Using deductive prowess, several bloggers determined that Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph, “The Battle of Iwo Jima,” may have been staged by Rosenthal. The bloggers once again triumphed over the mainstream media by Googling the words “Joe Rosenthal staged” and turning up this Fortune City page, which offered nothing more than conjecture on the subject. The Google search result took 0.06 seconds.
“If someone is thinking about it, then someone is hiding the truth,” said the blogger behind Little Green Gerbils, who speculated upon Rosenthal’s photograph at his day job when his boss wasn’t looking.
“Jay Rosenthal is a godless heathen and should be strung up in public before the weekend,” noted Michelle Milkme. “Never mind that he’s in his eighties. Vigilante justice applies even to those past their prime.”
The bloggers, who had abstained from ice cream to facilitate their anger, reportedly experienced higher blood pressure which coincided with their levels of outrage. The fever and hypertension spread to their readers, who offered more fury and amateur speculation in thousands of comments.
“What the maintream media doesn’t realize is that we too use Photoshop,” said Milkme. “I don’t quite understand all the filters and tools the way a professional art director does, but I do know how to crop a photo and save it as a new filename that I can upload to my site. So do most bloggers. The mainstream media will now think twice about messing with us. We have cropping and uploading skills!”
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
let’s not forge the Bad Reporter