Am I a TOTAL Loser for Never Hearing of Ganglandnews Before?
2000-02-05 23:36:55
So, I got this lame junk mail from Brill's Content today, trying to get me to buy a subscription. They used this stratagem of listing all these things you would know if you'd read Brill's in the last few months. The thing is that it was all BULLSHIT, for example: there's this site called IMDB where you can look up movie info. NO SHIT, BRILL'S CONTENT. So I was dumbfounded that they had a blurb about this Gangland News site that I'd never heard of. How did that slip by?
See, I'm way more plugged in to the Web and practically everything else than those mincing nancy-boys at Brill's Content. What a bunch of PUSSIES, I have to say. "Waah waah waah, we are all so very sad. Waaah waaah waaah, we bemoan the state of American journalism." WANKERS! If you're looking for some journalism, you just come on over to PDJ, and I'll shovel that shit down your scrawny throats by the BUCKETFUL. "State of American Journalism," indeed! It is to laugh!
SO, you can see why I was shocked and outraged to hear about a site like Gangland News for the first time from a cheeseball outfit like B.C. What's happening to me? Have I lost my EDGE? Am I no longer the clued-in Web warlord I once was? Whither Mr. Bad? Whither online journalism?
If it was just some lame-ass e-commerce dot-com that sold bamboo ass-scratchers or something, well, it wouldn't be so bad. The thing is, this Gangland News is the FUNKY SHIT. I can't believe how great it is! The guy who runs ganglandnews.com, Jerry Capeci, was this organized crime beat reporter for the New York Daily News for 6 years. Then he wrote all these books about John Gotti and etc. and he's now the PRIMO SOURCE for organized crime info in the WORLD. And he's got a Web site, with a long column about organized crime that he updates every week! Beaujolais to him!
The best part about Gangland News is that he doesn't just cover the well-trodden ground of Italian organized crime. Sure, of course, there's plenty of Gottis and Palermos and Bonnanos and the like. But Gangland News also covers the excellent Chinese mafias like the Ghost Shadows and the Flying Dragons! Plus the Russians! And the Vietnamese! And the Koreans, and even the Fujianese! Why limit yourself to veal marsala and zitti when there's a SMORGASBORD of racketeering fun? That's the way I see it.
The main thing I don't like is that it's mostly about New York criminals, but what can you do? The guy's from New York, that's what he knows. And, as much of a bastardo San Francisco bigot as I am, I have to admit that New York is the place to go if you're going to be organizing heroin rings or construction rackets or pinball franchises. New York knows CRIME, that's for goddamn sure.
Go read ganglandnews.com now, and every week from here on out until the end of time. It's like having a serialized version of Nick Tosches's excellent novel, Trinities, except repeated over and over, every week. Go check this out. Tell 'em Mr. Bad sent you. Don't mention the "Brill's Content" part. Fuck those Brill's guys.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Report from Spiritual Machines
Arkuat gives you the inside scoop on the "Spiritual Machines" panel and conclave. Wacky excitement ensues! (More...)
Our man Daemon Agent checks out the heavy heavy sounds of crazy space surf rockers Man or Astroman?. (More...)
This is one for the Ages. Our new signature SMRL drink. We beta tested this several weeks ago at the Goat Brothers B-Day Party. Oh my! (More...)
So I was walking around the Tenderloin looking for stray twenty-dollar-bills that might have fallen into gutters, and I was thinking, as I often do, about my mother. (More...)
Brother Wayne Lays Down the Truth
Flesh interviews Wayne Kramer of MC5. (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)