Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch asks his followers:

How do you react when a PR person insists on monitoring an in-person or phone interview with a subject?

Some of the responses:

One PR guy taped my iview with a player. Asked why and he said: “We don’t want you to misquote him.” Good start

It’s so common now I’ve come to expect it. They usually just check their phones tho. They never say anything

It’s vexing, esp. if it’s a phone interview & I don’t know it’s happening. Which brings up an ethics question.

As a PR guy, I hate hovering. But sometimes my boss wants me there.

If a PR flak insists on being around/censoring, then your story is probably already compromised.

On rare occasions when it happened, I felt compelled to be tougher with subject, to control the room

I don’t care if they’re just monitoring things, but if they do so they’re potentially part of the story.

Your thoughts?

Google is facing uproar from Asian American groups among others over the 'Make Me Asian' app available in the Google Play Android app store, which allows users to add Fu Manchu moustaches, coolie hats, slanted eyes, and yellow skin effects to their photos because being 'Asian' is hilarious for a certain type of white person. [ more › ]

By Tatiana Zarnowski
Gazette Reporter

Police have recovered nearly 30,000 pieces of stolen jewelry and are looking for the owners.

Just when you think it couldn't get any scarier it gets really good. [ Ed. note: This is part of keepsake show and tell project.]

— Toronto Sun

This clipping was posted over the weekend by @sladurantaye and forwarded by @nina9153.

The Kansas City Star has told reporters Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann that one of them has to leave the paper, and they — not management — have to decide who goes.

“Dillon has seniority, so she has the option of taking it or not taking it,” says a KCConfidential.com source. “And if she does, Dawn gets laid off. Dawn’s a great person but I think Karen will vote in favor of herself because she’s got teenage kids at home.”

I emailed the two reporters and editor Mike Fannin to confirm this process. Dillon did — I haven’t heard back from Fannin and Bormann — and tells Romenesko readers that “we’ve not made an official decision” on who gets to stay. “It’s one of the most difficult situations I’ve ever faced.” (KCConfidental.com now reports Bormann is out. I’ve asked Dillon to confirm this.)

Fannin and Parrish

UPDATE: I’m told that Fannin isn’t in the newsroom today. I’ve emailed and left a phone message for publisher Mi-Ai Parrish. UPDATE II: I made a second call to Parrish’s office and was told by her secretary that the publisher is “not available” to speak to me.

Fun fact: It was Dillon who first reported Paul Reubens’ 1991 arrest at a porn theater. From a Rolling Stone story: “An able young reporter named Karen Dillon, working the three-to-midnight shift at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, recognized Paul Reubens’s name on the police blotter and broke the story.” That tidbit is included in Dillon’s LinkedIn bio. (Here’s Dillon’s August 1991 follow-up story on the arrest.)

* Star unleashes “Hunger Games” on two reporters (kcconfidential.com)
* Star lets veteran employees determine who stays (bottomlinecom.com)
* Read the reactions from my Facebook friends and subscribers (facebook.com)

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Kenji's Top 8 Bites in New York From 2012

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopéz-Alt]

Only after putting together my list did I realize that a full seven out of eight of the very best bites I had in New York this year were from East Asian restaurants. Not a single burger or pizza on the list!

Does that mean that I didn't have any awesome burgers or pizzas this year? Certainly not. But it does indicate perhaps a trend in the New York dining scene. We saw the opening of at least one authentic Sichuanese restaurant (Legend in Chelsea) and one very inauthentic-but-still-delicious one (Mission Chinese). A Northern Thai restaurant run by a Northwesterner (Pok Pok) and a sit-down branch of one of my favorite cheap regional Chinese eateries (Biang!). Two Masa alums branched out to bring ultra high-grade sushi to folks unwilling or unable to spend $400 a head (Neta), and great ramen made its way all the way up to Harlem (Jin Ramen).

Meanwhile, I discovered that vegan food can be amongst the most exciting stuff in the city when executed with care, quality ingredients, and a sense of place. My dinner at Kajitsu was the most memorable meal of the year, perhaps in several years.

As for the lone non-Asian dish? The sea urchin spaghetti at Marea, which has become a strong contender for my favorite pasta dish in the world, right up there with the Sheep's Milk Ricotta Gnudi at the Spotted Pig.

Check out the slideshow above for a closer look at all eight dishes.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

I posted a story Tuesday about a sheriff closing schools after the Paducah (KY) Sun refused to disclose the name of a boy who claimed in a letter that a classmate “has brought weapons twice” to school and “has yet to be punished for anything.”

