What is even going on, when "liberal columnist" Maureen Dowd writes a column about how Obama should govern the country the way Sarah Palin promotes books, and token conservative Ross "still at least definitely not Bill Kristol" Douthat patiently explains that Huckabee and Palin are both ridiculous jokes.

Well, what is going on is that Ross "cares" about the "credibility" of the Republican party, and also he knows, as a grown man who reads books and remembers history, that these clowns will not be president of anything, ever.

Whereas Maureen is, as always, internalizing and repeating the dumbest talking points of the Cheney wing of the Republican party (a world where "bowing" is a scandal and "dithering" is a resonant critique) (and also "mom jeans," because, you know, it's not a Maureen Dowd column without a crack about how a Democrat is embarrassingly feminine). Obviously Obama should just act more like a petulant, polarizing moron, screeching for attention and repeatedly castigating the various people who have wronged him, because that would definitely take care of this Afghanistan mess.

Here are the sort of people he could then welcome into his governing coalition, once he "goes rogue."

It was a clear black night, a big first date

Walter G was in the sheets, tryna consummate

His skirt for the eve, but she left in a huff

Rollin on his side, chillin all alone.

He hit the East Side, up to old Club D's

on a Mission tryna find Mrs. Walter G

Seen a group full of girls, pals from Trinity

All those skirts knew what up with IBD.

Oh, sorry about that! You caught me right in the middle of working on a toast for an old pal from tennis camp who is getting married soon. I thought in lieu of a graceful anecdote about the fun we shared at Windridge back in the late 80's I'd call him out via "verse" about the night he first roofied his fiance.

Because did you know that there is "a growing collection" of wedding toasts that are "sung, or even rapped"? It's true: an editor at Brides.com used to hear about this five times a year, and now it's three to five times a month! It's all the fault of YouTube, or the fact that we were "raised on" Family Guy, even though Family Guy first aired in 1999 and so anyone who was "raised" on it is currently like 14 years old.

But I digress. I'm more worried about the woman whose friend decided to base her toast on "'Eleanor Rigby' by the Beatles because that is her favorite song." Yeah, she changed the words, but do you really want people on your wedding day reminded of something whose original lyrics include phrases like "all the lonely people", "buried along with her name", and "no one was saved"?

Anyway, I'm just amped because I don't have to change the …getting' high like every day lyric for my friend's toast! This is going to be great. I can't wait to be a YouTube sensation.

***

One thing is for sure: the wedding of Bess Rattray and Paul Gartside should be soundtracked by a choral arrangement of Cape Breton Lullaby (anyone else have to sing that song in seventh grade chorus?) This wedding announcement is interesting beause it somehow miraculously manages to combine East Hampton, sailing, and Vogue magazine in a not-annoying way.

Rattray, a "freelance magazine editor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia" and the scionne of the East Hampton Star publishing family that is "one of the oldest in East Hampton and includes several generations of whalers" was taking a sailing class in Maine while there to write an article for Vogue. Everything about that last sentence makes you jealous, admit it! Looking to find someone to chaperone her on a sailboat, she found "laconic Welshman" Paul Gartside, a naval architect who was teaching a class on boat design.

Several days later, after Gartside invited Rattray to join him in a regatta, they parted ways and he returned to Vancouver Island. But seriously, fuck you youngs and your sexting: you're not going to seal the deal unless you actually seal an envelope:

Neither believed their interaction was more than a brief flirtation, but after returning home they each received a note from the other expressing great pleasure in their meeting.

The notes crossed paths in the mail, and three months later it was Mr. Gartside who crossed the continent as he embarked on a different kind of voyage.

How baller is that? They got married in Nevis. They really don't make freelance writers the way they used to. And last year they adopted an Ethiopian baby. Someone needs to acquire the film rights to these people. I'm seeing Meryl, or maybe Emma Thompson, I'm seeing John Slattery in a fisherman's sweater …

Mia Feldbaum and Mark McGoldrick also met over water sports, only in this case it was a canoe trip in the Yukon territory and one of them was paralyzed from the waist down.

The "combustible fuel of alcohol, drugs, and trouble" of McGoldrick's adolescence left him paralyzed (there's a copy editing error in the lede of the Times piece, see if you can spot it) but also inspired him to travel the world and graduate cum laude from Harvard Law. The pair met when Mia was leading the 800-mile canoe trip — "Mark and Mia met tough," remarked Mia's father. "They had grizzlies, floods, mud, big snags in the river."

