SECOND LIFE: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was originally written back in the fall of 2007 for the Image section of the Sunday Inquirer. For reasons that remain unclear, the piece never ran. Today on Philly.Com, they posted what is basically the same story with different people — eight months later! On top of that, they cluelessly characterize Second Life as a video game, which is sorta like calling the Internet ‘a series of pipes.’ Sorry, just venting my frustration with the institutional arrogance of slow-brained bureaucracies. The accompanying video piece, however, is an excellent example of how newspapers can use the web’s […]

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PARKING WARS: A Beatdown In Upper Darby

DAILY NEWS: For a $15 ticket, police said, a young Yeadon couple “pummeled” Upper Darby meter maid Kalliopi Maroulis — punching her head and causing her to break her wrist — before speeding away with her ticket book. Maroulis, 46, said she took the meter-maid job in December because she loves to walk. Maroulis said she approached an illegally parked Dodge Charger behind the Wachovia Bank on Ludlow Street about noon Saturday and asked the occupant, identified by police as Ashley Dacons, 20, [pictured, left, via her MySpace page] to move her car. When Dacons refused, Maroulis said she began […]

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GOD BLESS SACHA BARON COHEN: Still Fucking With Gullible American Rednecks For Fun And Profit

ASSOCIATED PRESS: LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others’ clothes off and kissing — a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame. “We had a contract for cage fighting. We were deceived,” said Dwight Duncan, president and CEO of Four States Fair Grounds in Texarkana, where the first of two Arkansas fights raised suspicions last month. Matt Labov, a Los Angeles-based publicist for Baron Cohen, said he had no comment Monday about the […]

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MEOW MIX: The Jezebels Go To Fail Camp

First, completely on the serious, pause a moment in memory of Andrea Collins Smith, who documented her struggle with inflammatory breast cancer on PunkRockMommy until she passed away Saturday. She is survived by her husband, Kelly, six children, and everyone who spent time on her site and came away staggered by her grace and candor. Peace and prayers to her family. [Photo by JackHag66]…DEVELOPING… Back during the long, Parliament-smoked dream that was the 1990s, there was a skate and surf shop on Route 70 in Cherry Hill called Failure. I remember having a great conversation with the owner, who was […]

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WORTH REPEATING: The Last Word

PUNK ROCK MOMMY: If you are reading this, it means I have passed. I decided to put some final thoughts together in the hope that it will be of comfort to my friends and family. But also to those of you I never met but who felt a connection to me through this blog. Blog. I hate that word. It is so silly and trivial. I thought of this as an online journal. One designed to keep my loved ones aware of what was happening to me. I wrote as honestly as I was able. I have looked at many […]

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HECKUVA JOB: The Scaredest Man In America

Tragi-comic dispatch from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, wherein Phillip Swagel, Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Economic Policy stutters, sputters and mutters his way through an anxiety-riddled yet curiously half-hearted attempt to spin the latest economy numbers. Milbank dryly reports that 16,000 jobs were lost last quarter and speculates that many of them must have been journalism jobs, judging by the shockingly sparse attendance. It’s all fun and game until you realize that the economic fortunes of 300 million Americans are in the hands of men like this — straw men so easily blown over by the first strong wind […]

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KYW Silences Dem Ad Critical Of ‘Grand Oil Party’

THE HILL: A Philadelphia news radio station has rejected a Democratic ad that features an impersonator of President Bush thanking GOP congressional candidates for supporting the “Big Oil” agenda. Philadelphia KYW-AM Vice President and General Manager David Yadgaroff said his station decided not to run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) ad because it was worried its listeners would be misled. “As an all-news station, we were concerned that our listeners would have been misled by usage of an impersonator in the creative delivery,” Yadgaroff said in an e-mail sent to The Hill. The ad was part of a $100,000 […]

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NEWS CLUES: Like A Compassionate Release Of Truth

DN LOOKS INTO THE WRONGFUL LIFE & DEATH OF KENNETH KEITH Kallenbach, 39, a longtime member of Howard Stern’s “Wack Pack” who suffered from cystic fibrosis, was rapidly shedding weight while jailed on a parole violation. Even the Upper Chichester cop who arrested him in March for allegedly trying to lure a teenage girl into a car was shocked by his gaunt appearance at his preliminary hearing April 15. “He looked bad,” Officer Michael Smalarz recalled last week. “I said, ‘Kenny, man, you’re really losing weight.’ ” He was dying. But despite the mid-April request that Kallenbach be released — […]

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RADIO ON: Who’s Laughing Now?

CNN MONEY: Satellite radio subscriber growth is flat, the likely victim of a slowing U.S. economy and waning interest in the once-novel medium. Meanwhile cash is running dry. Last month, citing heavy debt costs, a tightening credit market and sluggish car sales, Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Wienkes slashed his stock price targets for Sirius and XM, raising the prospects that there may be a financial black hole ahead for the combined company. If so, analysts expect Sirius-XM to take a hard look at programming costs, either by waiting until existing contracts expire or using the onset of a financial crisis […]

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