quit yer bitchin' #45

sometimes actions speak louder than words. and sometimes no resume is required.

(we're not talking about here at the elsewhen offices, you understand. other places, far away. definitely other places.)

how to tell pr spew from news

frankly, these days it's getting hard to tell the difference. with layoffs across all media and our apparent indifference to political and fourth estate news, it's getting harder & harder for the remaining journalists to resist the siren call of using wikipedia entries as source material and disguising press releases as legitimate news.

luckily, the center for media and democracy publishes pr watch, which can teach you to tell original footage from repurposed b-roll.

surprising no one, tx fights global warming fighters

well, after dubya, no one is exactly claiming that folks from tx are the brightest bulbs in the carton, let alone have our best interests @ heart, so business as usual.

(by the way, did we mention that we once had a boss that pissed on the alamo? true story. he also set fire to a rental car out of boredom, got us banned for life from albuquerque taxis, and used to keep a loaded cannon in his office. which may explain a lot about both our work ethic and our tendency to carry bail money.)

how the web changed media economics

after the jump: an insightful (if grammarless) examination of what the web has done to all media from an economic standpoint.

what amazes us, sportsfans, is that newspapers (in particular) continue to live in a state of denial about the fact that they've been pushing up daisies for years, and are now beginning to stink up the joint. no amount of layoffs is going to change that. their business model has come and gone, and the world has moved on without them.

c'est la vie.

(meanwhile, their stock falls like the public's expectations of obama. sidebar: we think we might finally have a nickname for the prez. how does 'the brown bomber' grab ya? apt? racist? misnomer? magically delicious? at least he's better than tricky dickless. so far.)

quit yer bitchin' #45

for those who doubt that war is all about who's got the bigger johnson, we proudly present the penis cannon.

(very proudly. and without viagra, too.)

land of the lost

back in 1974, we had nightmares featuring hissing sleestak and their hungry, unseen god. some of us had other dreams about 'land of the lost', too - dreams that involved holly marshall and her rapidly developing bustline. but i digress.

people tend to either like or loathe will ferrell. we usually fall in the first category, and his riff on sleestak, zarns, and pakuni stands on its own about as well as any of his films have (with the exception of a pointless, protracted bit about hallucinogenic fruit and homosexuality). in the end, though, 'land of the lost' only makes us more interested in digging up dvd's of the original series. (and hey, will - would some cameos from the original cast members have hurt?).

oh, and anna friel, who plays a version of holly in the flick, looks like this without her clothes.

2 out of 5 doomy's.

surprise! banks skate oversight again

here's a headsup for those of us who thought installing obama as president would suddenly cure all political cancers: when it came time to draft the 'stress tests' by which banks would be judged following the economic meltdown that they created, the banks themselves wrote the tests, and scaled them to be as easy on themselves as possible.

congress and obama let them. just like they let the credit card companies walk right over their proposed 'reforms'.

we're not saying it would have been any different if a republican was president. who's kidding who? the banks own capitol hill and everyone on it.

but that doesn't make this right, especially when it's our money - okay, china's money, which we now have to pay back - bailing these horse thieves out. i mean, can't we send a few dozen of them to prison, just for appearance's sake? and not a country club prison. i think we'd all enjoy it more if they went somewhere that offered them the possibility of becoming someone's bitch. hell, we'd pay money 24/7 to see that; it would make a great reality show.

so come on, mr. president (sorry, we don't have a cute pet name for him yet) - show some spine, buck the party, and throw this pampered lily-whites to the dogs. we might not get our 401k's back, but i guarantee we'll all sleep better.

burger king denies global warming

here's a surprise: several privately owned burger king restaurants around memphis, tn have the statement 'global warming is baloney' on their signs.

did we mention this was in tn? just trying to be clear.

the truth, of course, is that beef production is one of the top 3 causes of man-made global warming, as sad as it makes our little, placque-ridden carnivore hearts to say so. and don't even get us into how much water raising cattle wastes.

of course, all that will fall by the wayside over the next 40 years or so, as we begin the cultural shift to worldwide cannibalism. after which, folks who've made a habit of eating at burger king - or mcdonald's, taco bell, pizza hut, et al - start to look tasty.

we've already laid in a supply of mucky duck mustard.