By the time I arrived back in New Jersey — where, by the way, we know from this kind of thing, from the years of whispered is-he-or-isn’t-he to the dramatic press conference to the shell-shocked wife looking on — Sen. Larry Craig was reconsidering his decision to step down and now says he plans to stay away from D.C. Even here in the Jerz, where our to-the-left attitude is part drag queen, part gangsta lean, people are like, “Yo, good luck with all that.” I never thought I’d say this, but compared to the what the folks in Idaho are […]
JFK: A View Of The Sun God
J.F.K.: A View of the Sun God From Inside the Television Set by John David Ebert John F. Kennedy was a man who spent his entire life, from first to last, living inside a television set. If we want to understand that life, then we must, like Alice through the looking glass, crawl up into the radiant, pixilated landscape of television ourselves, and learn to make our way about its contoured rows of ordered electrons, all carefully aligned on a grid and pulsing with life, like huge glowing radioactive eggs. We must tread carefully across this soft and spongy landscape, […]
STUDY: ‘Cancerous Mole? What’s The Hurry? Botox? Good God, The Doctor Will Be Right With You!’
NEW YORK TIMES: Patients seeking an appointment with a dermatologist to ask about a potentially cancerous mole have to wait substantially longer than those seeking Botox for wrinkles, a study published online yesterday by The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology said. Researchers reported that dermatologists in 12 cities offered a typical wait of eight days for a cosmetic patient wanting Botox to smooth wrinkles, compared with a typical wait of 26 days for a patient requesting evaluation of a changing mole, a possible indicator of skin cancer. MORE
PAYING THE PIPER: The Real Reason Why Danny Devito Does It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
Danny DeVito & The Contract WARNING: Adult situations, hilarity.
MILESTONE: The Young Ones At 25
BY CITIZEN MOM It took a good five years after its debut on BBC2 for “The Young Ones” to make it all the way across the pond, to where a kid in Philly could finally watch. And even then, it was work — these were the days before the city had cable, necessitating a VCR deal with the kid who sat next to me in homeroom and got MTV at his house in Lafayette Hill. But dammit, I’d been reading about the British comedy series for years in the import Smash Hits magazines I bought on South Street, and it […]
WORTH REPEATING: Tarring The Baby
BY ALFRED LUBRANO INQUIRER COLUMNIST When you’re a white person in America saying, “The black guy did it,” you are screaming “Fire!” in the cineplex. You are conjuring night fears of the Other, and stoking cell-level hatred that metastasizes. And if you’re a silly little twit like Lindsay Lohan, you’re lamely trying to deflect culpability for your own dangerously bizarre behavior. Last month in California, the troubled 21-year-old actress commandeered a car with three passengers inside and chased after her assistant, who had moments earlier quit working for Lohan. When the cops tried to sort it out, Lohan was sputtering […]
BLOGADELPHIA: MEET BETTY CONFETTI
As you may have heard by now, our esteemed colleague and Phawker Editrix AMY Z. QUINN, aka Citizen Mom, has been hired by McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington, D.C. bureau chief as a full-time blogger to cover the 2008 Presidential election. Her bi-weekly columns will run under the header BETTY CONFETTI, and her beat will be the intersections of pop culture and political culture rendered with all her patented Maneater-From-Manayunk bitchslap sass. We will be proudly excerpting her BETTY CONFETTI columns on a regular basis, and could not be more proud or horny. Here’s her auspicious debut: So, if we’re talking about […]
HOT DOCUMENT: Meet Confetti Betty
DEAR BOSS, I’m taking this week off. But wait! There’s more! When I come back, the week of Aug. 20th, I’ll be joining a new venture with the extremely cool and terribly hip folks over at The McClatchy Company, who you may remember owned the Inquirer for about 12 seconds. They’ve put together a team to provide non-traditional (well, for a newspaper company, at least) coverage of the 2008 election — a project called alt.campaign — and I’ll be part of it! alt.campaign will appear in the Election 2008 area of McClatchy’s national website and yes it is a paid […]
THE BREAKDOWN: Platinum Until Proven Guilty
BY M. EMANUEL True or false: You can still be one of the biggest pop stars on the planet even if you (allegedly) urinated on and then fornicated with an underage girl, videotaped it, and then that tape was leaked to the world and the authorities brought 21 counts of child pornography charges against you. As much as we would all like to think the answer is false, we all know that’s not true. However, knowing and caring are two different things and while we know the charges are still hanging out there, a better question is do we even […]
CENSUS: We’re Number Six! We’re Number Six!
New Census figures show Philadelphia has dropped to the sixth-largest city in America. It’s official: “Philadelphia is now the sixth-largest city in the US. It declined by about 8,000 people from 2005 to 2006.” Census Bureau Demographer Greg Harper says after measuring births and deaths and people moving in and out, Phoenix has moved to the number-five city with 1.5 million residents ahead of Philadelphia’s 1.4 million. What’s it all mean? Not much, says Temple University geography professor David Bartelt, who says people don’t judge a city by how big it is: “That’s not really the telling concern. Most people […]
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FILM FEST PICKS & PANS: Dante’s Inferno; Wicked Flowers; Book Of The Dead; Severance
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Heading into its last weekend, the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival unleashes the big celebrity guns, giving us this year’s American Independent Award winner, Dermot Mulroney. I spent a few minutes this week trying to stoke a friend’s memory on exactly who the very recognizable Mulroney is, and finally had to give up. His specialty in nearly 20 years of film acting has been in supporting roles, often playing ingratiating nice guys who are romance-bait for the female lead. He’s worked with Altman on Kansas City, with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding and most […]