Groaners are good. Today’s main news hed on the Post is a groaner, one of those puns that strains so hard that it elicits a groan, and an idea of a chuckle, and stays in your head all day like a tune you hear at Duane Reade in the morning and find yourself humming in your head on the way to bed.
It wasn’t always this way, but American humor has moved toward bad or overtaxed punning. You see bad puns as punchlines in all the smart sitcoms. The unreconstructed bad Post pun is “in” again. - Tom McGeveran at Capital New York
The real story of ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar,’ as argued by veterans of the New York Post
“Hang on, Vinnie, we’re not a hundred per cent sure it’s a topless bar!”
Vinnie jumped on top of his desk and waved his arms.
“It’s gotta be a topless bar!” he cried. “This is the greatest f——— headline of my career!”
The day Herman Cain canceled on Cindy Adams’ boss
Months ago, back when Herman Cain was still a future ex-front-runner, New York Post society columnist Cindy Adams made a plan to host the candidate at an intimate sit-down dinner at her Park Avenue apartment with a group of influential media and political types.
Cain’s Republican-primary moment didn’t last quite long enough for the event to happen.
The Sunday dinner was to include Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer, Lesley Stahl, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and Greta Van Susteren (whose husband, John Coale, is an informal adviser to Herman Cain), New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, and even a couple of Democrats: Senator Chuck Schumer and Democratic National Committeeman Robert Zimmerman.
Another guest who was scheduled to attend, according to two sources, was New York Post editor in chief Col Allan, whose paper afforded Cain relatively gentle treatment yesterday; the rival Daily News gave top billing to Ginger White, the woman who told the press that she had had a long-term extramarital affair with Cain. (White went public as the campaign was already grappling with multiple claims of sexual harassment.)
An ex-cop in a tie manhandling an Occupy Wall Street protester with long hair and a beard.It’s a photo-op made for the New York Post.
What irks me is that this bad-faith sale probably will gain readers this morning; and that even readers who habitually fall for the Post’s tricks never end up quite adding it all up: That the wilder the sale, the more likely they will start thinking about the 75 cents they just dished out as soon as they’ve done reading what’s there. It’s too bad. - Tom McGeveran on today’s tabloid covers.
Tom McGeveran: “PUSS ‘N’ BOOTS” reads the headline. (Beyond the fact that the fairytale character is also a cat I can’t see why this is the headline; why not CAT WOMAN or CAT’S EYE or CAT SCAN?) Sample sentence from inside: “Does Squires believe that her country cat has turned sophisticated city kitty and will miss the bright lights of Broadway?” I think this piece just should have been written with the word “meow” replacing every other noun, like the way that cat in Mr. Roger’s Land of Make-Believe talks.
Tom McGeveran: It’s not that unusual for a paper to change its front between the early edition (a copy of which I picked up at a newsstand in Queens a little before 6) and the late (which is on newsstands now), but every once in a while the change is significant. Sometimes not so much.
Today, the Post has retooled both its front and back pages. “SACRED” has taken the place of “MY SON,” and the Giants’ loss has taken the place of the Jets’ win. (That last is particularly confusing to me. The Jets’ win was much more dramatic and, the way this season is shaping up, meaningful.) Read more—->
Tom McGeveran: My favorite paragraph in The New York Post’s story about PBS issuing a statement saying that Bert and Ernie of “Sesame Street” are not gay is this one:
The very fact that the producers felt it necessary to educate their viewers about the non-sex lives of puppets demonstrates the extent of the mad online debate that captivated bloggers who had nothing better to worry about while Wall Street was going crazy.
I enjoy it so much because right there, on the front of the Post (which today makes no mention of the Dow’s uptick yesterday) at the very top of the page is a thick blue bar with a silhouetted picture of the two muppets (Ernie with his rubber ducky, and his arm around roomate Bert) alongside text that reads “‘Sesame’ wed furor.” The dek: “Bert & Ernie just pals, show insists.”
Of course people only “insist” when they are saying something implausible; otherwise they just “say.”
