Entries Tagged 'Controversy' ↓

I missile you much: GTA IV‘s Niko Bellic sends his regards

The worst job I ever had was working in the car loans department of the now defunct Chemical Bank, at the Huntington Quadrangle in Melville L.I. It was a small office of about ten to twelve mutually limited, small-minded people, held under the managerial thumb of a doughy, mouse-faced, unsmiling, bespectacled woman with yellow smoker’s fingertips and a bad perm.

Our task was taking in loan requests by fax or phone from GMAC finance dealers, processing them, and passing them up the chain for approval. What I remember most was how tense this office was, as this woman kept us under the grind to turn out precious loan apps. My solace was ducking into my ’75 Impala at lunch time, loudly playing Grandmixer DXT and Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock album, and sleeping.

But pristinely nested on the other end of my employment karmic balance is the job I loved the most: The 2 1/2 years I spent, from 2004 – 2006, working in public affairs at Rockstar Games, maker of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of video games.

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An estimated 5,000 Black human beings were lynched in the United States between the years 1890 and 1960. By averages, that’s one African-American dying horribly, in racist mob violence, every five days for seventy years. In almost all of these cases, no one was ever charged for the crimes. So affirms the guest on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, April 25, 2 pm ET.

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“Schtupp” just didn’t test well: The new Teutonic scent

The Germans: They went there. They totally went there. (Respect due to BoingBoingTV for the tip.)

Because it’s the question overloading your neurons right this moment, yes, this package, above, is totally real. The scent is called VULVA—a rather pretty word, it occurs to me—Original.

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“I’m sorry…I meant to go to jail!”: Akon makes a mean face

I’m not even an Akon fan. However, I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to write that headline before another blog did.

The Huffington Post got to The Smoking Gun earlier than the rest of us did, pointing out what rigorously fact-checked hip-hop magazines should have known a long time ago: When Senegal-born singer-songwriter-producer Akon

settled on “Konvicted” for the title of his second album, which sold nearly three million copies last year … “Kontrived” might have been a more accurate choice.

Akon’s ad nauseum claims about his criminal career and resulting prison time have been, to an overwhelming extent, exaggerated, embellished, or wholly fabricated, an investigation by The Smoking Gun has revealed.

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According to Forbes.com’s 2007 list of top TV personalities, in the year between June 2006 and June 2007, talk show host Oprah Winfrey earned over a quarter of a billion dollars, $260 million, precisely, or over $1 million a day.

Pauper.

In a report cited by The New York Times yesterday, Institutional Investor’s Alpha (IIA) magazine ranked the 50 top hedge fund earners of last year. (The incomes on this list are so outrageous that you need to have made at least $210 million to get on it. Were Oprah a fund manager, she’d have ranked 38th.)

At #1, John Paulson, right, 52, of Paulson & Company, utterly nuked his competition by taking home compensation of…hold your breath, people…$3.7 billion.

That’s not his net worth. That’s three billion, seven hundred million dollars in salary.

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Tee-hee. This week, The Huffington Post quoted a New York Times‘s article on the new Wall Street Journal parody, My Wall Street Journal. Apparently, it so angered Rupert Murdoch that someone from the company went throughout Los Angeles, buying up the entire stock of local newsstands.

Last Thursday, Alexander Laurence was working at one such stand in Los Angeles, chatting with a customer, David Metz, when, both of them say, a man in a shirt with a Journal logo asked if anyone had seen a paper that looked sort of like The Journal.

“This guy comes by all the time to bring promotional stuff for The Wall Street Journal — bags, coin trays, stickers,” Mr. Laurence said.

Sure enough, they found what he was looking for. “He grabbed them all, said, ‘I need to buy all of these,’ ” Mr. Laurence said. “He had been going around to different stands, buying them.”

The man paid with a corporate American Express card. “At first he’s saying they have to make a correction or it’s not supposed to be out yet,” Mr. Metz said. “But then he said these are not published by The Wall Street Journal.”

Perhaps what most outraged Murdoch, and what the Huffington Post reproduced but the Times didn’t, was this, above: A full-page, topless spread of conservative “#1 FOX News Fox” Ann Coulter, done painstakingly in stipple, per Journal stylee.

On one hand, though satire, it could be argued that the image refines the use of women’s bodies as a territory over which men do battle, often symbolically, and that this post is part of that.

On the other hand, if accurate, the picture of a sow-like Coulter raises serious questions about the veracity of her Young Americans for Freedom forum quote, in the hed, further proving that conservatives not only mangle the truth, but exaggerate the greatness of Americans, particularly when speaking to naive, impressionable audiences.

I’m gonna get you, sucka: John McCain flashes those pearly whites

It’s such an obvious question that it seems bizarre few in the media have asked it:

Does John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?

And, outrageously, did he refer to his wife with the evil “C-word,” during an outburst?

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Thanks to Afro-American Pie for tipping me to the spring’s hottest tee (detail, above): A stylish little number, set off with mugshots of indicted Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff / paramour Christine Beatty, and tastefully finished with patter from the duo’s estimated 14,000 X-rated e-mail text messages. Sassy!

Why, for the most part, have the ten children of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. never married?

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The sole issue more amazing than the blatancy of VOGUE’s having mined crude racist imagery for their April 2008 LeBron James/Giselle Bündchen cover has been the whiteout of surrounding media on the issue.

Here, in New York, neither The New York Times, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The New York Sun, or The Village Voice have cracked a word on this subject, online or off. Newsday wrote something, before the direct pairing of the cover and H.R. Hopps’s 1917 Destroy This Mad Brute—Enlist poster, right, was widely known. As for television, local and network, zero.

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