The couple survived all those things, and also survived this small bit of creepinees:

When the canoe trip ended, the group boarded a van headed to Edmonton, Alberta, where Mr. McGoldrick would depart.

"She's driving through the night and everyone else behind us is sleeping," he recalled. "I was reciting poetry to her, very softly."

Unclear on whether it was the poetry of a wedding toast RAP.

Moving on, guess how old this woman is!

Freaking SIXTY. I mean, not bad, right!? I want what she's having, even if what she's having is minimally invasive.

That's Susan Mendik, who is really short and loves golf and one time she got stuck in Palm Beach, where she winters, on Valentine's Day in a snowstorm and she ended up meeting up with Moe Tarkinow, whom she had been fixed up with previously, and the proposal story kind of confuses me because I guess he had custom chopsticks printed up with with the name Suzy Tarkinow on them and gave them to her during her 60th birthday dinner and "the whole place erupted" but then she mentions that the next morning after she thought about it "I knew it was the right time and the right man" but does that mean she actually said "Let me think about it" at the time in front of the erupting room? Because if so, imagine how the servers must have felt!

Elsewhere this weekend, a bride named Rainbow would have a nondenominational wedding; the "founder of PhemPhat Productions, an entertainment company in Toronto that promotes women in hip-hop and produces the annual Honey Jam concert" must really have gotten all the good wedding toasts; I know it's traditional but I still think it's awkward for just the bride to pose for a picture; this man, as far as I can tell, loitered at college bars looking for younger women … and it worked!; this mother of the bride is named Phyllis Meller and she is a wedding planner - email me, Phyllis, so I can interview you!; and this bride is an aggregate composite sketch of what every dietician I have ever met looks like.

Oh, and I'm not going to watch the video this week, although I do admit that the teaser in the print section of the paper telling me that "Mr. Buxton later proposed over a rigged game of Boggle."

This week's matchup:

Emily Theriault and Luca Laino

• The couple were married at The Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, a fancy club where old men swim and then pad down the hallways totally in the nude: +2
• The couple met at Dartmouth where they both received MBAs: +7
• Both are investment bankers: +2
• The bride is a VP and the groom is an associate: -1
• The groom's father is an opthalmology professor at Cornell medical school: +1
• The groom went to Camp Trin Trin: +1

TOTAL: 12

Helen Bailey and Farhad Manjoo

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Yale and received a medical degree at UC-Davis: +7
The groom graduated from Cornell: +3
The groom writes about Facebook and Kindles and Y2K for Slate (his advice on blogging: "Don't expect instant fame" and "Don't worry if your posts suck a little". Duly noted!): +2
I am a Slate fangirl: +1
The bride's father is a senior Lockheed Martin engineer: +2
They both wear power-nerd glasses: +2

TOTAL: 17. I just want to know what password Manjoo uses for his registry.

The lofty rhetoric surrounding the launch of outfits like the CNC, a MacArthur Foundation-funded news organization run by former Chicago Tribune staffers, is based on the notion that genuine public-service journalism—the expensive boring stuff that results in legislation—is at risk as for-profit newspapers crater. In the words of CNC founder and former Trib editor Jim O'Shea:

At a time of declining resources in newsrooms across the nation, journalists must adapt to new technologies and devise some creative, innovative ways to fulfill our obligations so we can hold our government accountable to citizens and restore to our journalism the standards desperately needed in these troubled times.

Newspapers can't afford to live up to those obligations anymore, so nonprofit-funded outlets like the CNC need to step into the gap. So what sort of hard-hitting "accountability journalism" can we expect from these new creatures? The CNC has contracted with the New York Times to produce an insert for the paper's Chicago editions purporting to bring Chicago readers the sort of shoe-leather that the bankrupt Chicago Tribune can't afford to produce anymore. It debuted today, so lets have a look.

• The lead story, by former Trib reporter Dan Mihalopoulos, is precisely in line with what news alarmists say will be missing if and when we lose newspapers: Internal documents from the company that the city of Chicago sold its parking meter business to last year show that it is making boatloads of money, and that the city would have done better just to keep the meters for itself. Bravo!

Now for the rest:

• A trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where we learn that "young people (under 30) tend to enjoy modern art."
• A 195-word story about a stay-at-home dad who tried to join a play-group for his infant son, but couldn't because it was for moms only.
• A 156-word story about the Chicago Bulls' "circus trip," an annual tour that the item doesn't really explain but has something to do with Ringling Bros. and the Bulls losing. Here's a Sun-Times blog entry on the matter, published two days ago.
• A column from Jim Warren wherein he visits a food pantry.

