!--paging_filter--pThe Slum Village lyricist, a href="http://www.myspace.com/zhifi" target="_blank"eLHzi/a, reveals a penchant for the Coen Brothers and radio-friendly alt rock. /p pbWhat was the best album of 2008?/b/p pRadiohead, iIn Rainbows/i. This album was able to make people like Radiohead if they didn't already. It was groundbreaking all the way around. Each Radiohead album is diverse, musical, and the lyrics are always on point and poetic./p pbWhat was the worst album of 2008?/b/p pa href="http://www.xlr8r.com/features/2008/12/best-2008-elzhi"read more/a/p

Son sort ne tenait plus qu’à un fil : l’entraîneur du FC Chartres, Joël Germain, a été limogé par le président, Gérard Cornu, après seulement six mois au club. Gérard Cornu évoque un désaccord avec le comité directeur. Pour le reste, c’est silence radio.

Son sort ne tenait plus qu’à un fil : l’entraîneur du FC Chartres, Joël Germain, a été limogé par le président, Gérard Cornu, après seulement six mois au club. Gérard Cornu évoque un désaccord avec le comité directeur. Pour le reste, c’est silence radio. L’intérim sera assuré par Christophe Hurault, l’entraîneur de la réserve. C’est lui qui préparera le match à hauts risques de ce week-end, à Malesherbes, un rival dans la course au maintien. Le FC Chartres occupe actuellement la dernière place du CFA 2.

div style="FLOAT: right"img title="Huawei U121 Announced" alt="Huawei U121 Announced" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/huawei-u121.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pHuawei Technologies has just released its third generation Huawei U121 handset that will cater to those looking for an entry-level handset without compromising on style. Made from high-quality materials including stainless steel, you will find the Huawei U121 pack the following :- p ul li1.3 megapixel camera/li liSupport for video calls/li liIntegrated FM radio/li limicroSD memory card slot/li li3.5mm headphone jack/li liAudio and video playback/li liminiUSB port/li li3G connectivity/li/ul p/pNo idea on whether this will make it Stateside or not as it looks as though it is a Russia-only candybar phone at this point in time. p/p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/huawei_u121_announced.html"Huawei U121 Announced/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081203205407" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081203205407?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081203205407" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081203205407amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Fhuawei_u121_announced.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/x94YMNv6luouds7qMV0Jh3Yri_4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/x94YMNv6luouds7qMV0Jh3Yri_4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=WkRd2tLH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=AnO5jKdq"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=AnO5jKdq" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=KPR0E1D3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=5jyut1tQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=5jyut1tQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=4Ang7MEZ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=4Ang7MEZ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/BLPycVnvxjQ" height="1" width="1"/

centerimg title="C'est Officiel, Le Samsung Ego GT-S9402 est Disponible" style="MARGIN: 0px" alt="C'est Officiel, Le Samsung Ego GT-S9402 est Disponible" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/samsung-ego-gt-s9402.jpg" border="0" //centerbr / pLe Samsung Ego GT-S9402 est un produit de luxe et n'est pas à la portée de toutes les bourses à en juger de son prix de ventre, 1.200€. Construit à base d'alliage "métal liquide" développé par Caltech, l'Ego est un solide portable qui se prétend d'être "plus résitant, supporte jusqu'à 1,8 fois la pression, 1,6 fois plus flexible, un taux d'absortion des vibrations 3 fois plus élevés et un taux de conductivité thermique 100% inférieur au titanium". Il dispose des caratéristiques suivantes:/p p ul liTriband Connexion GSM (900/1800/1900 Mhz), GPRS/EDGE sur la 1er carte SIM/li liDouble band Connexion (900/1800 Mhz), GPRS/EDGE sur la 2nd carte SIM/li li2" d'affichage en 262k color QVGA AMOLED /LI LIcamera 5 megapixel /LI LIAutofocus, stabilisation de l'image, détection du sourire, WDR et Flash LED/LI LIFM Radio intégrée avec RDS/LI LI1Go de mémoire intégré/LI LIlecteur de carte microSDHC/LI LIBluetooth 2.0 et port USB/LI/UL PDommage qu'il ne supporte pas le mode 3G ou WiFi, sinon il aurait sa place parmi les téléphones portable de haut de gamme./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr/archives/2008/12/cest_officiel_le_samsung_ego_gts9402_est_disponible.php"Capos;est Officiel, Le Samsung Ego GT-S9402 est Disponible/a d'a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"Ubergizmo FR/a. Aussi a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"en Anglais/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081203204006" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081203204006?