Time Inc:
RIP 600

Gannett:
RIP 3,000

Star-Ledger:
RIP 140

Christian Science Monitor:
Goes paperless
(I can just see the tombstone now.)


At least Twitter is still going strong, right? ... RIGHT? Oh, good GOD.

All this stress. I needs me a Vivanno^TM Nourishing Orange Mango Banana Blend. Bananas cure everything.

I've been through media layoffs before, from a company that started with A and ended in L and maybe had an O in the middle, but I'm not really sure. It was surreal to sit in the multipurpose auditorium where Santa would come to visit employees' children sprung briefly from the company daycare center across the street... where we created care packages for home-bound senior citizens on volunteer days... where we got discounted flu shots, donated blood, and ate brownie triangles on launch days ... and where we were, on a sunny October morn one year ago, receiving our severance packages in thick, navy blue folders that were not in any way pink, nor slip-like.

Do I miss my happy little company fambly? Yes, yes I do. Sure, I can joke about it NOW... but many, many more media cumps are following suit.

I predict an explosion in Blogspot accounts any second now. And three, two, one...

• Yes!
We!
Carve!
(.com) [by way of Daily Kos] shows off Obampkins! ...Barack-o-lanterns?


• New York Times piece on Cindy McCain makes her out to be a sad, lonely lady who's been shunned as the floozy John left his first wife for. It starts off with this telling anecdote:

"Cindy McCain was new to Washington and not yet 30 when she arrived at a luncheon for Congressional spouses to discover a problem with her name tag. It read “Carol McCain.” That was the well-liked wife John McCain had left to marry Cindy, to the disapproval of many in Washington. Fearing that the slight was intentional, she slinked to a half-empty table that never filled. “No one wanted to sit at her table,“ said Barbara Ross, , a friend who was not surprised when Mrs. McCain announced a few months later that she was moving back to Arizona. “It was like high school.” And McCain is POed -- Fox News fires back.


• New endorsements for Obama - Colin Powell, Chicago Tribune (who has NEVER endorsed a Democratic candidate), Chicago Sun-Times


• Did youse guys hear about this when it happened, ‘cause I sure didn’t: Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Bros., got punched in the face at the company gym after it was announced they were goin’ down: "He was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold.”


• Target: Women goes after the Disney Princesses. Finally! Someone needs to put those pretty little things in their place. I think Cindy McCain has been pursuing a career as a Disney princess, incidentally. P.S., Did you know that Al Gore helped start Current TV? I read it in his book "The Assault on Reason." Seriously, he did. This isn't like how he helped start the Internet.




• David Brooks: Sarah Palin "Represents A Fatal Cancer To The Republican Party" - Huffington Post. Wow. Harsh.


• McCain “Loves Being the Underdog" - CNN.com. Well, yeah, who DOESN'T love being the underdog? I love being an underdog almost as much as I love parking tickets, the smell of moldy bread and having to walk my dog at 2 a.m.

Sad, sad news: GLBT activist Del Martin (far right), who was part of the first couple to legally wed in California in June, has died at the age of 87.

Martin was born in 1921, studied journalism at Berkeley, married, had a daughter and divorced before she met the love of her life, Phyllis Lyon (left), in 1950. The couple married in San Francisco when marriage was briefly legalized there in 2004, and were the first couple to marry in California in June after the CA Supreme Court OK'ed gay marriage.

My first reaction on hearing her death was immediate sorrow that she only got to enjoy three months of marriage this time around with her partner of 58 years. But at least she lived to see it.

Recommended listening: “Feminist Housewives,” Bitch & Animal

• Those two guys are in a statistical dead heat. However! Here’s something you may not have thought of: Those wacky pollsters only call LANDLINES. Now, who’s most likely to NOT HAVE LANDLINES? The young, the urban, the less well-off ... Now, wanna take a gander at whom those peeps might be voting for? Right. Interesting that we haven't heard anything about this fact, since I feel like this is probably skewing the polls quite a bit.

• The Midwest Teen Sex Show has a new episode up! If you’ve never seen this Webcast before, um ... It’s not what you might be thinking.

• “Bush declares 'major disaster' area in Florida.”
Yeah, well, I claim a ‘major disaster’ area in pretty much everything Bush declares, so we’re even. (But seriously, you can make a donation toward Hurricane Fay disaster relief at the American Red Cross Web site.)

• Plus, Much Glorious Bonus Learnings! I learned from the above CNN article that someone other than Jeb Bush is now governor of Florida. My research (yeah, thanks, Wikipedia) tells me that he’s been out of office since January 2, 2007. Way to keep up with the times!

• No matter what you post on Twitter, you always sound like a jerky jerk. Then again, so do my friends usually.

• Feministing's Weekly Feminist Reader is up.

• Bestest video I saw this week:

Sure, Barack Obama announced his running mate, but let's devote CNN's resources to video interviews on Britney Spears' new diet plan!

I especially love how CNN host Brooke Anderson obvy has some inkling that, oh, 1200 calories a day is a tad extreme, and her correspondent stops her in her tracks with an admission that at her "boot camp" (they can't call it "fat camp" if you're already skinny) that was her calorie limit too. And poor Brooke Anderson just soldiers on, trying to convince her panel that Britney's regime is extreme: "...But not for an extended period of time, right?" (Do we need PANELS of people to discuss Britney's new body? Yes. Yes, we do.)

The word "hero" gets thrown about so much these days, but when Brooke starts in on how Britney never really had a weight problem to begin with, well, let's just say she's the greatest American hero since John McCain decided to stick around for more torture. *cough* But he doesn't like to talk about that.

She's got a point. Brit Brit popped out two kids back-to-back, was all sorts of bipolar and jacked up on boatloads of Cheetos. (God I want her life. For the Cheetos endorsements, anyway.) Really, I think it's OK for her to have been, oh, a size 12 or so for a bit.

"I think you have to remember though, that Britney sort of helped to repopularize the midriff," intones (what IS "intones"? but somehow, she's intoning here) VH1's Janell Snowden.

So that means she must never change, just like Subway's Jared has a no-weight-gain clause in his contract. Mmm plastic meat!

Um, anyway, nice to see a MSM anchor who gets it. Even if she won't take a hint from her Britney-must-be-as-thin-as-Nicole-Richie-before-she-got-knocked-up-and-thrown-in-the-clink-for-72-hours interviewees.