that excuse totally worked! This excuse will join "Stepped on a needle in the park" and "It seeped through my pores while I was holding money contaminated with coke, unbeknownst to me" in the Classic Cokehead Excuse Lexicon.
[Pic: Getty]

This whole argument is premised on the assumption that we must save newspapers. At the cost of making the internet into an inefficient mess! So Richard Posner, professional smart man and US Appeals Court judge who writes 23,000 words per day, floated the idea of banning links (and more!), so internet cannibals don't keep stealing newspaper content for nothing:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Periods, Richard Posner. Try them. To break up text. What you may notice here is that Posner proposes banning linking or paraphrasing copyrighted materials. The problem: this is America dude, we say what we fucking want, amirite?

You can copyright a news story, but you can't copyright the news. "The news" just means "things that happen in the world." What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let's ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

We all know journalism happens only at newspapers. Better to protect them at all costs than to invest in the murky "future."

This idea is supported by a newspaper columnist! Connie Schultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (who's married to a senator, btw, nothing to see here), also touts the idea of giving newspapers a 24-hour injunction on news they post, during which time it's all theirs, and can't be aggregated by others online.

Fine. You can have your injunction. But you can't stop anyone from discussing, and writing about, current events. As they happen. Go read all those "Twitter Generation" stories you guys are always writing! The idea that it's worth crippling the entire free flow of information on the internet in order to add to the bottom line of newspaper companies is prima facie idiotic. I guess you could also help save newspapers by passing a law that everyone has to buy one every day, or by making it illegal for TV news to exist. That doesn't make those things good ideas.

If Bill Gates pledged to make it so computers could not be operated properly until the user could prove they had read today's Cleveland Plain-Dealer that might save a reporter and he is a monster for not doing so, QED.
[Pic: Chronicling America]

See, now the Daily News will now be released as "an edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer." But everything else will stay exactly the same!

Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney said the change will save money on wire services by allowing the publications to act as a single subscriber, and will be helpful in selling advertising.

"Instead of telling advertisers we have 330,000 circulation (at the Inquirer) plus the Daily News, it will help to say we have 440,000 daily circulation," Tierney said.

Instead of telling advertisers and vendors we have two smaller papers, we'll tell them we have one larger paper. Nobody will know. [Philly.com]

The positives: $500,000 out of a rich person's pocket. Their absence from the New York metropolitan area from Memorial Day through Labor Day. And Hamptons parties overrun with bandaged, Joker-like figures, grinning grotesquely through their new masks of plastic.

This is like tee-ball for righteous outrage. Give us a challenge, you decadent monsters.

[NYDN]

A columnist for the Sun, Alicia Colon, said writers who pull no punches in their news pieces might not be able handle the give-and-take of political negotiations and campaigning.

"To be a politician you have to compromise, and I don't think a lot of editors or columnists would be able to do it." Ms. Colon said. "Maybe they have too much integrity.

Way to dig deep to find someone to represent extremism, NY Sun. Extremism of integrity, that is. But is it really too much integrity that stops columnists from taking their rightful place as our leaders—or is it that the masses are simply afraid of their intellectual honesty?

"We have a nasty tendency to see complexities in life, and I suspect your average politician likes to think in more terms of black and white," [NYT columnist Clyde] Haberman said yesterday in an interview. "They don't get bothered too much by all the gray that defines life for most people."

This is the finest coffee that we can make. ALL of this coffee is in the store within 2 weeks of its roasting date, and is fresh everyday, delivered from our new roasting plant, intended for your satisfaction. Its a mild coffee and is made fresh every 30 minutes, instead of every hour. Starbucks spent alot of money on this.
I just would like to share with you, that we are not just about baristas, and frapps. Its about the farmers as well. We help their children eat, and the farmers take great joy into working with us. I encourage all of you on Tuesday to go to your local store and try the new blend. And when you try it, think of the positives instead of just assuming the coffee sucks. To us, coffee is a goal, and a dream. If anything, work together.
We have gone astray with the values that we used to have, so hang in there as we transform that company back to what it was inteded. Quality service, and great tasting, fresh, coffee.

Of the seven varieties of coffee, the reviewer was dissatisfied with five. Among the criticisms: "a long, unpleasantly bitter aftertaste," ""I hate it. That's really spoiled fruit, like really bad wine," and "The drip coffee tasted burned and acidic."

If none of the coffees made a favorable impression, we concluded, it seemed that the problem lay less with the Clover, or the quality of the beans, than with the roast.

All the beans we tried had the oily surface you get in a dark roast, commonly called French and Italian roast. Starbucks and other companies are often criticized by coffee connoisseurs for using over-roasted beans.

Overall, the Clover coffee tasted the same as a French press, just quicker. Wow.

In conclusion, stop burning the beans, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. You could have just read the comments around here to learn that.