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081203204006" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=5336763717amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081203204006amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2Ffr%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Fcest_officiel_le_samsung_ego_gts9402_est_disponible.php"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/FnTDUOpeUKmNSbhx9GMPFJYzk-s/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/FnTDUOpeUKmNSbhx9GMPFJYzk-s/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo_fr/~4/ndWB4iydWIY" height="1" width="1"/

Struggling with rising music royalty costs, on Wednesday, Yahoo offloaded much of the responsibility for its Internet radio service to CBS, only a few months after Time Warner made a similar move with AOL Radio.

!-- pageType= magazinesmall slug= ff_blodget section= techbiz subsection= people headline= Financial Industry Scapegoat Reinvents Himself as Financial Reporter authorName= Daniel Roth creditType= photo credit= Mike McGregor caption= Henry Blodgetis back, and his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. -- pstrongHenry Blodget/strong has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/2005/10/welcomeand_than.html"dripped with disgust/a. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. /ppDuring his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/15/4-new-experts-henry-blodget-josh-kopelman-tim-o%E2%80%99reilly-robert-scoble-join-techcrunch50/"judging a contest/a for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come."/p pI meet a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/henry_blodget.html"Blodget/a at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/"Silicon Alley Insider/a, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience./p pThe site shares two floors of a Manhattan office building with programmers and business staff for some of Alley Insider's sister companies, all of which were started by former DoubleClick CEO a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/kevin_ryan"Kevin Ryan/a. Blodget works in a double-wide cubicle near a window, separated by a low wall from the site's two other editors. They spend their days crawling Twitter and RSS feeds, calling sources, and pumping out about a dozen daily takes on the business world, most with Digg-friendly headlines (no easy accomplishment with bone-dry business stories). "Is Facebook Distracting Us From Porn? No" is a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/is-facebook-distracting-us-from-porn-no"typical/a, or "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/googles_ginormous_food_budget_7530_per_googler"Google's Ginormous Food Budget/a: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million a Year." Blodget tells his team to think of the site as talk radio: He wants readers to feel compelled to check in several times a day to get the Alley Insider view on everything going on in their world./p pFor privacy, we duck into a small conference room, and Blodget, tall and skinny, sinks into a ridiculously deep leather chair. His floppy dirty-blond hair gives him a youthful, almost carefree air, but the deep circles that ring his eyes tell a different story. He's managing a 24-hour news startup. It's midday and he's been posting since 5 am. And then there's the burden that comes with being Henry Blodget, digital punching bag./p p"There are obviously a lot of folks who say, 'Now wait a minute, isn't that the guy who....'" He lets the thought trail off. He's legally barred from talking about the incidents that led to his vilification. "To them, I'm emthat/em Henry Blodget. There's not much more I can say. I still can't address specific points. So it's like, 'OK, here's my face. Throw the fruit. When you want to stop throwing the fruit, if you want to listen, great. If you don't, fine.'"