Some of this is perfectly useful, but is it going to save journalism? Does a recitation of the Bulls' woes count as holding "our government accountable to citizens"? Is the MacArthur Foundation fulfilling its mission of creating a "more just, verdant, and peaceful world" by subsidizing stories about dads getting barred from mommies' groups? Is this what all the fuss is about?

The problem is that yes, newspapers underwrite important, expensive journalism that in many cases falls through the cracks in the pageview-obsessed, run-and-gun environment of online publishing. But that's perhaps five percent of what the average paper does. Maybe ten or fifteen. But it's a fraction. The rest of it is rewriting press releases, spouting opinions, reviewing things, and telling people what's on television and when—things the internet is exceptionally good at. CNC has loudly proclaimed that it is going to take up the slack and "restore" journalism's "true values," but, to judge by its first outing, all it's doing is creating a mini-newspaper—one solid story surrounded by a bunch of fluff that you could get anywhere. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with fluff, it's just that no one is raising alarms about the lack of quality writing about art museums and sports and opinions about poor people as newspapers decline.

If the idea of nonprofit journalism and innovative ways of paying for and distributing important reporting is going to succeed, it's going to have to actually produce important reporting. And if former newspapermen are going to lay claim to journalism's future by launching projects aimed at restoring its values, they ought to come up with something better than one good muni story.

UPDATE: Jim Schachter, editor of digital initiatives for the Times, writes in to make a good point that we hadn't considered—the Times asked CNC to provide a mix of serious and fluffy stories. So it was the Times, and not CNC, that wanted the mini-newspaper. We still don't understand why the MacArthur Foundation has to step in to help pay for the fluff the Times is asking for, or where that fluff fits into the CNC's journalism-saving rhetoric. But good point nonetheless:

Perhaps your dart is a bit misaimed. We asked the Chicago News Cooperative to give us a mix of content, because we're trying to come up with a formula for adding local news to The Times that prompts people to keep their subscriptions or start one if they're not buying our paper now. The tough story at the center of today's report, about the parking meter deal, is representative of what CNC means to be about. And, to be fair, so is Jim Warren's humane and pointed column.

I'm expecting to see a lot more afflicting of the comfortable and comforting of the afflicted from Jim O'Shea and his crew over the coming months.

I was beginning to panic. I pored over the book to see if there was anything that I shared in common with this apotheosis of traditional American values.

We both had what Palin calls "a love of the written word" and we both won Veterans of Foreign Wars writing contests as children.

We both read "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "Animal Farm."

We both came from families that loved Ronald Reagan, drove Ramblers and watched "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights.

Palin's father offered to let her hold some moose eyes. My dad came from Ireland, where they ate sheep eyes soup.

Sarah and I both banged on the upright piano in the living room and twirled around to "The Sound of Music."

We both grew up loving Hershey's bars and bacon and steak. As Sarah explains her carnivore philosophy: "I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals - right next to the mashed potatoes."

She hunted moose, and I hunted for Bullwinkle on TV.

We both belonged to the scouts, were baby sitters and kept diaries. (Of course, I was writing about making Jiffy Pop, and she, stacking firewood.)

We both now have stressful lives where we sometimes, as she puts it, want "a wife" to organize things. And we both went through an Ann Taylor period before discovering Dolce & Gabbana at consignment shops.

And both of them are propped up and supported by powerful, supposedly smart people for no other reason than that they both annoy liberals.

John Koblin reports that Andrew Rossi, the filmmaker associate producer behind Control Room (which was excellent), is now working on a documentary about the NYT's media desk. Hardworking multimedia jackanape Brian Stelter describes some of the action footage that is already accumulating in the filmmaker's archive:

"He watches me edit, watches me write, watches me write emails, watches me tweet, watches me do interviews," said Mr. Stelter. "There are some days that are going to be more exciting."

Well. It's, ah...more interesting than our average work day, at least. So...put it on your viewing schedule!

Murdoch was on a panel with Indian mogul Ratan Tata and Mexican billionaire and future New York Times owner Carlos Slim. The question that elicited Murdoch's bizarre reference to New York Gov. David Paterson was clearly directed at Fox News: "How do we bring more civil discourse to the discussion, and stop appealing to the populists on the right and the left?"

