I Think This Is Also Known As “Repeating The Negative,” But No Matter . . .

Flood the zone, pay the price:

The owners of Gorilla Coffee — where irate employees walked out en masse in April — are suing the New York Times for destroying their lives by covering the debacle.

The New “Hyperlocal” News!

Suffice it to say, there are two reporters listed on this followup. What, there wasn’t another Gorilla Coffee angle to cover yesterday?

[Concur.]

But in this post-modern world, what if the story is actually something more clever than anyone realizes, even going beyond the mildly intriguing yet commonplace “story behind the story” speculation about crass viral marketing? What if, in the context of the Wall Street Journal’s recent moves into the New York media market, it’s actually an elaborate “rope-a-dope” scheme to make us all think that the Times is resting on its laurels when actually the metro reporters are busy preparing an explosive Bloomberg cheating scandal expose? Or some such. Or perhaps I’m overthinking this and just want Sewell Chan back on his old beat . . .

Why I’m Not Running For Dog Catcher

All the broken dreams fit to print. The paper of slackerdom. The Times seems to be the place where you announce you’re not going to do something — three and it’s a trend! First Bloomberg’s Why I’m Not Running For President, then Wiener’s Why I’m Not Running For Mayor and now Harold Ford, Jr.’s Why I’m Not Running For the Senate.

It’s always about being better able to “focus on the issues,” by the way.

All The News That Bit Now Shits

My metro section seems thin today:

The dining room at the paper’s headquarters on Eighth Ave. and 40th St. was shut down Thursday after several employees fell ill with digestive problems.

. . .

The culprit is rumored to be the pasta salad, a source told the Daily News. As many as 15 staffers are sick, the source said.

Location Scout: New York Times Building.

The Times: A Sui Generis, Feckless Solipsism Recondite And Abstrusely Louche — Sisyphean Appurtenance, Enervating Paroxysm

Where’s the gun? Here’s my head:

Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?

. . .

Some entries seem self-referential: it’s no coincidence that a list of obscure and difficult words includes abstruse and recondite, not to mention solipsistic. And while many of these words may look like a foreign language, some actually are: sui generis, bildungsroman and my old friend schadenfreude all make appearances. And some entries just seem baffling: how did we end up using louche 27 times?