Apparently the “moon rock” the U.S. gave to Dutch Prime Minister Willem Drees to commemorate NASA’s “moon mission” in 1969 has been revealed to be nothing more than petrified wood. The wood has been on display at the Dutch National Museum in Amsterdamn…

Roger Ebert, Are You In Good Company?

Roger Ebert came out of the A.A. closet last week, with a long and fascinating essay about…

Today David Carr writes about how the Journal News (a suburban Westchester newspaper) essentially laid off all 288 of its staff and invited them to apply for the for the 218 or so jobs that remained after “restructuring.” This is super nasty! But…

In the wake of the Summer of Death and the colossally major news that Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion (a number that means “death” in Cantonese and is therefore avoided at all costs-not in enumerations of 4, obvs-in addresses, car license…

Philip Markoff, the Craigslist killer, definitely one of our least favorite killers of all, gets the Maureen Orth treatment in the October Vanity Fair. What’s creepy is how it points out the sheer amount of tracking in our lives. For…

This review of T.R. Reid’s new The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care makes an interesting point: “The world offers at least two pure systems of ‘socialized medicine,’ the…

Apparently this is some kind of program that has been in the test stage for years, but because nothing registers until it happens to me personally, I am only now waking up to the outrage that is the new “pedestrian countdown signal” on our city’s traffic lights, some of…

The Audit Bureau of Circulations released its report on the first half of the year today. The results? “Twenty-four of the top 25 newsstand sellers posted declines in the first half of 2009, according to the audit bureau, including top seller Cosmopolitan…

Pitchfork put up the cover image for Ghostface Killah’s forthcoming The Wizard of Poetry album and it is awesome. After hearing the album’s first single, “Baby,” a nice hip-hip love song marred by the autotune menace, one can only hope the…

Disney owns Marvel
 Changed logo to Verdana
 Internet explodes!!!

None of this actually happened. Disney is too rich to use the same fug font that IKEA circa now uses.

Here you will find a terrible attempt to analogize the New Labour experiment to Oasis: “Visit Oasis’s Wikipedia page and the narrative eerily traces the birth, life and death of New Labour. The early Nineties are called ‘Formation and first years’; 1995–98…

A study showing that 1 in 10 New Yorkers was infected with swine flu earlier this year will be released this week. (Of that group, 47 died.) The estimate comes in advance of a press conference tomorrow from Mayor Bloomberg which will outline the city’s plans to deal with the…

A recent study showing that men-particularly those who are “devoted to traditional beliefs about masculinity”-are far less likely to visit the doctor than women or pussy-ass metrosexuals was not exactly a surprise to anyone, but it hit home personally and caused…

“The golfing community has been split by the birth of a controversial new caddy service which provides attractive, nubile women to carry players’ clubs,” reports Britain’s Daily Mail. It’s a typical story-I think this weekend’s Post had something about attractive…

Cold Open Worst Speeches of All Time — Ashton Kutcher Fan Fiction www.comedycentral.com Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games

Here’s a clip from Comedy Central’s new web-only series “The Worst Speeches of All…

Today’s wacky A1 story in the Wall Street Journal is about how, in these trying economic times, people are cutting their own hair, often with comical results! I’m not sure if this is a bona fide trend or just the peg for a funny frontpiece, but it puts me…

Tough times for Bertelsmann, owner of (among other things) Random House: “Anyone seeking a summary of the publishing industry’s woes needs look no further than first-half results from Bertelsmann. The privately held German…

Honesty time, for the public good, please. How many of you, with the best of well-caffeinated post-brunch intentions, began on the Kaiser Foundation’s 13,000 word Hurricane Katrina story on the cover of the Times magazine yesterday? And then how many of you…

The Sarah Palin money train is leaving the station: “Former

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has chosen among offers from 20 agencies that wanted to represent her and signed with Washington Speakers Bureau, which represents everyone from…