Awwww, snap

In keeping with the Spitzer theme that has been so popular in the recent weeks, and ignoring the inevitable ennui that goes along with seeing the same story over and over again...

The following ad for New York Sports Clubs ran in our paper today:

$29 to join

That's about $79,971 less than Spitzer's "workout" budget.

I'm Hillary Clinton, and when I'm not dodging invisible sniper fire I like to answer random Hillarys' cell phones

I posted last week about a schlub reporter in Ohio who mistakenly identified a freshman congressman's press aide for Hillary Clinton over the phone, then wrote a story quoting her as if she were Clinton.

This is stupid enough.

The argument was that he called the congressman's office and the press aide, whose name is Hillary Wicai Viers, answered the phone by saying, "This is Hillary." Because Clinton had previously visited that congressman's office, he assumed the Hillary he was speaking to must be Clinton. (apparently forgetting that Ohio had already held its primary, and not even getting suspicious when this Hillary said she'd be following the congressman for his entire statewide economic tour)

Now, it turns out he called the press aide on the aide's CELL PHONE.

Here's the aide's response on Poynter.

I want a lion

Courtesy of Gina...

These two British guys brought up a lion cub and then put him in a wildlife sanctuary in Africa when he got big enough. A year later, they went to visit him and they were told he wouldn't remember them.

Here's how that meeting went:

How to access Wall Street Journal articles for free

I have a WSJ subscription, but the discounted rate will probably run out soon and I'll need this, too. In any case, here's how:

The Wall Street Journal site, which I'm sure you all know requires a subscription, is set up to allow access through Internet news searches. Presumably, this is because more and more people are getting their news through Google News, et al, instead of choosing one or two favorite sites and sticking to them. This was the ultimate reason the New York Times scrapped its Times Select plan -- because it wanted to allow people to access stories through Web searches.

So anyway, if you Google News a Wall Street Journal article and click through that way, you will be able to access the site. It's only when you try to click through on the WSJ splash page that you're required to log in.

That means you can circumvent the subscription process in one of two ways: First, if there's a story you want to read and know the headline, you can Google News the headline and click through that way. But according to Salon, the search engine doesn't always bring up the story.

The other method (and this is also pulled from Salon) is to *convince* the Wall Street Journal that you're clicking through a news search engine. You can do this by downloading a Firefox add-on, which you can access here.

Once you install it, you'll see this addition to the Firefox toobar:
Then go to wsj.com, and follow these directions from Salon's machinist:

• In the refspoof toolbar's "spoof:" field, type "digg.com."
• Also in the refspoof toolbar, click the R icon, and select "static referrer."

By doing this, you fool the paygate into thinking you are accessing the site through digg, another news search engine.

And the machinist assures us that it's totally on the up-and-up, noting that if the Wall Street Journal didn't want you to have free access to its stories, it wouldn't provide that free access through search engines. They say it better than I can:

I'll grant you that setting your browser to spoof Digg is slightly deceptive. But it's a minor fib, on the order of, say, handing a cashier an expired coupon. The Journal adds Digg buttons to all of its stories, encouraging you to open its articles to everyone (including you) for free; by pretending that you're coming from Digg, you're simply taking advantage of that implicit offer.

The Journal no longer really has a pay wall. It's a pay curtain, useless and flimsy, and you're committing no transgression in dancing around it.

So there you go. Have at it...

Wait, why would I make my tax returns public?

A reporter at an Ohio paper called the Tribune Chronicle accidentally quoted a PR lady as Hillary Clinton because the woman answered the phone at a local congressman's office, saying, "This is Hillary."

The Tribune Chronicle published a correction yesterday saying:

Reporter John Goodall, who was assigned to the story, spoke by telephone with Hillary Wicai Viers, who is a communications director in U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson’s staff. According to the reporter, when Viers answered the phone with ‘‘This is Hillary,’’ he believed he was speaking with the Democratic presidential candidate, who had made several previous visits to the Mahoning Valley.

You can find the full story, which the paper pulled from its Web site, through Google's cache here.

Clinton was apparently in Washington when this guy thought he was talking to her in Ohio.

And the guy apparently never asked a question relating to her chances at the nomination... unless he was under the impression that Hillary Clinton speaks in the third person...

But I mean, seriously, who wouldn't assume that Hillary Clinton would be answering the phone at a random congressman's office after that congressman's state had already held its primary?

Because it's been too long...

...since you've seen pictures of my cats. And I don't feel like studying Econ and doing laundry. So to begin with, I bought them an "activity cube," which Giz thinks is awesome, both for playing and relaxing.

***

For a while, A.M. liked hanging out in my closet (I think she's over it now). She made a huge mess, but it was OK because she tended to look very sexy in there.

