One year ago this week, I made some shocking predictions for 2006, almost all of which came true.* I predicted that Wally would be *even sexier* in 2006 than he was in 2005. I was right.Where did I go wrong? I missed predicting Nicole Ritchie's final year-end weight by 14 ounces.
* I predicted that soybean futures would NOT be the place to put your money. I was right.
* I predicted the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, the election of Felipe Calderon as president of Mexico and the scandal involving Britney Spears not wearing panties. I was right, right and right.
* A woman in Idaho wins a large jury verdict after suffering a seizure watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Jurors are quick to blame the writing.
* Viewership of Internet porn rises at a rate two points higher than inflation.
* Minister Ted Haggard is spotted in Provincetown on the Fourth of July wearing a catcher T-shirt and dancing at the A-House with gay blogger Andrew Sullivan. They are both clutching a copy of Andrew's new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, now available on Amazon.com.
* An unnamed member of the cast of the Real World Road Rules Challenges on MTV fills out an application for a real job and doesn't get it.
* A prominent journalist at a major news network is outed. Shepard Smith breaks the story.
* The Bush Daughters celebrate a double wedding! With each other. In Massachusetts.
* Following the president's divorce, Condeleeza Rice-Bush quickly establishes herself as the most-loved first lady in U.S. history.
* A Broadway Musical based on the life of Hugh Beaumont from Leave It To Beaver becomes the national rage, while also igniting a furious debate over a shocking scene involving Jerry Mathers and a string of pearls.
* Dick Cheney shoots 14 people, including the president of Mexico, in a Thanksgiving day massacre before finally being wrestled to the ground by Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
* Andy Kaufman announces to the world he's really still alive, and then kills himself. Tom Shales at The Washington Post praises the stunt as brilliant.
* Dennis Kucinich is elected president of the new republic of Puerto Rico. Troops from Iraq are quickly redeployed as the U.S. leads the coalition invading San Juan.
* The Cup of Joe resumes its coverage of kittens to rave reviews, and doubles its daily readership to two.
With former President Gerald Ford now dead at the age of 93, I wonder if FORD DROPS DEAD was the headline in the New York Daily News today.
USA Tara Connor publicly confirmed, as one member of the 12-member panel of "occupations," that she wasn't the VIRGIN. (This proud title wound up belonging to the Asian guy wearing the Linus sweater.) She also confirmed she wasn't a GUITARIST, a FIRE EATER or a CRUISE SHIP PERFORMER, although after looking into my crystal ball I certainly wouldn't bet against the latter.
One year ago tonight, Dawna Stone was selected by Martha Stewart to be her apprentice. The stunning news came after a thrilling 16-week job interview in which applicants competed in tasks testing their ability to succeed in upper management, such as picking out napkin colors and deciding which flavor of punch to serve at parties.
Next year, Tara Connor will relinquish, on schedule, her title as Miss USA when a new young princess is given the crown by a panel of all-star celebrity judges, some of whom whose names I will recognize.
Richard Roeper gave Rocky Balboa a glowing, affectionate review on Ebert & Roeper yesterday, as did the guest reviewer filling in for the recovering Roger Ebert. It also made the front page of USA Today today.
I'm delighted to have been selected as among the 300 million or so winners of this year's Time Magazine Person of the Year.
(Today we turn over The Cup of Joe to reader questions.)A: I've been asking myself this same question for years.Q: I don't know why I read this blog. You are really annoying. I don't agree with a single thing you have to say. The site has no focus, is poorly written and you, sir, are one giant asshole. -- Gordy, Casper, Wyoming
Yes.
Q: Why did you recently eliminate kitten coverage from The Cup of Joe? --- Jeremy, Prairie du Chiene, WisconsinA: We simply couldn't compete with the better-funded mainstream kitten journalists and the old guard kitten bloggers who resented my erratic and often unfactual and irrelevant coverage.Q: Can we look forward to new features on The Cup of Joe in 2007? --Melinda, Westchester County, N.Y.
Why yes, you can, Melinda. New features will include a daily sudoku puzzle, online cooking demonstrations in real-time, a web cam (adult check ID required) and a new regular feature analyzing ancient scripture.