One way would be to not pay people millions of dollars to pursue bizarre conspiracy theories and call the first black president a racist—but that's not the Murdoch way! No, Murdoch's slurred, barely coherent answer blamed politicians, including Paterson, who, it's important to note, is "blind, and can't read braille, and doesn't know what's going on." And therefore is responsible for the lack of civil discourse in our political conversation. Class act. Good thing Murdoch has leftie liaison Gary Ginsberg at hand to smooth this over for him.

We're just going to throw this out there: Rupert Murdoch is not well. This senseless gaffe, on top of his strange and uncomprehending assertion last week that Barack Obama is indeed a racist just like Glenn Beck said and that no one at Fox News has ever compared Obama to Stalin when they obviously do on a nearly nightly basis, make him seem strange and muddled. He's getting old, and it's showing.

The conference had another highlight—Slim's defensive and belittling discussion of his minority stake in the New York Times. Asked why he loaned a quarter of a billion dollars to the struggling paper, Slim responded with a casual, "Why not?" before nearly interrupting the panel's moderator to point out that on top of a 14% interest rate, he'd received warrants in the deal. Asked to elaborate on the value of media investments, Slim started with, "I think the New York Times will pay. It was credit, with a high yield, and warrants." How reassuring. Slim did offer a perfunctory defense of the Times as a business, calling it one of the best newspapers in the world. Then he offered to lend money to the Wall Street Journal at 12%, two points better than he gave to the Times.

Yon sourced the report to "numerous very well placed sources," and said ex-CIA officers were involved in doling out millions to secure Rohde's release. This is of course at odds with Rohde and the Times' account of his ordeal—Rohde and his translator Tahir Ludin say they escaped serendipitously and without any outside help, and the Times says it paid no ransom. Yon seemed to be calling them liars.

"Not the case," says Yon. He wrote on his blog this morning that he was referring to the large amount of money spent by the Times on bribes sent "through Dubai to Pakistan" and money spent on "consultants and other expenses."

It's finally happened. I've spotted a trend. I feel winking and sleuthy and knowingly with-it. I'm a cross between Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair and Allen Salkin. I'm available for freelance work.

You ready for this?

Horseradish.

The root plant, part of the same family as mustard and wasabi, is a delicious addition to the Bloody Mary you are drinking right now, an important part of Passover, and an alleged aphrodisiac. (Gardening website Planet Natural is appropriately blasé on that last point: "It was also used by the Romans as an aphrodisiac. Although, what didn't they use as an aphrodisiac?")

It is also a trend. Thrice between this week and last, horseradish has been spotted in the wedding announcements in one form or another. And three is a trend, and thus it is so.

Last week, Melissa Johnson and Timothy Lagasse drank horseradish-infused vodka on their first date and ultimately held the condiment so dear to their union that they downed shots of same vodka at the altar.

For this week's featured couple Laura Strauss (of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux Strauses) and John Alexander, the horseradish plays a slightly more tangential but no less important role, appearing in a list of several vodka flavors served by the couple at their reception. Vodka because in Soviet Russia, shots take you:

Ms. Straus has, according to friends, a Russian soul. She is "a person of ‘strast,' of passions," said Paul Greenberg, a friend and the author of a love story partly set in Russia.

(I like Paul Greenberg's set of credentials there, by the way. Replace Russia with Brooklyn and everyone's an expert.)

Straus's Russian Soul's online dating page, which contained "lesser-known lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116", caught the Oxford-educated Alexander's attention, and the two hit it off on their first date when she learned he had studied Russian in boarding school.

Straus continued to date others, to the dismay of Alexander, but later we learn this probably wasn't the worst idea given the small detail that his divorce didn't become final until a year and a half after their first date.

Anyway then they got into some real Russian culture:

Inspired by a Russian friend, the couple became regulars at a Russian-style bathhouse in Lower Manhattan, where he and Ms. Straus would whack each other with supple oak branches, a method of stimulating circulation.

Supple and stimulating! Rosalie R. Radomsky, you naughty former news aide.

The largest manufacturer of prepared horseradish in the United States is Gold's, a kosher condiment company based in Hempstead, NY. That's "Gold's" as in newlywed Melissa Gold, the fifth generation of her family to work at the company.

Gold met her husband Adam Gottlieb "the old-fashioned way – set up by their maternal grandmothers, who were in the same Yiddish club at their retirement community in Monroe Township." (I'll just point out that a photograph of her "surrounded by the company's line of mustards in squeeze bottles" was involved in that particular meeting of the minds.)

