How…[DOT 15/5/23]

15/5/23 MegMegMcGee 36

…on earth is it the middle of May?

I hope everyone had a nice weekend and if you’re a mom you were property feted.

Turkey Updates:

Turkey elections live: runoff increasingly likely amid competing claims from Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/may/14/turkey-elections-live-vote-recep-tayyip-erdogan-kemal-klcdaroglu

He seems smart.

US senator denounced as ‘profoundly ignorant man’ over remarks on Mexico
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/14/senator-john-kennedy-mexico-drug-cartels

Stonks!

Stock futures slip on Sunday night after S&P 500 and Dow post two straight weekly losses: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/14/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

Sprots! (OMG!)

Rockies pitcher Feltner fractures skull after taking 93 mph line-drive to head
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/may/14/rockies-pitcher-feltner-fractures-skull-after-taking-93-mph-line-drive-to-head

Who you got Deadsplinters? It’s 50/50.

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36 Comments

  1. So that De Niro/Pacino poll is lighting up Twitter, apparently.

    One voter Tweeted that they’d refreshed the Pacino vs. De Niro vote more times than the 2020 election results.
    I must admit that in the Trump/Biden match-up I would much rather have participated in a De Niro/Pacino referendum instead. The clear winner is “Bobby” De Niro, of course:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H87yGvoCNHU
    But you know who was incredibly hot was the slightly younger Tony Danza who, incredibly, is now 72. There’s a story arc on “Who’s the Boss” where Angela takes Tony and the kids to California and Tony Danza spends most of it in swim trunks (not Speedos, alas):
    https://m.facebook.com/ThrowbackTVOfficial/videos/whos-the-boss-custody-part-1-season-2-ep-6-full-episode-throw-back-tv/489598646297289/
    The little boy, Johnathan, Danny Pintauro, is now 47 and was outed by the National Enquirer in 1997, overnight becoming a gay icon at the age of 21. According to Infallible Wiki he is now a vet tech in Austin, TX.

    • That’s weird. My comment didn’t format the way it normally would, but I’m not going to touch it because there’s a YouTube link that will get lost if I do. That YouTube link should take you to Banarama’s seminal 1980s hit, “Robert De Niro’s Waiting.” The Facebook link will take you to the episode of “Who’s the Boss” where Tony and Angela and the kids arrive in California and hit the beach.

  2. In media news, Vice Media has filed for Chapter 11.

    https://www.axios.com/2023/05/15/vice-media-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy

    This story points out that just six years ago Vice Media was valued at $5.7 billion. Not million. Billion. By whom and why is anyone’s guess. To put this in perspective, General Motors has a market cap of $45 billion. It’s a little ironic that I chose this Axios story, because Axios itself is probably sliding toward insolvency.

    • Oh no, my friend, there is indeed a contest.

      Bobby was the victim of a serial cat burglar. Because this is New York, the perp was wandering free among us despite many priors, because the police are seemingly powerless to intervene and our current DA and prosecutors are reluctant to prosecute almost anything that doesn’t involve an actual death. Rather than using his public soapbox to demand that the perp be put away for life, as I would do, he is advocating clemency.

      https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2022/12/21/robert-de-niro-new-york-christmas-gift-robbery/10937234002/

      It’s interesting to note that Bobby, perhaps Tribeca’s most famous citizen, now lives on the Upper East Side. Same with Woody Allen, who’s like the Upper West Side personified, and Spike Lee, who has made a living out of his “Brooklyn cred.” They all live on the Upper East Side, and have for many years. They don’t like to publicize this, though.

      • Just curious, but have you witnessed this kind of thing?

        I’ve read complaints about things like this for years, but there are a lot of claims that it’s gotten much worse recently.

        • I’m guessing that something happened and post hoc they “flooded the zone.” This happens all the time. Someone gets shot on a street corner, the EMS carts them off to the nearest public hospital, and an hour later there are like a dozen cops kind of looking around and staring at their phones.

          I will confess that I have great affection for our Women and Men in Blue, because I live across the street from a precinct and (used to) walk my Faithful Hound around that block, and they’re all huge dog lovers. I’m also a barely middle-aged white male (upper end of the spectrum) with mobility issues so I arouse no suspicion among them. I do not fall into the demographic that causes a huge proportion of street crime in the City, but on the other hand I am the right target demographic for financial fraud and white collar shenanigans of all kinds. Luckily for them and me I have no interest or knowledge about how to commit these kinds of crimes.

          • I think a lot of the complaints are that it’s devolved into preemptive flood the zone tactics in response to a complaint a week ago about somebody selling conterfeit T shirts.

            Adams has evidently boosted police overtime, and if it’s there, they’ll collect it, and they’re doing it in safe places, because why hang out to get double pay in bad parts of the Bronx where they might have to work? Meanwhile Adams is pleading poverty to cut libraries.

            The head of the NYC police sergeants union recently pleaded guilty to stealing $1 million from his own members. His lawyer, as it turns out, is the guy who is now repping the subway strangler, and failed in his run for Alvin Bragg’s spot as DA. He seems to have a knack for picking losing causes where he can fundraise like crazy without having worry about producing.

            • Oh, I didn’t know that. The subway strangler/next-gen Bernie Goetz/civic hero (depends on your assessment of things) has a legal defense fund set up and it’s already raised over $1 million. Plenty of NYC straphangers (as the Post calls us) have chipped in small-dollar amounts, mostly anonymously, but with very specific anecdotes, like, “I live in [wherever] and I take that subway line every day. That man is a HERO!!!”

