Archive: April, 2013
Philly Mag is in the news again, this time for issuing a retraction and apology in the wake of Anthony Gargano's article, "The War Within." Gargano's piece chronicles a Marine sniper, John P. Boudreau, who claimed to have killed a whole bunch of people in the Middle East, and the internal struggles he experiences while grappling with the "reality" of having killed so many people.
Turns out that the guy was making it up.
Philadelphia magazine editor Tom McGrath published an apology on The Philly Post on Friday explaining that the piece was largely sourced by Boudreau himself. So, even though the article went through the normal fact-checking process, many of the exaggerations and/or falsities made it into the final article.
In the Amazon rainforest, a tiny airstrip serves as one Peruvian town's connection to the outside world. When a mother, her newborn baby, and a 17-year-old boy needed to fly from Contamana to a hospital for urgent medical attention in the middle of the night, a local radio station broadcast the need for help. Within 30 minutes, people responded and nearly 300 vehicles were lined up to help light the runway for takeoff.
The world isn't always such a bad place. Happy Friday, you guys. [autoblog]
Back before Jason Segel was a mega movie star, he was just a muppet of a young man trying to make it in Hollywood. When he was 21-years-old, Segel sold his first script, a "kids' adventure movie in the style of Goonies or Labyrinth or something like that."
A while back, Segel bought back his own script because Hollywood is a crazy place where even after he became famous and incredibly funny in everything, his first script still just sat around waiting for someone to read it. There was a recent screening of Forgetting Sarah Marshall in New York (because that movie should always be screening somewhere), that was followed by a Q&A with Segel and director Jonathan Demme. Demme encouraged Segel to talk about his new literature project.
Turns out, Segel wrote a series of young adult books based on that original script. Now everyone wants a piece of them.
Christina Wayne was a creative. She started off as a music video director, but spent more than a decade as a screenwriter in L.A. One day, she got a call from a friend and ended up getting a script that had been sitting around on desks for eight years. Pretty much everyone in the industry had passed on it. It was Mad Men.
As we all eagerly await the arrival of Don/Dick and company's sixth season (less than 60 hours!), let Wayne explain how Mad Men came to be, how she's partly responsible for your love affair with Walter White and Breaking Bad, and what went into making Copper, the Gangs of New York-ish drama that she took with her when she left AMC. [h/t The Credits]
It was 19 years ago today that Kurt Cobain killed himself (though many people insist that he was murdered). The body of the Nirvana frontman was discovered three days later, on April 8, 1994, by an electrician. Today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has posted previously unpublished photographs from the scene of Cobain's suicide.
A few of their frames were published after Cobain's death in 1994. But most of them have sat in the same negative sleeves they were placed in the day they were taken.
So, Susan Clemens was shopping on Target.com when she came across the Mossimo Womens Kimono Maxi Dress and all of its available colors. The grey one was named "Dark Heather Grey." Then, she noticed that the Mossimo Womens Plus-Size Kimono Maxi Dress that came in, essentially, the same color wasn't called "Dark Heather Grey" at all. Instead it was called "Manatee Gray." This is the part when Target apologizes.
In this case, he says, there were two different teams of buyers responsible for the “missy” and plus-size product lines, and the teams didn’t coordinate when they inputted the product information for the site. One team apparently used the color’s official name, while the other eyeballed it
“We apologize for any discomfort this might have caused and are working to update the name of the dress to reflect Dark Heather Gray,” he said. “This was an unfortunate oversight and we’ll take it into consideration moving forward."
Here's Jeremy Irons creepin' everybody out, again. A little more than a month after suggesting that women should be totally cool with playful pats on their butts, Irons took a break from his busy schedule of not being in any quality movies since, like, The Lion King (unless you count Kingdom of Heaven?) to insinuate that legalizing gay marriage will make it so that fathers and sons will start shacking up. Take it away, Jeremy:
"Could a father not marry his son?" Irons asked HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps. Irons argued that "it's not incest between men" because "incest is there to protect us from inbreeding, but men don't breed," and wondered whether same-sex marriage might allow fathers to pass on their estates to their sons without being taxed.
But, Irons didn't stop there. Oh, no. He had to bring the whole animal thing into it because of course he did.
The hacker collective Anonymous has claimed to have commandeered the official Twitter and Flickr feeds of North Korea. The Flickr account posted, ahem, unflattering images of Kim Jong-un with a Mickey Mouse belly tattoo and pig ears.
To read more about the hack, check out readwrite, which has posted some of the pictures and messages Anonymous claims responsibility for.
Additionally, Anonymous claims to have hacked into North Korea's intranet, exposing 15,000 confidential user records. On Thursday morning, the North Korean central news agency's website, Uriminzokkiri was offline. But, experts are skeptical of Anonymous' claim. The Washington Post has more on those doubts:
We're only, like, 80 hours from Mad Men Season 6 (not that we're counting, or anything). Today's Mad Men piece of the day comes from Esquire, where Stephen Klinck reached out to the actual folks infiltrating your subconscious and planting ideas like they're Cobb to see how much the show resonates with the folks in that world.
Klinck spoke with creative directors, copywriters, advertising professor and account people to see which parts of the show ring true. They mostly said that there's less money and no liquid lunches, but a lot of the trade talk translates well.
How the ads hold up:
"Don Draper pitched an idea for a steel company. He made the steel company the official sponsor of major American cities. That was a smart and simple idea. That's something that could work today."
Do you like stoic Ryan Gosling and underground Thai-boxing? Then you'll LOVE the new Red Band trailer for Only God Forgives. Does it show Gosling dragging a guy across the floor by the roof of his mouth? Only hell yes. It's like the guy who directed Drive had an epiphany while watching Bloodsport.