The matter was settled Tuesday afternoon after the 17-year-old letter-writer agreed to meet with officials. Here’s what the student wrote to the Sun:

The boy wrote the letter “on behalf and at the direction of a teacher at the school,” says the sheriff’s release. “The teacher was identified and stated she had received the information from another teacher that allegedly had received a report from two students that had overheard a conversation between two additional students, about ‘bombs’ in class. …What the students were talking about was a video game called ‘Mine Craft’ [sic] which involves placing bombs and blowing up buildings as a way of collecting points.”

Schools are back in session today.

* Sheriff: “There was never a threat towards the school or students
* Here’s coverage of the “school threat” from today’s Paducah Sun
* Earlier: Schools closed after Paducah Sun receives a letter about weapons

Try this story on for size and see if you believe it.

A woman lives with identical twin guys, Lin Weihao and Lin Weizhuang, one of whom is her boyfriend. In March 2010, after heavy drinking by everyone, she walks into the wrong man’s bedroom, i.e. not her boyfriend’s. She has sex with him, gets pregnant. The brothers have a falling out — for obvious reasons — and a break-up with the girl ensues. She gives birth. One year later, she dies of cancer, and entrusts the baby to the brothers.

But who is the father? A paternity test reveals nothing, since they are identical twins.

Story via Sohu, as translated by Sinopathic:

Two years passed. In May of 2012, Luo Suhong passed away from terminal lung cancer. According to her last wishes, she entrusted the care of her one year-old child to the Lin brothers. However, the two brothers would each not personally admit to being the father of the child.

Recently, the mother of the two Lin brothers discovered the Furong Judicial [Paternity] Appraisal Center at the No. 2 People’s Hospital in Hunan province; she wanted to have the two brothers take a paternity test to confirm whom is the biological father. A worker for the [Paternity] Appraisal Center took a hair sample from both Weihao and Weizhuang to test for a biological match with the child. The result shocked everybody: both brothers served as a biological match as the child’s father. The twins are identical and conceived from the same egg; as they have the same genes, a paternity test is incapable of determining which of the brothers is the actual biological father of the child.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so tragic for all parties involved.

Woman Mistakenly Conceives Baby with Twin Brother of Boyfriend, New Hilarious Pilot for Sitcom Written (Sinopathic)

From Sweet Brown to "canoodling" to the lady from Portland ("I know the vacuum cleaner man, he's seen my tits"), it's a year's worth of WTF goodness.

Read more posts by Eliot Glazer

Filed Under: clickables ,tv ,local news ,news bloopers

Beards, or just any sort of facial hair, can change everything. It's finally winter and it's starting to get cold out — here's some beard-spiration.

Kip from "Napoleon Dynamite"

From Kip to hip.

Via: pinterest.com

Jerry Garcia

From Jerry to a young lady that goes a little too far every 4th of July.

Source: thingsiscool.blogspot.com  /  via: top5s.net

The Most Interesting Man in the World

From the Most Interest Man in the World to the least interesting used car salesman in the world.

Source: magnum-mania.com  /  via: google.com

Brian Wilson

From Brian Wilson to Jersey Shore reject.

Source: sfist.com  /  via: google.com

View Entire List ›

Yesterday morning, a whale washed ashore at Beach 216th Street & Palmer Drive in Breezy Point, Queens, driving concerned residents, rescue groups and local firefighters out to try to help it. Eventually, it was established that the 60-foot finback whale was very emaciated and sick, and there was little that could be done to save it. And very sadly, Riverhead Foundation executive director Rob DiGiovanni told the Observer it's believed to have died last night: “As of right now, the animal was lost last night,” DiGiovanni said. “It looks like it moved a little off the shore, relocated and it does appear to be dead.” [ more › ]

It seems that the word “Yakutia” itself is chilly. It is so far and so cold, how can people live there? . However it’s the very place to see the real winter. It’s where the pole of Сold is located … Read more...

Holidays come and holidays go. Over the course of a year a lot of things happen. For better or for worse, mine is a daily food blog and that means there are over three hundred original essays on food published here every year. Almost every single one of them is written by me, and the vast majority get reviewed by Mrs. Fussy before going live.

In many ways this year was like every other. We went on more FUSSYlittleTOURS and I made my case in support of the FUSSYlittleBALLOT for the third time. I continued to write Eat This! for All Over Albany every other week, and was reinstated as a judge for their Tournament of Pizza.

Except this year something happened. I don’t quite know what it was. But in January the traffic numbers went up substantially from the same period a year ago (over 40%). And now instead of just complaining about the Times Union poll, somehow the paper adopted one of the meaningful changes I was pursuing, which eliminated Subway from the Best Sandwich winner’s circle. Without a doubt the FLB has been getting more attention both within the Capital Region and beyond its borders, and that is very exciting for me.

