"Klotz" As In "Blood"

Here’s one you might have missed…..

The son of the most-wanted man in the world spoke Sunday to CNN in a quiet, middle-class suburb about an hour outside Cairo, Egypt.

Omar bin Laden, who works as a contractor, said he is talking publicly because he wants an end to the violence his father has inspired — violence that has killed innocent civilians in a spate of attacks around the world, including those of September 11, 2001.

“I try and say to my father: ‘Try to find another way to help or find your goal. This bomb, this weapons, it’s not good to use it for anybody,’ ” he said in English learned in recent months from his British wife. – CNN

No comment from dad yet. Don’t hold your breath.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman General Dee Livery acknowledged the veracity of the report but dismissed its relevance. “Fathers don’t listen to their own sons in any culture,” she stated. “Any more than sons listen to their fathers. Look at George W and Whatzisname.”

Per usual, I am perched upon the throne on Sunday morning, first beer in hand and the remains of last night’s cigar relit (What can I tell you? As a lover of animals, Guido tolerates the fecund and the fetid with hardly a raised red eyebrow), and here’s the execrable Parade Magazine infesting the Miami Hurled.

But even before I wipe my ass with it, I see the cover story is an interview with Benazir Bhutto, written by no less a fluff-puffer than Gail Sheehy, vapid unofficial spokesman for self-indulgent boomers lo, these last 35 years.

In case you missed the headline, Bhutto was assassinated December 27. She died, died. This story, weeks old, should have been yanked; or at the very least, there should be some editorial remark acknowledging the tragedy and explaining the story’s inclusion. But there’s nothing. It just rattles on in classic Parade Magazine appropriate-for-suburban airhead housewife mode.

“It’s not like we’re real journalists,” protested Louis “Lips” LeGurgitator, Parade Magazine’s publisher/apologist, when I reach him late Sunday. “It’s not as if any of the words we print mean anything. They’re just there to separate the pictures and the advertisements. You want news, you read the rest of the paper.”

What — you mean the Hurled?

“Well, no. We’re gossip mongerers. That’s a step in front of the Miami paper. Don’t you have a teevee?”

In fact, the website was updated to mention the inconvenient fact of her death. Not good enough. No way that edition of Parade Rag should have been included. But removing it would have pissed off a lot of advertisers. Besides, nobody cares.

“Really, big deal,” says Lips. “Another dead wog. For something that minor we should lose a buck or screw a sponsor? You wanna explain that to Proctor and Gamble or Taco Bell?”

The recent demise of and subsequent blog-o-chatter surrounding Stuck on the Palmetto gets a grudging nod from today’s Miami Hurled. Astonished, I place a call.

“Normally we would ignore something like this,” Shirley U. Jest, a spokesman for the newspaper snarled. “We regard any medium that steals away our audience or criticizes us as the Enemy. Particularly where there’s Cubans involved, and half that blog — ‘blog’? Is that the right term? — was Cuban. The ‘Stuck’ part I think. Or maybe the ‘Palmetto.’ I forget. Who cares?”

“I don’t know what the big deal is,” an editor observed, requesting anonymity. “Blogs come and go all the time. Kind of like newspaper ownership. But evidently this one had something of a following. God knows why. I never read the damn things, and, as a hidebound backwards apathetic head-up-my-ass third-rate journalist typical of the profession today, if it doesn’t concern me, I’m certain it shouldn’t concern anybody else.”

I agree. Blogs are a complete waste of time. A short-term fad, mark my words. The Hurled is right again.

Ft. Pierce, FL A man who reportedly was walking around a house while sniffing women’s underwear last week is facing a burglary charge, according to an arrest affidavit obtained Monday. — Sun-Sentinel

What — THAT’S illegal now? Olfactory theft? If smelling women’s undergarments isn’t the penultimate paradigm of a victimless crime, what is? Erotic daydreams, maybe?

“You didn’t get past the headline, did you?” asks “Stains,” my pseudonymous media contact in Palm Beach County, when I call. (Some day I’ll tell you how he got his name.)

No, Stains. It’s the Sun-Sentinel. Nobody reads past the headline. In fact, nobody reads it at all, they mostly just look at the pictures and line the cat pan with it.

“Yeah yeah I know. But look — this guy was picked up in somebody else’s house. He’s homeless. Wanders in, helps himself to a few items of jewelry, gets spotted by a neighbor through a window sampling panty perfume. Cops come out, and there’s your story.”

So the burglary charge is the jewelry, not the aroma.

“Duh.”

And the headline is to catch readers’ attention.

“Not just ordinary readers, of which there are, as you nastily point out, damn few. Just the perverts and oddballs. The Sun-Sentinel has a very focused marketing plan now that it dropped actual news coverage.”

Hmm. Seems to be working. Given this market, there are far more prospective oddball/perverted readers than newshounds.

“For sure. People in Palm Beach County who want real news read the Post — we call it the ComPost — or the New York Times. But most people don’t want real news anyway. It’s depressing, and there’s golf courses here.”

Thanks for clearing that up, Stains. What’s gonna happen to Mr. Homeless BeeVeeDeviate?

“The usual. He’ll be out on the streets in no time. Underwear sniffers are less threatening than coke snorters, even if they’re not as good for the economy. Catch you later!”

Stains rings off, and I sigh with relief, assured our civil liberties remain intact.

Takes me a day or two to catch up with the Sunday NY Times, so I just got around to this article this morning, which had me guffawing on the toilet loud enough to alarm Guido. “What the hell are you doing in there?” she calls in. No sense of humor, these Dagoids.

Henry Alford’s column is nothing more than a string of statements of apology issued over the last few years by public figures in the wake of their saying doing or saying something horribly stupid, racist, bigoted, insensitive, offensive, false, etc. It’s a scream. I can’t resist repeating these two:

“It is with a heavy heart that I apologize this morning to Aunt Jemima.” — John Sylvester, a radio host in Madison, Wis., re his comparing of Condoleezza Rice to Aunt Jemima, 2004.

“What do you want me to do? Go over and kiss the camera? What do you want me to do?” — Bill O’Reilly, who’d said that if no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, “I will apologize to the nation and I will not trust the Bush administration again,” 2004.

Enjoy yourselves.

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content…..After much internal debate, Times executives – including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. – made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.– NY Post

Well, consider the source. But we’ll see.

Gee.  Less than one week before linking to “Fake Steve Jobs,” the blogger behind it all gets outed.  Read it here.

Spurred by Alesh with no blogroll of his own, I added “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” to mine.

Now and then I tune in ACCU-Radio to hear some music at work. Rude shock today: they’re participating in an industry-wide “Day of Silence.”

AccuRadio is participating in today’s industry-wide “Day of Silence” event to draw attention to royalty rate increases that could shut down Internet radio. Please take a brief moment today (if you’re a U.S. citizen) to call your two Senators and your representative in the House of Representatives to ask them to co-sponsor the “Internet Radio Equality Act.” Click the SaveNetRadio button below to learn how.

To learn more about this issue, you can also listen to a one-hour talk show, featuring AccuRadio founder Kurt Hanson, (every hour on the hour today) at KCRW.com

Thanks from all of us at AccuRadio… and we’ll be back to regular music programming tomorrow (at least for a couple more weeks)!

Why couldn’t this happen to talk radio? And up the ante: let’s have a Year of Silence.

“Information is moving — you know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it’s also moving through the blogosphere, and through the Internets.”

— President George W. Bush, addressing questions from the Associated General Contractors of America, Wednesday 5/2/07. Whole story here.