Sacha Baron Cohen accepting an award on behalf of Borat at the British Comedy Awards:

Borat couldn’t be here tonight. He’s the guest of honor at the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.

Which reminds me of this:

And it works.

Having seen just one promotional-stunt clip on the Daily Show, “Unsigned” at Eat the Press was completely won over by the nascent, devilishly clever PR campaign from Al Jazeera English that is obviously designed to win over just his/her type: the young and the hip. (Is it possible that they’re this easy to manipulate? Yes—but only until the next PRopaganda (TM) stunt that convinces them otherwise.)

What an inspired, genius move on the part of the underexposed and under-carried Al Jazeera English network: Offer yourself up with abandon to “The Daily Show” for a long, meaty, hilarious, humanizing clip. …

The segment drove home the point that Al Jazeera is actually serious about serious news, with a pared-down no-nonsense style heavy on actual news content while at the same time humanizing the network by highlighting its employees, and the mission, which has not been overly popular, to say the least

then we get to the fair-and-balanced part of the report:

(and, in fairness, Al Jazeera is sort of associated with videos from terrorists who take credit for atrocities and shout about the glories of holy slaughter of American infidels, which sort of works against domestic viewer goodwill)

Yes, well, there is that … but never mind:

Anchors Dave Marash and Ghida Fakhry are particularly excellent sports. It’s a brilliant, hilarious segment, and is probably the best commercial Al Jazeera could have in this country. An amazing PR coup.

Being fair and balanced and print-oriented myself, I offer this perspective for your consideration—parts of an interview in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche with Al Jazeera’s editor-in-chief, Ahmed Sheikh [emphasis added]

How do you see the future of this region in which news of wars, dictators and poverty predominates?

The future here looks very bleak. …

At whom are you angry?

It’s not only the lack of democracy in the region that makes me worried. I don’t understand why we don’t develop as quickly and dynamically as the rest of the world. We have to face the challenge and say: enough is enough! …

In many Arab states, the middle class is disappearing. The rich get richer and the poor get still poorer. Look at the schools in Jordan, Egypt or Morocco: You have up to 70 youngsters crammed together in a single classroom. How can a teacher do his job in such circumstances? The public hospitals are also in a hopeless condition. These are just examples. They show how hopeless the situation is for us in the Middle East.

Who is responsible for the situation?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most important reasons why these crises and problems continue to simmer. The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. The West should finally come to understand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.

Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?

I think so.

Can you please explain to me what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to do with these problems?

The Palestinian cause is central for Arab thinking.

In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?

Exactly. It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.

If Al Jazeera English becomes wildly popular with America’s target demographic, it won’t be only a PR coup; it will be the most successful propaganda campaign to date of the Long War.

Need proof?

If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Predictably, the Sourpuss [I shall not elaborate further] Brigade is not  flattered by his thesis that women aren’t as funny as men.

Sweeties, you can relax. Something tells me he wouldn’t bother with you anyway.

The falsely labeled former “queen of nice” is in hot water.

Rosie O’Donnell says she’s sorry for mocking spoken Chinese on “The View,” but an association that represents journalists from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, including Chinese American, says it wasn’t enough.

Will she go? Will she stay?

Who cares?

Konrad Fiedler

The first stop for many immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island was a room and/or a job on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and hundreds of prominent business and civic leaders grew up in this community. Now, it is undergoing an unexpected renaissance.

“Until fairly recently the Bowery always possessed the greatest number of groggeries, flophouses, clip joints, brothels, fire sales, rigged auctions, pawnbrokers, dime museums, shooting galleries, dime-a-dance establishments, fortune-telling and lottery agencies, thieves markets and tattoo parlors, as well as second and third rate theaters,” the director of Eastern Consolidated Properties, Alan Miller, said.

The flophouses of the Bowery and Lower East Side are being replaced

(New York Sun) 

I can attest to that. I’ll take my camera outside one day and will show you the evidence.

This is tragic, unbearably sad, and heartbreaking.

How much more suffering at the hands of their own do these people have to endure?
Why, why, why are children never protected from and always exposed to weapons and gunfire in the Palestinian territories?

 AP

Chairman of the Hamas faction in parliament Khalil al-Haya, told a crowd of tens of thousands at a Hamas rally in Gaza Friday that “(Palestinian President Mahmoud) Abbas has declared war on Allah and on the will of the Palestinian people.” …
Twenty Palestinians were wounded, two critically, in exchanges of fire between warring factions in the Palestinian Authority Friday.

