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If ever there was a grim picture of the current financial clusterfuck, it's the once artsy (Björk! sigur rós!), hip, and rich island nation wonderland of Iceland, which fell into cataclysmic economic failure earlier this month. And it happened pretty much overnight. Since the three major banks collapsed under crippling debt and a plummeting currency, job loss has been widespread—the architecture industry, for example, has seen some 75% of its work force laid off in the past few weeks. Now the seemingly peaceful population has devolved into an angry, violent mob, with a gay "troubadour" named Hordur Torfason leading the charge against the government.
Torfason, a playwright/actor/folk musician who was the first Icelander to publicly come out about thirty years ago, says of the wayward parliament: "They don't have our trust and they are no longer legitimate." That the singer of charming little ditties could become the face of a nation of newly desperate and (for now) hopeless anti-government rioters kind of scares the hell out of us, because if it could happen in that seemingly idyllic country, what surreal end-of-days scenarios await us? Will John Waters take up the reins of the new American hobo class, rioting against police until our government is overthrown?
As for Iceland's demise, unemployment is estimated to reach 10% by next year. It's a microcosm of a much bigger disaster, that could "put [the country] back 40 or 50 years," according to Sarah Lyall of the New York Times. There is a silver lining though! Reykjavik, with its loungey up-all-night bar scene, used to be one of Europe's most tantalizing but prohibitively expensive nightlife cities. Not anymore! These days we can go there cheap and dance in the ashes of their once gloriously idyllic Norse city, ably forgetting our looming penury back here Stateside.
Then we'll come home and leave them to their own devices. The long forever-night will set in, and there they'll stay.
A frozen reminder of a wintry paradise, lost.
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Do you feel that tingly spark in the air today, especially as you near Times Square? It's because Total Request Live, MTV's long-running afterschool music video special is coming to an end after ten years, signing off on Sunday with a special big send-off bash. Yes, one of the last remaining programs on the cable net to still air videos (albeit at truncated lengths and often interrupted by shrieking teenagers) will be no more, ceding like everything else to the Date My Moms and Hills of the world. Ironic, because in some ways, actually, the top 10 videos of the day countdown show helped create the new MTV landscape that eventually came to usurp it.
The draw of TRL was never really the actual videos. It was the spectacle view of dizzying Times Square, the live-ness, the celebrity appearances, the affable and comfortably hip hosts (Carson Daly! And, um, Jesse Camp! And that girl from One Tree Hill!) It was really about the lifestyle of liking music, the thrill of just being thrilled, the ecstasy and immediacy and bittersweet fever dances of being a kid and out of school and having stumbled upon this great big infinite thing called Personality (I like this song—I am rock! You like that video—you are pop!). That celebration of the culture of music, rather than the music itself, has spilled over into the network's current top hits, like The Hills. That particular reality dollop of non-fat Cool Whip expertly employs the hit songs of tomorrow to evoke, along with the swirling cameras, a soaring and sprawling range of feelings. Like music usually is in real life, music on MTV now serves as the illustrative background to the people dating and getting made and dancing and competing and existing in the fore.
And we've TRL to blame/thank for that—for adding a bit of shape to the world as it's seen through the MTV lens. It said "here we are, set at on all sides by movies and television and pretty people and hormones, and here, in brief, is the soundtrack to accompany all of it. And you chose it."
And those huge picture windows overlooking the crowds and lights and glitz, through which we could look out and others could look in! A glass case of emotion!
!!!
MTV Shows
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Writer John Leonard has died, according to Vulture. He was 69. Leonard, an out-and-proud liberal, was the longtime TV critic for New York magazine and wrote a book column for Harper's. He has also been the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a book critic for The Nation, wrote for the New York Review of Books, and was a commenter on CBS's Sunday Morning. His most recent book is titled When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. He was also the father of Salon's tech editor, Andrew.
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After a long battle with cancer, science fiction's biggest crossover novelist Michael Crichton died today. Though the lanky Harvard graduate was most well known for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park, he leaves behind a sometimes controversial legacy of investigation into the most prominent scientific issues of our time. We review the highlights of his storied career:
The Chicago-born author made his stunning debut under his own name with The Andromeda Strain, which would inspire the first film taken from his oeuvre. Books like Disclosure and Rising Sun veered from his science fiction interests into cultural criticism and formed the template for his NBC series, ER.
