Spencer Morgan is a very good writer for the New York Observer, and another thing about Spencer Morgan is that 100% of his articles are designed to get you mad. Usually they make you mad because he writes about men who are objectionable in one way or another. Then once in a while Spencer Morgan is like "Hey, for a change of pace I think I will play like an objectionable man, myself." This is a pose and it is how he wins, as a journalist. A mad reader is an engaged reader!

So today Spencer Morgan goes and writes a story that is clearly preposterous, on its face, inventing this new made-up term "cheetah" to describe a lady that is not as old as a "cougar" but still likes to "prey" on weak men, and fuck them, for sex, when they are drunk or otherwise vulnerable. He makes sure to say "fuck" and "pussy" a few times, right there in the story, and to quote a bunch of NYC blogger scene guys (AJ Daulerio! John Carney! Lockhart Steele!) breaking down THE GAME, and how Cheetah Women run it on men, just to underscore the very important subtext of this story, which is: "Here is a caricature of the 'Cougar' type of story, which, preposterously, is taken seriously, in the media." Whereas some fake trend stories attempt to get one over on you by making you actually believe a fake trend exists, this story does not. The headline of this story should be, "I Really Hope Many People Get Very Vocally Mad About This Story, And Talk About Sexism, Because Then It Would Be Funny How Seriously They Took This Story." (It's a bit unwieldy, yes).

Rachel Sklar is so mad about this story!

Spencer Morgan: Winning by making people mad.

[Disclosure: I am a male though. Pic via]

They all totally agree.

Furthermore, the Observer reports that the following people have been spotted, at one time or another in the recent past, in Midtown: Paper magazine's Mickey Boardman, Penélope Cruz, Pedro Almodóvar, Debbie Harry and fashion couple Isabel and Ruben Toledo, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Anna Wintour, Zac Posen, L'Wren Scott, Richard Gere, André Balazs and Sumner Redstone, Bill Murray, Meryl Streep, David Chang, J Lo, Naomi Campbell, Clive Davis, Carolina Herrera and Calvin Klein, Agyness Deyn, Terence Koh, Vito Schnabel, Arden Wohl, Kirsten Dunst, Michael Stipe, Charlotte Ronson, and Julie Gilhart.

So you see, this is the new Midtown: Populated by celebrities, socialites, scenesters bored with downtown, and, above all, the rich.

Everything is different now.
[Pic via]

A New York Times Style section freelancer sent out this query today to Help A Reporter Out, the email service that connects flacks to reporters in need of sources. RESPONSES ABOUT THE COOLNESS OF HIGH SCHOOL CHORAL GROUPS ONLY.

Summary: Sing along with "Glee"
Media Outlet: New York Times
Region: United States
Deadline: 01:11pm EASTERN - 17 November
Query:

Story is for Styles section of the NYT. The topic: how is the hit show
"Glee" affecting kids' participation in school choral groups or choruses
Are they joning in droves? Are they, in fact, startang their own such
groups. Is the show suddently making it, yes, COOL, to be part of a school
chorale Would like to hear from high school students, high school teachers
and music educators. NO OFF TOPIC RESPONSES PLEASE

As if the fake marketing and technology trends challenging the manhood of young, attractive males wasn't worrying enough, now we have to contemplate the existence of a parallel fake trend afflicting our parents and grandparents which we really would prefer not to contemplate, at all, but there it is, right in the AARP magazine, of course:

"I'll say, 'You have an amazing body. You have amazing breasts,'" he reports. The next thing you know, you'll get a picture of a breast," he says with a hearty laugh.

Yea but an old dude said that, which makes it totally...

"If you're sitting in a restaurant waiting for your food, you can just talk dirty to someone, and no one knows what you're doing," Jill says, in a slow Southern drawl. "I would rather talk on the phone. But I'm also comfortable with hiding behind texting if I want to say something dirty."

Gurl u no ur body just don't quit. Gurl u no u shd let me show u my male body lotion. Gurl UR so fine.

It's not like you just have children and then don't have to worry about your fitness routine and whether the changes induced in it by parenthood would be good fodder for any fake trend stories in the NYT. You do have to worry about such things! You think jogging while pushing a stroller is just as easy as regular jogging, except while pushing a stroller? The paper of record has like a thousand words of filler that say you're wrong:

Ms. Arnold of Santa Fe joked that strollers should come with a placard, warning starry-eyed parents of what an intense workout they provide.

She's absolutely right. Strollers should come with a placard warning starry-eyed parents of what an intense workout they provide. "WARNING," this placard would say, in bold letters. "This stroller provides an intense workout."

But one placard won't be enough to resolve all of the serious fitness issues facing the adult New York Times-reading population. Allow us to present to you Michelle Slatalla's newest column detailing her adventures as a Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy. In this episode: Michelle likes to play tennis at the tennis club but she hurt her wrist and now she has to learn to serve with her other hand and despite her extensive work with Rafael the club tennis pro she's hesitant about returning to playing tennis competitively at the tennis club but her entire tennis team is putting mad peer pressure on her to come back to playing tennis until one day, Michelle reports, "She had put me in the lineup! OMG, OMG, OMG!"

