This tale lacks the hype and celebrity buzz associated with the network's other headaches - its inability to acknowledge that in a farcical search for ratings it sent Leonardo DiCaprio to interview President Clinton about the environment; and its handling of another interview, with Elian Gonzalez, age 6.
"I repeat that these defendants assert their innocence and will continue to assert it as long as they breathe," Emanuel Bloch said for the Rosenbergs. "They believe that they are victims of political hysteria, and that their sentences was based upon extraneous political considerations having no legitimate or legal connection with the crime charged against them."
Once I had seen Gore describe his youthful marijuana use as "infrequent and rare" in a prepared statement (what, both?), I needed no convincing that he'd been weeded-out in his time: This book has the details, should you care.
He flips out some photos of his wildly adorable three-month-old baby Emmett. Is Berg married?
"Uh, I think so." (This followed by a hearty round of heh-heh-hehs from Burns.)
I wish my friends said "woo-hoo" and meant it. All my friends do is talk about Dave Eggers.
My God! Hawke was more concerned with conveying grunge-cool while he opened a beer bottle for Ophelia in the nunnery scene than he was in really letting the audience know what is going on with an ambiguous line like "I never gave you aught."
And I looked through the window at downtown Belgrade, full of young boys and girls on a Saturday night, with the same shoes, the same jackets as kids in New York or Paris, and I thought, I know some of them are criminals, and some of their parents starve in order to make them look like that, but even so, you can't stop joy and beauty. It grows faster than crime and death.
In a sense, the lesson of this literary sketch, and its attendant hate mail, is an old one: Never overestimate the obviousness of your own irony. But perhaps the response also reflects a general hunger to believe in an elite that coldly excludes oneself. Would-be writers may actually prefer to think of the London literary world as a hive of toadyism and malpractice. Such an impression adds considerable poignancy to the presupposition of neglect.
A young black woman wearing a "Justice for Amadou" badge, who will say only that her name is Kelly, tells me that the four cops deserve to walk free.
I'm stunned. "Really? How come?" I ask.
"Anyone who can sit through a month of that boring shit has suffered enough."
