At some point early Sunday afternoon you will wake up hungover and with an odd feeling of dread about an impending obligation. Do not turn over and go back to bed, though. This is not the usual Sunday afternoon wave of nausea and regret. You actually do have perform an awkward and unpleasant task. It’s Father’s Day! Time to call Dad.

Here’s what’s going to happen: You’ll call home and your mom will pick up the phone, because she always does. She’ll ask you the usual questions and tell you the most recent developments in the lives of people you went to school with and have long since forgotten about. She will bring you up to date on the medical ailments of various relatives and friends of the family, at least one of whom with have some kind of cancer for which the prognosis is, “Well… it’s not good.” Then she will tell you that she loves you and she knows that you called to speak to your father and he’s right here!

Where your usual phone conversations with your father are of the “How ya doin’?” “I’m great, pop, how about you?” “Doin’ well, thanks.” “Okay. Well, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.” “Looking forward to it.” “Bye.” “Bye.” variety, that will not cut it today, because your mom is standing right there staring at your dad and you both know that you’re going to have to put in a few solid minutes of talk time or else you’ll get separate lectures at a later date about “Why aren’t you two closer?” or “How did this family get to be so emotionally distant?” and the ever-popular “I tried my best to make this the perfect home for all of you,” plus crying, and, really, nobody wants to sit through that. So you’re going to have to suck it up. To help you through this difficult burden, here are some suggested topics of conversation which will get you to the two minute mark.

Sports: The age-old classic. This one is particularly choice right now because the NBA Championships have just concluded, so you can very easily burn through your 120 seconds talking about how the Celtics let a completely winnable series slip through their fingers in the final half and does Kobe Bryant’s chronic selfishness make him pretty much the perfect symbol for the Los Angeles entertainment complex? You can also talk about baseball. If there is no regional team for which you both root, bring up that hot new pitching phenom for the Nationals. Do not attempt to bluff your way through a World Cup talk, because nobody gives a shit about soccer and your mom will know you guys are faking it.

TV: Your dad is getting older, and when he comes home from a hard day’s work all he wants to do is pour himself a drink and sit down in front of the tube. There must a show he really likes. Ask him about it!

Politics: If your dad is liberal you can let him bitch about how Obama is a) not doing enough or b) being prevented from doing anything (your choice depends on how far to the left your dad is). If your dad is conservative you can let him bitch about how Obama is a) running this country into the goddamned ground or b) a Muslim terrorist or, if he’s really conservative, both. The important thing is to let your dad bitch, even if you don’t agree with any of it. Your mom won’t let your dad talk about politics at parties or other events, so it’ll be nice for him to finally get some of it off his chest. Plus, you don’t have to do much talking.

His Idiot Co-Worker: He has one. He has anecdotes about him. He’s probably got a tight two-minute set ready to go. This is gold.

Advice: This works whether or not you have something mechanical in your home that needs fixing. Just say, “You know, I’ve been having problems with my [pretty much anything works here except for recent tech gadgets, which your dad doesn’t understand and will remind him that the world is changing in many ways and his obsolescence and death grow closer with every passing day] lately, any ideas on how to fix it?” Dads live to tell you how to fix things. This is also an ideal conversation because all you need to do is occasionally say, “Uh huh” or repeat the name of a tool he has mentioned. It’s win-win: Dad feels needed, and you can be reading the paper the whole time.

So there are plenty of options to make this situation more tolerable. And while it does seem like kind of a drag to have to go through all of this on one of your days off, remember, you are doing it for the person who gave you life, raised you right and only wants what’s best for you: your mom. This Father’s Day, show her how special she is. Give your dad a call.

Photo from Flickr by break.things.

I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.Fri Jun 18 06:02:49 via TwitBird iPhone

Mark Shurtleff
MarkShurtleff

Well, Jesus HMS Christ hanging on the cross, this really beats all.

If it is war you want, it is war you can have, Paris Review. Yes, some of us are pitied, mocked, shamed, ignored, etc., some of us receive a veritable Push of language-related insults, all for just the way we use English. (I, for one, do not use the word “iron” in public because of how it comes out of my mouth.) Believe me, I surely know far better about the shaming than anyone who spends long weeks composing copy for your tidy, august publication. Yet NEVER, never, shall snuck be a word and saying that it is, with your sole case being “because people say it is,” still does not make it so. (And this is no case of “small people”: there is no regionalism, no foreignness, no cross-cultural misunderstanding.) Yes, my literary dears, someone “told me” it wasn’t a word. That is called “an education.” You may write a note of thanks to those ass-people at Evanston Township High School, 1600 Dodge Drive. (Also, check the OED.) And though I also come from a people who say things like “y’all” and even worse things than that, that has no bearing on illicit creations of irregular verb tenses, and likewise no bearing on my expectation that your publication be a brave front guard against devolution, at the same time as it is a proponent of exciting evolution in literature! Snuck is one of those things and not at all the other!

Gothamist, a metro website company, founded in 2003, now has 13 city-specific websites, which reach 2.7 million unique readers a month, according to Quantcast. For a long time, in my opinion, Gothamist was stubborn about growing as a business. Its publisher, Jake Dobkin, did much of the business himself, and didn’t think the math worked out to have full-time ad salespeople. More recently, that math has apparently changed, and now the goal is to have as many ad salespeople as can support themselves. 16 million pageviews a month is, in the web business, a totally decent amount of inventory to sell. And for a larger media company that would like to seize that reader base, it’s a pretty good buy: definitely big enough, but not so big as to be outrageously expensive. And so, seven or eight months ago now, IFC came calling on Gothamist.

IFC has been eager to grow. They had hired a consultant, former MSNBC.com executive producer Rex Sorgatz, to spice up their web business, and for a while seemed on the edge of performing a pretty large-scale online expansion. But that didn’t seem to materialize.