In his 2004 novel State of Fear he aroused indignation from the scientific community. Crichton's right-wing politics didn't usually endear him to other writers, resulting in memorable clashes with Susan Faludi, Al Gore and Michael Crowley, who he memorably portrayed as a child molestor in his novel Next.
Crichton's public notoriety was balanced by his closeness with his family during his illness. "He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget," his daughter said today.
At his best, Crichton was able to anticipate emerging cultural and technological trends, and surround them with a compelling narrative that never failed to address issues of the moment in a non-contrived fashion like no other. He'll be missed.
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Studs Terkel, Chicago's beloved author, interviewer, activist, radio host, and historian, died today at 96. Terkel's books Hard Times, Working, and The Good War are essential reading for students of American history in the first half of the 20th Century. He was a legendary storyteller and interviewer, and it's amazing to remember that not only did he publish his first book when he was already 55, but he then lived on to publish a dozen more, including one, P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening, set to be released next month. "Take it easy, but take it." [Chicago Tribune, Related]
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Fred Baron, the attorney who rebuilt the Texas Democratic party and became famous, late in life, for his unfortunate help in covering up the extramarital affair of former Senator John Edwards, died Thursday of cancer. He was 61. Baron made a fortune in asbestos litigation, and used the funds to found the Texas Democratic Trust in 2005, among countless other philanthropic causes. In the Edwards affair, Baron was revealed as the source of the supposed "hush money" keeping mistress Rielle Hunter living in relative luxury. Baron fought corporations to the end, demanding that a pharmaceutical company allow him to use an experimental drug in his treatment. He won, but it didn't work. He won, but it didn't work. He is survived by his son Andrew, founder of the dumb internet video program Rocketboom. Andrew organized a movement to get his father the drug, enlisting Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, and John Kerry to help. [DallasNews]
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Guillaume Depardieu, the estranged son of renowned actor Gérard, died today from complications relating to pneumonia at a hospital outside Paris. He was 37. An actor himself, Depardieu received acclaim early in his career for the 1995 film The Apprentices. He costarred with his father in several films, most notably Aime ton père (A Loving Father) in 2002. Though, dark clouds seemed to often occlude his successes.
Depardieu had problems with heroin in his early 20's, serving a year-long prison sentence for smuggling. Also, a year after he won the César Award for Promising Newcomer for Apprentices, he badly injured his leg in a motorbike accident. In 2003, suffering from years of pain due to a bacterial infection, he decided to have the leg amputated. It was the same year that he had a public falling out with his father, writing a tell-all book in which he called Gérard a drunken miser, essentially. He also revealed that he'd once acted as a prostitute in his teenage years, partly to rebel against his father. There's no evidence yet to suggest that his death was related to either his injury or his drug use. Either way, a difficult, scrutinized life ended too soon. [AP]
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Joerg Haider, the extreme right wing Austrian politician who once said the Nazis had "an orderly employment policy" and referred to the concentration camps as "the punishment camps of National Socialism," died in a car crash last night. He was 58. "Haider was pronounced dead in a hospital shortly after his Volkswagen Phaeton veered off the road outside Klagenfurt in southern Austria and overturned several times after he successfully passed another car, police said. Authorities said an initial investigation showed no signs of foul play. At the time of his death, Haider was governor of the province of Carinthia and leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria—a party he formed after breaking away from the far right Freedom Party in 2005."
Haider always denied having a soft spot for the Third Reich and its Neo-Nazi spawn, but when he got into national government with 27 percent of the vote on an anti-immigration platform in 1999, the rest of Europe rewarded Austria with months of EU sanctions over Haider's statements—seen by less Alpine nations as anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler. Strangely, Israel's relations with Austria suffered after Haider's election, and the Israeli ambassador was pulled from Vienna.
Though Haider and his gang left the Freedom Party for the gentler Alliance for the Future of Australia in 2005, Haider met with the Freedom Party's leader last month when they realized their combined votes in the last national election were nearly equal to that of the winning Social Democrats.