Could someone please, please hand me a polo mallet: The new U.S. News & World Report is now on stands, and we here at The Cup of Joe have a message we'd like to send to headline writers and cover designers that won't require the senses of speech or hearing.
Earlier this month, I received an email sometime past midnight on a weeknight from a friend -- whom I commonly refer to as The Machine because nobody, including his wife, has ever seen him sleep -- and he was asking whether I was still up and watching Conan O'Brien. The word "manatee" came up several times in the email.
Now, we here at The Cup of Joe are pleased to report that the New York Times is reporting today on the horny manatee phenomenon, which came about after a Conan O'Brien ad-lib and worries from NBC Legal that you can't just mention a website that doesn't exist for fear of future, er, "exposure." More than 3 million people have now visited the above website, which the good folks at Late Night With Conan O'Brien created because an attorney got nervous.
Last Sunday, another Christian leader resigned from his church after admitting that he had sex with men. This time it was mega-church pastor the Rev. Paul Barnes of Denver. According to a New York Times article: "Mr. Barnes said he had often cried himself to sleep, begging God to end his attraction to men."
Your New York Times delivery carrier sends you a Christmas card (like the one at right) with the Sunday edition, which includes his wishes (to me) for the happiest of holidays along with his home address. Is some sort of Christmas gift in order? Expected?
The whole economic model for modern journalism seems to be collapsing.The New York Times (ad sales down 4.2 percent in November) is experiencing record losses, and one of its properties, The Boston Globe (ad sales down 11 percent in November), is bleeding millions and is on the sale block.
The Wall Street Journal has been accepting front-page ads for some time now, and in January will "right size" its paper by reducing its width by an entire column length, resulting in 10 percent less space for news.
Hundreds of job losses are coming at the NBC news division and MSNBC and, unfortunately, one of those jobs does not appear to belong to Tucker Carlson.
More job losses have happened this year at the LA Times, which has lost 25 percent of its editorial staff in the last five years. The paper is also on the sale block, and the editor was fired by his Tribune Co. bosses because he made the mistake of caring.
Last weekend, I watched the 1983 Al Pacino film Scarface. It's about one man (Pacino) and his compadres who were part of a wave of Cuban immigrants dumped on the United States by Fidel Castro in the early 1980s.
The day after viewing the movie, the New York Times Magazine ran an interesting story addressing the question about whether immigration leads to higher crime rates. There's good data to indicate that it doesn't.Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “I’ve discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics waslower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas.” He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami. In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”
The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard. A year ago, Sampson was an author of an article in The American Journal of Public Health that reported the findings of a detailed study of crime in Chicago. Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.
One not-so-fun-fact in the story: First generation immigrants mired in poverty don't turn to crime, but it is the second-generation immigrants -- the ones who have been discriminated against, beaten down and been here long enough to start imitating their American counterparts -- who are more likely to turn to crime.Second-generation immigrants in Chicago were significantly more likely to commit crimes than their parents, it turns out, and those of the third generation more likely still.Isn't that a little sad?
Opponents of immigration frequently charge that Mexican immigrants threaten America’s national identity because of their failure to assimilate. A more reasonable concern might be the opposite of this: not that foreigners in low-income neighborhoods refuse to adopt the norms of the native culture but that their children and grandchildrendo.
From the AP news wire:Former President George H.W. Bush broke down in tears as he cited his son, Gov. Jeb Bush, as an example of leadership.Now, as a simple laborer I'm certainly no psychoanalyst or psychiatrist, but do you think, just maybe, that some of those tears had to do with the fact that Jeb was the one who was supposed to be president, that he was and is the cream of the crop in this family, and that his loss in the governor's race is what killed his presidential hopes? And that maybe, just maybe, the former president knows what a complete mess his other son has created?
Bush was addressing lawmakers, his son's top administrators, and state workers gathered in the House chamber Monday for the last of the governor's leadership forums.
He said he was proud of how his son handled losing the 1994 governor's race to popular incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles, and vaguely referred to dirty tricks in the campaign.
Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There's a higher Father that I appeal to.’"So Bush the Lesser didn't ask his dad, a man who was president for four years and vice president for eight years and who used to be in charge of the CIA, and who had orchestrated the first Persian gulf war during the early 1990s, for any sort of advice before he decided to go to war in Iraq?
