According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House’s publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like Read more…
From the “this surprises you why?” department: Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance Read more…
Politicians love child porn. It is the ultimate grandstanding issue. It is an issue with effectively no opposing side, after all, if you come out “against” child porn you’ve implicitly cast any opposition into the role of pedophiles and child molesters. There’s no downside. Enter New York Attorney General Andrew Read more…
Because I haven’t had an asshat for a while, and because this is rich in all senses of the word, I want to share a tidbit I found on Whatever. Meet Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Yeah, those Rothschilds. The ones that are, well, kinda well Read more…
UPDATE: At least according to the band, their managers are the clueless asshats. I think they need better management. I haven’t nominated an asshat for awhile, then I came across this little tidbit. And no, this doesn’t involve some sort of draconian fan-stomping over who should pay for what. In Read more…
At least according to our latest asshat, none other than Stephen King. I’ve never thought of him as having a big mouth, but apparently it is just large enough to hold a foot. Quoth King: I don’t want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but Read more…
As the whole Cassie Edwards story pointed out, it is hard to be a plagiarist these days. Anyone with just a little suspicion can use the internet to correctly attribute just about anything, so it is a stupid, stupid, thing to do. The kind of thing you really only expect Read more…
And then they cover this. (via Scalzi) You know, I’m enough of a geek to actually be interested in fonts in and of themselves. But tying them into campaign coverage gives me a hefty dose of WTF. And I give the irregular-weekly asshat award to Seymour Chwast who managed to Read more…
“Irreconcilable editorial differences.“ That’s the word as Signet and Cassie Edwards part ways. Thanks to the Smart Bitches for the tip. (Or, if you’re the AP, the Smart B——)
No, don’t get too excited. But, in regards to my last weekly asshat’s asshattery, an apparently otherwise intelligent blogger, in posting her own rebuttal, suffered an extreme case of foot-in-mouth disease: […] romance novels […] are not “books”, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation Read more…