MSNBC Raps about Iraqi capital, Dr. Seuss style....

Oh this one was just too good to resist:

Obama Baghdag envoy nominee to meet with lawmakers

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29684291/

Few comments:

1) on the QWERTY keyboard, the letter "g" is only separated by the "d" by a single key, namely the "f" key. Maybe the person typing the article had really wide fingers.

2) more funny scenario - the person writing and/or typing the article (assuming they were one and the same) was trying to sanitize the war and the connotation of the Iraqi capital by turning it into a cute little rhyme a la Dr Seuss: Bag Dat Hag in Bagh Dag.... or something like that....

Funny, my peeps at MSNBC - cute way to spice up the day...

I'm sure the denizens of Baghdag will love your version of their city's name.

Hopefully they will greet the envoy with many gifts, you know, from their lovely city, BAGHDAG!!!

Hepatitis A Scare Gives New meaning to Crappy Celebrities

Ashton Kutcher's birthday party at the swank NYC club Socialista drew a big crowd of celebs -- including Demi Moore, Ivanka Trump and Bruce Willis. But city health officials worry that a bartender who contracted hepatitus A worked the night of the party and may have spread hepatitis A to the A-list patrons. (ABC News)

Word is that a bunch of A-list celebs including Madonna, Ivanka Trump, Bruce Willis, etc. attended a birthday party for Ashton Kutcher in NYC recently and were infested with the crap of a bartender who didn't see the merit in washing his hands before serving the public...

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4330347&page=1

Sad as it may be that a bunch of seemingly innocent celebs must now expel the toxin from their bodies, it is even more deplorable that ABC News.com can't get the correct spelling of the word HEPATITIS...

What the hell is hepatitus with a "U"?

Come on people at ABC News.com...unless one of your staff members was smeared with the same fecal matter as the celebs I don't see any excuse for the lack of attention to detail....

BREAKING NEWS....Two weeks later - Black dude's photo removed from Portfolio.com story about Gold Futures

Back on January 28th I first pointed out how the folks at Portfolio.com threw up an article on their site about gold futures and attached a mismatched photo of some random black dude to the article...

Well it took the slow-like-molasses staff two weeks to get their act together but I'm happy to report that the photo is gone...

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/ap/2008/02/12/gold-plummets-on-profit-taking

Nice job folks.

Remind me NOT to call you if I need something done right away...or if I need to have someone pay attention to detail immediately with lightning speed...

But if I need something done in a ridiculously slow and painful way consistent with the speed at which molasses move, you'll be number 1 on my speed dial :-)

It Really Sucks When Writers Can't Write (or Spell)...especially when they work for the New York Times

Take a look at the following phrase and then take a look at the caption below the photo....

News Analysis
Who Won the Writers Strike?

Monty Brinton/CBS

A scene from “The Amazing Race,” a reality show and ratings winner on CBS. During the writers’ guild strike, networks have relied even more heavily on such programming.

By DAVID CARR

Published: February 12, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/arts/television/12strike.html?ref=arts

Hopefully by now you have noticed the discrepancy between the caption and the headline...

Why is the plural possessive used in one place (with respect to the word "writers") and ignored in another?

This is really disappointing considering this is the New York Times...

Granted they've lost some of their luster as a result of the dude that wrote all of those fake war stories a few years ago and then passed them off as legitimate - much to the surprise of his supervisors, etc...

Nevertheless this is a major force in American news publishing...

What the hell dudes? Are you really that careless??

Don't you guys have a grammar manual handy? I mean come on - that is just ridiculous.

I'm not even a legitimate writer or reporter and I can do a quick 2.5 nanosecond duration Google search to research the rules of possessive plural and use of the apostrophe...

See? It's so easy...here you go: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html

Minimizing Hollywood...Bush, Blair, Brown, Merkel, Putin, Sarkozy and Ahmadinejad play Charades!!!

Today's journalistic blunder has been committed by CBS Marketwatch, a financial site.

The headline reads: "Progress reported in hollywood writers talks - report."

Last time I checked, conventional grammar rules indicated that proper names (that includes names of cities) should be capitalized.

Last time I checked Hollywood was a "city" although one could argue as to whether or not Los Angeles would truly qualify as a real "city" by modern standards.

You can check out the CBS Marketwatch site and the blunder for yourself:http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/progress-reported-hollywood-writers-talks/story.aspx?guid=%7B4D25A6B1-3B52-4D2D-92EA-2BA68F7162D5%7D

Until the melodrama pertaining to the current writers strike is sorted out however, there is absolutely no shortage of witty material out there...

If you want to laugh until you lose all control of your bladder, check this out:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?storyID=13500

Rupert (Murdoch) LOVES Barack Obama...