She plays okay. The point is, the reader demographics of the New York Times are fucking terrifying.
[Pic via]

• USA Today: "What happened to civility?"
• Hartford Courant: "US Lacking In Civility."
• Houston Chronicle: "Incivility is heard 'round the nation."
• Washington Post: "Call it the Glenn Beck-ization of America or an erosion of civility."
• San Diego Union-Tribune: "There's been a real shortage of civility lately."
• ESPN: "What has happened to civility?"
• Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Psst: The death of public civility."
• Columbus Dispatch: "Public figures aren't the only Americans who act this way, says P.M. Forni, co-founder of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore."
• Examiner.com: "All three episodes are a sad reflection on the politics of civility in contemporary society."
• Wichita Falls Times Record News: "If civility isn't dead, it's definitely on a respirator."

[Pic: Getty]

What happened to poor Julie Klam? Six months ago, the writer was "the best updater on Facebook," according to the Times' Viriginia Heffernan (pictured), excelling in a burgeoning genre of "perfect... spontaneous bursts of being." Klam was grateful for the value placed on her prolific Facebooking, but it seems her experience quickly went downhill; in a column published Wednesday, the same Klam was quoted by the same Heffernan as saying Facebook "felt dead" as of a few months ago — in other words, right after she "friended" Heffernan on the social network. "I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it's kids getting tired of a new toy."

The moral of the story: Journalists cannot be bothered to find fresh sources in the dog days of August for their specious (the New York Observer debunked it by the numbers earlier today) trend stories. Also: Under no circumstances should you "friend" Virginia Heffernan.

(Pic via)

THE ANGLE: The DC Suburbs are a "Safe Harbor of Reinvention" for the "Scandal-Tainted." Jayson Blair, Linda Tripp, Reagan-era HUD official Deborah Gore Dean—all retreated to the DC suburbs after their scandals. Not because they were from there, or because the DC suburbs are right next to DC, where they work, but because of the DC suburbs' magical scandal-healing springs that bubble up just over the city line, drawing supplicants desperate for their powers of reinvention, and thirst-quenching.

[Deborah Gore Dean is actually in Georgetown, which is not really a DC "suburb."]

This story also features a quote from instaquote machine Gene Grabowski, who I loved when I was a reporter because he will give you a quote on anything, and never tell you your made-up angle is stupid. He's great!

Don't let us steal the journalistic thunder—Read the whole story at WashingtonPost.com. A real newspaper put real work into it.

Employees of the New York Times Style section enjoy spending time in The Hamptons, and they can't help but spot social trends, with their trained journalistic peepers. These trends can be profitably converted into Style section stories that will pay for more weekends in The Hamptons. They could spot these very same trends in many inferior areas, but that would necessitate traveling to inferior areas. The trends would then become unimportant.

In The Hamptons, people judge one another based on t-shirt design. The multitudinous t-shirt designs of The Hamptons are one of the world's most interesting topics.

I am talking about T-shirts, of course, like the one from Ditch Witch in Montauk, sold in one place only: a car adjacent to the Ditch Witch food truck...There are those who swear by T-shirts from a strangely honky-tonk roadside lobster shack in Amagansett...There are some who prefer the pastel T-shirts that, until last year, were sold from only one place, beneath the counter at the Candy Kitchen luncheonette in Bridgehampton...Others demonstrate their south-of-the-highway credentials by sporting a homely T-shirt from Harry Ludlow's Fairview Farm on Mecox Road...Some lucky folks have managed to score shirts from Big Olaf's Ice Cream in Sag Harbor...There are T-shirts so echt-Hamptons that they have entered local lore, like the one commemorating Virgil the Frog Boy...A T-shirt from the Meadow Club in Southampton remains, in its way, the matchless symbol of privileged belonging.

Fascinating. Fuck The Hamptons, and their t-shirts.
[NYT]

Brooks Brothers is totally selling a lot, and that suave retailer isn't selling a lot of anything! They're the ultimate in pocket-protector chic, the perfect fashion accessory for a nation ruled by a nerd-in-chief.

Except: No. Just no. Even Tucker Carlson hasn't worn a bow tie since his sartorial embellishment figured in the epic beatdown Jon Stewart gave him. And the hero of Binkley's piece is some guy named Cooper Ray (above), who runs a site called SocialPrimer.com. Hello?

Binkley has been pushing bow ties for over a year now — a trend apparently driven by a single designer. In March 2008, she gushed over the ushers' bow ties at a Lanvin event: "My father-in-law wears them, and I like him, so maybe I'm partial." Full disclosure! Congratulations, Christina. For your ceaseless efforts to make bow ties happen, we now dub you the Gretchen Weiners of fashion reporting:

Sure, you want to teach your kids to eat healthy food. But some parents have little Johnny and Suzy running around scared of trans fats and sodium and who knows what else, to the point that they can't enjoy cookies etc. like a little kid should! Some parents are even starving their kids to death:

[A dietitian] recalled a mother who brought in her preteen, apparently bulimic daughter. As Ms. Setnick discovered, the girl was not trying to lose weight. "Her mother only served brown rice, but she didn't like it," Ms. Setnick said. "She did like white rice. And while I'm not going to tell anyone what they can bring into their own home, we discussed that when the family went out, it would be O.K. to get white rice."

