The Hollywood Reporter tells us what we've sort of already heard: that kids were laughing—laughing! at these precious words: "and so the lion fell in love with the lamb"! that is beautiful Britishy foggy dells and swoopy moors poetry! Lord Byron Shelley Austen! my crotch is sobbing!—while the film flickered on the screen.

So leave it to Variety's reported 45% over-25 audience to be the serious ones. They probably sat there all chaste and serious and adulty, whispering small benedictions to remind themselves that it's a good thing to have said "no" to Barry and that someone else will propose—he smelled like onions!—and that the living situation is just temporary and it's not that weird to have a litter box in your bedroom. Then the kids laughed and they got angry and fist shaky that, though it had looked touch-and-go there for a second, the irony which had plagued their lives for so many years was, in fact, not dead at all.

He's a lover:

...and then to Paris, where the most famous woman in the world, Coco Chanel, developed a sort of crush on me—or perhaps on my beautiful, young American wife.

A persistent success:

I will now officially be "older than dirt," one of the oldest journalists still working a beat, interviewing movie stars for Parade magazine and its weekly audience of 70 million, and writing this media column each Thursday for Forbes.com, largest business news Web site anywhere.

An editing phenom:

Late in '64 I came home to succeed John Fairchild as publisher of WWD, a post I held for the next seven years, turning the little trade paper a Time magazine cover story had called, "plain as gingham and just as reliable," into a publishing phenomenon, a must-read for the rich and fashionable.

An author extraordinaire:

And I wrote a dozen more books, some serious work about Marines at war, including a memoir, The Coldest War, and a novel, The Marines of Autumn, which I can't read today without sobbing.

An active literary titan:

I'm finishing a serious non-fiction book for Steve Power of Wiley and will then embark on an amusing yarn for Tom Dunne at St. Martin's Press, When the Name-Dropping Was Fun.

And kind of a pompous bastard. [Forbes]

After my morning lie-down I read the Telegraph and The Independent, then I might scribble a few letters. The fact is that ever since I won the Nobel, all I do is talk — whether I know anything about the subject or not. I once gave a talk at a university in New York. At the end, a girl asked: “Now, Mrs Lessing, tell me the meaning of life.” I replied: “What makes you think I know it?” She said: “Come on. Don’t be like that. Don’t hold out on us.”

[via Bookninja]

The term Fisking, or to Fisk, is blogosphere slang describing detailed point-by-point criticism that highlights perceived errors, disputes the analysis of presented facts, or highlights other problems in a statement, article, or essay.[1] Eric S. Raymond, in the Jargon File, defined the term as:

A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form.[2]

The term is named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist.

Ha, it's like what we do! Here we posit that Fisk has become bitter to the point of irrationality due to his mass of online detractors. Then we support it with a quote from him:

At one point, Mr Fisk retorted: “To hell with the web, it’s got no responsibility.”

Fisked.

[OJB]

In light of the recent stock market crunch and economic downturn, the Ad Council is launching stylized campaign at ControlYourCredit.gov that focuses on financial literacy for the Millennial generation. Statistically, the millennial generation is poised to accumulate mammoth proportions of debt.

According to a study conducted by Sallie Mae, more than 50 percent of college students accumulate more than $5,000 in credit card debt while in school. Additionally, Capital One reported that only 10 percent of high schools in America teach financial management and 75 percent of graduating seniors do not understand basic investment principles.

All of those things indicate, basically, that we are doomed, utterly fucked, by the olds. And the federal government will save us by spending god knows how much publicizing a stupid internet game about figuring out your credit score. (And also spending quite a bit on making sure the FDIC has enough money to bail out all the banks that we owe our college loan money to! Or something like that. Honestly, we don't understand anything about finance. If only there were a flash game of some kind....).

CORRECTION: The work was done pro bono (lol internet, right?) so no one spent anything on educating us about our massive debt.

Well ... just look at them! They old!

. . .

Photos via AP/INFGoff

Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I'd try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, "This is the end." I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

...When I look back on it, I wish I had had more quality time with my children. I remember once taking the two boys on a three- or four-day hike around Aspen Mountain. I remember every minute of it, and they remember every minute of it. I should have done more of that sort of thing.

...My nephew just got back from China. He's been there for two years on a teaching program, teaching English to poor Chinese kids in agricultural areas in the southeast. And I said, "How poor are they? Are they really on only half a bowl of rice a day?" And he said yes. He said that perhaps on holidays or the Chinese New Year, they'll get a ration of meat. He said there are lots of areas like that.

