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The Newark Star-Ledger, the biggest daily newspaper in all of New Jersey, is NEAR DEATH. If 225 workers don't accept buyouts like now, the Newhouses (specifically Si's brother Donald) will sell the paper along with the Trenton Times. The Star-Ledger will lose $30 million to $40 million this year, so it's a great buy! Soon Jersey residents will have to go back to getting all their news from Springsteen lyrics and Kevin Smith movies. This just in! They closed down the amusement park and also marijuana is quite popular. [NYP]

Does the Times' Play magazine want to marry awesomecredible Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps? Or just perform fellatio on him? We guess both. [NYT]

The failure of imagination that is John McCain's new "Celeb" ad against Obama has yielded unintended results in the form of exaggerated reactions to it. The most salient comes from Obama himself, who, speaking in Rolla, Missouri yesterday, said this: "John McCain right now, he's spending an awful lot of time talking about me. You notice that? I haven’t seen an ad yet where he talks about what he’s gonna do...And so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. So what they’re saying is, ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s... doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he’s got a, he’s got a funny name.'"

Had Obama stopped at the penultimate sentence, it'd have been a simple and excellent rebuttal. He might have then ironically thanked McCain for using his own money and resources to point out just how popular and well-liked Obama is at home and abroad. But was it accurate to imply McCain was using racist scare tactics in his latest YouTube salvo?

Obama was quick to climb down from the accusation. He clarified his original statement by saying it was intended against the conservative talk show hosts and smear artists, not the campaign itself. Then he repeated the original line again later that evening, prompting questions as to whether he has the courage of his convictions to call McCain out on scurrility.

There are those who argue that "Celeb" tries to depict Obama as either a fascist leader in embryo or a scary minority looking to rape white women — or both. Rick Perlstein, author of the well-regarded new book Nixonland, is perhaps understandably hypersensitive to the varied uses of bigotry in politics given his latest historical subject. He suggests the McCain filmmakers were deliberately channeling Leni Riefenstahl.

Perlstein's evidence consists of two still shots of "Celeb," which he then compares to closing scenes of Triumph of the Will. What both sets of images share in terms of perspective they don't share in terms of scale, but there are, shall we say, disturbing resonances.

If the comparison was intentional, it only underscores the incompetency of the ad. As the New Yorker discovered the hard way, the paranoid fantastists this type of innuendo would reach require over-obvious signs of Obama's lurking evil. Students of Third Reich cinematography they are not, and so the allusions would hit home mainly with liberal students of fascist iconography. Exactly the wrong effect.

In fact, the ad's haplessness is its best defense. It makes an agonized attempt to be funny and clever, not minatory in a "gathering storm" type of way. Its only substantive point against Obama is weak—not many people care about offshore drilling or would see it as a fix for high oil prices. But that hardly matters because its purpose is to characterize him as a hollow twit of the Us Weekly stamp. The sound of camera flash bulbs going off gives this the feel of a Pepsi commercial (is he Michael Jackson or Hitler?), which, whether by design or by accident, saps the politics of fear and bolsters the politics of pop. There's also the minor tragedy that it took John McCain to get Paris and Britney back in the headlines.

The GOP candidate may not be a web trawler or fluent in the many tongues of the Internet, but his staff members certainly are. I can well imagine they thought that by associating Obama with facile celebrities, they'd incite a blacklash against what they see as his warrantless fame. Some Republicans even read Gawker, and the sociology of hype is inescapable in the mainstream media.

But as to the racism charge... ABC's Jake Tapper notes that McCain has not just refrained from circulating bigoted, xenophobic attacks against Obama in the past, he's condemned those who have. It's not impossible that his campaign is desperate and demoralized and would begin to resort to nasty "Willie Horton" tactics. Karl Rove is a recent hire, after all, and it was Rove who decided to give voters in South Carolina in 2000 the impression that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was his love child with a black woman. If that can be forgiven, then never say never indeed.

But then, there is something defensive about assuming racism in any and all efforts to mock Obama in effigy, or depict him as an upstart who hasn't yet earned the right to be president. (This doesn't translate so seamlessly into "uppity Negro," as some quick-trigger lefty bloggers would put it). The right similarly bristles and howls that any criticism of McCain's competence or command of facts and reality is coterminous with the charge of senility or worse — that his mind went to mush in Hanoi. Can't it ever be an above-board rebuke?

Your interpretations of the ad welcome below.

