Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Dear Groupon: What??!

My dad was a great guy, and he did a lot for me...but he most certainly did not “give birth” to me.


Appears somebody needs a Human Reproduction refresher course.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Daily Beast's Ethnic Slur

This is from this morning’s Daily Beast Cheat Sheet, a link to an article about the most recent Vatican scandal:



The immediate and obvious question: What the hell is that mamma mia doing there? It has nothing to do with the article, nothing to do with the Vatican scandal. Clearly some doofus at The Daily Beast had an intellectual epiphany that went something like this:

“Hey, the Vatican’s in Italy, right? And those crazy Eye-talians, they’re always saying stuff like Mamma mia and pastafazool and other goofy things, right? So let’s just throw in a completely superfluous and vaguely insulting Mamma mia to lead off this serious crime story, ’cause, I dunno, it’ll be fun.”

And some perhaps-even-more-moronic Daily Beast editor—if in fact there are any, which I often have had occasion to doubt—said, “Wow, what a great idea! That’ll be loads of laughs! Too bad we don’t have any pictures of some greaseball goombah biting the inside of his own hand--that would be hilarious! Well, we’ll go with this picture of one of those beanie things cardinals wear. Not very funny, but it’s all we have.”

Incidentally, the Washington Post article to which the Cheat Sheet item points manages to avoid any such frivolity, and the implied ethnic smear.