You've got tens of millions of people like that. And then you've also got great economic expansion in these countries, which is causing a huge demand for energy and for food. When people come off the land and go work in a sweatshop and get ten dollars a day or something, the first thing they want is a bit of protein. And that's why, when you go to the supermarket, you're paying 30 percent more for milk or a burger or cheese than you were a year ago.

Rupert Murdoch implicitly criticizing China over human rights violations? Revealing emotional weakness? Admitting he consorts with, and emotionally bonds with, children? It's too much. Next thing you know Bill O'Reilly will be defending a Democratic presidential candidate from a right-wing smear campaign.

[Esquire]

Fox News just partnered with Facebook, even though the social networking website directly competes with its News Corporation sibling MySpace. MySpace, meanwhile, is working with MSNBC to cover the political conventions, despite a notorious rivalry between other News Corp. properties and Olbermann.

But the partnerships make sense when you consider demographics. With its popularity among rock bands and its garish design sensibility, MySpace is the social network of high school students and young adults — MSNBC viewers. Facebook, meanwhile, has a buttoned-down presentation that has made it more popular in corporate environments and thus among older people, making it a better fit for Fox.

As MSNBC adds coveted young viewers, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, it becomes less likely to ever seek, say, a conservative counterweight to Olbermann, or a barking pseudo-populist curmudgeon like Lou Dobbs. It would no more do such things than MTV would. And the temptation to become the winning cable network of the Obama years will be too great for MSNBC to ever truly balance its present leftward political tilt.

...thousands of once illiterate detainees have learned how to read and write. Hundreds more are now studying math, science, geography, civics, Arabic, and English and learning carpentry, bricklaying, and other skills that may enable them to feed their families after their release. They play soccer and Ping-Pong, visit their families, pray, and debate how to accurately interpret the Koran they can now read for themselves.

...after monitoring and assessing the detainees, his team began separating the hard-core Al Qaeda and other militants from the 80 percent or more who had joined the insurgency simply to feed their families or because they had been threatened into cooperating.

The story is built around quotes from the major-general in charge of the prison, his friend/subordinate, a military flack and the major-general's superior officer. Arthur Sulzberger must be so proud of how Miller has bounced back!

[Reader's Digest via Huffington Post]

“You know what that looks like?” Mr. Scarborough asked his panel as b-roll took over the screen showing Senator McCain in the dairy aisle of a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pa. “‘No, Granddad—no, no, not down here. Talk to the grandkids. Show ’em the penny trick!’”
“O.K., [liberal MSNBC host Keith] Olbermann, O.K.,” said Republican strategist and McCain 2000 mastermind Mike Murphy, a guest panelist charged with defending the Republican nominee. “Beat up the poor …”

Also, the press makes fun of McCain for not knowing how to work the Google and thinking that email and text messages are mainly for dirty hippies in San Francisco and should be filtered by his staff. But, c'mon, that didn't keep McCain from banning taxes on this "internet," or from "understanding the importance of the blogs."

And here is Jon Stewart of the liberal Daily Show making fun of McCain to the youngs by saying he has "John McCain's disease" — which doesn't even exist yet!

Everyone should please stop making fun of McCain just because he would be the oldest person ever to ascend to the presidency. Or, at the very least, if you do make fun of him, please do so via FAX or at a volume he can hear.

Kidding! What McCain needs (as many others have noted) is a killer line like Ronald Reagan's "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." But newer and hipper. Maybe ask Jon Stewart to write it, he's big with the kids these days and totally owes you one, McCain.

[Observer]

Writes Gross,

"Another friend, Ann, shares my fantasy of setting up joint housekeeping, assuming she outlives her husband. Our thinking goes something like this: If one of us can see and the other hear, if one of us is mobile and the other cognitively intact, we’ll muddle through as long as we can and then pool our insurance premiums to hire home care. We’d prefer to use the benefit for a masseuse and a manicurist but know it would be a hard sell to persuade MetLife that those were the kinds of “activities of daily living” our policies cover.

I’ve written before about pairs or small groups of unrelated women who are already doing this, some even constructing houses designed for their old age."

This sounds like the perfect idea for the fourth movie, actually. Carrie, help!

Another idea: OMG, maybe a Sex and the City version of the Golden Girls. It would only be half as funny, but the product-placement opportunities are endless.

I'm sure I angered Tricia on Monday, when Philip Smith - still dapper and, dare I say, smoking hot - jokingly asked me to marry him.