/p pIt's been almost a decade since the impulse to greet him with rotten mangos first struck. Back in 1998, as a 32-year-old analyst with investment bank CIBC, he a href="http://www.thestreet.com/markets/analystrankings/977502.html"declared/a that the stock price of Amazon.com would nearly double to $400. Three weeks later it did, and Blodget was a hero. Soon he packed up his spreadsheets mdash; he's never more comfortable than when he is lining up numbers in rows and columns and teasing out their secrets mdash; and moved to Merrill Lynch./p pInvestors followed the new oracle's every utterance, and bankers wanted Blodget to bless the stocks of companies they were hoping to do business with. The lines on his graphs always seemed to point one way mdash; steeply up and to the right. He wasn't just predicting profits, he was selling a revolution: The old metrics didn't apply. Blodget may have counseled people to own only a small percentage of Internet stocks mdash; 10 percent at the most mdash; but nobody listened./p !-- pagebreak -- div id="embed" style="width:370px;" div id="pic" style="width:350px;" img style="width:350px;" src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget3_f.jpg" alt=""/ div id="caption" Launched in 2007, Silicon Alley Insider is gaining on some of its established rivals. br/ emSource: Compete/em /div /div /div pThen came the crash. Five trillion dollars in wealth vaporized in 24 months, leaving behind unquantifiable amounts of rage among the masses of day traders who had believed briefly that they, too, were market savants. When the bubble burst, so did Blodget's aura./p pStill, it wasn't the crash alone that crushed him. It took Eliot Spitzer to turn Henry Blodget into emthat/em Henry Blodget. Spitzer, then New York's crusading attorney general, investigated Merrill in 2001 for conflicts of interest. He discovered a clutch of emails from the young analyst showing that while talking up certain stocks to clients, he was trashing them internally. Companies like 24/7 Media, Excite@Home, and InfoSpace mdash; firms Merrill was publicly cheering mdash; in private were deemed by Blodget to be "shit," "crap," and "junk" (respectively). According to Spitzer's findings, Blodget would have pulled in $12 million in 2001 mdash; quadruple his earnings in 1999 mdash; if he hadn't accepted a buyout that year. In 2003, Merrill's boy genius agreed to pay a $4 million fine and accepted a lifetime ban from working in the securities industry./p pPublic disgrace usually drives a person into hiding, or at least into a different career. Jerry Levin, the brains behind the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, today runs a href="http://moonviewsanctuary.com/staff"Moonview Sanctuary/a, his wife's spa; Spitzer, forced to resign as governor last summer, is currently discovering the a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/06/10/spitzers-next-act-distressed-real-estate/"joys of real estate management/a; Health South CEO Richard Scrushy, while on trial for accounting fraud, a href="http://www.richardmscrushy.com/biography.aspx"became a televangelist/a. Not Blodget./p pOne former colleague says Blodget spent the months when he was being investigated trying to grasp why he was singled out for something that was commonplace in the industry. He figured the controversy would blow over once the public realized his conduct was not unusual. "He was incredulous that the investigation got traction; he said it was silly," a friend says. But there was too much anger in the wake of the bubble, and Blodget's embarrassing emails made him an easy scapegoat. Later, when he was inclined to argue his case, the settlement terms prevented it./p pSo Blodget did what came naturally. He began writing about the companies he used to cover, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2104656/"first for Slate/a, then on his own blog, a href="http://www.internetoutsider.com/"Internet Outsider/a. Was this journalism mdash; or was it therapy? Rather than hide, he started saying in public what he had once said only in private, using the same brutally frank voice that got him in trouble with Spitzer. He marketed his notoriety to a new Web readership hungry for smart, independent analysis./p pWhen Ryan, an Internet Outsider reader, approached him about starting an industry news site, Blodget jumped at the prospect of a bigger stage. Before working on Wall Street, he'd been a freelance writer; now he could combine the two vocations, borrowing freely from both journalism and equity research./p pThrough Alley Insider, Blodget is trying to erase, post by post, Spitzer's portrait of him as a duplicitous, money-grubbing shill for big business. Blodget has always believed that the Internet changed everything, so naturally he believes it has the power to change the world's perception of him. The venue offers all Henry, all the time (and even when his other writers are posting, it's clear they're channeling him). The result is a unique blend of x-ray analysis and tech evangelism./p pAs we talk, Blodget gets up from his chair, antsy to return to his laptop. I ask him if he understands what he's up against. If the hate has lasted this long, why expect it ever to fade away? "If all I knew about me was what I read during that period," he says, "I'd probably have the same reaction."