Said Freedom Party boss Heinz-Christian Strache, "Joerg Haider achieved great things ... he was a great figure." [AP]
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When we remember the New York Sun, we'll try to remember the great local reporting and the fantastic sports page and the serious and smart arts coverage. Not so much the ideological inanity and loud constant taking of the precisely wrong side of every important issue of this miserable era. In trying to remember them that way, of course, one is best advised to skip most of their farewell edition. The goodbyes are not self-pitying, at least, but they reveal a newspaper that imagines it had some small role in the destruction of this country while turning a blind eye to the many myriad ways they could've continued on their crusade if they hadn't been so utterly out of touch.
The opening of the farewell editorial sets the scene:
What a run. A newspaper founded by a company that was scheduled to be created on September 11, 2001, announces its last issue on September 29, 2008, the day of the largest one-day point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's easy to forget the boom years in between that were bracketed by the terrorist attacks and the financial crisis.
Who can forget the glorious boom years of fear, war, torture, scandal and ignorance that have led us to this miserable wheezing end of our second gilded age? Thanks, Sun!
Their official history of the paper similarly ignores the things we loved about the scrappy daily in favor of reminding us of things like their idiotic call for the privatization of the New York subways in the very first editorial (followed by one announcing that some Washington Mall hippie demonstration was part of "The War Against the Jews"). The paper's founder and brainchild continues to impress:
When the paper was launched, a reporter of the Washington Post had asked its editor, Seth Lipsky, how the Sun would be able to compete against the New York Times, which had "eighty reporters" on its metropolitan desk. The Times might have 80 reporters, he replied, but they missed the story that taxes are too high, that the reason there is an apartment shortage is rent control, and that vouchers are a movement to rescue minority children from failing schools.
Yes, the Times missed that all-important local story on how taxes are too high, much as they missed the breaking national "hippies smell" scandal. We are trying to root for you here, Seth!
But it's hard. It's oh-so-hard. It is sad to see a daily broadsheet with smart writing fail, but honestly it didn't have to. The paper "burned through an estimated $80 million in its six and a half years of operation," according to the Post (which is gloating about the failure, yes, but still). If they'd began, back in 2001, as the tiny modest paper Lipsky originally intended, and built a strong internet presence, they'd be the Politico of the Intellectual Zionist New York Right Wing right now. Do you know what we could do with $80 million???
But no. They launched their paper just as their world-view reached its peak influence (post-9/11!), not when it was still a burgeoning, growing movement. So then they were stuck with it as it failed and lost favor. They launched a newspaper—a daily broadsheet!—as the newspaper industry collapsed and the internet took off again. It's hard not to see this as yet another example of "the smartest guys in the room" coming out looking like suckers.
Situations change of course, and added to the mix has been the great debate over foreign policy and the war. We are struck with each crisis — including the one that has beset our markets, when the temptation is running strong for so many to take the statist bait, though not once did we consider asking Washington to bail out the Sun — of the importance of guiding principles.
If that bit about not asking for a bailout is a joke, it's a lousy, un-self-aware one. Their glorious market, like their generation-defining war, was built on lies and misplaced faith, sold to us by hucksters like them (but more successful ones), and the cleanup for both mistakes will take years. Good riddance. See you on the internet.
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Posted: August 26th, 2008, 12:37pm CDT by Moe
Jerry Ford,* the (dapper!) fellow pictured here, is dead at 83.** Ford founded Ford Models, one of the leading agencies in the seventies and eighties that legitimized the industry and gained renown for discovering Lauren Hutton, Christie Brinkley, Rachel Hunter, Vendela and sundry other blonde ubermodeltypes and OMG I totally forgot about Xuxa. Ford is slightly less famed for its canny picking of future Mouseketeer Gone Wild types: the agency represented Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton, Ashley Tisdale, Courteney Cox, Ali Larter and ha ha ha we will forgive him for this but Paris Hilton. Because Jerry Ford was the first genuinely decent boss in a business characterized by predatory "robber barons." A lot has changed since Ford's heyday, and not for the better!
The robber barons, for one thing, are back. As our anonymous industry friend and Jezebel contributor Tatiana tells us, most modeling agencies these days are glorified human traffickers that occupy a place on the "usury" spectrum somewhere between Payday Loan shops and actual armed robbers. Agencies stick them in overcrowded model apartments and gouge them on rent. When they are not in "demand," they're forced to work for either clothes or nothing at all; when they are in demand, they're forced to walk 28 shows in a week and that sort of nonsense.
