ablevision goes hollywood



triangle, one of rectangle's cousin organizations, has an excellent media production wing named ablevision. ablevision recently landed a huge interview with kevin james, late of my favorite sit-com the king of queens, and i thought i'd give them a little free publicity.

feel free to check out ablevision's additional clips on youtube.

mid-day time waster

i don't know about you, but when i listen to political rhetoric i find the frequent snapshot stories the politicians make to ordinary people and their concerns quite patronizing. i don't, as of yet, hate these stories quite as much as the personal interest pieces that have ruined the olympics, every major american sporting event and dancing with the stars, but i could do without them nonetheless.

for this reason, today's mid-day time waster assignment is to put your own snapshot story into one of the leading presidential candidate's mouths. feel free to ridicule the pol all you want, but let's keep it relatively clean.*

"Speaking to a re-energized crowd in Huntington, West Virginia, Ms. Clinton spoke to her core constituency by sharing the following story. 'As we celebrate this magnificent victory tonight and recommit ourselves to the goal of winning this nomination, I cannot help but think of Lilly Ann Miller who I met in Clarksburg last week. Lilly Ann is a single mother who served as an administrative assistant at West Virginia Coal Cooperative for twenty years until she was sidelined by type one diabetes and carpal tunnel syndrome. As Lilly Ann and I shared a funnel cake and a Diet Coke she told me that after all her years of hard work she is now uninsured and has no money to pay for the gastrointestinal bypass procedure that will help her lose weight and just might save her life. Under my opponent's health care plan, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, regular folk like Lilly Ann would not have access to the gastrointestinal procedure and might have to attempt to crack back into the college educated workforce in order to ensure the procedure that she so clearly deserves. If you love empowered women like Lilly Ann, like I do, and you are committed to ensuring that every American has the opportunity to access optional medical procedures, please visit my web site HillaryClinton.com. On that site you'll have an opportunity not only to make a donation, but also to join other small-town, life-long Americans who are committed to electing the candidate who will be ready on day one!'"

* this is, after all, a family blog.

for the record

i would be the worst.stay-at-home.mom.ever. it's not that i fail to get anything done when i'm home with a sick preston. rather every time i'm home alone with him i find a way to get nothing done.

there must be a special place in hell for men like me who've made fun of stay-at-home moms over the years. i admit it, on a couple of occasions in the past i have been an ignorant, misogynistic bastard when discussing this issue. i am truly sorry and i humbly repent.

buzz bissinger on blogs

i realize that i'm really late to this story - as well as pretty much every other story that has taken place over the past four weeks - but two weeks ago buzz bissinger, the author of the superb friday night lights, and will leitch, a dedicated cardinal fan and the editor-in-chief of deadspin one of the quirkiest, funniest and most popular sports sites on the net, squared off on costas now.

if you watch the clip* you'll notice that bissinger prefaces the conversation by defaming leitch for defaming athletes and then proceeds to eviscerate, with costas' help, sports blogs for posting pictures of athletes making arses of themselves, providing a forum for commenters to ridicule espn hosts and refusing inside access to press boxes and clubhouses, which are, apparently, the only place that sports writers can ascertain "facts" about athletes and athletic events.**

i think this clip is fascinating not only because of bissinger's ad hominem attacks as well as he and costas' apparent agreement to irrationally conflate blogs such as deadspin with more traditional sports reporting. i am also fascinated by both bissinger's implicit claim that "objectivity" in sports journalism is both possible only with a press pass and buzz's apparent ignorance of, or indifference towards, the fact that many mainstream sports journalists are now utilizing the blogosphere as well.

one more thing: in all of the analysis of this conflict that i've read thus far, no one has pointed out the fact that, for all his high minded arguments and significant writing ability, bissinger is not above writing a puff piece such as three nights in august which was commissioned by his subject and failed to contribute anything about la russa's managerial "genius" that could not be gleaned from one chapter of george will's men at work.

in sum, bissinger appears simply to be a profane, cranky old man bent on fighting irrelevance by shaking his fists at the inevitable. i should also add that although he comes off as a smart-ass know-it-all at times in this clip, i thought leitch fought his way out of this ambush quite well.


* which is not work safe, by any means. for the record: watching a clip in which bob costas utilizes the term "f*ck face," while strangely rewarding, will almost certainly draw the ire of your boss.
** which, in my opinion, many of us, including myself, take waaay to seriously than we should.