Wow, Amy Alkon sure has a lot of time on her hands. And she sure knows impressive people, like someone “who does some PR for Halle Berry, whom [she'll] probably see at dinner tomorrow night” and her lawyer who works “for a pretty huge Hollywood entertainment firm, and is in charge of the legal work for a TV network,” both of whom she’s going to sic on a disabled seamstress in Wisconsin who, unlike Alkon, is unaware of various finer points of intellectual property law. Be sure to check out the image on her site of the devil poking Alkon with a pitchfork.

(If Amy sues me for quoting from her website without permission, I’ll be having a garage sale on Sunday. Pick up rare Go-Betweens records and out-of-print Erving Goffman books at bargain prices.)

UPDATE: Langdon has taken down the page with the purportedly copyright-infringing Alkon photos. A victory for intellectual property patriots against the vicious syndicate of crippled, impoverished manual piece-work laborers in Wisconsin college towns!

In the new LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold makes another rare foray into music writing, profiling rapper The Game. He makes it to paragraph three before mentioning a restaurant. (Okay, so the restaurant is Taco Bell, in the context of holding one up, but it’s still food.)

It’s actually a good article, a notch or two above a lot of the Weekly‘s music coverage. But I hope Gold isn’t getting bored with the food beat. Speaking of which, can someone please explain to me what the hell Arty Nelson is talking about every week? Citybeat should include a decoder ring.

LAObserved notes (scroll down a bit) that shoddy reporting in this LAT article forced the paper to run a whopper of a correction. Most significantly, the guy reported as being dead is alive:

FOR THE RECORD
Cal State Chico — An article in Tuesday’s California section about hazing at Cal State Chico mistakenly said that a pledge to a fraternity at nearby Butte Community College died of alcohol poisoning. He did not die but was hospitalized. The article also said Chico has a population of 35,000; according to the city, the population is 71,317. In addition, University President Paul Zingg was quoted saying the school would shut down its Greek system if problems with hazing did not abate. Zingg made his comments to a group of 850 students and others, and his remarks were quoted in the local media. He did not speak with The Times. Also, although the article characterized the school as being well-known for its basketball program, its winning baseball program may be best known outside campus.

I guess this is what David Shaw means about how a zillion editors check everything at the LAT.

(UPDATE: Jack Shafer takes note of this embarrassing incident coming right on the heels of Shaw’s blogging piece. Yay! Two months into blogging and I’m already having the exact same thoughts as Shafer. This media watchdog stuff is E-Z.)

Kausfiles reports that at yesterday’s AARP Hollywood luncheon honoring Smith, the gossip doyenne had some choice words about the LA Times:

[Smith] ragged gleefully on the L.A. Times for its pathetic, stuffy, circ-killing, even David-Shaw-like refusal to have a gossip column. Smith noted the LAT actually subscribes to her column but doesn’t publish it. “I guess the editors like to read it the night before.”

Oh, and Mickey Kaus adds this aside about the luncheon:

P.P.P.S: Best lookin’ senior celeb in person: Rita Moreno! Who knew?

Funny, that’s exactly what the email I just got from Moreno said about Mickey.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Guess Ms. Smith doesn’t read the Times. Her column IS carried. However all the really boring stuff is edited out and only the less boring stuff is printed. Zzzzzz….

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader writes:

You missed the real story about the AARP luncheon. What the hell was Mickey doing there with those alter kakhers?

Franklin Avenue reports that Nintendo is circulating an online petition asking the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to make video game characters eligible for Walk of Fame stars. You know, like, oh, for instance, Nintendo properties Mario and Zelda. Mario himself reportedly agitated for this cause outside Grauman’s Chinese this morning. (Any eyewitness accounts?)

I hope the Chamber of Commerce holds the line at pimping for lousy movies.

In her LA Weekly column tomorrow, Nikki Finke conducts a worshipful (and, yes, informative) interview with new Air America CEO Danny Goldberg. It’s not quite Deborah Solomon / Jonathan Safran Foer territory, but it’s close, especially for a journalist with a self-ballyhooed reputation for toughness:

What Goldberg vigorously emphasizes… and what Rush Limbaugh and his echo chambers (Sean Hannity, Tony Snow, Bill O�Reilly, Michael Medved, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Michael Reagan, Dennis Prager and Larry Elder, ad nauseam) purposefully ignore, is that Air America and its Bushwhacking stepsister in the radio business, Democracy Radio, are now not only on solid financial footing but also informative and — dare we say it — even fun. And not just because of the Grateful Dead bumpers.

That’s why liberal talk is the radio industry’s fastest-growing format.

Not coincidentally (and not undisclosed by Finke in the piece) is that Finke is a frequent Air America contributor.

From the last paragraph of the LAT review of R.W. Apple’s new book Apple’s America, a guidebook aimed at ‘discriminating travelers’ (in other words, rich New Yorkers who are forced occasionally to go to other cities on business)(I did the bold-facing):

Naturally, the first city I looked up was Los Angeles… Reading an outsider’s take on the place where one lives is bound to highlight any shortcomings in the visitor’s account. Yes, we have smog, but efforts to control emissions have improved the air quality from what it was half a century back, despite huge growth in the interim. Apple has, however, noticed the lovely scent that pervades our atmosphere on non-smoggy days throughout late winter and spring, attributing it to hibiscus, oleander and jasmine. He’s right about jasmine, but the first two are not very odiferous. The fragrance, in fact, comes mainly from Victorian box and a plethora of citrus blossoms.

Thanks for the info. If only the LAT would apply the same standards of thoroughness to, say, its coverage of local news.

Big news. Business 2.0 reports that Arianna Huffington is preparing to launch a web venture called the Huffington Report, which along with more pedestrian web content will feature a group blog by a bunch of famous people:

Based in New York and staffed with a full complement of editors, the Huffington Report appears to be a culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate. It will have breaking news, a media commentary section called “Eat the Press,” and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite: Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown. That’s just to name a few, and Huffington is still recruiting.

I’m going to sponsor a contest: The first person who provides convincing proof that one of the celebrities’ blog posts was in fact written by an assistant will win an all-expense paid visit to the FishbowlLA offices.

Soft launch expected in April. Parody websites expected in about five hours.

The NYT Business section covers new imported-from-Britain editor Paul Field’s efforts to expand and retool the The National Enquirer. Apparently what this means is that heads may roll, particularly in the LA office:

The ever important Los Angeles office, with its roster of old-school reporters who have a web of paid and unpaid tipsters among the maids, drivers and bodyguards of the famous, remains substantially intact, for the moment.

“I was on a conference call with the L.A. office this morning, and there has been quite a bit of speculation over what was going to happen to them,” [Field] said. “And I told them they had nothing to worry about, as long as they perform to the standards I have set out. If they don’t, then they are dispensable. Before my regime, what they got was good enough, but not any more. I am not going to pay somebody $75,000 a year if they don’t make the grade.”

Wow. It’s hard to imagine many American editors being that blunt. ‘Dispensible’? He sounds like a B-movie villain. Good luck over there, guys. To any tipsters who get canned, feel free to deposit your tips here.

A while back I mentioned that David Foster Wallace was slated to appear on John Ziegler’s KFI show to discuss his lengthy (and worthwhile) Atlantic Monthly profile of Ziegler. Apparently, this never happened. From Ziegler’s website:

[Wallace] was invited on to the show to discuss, in a friendly manner, his observations (as well as some of the inaccuracies) in the article, but he was apparently too much of a coward and without enough gratitude for the access we gave him to even provide us with an hour of his time.

A shame. It would have been a Great Moment In Radio.