The Huffington Post

[whometense]

Just for fun - I don't know yet if this is going to be an exercise in the self-massaging of colossal egos or if it will turn out to have something of value to contribute, but in any case today marks the debut of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's celeb group blog.

There's stuff up there from David Mamet, Mike Nichols, John Cusack, Harry Shearer, and others. It's at least a novel idea, and worth checking out, anyway.

[whometense]

1. TayTay, check this out when you have time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/leaving-home-wi.html

Walter Shapiro is living in Cambridge right now!

This renunciation is akin to Tom DeLay forsaking golf junkets. Here I am a recovering newspaper columnist, a print-and-paper junkie, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School ostensibly concocting cosmic thoughts about the future of journalism, and still on certain days of the week I just never get around to purchasing a daily paper.

True, my itinerant schedule during my temporary sojourn in Cambridge does prevent me from getting home delivery of the Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. So each morning I have to weigh the cosmic question: Are reading the papers at breakfast worth a 10-minute round-trip walk to the convenience store? As odysseys go, this is a far cry from "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel." But it is a telling reflection of my fast-changing reading habits, or perhaps my middle-aged sloth, that too often I decide, "Nah. Who Cares? I'll skim the headlines on-line and catch up with the papers tomorrow."

[TayTay]

2. Not bad

I'll have to keep an eye on this. I like Shapiro. The rest of it is celebs. Anything good from the celebs?

[whometense]

3. There's so much there

I haven't had time to read that much. It's ENORMOUS.

John Cusack is one of my favorite actors, so I really enjoyed his piece on Hunter Thompson (it's short) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/goodbye-hunter-_1.html

She seems to have an eye for interesting people who might really have something to say. So, we'll see, I guess.

[fedupinBushcountry]

5. Did you read this

Jim Lampley
The Biggest Story of Our Lives

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

more>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/biggest-story-of-our-live.html

[whometense]

6. Wow. That was great.

Jim Lampley:

http://www.hbo.com/boxing/commentators/lampley.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Lampley

Doesn't appear to be much of a lunatic fringe type.

[politicasista]

8. This was good.

[whometense]

4. Howard Kurtz

in today's WaPo has a longish piece on it.

[sandnsea]

7. GREAT one today

I wasn't too thrilled at first, but it's getting better I think. This one is incredible. My husband is a boxing fan so I've followed boxing by default, for some 25 years. Having Jim Lampley make this statement is about as shocking as if Joe Montana had said it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/biggest-story-of-our-live.html