To first mind my manners: Thank you, Joe Loveland, for inviting me to post here at WWP from time to time.

There’s a Noel Coward-allows-feral-urchin-into-drawing room quality to the invite, but I’m conscious enough to (attempt to) respect the established decorum. Joe and I were together before as part of the late, lightly-lamented Same Rowdy Crowd. But when Joe moved on to start WWP the “Crowd” part of SRC was pretty much reduced to a voice of one, as often happens in the heavily-trafficked, highly-paid universe of unsolicited opinion writing.

Anyway, I’m happy to be here and have made myself a couple promises which I’ll probably break before lunch. I: To be briefer than my usual “Lawrence of Arabia”-meets-“War and Peace” posts at SRC, and 2: To mix in a bit more culture than in the past. (Also, for the pedants who focus more on punctuation than content, I’ll do everything in my limited power to re-check the apostrophe when using “it’s” instead of “its”. Sheesh.)

That all said a couple (brief) thoughts on media stories “out there” recently.

The canning of Jill Abramson at the New York Times reignited the familiar complaint about women being held to a higher standard than men when it comes to being overbearing misanthropes in executive offices. My old pal, David Carr tread as fine a line as an employee could when decoding the equation of the episode for his readers, and of course Ken Auletta has maintained vigilance throughout. Neither though has aggressively fingered Abramson’s boss, Arthur O. Sulzberger as the critical putz of the story.

While there is an interesting walk-through-the-minefield discussion to be had over whether (some) women breaking through the glass ceiling exaggerate the obnoxious qualities of male executives as a way of asserting their new sheriff/tough as any y-chromosome, pretty clearly Sulzberger — the scion of the family-controlled enterprise — couldn’t deal with Abramson. This despite the fact, as Carr and Auletta have pointed out, that unlike a couple of her sausage-bearing predecessors the paper suffered no egregious ethical lapses under her reign — like, you know, not policing a serial plagiarist or failing to fact-check a credulous reporter carrying water for a White House ginning up a fraudulent case for war

Point being, if Sulzberger had a boss he’d have been whacked a decade ago. He hired Abramson. If her personal style annoyed him, it was his job to work it out.

Next … Ann Hornaday, the movie critic of The Washington Post rips into … Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen as inspiration for the latest/this week’s heavily-armed nut job’s mass slaughter? Rather than risk making the obvious point that here in ‘Murica our sexually repressed nuts can accumulate an arsenal of firepower (and yes, I realize this Rodger kid stabbed three of his victims to death), Hornaday points her finger at popcorn comedies that suggest — horror! — that nerds can get hot chicks.

Talk about ineffectual editing.