Well, that might be a bit of a stretch but not really given the fact that the Murdoch-owned and historically conservative newspaper THE NEW YORK POST has come out in favor of Barack Obama...that is very significant on many levels indeed...

The troubling part is that there is a discrepancy between that which is reported on the Yahoo! News page and that which actually appears on the NY Post website...

It appears as though there's a bit of shadowy editing going on...

Let me show you what I'm talking about...

Here's a link to the Yahoo! News page that contains the story about the Post endorsement of Obama: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080131/ts_alt_afp/usvotedemocratsendorsement_080131170710

I would direct your attention to the following excerpted paragraph from the Yahoo! News story:

"For all his charisma and his eloquence, (Obama) sorely lacks seasoning. And on national security, his worldview is beyond naive -- blithely unware that America must defend itself against those sworn to destroy the nation.

For the sake of a comparison metric I now give you the link to the actual NY Post editorial page: http://www.nypost.com/seven/01302008/postopinion/editorials/post_endorses_barack_obama_813218.htm

And now the very paragraph that is quoted by Yahoo! News:

For all his charisma and his eloquence, the rookie senator sorely lacks seasoning: Regarding national security, his worldview is beyond naive; America must defend itself against those sworn to destroy the nation.

Did you notice something missing?

Where did the part about "blithely unware" go in the NY Post article?
Was it never included in the original story?
Did it get edited out of the NY Post story after the fact?
Is it merely a figment of Yahoo! News' imagination (in conjunction with the true source which in this case is AFP, Agence France Presse)?

This is a mystery to me...

I feel like this is a journalistic version of the age-old question about the chicken or the egg...

Maybe someone thought it was too critical to include the term "blithely unware" so they removed it? But that doesn't seem likely given the fact that the Post and its backers are conservatives so they wouldn't shy away from criticism of a Democrat...

By the way, in case you were not aware, the word "unware" is a real word...it is another spelling/usage of the word "unaware."

I Just didn't want you to think that I was slipping or anything like that :-)

Anyway peace out my homies...

Happy February 1st...by the way isn't tomorrow supposed to be Groundhog's Day?

I wonder what the little bugger is going to say...oh the mysterious randomness of this life.

Yo! To my Peeps at Portfolio.com...You Gots Some 'Splainin' To Do....

A few days ago I posted an entry about a photograph (see above) that was associated with an article about the price of gold futures in relation to the (first) rate cut by the Fed...

I happened to notice it only because the Google News page that cited the article happened to have a thumbnail of this very photo beside it and the two didn't seem to fit...and I thought to myself: "This is kinda weird...let me check it out."

So I did and what you see above is what I saw...and that was two days ago...and the photo is STILL there...

See for yourself (assuming you didn't catch my entry from two days ago):

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/ap/2008/01/30/gold-futures-hit-record-on-fed-decision

Makes me wonder...are these people (at these so-called media outlets) a) visually impaired; b) careless; c) trying to be "funny"; d) trying to sabotage the entity that employs them by making them out to be utterly ridiculous vis a vis things such as this? e) all of the above; f) and I know this is not considered "P.C." but are they (dare I say) stupid?

Meaning do they have an IQ which is equal to their age subtracted from their shoe size (yes, that is right...your output from that equation should be a negative number)...

I thought it was bizarre, possibly funny, definitely weird and completely idiotic a few days ago...

My opinion today is something slightly more negative than all of the above put together multiplied by the square of the sum total of the collective shoe size of each component member of the combined journalistic and editorial staff of (Conde Nast) Portfolio.com.

If you look closely you see that the obviously lazy staff at Portfolio.com blatantly pilfered the article from the newswire given the fact that they had to give credit to the original entity that wrote the story, in this case, Associated Press.

I'm imagining someone sitting behind a computer whose single and sole purpose in life is to pull stories as they come on to the newswire...they then do a cut and paste and they decide it is relevant and appropriate to paste a photo of a black man in the article, which, BY THE WAY, clearly doesn't go with the article...maybe they were trying to communicate something subliminally...but how can we really be sure what they meant to convey?

I'm not a mind-reader...

I don't get it...am I missing something?

All I want to know is how do these two things go together?

Doesn't anyone check their work any more? Don't these people have someone looking over their work before it goes on a major website backed by one of the biggest modern publishing entities?

I am really curious to know how stuff like this happens...

Seems like there is more than mere carelessness at work here...I haven't quite figured out what else to attribute it to but give me a bit more time to ponder this and I will let you know what else I come up with...

In the meanwhile, here's a photo of something that epitomizes carelessness and lack of oversight: