Thousands Pay Respects to Ted Kennedy in BostonBostonians lined the streets of the city yesterday afternoon to see the liberal lion’s casket progress toward his brother’s presidential library.
ByChris Rovzar
Boston ‘Jungle Monkey’ Cop Sues Over Job LossWhen he said Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a ‘banana-eating jungle monkey,’ he didn’t mean he was ACTUALLY a primate who lived in the trees and ate fruit — duh.
We Cannot Thank Eli Manning EnoughAs we face a Celtics championship, we look fondly toward Eli Manning — do you realize what sort of three-sport Masshole championship insanity he saved us from?
gossipmonger
Eli Manning’s Little Town Blues Have Melted AwayEli Manning and Yogi Berra sang “New York, New York” together at Rao’s. Male madam David Forest says Marc Jacobs used to employ his services. Mariah Carey shot a video on the rooftop of Lenny Kravitz’s Crosby Street apartment. Mayor Bloomberg celebrated his 65th birthday with Steven Ratner and others at Michael’s. R.E.M. front man Michel Stipe got into a go-cart accident two weeks ago but is fine now. Blackstone Group co-founder Pete Peterson sold his River House digs to financier Jeffrey Leeds for $10 million.
the morning line
The Kennedy Conspiracy
• There’s more on the weekend’s big story, the foiled plot to blow up JFK. One angle: The fourth suspect, still at large, could be an Al Qaeda lieutenant with direct ties to bin Laden. [NYP]
• Another: The man who led the Feds to the plot was a twice-convicted drug dealer who successfully infiltrated the terror group after being muscled into serving as a government informant. [WNBC]
• Rudy Giuliani, seeking to diversify his stoicism-in-the-face-of-tragedy bona fides, stopped by to speak at Montoursville High School, which lost sixteen students aboard TWA 800. The campaign hilariously insists he just popped in for no reason. [amNY]
• Gun groups nationwide are casting Bloomberg as their No. 1 enemy, despite his concentration on illegal weapon sales. The NRA (whose site has a breaking-news ticker!) calls the mayor a “billionaire, Boston-grown evangelist for the nanny state.” Boston-grown — now that stings. [NYT]
• And OTB wants to put touch-screen terminals into city bars and accept “BlackBerry bets,” convinced it will find a new demographic there. We eagerly await the spectacle of drunken hipsters ironically losing their shirt on their ponies. [NYDN]
in other news
And So the Boston ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ Crisis Comes to an End
• Reimbursing city and state agencies for their costs in shutting down highways and bringing in bomb squads to remove the Aqua Teen Hunger Force advertisements placed throughout the Boston area Wednesday: $1 million
• Donating to help fund homeland security and other programs in the area, in what is clearly a boy-are-we-sorry PR move by Turner Broadcasting: $1 million
• Commissioning the advertising campaign in the first place: Cost unknown
• Scaring the shit out of gullible chowder eaters for an afternoon: Priceless
TBS, Interference to Pay $2 Million for Advertising Campaign That Caused Bomb Scare in Boston [AP via Yahoo]
in other news
Boston Cartoon Attack Was, Well, a GlitchSo those two hair-obsessed guys arrested in Boston for planting the Aqua Teen Hunger Force non-bombs that terrified New England? A bit of creative Googling reveals that both men — Sean Stevens, 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27, who goes by “Zebbler” — are affiliated with a “live performing video force” called — and this is the sort of fun part — Glitch. Well, yes. We suspect that Turner Broadcasting, parent of Aqua Teen’s home, the Cartoon Network, sees this as quite the glitch. Which perhaps explains the whole thing: It’s all part of Time Warner, and Time Warner is trying to be more synergistic, and didn’t Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore just say her company needs to fail more? This, folks, is failure done right.
Two Men Charged After Boston Security Scare [Reuters]
the morning line
So Dark the Con of Man
• The Times declares Spitzer’s political honeymoon over; the governor’s first state budget, which cuts $1.2 billion from health care and increases spending by 6 percent, seems guaranteed a hard time in both the State Senate and the Assembly. [NYT]
• Firefighters: Every time we come dangerously close to deifying them, they do something crazy. Like, in this case, by buying fake “St. Regis College” diplomas online, at $500 a pop, and submitting them to the Fire Department for promotions. [Newsday]
• A Long Island con-artist duo lured married marks into one-night stands, videotaped the trysts, then proceeded to blackmail them. The scammers’ photos, printed in the Post, make the “luring” part positively puzzling. [NYP]
• In a feat of participatory journalism, a Daily News reporter spends a “day dressed like Sienna” (Miller). For our money, she looked more like JT LeRoy. [NYDN]
• And a New York marketing firm scared the bejesus out of Bostonians with promo signs for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which the Boston Police Department somehow mistook for bombs. Nobody objected here, where “a box of fries … giving passerby the finger” is a relatively normal sight. [amNY]
