Quickies: Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

• You may have hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk, but you still have to trek outside of Atlantic City to find a supermarket. The only one on the island is closing soon. Isn’t it nice how much casino gambling worked out for the city? [AP/6 ABC]

• Bryan Curtis at Slate says you should read Marley and Me, the doggy Inquirer columnist John Grogan — and, remember, if you criticize him, you’re just jealous! — but only when the doggy’s little. When he gets older, put it away and kick it to the curb. (The book, not your dog.) [Slate]

• Service journalism: How to recycle your computer so it doesn’t end up in a landfill. Seriously, go to the front page of Salon and there’s a photo of a kid surrounded by thrown-out wires and such in Asia, since apparently we outsource our computer trash removal, too. [Salon]

• A town councilman in Upper Darby is accused of shoplifting sneakers from a store. Let’s see if we can get him in a cell with Rick Mariano. [Bucks County Courier Times]

Quickies: Now with extra snark!

• Congratulations to the Daily News‘ Jenice Armstrong, who managed to get the artist who recorded “Gold Digger” — that’d be Kanye West — incorrect in in the first sentence of her story yesterday. And congrats to the DN staff, who even put a photo of Ludacris with the story. [DN]

• Jessica Pressler and Phillymag discover the secret to a No. 1 bestseller: Write boring columns that your colleagues don’t like, get a cute doggy, write book about him. Instant profit! [Phillymag]

• Hey, how about those Phillies! In their first exhibition game, the Fightins beat the Yankees, 6-3. [AP/Yahoo!]

• Look out, Bucks County: The Bloods are coming! From Trenton! [Bucks County Courier Times]

Open casting call for bearded actors

Nice! A movie about his recent column bashing those danged AOL CDs can’t be far away. (But, really, how awesome is this? Congratulations!)

Best-selling ‘Marley & Me’ is heading to the big screen [Inky]
Jan. 6: Is that your final answer?

Blogicized: More power

• There’s a photo of Philadelphia in the “Photo of the Week” contest over at Gridskipper. The official Philadelphia Will Do-approved Candidate™ is twoeightnine, but feel free to vote for whoever you wish. (To be fair, the two New York photos are also really, really sharp.) [Gridskipper]

• TinaPoPo names Dann Cuellar her newscaster of the week — “He delivers the news like someone’s got a gun to his head” — and angers me because I didn’t think of this idea first. A two-fer! [TinaPoPo and Friends]

• As I’ve said here earlier, John Grogan’s book about his doggy is taking over the world. Because it’s got a little cute puppy on the cover that makes you just want to go awwww for ever and ever and ever! Aw. [Rittenhouse Review]

• Remember, this is what politics are all about: If you move one inch away from the standard talking points, you’re a traitor to the party. Just in case you thought it was about doing good or anything, you can put that aside. [MyDD]

Doggies > Legislative pay raises

Okay, I know everyone’s all ga ga over John Grogan ever since his book about his doggy became a best seller. It’s always nice to see a local guy do well. But, before Marley & Me, he spent roughly half of 2006 writing and writing and writing about the legislative pay raises, which were eventually overturned. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He’s back on the beat today, but he’s writing about Delco Rep. Greg Vitali, who voted against the pay raises and didn’t take the money (unlike a bunch of local politicos, namely Myers, Stack, Tartaglione and Kitchen, who voted against the pay raises but immediately took the money). I thought this part was interesting:

Reams of copy have been written about the venal lawmakers who voted themselves the raise in the dead of night, then left town and refused to discuss it. But not much has been said about those who voted against it, or about those who refused to collect it in the form of unvouchered expenses despite a ban on midterm pay raises.

Yes, John, reams of copy were written mainly by you. Now bring on more cute doggies!

John Grogan | Vitali benefits from pay virtue [Inky]
Hoagie Dip 8.10 [PW]

Puppies are so in right now

We journalists are always looking for trends. That way, we can write a trend story, get ahead of the curve, get noticed by readers and other journalists and maybe one day actually make some money in this business. (Well, the last one is probably pretty unlikely.)

Trend stories are sometimes fairly bogus, other times dead on and usually very unscientific. No big deal there; it’s just journalism, and if the readers approach trend stories with a healthy dose of skepticism, it’s all good.

And, well, I think I’ve spotted the newest trend: Doggies!

Yes, doggies (and by extension puppies) are the hottest thing on the market right now. My evidence? Inquirer columnist John Grogan’s new book, Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog, hit No. 1 on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list. It’s a runaway best seller in its 17th printing. The Inky did a nice profile of Grogan in Sunday’s paper. It was also a bit of a trend story, since the humor columnist for Bark magazine has a new book coming out, Grogan’s book is all the rage and there are other copydog books soon to follow.

I write about this simply to notify you, the reader, of who’s at the forefront of this doggies/puppies are awesome fad: Well, John Grogan. But know who else is? That’s right, yours truly. I’ve been posting puppy photos since early September.

I can only assume that other things I harp on in my little corner of the Internet will soon become big trends as well, which is why I’m writing up a pitch right now for The Complete Northeast Times Letters Collection. I mean, who wouldn’t buy that?

Dog’s tale unleashes canine passion [Inky]

Is that your final answer?

John Grogan’s spent most of the second half of 2004 writing about the legislative pay raises in his Inquirer column. (There was a sprinkling of Catholic church sex abuse scandal thrown in for good measure.)

Now that the pay raise has been rescinded, and we’ve had to purchase new calendars, Grogan has turned his attention to a much more pressing issure: those free AOL trial CDs.

No, really. Grogan spotted two AOL CDs he had already thrown out and decides to take action; he tries to return them, wasting the time of several postal clerks — but, surprise, they can’t be returned with the bulk rate AOL uses. Then he calls up AOL a few times and thinks about sending them himself, but doesn’t want to spend the money to do so. And, finally, he gets through to a friendly call service rep in somewhere not in America and gets off the AOL mailing list.

Okay, forget that this is a column that people would have said was stale if Dave Barry wrote about it in 1997. (He probably did have, actually, but there’s not enough time to check his 47,000 books to find out.) But who even gets AOL CDs anymore? I didn’t even know AOL had the money to send out free trial CDs to every human being in America at this point. Most of us have moved past the idea that “A/S/L” is an exciting form of communication — now people just say “fuck u” or something of the sort — and we’ve moved on.

At least John Grogan has taught us today that AOL still exists, which is something I wasn’t quite sure about until this morning. Get ready for his exciting column about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? early next week.

John Grogan | You’ve got spam: AOL’s trial CDs [Inky]