What follows isn’t so much a top 10 list of the most popular posts, but really rather buckets of what seems to have resonated over the past year. This is as much to help me figure out how to write more meaningful content in 2013 as it is for the curious or neophyte to either re-read or discover significant posts from the past year.

So here it goes:

Influencing the Times Union Poll
Thanks to all of you for passing along the link to your friends, families and coworkers on Facebook, Twitter and by e-mail, the FUSSYlittleBALLOT 3.0 was the most read post from the past year. It has a full summary of all the discussions we had on the blog in the weeks and months leading up to the annual reader’s choice poll. It’s worth checking out even if just to be reminded of which places are truly among the best of the region.

But the voting guide wasn’t the only critical piece. The Open Letter to the Times Union might have been even more important. Many of you signed this via your comments, and in the end the paper changed the questionnaire in a way that reflected the goals of this effort. By making readers choose a single location of a business that makes the best of anything, it took away the unfair advantage held by mass market chain restaurants. I cannot even tell you how happy this made me.

Ultimately the combined effort scored one big win.

Food Tours and Tastings
Of all the FUSSYlittleTOURS from the past year, the one that got the most love from readers was the Tour de Hard Ice Cream. But more than the tour itself, people were interested in the results. This one had a great turnout, and I was thrilled to get back to the winning establishment for further investigation on All Over Albany.

The Tour de Egg and Cheese on a Hardroll got more than its fair share of readers, as did the subsequent results post.

Somehow I seemed to get into a dustup with the Saratoga Idiots and found myself in the center of an intra-regional ice cream sandwich competition. Readers of the FLB selected their two favorite ice cream sandwiches in Albany to compete against the best from Saratoga Springs. A small but dedicated group then went around and tried all four ice cream sandwiches on one day to come up with a winner. It was hard work, but we ate well.

People were also compelled by the third installment of the Tour de Cider Donut and the blind cupcake tasting that put Coccadotts up against Bettie’s, Sweet Temptations and Fluffalicious.

We’re Cooking, Kind Of
It’s not easy for me to buy anything. It’s almost always a well considered purchase. So I took the time to explain how I selected my new slow cooker. I’m glad to report that I still love it.

Partially, the story called Stupid Easy Chocolate Syrup took off because someone posted it on Pinterest. Thank you mystery poster. I’m just glad that there may be a few less people paying good money for bad commercial syrup at the supermarket.

Declaring the Emperor Has no Clothes
People came out of the woodwork to read my thoughts on the Honest Weight Food Co-op’s expansion plans. This place has a lot of supporters. I too think the co-op is a valuable community resource. That’s primarily the reason I don’t want to see it fail. But I’m worried.

I was also concerned that one of my favorite local restaurants had lost its way too when they started selling hamburger for more than they used to sell steak. The good news is that since the post was written the restaurant has lowered its price of this monstrosity. It’s only by a buck, but it points to the fact that perhaps I was correct in my assessment of this dish.

In the spring I noted that Albany’s Restaurant Week was getting weird. But thanks to the miracle of social media, when the fall iteration of this promotion came up I was able speak with someone at Jack’s and confirm a suspicion about how restaurants view this event.

Finally, if you want a laugh you should check out this job posting for a marketing position in a local restaurant company. I can’t wait to meet the marketing guru who took the position.

Ingredients for Better or for Worse
I was one of only three people who actually enjoyed the first annual BaconFest. That’s because I was a judge for the event and neither had to wait in line nor suffer the trip to Hudson only to be deprived of bacon when the vendors ran out. Next year promises to be better.

It was refreshing to see people flock to the story about the current problem with rice.

Thank you all for participating with the blog this year. I’m looking forward to more of your comments in 2013. Please keep on spreading the word about the FLB to your friends, and I’ll keep working to try and say interesting things about food and drink on a daily basis.

By popular demand, our topic today is beer, cheap beer, beer cheaper than a relatively solvent individual generally sucks back. “Try all of the cheapest beers,” a thirsty mind demanded. “Compare and rank them.” Some of you may be wondering, in the solicitous tone a gracious host takes toward a problematic guest, whether the subject under discussion might be better off beneath discussion. Such concerns are not to be pooh-poohed; most conversations about cheap beer employ the word rank strictly as an adjective. And yet the theme of cheap beer abounds with richness and flavor, thus presenting a vivid contrast to the fact of it.

Bad articles deserve to die a silent, lonely death. Really bad articles, however, deserve to be thrown into the public stocks and ridiculed. This one from Daily Mail belongs with the latter.