/p pstrongOn a late summer morning/strong, Blodget waits in the lobby of the Nasdaq building in midtown Manhattan. He's all banker today: blue suit, red tie, black cap-toed Oxfords, his shirt so deeply pressed there are creases down the sleeves. It's 10 am and, ready for his second breakfast, he pries open the plastic case of a turkey and Swiss sandwich and starts wolfing it down. In a few minutes he is supposed to conduct a video interview for Yahoo's Tech Ticker finance site. As soon as Blodget started appearing as a regular host in February, the Furies a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/650/Jerry-Yang-Strikes-Back;-Here%27s-Microsoft%27s-Next-Move?tickers=yhoo,msft"reemerged/a. "Did you not find any other decent, credible guy than Henry Blodget?" one of the first comments read. "Why spoil this new feature with such a scum and spoil the Yahoo reputation?"/p pAs producers prepare to tape the show, Blodget wipes his crumbs off the table. He explains the guiding vision behind Alley Insider. "We don't want to do things we don't care about," he says. "It's nice to say theoretically we're the judge of what's important and what's not, but come on, give readers credit. They'll tell you immediately what they want, and that drives coverage. People are fanatically interested in Apple, Google, Microsoft. It wasn't a tough call to know what to write about."/p pBlodget's focus on content is matched by his apparent indifference to the look of the site. Alley Insider employs a cookie-cutter template of scrolling headlines and thumbnail photos dragged off the Web. But design limitations notwithstanding, by September the site was getting nearly 500,000 visitors a month, rivaling a href="http://allthingsd.com/"AllThingsDigital.com/a, the citeWall Street Journal/cite blog edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Since the beginning of the year, traffic to the site has more than doubled, and Blodget's words now carry surprising weight. When a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/apple-s-steve-jobs-rushed-to-er-after-heart-attack-says-cnn-citizen-journalist"he reported/a early this fall that Steve Jobs may have been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack mdash; citing an anonymous (and, as it turns out, fraudulent) post on a minor user-generated news site run by CNN called iReport mdash; Apple's a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/technology/apple/"stock dropped/a nearly 10 percent. Critics blamed Alley Insider./p p"I read citeThe New York Times/cite, citeThe Economist/cite, and Alley Insider," says a href="http://www.firebrandpartners.com/principals/index.html"Scott Galloway/a, head of investment equity firm Firebrand Partners, who is best known for his successful public fight to get on the board of citeThe New York Times/cite. "Henry takes a no-mercy, no-malice approach to Web business and media." Valleywag recently called him "the disgraced stock analyst everyone now listens to."/p !-- pagebreak -- div class="wide_img" img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1612/ff_blodget2_f.jpg" alt="" div class="wide_caption" div class="wide_caption_txt" The team at Silicon Alley Insider (left to right): senior editor Dan Frommer, COO Julie Hansen, cofounder Kevin Ryan, and editor in chief Blodget. br/ emPhoto: Mike McGregor/em /div /div /div br/ br/ pFor all the success today, it took Blodget amp; Co. some time to figure out a winning formula. When Ryan, a New Yorker, launched the site in 2007, he wanted to cover the local startup and media scene. Blodget signed on as CEO and editor in chief, bought a minority stake, and hired citeForbes/cite journalists a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/peter_kafka"Peter Kafka/a and a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/dan_frommer"Dan Frommer/a to help him develop content (Kafka was later hired away by AllThingsD). The first few weeks, the site read like a tourist's guide to spotting B-list Internet companies in the big city, with each firm's location prominently announced: "NoHo-based Meetup has quietly launched a Facebook application"; "Flatiron-based YellowJacket Software has raised $1.25 million." Blodget branched out, taking on the bigger names himself mdash; Apple, Dow Jones, NBC, JP Morgan. It quickly became clear to him that New York's tech industry was too small an arena to contain the ambition of the site. And nearly half the readers were in California anyway./p pAlley Insider soon dropped its Silicon Alley focus but stuck with the moniker. And Blodget