Yesterday the Philadelphia Parking Authority released a list of the names of th top 25 scofflaws in the hopes of shaming them into coughing up the combined $308,000 they owe in unpaid parking tickets. They are as follows: Faraco Knife Grinding Services, Pennsburg, Pa., $40.580 Sergio M. Claudio, Philadelphia, $21,444 Sharwin L. Coates, Philadelphia, $18,812 Alberto Galue, Philadelphia $18,398 New Century Travel Inc., Philadelphia, $16,320 Sharonda Everett, Philadelphia, $15,972.70 Anthony G. Dowd, Philadelphia, $14,477.25 Willians Nafis, Philadelphia, $13,408.75 James P. Fiscaro, Philadelphia $12,972 Faith Brown, Philadelphia, $12,473 Kenneth Brockington, Philadelphia, $11,991.40 Lafayette Outen, Philadelphia, $11,149.20v Christopher Harden, Philadelphia, $11,106.65 Frederick […]
PHOTOGRAFIKA: The One Time Dick Cheney Smiled
[Photo via BUZZFEED] Happened in 1976, miraculously a photographer captured the moment. And then the men in black took him away, never to be heard from again.
ARTSY: A New Festival Grows In Philly
BY TIFFANY YOON This morning Phawker joined many familiar faces of Philadelphia media at the Kimmel Center for the announcement of a new Philly-based arts festival. The festival, entitled Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA), is scheduled to begin on April 7th, 2011, and it will run for three weeks until May 1st, 2011. It’s quite a way’s away, but with a grant of $10 million from the late Leonore Annenburg, PIFA certainly has the resources to make a splash. This morning’s press conference didn’t shed much light on the specifics of PIFA’s line up of events or venues, […]
EARLY WORD: Rock For Haiti
RELATED: The hasty remake of REM’s classic “Everybody Hurts” hits the airwaves and Interwebs today as part of a campaign to raise cash for Haiti. Produced by American Idol’s Simon Cowell, the tune includes vocals by Leona Lewis, Mariah Carey, Jon Bon Jovi, Robbie Williams, Kylie, Rod Stewart, Alexandra Burke, Miley Cyrus, Take That, Joe McElderry, Cheryl Cole, JLS, Mika, Michael Bublé, James Blunt, James Morrison, Susan Boyle, and Westlife.
ACADEMY AWARDS: Who Didn’t See This Coming?
Best director nominees included James Cameron for “Avatar” and Kathryn Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker”; best actor nominees included George Clooney (“Up in the Air”) and Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart”); and best actress nominees included Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”) and Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia”). FRESH AIR The singer, songwriter and producer T-Bone Burnett says his approach to making music is simple: “Just listen until it sounds right.” Burnett has been getting it right for a long time, and his latest project is the critically acclaimed film Crazy Heart, for which he wrote several songs for the main character […]
SHADOW OF A DOUBT: Six More Weeks Of Winter?
CNN: Punxsutawney Phil, America’s most famous rodent prognosticator, saw his shadow Tuesday, signaling six more weeks of winter. Phil emerged from his ceremonial tree stump at Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, to a cheering crowd that had waited in the cold for his annual prediction. It is the 99th time that Phil — in his various incarnations — has seen his shadow, according to groundhog.org, the official Web site of the groundhog club in Punxsutawney, about 75 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, in western Pennsylvania. Not seeing a shadow — something that has happened just 15 times in Phil’s history, according to the […]
GOING VOGUE: Sarah Palin’s PAC Spent $63,000 Buying Sarah Palin’s Book & $8,000 On Bookmarks
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] ABC NEWS: Sarah Palin has been using her political action committee to buy up thousands of copies of her book, “Going Rogue,” in order to mail copies of the memoir to her donors, newly filed campaign records show. The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had her political organization spend more than $63,000 on what her reports describe as “books for fundraising donor fulfillment.” The payments went to Harper Collins, her publisher, and in some instances to HSP Direct, a Virginia-based direct mail fundraising firm that serves a number of well-known conservative politicians […]
SHOOTING THE MESSENGER: Don’t Hate Jonathan Safran Foer Because He’s Got A Beautiful Mind
BY RITA BOOKE* If Jonathan Safran Foer pisses you off, it’s not him. It’s you. The release of Eating Animals had critics screaming louder than a stuck pig. Rather than critique the content of the book they shoot the messenger, it’s Safran Foer himself who gets the critiqued: He’s an arrogant, condescending, pampered, overeducated urbanite who’s not like us. You know, real people out there in flyover country. It was like Rush Limbaugh had infiltrated the Sunday paper’s arts section. In Eating Animals, Safran Foer presents eating animals as largely a moral dilemma. He was on-and-off vegetarian since at age […]
RAW FOOTAGE: Traffic Reporter’s Cessna Makes Emergency Landing On NJ Turnpike
ASSOCIATED PRESS: A traffic reporter in a small plane put himself in the thick of a rush-hour tie-up when his aircraft had to make an emergency landing Monday on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a little before 7 a.m., before the morning rush in the Philadelphia suburbs gets going, when a low oil pressure indicator came on in the Cessna owned by Wilmington, Del.-based Out of the Blue, Inc. The pilot, flying with traffic reporter Mike Lankford for Metro Networks, which was providing traffic reports for a number of TV and radio stations, put the plane down on the […]
China Winning The Clean Energy Race While America Bickers About The Validity of Climate Science
NEW YORK TIMES: TIANJIN, China — China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this yearChina has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants. These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the […]
The Whitewashing Of John Woo Is Now Complete
WASHINGTON POST: Bush administration lawyers who paved the way for sleep deprivation and waterboarding of terrorism suspects exercised poor judgment but will not be referred to authorities for possible sanctions, according to a forthcoming ethics report, a legal source confirmed. The work of John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, officials in the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, provided the basis for controversial interrogation strategies that critics likened to torture in the years after al-Qaeda’s 2001 terrorist strikes on American soil. The men and their OLC colleague, Steven G. Bradbury, became focal points of anger from Senate Democrats […]
GOODNIGHT BROOKIE: Number 40 Goes To Eagles Heaven
NEW YORK TIMES: Tom Brookshier, a star defensive back who helped lead the Philadelphia Eagles to the 1960 National Football League championship and later teamed with Pat Summerall as CBS’s No. 1 professional football broadcasting duo, died Friday at a hospital in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood, Pa. Brookshier, who lived in West Conshohocken, Pa., was 78. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Barbara. When Brookshier, a native of Roswell, N.M., joined the Eagles in 1953 out of the University of Colorado, he was a 10th-round draft pick. Figuring he was likely to be cut, he decided to make […]
CINEMA: A Bold, Fresh Piece Of Shit-Talking
BY GREG ADOMAITIS If there is such a thing as a Fox News fanboys they showed up at the box office this weekend in full force for Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. Their “Bold and Fresh” tour brought this unholy trinity of truth-y infotainment under one roof for five live dates and was streamed as a nationwide cinecast. The tour’s name is taken from O’Reilly’s latest book “A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity” and brings the two anchors together for two hours of moonbat-bashing and wingnut meme-spinning in the no spin zone. Their friendship began when Beck left CNN early […]