Improv Everywhere Gives Little League Team Their Best Game Ever [Things We Actually Like]

Improv Everywhere is the cosmic balance to Gawker: a group of real-world performance artists who generally make people feel like the world is a magical place. And in this clip that's been making the rounds, they turn a little league baseball game into a major league match, with an NBC sportscaster, a Jumbotron, and I won't ruin the rest. See below.

Man, it's like those scenes at the ends of family movies I'd see as a kid where everything works out really well and I would get so thrilled that I'd be embarrassed for having such a pure uncynical emotion. God, I just realized where my lifelong unhappiness started.

Anyway read the mission recap, which explains how the improv group got NBC to help out.

Conan-Harassing Priest Plans Return To Church [Stalky]

The Roman Catholic priest accused of stalking Conan O'Brien pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and confessed to writing to the Late Night host's parents and sending DVDs to O'Brien's home and office. He promised to stay away from O'Brien for two years. "I recognize that what I did was disorderly, and I’m glad the people of New York have accepted that... I plan to return to the Archdiocese of Boston, and I hope to return to ministry duties." [Times]

Radio Perez Validates All Blogs [Do Not Want]

Thank heavens for celebrity gossip Perez Hilton and his new radio deal, because otherwise there would be no one to "show how the blogosphere is generating new talent for the traditional media," as the Wall Street Journal puts it. Perez will make three-minute radio shows for stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere, for use during rush hours. He's also starring in a summer movie called Gays Gone Wild and has a book deal. Hilariously, the Journal said Perez wants to "carefully cultivate" his public image, just like Paris Hilton. Also, This Changes Everything:

The show, "Radio Perez," marks the debut offering from "C" Student Entertainment Corp., a radio and mobile-focused programming provider created by Steve Lehman, former chairman and chief executive of Premiere Radio Networks, and Andy Schuon, former head of programming at MTV, MTV2, VH1 and Infinity Broadcasting, now CBS Radio.

"We're going to prove that [the blogosphere] is a place where you can find talent," said Mr. Schuon.

[WSJ]

AP Swallows Obvious Alien Cover Story [Aliens]

Federal agents secretly removed 67 bodies from a patch of New Mexico desert not terribly far from UFO crash zone Roswell. Clearly these are alien remains, but the Feds insist they are the skeletons of black Civil War soldiers, and needed protection from a crazy historian in an airplane, who is now dead. The Associated Press did not bother to dig for the Truth, which Is Out There. [AP]

Top 10 Tips For Writing A Top 10 List [Bloggers]

The "Best Week Ever" blog outlines the method that made it the most popular online source for top 10 lists since College Humor, Cracked.com, The Onion, McSweeney's, and Something Awful. I have the short version below. [Best Week Ever]

10. Ten it
9. Peg it
8. Weird it
7. Blurb it
6. Bore it
5. Hook it
4. Shock it
3. Pic it
2. Tit it
1. Technologic

"Julia Allison" Honored By Your Hate [Bloglash]

Julia Allison won a special Web award, yay! Not for best lip-synch video, accidental nipple flash, perviest readers, shameless self promotion or most narcissistic apartment in a supporting role, though lord knows the Star editor at large would be in the running for any of those categories. No, Radar has named Allison the third most hated person on the internet, and the intrepid Neel Shah managed to track down press-shy Allison for a quote. Her comments are actually kind of awesome, if only for the fact that they begin, "Wow, you hate me! You really, really hate me!" UPDATE: Assuming, uh, they are actually from Allison. Which they can't be, really.

"Wow, you hate me! You really, really hate me! I have to say, I'm truly humbled by this honor. As everyone knows, achieving something like this is a group effort, so I want thank everyone over at Gawker and Valleywag, especially Emily Gould and Owen Thomas, you sexy bitches! I couldn't have done it without you! I want to thank my agent, who has been with me since I was just mildly annoying. I also want to send a special thank you to all the Gawker media commenters, especially those who incessantly referenced my sluttiness, STDs, propensity to gold-dig, show cleavage, and simultaneously say stupid shit! Of course I want to thank my self-promotional narcissism and my incessant desire for infamy at any costs. Thank you so, so much. Last but not least, I want to thank Nick Denton and God. That may or may not be redundant. THANK YOU! Goodnight!"