began to draw more heavily on his research experience. He created financial models of the companies he was talking about and posted the spreadsheets as Google docs so anyone could download and toy with them. He analyzed the potential revenue YouTube could bring to Google, mapping out his assumptions about viewership and ads watched, and offering a clear bottom-line conclusion. Readers weighed in with their critiques, which Blodget used to sharpen the model. He figured he wouldn't just write about Wall Street, he would also usurp part of Wall Street's business by providing high-quality research, the kind brokerage customers used to prize./p pBut visitors to the site wanted more than analytics. They also craved the edgier Henry of the Spitzer emails. Blodget obliged. In one post, a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/ben_stein_is_an_idiot"Blodget declares/a citeNew York Times/cite economics columnist Ben Stein to be either "an idiot" or possibly just "delusional." He suggests that the anonymous sources cited by archrival TechCrunch in its reporting on Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/yahoo_stock_fades_as_techcrunch_microsoft_takeover_sources_sober_up"must have been drunk/a." And in November 2007, when E-Trade lost $9 billion in value as its risky mortgage bets turned to dust, Blodget offered only one piece of advice to the company's shareholders: "a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/etrade_etfc_total_cost_of_screwup_9_billion"Cry/a."/p p"On Wall Street, I'd consistently submit a report that would say, 'This is going to be roadkill,' and it would come back rewritten as 'We see some weakness,'" Blodget says. "Now I can say, 'It's going to be roadkill.' That's very satisfying."/p pBut even as he delights in railing against corporate giants, he's still disciplined enough to run the underlying numbers mdash; Blodget loves the drama, but he loves the spreadsheets just as much. One post about craigslist should have been something only an accountant could love: a complex set of assumptions and analyses to determine what the company might be worth. Yet Blodget wrote the whole exercise as if it were a mystery plot, parceling out details and stringing the reader along until the very end./p pWhen Yahoo announced this summer that it had hired Bain amp; Co., a consulting firm usually brought in when a company is about to start swinging the ax, Blodget a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/yahoo-fat-farm-how-many-people-does-yahoo-need-to-fire-to-get-fit-"sharpened his own pencil/a. "We're mad as hell ... especially now that Yahoo's wasting millions on Bain." He offered his own, free advice (spreadsheet attached) cataloging how many people Yahoo should fire in each division mdash; 1,804 from its "positively obese" sales and marketing arm alone mdash; in order to goose operating margins to a "more respectable" 20 percent from its current 7 percent. "He pushed us early on to ask, 'What does this mean for profits? How does any news affect a company's numbers?'" Frommer says. "It's great if it makes a company look bad or look good, but is this really going to affect the numbers?"/p pBlodget is also trying things that no mainstream-journalism-trained blogger like Swisher or GigaOm's a href="http://gigaom.com/"Om Malik/a would ever dare. He makes serious-sounding offers to buy companies that he wants to demonstrate are significantly undervalued. It's pure showmanship, but with Blodget's background in finance and his ties to folks up and down Wall Street, no one knows just how far he will take the joke./p pHis first target was CNET. With the a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet"slightest of winks/a, he wrote a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/1/cnet_update_on_our_offer_and_restructuring_plan_part_1"post after post/a explaining how he'd a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/jana_here_s_our_plan_for_cnet"purchase the company/a. At first he proposed a sort of reverse merger, with CNET buying Alley Insider for $50 million in stock, at which point Blodget's team would take over every aspect of the company. Then he detailed the operational changes he would make./p !