By Steve Rhodes
NOTE TO READERS: The [Monday] Papers have been delayed so long – due to unforeseen circumstances including a flat tire, some sort of yummy quesadilla and thai curry salad that came into my orbit and distracted me, and a series of slightly urgent phone calls – that I’ll just roll what I’ve got into The [Tuesday] papers tomorrow. I must attend to the Beachwood’s finance and marketing divisions this afternoon. Apologies, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
1. A map of The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Caption Contest winners. (via emdashes)
2. K-Tel Classics shut down.
3. So much for the Cuban Cubs. “Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has told associates that he has been unable to open any kind of dialogue with the Pirates’ owners about possibly buying the club. Meanwhile, a baseball ownership source says Commissioner Bud Selig, a conservative sort, is likely to dissuade any team from trying to sell to Cuban, the flamboyant Mount Lebanon native.” (via Hardball Times)
4. Among the Sun-Times letter-writers responding to Jay Mariotti’s column about Ozzie Guillen lambasting rookie pitcher Sean Tracey for failing to bean a batter: William Julius Wilson, the Harvard University sociology scholar formerly of the University of Chicago. What Wilson said: “I found Ozzie Guillen’s behavior sickening, to say the least.”
5. Where have all the UFOs gone?
6. “Your columns and blogs are good stuff, though I often disagree with them. But the ‘Zorn to Schmich, Schmich to Zorn’ stuff is too cutesy for me. That is best left to the Sun-Times for A Very Special ‘Sneed to Ryan, Ryan to Sneed’ column after our former governor is sent to the pokey.” Posted by: Tom | Jun 15, 2006 10:34:08 PM
– from Eric Zorn’s Change of Subject, in a thread inviting readers to hold him in contempt
7. Zorn also has the scoop on the latest developments on local radio personalities Tom Roeser, Ed Schwartz, and Nancy Skinner.
8. “Seems to me the ‘best band in the universe’ shouldn’t put you to sleep, leave you with the sense that you’ve heard everything in its latest grooves before (and done better) or give you four satisfying tunes out of a dozen this long into a much-vaunted career.”
– Jim DeRogatis reviewing the new Sonic Youth record, Rather Ripped
9. Catching up with another piece of puffery from MarketWatch‘s Jon Friedman that is too flawed to even bother with – this time on RedEye. Who is this guy?
10. People who work at Motorola are called Motorolans. The rest of us are Non-Motorolans.
11. Among corporate bloggers, Boeing has received good marks. But I stil prefer The Slowskys.
12. Roger Ebert captures the psychologically dislocating brilliance of The Shining.
13. Onion or New York Times? “Here at Mexico’s own southern edge, Guatemalans cross legally and illegally to do jobs that Mexicans departing for the north no longer want.”
14. Onion or New York Times? “In the woods with the Klingons, Brad Graper, 52, finished detailing a pair of Nerf guns painted gray, with sections of chrome tailpipe added to them as gun barrels. Mr. Graper sat at a cluster of picnic tables in this lush 1,814-acre park. Klingon re-enactors from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania played extras.”
15. Onion or New York Times? “Dozens of members of the Bush Administration’s domestic security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell domestic security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.”
16. Where John Madigan, architect of the Tribune Company’s possibly-fatal takeover of Times-Mirror, is now.
17. “Throughout the summer of 2003, [retired Air Force colonel Sam] Gardiner documented incidents that he saw as information-warfare campaigns directed both at targeted foreign populations and the American public. By the fall, he had collected his analysis into a lengthy treatise, called Truth from These Podia, which concluded that ‘the war was handled like a political campaign,’ in which the emphasis was not on the truth but on the message.
“As his paper circulated among government and military officials that fall, Gardiner says he received a call at home one night from a spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He told Gardiner that his conclusions were on target. ‘But I want you to know,’ the spokesman added, ‘that it was civilians who did this.'”
– from “Mind Games,” an extraordinary piece in the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review
18. “It’s no longer amnesty, it’s shamnesty!”
– Lou Dobbs recently
19. Why not open borders?
20. A partial transcript of a discussion of Tribune Company’s woes on CNN’s In The Money on Sunday between Andy Serwer of Fortune and CNN correspondent Jennifer Westhoven.
WESTHOVEN: Well, that’s maybe because a stock buy-back doesn’t do anything. It rearranges the numbers. It doesn’t mean that you’re changing your business. You’re not affecting real change here, you’re just doing a simple mathematical equation. So you’re really saying business as usual, and that’s a separate argument whether or not that’s OK.
SERWER: And I think what CEOs are starting to learn here is that you put all these businesses together, you put together TV networks, TV stations, the Internet, the Chicago Cubs and what do you get? You get kind of a big mess. And the sum of the parts is not worth more than the parts themselves.
I think that’s what we’re learning. You’re seeing all these big companies that get put together during bull markets. Time Warner, our parent company, no exception. Viacom. And now, when times are a little bit tougher, you take them apart to get the real value.
WESTHOVEN: So you’re saying they really haven’t been able to do that cross platform stuff that they talked about?
SERWER: And there’s even a worse word, Jen. Synergy.
WESTHOVEN: Oh, yes.
SERWER: So, you know, I think that this is a story that’s going to continue for these media companies. We’re going to see them broken apart and when the next big bull market comes, well, maybe they’ll put them back together again.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Fully synergized for your protection.
Posted on June 19, 2006