ASSOCIATED PRESS: Stinging from an acrimonious divorce, a man plotting revenge against his ex-wife dressed up like Santa, went to his former in-laws’ Christmas Eve party and slaughtered at least six people before killing himself hours later. Three people were listed as missing after Bruce Pardo’s rampage — his ex-wife and her parents — and it was feared their remains were among the ashes of the home, which Pardo set ablaze using a bizarre homemade device that sprayed flammable liquid. MORE [Photo by AXEL KOESTER for the New York Times] REUTERS: Survivors told police Pardo seemed to zero in on […]
DEATH OF PURRFECTION: Eartha Kitt RIP
NEW YORK TIMES: Ms. Kitt, who began performing as a dancer in New York in the late ’40s, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of […]
HO HO HO: Seasons Greetings From Phawker
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: This is the year Santa finally kicks that funny little Coke problem.
SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: Whatever Happens In Room 315 Stays In Room 315, Part 7
PART VII BY JEFF DEENEY After lunch the students return to room 315 for a structured free period. On an average day the group spends structured free period playing board games like Battleship and Monopoly, but on a good day they might get to go to the computer lab. On a bad day the free period isn’t so structured and the behavioral health worker Mr. Thompson spends the hour breaking up shoving matches and trying to keep furniture from being thrown across the room. The school has a total of 6 aging Dell PCs for roughly 1500 students. Getting a reservation for the computer lab […]
THIS JUST IN: Michael Jackson On The Verge Of Death
STUFF: Jackson’s biographer Ian Halperin told US gossip magazine In Touch Jackson is suffering from a rare genetic illness called Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, as well as emphysema and gastrointestinal bleeding. The 50-year-old former King of Pop is also reportedly 95 percent blind in his left eye and can barely speak. “He’s had it for years, but it’s gotten worse,” Halperin told In Touch. “He needs a lung transplant but may be too weak to go through with it.” Halperin said the gastrointestinal bleeding was Jackson’s most dangerous ailment: “It could kill him.” Jermaine Jackson has not denied reports of his […]
CONVICTED: Fort Dix 6 Guilty Of Conspiracy
INQUIRER: A federal jury today found the five foreign-born Muslim men guilty of conspiring to kill military personnel, but not guilty of attempted murder. The verdict ends one of the country’s most sensational cases of domestic terrorism, a case that garnered international headlines on May 7, 2007, when the defendants were arrested in coordinated raids. On that day, brothers Dritan and Shain Duka attempted to buy seven rifles from Mahmoud Omar, who was working as an FBI informant. A third Duka brother, Eljvir, also was arrested that day. Like all of the defendants, the brothers were born overseas, but raised […]
DIRECT ACTION: Democracy Needs Your Help
“Yesterday, a coalition of major city unions, clergymembers, library users, and community leaders stood together to announce a class action lawsuit to halt the shutdown. But to insure that the courts hear lawsuit effective, we need members of City Council join us as plaintiffs. So click here to ask your district and at-large city council members to join in the suit. Under a law that requires council approval for closing city-owned facilities, the Mayor’s unilateral action to close the libraries is illegal.So click here to tell your council members to stand up for their own rights, and for our libraries, […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Path Of The Righteous Man Is Beset On All Sides By The Tyranny Of Evil Men
NEW YORK TIMES: WHEN HE WAS 12 YEARS OLD, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN saw a local production of “All My Sons” near his home in Rochester, and it was, for him, one of those rare, life-altering events where, at an impressionable age, you catch a glimpse of another reality, a world that you never imagined possible. “I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists,” Hoffman told me on a gray day in London early in the fall. He was sitting in the fifth row of the audience at Trafalgar Studios in the West End, where he was directing “Riflemind” (a play […]
WHO WANTS TO KILL A MILLIONAIRE: Fatcats Continue To Lead ‘Life Of Riley’ On Taxpayer Dime
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits in 2007, an Associated Press analysis reveals. The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages. Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the review of federal securities documents found.The total […]
CH-CH-CHANGES: RIAA To Stop Suing Customers, Warner Music To Take The Led Out Of YouTube
WASHINGTON POST: The Recording Industry Association of America is taking a dangerous step with its decision to stop suing suspected music sharers and start cutting off their Internet access instead. While the discontinuation of the lawsuit practice has its merits, the move opens up a whole new can of worms — one that could have serious implications for our future rights as consumers of information. On the one hand, the shift — revealed Friday, initially in a story published in The Wall Street Journal — does mark the end of a troubling and generally ineffective process. RIAA’s past practice of […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
The Good News Flower Hour #4 Folks, here’s the latest installment of The Good News Flower Hour, wherein I provide the voice for a flower that reads the news. The debut is HERE and the last couple episodes are HERE and HERE. We are still tweaking the concept and streamlining the production schedule on these — it takes a LONG-ass time to make these little three-minute suckers — but we hope to make this a weekly feature in the very near future. Enjoy.
GAYDAR: Jingle Bells, Batman Smells
[Photos by THOMAS SHEEDER] BY AARON STELLA Some people just get more Christmas than others this year. While the Scrooges of Wall Street help themselves to the bailout buffet, us Cratchets must fight to make ends meat, much less a “Merry Christmas” (and it’s ‘Happy Holidays’ now, by the way). Even the shrewd, business-savvy Jews are barely scraping by; at least that’s the case in the Dumpsta Players’ destitute portrait of the Lipshitz family. This year for Christmas, trash-glitz drag troupe the Dumpsta Players showed their sympathy to the millions going without this Christmas in “A Very Lipshitz Christmas” on December 18th […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward talks about FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt — a.k.a. “Deep Throat,” the secret source who helped Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Felt died Dec. 18 at the age of 95. A long-kept secret, Felt’s identity as Woodward’s source was revealed in the July 2005 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Woodward later detailed his clandestine meetings with Felt in the book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. Woodward’s latest book is The War Within: A […]