'Who asked YOU?'

See the post of 5/18.

AP Photo

There are some new aditions to Spotbit.com, including some foreign Web design and fashion magazines. I guess they're not worried about losing the money.

The rest are sill "coming soon." Promise.

There's no such thing as a free lunch...or a free magazine evidently.

Earlier this week, an item on MediaBistro.com, a daily industry e-newsletter reported on Spotbit.com, a site that offers (offered?) free and complete e-versions of dozens of popular magazines in PDF formats. Among the periodicals are/were newsweeklies (Time, Newsweek, Macleans, and US News and World Report); fashion (Elle, Vogue); men's interest (Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim), gadgets and technology, sports, and a few others.

Questioning the legality of the whole enterprise, the last line of the article asked how long it would be until the site was shut down.

The magazine publishers obviously caught wind of the too-good-to-be-true offerings. I browsed Spotbit on Monday and was impressed by the breadth of availability. By Wednesday, several publications were no longer available. Today (Thursday) every remaining magazine -- and there aren't that many -- has a "coming soon" banner across the cover. Strangely, the only items currently available seem to be several months' worth of a Wo, Chinese men's magazine.

The owner's of Spotbit seem to have had their hearts in the right place, even if their heads were who-knows-where. The following appears on the "contact" link for the site:

For Publishers: If the copyright license of any magazine belongs to you, contact us and we'll remove it. However we will appreciate it if you can tell us how much money we have to spend to be able to offer your contents in our site. This domain may be gone, but we'll keep trying, so please reply our letter

Maybe it's just me, but the whole project seems to be the work of either non-Americans with a poor grasp of business acumen, adolescents, or perhaps both.

A New York Times piece awhile back addressed the excesses of a rite-of-passage as exemplified by MTV's program, My Super Sweet 16. Yes, MTV, whose thoughtful shows for adolescents include such educational gems as Tiara Girls, Date My Mom, Fresh Meat, and, of course, Beavis and Butthead.

Rich folks will spend the equivalent of the gross domestic product of a small nation for their sweet baby girls.

Times writer Lola Ogunnaike, picking up on a story about the program that appeares in TIME Magazine reports on the situation with a few representative anecdotes:

Aaron Reid, son of the music mogul L. A. Reid, took five months to plan his party. He had just moved to New York from Atlanta and was eager to make a name for himself at his new prep school, to establish himself as more than L. A. Reid's son. His invitation was an MP3 player. At his party, held at Jay-Z's 40/40 club last November, the producer Jermaine Dupri was the D.J., the rapper Kanye West performed, and Diddy, Aaron's godfather, made an appearance. Poppa Reid clearly pulled some strings.

''Everybody else spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I didn't spend anything,'' Mr. Reid said proudly. ''I got my friend's club. I got my friend to perform and I got my friend to D.J.''

''There's absolutely no way that I would ever spend that type of money,'' he continued. ''I think it's over the top and sickening and a real poor representation of wealth.'' (emphasis added)

In other words, it's all right to throw an outrageous party costing tens of thousands of dollars as long as you don't have to actually pay for it.

Ogunnaike continus with the story about a joint birthday-graduation party for two daughters of a cardioologist who immigrated to the United States from India in the mid-1980's.

''It's the American way. You work hard and you play hard.''
Born with silver ladles in their mouths, his daughters have certainly mastered the latter.

Their Bollywood-themed party for 500 guests will be held in the family's backyard --all 4 1/2 acres, behind the 10,000-square-foot house. The Format, their favorite band, will perform. And they will make their grand entrance on litters, during an elaborate procession led by elephants. The sisters, who plan to perform a choreographed routine at their to-do next month, are also taking dance lessons, and they've enlisted the help of a trainer.

''We both want to lose three pounds,'' said Priya, who received a Mercedes convertible and an assortment of diamond jewelry for her birthday. Her sister's graduation gift package included a Bentley, diamonds and two homes in India.

''I was really surprised,'' Divya said, ''because I was only expecting a Bentley and one house.''

Who says you can't raise kids with reasonable expectations anymore?

According to the TIME piece by Ana Marie Cox:

To witness such unself-conscious acquisitiveness in one sitting is like eating an entire normal-kid birthday-party sheet cake, wax decorative candles and all. There's the same queasy sense of monochromatic excess because all the shows are alike, from the fake panic that the party may not happen to the scary-sexy dry humping on the dance floor.

