High Masculine Tones

... but a more accurate headline might read:

US Credibility Around the World Shot to Shit Long Ago

On a vaguely related personal note, we've finally cancelled our weekly subscription to the Sunday New York Times and I never thought that cutting off an information feed could feel so good. The Times has to be the single most overrated publication in all of journalism, and the Sunday issue is a monument to irrelevance. Bloated by ads, choking on smug self-importance, enthralled by iconic status, it barely bothers with reporting -- preferring to reprint press releases, lightly embroidered with weenie hand-wringing, awash in grown-up conventional wisdom. The Sunday New York Times is prime beachfront property on the east coast of Catatonia.

Lizzy Winstead got it right in a recent New York Observer profile, noting that The Times acts "like a celebrity who gets pregnant -- expounding on things everyone already knows as if they were the first to discover them."

There's about twenty minutes of reading in a typical Sunday edition: the Magazine is OK, and Frank Rich is usually worth a look. I never miss Tom Friedman, whose bombastic drivel drives me to such a rage that the aftereffect is somehow galvanic. But the worthy bits are easily accessed for free online. How many tall, noble trees must sacrifice their existence to this epic of inanity? It lands on our porch in early morning hours, and wakens us with its sickening leaden thud, a corpse dumped by careless assassins... and man oh man, the stench is unbearable.