Category: Someone's cranky...

Normally, we'd avoid talking about anything that happens in academia because the pettiness of Ivory Tower politics depresses us. (And whoever said the stakes were small was understating the facts. They're microscopic.) On the upside, it makes the commercial media industry look good and right and smart and interesting—by comparison.

But sometimes it's unavoidable. Like today.

According to CampusJ, a Yeshiva University professor "started class yesterday by saying that his classes would be 'off the record.'" Not that this hasn't happened before. (Al Gore. Columbia. 2000.)

We're going to save any other professor or public figure who tries this the trouble: if you're talking to a room full of people that includes journalists and/or bloggers and you tell them it's off the record, that's the surest way to get them to write about it—and you. (Are you listening, Dan Bartlett? Steve Rattner?...) In that situation, there is no off the record.

The Nation - its pages getting thinner by each issue, it seems - is spittin' mad. At least Naomi Klein is: Taking her cue from the fact that most Iraqis voted in their first post-Saddam election not only to oust US-sponsored interim leader Iyad Allawi and embrace the mullahs, but also to kick the rest of us over there to hell and gone, Klein is the only voice we can find which questions what kind of government we'll be leaving the locals.

While Fishbowl finds some of her logic of the pretzel variety (i.e., people might have been better off during the old regime they knew and loved), no one else has tried to connect the dots and look ahead more than a few months. Because that, Dear Reader, looks less fun for anybody now that Achmed Chalabi has sprung up like someone's Jack-in-the-box. Sum total: She talks about stuff the MSM (remember them?) fluff up. Now, if only the Nation's ad base didn't suck so hard...

How could Disney press maven Zenia Mucha not stop this? In a hilarious bit of news from New York Magazine, we learn how Disney's own Don Quixote (and sometime involuntary editor), Michael Eisner, not only tried to arm-twist James Stewart long after the Disney chief had withdrawn his support for the upcoming, unflattering, look at how the most dysfunctional movie studio actually works: Our favorite part so far of "Disney War" is how Eisner suggested that the on-air wife of deceased actor John Ritter become pregnant on the show after his real-life death; (aww, that takes us back to L.A. creative meetings of yore.) Apparently, Eisner's people didn't agree. Because it might raise "taste issues." Where do you people think you are, PBS?

We always knew the New Yorker staff wore their anti-automobile tweediness like a badge of honor. But this week's issue proves it: Adam Gopnik - who really counts as a semi-Parisian, anyhow - takes the new traffic signs to task for being too kind on drivers, rather than favoring pedestrians. He compares their clumsy placement to Los Angeles, where Fishbowl spent some years in Purgatory for our sins, and, Adam, we can unequivocally tell you this: We love it here. Driving sucks in both cities. But the old signage you love so much? Very 18th Century. Ever try to find the southbound FDR Drive at night? From anywhere?

Count on Bill O'Reilly for trumpeting what everyone has known from way before his own phone messages about the creative uses of "falafels" first saw the light of day: Europeans hate us. Or, at the very least, they hate foreign fanny-packers elbowing their way to the buffet. Except, Bill, you go on to claim that they do so because of the bad sartorial taste of travelling Americans, and that we're "alone" in the War On Terror (henceforth to be abbreviated to WOT). Um, we think that, since train stations and synagogues have been going up in flames over there, Bill, that you may have overreached just a tidge. But that's just our opinion. Don't think us unpatriotic to have one.

Hang on just a patriotic minute! Dick, do you mean to tell us that a blue-collar, blue-state tab like the Daily News has it right? That after a long weekend of pulling favors from everyone in the bumper sticker business and working since late Friday night in the cramped Fishbowl offices to make the new ticket look appealing even to Saab drivers, you're not gonna go for the brass ring in '08? Well, then, you can forget the lifetime supply of McRib sandwiches we had planned on sending you, special. We'll give that gift card to Roger Ailes, instead. But let a fella know next time?

When Fishbowl first heard the news this morning that New York's own Don Quixote had decked a traffic cop who wouldn't let him pull his car over for just a second after a traffic accident moments earlier, we sat in a restaurant in the snowbound half of the city and cheered: State Senator Kevin Parker had apparently also crumpled the ticket and thrown it in the officer's face. You soulless, poorly named Dept. of Finance, take that!

The only newspaper inside Vinny's Pizzeria was the Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill Courier, which told the story broken several days earlier by the big tabs. Still, for all the talk among larger dailies about wanting to do more "local news" and keeping up "our responsibility to all five boroughs," this little, poorly edited and still scrappy weekly has consistently covered the ongoing IKEA colonization of Red Hook (hey, it's right next door). Every week, its sub-staffed reporters come back with the story: Construction code violations, asbestos, the lot. Now all we need is to get Rev. Al to stay the hell out of this story, please. Everything's fine.

Now, when have you, dear reader, known pundit commando Ann Coulter - she of the high cheekbones and cheekier logical diatribes - to run out of air when pointing out the sins of the Left? Fishbowl didn't think it were possible until we read her opening salvo for the year on www.anncoulter.org, in which she vainly makes a case that the Clintons (natch) were to blame for the Rwandan genocide because their inauguration party lasted for a week.

It seems to us that everyone has written off Ann as a nutjob and therefore refuses to take anything she says seriously, but why is that, we wonder? As long as she gets airtime on Hardball, why the tut-tutting and shrugging? Why the slack? Do lefty pundits view blondness as dumbness, and therefore as inconsequential? If so, then the joke's on them. Absent any real opposition from the other corner, readers can coolly ponder the fact that the Bush re-election was the worst thing for her - righteous ire doesn't grow when you've got a strong tailwind.

So scratch her off the gamepad as a voice that matters, at least until 2008. Memo to Frank Rich and other dormant, sulking liberal foghorns: This is your cue. Use it. Before Hillary sucks all the oxygen out of the room and blows it for you. Again.

It had to happen. Hip-Hop, with its never-too-secret fantasy fuel of bling, rides, Glocks and women who seem always to be emanating from poolside at the fill-in-the-blanks thug of the moment, is officially dead. And who broke the story? Possibly the Whitest Paper in America. Newsday, with an assist from the L.A. Times. Here's how:

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