-- pagebreak -- pRyan got nervous about Blodget's new direction. Blodget's deal with the government forbade him from giving individual research advice, but it didn't say anything about jumping into the private-equity space. Still, there might be legal issues. "Look, why don't we run this by a lawyer just to make sure, because we're getting into securities stuff here," he said to Blodget. When the lawyer asked them "Is this a real offer?" there was a brief silence. For the first time the two really thought about it./p p"You know, yes," Ryan replied. "If they said yes, we would accept $50 million at that time to buy them. So it is a real offer. But we're actually asking them to buy us." The lawyer signed off on the convoluted reasoning./p pAfter Blodget's taunting posts went up, investment firm JANA Partners announced a hostile takeover attempt of CNET. It failed, but by spring 2008 CBS a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cbs_buying_cnet_for_1_8_billion"stepped in to buy/a the company for $1.8 billion./p pFor one CNET executive, memories of Blodget's unwanted attentions still rankle. "The way you make a big name for yourself on the Web today is to make, for lack of a better word, ridiculous statements," says Zander Lurie, former senior VP of strategy and development at CNET and now CFO of CBS Interactive. Lurie found himself reassuring employees who sent him Blodget's postings and wondered whether their company was at risk. "Everyone knew there was nothing in the offering: He didn't have the capital, the expertise, or any specific insight into our business," Lurie says. "He makes the ridiculous statement and it gets sent all around, and then he claims credit when there's an event the following year, which obviously he had nothing to do with. Less than zero to do with. We all have reputations. And his track record is well known."/p pBlodget has been a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself"waging another/a half-serious acquisition fight, this time for the New York Times Company. All he wants is the Web site mdash; the print side is dead, he says. He thinks the paper needs to cut about 80 percent of its costs, at which point it would be the perfect size to be the digital paper of record for a long time to come. "It's a serious offer from our perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously," Blodget says./p pstrongIn the wake of Wall Street's latest meltdown/strong, Blodget finds himself in even greater demand. He's doing regular TV appearances and is posting again on Slate. When NPR wanted someone to talk about the Wall Street culture of greed, they a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94667073"brought in Blodget/a. The reporter introduced him by pointing out that Merrill is now gone, "and Henry Blodget is gone, too; he's banned from Wall Street after being charged with fraud."/p p"Thanks," Blodget said, stuttering for a second, "especially for that horrific introduction." They both laughed. But by the end, the host was treating Blodget like an elder statesman./p pRecently Blodget has been expanding his franchise. He and Ryan have launched two sister sites: a href="http://www.clusterstock.com/"Clusterstock/a, which will compile and analyze Wall Street research on a much wider range of industries, and a href="http://www.businesssheet.com/"the Business Sheet/a, which will focus on corporate scandals. A third is in the works. For each new site, Blodget provides the bulk of the early posts, seeding the new enterprise with the Blodget touch./p pBlodget is broadening beyond tech to get ready for what he sees as a coming shakeout in the news-blog industry. He says he might even start making acquisitions if the price is right. Ryan's suite of companies has raised $50 million in the past few years, possibly enough to buy out some other interesting small blogs. The winning formula for this new kind of business remains elusive: It's a matter of finding the balance between gossip and analysis, between aggregating news from other sources and doing original reporting. Revenue models that go beyond basic advertising have also been slow in coming. "If you look at the development of every new medium, there's been a new form of journalism that has been made possible by it, and there has always been this period of transition," Blodget says. "There is collective experimentation as people figure out what works and what doesn't, and usually you have some very important publications that are built."/p pAnother way to expand is to sell to a larger media company. Blodget says he'd consider an offer, but Alley Insider is still defined almost entirely by one man. If he left, the value would plummet. Also, some media institutions mdash; the grayer, stodgier ones mdash; may find Blodget's unique baggage unacceptable. The endless barrage of comments, the angry mob that seems to follow him everywhere, may be too much for the sensitivities of some management teams, even in these freewheeling days of media transformation. When Blodget wrote a few small items for citeThe New York Times/cite, the newspaper's a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11pubed.html"ombudsman went haywire/a. "The citeTimes/cite luster may help Blodget," he wrote last year, "but some of his taint rubs off on the citeTimes/cite."