The Story is Dead, Search Perps, We're Feeling Safer, Can We Still Use "Blind Bastard"?

When did the New York Post become so fond of guys who prey on children? It's predictable that the tabloid would play up the short prison term of a teen killer. Still, the paper's getting carried away with persecuting young Daphne Abdela, the "Baby-faced Butcher" who allegedly uttered our favorite homicidal quote of 1997: "He's a fatty, he'll sink."

Abdela was only 15 when she and Christopher Vasquez, also 15, murdered Michael McMorrow in Central Park on May 23, 1997. Now she's free, but why is the Post stalking her with headlines like "Predator of Park Goes Out to Pray?" Back in '97, the real predator was the 44-year-old McMorrow, a pathetic loser nicknamed "Irish" who sure as hell wasn't out drinking with those kids as a public service. If the Post wants to invent a scandal, they should be asking why a creep like McMorrow got a plaque in Central Park.

Don't worry, Daphne?you may have done the wrong thing, but you sure chose the right victim.

Search Perps

Whatever happened to Lexis-Nexis? To gauge the polarity or importance of a subject, be it the weight-loss pill Zantrex or naked men and women, The New Yorker's scribes seemingly rely on just one source: Google. Not Lexis-Nexis, but Google. The favorite crutch of work-at-home hacks and lazy factcheckers has crept its way into the copy of New York's fabled highbrow magazine.

Curiously, using The New Yorker standards, Nancy Franklin, who cited Google in her Feb. 2 article, "L.A. Love," is more than twice as popular and important as Michael Specter, who used the search-engine of choice for his piece, "Miracle in a Bottle"?3410 vs. 1670 hits. The data may be skewed, however, given that Franklin shares the name of a prolific porn star.

John Updike remains the magazine's most important figure, with 89,400 hits, while poor David Remnick pops up with just 12,800. Still, he's far more important than "chocolate Twinkies" (147) and a "solar powered vibrator" (52).

Who knew cultural studies could be so easy?

We're Feeling Safer

There were an awful lot of consumer product recalls last week. Nautilus Direct was recalling 420,000 Bowflex exercise devices after realizing that the damn things have a tendency to collapse, injuring those idiots foolish enough to use them in the first place. Meanwhile, Philadelphia-based Vincent Giordano Corp. is recalling 52,000 pounds of roast beef, corned beef and pastrami from deli counters after some guys in Georgia say they detected listeria in some of it.

But our Product Recall of the Week goes to good ol' Hormel Foods, who announced that they were recalling an estimated 104,000 pounds of Stagg brand canned chili. The chili, say U.S. Agriculture Dept. officials, "may contain plastic and other material." You might ask yourself how plastic could end up in a batch of chili. They aren't going into much detail, except to say that "the pieces of plastic came from a calculator."

The lesson here being that the bean counters should do their job before the beans go in the chili. Barump-bum.

Can We Still Use "Blind Bastard"?

When word first broke on the morning of Friday, Jan. 23, that 25-year-old Kevin Lazare had been shot three times in the back at a Brownsville bus stop, the victim was identified both on NY1 broadcasts and their website as a "deaf-mute."

Within the hour, however, the headline on the site and the text read by on-air news anchors had been corrected. Lazare was suddenly no longer a "deaf-mute." He was now "speech and hearing impaired."

How many outraged, self-righteous and barely understandable calls did it take from the Language Police to get that little faux pas scrubbed clean?