After some charming fumbling and bumbling on the first few dates the couple finally became serious after Passover, much to the great delight of their sweet bubbes. It took until then, notes the Times parenthetically, because Passover was "Ms. Gold's busy season with stepped-up horseradish production."

I suppose while we're mentioning trends I'm contractually obligated to stifle a yawn at the "Field Notes" article about cougars.

You may wonder why the Times is returning to a topic that it already covered (twice!) a month ago. I guess now the "cubs" are pursuing the "cougars" and not the other way around, based on some anecdotal evidence about attendence at a couple of cougar speed dating events and cougar cruises? I dunno, my biggest takeaway was that Benjamin Franklin liked sexing the older ladies because they were "so grateful!"

The cougarticle was made all the more random by the fact that the biggest older woman-younger man age gap in any of the adjacent wedding announcements was one year. On the other hand, bring on the intergenerational gays! Andre Caraco and David Azulay have 12 years in between them, William Gorman and Joseph Nardone are 15 years apart, and James Godfrey and Gregory Miller are separated by 17. Who's the trend piece writer now?

Elsewhere this weekend, Donald Rumsfield's speechwriter and special assistant entered into a second union of lies; this bride has the most random (and thorough!) set of freelance assignments that I've ever seen listed in one announcement; I'm still trying to figure out a way to weasel myself into a Birthright trip; a decorated major in the Army got a nice homecoming; if your iPod keeps breaking you have this guy to blame; and Roger from the final cast of Rent is lightin' some candles of his own.

This week's faceoff is not even a contest, just to make that clear right up front. But while the runner-up couple might not have stood a chance against the winning powerhouse couple in the conventional points system, they have healthy power-Brooklyn cred. I can say this because I once wrote a love story based partly in Brooklyn. In my head.

Lauren Arana and Jesse Weinraub

• The bride graduated cum laude from Vassar: +3
• The bride received a master's in nonprofit and NGO leadership at Penn: +4
• The bride grew up in Brooklyn: +1
• The bride's mother is an education director at Berkeley Carroll School: +2
• The bride's father is an architect: +2
• The groom went to Wesleyan, the most annoying liberal arts school in the US: +10
• The groom works in the documentary department at HBO: +2
• The groom's dad is former New York Times Hollywood institution Bernard Weinraub: +2
• The groom's mom is former Washington Post food reporter Judith Weinraub: +2
• The bride is keeping her name: +1

Total Power-Brooklyn Points: 29

Lisa Rockefeller and Edward Sebelius

• The bride graduated cum laude from Princeton and received an MBA at Dartmouth: +8
• The groom graduated from Georgetown, from which he also received a law degree, and received a master's degree in public administration from Harvard: +6
• The couple was married at the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande by an Episcopal priest: +2
• "The bride is a descendant of William A. Rockefeller Jr., who with his brother John D. Rockefeller were among the founders of the Standard Oil Company": +3
• On the other hand, William A. is no John D.: -1
• "His mother is the secretary of Health and Human Services. Until May, she was the governor of Kansas.": +3
• I have an insane crush on Kathleen Sebelius and her hair of blinding perfection: +2
• No seriously, she must have looked so good at the wedding: +1
• The bridegroom's maternal grandfather is a former governor of Ohio, his paternal grandfather was a congressman who represented western Kansas, and his dad is a federal magistrate judge: +5
• The couple met in Iowa in 2003 while working on John Kerry's campaign: +2
Total New American Monarchy points: 31

My only issue is that I'm bummed the Times didn't take full advantage of the whole meeting-on-the-Kerry-campaign. Because really, they totally could have worked in this.

I mean, I guess we shouldn't be shocked? It's generally been accepted and engendered as common knowledge that the health care industry—where people go to, you know, try to keep living—is among the most bottom-line profit centers in America. That bottom line, of course, being somewhere between your heartbeat and your wallet. I still find this one a little hard to get over, though: it's probably been going on for years, and it's no doubt common practice where it's exercised, but still. When people are as unabashedly, apologetically having their agendas literally written by multinational corporations, you have to wonder what it's gonna take for someone to throw the first Molotov Cocktail, figurative or otherwise.

The New York Times found emails proving that a subsidiary of Swiss pharmaceutical pusher Roche had their distributed talking points for both Democrats and Republicans printed in the Congressional Record under the names of 42 representatives. It was almost an even split: 22 Republicans, 20 Democrats.