[Rick Perlstein: OutFuture.org]
[ABC News]

Real estate folks made up terms like SoHo and TriBeCa in order to hype up undeveloped neighborhoods. But if you're not in real estate, you just sound like a jerk! In Time Out this week, two Bushwick roommates call their area of Brooklyn "Billywick or Bushburg. "You sound like an asshole when you say you’re from Williamsburg," says one. (Uh-oh. A casual Google search shows a couple MySpacers listing Billywick as their 'hood.) [Time Out]

Ebay is not just for auctioning off books related to obscure literary feuds; it's also a good place for members of the working class to hustle mementos of the humbling moments when celebrities crossed their paths and acted like jerks. One item that you just missed bidding on: a receipt from an Atlanta-area restaurant signed by Outkast rapper Andre 3000. The meal cost $46.01. Andre's tip: $0. But the receipt sold for almost $15, so the waiter came out ahead. That said, let's segue into THIS: a look back at some other fabulous celebrity-related items that appeared on eBay in the recent past:

• The Keith Gessen Middlebrow FSU Remix Book!
• A scam Sex and the City vacation package!
• Disturbing Heath Ledger figurines!
• A magical Lou Dobbs tortilla!
• A fleeting meeting with Scarlett Johansson!
• Scientology's E-meter of the future!
• Gary Coleman memorabilia!
• Corey Haim's snowboard!
• Spike Jonze's random doodles!
• Courtney Love's fat jeans!

Ebay!

Here's an interesting variation on the blog-to-book deal: the webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield, which simply removes the cat from all the Garfield comic strips, will be a book—published by Ballantine, the publisher of the regular Garfield books. ("Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?") It will come out in conjunction with the official 30th anniversary of the Garfield book. Creator Jim Davis says he approves!

[Throws up hands and pushes back from desk, walks out of room. Sound of footsteps going downstairs. Sound of drawer opening. Pause. Gunshot. Thud.] [Beehive]

Rock of Love, in which former Poison something-or-other Bret Michaels tries to find the love of his life among a bevy of obliterated old groupies, may be our most winningly repulsive reality show. And that's saying a lot, considering it's on VH1 which is also host to the grim parasite that is I Love Money. But the problem is that it's always been in Los Angeles—we'd have to send our blinded-by-bathtub-moonshine sisters and daughters (and wives) hobbling all the way across the country if we wanted to vicariously taste the salty-sweet thrills of the Bret Michaels Experience ("face time!") But, now, no longer!

The next season will send Bret and his ladies hurtling across this great nation of ours in a tour bus, while he rocks out with his melted pencil eraser cock out. And they're casting in New York and Hoboken (founded, five hundred years ago, by hobo Ken.) The cattle call is below. I urge you to audition ladies. Your lives and livers will be forever changed.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Christopher Long, the Critical Mass cyclist pushed off his bike by a rookie cop—and captured on YouTube—is back at his job in Union Square's Greenmarket. He's not talking to press because there are pending charges against him of assault and resisting arrest. (They'll probably be dropped.) Meanwhile: investigation 2.0! Because of videos like this one, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly tells the Post that "Within the next two months, people will be able to send video and text straight to 911 to increase flow of information." Naw, they'll just hide them. Send all video footage straight to us. [Daily News]

Is honey cruel? Should vegans be able to eat it? No? More for me then, suckers. [Slate]

Radar has an excerpt of the forthcoming satirical book Damn It Feels Good to Be a Banker, which came out of the Leveraged Sell-Out blog. (Rough timing for a book like this—the market's so unpredictable.) But it is true that "Bear Stearns is the Wall Street Radar." [Radar]

The magazine industry cares about the environment. They promise. For example, did you know that magazines can be recycled? Just put them right there in the recycling bins and feel the satisfaction! The industry is even running a campaign to urge you all to "Please Recycle This Magazine" after you read it (though I choose to recycle Entertainment Weekly before I read it). But are the biggest publishing companies themselves living up to these lofty recycling standards? One possibly soon-to-be-fired Conde Nast insider says hell no!

Conde Nast Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici says in a post about the green campaign:

At a certain major magazine publisher — because I work there, I won't reveal its name other than to say it makes up the first two words in the name of my magazine — it's an open secret that the ubiquitous blue recycling bins actually get emptied into the trash. I'm still waiting to hear back from a spokeswoman about just why it is this company, which is known for lavishing money on its top editors and executives in the form of clothing allowances and no-interest loans, and which always has a line of Town Cars idling outside its 43rd Street entrance, can't seem to find a way to recycle the tons upon tons of paper it discards every year, as its two main competitors, Hearst and Time Inc., already do. And seeing as this company is a member of MPA, and thus a de facto sponsor of its "Please Recycle This Magazine" campaign, it would seem just a tad hypocritical not to address this matter in short order.

Ha, Jeff are you feeling salty or what? It's a heartening thing. That man is due for either a pat on the back or a Krucoff-like dismissal. We hope the former!

Then in the comments, News Corp. stands accused of the same crime by and anonymous troublemaker:

This is also true of the blue buckets in News Corp's NYC HQ. Employees can separate to their hearts' content, the building's owner throws it all together.

Anybody else have info on their big famous publishing company's environmental hypocrisy? Email us. (Gawker Media has not used a sheet of paper since 2005).