Ford was different. He instituted a five-day workweek, paid models every Friday even when clients didn't pay up, and ran a practically Victorian institution wherein models weren't allowed to host gentleman callers. I don't even think he knew how to get coke! Obviously all that shit is gone today. In any case, Ford sold out to a private equity firm in December and his son who is still involved in the company is apparently (duh) a modelizer.
We welcome any and all old Ford Model cards, hot Courteney Cox pix, links to that cute Lindsay Lohan-Mischa Barton catalog picture that surfaced sometime last year and/or clips of that retarded Xuxa show.
Jerry Ford, Man Behind The Models
*The nice ex-president with the homophonic name died in 2006, remember? Hah.
**On another note, Ford died of endocarditis, a deadly heart valve infection that generally results when a sick patient contracts a virulent strain of the sort of antibiotic resistant staph you may know as MRSA. More people die from MRSA every year than AIDS these days, but as the New Yorker recently pointed out, few pharmaceutical companies invest much money in developing drugs to fight infectious disease anymore because there is so much more money in developing drugs that might make us less fat or something.
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Someday, everyone reading this is going to die! And we should all get started on whatever we really want to do now, because the Grim Reaper could come to collect us at any minute. He's already come for Dave Freeman, co-author of 100 Things to Do Before You Die: Travel Events You Just Can't Miss. Mr. Freeman died at his home last week after falling and hitting his head—he was 47.
Events that we just "can't miss" before we die, according to his book's table of contents, include the Iditarod, New Year's Eve in Times Square, the Navajo Nation Fair, something called the "Testicle Festival," and Burning Man.
With that in mind, I guess I really want to go to France! Haven't been there yet. Also Thailand. But there is no way in hell I'm going to work myself into a hell-demon acid trip with a bunch of hippies in the desert at Burning Man—dead or not dead.
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Posted: July 29th, 2008, 11:19am CDT by Richard
As you stumble home drunkenly this evening, trundling down Stuart St. in Boston, or off of some semi-major highway in the greater Chicagoland area, don't plan on getting your faux-Irish crapbag food fix the way you've gotten it for years. Tonight, everything goes away. After three hundred and twenty-two devoted years of deep frying sandwiches (seriously, one bite and you died... in a good way) Bennigan's Grill & Tavern, known to some as Not-Applebee's, is shuttering most of its locations. Though, if your local family feedbag is one of the independently owned franchises, it might stay open. (Especially in Indiana!) So enjoy that special Jameson barbecue menu for as long as you can. It might not be long, though. Because I remember? When the Ground Round went out of business? There was one near me that stayed open? But then it totally closed, like, only a few months later. Let's take a moment of fried silence.
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Posted: July 25th, 2008, 12:31pm CDT by Sheila
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Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:57pm CDT by Richard
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Posted: July 11th, 2008, 1:13pm CDT by Pareene
Hiroaki "Rocky" Aoki, the wrestler and restaurateur who essentially introduced America to Japanese food with his Benihaha chain, died today in New York. He was 69. Aoki raised the money to start his first Benihana by driving an ice cream truck in Harlem, which is awesome. More recently, he's been known to New Yorkers through his children, model Devon and annoying scenester DJ Steve. He faced deportation in 2006, and you could do worse for an introduction to his colorful life than this New York story on that incident. It begins, ominously: "'My daughter Grace is telling me, Daddy, your wife is going to poison you to death. Be careful what you eat,' says Rocky Aoki with an odd, amused grin." [AP]
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Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine, died today at the age of 80 after an extended illness. The Missouri native got his start in journalism as a magazine writer for titles like LIFE, Time, and Esquire, but he will go down in history as the man who codified a method for chronicling the elite of New York, while providing a platform for the city's best writers. He's responsible for creating the only real glossy city magazine that is also a good magazine on its own merits—unapologetically elitist, but not blinkered. And slick enough to justify it all.
Felker started New York in 1968 as a "new journalism" window into the workings of the city's power structure—but one that defined the power structure broadly, and explored how the city's different spheres collided with each other:
Thirty years ago, not long before his fellow owners and Rupert Murdoch squeezed him out of the magazine he had founded, Felker defined New York very simply as a guide to "how the power game is played, and who are the winners." And Wolfe, his early superstar, has said that "Clay's real interest, although I'm not sure he ever thought it out conceptually, was status and how it operates in New York. ... In New York Magazine, Clay really wrote an enormous novel about the city. ... It was his vision, his plot—a huge novel called The City of Ambition."