It begins:

Ravaged by hunger and desperate for food, these are the sad pictures which show just how needy families in China are.

Oh yes, look at these people ravaged by hunger…

…desperate for food…

…and… smiling?

…and waiting IN AN ORDERLY FUCKING QUEUE.

First: can we agree that these people aren’t ravaged and desperate?

But second, and more importantly: we all know there is poverty in this world. How we compartmentalize that fact so that we can continue functioning without the anvil’s weight of guilt turning us into unproductive saps is up to us. We compartmentalize ugly realities every day, in fact, for otherwise we’d be too shocked at the world to ever properly function in it. The Daily Mail’s response, however, is to direct the end of a scraggly and wrinkled fingertip down upon the faces of the impoverished and say, “Poor people. POOOOOOOR PEOPLE.” They express sadness and pity at their existence, yet are immediately and immensely comforted when you change the subject to, say, the benefits of organic living, or hand over a hazelnut latte. The Daily Mail is like Miranda of The Tempest – ”O wonder goodly goobies, O brave new world, how beauteous mankind!” — if Miranda were deposited not on an island but Taiyuan, Shanxi province: “O THE POVERTY, MY WEEPING HEART.“ The Daily Mail is the worst type of privileged first-world colonialist asshole.

In the interest of fairness, here’s the article’s second and third paragraphs:

Parents and children queued for hours, just so they could snatch a few free cabbages which were being given away.

Shopping mall bosses in northern China gave away 200 tons of greens to their desperate customers.

POOOOOOOOOOR PEOPLE.

For a fun time, read to the end and learn about how oat is integral to Inner Mongolia and Tibet.

(H/T Alicia)

OK, now it's Christmas.

Hey, a walrus is much better than the hackneyed alternative (nsfw).

Via: reddit.com

Tenian (Northern Mariana Islands), USA. Torii stands silently with Jamaican cherry trees in a jungle.


Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands), USA. The gate was donated by a Japanese called “King of Sugar", now it stands in a graveyard of Catholic church.


Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands), USA. Torii in a deep jungle.


Hualien, Taiwan. A house contains part of a Torii. People have attached TV antennas and a basketball hoop to its post.


Taichung, Taiwan. The shrines are gone, but the gate is still used as a large bench (not to show contempt to Shintoism, but just to have a comfortable seat in the park).


Changchun, China. Torii used as the gate of a kindergarten.


Geomundo Island, Korea. A staircase is all that remains of a former shrine. Shitamichi has not found any Toriis in Korea.


Sakhalin, Russia. Torii standing alone in a field. Many foundations of shrine buildings and immigrants’ houses were covered by grass.

Motoyuki Shitamichi: torii

Torii are a symbol of Shintoism, a traditional Japanese religion. These gateways mark the entrance to shrines—at times, long after the buildings have been demolished.

Motoyuki Shitamichi has focused on the Torii’s peculiar history in former Japanese colonies, visiting the Northern Mariana Islands (USA), Taiwan, Korea, China, and Sakhalin (Russia). One gateway stands silently in a jungle, another remains in the grave yard of a Catholic church. Sometimes the structures take on a completely new life, used as a post of a house, or a large park bench.

Torii remain as the evidence of a former period of Japanese occupation. “There are fewer and fewer people who remember this time,” said Shitamichi, “these ruins are trying to play a role as storyteller.” Originally placed at the start of a shrine’s entrance way, the torii are now gateways to the past.

“torii” series is exhibited as a part of group show “MOT Annual 2012: Making Situations. Editing Landscapes” at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo until February 3rd, 2013. To see more information, visit m-shitamichi.com and nap gallery.

The 1000 or so Jews who live in Beijing often get asked about how much money they make, why they are so smart, and how Jews such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet (incidentally, both gentiles) have made so much money. For this episode of Bloggingheads, I spoke with Dror Poleg, an Israeli businessman and 8-year veteran of Beijing (and friend of mine), about Chinese people studying the Talmud to discover its business secrets,  Asia's strange brand of philo-semtisim, and the story behind Jews' yuletide culinary choices.  The full video can be found here. Enjoy!  

 

Diane Rothschild, a Creative Hall of Fame copywriter, made it to the top of The Mad, Mad, Mad Men world.

Rothschild was elected to One Club Hall of Fame in 2005. It was the first time a woman had been inducted since 1974. Rothschild died of lung cancer two years later at the age of 63. As she was dying, she wrote a print ad featuring herself for the Lung Cancer Alliance that said: “This lung cancer patient can’t stop smoking. Because she never started.”

She began her career in 1973 at the best ad agency in the world, New York City's Doyle Dane Bernbach. She started her own agency in 1986, Grace & Rothschild, with DDB art director and industry legend Roy Grace.