***

Here she just looks majestic, which makes me happy since she's normally not very photogenic.

***

And then there was the day when they were lying on the bed completely parallel. I was impressed.


OK, I'm seriously going to study now. I have my priorities...

The $4,300 Woman

Spitzer's ladyfriend has stripped down (bad pun intended) her MySpace page, but thanks to Google's cache, you can still access it here. It's relatively non-descript, but there are some funsies about the 22-year-old "musician." (The picture to the right used to be her profile picture, but has been taken down)

From her About Me section, with my own parenthetical points included...

• I live in New York and am on top of the world (and the governor). Been here since 2004 and I love this city (in addition to anyone willing to shell out $1,000 an hour), I love my life here.
• I spent the first two years getting to know the music scene, networking (if you know what I mean) in clubs and connecting (penally) with the industry.
• What we Want is my latest track. It’s really about trust, something my past has made very difficult for me to feel. This one was inspired by a guy (named Eliot), who taught me not to confuse my dreams with the sounds of the city (or the sounds of the city's governor grunting loudly on top of me)…I hope you like it.

I do feel badly for this kid. She's had a tough life and suddenly got caught in the center of a giant scandal, and she's been bombarded by media since her name went public.

That said... according to the NYT, Ashley Alexandra Dupré's story is pretty sad. She is a Jersey Shore native who left home at age 17. The Times described her latest track (which you can no longer access, even through the cached page) this way: “What We Want,” an amateurish, hip-hop inflected rhythm and blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and used some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

She hasn't been charged with anything. The guy she was living with recently walked out on her after she discovered that he fathered two children. She told the NYT she can't afford her rent anymore, and that she's considering either waitressing or moving back with her family in Jersey.

The Times story is here. You can listen to her song through the New York Post site.

How many diamonds is your hooker?

I wanted a more creative headline, but "Eliot Mess," "Ho no!", "Addicted to love Gov" and "Spitzer swallows" were all taken, and "Spitz likes tits" wasn't creative enough to justify the profanity. Or was it? As for "Spitz's ditz," that just makes unfair assumptions about this "Kristen." Especially since the Emperor's Club site says their ladies are well-educated.

In any case, I figured it was only proper to provide my own pun-filled take on the ins and outs of the Spitzer scandal. I'll preface this by saying I feel really badly for his daughters and his wife, but I'm assuming none of them read harbatkat so I'll soldier on.

If anyone's unfamiliar with the situation because they have apparently been living in seclusion this week, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Monday was implicated in a high-end prostitution ring. Spitzer's involvement was discovered after his bank filed a "suspicious activity report" because he had broken up a $40,000 transfer into a bunch of smaller transfers and then asked the bank to remove his name from the transactions.

Investigators were expecting to find fraud -- kickbacks, bribes, etc. What they found instead, through an investigation of financial records and court-approved wiretaps, was that he'd transported a prostitute named Kristen from New York to D.C. when he was on a business trip there.

It gets even ickier because Spitzer was apparently in D.C. to testify Feb. 14 before a congressional subcommittee that hadn't invited him to testify. He apparently had to convince the subcommittee to let him speak on Valentine's Day. Knowing this, his wife has to stand behind him at the podium throughout this ordeal, seemingly showing her support in both his apology and his resignation.

In 2004, he signed into a law a bill raising the penalties for patronizing a prostitute. And transporting the prostitute to D.C. is a violation of the Mann Act, a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport individuals over state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

According to the New York Post, he has spent $80,000 over as long as 10 years on these services. His most recent transactions have been with Emperors Club VIP, an international prostitution ring that rates its ladies from three diamonds up to seven diamonds. Ratings are based on the "individual education, sophistication, and ambiance created by each of our models," according to the site, which has been taken down.

Spitzer's girl, Kristen, was probably a three-diamonder, since she cost $1,000 an hour (He paid $4,300 for two hours, but he's just a good tipper). Hourly prices range from $1,000 for three diamonds to $3,100 for seven diamonds. Salon has a good story on it, cum-plete with rates and screenshots from the site (I told you to expect bad puns).

According to an AP story, Kristen was warned about Spitzer's shenanigans:

The agent said she had been told the client "would ask you to do things that ... you might not think were safe ... very basic things,'' according to the papers, but that Kristen responded by saying, "I have a way of dealing with that ... I'd be, like, listen dude, you really want the sex?''

And if you're so inclined, you can access a broken-up version of the page through Internet Archive, a free service that provides old versions of Web sites that have been taken off the Web. Just type www.emperorsclubvip.com into the "Way Back Machine" search box and choose a date. Warning: it can be slow.