[Mixed Media]

newVideoPlayer("/Larry_King_Voice.flv", 506, 423,""); The mysterious Young Manhattanite writes: For months now I have been looking for a classic clip of Larry King drunk on his radio show that I heard way back in the dawn of the public Internet when my friend downloaded it from a newsgroup. It's NOWHERE online now. My friend finally found the cassette tape he transfered it to back then (yes, a cassette tape!) and redigitized it. After some digging, it appears this recording was made between 1987 and 1994 when his radio and tv shows overlapped. This witching hour call-in segment was called Open Phone America. According to Wikipedia, the phones would open up at 3 a.m. for callers to discuss any topic they pleased with Larry. Give it a good listen. Really picks up halfway through. Update: Transcript below!

Hey, the HuffPo typed it up!

Caller: I'm a student of print journalism, and I just wanted to know: what advice do you have for young people coming up into the field? Like, a lot of our professors are telling us how hard it is to get into the field at first. I'd just like to know, since you're in the field, if you have any advice on that.

[silence]

Caller: For instance, experience: is that important?
Larry King: Uh huh, sure.
Caller: Is that probably the most important?
Larry King: Well, it's way up there.
Caller: It's way up there...anything else?
Larry King: Pressure under fire, done this before, I don't want this to be his first surgery.
Caller: Okay...
Larry King: Applied himself well. These are the things that I'd have confidence in a young M.D.
Caller: Okay...I'm talking about the journalism field.
Larry King: I'm lost, what do you mean?
Caller: Journalism...I'm a student of journalism at a college and I was just wondering the most important aspect of getting into journalism. Not the medical field. I think you're exhausted from 30 nights.
Larry King: I am exhausted from 30 nights. No person, even those of us who are superhuman, those of us with Herculean appetites for the diverse and the bizarre, even those of us who have shown an aptitude to fight the good fight and stay the good long battle...even those of us can get tired. And your boy is tired after 30 consecutive nights. I have a half hour to go and I'm gonna do that half hour because I'm a pro, and that's what pros do. I'm a pro-fessional. Look it up in the book.
Caller: Okay...
Larry King: That's what we do, we're pros. We're never rude and we don't cop out. We don't tell you that we're ill or that we're looking for the farmhouse in the middle of the desert. Or that we're parched. We don't tell you that maybe the check didn't come through this month, and where the hell does it go anyway if you're a guy who's left 16 forwarding addresses?
Caller: Okay...
Larry King: So what do you do? What is the answer? Yeah, you're a little perturbed now. Kinda worried about the club.
Caller: The club?
Larry King: Don't worry about the club. Worry about, maybe, Jackie, my...haha, nah, don't worry. Okay, just cool it. Life is a breeze. Of course, some breezes as you know at 110 mph and get promoted up to hurricanes...I just thought I'd pass that along. Speaking of pass along, we're gonna pass along now to the newsroom, the Mutual Newsroom high atop the overlooking downtown, beautiful downtown studios of [slurred, Arlington?] Virginia, Washington DC. The Mutual Newsroom will get us up to date on the news headlines and we'll come back with more Open Phone America and we'll have our salute to my man Duke [?] by taking him to one of his favorite places, one of mine too: the town of Cooperstown, New York. This is the Larry King Show in Washington, and we'll be right back.

newVideoPlayer("Holler_at_your_Boy.flv", 475, 376);
Hello, this is Joshua David Stein. I am back briefly to talk about the fifth season of Bravo's Project Runway whose third episode aired last night. Contentious, heated and puzzling, last night's episode was a pitched battle for who is the most annoying character this season. In the running is Suede, the bargain-bin mohawk Smurf who inconsistently speaks about himself in the third-person; there's Blayne, the blonde tan troll droll; and Jerrell, who Mr. Richard Lawson and I agree, says nothing substantive but does it in a tone of voice as if what he is saying is clever and bitchy and we're just assholes for not getting it. And then there's our own Montauk Monster, Stella Zotis, the walking D.A.R.E. ad. She's not so annoying as just nervous-making. She did however remark whilst banging a gromit into yet another pair of leather pants, "What a gay little gromit this is," which may be the best line of the entire series. At those words, little Blayne's pointed poison ivy ears perked up. He's a gay little gromit too.