This shit's just incredible. Watch this jackass blame it on his staff instead of making himself accountable:

In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: "I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was." He said he got his statement from his staff and "did not know where they got the information from."

Asshole. Now, you're probably wondering, well, come on, how blatant was this? They had to at least, I don't know, slip them pieces of paper, hard copies. I mean, this is the kind of thing that's only talked about at lobbyists firms, when they're wasted and jumping around with glee at making their money influential in politics! Right. Right?

In an e-mail message to fellow lobbyists on Nov. 5, two days before the House vote, Todd M. Weiss, senior managing director of Sonnenschein, said, "We are trying to secure as many House R's and D's to offer this/these statements for the record as humanly possible." He told the lobbyists to "conduct aggressive outreach to your contacts on the Hill to see if their bosses would offer the attached statements (or an edited version) for the record."

You're reading this correctly.

[Interlude: Can we get a #FuckYeahNYT? This is the fourth estate at their finest.]

So. Exactly how upset should we be about this? Because this isn't groundbreaking, this is just more proof that the scenario here is circumstantial. Lobbyists are running the rhetoric of Washington D.C., shamelessly, the more money they have behind them, the better they're doing.

Our elected officials are a bunch of clowns. Smart words written by smarter, better paid people are given to them. The words come out of their mouths. They get something in return. The chance to sound smart? Money? Who knows. Can we stop it? Can we make Washington a cleaner place where lawmakers aren't spoon-feeding the future of our country the poisonous horseshit that is a medical company's bottom line? And mind you: this is just one lobby. And one instance.

Is there any kind of indignation or recognition that this might be even—maybe, kinda, sorta—disingenuous and sociopathic behavior on behalf of our elected officials? Can Washington even recognize its own processes for what they are?

Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: "This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it."

Right. So. You done with that bottle?

In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists' [NYT]

Times media writer Edward Wyatt penned a soft, round filing that was about the word "douche." It appeared on today's front page.

This word is one with which this website (and media network) has a wide breadth of experience with. In November, 2006, former Gawker scribe Emily Gould wrote:

Don't get us wrong. It's not that (50%) of our delicate ladyish sensibilities are offended or anything; far from it. It's just that, as vagina-havers, we want to branch out a little bit in the realm of vagina-related insults. Also, we couldn't help but notice that the trope is now so bitten and tired, it pretty much begs to be called "Already Over" (if Already Over wasn't Already Over, obvs). Plus, Dolce has co-opted it for his own use. What a fucking asswizard!

Before we go any further, can we just say that "azzwizard" is kind of magical?

Anyway. People, as we are, can't be without first-stone casters. Observe:

I really, really hope there aren't actually 17,400 results for the word "douche" on Gawker websites that can't be cross-referenced with Joe Dolce.

But for a moment, back to Wyatt's piece. He didn't write about how the word evolved from a technical term of feminine hygiene to a schoolyard pejorative, to a favorite of bloggers and mediocre satire writers alike, to a Times media piece. No: that'd be too meta, and too interesting, and too far into the purview of their excellent After Deadline column.

In a newspaper where the word "fuck" is too vulgar as to only be printed once in its entire history—despite the word "fuck" and its entrenchment in our daily lives, in politics, popular culture, literature, and I'm sure its handy usage around Times' bullpens—they penned a piece based on the statistical usage and adoption into sitcom television, where every decent slang word goes to die.

It's filled with numbers about usage, and quotes from TV writers about how they employ it, like this one:

"As a writer, you're always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk," Dan Harmon, the creator of "Community," said about the word "douche." "This is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years - a thing that sounds like a thing you can't say."

It doesn't get much more interesting than that, except for a line about how the show that once presented the American Public with Dennis Franz's tuchus decided to give it an evolved go:

Users of the recently popular word "douche" defend its use, noting that it was invoked, usually with the suffix "bag," in the 1990s by the character Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue," an ABC series that frequently pushed the boundaries of network acceptability.

Naturally, since this story dropped, the Gawker Weekend inbox has been brimming with glee and excitement.

There are a few angles to take on it. Mediaite's Joe Coscarelli reflects much of the sentiment I've already heard out there in his lede:

I bet you never thought you'd see the day when you could pick up a copy of the New York Times and see the word "douche" on page one. And we're not talking hygiene!

