A young Texas cop is being investigated after using a stun gun on a 76-year-old driver with expired tags in an incident caught on the police cruiser's dash cam.
Old people do not stink, scientists found today. A large-scale study of people who wore things in their armpits and then had other people smell those things concluded that "the underarm odor of 75-to-95-year-olds was judged to be less intense and far more pleasant than the scent of either young or middle-aged adults."
What should have been just another sleepy Canadian Football League alumni luncheon in Vancouver on Friday turned unexpectedly violent, when Joe Kapp, 73, former quarterback for the B.C. Lions, got into a fight with his longtime rival, 74-year-old Angelo Mosca, former defensive tackle for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
Shit ton isn't a scientific measure, but it can be used to describe the 104 bricks of coke that Leo Sharp, an 87-year-old Indiana resident, was busted with in Michigan. This is like a real life Breaking Bad.
An 85-year-old woman walking near her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was dragged by her neck and forced to perform oral sex on her attacker in a stairwell on 83rd St. She's in stable condition at a nearby hospital, but her attacker is still at large; police spent Monday driving vans "equipped with loudspeakers blaring the suspect's description" around the neighborhood. He's said to be "a light-skinned Hispanic man, 25-30 years old." [WPIX]
Yesterday on the Politico website, Andrew Glass posed a query about Washington Post columnist David Broder, who is known as "the dean of the Washington press corps" because his early columns about how he could see good arguments on both the Loyalist and Whig sides during the revolution set the template for evenhanded analysis that exists to this day. Glass' question is, in fact, related to that evanhandedness. Why, if Broder is so "relentlessly centrist," do so many people hate his fucking guts and vomit blood every time they read his meandering advocacy of the status quo?
"SPEAKING of fathers who had it tough, how about the father of our country: In 1776, the 30,000 British troops that fought George Washington and his overmatched army in New York City was, until D-Day, the largest naval attack force in history. Thousands and thousands of New York rebels perished in the battle." [NYP]
David Broder—known as "the dean of the Washington press corps" because he taught a young H.L. Mencken how to read—offers his thoughts on the Imus affair and the Duke lacrosse incident today. Broder's columns usually read like a parody of, well, Broder columns, but this morning's missive is almost a parody of a parody of a Broder column.
Pity poor Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times, tasked with explaining the phenomenon of teen social networking sites in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.
"In December 1996, inspired in part by [Tony] Randall's well-publicized late fatherhood (his wife was 26 at the time), I wrote an article for The New York Times about men having children at a stage in life when their peers were usually contemplating a move to Florida or their next cardiogram. One proud papa dubbed them start-over dads, or SODs for short.... Under the circumstances, it seemed natural to check in with some of the same fathers 10 years later to see how they are faring in their eighth or even ninth decade."
Lewis Lapham, the former Harper's editor whose name we are seemingly unable to type without attaching the descriptor "soporific," gets a profile in today's Sun pegged to the forthcoming release of Lapham's Quarterly, a publication which should have the billion-dollar sleep-aid industry soiling its collected trousers. Sun scribe Gary Shapiro starts the piece by noting that "F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, but he never met Lewis Lapham." Lewis better get a move on if he's going to finish the first scene of his Act Two. Dude's a septuagenarian with a smoking habit. That curtain is coming down one way or another. Bonus fun fact: As it turns out, reading about Lewis Lapham is only slightly less boring than reading Lewis Lapham.
Number two? Dying.
• Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone: Old and in charge. [LAT]
• Media readership falling? (Yes.) Maybe we should change the way it's measured. [Guardian]
• Social networking: The next big thing for parents. And dogs. [NYT]
• Memo to the NYT: When a guy's your go-to quote pretty much every time a new magazine launches, you might want to learn how to spell his name correctly. [Seth Mnookin]
All right, we promise this will be the last installment of our recent obsession with vintage advertising. Still, this one (our subtle favorite from a larger gallery) is worth a look both for its pharmaceutical shilling and its ends-based directive concerning the inconveniently elderly. The ad predates senior-targeted drugvertisements focused on walking by the seashore, dandling babies in laps, or performing creaky tai chi in a park somewhere. Grandpa acting up? Pump him full of Thorazine, and enjoy the drooling silence! We think Gramps is just understandably "agitated and belligerent" about that giant fat tie. Full ad after the jump.
Women's Wear Daily reports that Jann Wenner's decision to replace Michael Caruso at the helm of Men's Journal hasn't worked out as well as, um, pretty much only Jann, expected. "[N]ewsstand sales for the magazine have gotten increasingly worse since Wenner took over as editor in chief last November," says WWD. Why could that be?
We've called Liz Smith a few unpleasant names over the last few years: "doughy," "antediluvian," "senile," "past her prime," "washed up," "an escapee from the nursing home," "ready for her Aricept," that sort of thing. Still, we bear her no general ill will and today, in fact, find ourselves in some sort of sympathy with her:
Post gossip dowager Cindy Adams emerges from her mausoleum this morning to -
