Someone HAD to do this. Delicious.
Excellent.
That’s pretty funny. Almost too easy.
pretty funny. i actually saw that one yesterday and suspected nothing.
I’ve always liked the Metropolitan Diary. *ducks*
there’s a really obnoxious one on the site now involving a parking space. and obnoxious by met diary standards is something.
I’ve always wanted to submit a Metropolitan Diary involving the G train and the delightfully unscrupulous childrearing methods observed therein. Oh, those pesky scamps!
a coworker of mine used to insist that these weren’t made up.
I’ve always wanted to submit a Metropolitan Diary involving the G train and the delightfully unscrupulous childrearing methods observed therein. Oh, those pesky scamps!
I propose a “let’s troll metropolitan diary” contest.
Link to unedited nytimes entry?
there’s a lot of bored dowagers living in the upper east side with time to submit these things. what’s even more revolting are the poems they sometimes print.
as much as i detest the column, it’s sort of an institution i would miss if it went away.
Link to unedited nytimes entry?
Gawker has the version as submitted, and as it ran in the paper:
http://gawker.com/news/metropolitan-diary/times-metropolitan-diary-gets-punked-by-wfmu-235918.php
A VALENTINE SACRIFICE
There’s nothing like bling
To tug the heartstring
From Tiffany to Cartier;
As he sees his love’s smile,
He forgets for a while
That he’s lighter by
Half of his pay.
btw, one of the radio pranksters, Andy Breckman, is the creator of TV’s Monk, and once said on the air when I was calling in, “I betcha Dr Morbius lives alone.”
that parking spot one is so fucking bizarro.
“I guess this guy isn’t from New York, and he doesn’t know that we save spots for each other.”
... they do? what? new york has a tradition of parking-spot sharing & interdependency, while out-of-towners are the selfish dickheads?? BOXCAR.
i read that one and was like, ok that doesn’t seem like yr usual metropolitan diary entry, fwiw. i’d chalk its inclusion up to the fact that fewer people under 65 are into the thing anymore, hence fewer entries.
I do love the seven second delay.
WTF?
A friend of mine, a transplanted New Yorker visiting from Swaziland, braved New York City traffic to drive her parents’ car and meet me in Greenwich Village.
WAHT AN ASSHOLE DON’T YOU KNOW MY FRIEND CAME ALL THE WAY FROM SWAZILAND!
...
To my surprise, the leather-clad Harley rider maneuvered his Harley in between me and the car. He sat there looking threatening and glared down the car driver, who had no choice but to keep on driving.
My new Harley protector stayed and held the spot for me until my friend arrived within a minute or so.
It was a sweet moment of triumph.
HORNY TOUGH GUY HELPS ME OUT BC HE THINKS I’M CUTE = I’M MORALLY IN THE RIGHT!
nyc traffic is more challenging than life in swaziland, don’t you know.
Plus the dude who deserved the space “braved NYC traffic” too. Ugh. Sometimes I give people the benefit of the doubt on the space-saving thing, because I (naively) assume someone would only do it if they really needed to.
I’d never heard of this column before, but it reads like Reader’s Digest “Life in These United States” schlock anecdotes, except with rent control and tiny dogs.
OK this whole thing just reminded me how much I love ‘seven second delay’ (I used to listen to it all the time). Yay for podcasts!
This is probably the first ‘successful’ 7SD that has topped the disastrous ones in a long while.
OMG did you hear the one where they tried to coax customer service reps into “flirting with an underaged girl”?
I miss the show most weeks.
More Gawker fun with MetDiary:
Suggested revisions for Metropolitan Diary’s standard line, “Without missing a beat”... —“And then the clerk, this son of a bitch, just blurts out...” —“Then, faster than it takes a whore to say ‘Hello, Sailor’ my husband Gerald yells out...” —“Then the fucking clown standing ahead of me in line pipes up...”
http://www.gawker.com/news/new-york-times/metropolitan-diary-just-the-punchlines-128805.php
anyway, if y’all want to point and laugh at something in the NYT today, you’d do much better to ignore the self-congratulation anagnorisis of the Metropolitan Diary and focus instead on the Arts section annunciation that lots of black people listen to some dude named Tom Joyner
i love andy brekman and station manager ken.
WAIT: This is real then?
Dear Diary:
I was in my warmest running gear on a frigid day. The cold had worsened the pain in my bad knee, but I was determined to finish my last two laps around Tompkins Square Park. That is, of course, until I decided to just quit, go home and take a hot shower. I gave up and started walking by the park’s southwest corner.
A man who wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and whom I’d seen in line for a soup kitchen in the park a few minutes before, was walking on the sidewalk near me. “You’re not finished,” he said to me. “Don’t give up now! Come on, go!”
I smiled, thanked him, and happily ran my last mile. Michele Ventura
THANK YOU HOMELESS MAN FOR MOTIVATING MY RUN BUT DON’T TOUCH ME
WE INVENTED THE REMIX
mike pollak, you douchebag
haha andy breckman is calling the times now!!!
OMG OMG OMG
I just realized Andrea is the blog girl—the same one who did the pranking in the 7 Second Delay I mentioned above. She’s totally brilliant.
I take it this is where the WESU/WFMU came from on Pollak’s part:
Is it the same Andrea? Cuet!
that twit from the Times was hilarious at the end of the show.
...but he’s vicious.
http://gawker.com/news/wfmu/metropolitan-diary-editor-steamed-at-wfmu-236995.php
Michael Pollak. Pollak threatened, more or less, to sabotage her Fulbright application. (She’s a college senior.) He also called her “arrogant” because there’s lots of stuff about her on the Internet (!), and pointed out that the Metropolitan Diary is the one bright spot in the sad lives of many elderly people....
Especially in this post-9/11 world.
Ever more impressive!!
1) http://gawker.com/news/metropolitan-diary/prank-might-kill-metropolitan-diary-237136.php
We hear that the WFMU v. NY Times incident might spell the end of the Metropolitan Diary column. (The incident: an WFMU intern submitted a funny fake item, lied when Times editor Michael Pollak called to verify, and got chewed out on the air after it was published.) We hear Pollak has been opposed to the feature for a while, even though it’s the sole solace in the lives of some elderly New Yorkers, because he hates that the items in the column are impossible to verify. In the words of our informant, he “knows” that this isn’t the first false item that’s slipped in. We shudder to think that this prank might just be the ammo Pollak needs to convince his higher-ups that MetDi should close up shop. What will the old folk do for fun now?
And a thorough update from Ken at FMU’s blog:
Michael Pollak ... testily informed Andy and I (aged 50 and 48 respectively) that the New York Times is a “smorgasbord” which does not publish exclusively for “young trendies.” He lauded the Web 2.0 nature of The Metropolitan Diary, a column with an audience of elderly people “who look on it as a kind of one bright spot in a week of otherwise gloomy news.”
OK, I missed the first half of 7SD last night — a SECOND FMU-inspired fraud made it into MetDiary??
they all seemed fake to me.
well, sure! Maybe Ken & Andy are just brilliantly faking a second fake.
http://gawker.com/5867586/ this is v good, i don’t really read times columnists so didn’t actually know who this guy was