Chuck Berry was prescient in his song on the subject, written almost 50 years ago:

Sweet little sixteen
She's got the grown up blues.
Tight dress and lipstick.
She's sportin' high heel shoes.
Oh, but tomorrow morning
She'll have to chang her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again.

Except I would expect these guys to cut class...or have mummy and daddy pay someone to attend for them.

An article in the May 14 Sunday Times by Pat Borzi caught my eye.
Entitled "Mets' Lima Has Searched For Excuses, Not in Mirror, " it was a fairly caustic piece about the shortcomings of Jose Lima, a pitcher brought up to help fill the gap caused by injuries to two of the Mets regular starting rotation. (Actually his name is pronounced lee-ma, not ly-ma). Borzi chastised Lima for not accepting responsiblity for his mistakes, blaming the umpires instead.

Borzi wrote: "Lima claimed the plate umpire, Rick Reed, did not give him a called third strike on a borderline 2-2 pitch to Rickie Weeks in the fifth with a man on second and two out. In his first start last Sunday [May 7], against Atlanta, Lima accused the umpire Angel Hernandez of not giving him the corners because he was not John Smoltz, his opponent."

Now, I'm not a great fan of Lima's, but even I thought the tone of the piece seemed unusually harsh for a news story. Also self-contradictory when the writer concluded with the following:

"They needed me so bad today, because it was so tough last night," said Lima, referring to the rain-shortened 2-0 loss in Philadelphia on Thursday. "I got the lead. I didn't hold it. It's not the guys' fault. It's my fault." (emphasis added).

Sounds like a mea culpa to me, like someone who's not looking for excuses. Make up your mind, Pat.

What made it even harder to discern was a small filler following the story which stated, "Other points of view on the Op-Ed page seven days a week. The New York Times."

So was this a "point of view" then? If so a) there should have been something to state it as such; and b) it doesn't belong in the sports news section. You can't have it both ways.

It's one of those issues that comes in cycles. It hits hard then falls off the radar for awhile, until the next big thing.

A few years ago it was Jayson Blair, the reporter for The New York Times, who plagerized and fabricated his way to infamy. Most recently it was Kaavya Viswanathan, the young Harvard student who took pieces of her novel from the works of other published authors.

Now it's a freelance writer for NBC who lifted pieces . . . complete with inflections . . . not from some obscure years-old cable show, but from the network's own West Wing as part of the Kentucky Derby coverage.

The chutzpah of this writer, to throw their own show back at them like this. And the shame of NBC personnel for not reconizing it before it was aired.

Other things that may or may not be good for you, depending on which way the wind is blowing on a given day:

• tomatoes
• potatoes
• wine / alcohol
• caffeine
• chocolate
• television
• primary education
• secondary education
• college education
• free speech
• the Internet

THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read, by Stuart Kelly on Bookreporter.com

More jumping on the Kaavya Viswanathan bandwagon. A piece on yesterday's MediaBistro Web site reports more instances of plagerism from other authors.
Makes you wonder: If she's done all this in the professional world, what kind of "training" did she have as a student? Will Harvard review her application and credentials?

In this week's Sports Illustrated, columnist Rick Reilly offers some advice for Delmon Young, the Devil Rays prospect who registered his indignation over being called out on strikes in a minor league affair by throwing his tossing his bat, which hit the umpire.
"Regretlessly Yours" follows a mad-lib, fill-in-the-blank form for Young and his boorish brethren, fulfilling the obligation of apologizing without the actual sincerity.

As SI baseball writer Tom Verducci put it:

The disgraceful episode apparently wasn't so much as a wake-up call for Young. Instead of giving an immediate, on-camera apology that night, he hid behind a prepared statement the next day. Quick accountability would have been a good place for Young to start rebuilding his image.

Keith Hernandez could also find the apolo-form helpful, writes Reilly. The Mets broadcaster objected to the presence of the San Diego Padres' female massage therapist in the dugout with a "woman's place is in the kitchen" mal mot. His attempt to lighten the momement by saying how much he loves "the gals" probably didn't help. Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornhesier was only one pundit to comment on Kaveman Keith.