There, she created the above ad which we all see every year in December on Internet "Best Christmas Ads" lists. J&B ran the ad for years.

When she was inducted into the Hall of Fame she said:

“Based on the world according to uninspired, rigid, time-warped and aging advertising men, I should be home right now in a little apron.”

The story you all have watched of Peggy Olson on Mad Men is very much how it was for women in the business in the 1960s-70s and even still is, somewhat, today (I've seen it).

Rothschild was one of my strongest inspirations for getting into advertising in the late 1980s.

Via New York Times.

Tired of hanging out with the family? It could be worse. Way worse.

Just picture yourself waiting in this Starbucks line.

Source: lhowanit.files.wordpress.com

Already sick of playing board games with your cousins? Here is a 10-minute video of paint drying.

Here are the terms of service of owning a Microsoft Zune.

You could be eating a bowl of plain iceberg lettuce.

Source: d74bwl3dcueqd.cloudfront.net

View Entire List ›

Last week in Albuquerque, dozens of wannabes showed up in costume for a contest hosted by Steven Michael Quezada (who plays Steven Gomez on Breaking Bad) to see who was the most Walter White–y. The contestants were judged by the man himself, Bryan Cranston.

Read more posts by Eliot Glazer

Filed Under: clickables ,tv ,breaking bad ,walter white ,steven michael quezada ,bryan cranston

Follow @drewtoothpaste and @nataliedee on Twitter or join the Married To The Sea Facebook Page.

On Friday, China's largest English-language newspaper, China Daily, launched Africa Weekly, a supplement that "will look at the precise nature of Chinese involvement in Africa and also the prominent role many Africans play in China." The announcement on the government-owned China Daily featured quotes from Chinese and African diplomats falling over each other to praise how this initiative will improve mutual understanding, especially Africans' understanding of China: "Minister of Culture Cai Wu said the new weekly will give African people a comprehensive and reliable guide to China" and "Abdul'ahat Abdurixit, president of the Chinese-African People's Friendship Association, said the launch of an Africa edition by China Daily 'will surely help improve communication between China and Africa.'"

Improving African understanding of Chinese is a great goal, though it probably wouldn't hurt if Chinese expanded their views of Africans. During a China-Africa summit in 2006, billboards lining the road to the airport featured some purporting to "glorify" Africans, though at least one, featuring a tribesman with a bone through his nose, depicted a Papua New Guinean. A month before a 2012 China-Africa summit in July, Africans rioted in Guangzhou after a Nigerian was found dead in police custody; "the Chinese social media response to the latest protest in Guangzhou was dismayingly xenophobic," wrote Time's Hannah Beech, who also noted that the districts where Africans congregate in Guangzhou are known as "chocolate city."

While there's plenty of anecdotal evidence out there, it's hard to generalize about what Chinese think about Africans without being hypocritical, so I'll just quote what a Chinese English-teaching recruiter once told me in Beijing: "We try not to hire black people. They tend to scare the children."

One prominent example of the gulf in racial understanding between Chinese and Africans is "Black People Toothpaste," one of the most popular toothpaste brands in China, which I wrote a story about for Newsweek in 2010, and which a Colgate spokesman I spoke with on Friday confirmed is still 50 percent owned by his company. The logo features a minstrel singer wearing a top hat, backed by a white halo, and flashing a smile of blindingly white teeth. The brand is so widespread it's even engendered a popular knockoff brand, "Black Younger Sister Toothpaste."

Black People Toothpaste used to be called Darkie in English, but an outcry against Colgate when the news was reported in the United States in the late 1980s caused the brand to change the English name to the less offensive Darlie, and to change the logo from offensive and sinister to just offensive. "The only difference between black people and white people is that black people have whiter teeth," Wu Junjie, who works for a Taiwanese fast-food restaurant in Beijing, told me in 2010. Before China Daily and other state organs can successfully highlight the "prominent role" Africans play in China, it probably wouldn't hurt if fewer Chinese people associated black people with toothpaste.

In one handy chart! Never be crippled with anxiety when using Important Wine Words like “herbal” and “high tannin.”

Print it, frame it, love it, and send it to all your friends who think that Lambrusco is a kind of sheep cheese.

You can see an *even larger* view of this chart and get a full breakdown of the info here.

Source: winefolly.com  /  via: visual.ly

Casa Nueva is everything one would expect of an independent, worker-owned restaurant in a funky, progressive college town like Athens, Ohio. The walls are lined with jewelry and art for sale. Children’s drawings are tacked above tables. Its low prices, locavore philosophy, and good beer selection help it attract students, faculty, and townies.