IFC is owned by Rainbow Media. Rainbow Media is owned in turn by Cablevision, a publicly-traded company which is, unsurprisingly, a cable provider. They also own the Clearview Cinema, which you may know from outings to Chelsea! In 2008, they bought Newsday, and they recently spun off the company that owns Madison Square Garden. They’re controlled by the Dolans, who are pretty famously fun-and a bit tempestuous.

So the approach to Gothamist was an audience play. Rainbow and IFC had had some interest in the Village Voice previously, but didn’t see the math working out. But they were still interested in getting a largely online, sort of “indie” audience.

In the discussions with Gothamist, it took a good while for IFC to finally cough up a number. The first number they came up with was $4 million. Now that’s pretty low. You would imagine that Gothamist would figure out they’d make that themselves in the next three to four years or so, so why would they bother selling it for that price?

By March, as Paid Content noted, the offer had edged up to $5 to $6 million.

This was a strange thing to even be reported. “Spoke to a company source,” noted Paid Content. What benefit would Rainbow have in talking to the press about this potential deal? Did they think it would push down the price?

In any event, were a sale to occur, IFC/Rainbow wanted to make payments over three to four years. This is not something that a purchasee would think was a great idea. In the event of any friction, Gothamist would have to sue for the money, which is, obviously, a tricky thing to finance when you haven’t gotten paid for your sale yet.

There were meetings with lawyers and the like but these conversations never got that far-surely in part because it’s hard to negotiate a potential sale when the buying party is leaking deal terms.

Gothamist and IFC did, however, sign a confidentiality agreement. And then, more recently, they also signed a short-term exclusive to negotiate, for a period of 45 days.

Now, Jake Dobkin said something mouthy, as he does pretty regularly. He made a doofy joke on his Twitter about how a Times profile of his friend Lockhart Steele, the owner of the Curbed blog network, was a “blow job.” But Dobkin hadn’t checked his own current slate of advertisers, and this was during a period when the Times was advertising again on Gothamist.

The Voice and Gawker went to town on these two bits of news. The Voice claimed “Gothamist Sells Out to Cablevision,” for starters, which wasn’t true (though to be fair, they were working off Paid Content, who said Gothamist was “being acquired”). And then the Voice asked, among other things: “Wonder how Dobkin’s gonna feel with Jimmy Dolan’s cock in his mouth?” The suggestion being that Dobkin would, in such a sale, lose his freedom to say doofy things about advertisers.

That day, the head of IFC called Gothamist, and said that they had to put a full stop on the negotiations: Jimmy Dolan was flipping out.

This was kind of funny, because IFC and Rainbow had always maintained that Dolan wasn’t involved, and didn’t know about the deal even: they had independence and could pursue business how they wanted.

And what’s more: no one would have written about it in the first place if someone hadn’t been leaking deal terms.

Four weeks passed. The time period in the Letter of Intent to negotiate expired, and, in the end, IFC said that there was no way Cablevision would let a deal go through. Gothamist must have been relieved-at least they’d seen close-up what they might have gotten in bed with.

So for Gothamist, at least, the dust has settled. They walked away from an odd little negotiation that wasn’t actually that interesting, financially speaking, without even much of a lawyer’s bill. The Village Voice wasn’t so lucky. Cablevision pulled something like a million dollars in advertising over either the original comment or the paper’s proud stance of refusing to apologize.

Or were they? Maybe the Voice got equal payment in notoriety and attention, or perhaps even in cash from advertisers impressed with their moxie, and the math works out for them just fine.

But who knows exactly what consequences there’ll be at IFC and Rainbow? Yesterday’s Times profiled Dolan, and it prominently mentioned the Village Voice crack about Dolan’s genitalia. If the original joke so infuriated Dolan that he wouldn’t let IFC pursue a deal that seemed pretty great for them, well, everyone over there must be having a rough week.

You know what’s happening in Philadelphia this morning? NOTHING.

A reading from the Book of Sarah:

Last summer I stood on the grassy bank of an Alaskan waterway that was teeming with salmon to watch part of Alaska’s brown bear population forage, fight, feed, and fend off enemies to survive. I joined Fish and Game biologists to observe 42 of these majestic wild animals all within eyesight, all at once. Even though I’ve lived all my life in the “Last Frontier,” I still find days like that absolutely fascinating! And I swear the hardest workers on the water were those “mama bears.”

Obviously not waiting for another bear to do the work for them, the mama bears not only foraged for themselves to prepare for winter, but they worked twice as hard to slay salmon for their cubs, too, making sure the future of the population was ready for the season ahead. She would instinctively rear up on hind legs when her cubs were threatened — you don’t mess with her cubs. And most importantly, just as the well known modern proverb expresses, she didn’t just hand over a free fish for the day — she taught young ones how to fish for a lifetime. (There’s no shortage of life lessons learned while scanning our great outdoors!)

So very true! Particularly if you are scanning our great outdoors from, say, the air.

Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, the first writer of the Portuguese language to receive that award, has died at the age of 87. Read Blindness if you haven’t already, it’s really good.

“Excuse, Mr. Snoop Dogg?”
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, sir. But HBO called. They want to know if you’ll do a promotional rap for the True Blood show.”
“Oh, True Blood? Yeah, sure. I like that show.”
“When should I tell them you’ll have it done?”
“About fifteen minutes.”
“Very good, sir.”

Every science fiction book I have ever read suggests that letting fertilizer-fueled oil-eating microbes loose in the world to clean up our disgusting oil spills ends very terribly. And also: “There’s already a 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf off the mouth of the Mississippi River, created years ago by the same fertilizers washing down from upriver farms.”