The narrative arc of last night's episode have been exhaustively and episodically brilliantly covered by MisterHippity and his 882 twitching liveblogging fingers. The challenge was to take New York City as an inspiration. The contestants took wildly out-of-focus photographs of idiotic details we find in our fair city and then tried to render them in fabric to various degrees of OMFG That's Hideous, Get A Way From Me, You Monster Sewer.
It has been done before and is done every season and as always some poor fucks flounder. The loser this week, spoiler whatever, is that long-necked scary-eyed pseudo-hipster chick who made a black dress with day-glo puke ruffles on its front. Strangely, a model in a little black dress with day glo puke running down the front of it truly is a New York sight. Anyway, she got axed. But funnily, Blayne made almost exactly the same dress. His is on the left. Witness:


Anyway, at a later point in the show, Blayne puts Tim Gunn, who we all love in these parts (you should see where I'm pointing!) in the bad bad position of saying, "Holla atcha boy!" See, that's something that Blayne says because he's an idiot asshole. That's not something Tim Gunn should say because, after all, no idiot asshole is he. It made me feel bad like when I watched that video that a deeply immoral soul posted of his Grandmother watching 2 Girls 1 Cup. The dignity of the olds shouldn't be sacrificed for the pleasure of the young.

Let's face it: We all know Blayne is rotten to his carrot core. He's a bad egg. He's ugly cabinetry. He's a mediocre fool and what's worse than that? He's a gay little Gromit. He's bird poop straight from the cloaca. And when he says "Holla Atcha Boy" it makes me want to scream.

What more is there to say about The Hills? Since its turgid, overly-lit debut in 2006, the MTV reality gloop—about pretty dim things wandering the echoing halls of Los Angeles—has captured the fancy of a small and annoying group of Americans. Debate has raged about the verisimilitude of the ladies' (and even-worse gents') exploits, because they all seem so staged and wooden. Every possible story has churned around the media washing machine, and now Entertainment Weekly has a cover story this week in which they promise "The Most Intimate Look Ever" at the show.

And, I dunno, it's probably not so much EW's fault as it is the tight-lipped and withholding producers' and stars' that the article doesn't really teach us anything new. The two most interesting tidbits come when we learn that Lauren, arguably the star of the show, sometimes wakes with a start in the middle of the night and thinks she's being filmed, and when they provide a little rundown of the show's "scheduled reality" (like that turn of phrase) production schedule. That description is below.

As with most scenes on The Hills, the cast knew ahead of time that cameras would be present at the barbecue. Almost everything is planned in advance, which is why production of The Hills has always faced tremendous skepticism — is it contrived? Is it fake? The answer is...to a point. The Hills is, essentially, scheduled reality. A typical week begins with producers calling the core cast members on Sunday and getting intel on what's happened to them over the weekend. An e-mail update is sent to the staff that night so everyone can prepare for Monday's ''story meeting,'' in which the producers and story editors sit around and dissect the Hills girls' personal and social lives. From that, they determine whom to film during the week. (On average, it takes editors four to six weeks to cull through the footage and put together an episode.) Lauren and her costars are forbidden to attend these meetings. ''I would love to sit through one of those,'' says Lauren, ''because it's really them being like, 'Yo, did you hear what this person said?'''

As if paying out the snout for a graduate degree to help you land a low-paying job in the highly unstable field of journalism wasn't hard enough. Now, Inside Higher Ed reports, J-schools are adding "new media" concentrations and programs to their repertoire. That's right: THEY'LL TEACH YOU HOW TO BLOG.

"Many schools gradually branched into video editing, Web design and blogging, among other media, as they became more widely accepted over the years. More recently, courses are being organized into concentrations and in several high-profile cases, the programs are receiving significant backing from foundations seeking to improve and reform journalism education for the 21st century.

“I think one of the main benefits of encouraging convergence and learning how to tell stories not just through one medium but many media” — such as video cameras, cell phones, pen and paper, Twitter and other tools — is “creating an environment [in which] you are not just preparing a journalist to tell a story with one method,” said Ellyn Angelotti, an adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, and interactivity editor of its Web site."

Twitter. TWITTER. Tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition and people are talking about TWITTER, perhaps the most idiotic form of communication of our time.

Anyway! @J-School: Late for my YouTube seminar! One last important fact from the article: between 40-60% of working journalists never went to J-school.

In New Media Programs, Who Benefits?[Inside Higher Ed]

People magazine has won the heated bidding war for the new Brangelina baby pictures, according to a report (unconfirmed, so far) on JustJared.com, who puts the winning bid at "between $10 million and $15 million." Rumors of a $15 million payday for the tot photos surfaced almost two months ago. People was bidding against OK!—where publisher Richard Desmond was reportedly so determined to land the rights that he was leading the negotiations personally. If People really walked away the victor here, they will have succeeded in staving off (temporarily) OK!'s ominous ambition to corner the baby picture market. [JustJared]

newVideoPlayer("/Montauk_Monster.flv", undefined, NaN,""); As Montauk Monstergate continues, the national news media has begun to take notice (and drink companies are trying to piggyback on the buzz). The breezy wind-up toys at Fox News did a segment on our little creature friend (who I suppose we can now call Monty, as suggested by a commenter) this morning, bringing on noted animal expert and possible crazy person Jeff Corwin to resolve the mat