| Owner Fred Wilpon says 'it's a championship season' for Mets
PORT ST. LUCIE - Fred Wilpon, whose spring-training declarations usually teeter between vague and unambitious, this time offered a concrete, borderline Steinbrenneresque expectation. After authorizing a $140 million payroll - a franchise record by roughly $20 million - the one-time author of "meaningful games in September" fully expects the Mets to be playing games in October. Make that late October. "It's a championship season," said Wilpon, in unusually blunt terms, during an early afternoon address at the team's complex. "We expect to be in the playoffs, and deep into the playoffs. That's our expectation." With his son, chief operating officer Jeff, by his side for the first time during a spring address, the 71-year-old Wilpon suggested he suffered daily heartache this winter as a result of the Mets' late-season collapse.
China Discovers the Permissive Society
The no-tell motels in Beijing's university districts pulsate with sex. Every weekend, lusty college couples make a beeline past greasy spoon restaurants and bootleg video game shops for the dim hotel lobbies to book three-hour blocks of privacy. Students fill half the simple but tidy rooms at the Cheng Lin Ming Guang Hotel, a 10-minute walk from Beijing Normal University. China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, a byproduct of rising prosperity and looser government restrictions on private life. The relaxed attitudes about sex mark a historic turnaround from the days when love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence, and unisex Mao suits and drab austerity were the norm. But the revolution is taking place largely behind closed doors, and the word "sex" — or "xing" (pronounced shing) is spoken only among close friends, and then usually in a whisper.
Review: 'Tir na nÓg' a bumpy ride
It's a disappointing outing for both Smith, directing his last play as the Magic's outgoing artistic director, and O'Brien. Her inventively constructed and tantalizingly oblique "Triptych" in '03 remains one of the highlights of Smith's five-year tenure. "Girls" and the succeeding novels that make up "The Country Girls Trilogy" ("The Lonely Girl" and "Girls in Their Married Bliss") were the books that established O'Brien as one of Ireland's leading contemporary writers (getting banned in Ireland didn't hurt). But the lack of descriptive clarity that haunts the novels carries over into the dramatization in ways that will frustrate those who know the books and perplex those who don't. Characters who play important roles in young Kate's life are reduced to broad caricatures - or, in the case of Michael Louis Wells' Hickey, touching anomalies - whose relationship to her or purpose in the story is left unexplained.
Archives: December 2007
A publishing executive warned me yesterday that Steve Florio, the iconic former CEO of Conde Nast Publications, was even more ill than had been previously reported. Today I awoke, switched... Gone Fishing Posted by: on December 11, Categories: I'm on vacation until just after Christmas. While I'm away, posting frequency will range from very light to nonexistent. Enjoy your holidays!... Led Zeppelin Reunites, Leading To Totemic Moment In Targeted Advertising Posted by: on December 11, Categories: Advertising: Egregious, Led Zeppelin As you may have heard, Led Zeppelin played a one-off reunion show in London last night. And, like any good rock fan, I clicked on the video link on this... The Rich Zannino Scorecard Posted by: on December 06, Categories: Dow Jones, News Corp., Rich Zannino, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal Took over as CEO of Dow Jones: Feb, 2006.
Ledger death leaves studio with balancing act: analysts
It kind of takes your breath away when you see his face like that.
"I would think it would be a mistake to take him away from the marketing campaign because in a morbid kind of way people want to see his performance because he's passed away, and because if you're a fan of the franchise you want to see how he plays the Joker."
An executive at a rival studio quoted by the Wall Street Journal agreed that it would be unwise to change the marketing strategy for the film.
"The best thing that could happen is that all this marketing stuff just goes on and the movie and the campaign don't turn into some kind of weird grave marker," he told the paper.
But Bock said "a sense of melancholy" would forever be associated with "The Dark Knight" regardless of how it was received at the box office.
Recipient E-mail
There are lots of ways that people try and show who the best is at a variety of topics. You've got the old standby, who can drink the most beer. Then there is who can land the best looking guy/girl, and you can always resort back to who makes more money as a way to prove who's better. In the world of computers and overclocking the way you prove you are better than the rest is with synthetic benchmark scores. Depending on what site you read for your hardware reviews synthetic scores for video cards and computer systems are either a great way to tell how a video card performs or a fat waste of time. Personally I don't care how you measure the performance of a video card in a review, so long as you do it the same way each time so I can get an idea of the parts relative performance.
Mike Smith, lead singer for Dave Clark Five, dies
Although the Beatles were the most popular of the British Invasion bands of the 1960s, the Dave Clark Five claimed a string of U.S. chart-topping hits, many of them co-written by Smith and Clark, including "Because," "Glad All Over," "Any Way You Want It" and "I Like It Like That."
The band made 12 appearances on Ed Sullivan's variety show, the most for any British act.
The group was founded by Clark, who played drums, in 1958. Smith was not an original member. He joined in 1961 as keyboardist, lead singer and the band's most recognizable face.
Smith was born in London on Dec. 12, 1943. He began studying classical music at age 5 and was admitted to Trinity Music College in London at 13.
After the demise of the band in the early 1970s, Clark and Smith continued to release singles as Dave Clark & Friends until 1973.
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