Designed as a sort of urban-centric antidote to the New Yorker's more eclectic musings, the magazine fostered a ton of talent, including Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Gail Sheehy, Felker's future wife. He lost the magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a hostile takeover in 1976. He would go on to hold a series of editorial jobs at a kaleidoscope of titles, including Esquire, the Daily News, the Village Voice, and US News & World Report. But none would approach the legacy that he left with New York.
Kurt Andersen says that Felker, the middle American emigre to the big city, simply took his mental playbook of how New York worked "literally, and published it in weekly serial form." And look around: that's what everyone—including us—is doing today. For that, we must all acknowledge that Felker's mark will never disappear, as long as this city stays full of smart people with a burning ambition to talk.
[NY Mag]
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Stand-up comedian George Carlin, whose routine about forbidden words on the airwaves led to a key Supreme Court decision on government broadcast oversight, died of heart failure near Los Angeles. He was 71. Carlin had been admitted to the hospital earlier in the day with chest pains. He launched to fame in the 1960s as a straightlaced, suit-and-tie comedian appearing on programs like the Ed Sullivan Show as characters like the "hippie-dippie weatherman." By the 1970s, he was doing more risque material in long hair and jeans, and his performance of the routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" prompted an obscenity trial in Milwaukee, plus the Supreme Court fight, which arose from the airing of a similar routine on the radio in New York and an FCC fine.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Carlin's comedy became both sharper as social commentary and emotionally darker, sounding even, at times, bitter. The comedian was treated for alcohol addiction after a fight with an audience at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 2004.
Below, Carlin's 1990 routine (NSFW) on how euphemisms undermine discourse in America. Post your own favorite routines in the comments.
[AP, Times]
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Posted: May 21st, 2008, 10:40am CDT by Sheila
Florent, the long-standing neighborhood 24-hour bistro that's welcomed 7a.m. clubbers and regular folk alike since 1985, has been warning of its demise for months now. The owner, Florent Morellet, vowed to stay open for as long as he could. Now it's official: the last day of business will be June 29th—the rent went up to over $30,000 a month. Frank Bruni eulogizes the restaurant in the NYT today—comedian Jackie Hoffman tells him, "It was kind of like the halfway house of restaurants. If there was a pre-op tranny or someone who just wasn't finished yet, or a burn victim — anyone could go in there and not be judged." Meanwhile, Florent Morellet himself explains why he didn't want press hype in the early days—and what he did to restaurant reviewers who betrayed his wishes.
MR. MORELLET: I didn't want any press. I was so scared because I'd seen so many restaurants opening with a bang, big media, blah-blah-blah. And it's a disaster.
MR. RUBINSTEIN: I must have gone in there at least a half-dozen times before I wrote about it. Then the review came out, and I remember being home on a Saturday night, and the phone rang at about 8 o'clock, and it was Florent, furious. Furious.
MR. MORELLET: After he wrote it I called him and yelled at him and I said, "Listen!" I put the phone up to the din of the dining room, which was really loud, and hung up.
MR. RUBINSTEIN: He basically started with a stream of invectives that went on for five minutes. He cursed me out. I'd betrayed him. Destroyed him. He called me every word in the book. He slammed the phone down. The phone rang two minutes later.
MR. MORELLET: And then I called him back and I said: "Come over. We have to have dinner."
Restaurant Florent Takes Its Final Bows [NYT]
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Posted: May 13th, 2008, 10:01am CDT by Pareene
Artist Robert Rauschenberg, the man who saved us from abstract expressionism, died Monday at the age of 82. The Times describes him as a "brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner." People used to care way more about art when it was made by people like that instead of twee New School students. Rauschenberg started out making art out of junk he found on the streets of lower Manhattan, announcing that if you didn't find "soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles" beautiful than you must be a miserable bastard. So go to the Moma this week and see First Landing Jump, which is made of "a rusted license plate, an enamel light reflector, a tire impaled by a street barrier, a man's shirt, a blue lightbulb in a can, and a black tarpaulin." And some paint and canvas, sure. [NYT]
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Posted: May 7th, 2008, 3:37am CDT by Ryan Tate
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Posted: May 1st, 2008, 12:58pm CDT by Pareene
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the "DC Madam" who was convicted in April of charges related to her famous prostitution ring, died today in an apparent suicide at her mother's house in Florida. She was 52. Palfrey was busted in October of 2006, and it wasn't long before she captured national attention by threatening to release her phone records—records that could've destroyed the careers of hundreds of Washington politicians and officials. Or so went speculation at the time.
