Nationals TV viewership is getting worse and worse: Dan Steinberg blogs today on a Sports Business Journal story reporting that a Nats game that aired during Michael Phelps' medal run attracted only 1,600 households, "and a source said that the last half hour of the game was below measurable ratings standards."
That, combined with a horrid [...]
Editor & Publisher reported yesterday on the end of Leonard Downie's tenure as Washington Post editor, mentioning that he'll start dedicating his energies to writing books. He already has one novel in the can—The Rules of the Game, to be published by Knopf in January—which he says is "not about The Washington Post."
Reading Knopf's [...]
As my colleague Ruth Samuelson mentioned on this blog this morning, Beverly Hills, 90210 is back in a new version called 90210. This is, she rightly points out, exciting news. I made a point of watching last night's premiere, partly because I do love bad TV so. But I also tuned in because 90210 was, [...]
In a world without deep booming voiceovers, in a time when one man's sonorous intonations will no longer keep us from completely losing it after watching 30 trailers in a row at the theater, what will we do?
Don LaFontaine died of of complications relating to pneumothorax, reports the Post Chronicle. A quick YouTube primer to [...]
Jazz in the Diamond District, a homegrown film about one woman's attempt to achieve national stardom by (whoops!) joining a go-go band, will screen at New York City's Urbanworld Film Festival next month. The movie premiered at Filmfest DC in April; back then, our reviewer Tricia Olszewski wrote that the film "has good intentions, atypical [...]
In the mail today: State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, a collection that proudly announces on the cover that it features "50 writers on 50 states." There's a nice batch of writers essayifying on Georgia (Ha Jin), Maryland (Myla Goldberg), Ohio (Susan Orlean), and so on. Better still, D.C. didn't get neglected: The [...]
Creature of habit that I am, my Sunday nights tend to go the same way: At 11 p.m. I turn on the TV, watch the best show on television, then go to bed, visions of faceplants dancing in my head. But lately I've had a few more options to choose from, thanks to the advent [...]
Every journalist, at some point in his or her life, must write the "I've seen something out in the world which confuses me" piece. Andy Rooney does it every week. Me, I've publicly scratched my head about umbrellas. But I tried to keep my whining to a couple of sentences, and Rooney's done gassing in [...]
If Barry Svrlugla's reward for covering the Nats last season was to be the lead reporter on all things Michael Phelps, Chico Harlan deserves a front-row seat at the Second Coming. Since taking over from Svrluga earlier this season, Harlan has ably covered a team that is now re-threatening 121 losses.* Moreover, Harlan has reveled [...]
World-famous Czech director and rabbit aficionado Milos Forman comes to the AFI Silver tomorrow night to speak after the screening of his 1975 film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Forman isn't quite the force he was back in the '60s, when he helped spearhead the Czech New Wave with films like The Firemen's Ball [...]
The best local TV channel has gone dark. Earlier this week the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that WWTD, Channel 49, has ceased broadcasting after the majority owner of the channel sold its lease to Albritton Communications. "WUFO-TV" had been using the channel, and the change left founder Michael Gravino to decide whether to keep the station [...]
Your last chance to see George Pelecanos in the D.C. area for—eh, a couple of weeks—is tonight at the Borders Baileys Crossroads, where he'll be reading from his new novel, The Turnaround. If you're a "real Washingtonian," consider studying up.
Over at the Post's Comic Riffs blog, Michael Cavna bravely attempts to make a case for the District as a comedy-rich zone. The inspiration for his ranting is the latest issue of GQ: The second-best glossy men's magazine* strangely proclaimed Montreal "Funniest City." Cavna is bothered that D.C. is behind Montreal, but I think that's [...]
If you haven't quite finished nerding out on George Pelecanos, you have a couple more options in addition to his readings this week. Today Akashic Books (founded by Johnny Temple, frontman of the onetime D.C. band Girls Against Boys) announced a pair of readings attached to D.C. Noir 2, a collection of classic District-set fiction. [...]
As if any more proof were needed that the D.C. area is uninhabitable in August, stepping out of the shower this morning I encountered a creature closely resembling this thing:
Yup, camel crickets are back. That picture doesn't give you a good sense of scale, so let me make it clear what's going on here. Camel [...]
