Hooker Scare XLVI: The Super Bowl’s Prostitution Panic
I
Last July, Austria Andrews walked through the lobby of an Indianapolis hotel, holding a vanilla-frosted cupcake. Her braided hair was neatly twisted up, and she was dressed in a geometric-print wrap dress with some silver jewelry. Andrews looked like any other woman in the hotel that day: an unremarkable extra. If you saw her and thought anything at all, you would guess she was paying a birthday visit to a friend.
Up in a hotel room minutes later, Andrews was arrested on both criminal and civil charges for prostitution and fined up to $7,500, according to reports in the Indianapolis Star. The cupcake, her calling card, sat untouched on a nearby shelf. Andrews — fully clothed, arms crossed — watched on in muted outrage as patrolman Jeff Goodin — naked from the waist up — rifled through her purse.
The Limited Scope of “Limitless”
Interested in the proliferation of sci fi/realism films that landed on us in, say, February or March of last year (“Adjustment Bureau,” “Source Code,” “Limitless,” probably others I have forgotten), I streamed “Limitless” (2011, dir. Neil Burger), eager to see the moral conundrum of pharmaceutical narcotics improvement. The premise seems right: a guy named Eddie Morra, played by Bradley Cooper, gets a miracle pill that allows him to use “100 percent of his brain” rather than the same old noodles (the movie claims that we normally use 20 percent), and he suddenly becomes Sherlock Holmes in a suit jacket with no tie. He figures out the formula for making lots of money with stocks, has total recall of everything he has even incidentally read or seen and he likes to exercise more. Complications come up that he has to think his way out of (sometimes with the miracle pill, sometimes without), and he meets Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro) and they have a few conversations. The movie ends with the guy running for the Senate and getting a new haircut, all the while being smart, ruthless, conniving and handsome.
You’re Welcome, South Carolina: Colbert & Cain
The political scene in Charleston, South Carolina.
One man wants on the ballot, the other might as well be off.
Together, they arrived here Friday in the official vehicle of a defunct campaign to address an overflowing Cistern Yard, at the College of Charleston.
On the eve of the Republican Primary, or the election for “President of United States of South Carolina,” former Republican nomination candidate Herman Cain joined comedian Stephen Colbert in the Holy City, backed by the Coastal Carolina University Marching Band and a local gospel choir.
The Rev., The Nurse and The Director
Late last summer, on the secluded tip of Conanicut Island, in Rhode Island, an Episcopal reverend and his wife, a nurse, were watching Wes Anderson shoot his new movie, Moonrise Kingdom.
The Rev. and the Nurse, who live just a few houses away, were drinking frozen daiquiris and had been corralled, along with the rest of the neighborhood folks, a little way up the road, so they didn’t disrupt the filming.
“You know, we talked to Wes for a while yesterday,” the Rev. said, hushing his tone, because someone already had called for quiet on the set. “And he’s very nice. Very, very nice.”
“Yes, a very, very nice young man,” the Nurse agreed.
Foxy Knoxy Found Not Guilty, but The Mail Convicts Anyway
Yesterday, as the media fervor over Foxy Knoxy’s Perugia, Italy, murder appeal reached its peak, everyone — everyone — geared up to break the news. While most on-the-scene reporters were getting ready to tweet and file copy — doing groundwork, gauging the crowd, etc. — at least one outlet had already written its story — the wrong one, coincidentally.
Nick Pisa, a reporter with London’s The Daily Mail, already had pre-written two stories: Amanda Knox was both guilty and not guilty. Then, at 9:50 Perugia time, as the verdict was read, the “guilty” story landed on MailOnline.
OK, you say, so what? Anyone who has ever been in a newsroom knows that hedging time constraints with prepped copy is standard fair. Both the stories were loaded into the paper’s CMS, but someone published the wrong one.
But what made Pisa’s story egregious wasn’t simply that it was pre-prepared. Instead, Pisa’s “guilty” story pretended to shine a light on what had happened in court as the verdict landed. Read More →
A Kelleriana for Bill Keller
In 1928, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. published Menckeniana: A Schimpflexikon, a book compiling assaults, slurs and rants against H.L. Mencken.
Its pages insulted Mencken, the critic and reporter whose viewpoints were seldom secret, in every way.
How to win The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest
Unless you write like Malcolm Gladwell or Susan Orlean, your best chance at appearing in The New Yorker is probably on its last page, the Cartoon Caption Contest. But even that’s improbable. It took Roger Ebert 107 tries. Yes, that Roger Ebert, the famed film critic, journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner, screenwriter and all-around ass kicker.
Our Holiday
A few weeks ago, while I was typing away in a newspaper office in South Africa, one of my co-workers stumbled out of the lunchroom with half a sheep’s head on a plate. The head had been boiled and cut lengthwise between the eyes. “It’s skobo,” she said, picking meat from between the bones. “It’s good. Want some?” And that’sRead More →
Tumblr Back Online, Balance in Universe Restored
The Tumblr crisis of 2010 has finally ended. For the past 24 hours, the microblogging service was down because of a database failure.
Featured on Flood Lite
One hell of a meal. These guys are cooking up a storm. The combination of a very pretty lady and a corndog that screams, “cardiac arrest,” is must-see tv.