VBVW for December 22, 2006:
Hell’s Jingle Bells
• The Very Best
La chien terrible of the publishing world, Judith Regan, lost her job shoveling smut for publisher HarperCollins. And, surprise, it’s not because she climbed into bed with O.J; it’s because she doesn’t like being in bed with Jews.
After Congressional criticism and general outrage from all interested parties, the Legal Services Corp. has tempered the expensive tastes of its top officials who have been living high on the hog while poor clients were turned away for lack of program funds. Internal memos announced that there would be no more $70 lunches and $14 “Death By Chocolate” desserts at board meetings. For the first time this year, someone in government is paying attention.
Special holiday Schaudenfreude!
Saparmurat Niyazov, the president of Turkemistan, died this week at age 66. The nutcase dictator, in power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, isolated the desert nation while turning it into a shrine to himself. Among his fun foibles: building an ice palace big enough to hold 1000 guests (we mentioned it’s a desert nation, right?); banning the practice of lip-synching; erecting a gold statue of himself on a rotating platform so that it would always face the sun; closing all the libraries and instead sending kids to a national theme park; and renaming the month of January after himself. Oh alright, we’ll give him credit for the lip-synching.
• The Very Worst
The Knicks-Nuggets knife fight reminds us that since Michael Jordan left the NBA, the league has become a low-rent district lorded over by thugs and poor sports. If we want violence, we’ll go to a hockey game, thank you very much.
Time Magazine selected “YOU” as Person Of The Year. Nevermind profound newsmakers like the American soldier, Hu Jintao ushering China into the 21 century, or Jeffrey Sachs battling poverty. No, this honor goes to the kid from Woonsocket who lights his ferret on fire and posts the video on YouTube. Thanks, Time, for notching up the media one more click.
Five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor have been sentenced to death in Libya. A court in Tripoli found them guilty of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with the HIV virus, but Bulgaria and European officials believe the healthcare workers have been scapegoated for poor health standards in the Benghazi hospital. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, perhaps jealous that all the crazy-world-leader press has been heaped on Kim Jong Ill, believes the C.I.A. and Israel’s Mossad are behind it. Especially awful is that after Abu Guhrayb and black-op prisons and Guantanomo and waterboarding, a guy like Qaddafi can make those claims about our own intelligence agency and not sound insane.