There is fire falling from the sky, the timbered ceilings are barely holding, the low-pile carpet is soggy with rising bile, the white boards are weeping away the month’s strategy, the troops are rebelling, the dogs are snarling, the elevator alarms are bawling.
No, but the new issue of the magazine is due to the printer this week, which means we begin to slough off on this here blog. No time to muck around with the internal politics of the New York Times, no time to argue the finer points of punctuation, no time to gripe about writers and poets who childishly refuse to capitalize their initials—nor to celebrate the brave editors who refuse to comply.
But we do note with a small fizzy kick of pleasure that CJ, our friend over at the Star Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities, seems to believe that she has a copyright on the facts. It would seem that someone over at Page Six clipped a tragi-comic item she penned back in February regarding some charity event or another, about some quaint risposte between vulgar comedian, schoolmarmish grandmother, and the princely sum of $25 thousand.
We’ve been over this before—one man’s poaching is another man’s public information. We feel your pain, CJ, and wish to take this opportunity merely to suggest that no one is immune from the old Reach Around.
Now, we know that CJ would never pick up an item from any other gossip columnist, at least without a little credit. She is, after all, the hardest working woman in local print journalism, writing as often as three times per week, in a news-generating community that is an open-pit mine of rich gossip concerning professional athletes and the news readers who dig through their garbage. Also, occasionally, a movie star has a layover out at our International airport.
So when CJ asks, “Is there no honor among gossip columnists?” we think the answer is pretty obvious, but we’ll have to check first with our sources.
UPDATE: We have been asked by “Bewildered” to explain how we find time to read CJ during production week. Easy. Our rigorously adhered-to schedule and patented Deluxe Peerless Editorial System allows us to raise our nose from the grindstone at least once a day for a period of up to thirty seconds–precisely the amount of time it takes to read and digest CJ, when necessary.
Leave a Reply