BY AMY Z. QUINN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right — these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. Hey, we know how it is — so many words to read, so little time to surf for free porn. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you, freeing up valuable nanoseconds that can now be better spent roughing up the suspect over at Suicide Girls or what have you. Every week we pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer you towards the gooey caramel center each edition. Why? Because we like you.
OUT FRONT
Philadelphia Weekly: Pedestrians vs. cyclists vs. motorists, such is the state of this thing we call public transit. Steven Wells starts out with (more than usual) pedestrian superiority, quickly devolves into
crankypants ranting, calls drivers of automobiles Iraq baby killers (or something very close to that) and dismisses bicyclists as “utterly self-obsessed, sidewalk-riding, spandex-clad lunatics.”
“Being a pedestrian in Philadelphia is like being a civilian in Baghdad, except with more social stigma. We?re threatened, patronized, demonized, discounted, abused, killed, crippled and treated like subnormal freaks,” says Wells, who describes himself as “an ADD-addled hyperactive sufferer of symptoms consistent with mild autism, Tourette?s, anarchic limb syndrome and epilepsy.” Hmmm, maybe add “martyr complex” to that list?
Brian McManus’ missive on behalf of cyclists made me giggle; Kia Gregory’s love letter to her Pathfinder contains this classic line: “And I’m always changing lanes to avoid some lumpy hipster chick sitting on a banana seat hopelessly pedaling her dinosaur vintage novelty bike just clipping distance from my car.” Heehee.
Also, I’m not sure, but PW may have just broken some kind of record on the number of ways to call hippies dirty and self-righteous. Best one of the lot, from Jean Luc Renault: “What?s her rush? The drum circle goes all day.” Bwaahahahaha!
City Paper: Well, aren’t they crafty! Just a few weeks after the greatest accidentally gay cover image in history, CP’s offering this week on the 2007 Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Fest is so straight it hurts. Or is the popcorn machine you can rent at Party City some kind of queer shorthand? No matter, Sam Adams has Allan Cumming all up in here, and that man-candy can butter my kernels anytime, OK?
Cumming says he’s never had any firm indication that his sexuality has cost him roles, and tries to downplay the importance of the issue altogether. “It’s a hypothetical situation,” he says. “I think that real people don’t care that much. They don’t look at a film and say, ‘I’m not going to see that because he’s gay.’ I think we, the media ? especially the gay media ? perpetuate that idea. I think we should shut up about it.”
Now, take A.C.’s comments in conjunction with the plain-vanilla cover image, and the message is clearly that the most interesting thing about the festival isn’t the common thread of 
sexuality which ties its actors, actresses and films together, but rather the work itself. Which is all well and good, but it makes the cover feel like some kind of diversity seminar.
INSIDE THE BOOK
CP: Remember when Chris Satullo used to do those preachy illustrated stories on the Inquirer’s opinion pages, like on holidays and stuff when nobody was around to write anything live? Yeah, Swierczynski‘s doing that this week except it’s noir in the summertime. On the plus side, the Bell Curve had me totally LOL’ing, f’reals.
PW: Matt Prigge has an interview with actor Steve Zahn, who does a mean Werner Herzog impression and who starred in one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies, the Tom Hanks/chubby Charlize Theron flick That Thing You Do! On the web, Prigge also chats up actress Zoe Cassavettes, who inherited not only her dad’s cinematic tendencies, but his almost-creepy stare. Also, in boobies, unlike poker, a pair beats three of a kind!
WINNER: PW, with an EZPass!