Leftovers: Shore enough

• Ahh! Shore guide in the Inquirer! That means it’s almost summer. All together now: Yay! [Inquirer]

• Speaking of going down the shore, Atlantic City will be remembered in the new Monopoly — on a Community Chest card. Gee, thanks, Hasbro. [KYW 1060]

• Not only is 911 a joke, but so is the CIA. Now, how long until the first “Hey, by reporting this you’re hurting national security!” from Michelle Malkin? [Harpers]

• A delivery company screwed up and had a ton of SEPTA Trailpasses stolen — Zone 2. SEPTA asking the public not to buy them. You know what this means: Cheap trailpasses! [Inquirer]

• Arlen Specter to Russ Feingold: “You are no more a protector of the Constitution than am I.” Russ Feingold to Arlen Specter: “Wait, you’re still a senator?” [Washington Post]

• This just might be the best newscaster slip-up, ever. [YouTube]

Photo by jessica jeanne

Po-TAY-To, Po-TAH-To On Guns

Yesterday, John Street held a news conference where he laid out a thousand and a half guns. (The photo at left was taken from Metro’s website.) It was a dog and pony show meant to pressure lawmakers in Harrisburg to pass a bill allowing the purchase of only one handgun a month.

So where does one get 1,500 guns? The Daily News described it as such:

The illegal guns - about 1,500 of them - covered most of the floor of the Mayor’s Reception Room on the second floor of City Hall.

Mayor Street, who said they had been confiscated since the start of 2006, used them as a platform yesterday for launching another gun-control campaign in Harrisburg.

The city may have confiscated 1,500 guns so far this year. (And there’s no reason to think they’re lying, but… really? 1,500? Wow.) But those guns in City Hall yesterday, well, we’ll let Metro explain:

The 1,600 guns displayed yesterday on white sheets were representative of the guns the city’s police department have confiscated this year. The guns themselves, including handguns and assault rifles, have been confiscated over the last five years.

So, y’know, the guns weren’t really from this year. But perhaps I’m just being nitpicky. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Antigun dialogue continues [Metro]
Street, amid weapons, renews gun-control effort [Daily News]

An Historic Merger

I didn’t notice this until a fellow PW staffer alerted me to it yesterday. It’s from the current issue of the Philadelphia Gay News. The first two paragraphs of the story (emphasis mine):

The number-two executive at the Free Library of Philadelphia is the new right hand of the city’s chief taskmaster, the official announced this week.

Kevin Vaughan is leaving his position as Free Library associate director to become Managing Director Pedro Ramos, according to Ramos’s chief of staff.

Holy shit! He’s taking over his body? They should say “according to scientists!”

With slur out, official heads to City Hall [Philadelphia Gay News]

‘Action News’ Horribly Late To Party, Still Makes Major Faux Pas

Ooh. Close, Action News. You allllmost got it.

The Next Big Band? [6 ABC]

Blogicized: Clearly, Tiki Bob’s was unavailable

• If I’m ever in politics, I want to announce my candidacy in a dive bar — Blarney Stone, for instance — like Anne Dicker. [MyDD]

• Will Bunch waxes so poetic/esoteric about a small newspaper mistake you think I would have written it. [Attytood]

• The most fun comparison I’ve heard of Ryan Howard yet: Cecil Fielder. Let’s hope Ryan stays below 300 pounds, though. [The Good Phight]

• Our new favorite specialized blog — only about one team’s run in one conference tournament — continues as Temple routs No. 6 GW, putting the Owls in the semifinals. Another two wins and they’re in the NCAAs. [Temple 2006 Atlantic 10 Performance]

• Thanks to one man, the important statistics of a social networking program are ruined! Actually, no, wait, this is great. [The Lunabomber Manifesto]

Dean of journalism

A correction in today’s Daily News:

A story in yesterday’s paper about pending legislative races provided the wrong first name for 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean.

The story appears to have been purged from the website, but I can only assume they accidentally identified him as sausage entrepreneur Jimmy Dean.

Correction 03.07.06 [DN]
Jimmy Dean [Wikipedia]

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]

Blogicized: God bless the Internet

• Hmm. If you get rid of 75 staffers and apparently have a commitment to annoying, boring writing, you might come up with an annoying, boring, incorrect editorial. But think of the profit margins! [Suburban Guerilla]

• In the grand tradition of “All Your Base” and “Bubb Rubb” comes the newest Internet fad, remixing subway maps with anagrams. How else would we have known that “Fairmount” can be rearrange to spell “I Mourn Fat”? [Philebrity]

• The number and percentage of blacks at Temple has gone down since 1999. Is this a problem? Eh, I dunno. But God help Holy Family if this guy ever finds out the stats on its female-to-male ratio. (It’s 3-to-1. Why I didn’t go to Holy Family, I’ll never know.) [Marc Stier at Large]

• Who would possibly be enough of a loser to hack some blog in Delco? [I Live In Delaware County]

• The Art Museum has a new website. And it appears to be Rocky VI free. But just wait. [JMG Artblog]

Action News BS

When media outlets are looking for a way to drum up ratings and scare their readers/viewers/listeners, they usually resort to attempting to educate their older audience about things that only kids know about.

Usually, the answer for this has recently been exposes on “The Choking Game” or Myspace. And that’s fine and all. Kids could get stalked on Myspace and any game where you could possibly kill yourself is a good one to stop, I suppose.

But, last night, Action News decided the newest danger to kids across the Delaware Valley was Nintendo’s hand held DS system. (The photo’s from Nintendogs, the cutest game ever.)

And, so, what 6 ABC did, of course, was broadcast an “important warning” talking about the Nintendo DS’ wireless capabilities and how you can play anyone in the world. This is true. The problem is, after saying this, they talked about a message a young girl received from a “screen name is so offensive, we can’t even show it to you.”

She got the message in PictoChat, a built-in chatting tool for the system. And after Action News talks to ‘experts’ and tries to scare every parent of a kid with a DS is that… well… Pictochat can only go 65 feet at most. (Well, they say the company “claims” that.) So the offensive message she got had to be from someone, essentially, in the room with her. And when you can play with people over the world in, say, Mario Kart, you can’t see who they are.

This, of course, means the Nintendo DS is essentially just as dangerous for a kid as going outside. But maybe Action News was just buttering us all up for their big “THE SKY: COULD IT BE FALLING?” exposé during sweeps.

The Nintendo DS System [6 ABC]

And we begin another week just the same as usual

We shall begin this week with a little factoid: the all-boys high school I went to has apparently started allowing girls into the school and changed its name to “Abington.”

Welcome to another week!

Bensalem tops HGP [Bucks County Courier Times]