media

22 posts

Open Caption: Simon Cowell Is a Doggy Daddy

SimonDogsSmallSometimes an image just needs the right words to go with it. Simon Cowell has provided just that image.

Yesterday Mr. Cowell decided that an incoming human baby just wasn’t enough excitement in his life and he decided to get two puppies to fill out his instant family.

He’s gone from globe trotting playboy to stay at home dad almost overnight. The only thing left for him to do is get a minivan.

Go forth and caption. Or, if you’d rather suggest names for his pups that would work too.
Continue reading →

The War on Social Security Disability Benefits

Roosevelt_in_a_wheelchairRecycling a section of the media strategy that always stops the U.S. from having any of the good stuff, now journalists are trying to scare Americans into believing that the real source of our fiscal crises is the disabled. And once again the recent reports about federal disability benefits creating a culture of underachievement in poor communities and the poor cheating the social security system to receive the cash benefits eliminated by the Welfare Reform Act in 1996 (any of this sound familiar?), are coming from some of the most supposedly liberal media outlets. Continue reading →

Signing Off

CARRADIOI was 16 when I first walked into a newsroom.

It was WCCM in Lawrence, Massachusetts (city motto:  Arson Capital of the Nation!). I was a high-school senior in the town next door. My school had an internship program where I could get out of the hellish school day on a half-day and intern in what would allegedly be my chosen career. I wanted to be a writer, but the local paper didn’t take high school interns.   Continue reading →

Learning to Cover a Tragedy

800px-20031113_Station_Night_Club_Memorial@COMMONS

Every December 3rd, around 6:13pm, I stop for a minute and remember the Worcester 6.

On December 3rd, 1999, two homeless people named Thomas Levesque and Julie Ann Barnes were living inside the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse. The building was abandoned. It was a relic of another age, six stories tall, so close to the elevated Interstate 290 that, if you wanted to, you could reach from the side of the highway and almost touch the façade of the building. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday Ms. Magazine

Happy Birthday Ms. Magazine! It seems like only yesterday when you were born. It must be annoying to hear that over and over again. 40, wow! You look great! Really you do. Don’t give me that look, it’s okay to care about your looks if you’re a feminist, don’t try that on me. You look great, really. You know a lot of other magazines have very bloated advertising, and a rather eerie glossy finish. But not you. Yes you’ve freshened yourself up over the years, but that’s what keeps you modern and relevant.

Do you remember the first time you came to my house?  Me neither. But I remember you being there in those early years. My housewife mother must have heard about you at her consciousness-raising group and invited you home. I’m guessing you got passed around a bit. Household expenditures were tightly monitored (it was the 70s after all, things were tough all over.)  Continue reading →

Your Conservative Blog Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad

Momof3 posted a link to “a right wing blog that [she’s] not terribly ashamed of.”

I’m always game for opposing viewpoints, but within the first minute of perusing the article titles, I knew that this was a comedy gold mine. Not because it was particularly funny or interesting, but rather that it was the same conservative tripe wrapped in a veneer of disrespectability, which is admittedly something new.

So, because I can’t let stupidity like this go unridiculed, I picked a few articles from the homepage and had at them, FJM-style. Continue reading →