Sixteen people were wounded in Ramallah, four in Gaza. Fatah officials reported that several Hamas gunmen have barricaded themselves in the Nazer mosque in the city of Ramallah and are firing at Fatah and Palestinian security forces inside the mosque compound.

 

Yeah, yeah, I know—my mantra is that infotainment rules. Except that this is America, where we get new moral outrages every news cycle and where pundits can’t let go of our Puritan heritage and so more often than not these days, it is Puritanism that rules.

When the O.J. book scandal erupted a few weeks ago, I commented that Rupert “How Low Can You Go” Murdoch had finally discovered the limits of America’s tolerance for tabloid excess. (He was also, oddly, applauded for his moral rectitude when he pulled the plug on Judith Regan’s HarperCollins project—which Barbara Walters, of ABC, had also flirted with but got a pass on), and I said that the project would have flown in England.

In case you don’t believe me, feast your eyes on “Forget Paris,” by Rachel Shukert, about Britain’s tabloid trash queens:

Jade Goody is more than just a bundle of adorably illiterate malapropisms. She has amassed a fortune of roughly $7 million simply by presenting and appearing on reality shows — Celebrity Wife Swap, Celebrity Driving School, Back to Reality, Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes, and most recently Jade Goody’s Diary, which is sure to rival that of Samuel Pepys in capturing the zeitgeist of the British society of the time. In October, suffering the stomach pain that often accompanies a sudden dip in media coverage, Jade underwent emergency screening for colon cancer (in U.K. speak, “bowel cancer,” a term at once deliciously visceral yet vague). When the prevailing medical opinion was that her abdominal pain was probably the result of a few nasty kebabs, Jade let her anger out by slugging a grandmother in the face at the cinema, in a fracas possibly instigated by her nineteen-year-old lover, Jack Tweedy (she has since broke things off with him, after several tabloid photographs surfaced of him in the embrace of a naked blonde, speculated by some snarkier British gossip blogs to be celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.) The granny, surely the kind of woman who lives in a flat decorated with Royal Wedding memorabilia and serves her guests tea from charmingly mismatched floral china, had this to say about Goody: “She called me a fat cunt. I used to like her from the telly but now I think she’s a pig-faced thug.”

Meanwhile, back on the Puritan side of the Pond, Kelly Jane Torrance of the Washington Times is fulminating over the fact that the publishing industry’s cheerleader, the trade magazine Publishers Weekly, is celebrating HarperCollins exec Jane Friedman, who green-lit the O.J. project (and let her employees understand that they were to keep their mouths shut about it).

The president and chief executive of HarperCollins was one of those responsible for the O.J. fiasco — she approved the reported $2 million to $3.5 million paid to Mr. Simpson’s representatives for his participation. Instead of being chastised for her misreading of the public mood — not to mention a shocking lapse of taste — she’s being rewarded by the very industry she tainted.

[the industry was "pure" before this project? Gawd--ed.]

Honoring one of the people responsible for a tasteless idea born out of pure greed shows the industry hasn’t learned its lesson. There are some things Americans simply won’t buy, no matter how much marketing goes into them.

But perhaps no one expects anything more noble from the publishing industry anymore.

One would hope not.

Steven Soderbergh is accused by three out of three reviewers I read of neglecting his audience in his new film The Good German, which he shot deliberately in a style reminiscent of the 1940s.Here’s Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York:

If Soderbergh is condemning wasteful current productions, he should be reminded that rear projection went out for good reason. And if he’s implying that Hollywood’s wartime chestnuts are fake, he should be corrected. At least those films never forgot who was most important: the audience.

Here’s J. Hoberman in The Village Voice:

Soderbergh isn’t the first to try this particular stunt—Lars von Trier played a similar game in his underappreciated Zentropa, and The Good German is haunted by The Third Man the way Carol Reed’s 1949 classic was haunted by Orson Welles. But neither of those were Hollywood movies and neither one had the same concern with resurrecting something that may never have existed; such voluptuous disillusionment regarding U.S. motives wouldn’t have had a place in a 1946 American movie. …

But if Casablanca was the acme of wartime romanticism, The Good German is its self-conscious antithesis. Soderbergh wants to show the birth of postwar moral relativism. It’s hard to believe in anything—his characters most of all.