And NYTpicker, that anonymous scourge of the New York Times' newsroom, takes out his or her butcher knife and gets to work on how typically bullshit the numbers used to create this story are, making a special point to note that the Times calls the word "offensive to many people" but doesn't say who those people are:

But seeing TV reporter Edward Wyatt and the NYT base its front-page reporting on numbers the paper actually requested from the Parents Television Council — a notoriously conservative TV watchdog group that has brought 99 percent of all indecency complaints before the FCC (we learned that from an excellent 2004 NYT story) — makes us a little sick. The PTC has been around since 1995, founded by conservative commentator L. Brent Bozell, and is responsible for complaints to the FCC about the Janet Jackson nipple slip and cursing on "NYPD Blue."

NYTpicker's right, and Joe Coscarelli's right. It's patently ridiculous that the Times uses generalized opinions to substantiate their numbers, to help give their story a case. There's also something inevitably entertaining about watching a newspaper as prude as the Times give the word "douche" some kind of once-over, even if the story behind it is fairly flimsy.

But honestly, this all just kind of brings me down.

Believe me, the last thing I want to do is rain on the parade of fun that is the New York Times using the word "douche," as someone who can only die happy once Clark Hoyt calls one of the Styles writers a "fuckface" in his Public Editor column. But let's talk about this like adults, kind of, for a moment. As someone with a strange affection for vulgar language, I only see this as an intense letdown.

To do this story two years ago would've been one thing, as the numbers slowly rise into becoming a trend, before it hits fever pitch. But for this story to run now, without Styles writer Allen Salkin's byline—and Salkin would've done way better with this—is absurd. Besides the fact that it's boring and plucked from a bullshit ether, the potential they laid waste to with this one is absurd. Mainly: to address the issue of creating new terms that don't exhaust themselves more and more on each usage. For example:

Where did the word "douche" come from in it's literal, non-slang implication?
Who were the first people to make the word "douche" a pejorative?
Who appended the word "bag" to the word "douche"?
Who uses this word every day?
How long has it been around?
Who (besides Gould/Shafrir/Balk/Sicha-era Gawker) has called this word over?
And what media outlets use it on a regular basis? But mostly:
Who's offended by the word?

There's nothing interesting about the word "mediocre" unless it's placed in an interesting context. On the inverse, the word "fuck" is almost always interesting, if only because it begs the question of necessity. The idea behind using a word like "douche" or "fuck" is to emphasize or exclaim something, it's to aid a common goal of writing or speaking, the reason people like me love language: to communicate an idea to someone you otherwise couldn't.

But what does the word "douche" communicate, exactly, besides the kind of person who would use it?

Maybe someone who's just unsavory in some regard, or someone who's typically unaware of their uncouth behavior. Or someone who does something your way of going about things disagrees with. There're way too many words like it. Maybe people just enjoy the way it rolls off the tongue, or maybe people actually enjoy employing the connotation of a Feminine hygiene product (which is the point all you nu-Feminists should take to say the exact same thing Gould said three years ago).

But really, the word douche is just like the story the Times did on it, and the generalized sources—the "some people" who "may be offended" by it— they used. It's empty. It means nothing. It's a completely subjective assessment of somebody who does something you don't like. I know people who use the word "douchebag" when referring to other people; I'm willing to bet those same people use the word "douchebag" to refer to the people referring to them. And I'm most disappointed when people I know who use the word could find something more concise, or shocking, or linguistically artful to go with. It's sold at the Wal-Mart of pejoratives. It's cheap, it's made en masse, and there's nothing but bad preservatives in the ingredients. Let's all—The New York Times, Bloggers, TV Writers, Those Who Use The Word "Douchebag," Those Who You Would Call A "Douche," Bar Patrons, Sports Fans, English Professors, Joe Dolce—become better communicators, and find something better than the word "douche" and it's mediocre suffix "bag" to go with.

Or, you know, we could just judge each other a little less.

Since none of these things will probably happen in the foreseeable future, just go with "douchenozzle" until it does. At least it sounds funny.

[Related Reading - Commenter VioletViolet makes a salient point: "I still think the NY Times article on "vajajay" was worse, although at least it wasn't on the front page. When you're asking Gloria Steinem for her opinion on a term that's use was mostly limited to The Soup, you're in trouble."]

Rohde's remark suggests that other press blackouts, like the one enforced for seven month by the New York Times as it tried to negotiate Rohde's release, are currently in place regarding abducted reporters.

Please remember—I'm not disclosing any names tonight—but there are still journalists, local and foreign, and many average Pakistanis and Afghans still being held prisoner tonight in the tribal areas. This problem has not been solved. We were extraordinarily lucky to escape. Others will not be.

