The Week We Refused to Loosen Our Viselike Death-grip on the Internet [Week In Review]

• This week everyone went INSANE.The comments, the editors, other bloggers, noted literary geniuses, everyone. It was that heat wave! Anyway. There were lists and frivolity. Sexy anchors and racist anchors.
• Fox News said terrible things about Barack Obama and his wife. We said terrible things about Bill Clinton.
• Also some future-phone from the future came out, again, except no one can have one.
• The genius behind The Lady in the Lake is a prick! Who know? No one knew, because no one went to see his last three movies.
• Maybe from now on we'll plot the Week in Review on a matrix of some kind. (Total Suck rip-off, btw!)
• Who is bothering to try to convince anyone of anything these days? The answer is ALWAYS viral marketers. Lock them all up, we say.
• What's wrong with this logo? What was wrong with John McCain's first wife? What's wrong with spilling something on Frank Bruni?
• What's up with Shia The Beef? Seriously, what is his deal?
• Keith Gessen, we will give you back the internet when you TAKE BACK THIS KITTEN.
• Go Bills.

Special Sightings: Man Sans Cash Fan [Craigslist Cash-Waver]

A tipster sends in a sighting of the now-famous Craigslist Cash-Waver outside a Broadway building: "The red, white, and blue sunglasses were in the same slanted sunglass style as the photos, and his matching shoes were those big plastic-y looking sneakers. Shirt and jeans were nondescript, but the chin strap was in full form...This was around 4:15 on Wednesday. I've never used this site before, can I make sure my full name/email don't appear with the sighting? I don't want him to sue/punch me." Sure! Caveat: Yes he was funny and everything, but he didn't really do anything too bad, so everyone (especially us) should try to be nice. Okay! [Previously]

The Underminer, Live In Person [Friday Fun]

Remember our much-loved columnist the Underminer, the friend who casually destroys your life? Underminer author Mike Albo plays one version of him—a little too convincingly—in a video. After the jump: the Underminer goes to Total Foods.

Russert Update [Update]

Peggy Noonan or Jack Handey? [Pop Quiz]

• "You disappear and then come back and people say, 'Hey, look at that guy.'"
• "His staff should build a podium for him, one that fits, and take it wherever he goes."
• "You know that on some level, at some moment, Dwight D. Eisenhower looked at John F. Kennedy and thought: Punk."
• "Old America: 'We've been here three generations.' New America: 'You're still here?'"
• "The eagle, you will note, is the centerpiece of my flag. It symbolizes freedom. Also the ability to see far away, so you can spot somebody doing something fishy and get him locked up."
• "His father died of AIDS, you asshole"

First four: Noonan
Five: Handey
Six: Gessen

Bad Luck For Some of You [Executions]

From our official Commenter Executioner, Jack Ketch: See the title? Get it? Because it's Friday the 13th and now you are dead! I was going to start this post with a history of Friday the 13th, why it's considered unlucky, and what a typical English Friday the 13th consisted of in my time. But then I realized I don't know anything about this day, and have been living here in the future for so long that I'm basically a lazy, ignorant, and slovenly American by this point. I can't even be bothered to write my posts in old timey English. I'll probably have to execute myself soon. So, it's Friday the 13th, which is bad if bad things happen to you today. Look both ways before crossing the street, don't stand near out of order elevator shafts, and make sure to wear your hat really low if you go wilding. They have cameras everywhere now. Fucking cameras. Let us jump, and please be careful not to slip, to the fun part.

Lothario
Crime: Cuntishness

Executed: In Other News...
Crime:

JACK KETCH: Hello, In Other News...

IN OTHER NEWS...: Oh my! Um, hello. I didn't notice you there. I was just writing another excessively long dialogue exchange for Gawker.

JK: I don't think that will be necessary.

ION: Why not?

JK: Because you're dead.

ION: I am? I don't feel dead. I feel...pretty.

JK: and witty? You aren't.

ION: Some people seem to like my really really long and kind of repetitive one note joke dialogue comments.

JK: That's nice. I find them bothersome. Want to write one act plays? Get a blog.

ION: I have one! It's&mdash

JK: I don't care. You're dead.

ION: Wait! Is this like one of those joke executions where I get to come back in two hours?

JK: I should fucking hope not.

