Allahpundit is on the scene:

I’m starting to think Lucas’s endless mind games with “Star Wars” fans is some sort of“Magic Christian” prank in which he’s gotten bored with his mountain of money and is now having fun by messing with people’s heads. Maybe he’ll put Jar Jar in one of the TIE fighters at the end of “Star Wars” when he does the next re-edit, just to kick his most devoted acolytes in the groin.

A weird, weird, story.

The new graphic is not to be missed.

I have no idea what’s going on in this picture. There’s Miranda Kerr, Legolas, a hot-tub, a Born Free bottle, a champaign flute, a naked baby, and a gaggle of people in swimsuits who may (or may not) be nannies/friends/other mothers.

But whatever it is, the Australian version of parenthood seems to differ somewhat from the experience I’m more familiar with.

I just got a minute-long (actually, 1:07) voicemail from a reader. She was unhappy with this piece I wrote about Planned Parenthood because I “failed Journalism 101” and didn’t name my sources. By the end she was pretty much just yelling, “Shame on you Jonathan V. Last–shame on you!!!!”

Awesome part: I haven’t written anything about Planned Parenthood in months (years?). She was obviously misattributing something to me. So she cared enough to find a phone number, make a call, and scream into a phone for a minute, which must have been an investment of five minutes of her life. But not enough to figure out who actually wrote the piece that made her so upset. Which might have taken a second and a half.

If only she had left a call-back number.

For reasons I’ll share with you at a later date, I decided to treat myself to something nice last week. It came today.

Fantastic Four #49 is a really neat key all by itself–first full appearance of Galactus, second appearance of the Silver Surfer. And the first time the two of them appear on a cover. Plus, I really dig the art; it has such a great rocket-age vibe. But the real pleasure is right above the right hand of Galactus. You’ll have to click to enlarge.

Here’s Matthew Yglesias with a quick history of American news media:

The Grand Old Days of American journalism were characterized first and foremost by severely curtailed competition. There were three television networks, and outside of New York each city had basically one newspaper.

At first I thought this couldn’t be serious. I understand that the days when there were only three broadcast networks are before Yglesias’s time–but it isn’t exactly ancient history. There are lots of people who were around then. Some of them even work at Slate. You would think that, if he couldn’t be bothered to research the period, Yglesias might have queried one of them.

For instance, when I was a kid growing up outside Philadelphia, we had: the Philadelphia Inquirer,  the Daily News, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and the Philadelphia Journal. That is, in addition to the two local dailies, the Gloucester County Times and the Courier-Post.

Without thinking too hard, Boston had the Herald and the Globe (that’s off the top of my head, they may have had more); Seattle had the Seattle Times, the News-Tribune, and the Post Intelligencer; St. Louis had the Globe-Democrat and the Post-Dispatch.

You get the idea. Back in the Grand Old Days most cities had at least two newspapers. (And that’s just counting the major papers–there were tons of smaller ethnic and alternative papers.) I know it’s hard to believe, but once upon a time the major American cities actually had morning and afternoon newspapers. And many of these cities had papers competing even within those time slots!

I know. It sounds crazy. And really, who can be expected to know about stuff that happened way back in the age of rotary dials. I don’t blame Yglesias. It would have taken him 30, maybe even 45 minutes of research to find this out because since most of these papers disappeared before the digital age it’s hard to find them mentioned on the internet.

And really, you can’t blame a journalist for not knowing something if it isn’t in Wikipedia or on Google’s first three results pages. I mean what–do you want journalists to have to read books just so they understand stupid details about what the world was like before iPhones and Twitter?

And I’m sure that from here on out Yglesias will be more careful when spouting off on topics about which he knows very little.

Oh. Wait.

Update: In the comments, Galley Reader JSG asks an interesting question: Is Yglesias’ contention that most cities once had only a single newspaper true for any major American city? Maybe someone with a Twitter account can ask him to provide an example.

A bunch of my friends have just hung up their own shingle at the Washington Free Beacon. It’s going to be a really neat project, so check in with them early, and often, for good stuff. I’ll have more later in the day.