"Are you available?" said Philip, when I asked if he'd wed again. I'm not, but don't tempt me.

Then, on Tuesday, Tricia's trained attack Chihuahua, Joseph McCaffery, a pony-tailed loser who hails from Aurora, Ill. - remember "Wayne's World"? - yelled at me outside Trish's soon-to-be-ex home. So I called him an "asshole."

I was holding back.

So, what's the problem here?

[NYP]

See? Then they'll dissolve the Senate and create the Galactic Empire.

Name: Sumner Redstone
Age: 85
Position: Chairman, National Amusements (Viacom, CBS, MTV, etc.)
What kind of old man is he?: Befuddled
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with daughters.
Key quote: "I'm gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don't want to go anywhere else"
Health threat: Face of porcelain

Name: Rupert Murdoch
Age: 77
Position: Chairman, News Corp
What kind of old man is he?: Vindictive
Trick in staving off old age: A much younger wife.
Key quote: "You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place."
Health threat: Enveloped in skin folds.

Name: Sam Zell
Age: 66
Position: Owner, Tribune Company
What kind of old man is he?: Gnomish
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with his employees.
Key quote: "Fuck you [OLD AGE!]"
Health threat: Balding

Name: Barry Diller
Age: 66
Postion: Chairman and CEO, IAC
What kind of old man is he?: Angry
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with fellow businessmen.
Key quote: "I thought they were talking about eye charts. I don't see anything full-blown." [On being called a "visionary"]
Health threat: Tooth gappage.

Name: Hugh Hefner
Age: 82
Postion: Owner, Playboy Enterprises
What kind of old man is he?: Desperately youthful
Trick in staving off old age: Parties, hordes of women, pajamas.
Key quote: “In many ways, I'm younger than I was 20 years ago."
Health threat: Priapism.

Lisa Johnson Mandell had more than 20 years of experience in broadcasting and movie reviewing, but she couldn't get a second look! Here's how she made it work:

• "Create a modern image": One consultant suggests going to a hairstylist for a new 'do!
• Whitewash your resume: Johnson Mandell "removed the 1980 date of her summa-cum-laude college graduation and deleted some early jobs." Sneaky!
• Show you're "hip to new media": She started a video blog site. On the internet! With some guy she found on Craigslist—another internet location!
• The photo thing: Do people really need to include a picture with their job applications? Apparently so! But it has to be a picture with a "contemporary look," like this real one of Johnson Mandell:
  
  
  
  
  

Now Lisa Johnson Mandell has a six-figure salary. Screw you, youngs.

[WSJ]

"Mario was originally No. 1 on our radar as we planned the campaign," said an insider. "We were ready to call him with an offer, but then we saw Nick. He's younger, sexy, more interesting. On top of that, his body was crazy. We set up a meeting, and when he walked in, that was it. We never even looked at anyone else after that."

Another underwear exec called Adams, 25 to Lopez's 34, "the new face of sexy." Burn!

Obviously, the underwear story could be a giant marketing ploy. The company claims it was "ready to call [Lopez] with an offer," but it is never stated that Lopez sought or had any interest in the endorsement deal. On the other hand, Lopez sounds like he'd strip down in front of a camera at the drop of a hat.

[Post, Nick Adams, Mario Lopez]

(Photos via nickadams.biz and mariolopez.net)

[EW]

The club was quite a hot affair for the first 40 or 50 years after its founding in 1905. It once boasted members like Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and the cream of the city's journalism, literary, and artistic communities. Today, it can be more accurately embodied by the membership of gossiping octogenarian oddball Liz Smith. They're old:

A weekly e-mail message is sent out to "newcomers and forgetful old-timers" reminding: 1, Lunch is still $25 and wine is on the table; and 2, please be sure to turn off cellphones, or put them on vibrate.

They like to get buzzed:

A gold medal dangling on a red ribbon is handed out to guest speakers and performers, engraved with the club's mascot: a man in a top hat and tails with a monocle reclining in the bottom of a martini glass.

And they're now equal-opportunity horndogs:

Women were not admitted until 1991, a dramatic change that came about after intense voting, which required a recount because of suspected cheating...

Since the 1920s, the club has produced a yearbook known for its drawings of nude women that used to be inspired by the club's favorite coat check, hat and cigarette girls. At the end of the annual dinner, members will be given their 2008 yearbooks by the club's first woman president, the cabaret singer KT Sullivan.

[NYT]

Clare's new line beats the original, "Oh My Hips! Down I Go..."