Fresh outta the mailbag:
Philadelphia Newspapers Lays off 68 Guild Members
Feb. 27, 2008
The Company laid off 68 Guild members today from the advertising, circulation, customer service, finance, marketing and systems departments.
This amounts to almost 10 percent of the union’s membership. Company officials said that a very small number of managers would be laid off.
“If the [...]

CHOADS: We can’t help but ponder what it all means when Philadelphia Weekly does a whole cover story on Frank Rubino’s favorite WIP caller? Further, what does it mean when you actually spend time reading this? We think it means that there is now so much media that the media itself has completely run the [...]

Promise #317:
On this day, Wednesday, February 27, 2008, Philebrity shall hereby retire the DJ/music term “bangers” and all derivations thereof: “club bangers,” “THE bangers,” and so on. We are not sure anyone knows what this term has ever truly meant — or if it meant anything at all — and anyone who uses it, even [...]

Herrrrre’s Johnny!

$55K and you can’t even listen to Howard Stern on me. Seriously, WTF.

Can you hear something that Nutter’s Hybrid is trying to think about? Send it along to tips[at]philebrity[dot]com.

>>> Dig if you will the picture of these sleeping men at left: Who are they? A) The future of hip-hop. B) Comcast employees. C) The world’s largest 5-year-olds. If you guessed “B,” you’re right — sort of. These are the mopes that Comcast hired off the street to attend an FCC hearing in Cambridge, [...]

Sunday, March 2
Terry Gross Visits Springfield
This Sunday, host extraordinaire of NPR’s Fresh Air makes a cameo appearance on Fox TV’s The Simpsons, playing herself in an episode called “The Debarted.”
[...] When a new, tough-looking kid at school named Donny teams up with Bart to help him carry out his pranks, Bart thinks he has found [...]

Employees are overworked with no relief in sight, and not being paid for working overtime. Reporters often lack necessities to do their job[...] This climate of crisis is embodied by the soiling of the bathrooms. In the first incident, in the men’s bathroom, it took 24 hours for the feces to be removed from the [...]

I saw Dave Chappelle as I was walking to work this morning.
He was talking to a woman from the Center City District (wearing one of the minty green janitorial uniforms) on the corner of Juniper and Walnut. I took off my headphones to hear his voice and make sure. I am 99.9% such.
He was wearing [...]

>>> We’ve been hearing good things about this new band that Gianmarco Cilli has put together. You may know Cilli from Windsor For The Derby or National Eye, two thoughtful, moody indie rock bands he plays with, and his solo stuff does not fall too, too far from those trees. There’s a more personal sweetness [...]

After the jump, an important update for this week’s installment in the TLA Philebrity Screening Series! Note: Includes letters of apology, salty authors, life lessons and, ultimately, Sean Agnew and Real Genius.

The hip-hop world is still reeling from last December’s news of Jay-Z parting ways with Def Jam, but we’ve seen precious little about the repercussions of the split locally. And there is much to consider: Jay-Z’s label, Rocafella, was the source of much of Hova’s Def Jam activity, and Rocafella housed arguably the two biggest [...]

Honestly, Officer, there’s a perfectly good explanation for all of this.
PerezHilton: It’s A Lot Funnier If You Read It In The Voice Of Tom Brokaw

After the jump, Brian James Kirk examines the cult of Newgrounds.

The brainchild of Philly native John Ferlaine, finally rescued from 1960s obscurity.

Last month, we posted about the strange meta overlap and old wounds dying hard between, well, between a bunch of things when it came to this season of HBO’s The Wire: Baltimore and Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Baltimore Sun, and most pointedly, present Inky ed (and former Sun editor) Bill Marimow and Wire [...]

>>> Philly subscribers to the PETA email list got a strange and perhaps unsettling piece of spam yesterday: An email imploring them to try the vegetarian offerings at local 7-Eleven’s. We know, your mouth is already watering: faux chicken, seitan steak, falafel, and tofu egg salad. The veg-friendly 7-Elevens are as follows: 16th & JFK, [...]

>>> Attention lovers of highlights on fiftysomething men, snakeskin everything and steel horses on which we ride. Richie Sambora (pictured) is in the motherfucking building. Two Liberty Place, that is. Somebody send dude a gold-flecked Joe’s Pizza, pronto, and welcome him to his new, window-less Philadelphia life. [Inky]
>>> What is the only thing that could [...]

Click to enlarge.
Before we’ve even had a chance to talk about Larry Farnese — the Center City litigator who’s just entered the race for Vince Fumo’s Senate seat (alongside Anne Dicker and John Dougherty) — it seems as though two major gaffes are doing the talking for him. Just last Friday, the Daily News reported [...]

>>>> Aw man, everybody’s gotta pay the bills, right? Right. But pardon us if we take particular joy in ObamaGirl Amber Lee Ettinger’s nazzzz-ty-azz pitstains (view video at right). We may be small people for enjoying this so deeply, but the arc of webfame is no less awesome and humbling because of it. [MakeTheLogoBigger]
>>> Oh, [...]