[Radar]

(Photo: Megan Asha)

UPDATE: This has to be a joke. "Of course I want to thank my self-promotional narcissism and my incessant desire for infamy at any costs." Never take a former Gawker intern at face value.

UPDATE 2: Gawker IM transcript of shame:

W Script: "Don't Get Cute Turdblossom, This Is Serious." [Oliver Stone]

The Hollywood Reporter posted the first scene of the widely-leaked script to Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, W, which is about to start filming. Reading it, its easy to see why some historians are calling the film an inaccurate caricature. It's hard to imagine even Bush, not to mention Dick Cheney, seeming like as much of a strutting fraternity brother as he does at the end of this White House scene:

Full scene: [Hollywood Reporter]

Shameless Publishers Lied For Profit [Bringing Down The House]

Fabricating author Ben Mezrich isn't another Margaret Seltzer or James Frey, instead he's part of a far more serious deception. It has emerged that Mezrich invented most of the card-sharking characters in his supposed "real-life" biography, Bringing Down The House, the basis for the hit movie 21. He also appears to have manufactured the bloody beating of a gambler, the smuggling of cash at the airport using hollow crutches, the theft of a safe and the very existence of an MIT instructor. The thing is, his editors knew all about it. But they decided to market his book as a true story, and label it that way on the cover.

Inside the book, in small type, they placed a small, incomplete disclaimer that contradicted the labeling on the dust jacket. Free Press and William Morrow are shamelessly stripping the label "non-fiction" of all meaning, at least when they're the ones affixing it. That sort of institutionalized lying is far more pernicious than the freelance deception Frey and Seltzer engaged in.

Mezrich openly admitted that five of the six main characters from House are not real at all but amalgams of two decades worth of blackjack teams. And who knows whether to trust him even on that, given that he appears to have outright invented other book elements.

The one character in Mezrich's book who is not a composite, the team leader, is portrayed teaching at MIT, which he never did.

The blackjack players in Bringing Down The House smuggle large amounts of cash through airport security using "fake umbrellas and laptop computers, plaster casts and hollow crutches" and eventually by strapping it to their bodies, according to the Globe. But the blackjack team leader said he has never even heard of those techniques, much less used them.

The best part of the Globe story is easily the weasely quotes from the author and his editors. Here's Mezrich:

"I took literary license to make it readable... The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it's true."

That sounds familiar.

The editorial director of Bringing Down The House's publisher, Free Press, said fabrication was neccesary to protect some players' anonymity. "There was an obvious need for privacy of some of the people involved," he told the Globe.

Mezrich's new publisher, William Morrow, is even more brazen. The company is marketing supposed nonfiction from Mezrich that includes, buried at the end of the author's note, a disclaimer "that warns readers about changed names, compressed time periods, and altered identities and backgrounds. Certain characters, it goes on, 'are not meant to portray particular people.'"

Mauro DiPreta, the book's editor at William Morrow, says the disclaimer was inserted simply "to let the reader know what to expect in the book." What Mezrich does, he argues, is clearly nonfiction. "Sometimes reality is messy," he says. "I think it can be fine to streamline a story for narrative purposes."

Not everyone is happy that the idea of true nonfiction is being destroyed before our very eyes. Narrative non-fiction pioneer Gay Talese and WW Norton editor Robert Weil are quoted rebuking the practice.

But everyone actually involved with producing and potentially profiting from Mezrich's projects seems quite comfortable labeling fiction as nonfiction. They get to potentially profit from deals for movies like 21, and all they have to do is define truth the way one of Mezrich's characters does at the end of the Globe story:

"It's 90 percent true if you count things that happened to anyone," he says. "It's only about half true if you define it as actual things happening to the actual people they happened to."

[Globe]