Thursday, October 8, 2009

Updates: Playboy CEO Threatens Seppuku; plus SF SPCA, Conde Nast, Levi Johnson & More

  • As a follow-up to my post a couple days ago on the troubles at SF SPCA, I wanted to share this short story from CBS5 TV news in San Francisco. It's just more reporting on the mess at that organization.
  • I'm just thinking that it must not be much fun to work at Conde Nast these days. After their recent magazine closures (supposedly the last), now they're doing layoffs at one of the surviving mags.
  • Meanwhile, The New York Times provides a visual aid for people trying to comprehend what a smaller Conde Nast could possibly mean in this crazy, upside-down world, *sob sob sob*
  • A while ago I reported the most important news in the history of the world, or at least in the annals of the Sarah Palin saga: The father of her grandchild is going to pose for Playgirl (presumably the web site, since it stopped publishing a print Playgirl magazine a year or so ago). He's apparently been working out, and his lawyer says that the photo shoot is a foregone conclusion.
  • Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, who's apparently been doing the rounds of the business press, is quoted by Reuters as saying, "Over my dead body will we quit producing the magazine in print." Though threatening to commit seppuku helps address fears (which we can now largely begin to ignore) that the magazine would be deep-sixed, it doesn't tell us more about a report in the Chicago Tribune that the publication could be radically down-sized.
  • I hadn't intended sex to be a common theme of much of this list of updates, but it's turning out that way. Anyway, the Los Angeles Times reports that Hugh Hefner does write down his own tweets for Twitter -- but he doesn't tweet 'em himself; one of his girlfriends actually retypes them so they can be read by his more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. That's kind of like someone who recently called us to let us know they had just sent us an e-mail. But hey, at least he writes his own tweets.
  • What the heck: Finally, because so many people seem to be getting caught with their pants down in prostitution and womanizing news, I figured I'd share this story from Times of India about a Tamil journalist arrested in a prostitution sting. Or wait, how about this minister in Nicolas Sarkozy's government who wrote in a book about his past experiences picking up young (just how young seems to be under dispute) male prostitutes in Thailand -- oh, and the minister just happened to be a vocal supporter of Roman Polanski. It starts to make David Letterman seem downright grandfatherly. Keep your pants on, folks.

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