/p pIt's just the sort of comment Blodget has come to expect from, well, everyone. That may change, but only if this latest reinvention succeeds in burying his past forever. In which case, he will have been right: The Internet really does change everything./p pemSenior writer Daniel Roth /em(a href="mailto:daniel_roth@wired.com"daniel_roth@wired.com/a) emwrote about the a href="/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi"future of the electric car/a in issue 16.09./em/pbr style="clear: both;"/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:e5509a1338aa2d046a0f36f53c86fd46:KTSfKmr30cBfHohgGm6zBCE5aLDI579Ry5%2FoG9QrW9e1KIT2xpDAJhCNE%2FP6%2BodTaIRTxDwhJCc5xg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Facebook' alt='Add to Facebook' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:85af8ef1f22075639f5e1be7151d039b:KjXRBL7FimCdPfkcPkDUOZbe%2BR8tiL4gaeJxl%2FnucFQ8UL28mzRmZSeHpMqoJwFUINppaALMULUa'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:db4d557cf92ff9467e13e01b1aee6530:PWDj6Lri2aPp2F0l1o37LwimABRJS%2Bw%2FOQMMPSWuRMZRLZhLRGI4Q9jz2JLAIoyYna2BguNYIBWs'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:064842e7a9d26f4e96559df7ad75369c:Ri7lRQ2YuIojw9J42qFhanIkt9g%2B2lNj7ky0mPfhji4DJCDrd66IrgRLO78oVkOke9RGBuQDA3ra'img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'//a br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c54405cdda6d6c80dfe38fdee8a0c2a5" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/ pa href="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?a=V04TVZ"img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~a/wired/index?i=V04TVZ" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~4/474334201" height="1" width="1"/

p!-- google_ad_section_start --/p pimg class="float_right" src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/12/custom_1228345833606_Picture_920.png" border="0" width="477" height="857" /Believe it or not, there's no definitive ranking of media properties on the web. a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003918425"The latest list of top news sites/a put together by emEditor Publisher/em is ridiculously newspaper-centric and makes use of Nielsen's notoriously erratic pageview numbers (rather than the monthly visitor numbers that advertisers instead rely on)./p pNielsen's own news and information rankings include miscellaneous weather and directory sites. Neither includes entertainment sites such as People.com. So I've taken the media research outfit's latest audience numbers for the top 50 online properties-whether they're brands that began in print (gray), on television or radio (dark gray) or are native to the internet (red). It's as good a guide as we have to the new media landscape./p pConclusions? First of all, internet-born properties such as Yahoo! News, emThe Huffington Post/em and Gawker Media-with 14 of the top 50 properties-do not dominate./p pSecond: television-with 20 of the top 50-is holding its own. Sure, TV networks have a smaller share of the online audience than they do of all media consumption; but they have a future./p pThird, no surprise, newspapers and magazines are struggling. They have 16 in the top tier-but it's astonishing that established print giants such as Cox Newspapers and Time Inc haven't yet squashed the internet insurgents with which they compete in these rankings./p pimg class="float_left" src="http://static.10gen.com/www.alleyinsider.com/~~/f?id=47a93c754b543772005f9d06" border="0" alt="nickdenton.jpg" title="nickdenton.jpg" width="100" height="87" /emNick Denton is the CEO of Gawker Media. This post is reprinted with his permission from a href="http://nickdenton.org/5083616/a-2009-internet-media-plan"nickdenton.org.img class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.58.1/t.gif" border="0" style="border: 0pt none; margin: 0pt ! important; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-family: trebuchet ms ,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; float: none; position: static; left: auto; top: auto; line-height: normal; background-image: url(http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.58.1/theme/silver/palette.gif); background-color: transparent; visibility: visible; width: 14px; height: 12px; background-position: -1128px 0pt; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;" //a/em/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/OJIYozR9F55kk_gscc_T1g9koEg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/OJIYozR9F55kk_gscc_T1g9koEg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=B7Q4EO0X"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=B7Q4EO0X" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=JKHlXtUI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=flfKM9md"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=JTWM9DUU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=JTWM9DUU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=E41frcuD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=6kHsSFks"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=gg3bsjtt"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=deoBk1dy"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/_IJPoS2_zYU" height="1" width="1"/