When the girl told her mother what Ms. Setnick said, the mother was furious, according to Ms. Setnick. "She said, ‘Don't you know white rice is just like sugar?' "

Outrageous! Round up the pitchforks, handcuffs, feeding tubes, and bags of Cheetos—we're off to save some kids from nutty health food! Christ, it sounds like this is everywhere. I mean the Times didn't even have that compulsory graf buried somewhere halfway down in a trend story that slyly reveals the whole premise of the piece is made-up for maximum shock effect...oh, wait:

But even without firm numbers, anecdotal reports from specialists suggest that a preoccupation with avoiding "bad" foods is an issue for many young people who seek help.

Still, punch any granola-bearing parents just in case. [NYT. Pic via]

True, a typesetter transcribing the speech did follow a semicolon with a parenthesis — the "wink" emoticon we all pretend to hate and secretly use in IM all the time ;) . And it did come in a parenthetical reference to the crowd's "applause and laughter" inserted by the transcriber. But Bryan Benilous, the researcher at ProQuest who noted the anomaly, admits that it's the only occurrence he saw in hundreds of similar, contemporaneous passages. If it were an intentional usage, meant to be read with its modern sense, wouldn't someone elsehave picked it up? Let us give the final word on the notion that emoticons have a 147-year-long history: :-p

A user on eBaum's World, a site which posts pictures and invites often profane discussion, suggested his peers search on a string of icons — "✈ ▌▌" — and thereby launch it onto Google Trends, the search engine's tracker for swiftly rising Internet phenomena.

The trick worked; Google's algorithm declared the glyph's rise "volcanic." And despite a surge of protests about its tastelessness, the Googlers have yet to censor the term, as they've been known to do with other offensive searches which show up on Google Trends, like a swastika symbol which showed up last summer.

Officially, Google says it has robots which take care of this: "The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material." In reality? The 9/11 hack shows how easy it is to fool Google.

The star of the Times piece is Michael Buckley, a fast-talking and overbearingly gay celebrity commentator — think Ted Casablanca, if Ted Casablanca lived in Connecticut. Buckley says he makes $100,000 a year on YouTube ads. Google sells the ads and splits the revenue with Buckley, as it does with other video creators it has dubbed "partners."

It just gets worse from there, if you're looking for online originals. Take "Fred," the most-subscribed partner with 700,000-some regular viewers. A guy pretends to be a six-year-old, Fred Figglehorn, who speaks with an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice. (Yes, that's the extent of the schtick.)

These crap shows are the future of moneymaking on the Web — trite reworkings of tropes that we first watched in basic-cable reruns, lying on the floor of our dens?

If it's bad news for the culture, take schadenfreudian delight in the thought that it's bad news for Google, too, which spent $1.65 billion buying YouTube and is thought to be shelling out hundreds of millions more a year on servers and bandwidth.

At least Google can sell ads on partner videos. Most of the clips on YouTube are of such questionable ownership and quality that Google doesn't dare sell ads next to them. A Google spokesman says "hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month." Well, that's vague enough, but it tells us that Google's annual take from these videos runs somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. It turns out that crappy video is a crappy business. Justice!

Yes, nanotechnology — the catch-all term for fiddling with materials at the molecular level. A scientific study found that opposition to nanotech on moral grounds varied in proportion to the prevalence of strong religious beliefs in a country.

What offends the religious about nanotech? The notion that man is fiddling with nature, mostly. Futurists predicted nano research would lead us into a future of self-assembling, microscopic robots which would tear the earth apart atom from atom in a runaway quest for raw materials.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists are just as offended by nanotech, though on financial grounds, not ethical ones. Nanotech turned out to be vastly overhyped, a bubble that never really inflated. There was no gray goo, no robots, not even any fiddling with nature of consequence. The reality of nanotech is prosaic: It ended up being good mostly for stain-resistant khakis.

But that just shows you how much both the proponents and the detractors of futuristic technology engage in acts of wild faith and outrageous belief — over something so small, it doesn't actually exist.

See, statistics say the "Fitness" field will grow by a quarter by 2016. How much of that growth will be from laid-off corporate types? The New York Times has no idea, but they found several anecdotes to create the appearance of a full-on exodus!

One equities lady became a yoga instructor, at a salary of $20K. Hardly a sound financial decision! A stock trader opened a personal training place in Jersey. A former healthcare executive is organizing "ultradistance" races out of his basement. A lady went to Harvard, then quit a lawyer job to teach yoga.

Ironclad!

Not only is this trend fabricated, but even if it were real, it stands to reason that it would collapse immediately. If people can't make money working for Wall Street, do we expect them to flourish as personal trainers, one of the things that any smart person would immediately cut from their budget during a recession? No. The future of recession fitness is obviously this:

What Did You Call It? [NYT]