Things I've gotten word of recently:

1) This Macalester College student objects to Caitlin Flanagan's characterization of hip-hop in her recent Atlantic piece about teenage girls and oral sex. That's right, people googling "teenage girls oral sex," this is the destination for all your honorable research needs. Writes the student columnist, Tinbete Ermyas: "Flanagan notes that it is this rap culture that has helped to disrupt and saturate 'poor and middle class' culture in America through a 'prison-yard' genre that helps 'brutalize' young girls in America.... Wow, those are fightin' words."

2) In a story about our, uh, constitutional right to free speech: "The ejection of two women from the U.S. Capitol for wearing message T-shirts during President Bush's State of the Union speech this week was the latest incident in a growing trend of stifling dissent.... Silencing dissent isn't unique to the national government. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani once ordered city buses to remove an ad for the New Yorker magazine that made fun of him."

Clarification! A friend writes:

Re: your blog this morning--you should add an addendum that the Mercury News got just about everything wrong in its citation of the Giuliani episode with New York magazine (as opposed to the New Yorker, as they said. Can you imagine the New Yorker putting ads on the fronts--not the sides--of buses? Ads that make fun of Guiliani?) Of course, they're also wrong that Giuliani got the ads off the buses. He didn't. He tried in the courts, and failed. So "ordering" the buses to remove the ads isn't technically accurate either. Oh, poor, poor Mercury News!

The New York mag campaign, from 1997 or 1998, was by DeVito-Verdi, and the tagline was "Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Big whoop, right? Shows how thin-skinned Guiliani is.

3) Speaking of Manchester United, the multitalented David Beckham liked both cash and girls at 16.

4) New Sparrow anthology! "It's high time that Sparrow, the poet, journalist and 'prose-provocateur,' was dragged into the harsh commercial light of day. This way we can pick over the refuse of his political and cultural commentary and say that he was better back in the 1970s when he wrote for a Manhattan weekly, and in the early days of the Unbearables Assembling Magazine, the Literary Supplement of the Revolutionary Poultry Overview (pro-Poland) and the New Yorker (after browbeating, protesting and generally badgering poetry editor Alice Quinn)."

5) An AlwaysOn discussion heading reads: "Love, Sponsorship, Magazines, and Jazz: Variations on a theme of advertising stimulated by an interesting talk by Jim Morris on Advertising given on Coyote Hill Roard last week plus the pay-for-spam developments of this." Commenter Mark Plakias writes:

Jim Morris, currently Dean of Carnegie Mellon West...gave one of the Thursday afternoon talk[s] at PARC last week. The topic was advertising, and the title, Advertising as Flirtation.... Showing the first magazine with advertising – for those of you who said Benjamin Franklin take an extra cookie – Morris argued that the heyday of the medium was in the 1950's.
...
Now, a short digression. You want to talk about magazines, how about arguably the most famous one of all – the New Yorker. Yup, I'm one of those people that bought the entire corpus on 8 DVDs (great packaging I might add). Download the reader, fire up the search tool, enter "Coltrane." Bang, you're into a Whitney Balliet (whom I never did like) review of a live Town Hall concert in '57, not just Trane but Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and Art Blakey – and it's clear that Balliet can describe what's happening in very clear prose, even if it is totally orthogonal to his aesthetics. And I sort of soften a bit to the late tres trad jazz reviewer of the New Yorker (ahem, D. Remick [sic], who would that person be now? isn't the 'stuff it in the listings' paucity of jazz coverage in the magazine a bit of a scandal?).

6) Not a link, but a loss: just as David Remnick and the other framers of the DVD archive (and then reviewers) predicted we all would, I have surrendered my collection of 2003-05 New Yorkers to the recycling wing of the Sanitation Department. All that's left is what's arrived in '06, a few vintage beauties (Salinger, "Professor Sea Gull"), and, of course, my eight archive discs, shiny and flat as retro-futurist money and full of possibility. I feel good, yet empty. I will execute whimsical screen grabs till I feel better. Farewell, sweet print!