              Good luck getting an indictment out of a subway-reliant grand jury. Even the white-on-black aspect, rare as that is, might fall flat because during the lockdown, when few white-collar workers had reason to use the subways, the people that really make the city run, the lowest paid among us, had to show up in person, and they were mostly minority. Although I think we’re now a majority-minority city. But you know what I mean. So imagine being a working-class Black woman who took the subways during the pandemic and was confronted with her share of Jordan Neelys on her commutes.

              Some of the toughest criticisms my beloved, sainted mother-in-law ever leveled in my presence was against the children of her Black friends. She once said to me, “[Mattie], you got lucky with [Better Half]. I raised a good son. He, for one, doesn’t have a prison record.”

              [Edit: Harmless 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator Jordan Neely had over 40 prior arrests, and they weren’t for “existing while homeless,” like vagrancy, which NYC hasn’t prosecuted since the Giuliani years.]

              After that conversation, in the car leaving her house and Better Half’s ancestral home, I said, “Your mother was kidding, right?”

              “She was exaggerating, but yeah, the woman next door has three sons and they’ve all done time. Drugs and armed robbery I think. But they’re all older than I am so I don’t really know them.”

              If you’re still reading, I’d like to balance my comment by saying that the great love of my life grew up in a trailer in the Mountain West and had an older brother who went to prison for drugs and armed robbery, and they were white pioneer stock. And in fact I have a cousin whose husband did prison time, but it was white-collar crime and didn’t involve drugs or armed robbery.

  5. More management idiocy at CNN. Lots of twists and turns (never a good sign for crisis management).

    The story is that after their TV Trump rally, CNN’s media critic (Oliver Darcy) wrote how a lot of staff was upset, echoing what plenty of other outlets were saying.

    Then Dylan Byers (the guy who Ashley Feinberg jokes has a red light on his desk that starts flashing everytime a billionaire needs defending)  wrote an account of Darcy being called into a meeting with head guy Chris Licht and a couple of his flunkies that someone at the meeting told Byers “put the fear of god” into Darcy.

    Likewise some anonymous source in CNN management went to Fox News to mock the upset CNN staff.

    Now Darcy has been quoted as saying the meeting was cordial and Licht said he would back Darcy, and the two flunkies were called out by name in the report.

    If Licht is the leaker to Byers and Fox, that’s toxic. If he’s trying to maintain deniability and his people are doing this on his behalf, CNN’s staff has signalled they’re going to name names and it’s coming back to him. If his flunkies are freelancing, then he looks weak.

    The bottom line from a PR perspective is Licht screwed up because this story has legs and he’s looking weak and unable to control it.

     

    • But remember, though, Brian Stelter was the last media figure in New York to learn that his boss, Jeff Zucker, was sleeping with the woman who worked just down the hall…or so he claims. Or about colleague Chris Cuomo’s collusion with his brother, Handsy Andy, for a ratings-generating Covid lovefest (until everything went tits up, as the Brits would say, and Handsy should be prosecuted for approximately 15,000 preventable nursing home deaths) and then Fredo’s doing PR for his older bro when the sexual abuse survivors emerged. I wonder if he has ever heard the rumor that Donald Trump has been previously married?

      • Right. I think that says something about the difference between Zucker and Licht — Zucker knew how to keep his inhouse media critic under wraps and his dirty laundry buried for years.

        Licht is making Zucker look smart, and Zucker was just awful at his job.

        Stelter is feeling free now that he was fired, when he clearly showed he would quickly go complicit. LBJ famously said about Hoover “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” I don’t think Licht understands why he should have kept a guy with Stelter’s blindspots onboard.

        Hopefully this is a sign he’ll get fired, but Licht’s owners seem weirdly unconcerned about his ratings disasters, so maybe they don’t care about this either.

        • I never knew that the “pissing/tent” quote came from Johnson about Hoover. I do know that Hoover lived for decades in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria and lived into the early or mid-1960s. Imagine racing off to your office at Rock Center in 1960 and bumping into Herbert Hoover. “Oh my God! President Hoover! I didn’t realize you were still alive!”

            • Of course, you’re right. Herbert Hoover did the dignified thing after leaving office and quietly “hoovered” (vacuumed) up money through his law work and what has long been known as lobbying. J. Edgar was still at the height of his powers. I wonder, if he hadn’t died suddenly (I believe he had an unexpected heart attack) whether he would have written a tell-all. The stuff he must have had on the Kennedys alone would have…oh well, that went to the grave with him.

              • J. Edgar had massive files and when he died Nixon sent someone to take a look, no doubt prospecting for clues. His loyal officeworkers told him that they had no idea what files anyone could possibly be talking about. For some reason, Nixon never followed up.

                And then Hoover’s old secretary, who still had the keys to file cabinets, bit by bit took them away and burned them.

                Nixon’s lack of interest is odd, because he’s known to have been absolutely paranoid about Hoover having taped his plane in 1968 at LBJ’s instigation, which probably happened. He also seems to have been worried about LBJ having information on Nixon’s scheme to torpedo the US-Vietnam peace talks in 1968, but it’s unclear whether that was ever captured. But the unresolved status seemed to drive Nixon nuts.

                For a lot of things, Nixon seemed to dither back and forth about whether they were important or risky, and chasing down those files may have been one of them. But by the time the new director, L. Patrick Gray, took over, they were gone.

    • Oviedo is practically next door. I was there at a park yesterday. No gators. Well, that I could see. I didn’t check the pipes.

      Uniquely Florida man warning:

      “Thank goodness our crews have a robot”, officials added, warning locals not to wander down into the pipes.

      Yes, locals, please don’t wander down into the pipes.

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