One of those reporters, the Norwegian documentarian Paal Refsdal, was released yesterday after being kidnapped a week ago by Taliban fighters near the border with Pakistan. A Pakistani newspaper reported Refsdal's kidnapping on Monday, but no western media organizations followed suit until he was released. The Rohde blackout was hardly the first: Canadian journalist Melissa Fung spent a month in captivity while western media remained silent about the story at the request of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The irony of Rohde's appeal for us to keep those unnamed journalists in our thoughts is that, by withholding their names, he appears to be both endorsing and exposing a noble conspiracy to prevent us from thinking about them or knowing that they exist.

Rohde's full remarks, which presented a thoroughly depressing portrait of the fanaticism we face in Afghanistan and Pakistan, can be seen here.

NYTPicker found this bio for Pogue on the website for an upcoming tech conference:

So what is a New York Times Visionary, other than something you get demoted to when everyone realizes you're not actually a journalist? That's unclear. Maybe it involves being able to see past the flaws in an operating system, like endless crashes of key software, to call it a "sleek upgrade." Or to call a notebook computer a "slice of heaven... not underpowered by any means" and then later tweet that the same machine is "too slow for Photoshop, video even Word sometimes." Or not! (We've put in an inquiry with the Times and Pogue.)

UPDATE: Pogue wrote us back:

That's definitely not a title I would ever use for myself. (I usually go by
"Consumer Tech Columnist"). And it is, obviously, not a title The Times
selected.

It sounds to me like something that panel's organizer, Warren Buckleitner,
made up, for the sake of more interesting brochure copy. Maybe you should
ask him?

We've corrected our headline accordingly.

The layoffs will come in the New York Times News Service (which includes the paper's AP-like newswire). Next year, the company is moving editing duties for the News Service out of New York and down to sunny Florida, where nonunion employees at the Gainesville Sun will be happy to do the same jobs for a fraction of the cost, concomitant with Gainesville's affordable "100% trailer park" cost of living.

Below, the memo that the Newspaper Guild sent out to its members about this inevitable, economically prudent union-busting development.

Times to Subcontract News Service

Times management informed the Guild late this afternoon that the company
intends to subcontract the work of the News Service. Management
representatives told the Guild the work will be sent to the Gainesville
Sun, a property owned by The New York Times. The subcontracting would
impact all 28 Guild staffers – one assistant to the editor, two editors,
23 staff editors, one news assistant and one news clerk.

After members had been informed by management of the subcontracting, the
Guild met with the affected employees to answer questions and inform them
of their rights under the collective bargaining agreement. Under the
contract, The Times has given the contractually required notification to
the Guild, which triggers a 60-day period that allows the Guild an
opportunity to try to avert the subcontracting. The Guild, as always, will
monitor the situation and keep members informed.

The (enemy) WSJ's Katherine Rosman overheard this exchange:

And there was the inevitable shop talk: As Times executive editor Bill Keller slid into a row of seats, an acquaintance asked, "So, are you parent of the year now at Dalton?"-a question that presumably referenced a story that ran on the front page that day about an incident at the student newspaper at the Dalton School. "I'm not sure how they feel about me," he responded and then took his seat.

That, of course, was the story this week about Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy making Dalton's school newspaper run its copy by him before it published. How outraged must the Dalton mafiosi be that the lowly New York Times dared to publicize the secret inner workings of their school paper! Remember:

Editors at The Daltonian either would not comment for this article or did not respond to requests for an interview, although a staff member provided a draft of The Daltonian's article.

The high school editors of The Daltonian can hardly be expected to make time for the sleazy tabloid lurking of the New York Times! Kudos to Bill Keller for having the courage to stand up to the Dalton Mob, putting his own family at risk for the sake of journalistic ethics. Your fancy Manhattan Media daily topic of discussion, ladies and gents.

Not only are men scooping up old-timey hunting and fishing wear—even bowlers!—but women are doing everything short of dusting off their whale bone corsets to get into the 19th century mode. Ye Olde Times:

This flamboyance is part of a curious new movement called Tweed Rides, informal gatherings of spiffily dressed ladies and gents cycling leisurely through town and disdaining finish lines. Tweed Rides began in London earlier this year and have spread this fall to Boston, San Francisco and Chicago. As the directions for this weekend's Tweed Ride in Washington, D.C., put it: "Leave the fleece, Lycra and outer shell at home. This ride is for the dandy.

First one to spot a monocle this winter wins $100.

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