Matthew Broderick's "Mostly Gay Friends" [Sarah Jessica Parker]

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker "can be hilariously unguarded about saying things that, when taken out of context, might seem absurdly suggestive. For instance, when I talk about my husband, who like Broderick is a science geek and a gadget-hound, she suggests that we should set them up as friends. 'Matthew doesn’t have enough friends,' she tells me, sounding very mother-hennish and adding that Matthew has mostly gay friends in New York. Because this is such a crazy thing to say to a reporter—surely she knows that the higher her star has risen, the more the gossips insist her marriage must be a fake—I decide that this means that Matthew is definitely not gay." [New York]

Not Portfolio? [Jobs]

"Bethany McLean, co-author of a best-selling book about the Enron debacle, is leaving Fortune after a 13-year run to jump to Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair... It marks at least the third time that Condé Nast, which is headed by billionaire chairman S.I. Newhouse, Jr., has come calling on McLean, one of the higher-profile journalists at the Time Inc.-owned business magazine. Portfolio had tried to get her to jump ship a year ago when Condé Nast was launching its business magazine, but Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey intervened to help Fortune win that tug of war." [Post]

BREAKING: Monster Murdoch Moves WSJ 'Pepper... And Salt' Cartoon! [Evil Corporations In Action]

The Wall Street Journal has a cartoon called "Pepper... And Salt" which — and I did not know this after 12 years of reading the Journal — has been "edited since 1950 by Charles Preston... [and] is culled from hundreds of submissions each week." Anyway, the 'toon was once in the paper's Arts & Leisure section, and it must have been too controversial (ahem) because it was moved to the editorial page in April 2007. But now Rupert Murdoch is pretty much personally editing the whole Journal, and "Pepper... And Salt" is moving back to Arts & Leisure. Why? Possibly so the right-leaning media mogul can unleash a horrifying "Murdochian brand of editorial cartoon!" Reports the Times :

“Murdoch’s papers are known for their great editorial cartooning,” said Rex Babin, the editorial cartoonist for The Sacramento Bee. Mr. Babin noted that Pepper’s targets — the foibles of offices and other institutional oddities of American life — were not distinctly editorial in nature, and The Journal page might benefit from an actual conservative editorial cartoonist, as opposed to a feature cartoon whose spiritual sibling is The New Yorker.

Ah, yes, the brilliant editorial cartoons of the Murdoch papers. Like that Sean Delonas over at the Post.

[Times]

Barbara Walters More Hated At Today Than Katie Couric [TV]

Barabara Walters had "a bitter parting from Today. She said, 'Unlike Katie, there were no going-away parties for me,' connecting her departure to become the first woman on an evening newscast [at ABC] to the current situation of CBS’s Katie Couric." [Times]

No One Dies In Sex And The City Movie [Rumormonger]

So, this one time, actress Cynthia Nixon supposedly said a character would die in the Sex And The City movie, and since then everyone has been champing at the bit to find out which one. But the Times just profiled the head writer for the show and movie, and he mocked the idea of killing off a character. Although, in a way, he is killing someone, Carrie and Mr. Big's parents to be precise, by writing them out of Carrie and Mr. Big's wedding, because, he says, having parents at weddings is so cliché. The relevant quotes about the death and about the wedding:

Death:

It is either the seriousness [SATC writer Michael Patrick] King displayed in the final seasons of “Sex and the City” or a general sense of bleakness among his fans that has led some to speculate that he might have a taste for a particularly morose strain of melodrama. “You don’t know how many people came up to me when I was making the movie and said, ‘So is somebody going to die?’ ” he said. “Yup. Happy summer. Thanks for your $10. Enjoy your Diet Coke. Someone’s going to die. Like that’s what I’m going to do.”

Wedding:

While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, Mr. King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. “My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,” he said. “The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.”

Also driving Mr. King’s decision was his fear of falling into cliché. “Who was going to play Carrie’s mother? Connie Stevens? It’s such a traditional sitcom limb. It’s the Thanksgiving episode, and there are Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch. I never wanted to do anything like that.”

Mr. King: Please rest assured that if you killed off one or, better yet, more than one of the Sex And The City characters, many peoples' Diet Cokes would taste even sweeter and they would no longer feel their $10 was totally wasted.

[Times]

Obsequious Murdoch Stiffed In China [Rupert Murdoch]

"After years of pleading, [News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch] finally landed an audience with Jiang Zemin, then China’s party chief, to try to schmooze away the satellite ban... Mr. Murdoch put $60 million into a venture of Mr. Jiang’s son. Mr. Murdoch also relocated his own son James to China. While the elder Mr. Murdoch went on to disparage the Dalai Lama in 1999, his son disparaged the Falun Gong in 2001. The satellite ban stayed in force. Outfoxed!" [Times]

How To Tap Someone's Phone [Working 'with' The Press]

Here's another reason to finally cancel your landline telephone and just use your cell: home phones are "really, really easy" to tap, according to a Times digest of lessons from the wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano, the Los Angeles private investigator of journalists and movie moguls. Anyone tapping my line would mainly just hear me calling my own mobile phone to determine which pocket I left it in. But in case you actually conduct secure communication from home, or like to indulge in the occasional Raymond Chandler fantasy, here are the key attack vectors:

• The curbside neighborhood "b-box" has your target's line, you just have to figure out the right two wires, then use $50 worth of Radio Shack equipment to intercept their calls. Many of these boxes are unlocked, at least in Southern California, while the others tend to all have the same key, "and retired technicians apparently keep them."
• Sneak in to the central switching office, open at all hours for technicians and "often unsupervised."
• Seduce the phone company dispatchers, like this guy: "Prosecutors say a field technician from SBC Communications (now AT&T), Rayford Turner, who was a bit of a ladies’ man, prevailed upon a small group of middle-age female SBC dispatchers to give him whatever data he requested: toll records, cable pairs, names, phone numbers and so on. They continued to do so long after he retired."
• Rent an apartment: " When Mr. Pellicano wanted to hear the calls of someone who lived outside his area code, prosecutors say, he rented an apartment nearby and had Mr. Turner run the duplicated phone line into it. There it would be plugged into a Macintosh computer that would record a new digital audio file each time the subject’s receiver was lifted off the hook."
• Get a special "set of undocumented phone lines" from the central office to yours. Pellicano did this and was able "to monitor calls across Beverly Hill without even stepping outside."

[Times]

(Image via EveryStockPhoto)

One More Thing [New Classic]

The Sopranos, edited for PAX Christian Television. And, yes, I do think Mad TV is classic!

While We're At It: The New Indiana Jones Trailer [Dr. Jones!]

Movie studios like me, that's why they release their new trailers on the weekends. Here's the brand spanking new one for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And, unlike the first one, it looks really good!

Better quality version here. [via EmpireOnline]

Subscribe with an RSS reader Older News Archive Add news to your web site