Palfrey, a former receptionist, cocktail waitress, and probable escort herself, began her escort service under the name "Pamela Martin & Associates" in 1993. By 2006 her girls charged $300-per-hour and allegedly counted as clients thousands of important Washington figures.
She was finally busted in 2006 (by the Post Office!), whereupon she began her second career as an inescapable media figure (in DC, at least). She made headlines by threatening to sell her client list to pay for her attorneys—attorneys she kept firing, until finally deciding to defend herself. The presiding judge eventually convinced her to take a court-appointed lawyer as the case went to court this February.
Meanwhile, Palfrey continued insisting she'd done nothing illegal. She was merely offering an "erotic fantasy service." The first high-profile johns Palfrey outed—Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias and some think-tank nut—admitted no wrong-doing. Tobias did eventually resign.
And finally she released what is probably the biggest name on her list—Senator David Vitter. Vitter, who's even been linked to other whores, did not resign.
She didn't sell the list. She did hand it over to ABC, but they apparently found nothing on it newsworthy enough to share.
As her trial for money laundering and racketeering drew closer, Palfrey found herself settling into a comfortable role as a media talking head—DC's own unrepentant Heidi Fleiss, happy to opine on the whoring of great men in case tomorrow's column was looking a little dry.
Faced with the convictions on all charges, though, and possible jail time, well—who the hell knows what was really going on. You never do.
Now we await the conspiracy theorists who'll swear she was killed by the government before she could reveal that Dick Cheney was a client, or something.
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Thousands of people in Jamaica turned out last weekend to celebrate the life of Bob Marley's mother, who apparently died earlier this month, in a development I totally missed. Her name was Cedella Booker, and she died at the age of 81, outliving her son by 27 years. Bob Marley, the reggae superstar who was (argument starter) the most notable musician of the 20th century, now leaves behind only his seemingly endless procession of kids to carry on his name—his British dad died in 1955. We should also note that Marley once had a brief affair with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Noted! Anyhow, let's take a moment to remember Cedella Booker, who recorded two albums herself, and wrote two books about her son [The Root]. Her life produced a net gain in the world's happiness. How shall we memorialize her? With a video of her son singing "Natural Mystic," of course:
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The Semicolon died this week at the age of 417 from complications of irrelevancy and misuse. Semicolon was born in England in 1591 to Ben Jonson, the first notable writer to use them "systematically." The mark of punctuation dedicated its career to connecting independent clauses and indicating a closer relationship between the clauses than a period does. But mostly it just confused the shit out of English students everywhere.
Well, the semi isn't technically dead yet but there's a healthy debate going on speculating that its days are numbered. And as any B-list celebrity can attest, when people start asking whether your career is dead, it already is. So that's the angle we're going with.
The Guardian offers a rather startlingly in-depth analysis of the viability of the semicolon, including "for" and "against" arguments from notable writers. It should come as no surprise that Jonathan Franzen takes an unabashedly pro-semicolon stance.
"I love a good semicolon, but this sounds like one of those Literature is Dead! Stories that The New York Times likes to run," he says. "I've never heard from a reader confused by one of my semicolons, and I don't remember ever throwing a book aside for being semicolon-free."
The late Kurt Vonnegut, meanwhile, takes the subtle approach and compares semicolons to cross-dressing she-males: "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons," he has cautioned. "They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All
Longtime ultimate fighter and former UFC middleweight champion Evan Tanner was 
G Spa—the tiny, dank club in the basement of the Meatpacking District's Hotel Gansevoort—is closing on Saturday. It was a celeb-magnet and a dreadful place. It will not be missed. (We voted it the 
Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University professor whose last lecture after being diagnosed with terminal cancer became a YouTube hit last year, has died at 47. (That turned into the bestselling book The Last Lecture.) Pausch, an award-winning computer science professor, had pancreatic cancer. After the jump, his famed lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."
Estelle Getty, actress and adorable little old shrunken lady, 