Much more damningly, Manohla Dargis calls Soderbergh on the carpet for his cynical disregard of the audience and the degree of his detachment. She also calls a spade a spade in the New York Times [emphasis added]:

In his genre pastiche “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking. … The most striking difference between it and a Hollywood film like “Casablanca” aren’t the expletives, the new film’s calculated cynicism or even that glimpse of bedroom coupling; it’s that the older film feels as if it was made for the satisfaction of the audience while the other feels as if it was made for that of the director alone. …

Increasingly, Mr. Soderbergh’s oscillation between glossy divertissements like the “Ocean’s” films and modest diversions like “Bubble” seems less like the natural workings of a restless imagination than a disengaged one. …

The extent of that disengagement is most evident in the new film’s wildly feel-bad denouement, in which the paradoxically good German of Mr. Kanon’s title, the one who looked away from atrocities, is transformed into a duplicitous Jew. The most charitable explanation for this offensive, historically spurious character is that Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Attanasio, in trying to cram the novel’s nearly 500 pages into a 105-minute film, decided to conflate two different clichés into one.

Rather unfortunately, and perhaps with an eye to the present, they end up suggesting that in wartime everyone’s hands can become slicked with blood, even a Jew in Nazi Germany. Somewhere, Jack and Harry Warner, who stopped doing business with Nazi Germany before any other studio in Hollywood, are spinning. They aren’t the only ones.

So Mr. Indie went Hollywood only to become morally bankrupt. How very encouraging.

Have you ever read something that was not written by you but that could have been? I just did. Here’s Jane Galt:

I read fast. Really fast. … I have never taken a speed reading course, and never tried to learn how to read fast; I’ve been doing it . . . well, I don’t know how long, but at least since I was in junior high school. The only tricks I know for learning how to read fast are:

1) Be born to parents who read fast, and a lot 2) Read a lot yourself when you are a child

As I get older, though, I’ve figured out how I do it: I skip things. This may seem obvious, but I actually had to catch myself doing it; it is not a conscious process, and if I think about it, I can’t do it. Somehow, my brain selects chunks of text that it thinks won’t convey new information, and avoids them. Perhaps this is not optimal, but it works well enough for me to have made A’s in most of my college lit classes. [I didn't take many college lit classes ---ed.] I can still read faster than most people while reading completely, and I do for some things, like textbooks, but it takes effort and I don’t enjoy it as much.

What brought this on was Tyler Cowen’s post on How to read fast

Galt thinks that most bloggers read fast (and describes someone witnessing Glenn Reynolds’s awesome speed-reading***). She’s probably right about that.

It’s only logical. I blog daily, and I consume (”read”) a whole lot in order to be able to produce, on average, four content- and link-rich posts a day. I won’t begin to guess the ratio (do I consume ten times as much as I produce? five times?). The point is that I need to be able to “read” fast in order to produce that much.

I’d argue, though, that when I’m reading at my fastest, I’m not reading “completely,” as Galt says she does when she reads five or six pages a minute. Not even close. The faster I read, the more often I have to backtrack in order to comprehend what I’m reading. The “searching for keywords” process that allows fast readers to hurtle through a text doesn’t really allow for complete processing. Not in my experience, at least.

Galt continues:

The interesting thing is that while I read a lot, I also re-read a lot, mostly fiction. For good books, I find each reading a deeper experience; it now occurs to me that this is because I’m reading a slightly different group of paragraphs than I did the previous time. My friends who read slowly, never reread.

I re-read a lot, too. I re-read constantly, in fact—as I’m reading. I’m forced to, because oftentimes there’s a lot riding on my getting what I read. Close reading (for nuance, for deep meaning, for shades of difference) requires you to slow down.

My “slow” is probably faster than what some people would consider “fast,” but there’s no virtue in this for me. I have family members who read slowly. They remember and treasure every word they read in the books they loved. Like Jane Galt, I re-read a lot of fiction, too. I have to, because there’s a lot I just don’t remember from the first time around…because I skipped over it.

That’s why, like Galt,

I have a pretty remarkable gift for forgetting whodunnit; I can read them every five years, and never see it coming.

I dunno. I can’t quite come around to thinking that this is a good thing.
———-

*** The prodigious Reynolds is, obviously, Mr. Incredible.