The worst youth basketball team in America

Here they are. The 2008 Villanova Wildcats: 0-8Top row, from left to right: Brent shoots the ball like he's a quarterback throwing a 50-yard pass; Ariel is the one I'm gonna be coaching individually starting next week; Ishi always does the jump ball for us but never jumps; Jason is the greatest defensive player ever; Jisu thinks I made up the concept of boxing out; Colin is the son of the other coach; Alan is the other coach.
Bottom row, from left to right: Max has been known to spin around in place for minutes at a time during games; David really enjoys the armpit-farting game; Mordy, who I couldn't tell apart from Ariel for at least the first half of the season.

So that's it. Tomorrow is the end-of-season celebration, so you will no longer hear about my team's inability to shoot, dribble, pass, rebound or score. Although the coach's game is tomorrow, so you may be hearing about my own inability to shoot, dribble, pass rebound or score. Fun.

Is that a peek-a-boo dance dollar in your 10-year-old's garter?

Apparently this made international news back when it happened in 2006, but in case you're like me and missed it...

A toy company in the U.K. began selling this toy about a year and a half ago. If you think you're seeing it wrong, you're not. The £49.97 kit comes with an 8½-foot chrome pole, complete with play money, "a sexy dance garter," and an instructional stripping DVD for aspiring young strippers.

The toy company, Tesco, advertised this on their Web site with the following:
"Unleash the sex kitten inside...simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go! Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars."

After public outrage from parents who for some reason didn't want to encourage their 8-year-olds to become strippers, Tesco removed the toy from the "toys and games" section of its Web site but said it would continue selling it under the "fitness accessory" category.

Wombat sex

Somehow, my coworker Gene and I got to talking about wombats. I think for some reason we were discussing that fetish where people dress up in animal costumes, and Gene's mind immediately went to the wombat. Then we realized that neither of us knew what a wombat looked like.

So I ran a Google image search for "wombats," and the first result was an Australian newspaper article with the headline, "Secret sex life of wombats."

Perhaps if American newspapers had stories this awesome, they're circulations would not be declining at the rate of a female wombat running a figure-eight around her potential mate.

Intrigued yet?

A study was released in December 2005 detailing the sex life of wombats, a previously unexplored phenomenon. Turns out, they're way into the Kama Sutra.

"It appeared to be a physically demanding process, complete with chasing, biting, grunting and loads of heavy breathing," said biologist Clive Marks, the author of the study.

After prolonged copulation, Marks said, the female pulls away and begins trotting in figure-eights around her mate.

"The male chased her, following closely behind, and then bit her on the rump," Marks wrote in the study, published in Nature Australia.

"She immediately stopped just long enough to permit him to roll her on her side and begin copulating again.

"If the male was slow to mount, she would kick back aggressively and not let him roll her on her side again until she had run round in more circles and figures of eight. This happened seven times."

This study prompted zoos to reevaluate their wombat enclosures. Apparently, if wombats don't have enough space to trot figure-eights around their mates then they just won't mate at all.

If you're interested — and seriously, who *wouldn't* be? — here's the full study, entitled "Wombat Sex. It includes gems like:

But in an obtuse if not flippant sort of way, Australians have always nursed a fascination for the sex life of wombats. If only I’d been given a dollar every
time I was asked the question: “Is it true that a wombat eats, roots and leaves?”

If you read it, try not to judge the dude for his overuse of exclamation points. He's just really excited about wombat sex.

www.AngryJournalist.com

'Nuff said.

Wait, why is this entire column written in Latin?

I must have missed this story from the GRE bubble I was living in last week:

President Bush's social and religious liaison who sometimes writes guest columns for an Indiana newspaper was forced to resign Friday after a blogger discovered that he plagiarized. From the Pope.

Tim Goeglein had been working for the Bush administration since 2001 and was a top aide for Karl Rove. He was largely credited for garnering the evangelical vote in 2004, according to the New York Times. He had been writing columns for the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., for more than a decade.

He plagiarized from an array of sources (the Pope is obviously my favorite), and an internal investigation revealed that 19 of his 38 guest columns over the years contained plagiarized material.

A former columnist for the News-Sentinel broke the story in her blog.

Pulled straight from her blog:

On April 6, 2005, Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times: “It was based in the belief that, as he (the Pope) once put it, ‘a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being’ was at the root of the mass movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism,”

In a column published Oct. 18, 2005, Goeglein wrote: “A degradation and pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being was at the root of the 20th century, the twin evils of communism and fascism.” No attribution is given to the Pope or to Cohen in the column.

Well I guess if you're gonna plagiarize, there's really no one better to pull from than the Pope.

No more GRE!

I am officially done with the GRE. I will never have to look at another permutation or isosceles triangle or strange algebraic equation again. I am also free to forget the 600-some useless words I learned in the process of studying.

Oh, and in case you people are wondering, I am awesome at English and not-quite-awesome at math. I'll take that...