Shots in the Dark

The killer ape in Connecticut was on antidepressants.

So yesterday I got this e-mail that totally made my day: the creator of the brilliant and hilarious blog, Fuck You Penguin, dropped me a note of thanks for having written complimentary things about FUP.

His name is Matthew Gasteier, he writes about hip-hop for the Boston Phoenix and elsewhere, and he wrote:

I just wanted to write you to thank you for what you wrote about FU Penguin on your blog. Someone sent it to me and I was very flattered. It’s always nice to get good feedback on the humor on the site, but I do put a lot of work into the writing style to make it look easy, and it’s a real pleasure to hear that people are appreciating that work.

I wrote back and said that it really is difficult to write in a style that reads casual and funny and irreverent but is in fact structured and deliberate, and I admire him for doing it so successfully. Also, I asked how he started the blog. Here’s the answer:

A silly blog deserves a silly origin story. My fianceé and I have always joked about cute animals knowing that they are cute and being shameless about it. One day, I saw a coat by Penguin, the clothing company, that I really loved but was extremely expensive and I thought, “Fuck you, Penguin.” I immediately grabbed a picture of an actual penguin (my favorite animal) and it just clicked. If you look at the early ones, you’ll see it took me a month or so to really find my rhythm and get to the point where I could actually see it being funny past a few posts.

There’s a good lesson in writing and the value of blogging there: Blogging, as a daily exercise, can improve your writing. It’s just practice, practice, practice, and eventually that’ll get you to writing a hilarious blog in which you make fun of cute animals.

The good even better news? There’s soon to be an FUP book. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy, and I would buy copies for my nieces and nephews except they are too young to swear, much less understand that, sometimes when you swear at cute animals, it’s because you really, really like them.

You should pre-order your copy too, right here on this Amazon link.

As Bill O’Reilly once said to me, “We know how to sell books on this show.” And by “we,” he meant “I.”

In the May issue of Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi makes the case against the Yankee GM.

Brian Cashman has kept his job in baseball over the years because he is masterfully good at just one particular thing: choosing sides in exploding Yankee scandals.

… Most Yankee fans believe Cashman didn’t really want to fire the revered Joe Torre and didn’t really want to sign Japanese special-needs student Kei Igawa and didn’t really want to acquire wall-puncher Kevin Brown or anger addict Randy Johnson or Jaret Wright or José Contreras or Jason Giambi or any of the other overpriced, underperforming free agents who soiled the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium over Cashman’s tenure. The story we’re supposed to buy is that Cashman deep down inside is really a Theo Epstein–style GM who values internal player development and homegrown pitching….

I’m not really a fan of Taibbi, who seems to believe that just because you can say “fuck” in Rolling Stone then, by all means, you should do so as often as possible, apparently not realizing that the impact of the word “fuck” diminishes every time you say “fuck.” (See?)

But he does have one point here that seems to me worth considering: Cashman has been consistently out-GMed by Theo Epstein. Year after year Epstein seems to find great new ballplayers whom he doesn’t have to pay a ton of money, while for the Yankees, it’s really just Joba Chamberlain and Robinson Cano. Not that those guys aren’t terrific, but….

The question is whether that’s Epstein’s fault or has more to do with the nuttiness of the Steinbrenners. True Yankee fans assume that just surviving in a Steinbrenner-run organization requires massive intelligence and enormous political skill, so we assume that Cashman must be really smart. But maybe he has to spend all his time dealing with the Steinbrenners?

He still doesn’t have a home run. It’s getting a little painful.

But to be fair….the Red Sox are, at least, winning. The Yankees are just mediocre. Granted, they were beaten yesterday by the great Roy Halladay, but still—they haven’t beaten a really good pitcher this entire season. They go down a bit too meekly….

Plus, the Yankees’ age is showing. Derek Jeter has a pulled muscle, Hideki Matsui left the game early, Jorge Posada has been hurt…if this keeps up, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, the Yanks are going to have a tough time getting into any sort of groove.

On the more optimistic side, Chien Ming-Wang sounds like he’s getting back on track down in the minors, A-Rod and Mark Texeira are going to start hitting, and the pitching is going to come around. There’s no way this is a sub-.500 team for much longer.

The Crimson reports that students are none too happy with the first round of cuts.

While administrators called the cuts “a grueling exercise for everyone” and “a shared pain” at the meetings, many students said they disproportionately affected student life and that the process of making cuts had not been transparent.

(Nice shot of college administrators strolling past an “Emergency” sign, by the way, Crimson folks.)

It is a little hard to see how these cuts are a shared pain. So far, at least, they’ve affected union workers, graduate students, and undergraduates. (I’m not counting a professorial salary freeze, because no one’s getting raises in this economy.) It’s hard not to get the impression that those who are making the cuts are taking care of themselves.

But then—this is only about one-third of the $220 million in total cuts needed. Which should be alarming: If they’re cutting hot food now, and they’ve got $143 million to go, what’s next?

Harvard Magazine has a nice write-up on the Harvard budget cuts and the new website detailing them.

Things sound almost Dickensian:

—no hot breakfasts during the week

—cold rooms in winter and hot rooms in summer

—more than 500 fewer staffers around the university, and probable layoffs to come

How bad is it? And will it get worse?

“36 Hours in Philadelphia.”

—today’s NYT

You probably knew this already, but the Wall Street Journal confirms it.

The bad news for this spring’s college graduates is that they’re entering the toughest labor market in at least 25 years.

The worse news: Even those who land jobs will likely suffer lower wages for a decade or more compared to those lucky enough to graduate in better times, studies show.

Sorry about that…

Today’s TImes has a piece about how the economic slump is putting pressure on town-gown relations across the US, with a particular emphasis on Harvard.

The rats are out in spades this spring in North Allston, a gritty neighborhood wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike, and residents are blaming Harvard.

Etc. The article actually says nothing that you wouldn’t learn from reading the Crimson. (Pretty lame, actually.) And honestly, one wonders if those rats are really “out in spades” this spring, or if that isn’t just a little bit of pro-Allston rhetoric that the reporter took at face value.

Another university facing this problem is Brown. The mayor of Providence wants to charge Brown students a $150 “municipal impact fee” per semester. This is a dumb idea, for lots of reasons, foremost among them being that if you took Brown out of Providence, why the hell else would anyone go there?

One university that, in the past, would almost certainly have been mentioned in this context but is entirely absent from the article: Yale.

You have to give Yale president Rick Levin, who just underwent surgery for prostate cancer, much of the credit for that.

I’m happy to see that Louis Caldera’s decision to fly Air Force One over the southern tip of Manhattan has cost him his job as director of the White House Military Office.

The White House released the resignation letter and a seven-page review of how the flyover was planned by several government agencies without anyone raising caution flags that the flight could spark fears of another terrorist attack in Lower Manhattan. A photograph of the plane, flying low above New York Harbor, also was released on Friday by the White House.

…The Air Force estimated the flight cost taxpayers $328,835, including $35,000 in fuel for the plane and the two fighter-jet escorts.

Have these people never heard of Photoshop?

One of the reasons Caldera didn’t object more to the flyover: He apparently hadn’t checked his e-mail in several days, saying that he’d left work early several days in a row due to back pain.

If ever someone deserved to be fired….

And if that sounds mean, watch this video of the flight, and imagine that you had been in southern Manhattan on 9/11, and were there on this day as well.