Fin
(Thank God)

Please direct all whining to gawkerexecutioner@gmail.com. Or whatever Conbon's email address is.

read more executions commenter executions commenters jack ketch Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:00:55 EDT Sheila

'Snowman' Rapper Unsurprisingly Implicated In Cocaine Ring [Young Jeezy]

Might as well go for a music star crime news two-fer this afternoon: Atlanta rap star Young Jeezy has been implicated in a major cocaine-dealing trial. A witness testifying in a case against members of Black Mafia Family—a massive Atlanta drug gang that moved hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of coke across the country—said that Jeezy bought several kilos of coke from BMF. Well, duh. Jeezy's nickname is "Snowman":

Simms testified that his job was to unload BMF's cocaine from limos outfitted with secret compartments. He said he piled as many as 100 "bricks" of cocaine at a time inside the basement of one of BMF's stash houses, an ultra-modern Buckhead mansion nicknamed "Space Mountain." And he said that on one occasion, in the fall of 2004, he was ordered by high-ranking BMF members Chad "J-Bo" Brown and Martez "Tito" Byrth to set aside multi-kilo cocaine "shipments" for two customers. Simms said the customers picked up the coke from him at Space Mountain.

When asked by assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney who the customers were, Simms gave two names: William "Doc" Marshall, a high-level BMF co-conspirator who testified earlier in the trial, and "Jeezy."

"Young Jeezy the rapper?" McBurney asked.

"Yes," Simms answered.

Less than surprising. But this could really put a cramp in Jeezy's brand new social networking site. On the site right now:

Quote of the Day

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

David Brinkley

APPROPRIATE. Now enjoy this Jeezy coke rap song. He wasn't kidding, yall.

[Creative Loafing]

Tim Russert, 1950-2008 [Obit]

Mean Commenters Are Running Bloggers Out of Town [The Internets]

"Fuck this, I'm out of here," declares Chelsea Alvarez-Bell, blogging for Seattle's Stranger, at the end of what has obviously been a long guest-blogging stint. "I have no desire to contribute here any longer. I am taking my ball and going home. I was warned beforehand that some of the commenters on Slog could be mean. That was an understatement. The word I would use is cruel." Oh noes! The idea of mean commenters (or awe-inducing donators of labor, as a certain novelist likes to call them) taking over blogs and ruining the Internet has been quite the trend lately. Anyone got a problem with that?

It's not just her. Our very own publisher once remarked, "We were scared of the commenters for a while, yeah?"

Alvarez-Bell goes on to say:

No matter what I post here, it will be ripped to shreds, whether by the grammar police (I dare you to find me something more boring than someone correcting another person's grammar), the pearl-clutching grannies who take umbrage with my use of profanity, or those with a general distaste for what and how I write. That's not what bothers me (I just find it intensely dull). What bothers me is that I woke up these last few mornings perfectly happy... until I remembered that I had to write something for Slog and the dread set in.

Related: Should novelists respond to their critics? Harper's dissects.

However! As evidenced by last Wednesday's real-life commenter festival, blog commenters are people, too! They are, almost without fail, surprisingly sweet in person. Maybe it's because our commenters, besides being smarter than the average ones (although still disturbingly critical of other's physical appearance), live in constant fear of execution. Like in Stalin's Russia.

R. Kelly Acquitted: Jury Says It Wasn't Him In Sex Video [Trials]

R&B singer R. Kelly has been acquitted of everything. Specifically, the 14 counts of child pornography that he's been on trial for in Chicago for the last month, stemming from a video allegedly showing him having sex with a 13-year-old girl. The jury repeatedly viewed the video during their deliberations, and have now let him walk. Everybody else in the world thought he was guilty. The entire case may have hinged on a single mole:

In closing arguments, Kelly's attorney banged on the jury box with his fist, yelled and whispered, laughed and pleaded for more than in hour in his emotion-filled closing.

At one point, Sam Adam Jr. referred to a defense argument made repeatedly during the trial that a mole on the singer's back proved he simply can't be the man in the video.

After displaying a freeze frame of the man's back in the video — with no apparent mole — Adam walked over to the defense table and placed his hand on Kelly's shoulder.

"The truth be told, there is no mole ... that means one thing," Adam told jurors, then paused and lowered his voice. "It ain't him. And if it ain't him, you can't convict."

Prosecutors wrapped up their arguments the same way they began them a month ago: by playing the entire graphic sex tape in open court.

[CNN.com]

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