centerimg title="Roberts Launches Under-Kitchen Counter DAB Radio" style="MARGIN: 0px" alt="Roberts Launches Under-Kitchen Counter DAB Radio" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/roberts-kitchen-dab.jpg" border="0" //centerbr / pRoberts has the welfare of housewives (and househusbands) in mind when it launched its latest DAB radio that is specially designed to fit under kitchen counters, helping you save on essential counter-top space - not to mention reducing the risk of accidentally frying the circuits of the DAB radio via spilt liquids. This new DAB/FM RDS Kitchen Radio comes with a built-in under cupboard fixing bracket and features a control panel that is a snap to clean in addition to sensor touch controls for easy navigation. Other features include an instant SD record function, PausePlus and rewind functions for cooks who are knee deep in business. With the use of an SD memory card, this means you can also playback your favorite MP3s. An egg timer function rounds up the list of features, retailing for pound;99.99./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/roberts_launches_underkitchen_counter_dab_radio.html"Roberts Launches Under-Kitchen Counter DAB Radio/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081203190347" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081203190347?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081203190347" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081203190347amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Froberts_launches_underkitchen_counter_dab_radio.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/j4d2ltC4DML0xp_SIwU5Us6KAek/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/j4d2ltC4DML0xp_SIwU5Us6KAek/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=v6RkGR6O"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ZI2mC3hK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=ZI2mC3hK" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=OWzwy68W"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=bBdBFlH3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=bBdBFlH3" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=K4eQ8YeK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=K4eQ8YeK" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/na9p1DgxQFc" height="1" width="1"/

I work for walmart and didnt hear about this until today... and im a manager...

Shortly after we posted about the iPhone coming to Wal-Mart this morning, it seemed like all of our ninjas came out of the woodwork to bombard us with info. Rather than post an update, we want to lay out what is now confirmed info. First and foremost, it looks like Wal-Mart will indeed begin selling the iPhone 3G on December 28th in select locations only. When all is said and done, about 2,500 locations will offer the iPhone 3G. Some stores will also be getting live demo units to display just like Best Buy Mobile. What’s more, we’re also now getting word that 69 Sam’s Club locations (locations that use the Wal-Mart ordering system, not the Radio Shack ordering system) will offer the handset as well - also beginning on the 28th. As Sam’s Club is a division of Wal-Mart, this certainly makes sense. Unfortunately it looks like everyone is still in the dark with regards to pricing and we expect it to stay that way to avoid slowing MSRP iPhone sales during the holidays. Won’t people be happy when they find out Apple’s handsets popped up at discount prices three short days after Christmas? Hit the jump for some internal Wal-Mart correspondence.


We are pleased to announce that Wal-Mart has reached agreement with Apple to offer iPhone 3G in Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart-managed Sam’s Club* Connection Centers nationwide beginning December 28, 2008. AT&T will support Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club with the activation process for iPhone 3G, and we need all National Retail employees engaged to ensure a successful launch.

Starting next year,a href=http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10112881-27.html CBS will take over the programming on Yahoo Musics LaunchCast Radio/a. It will be pretty interesting if CBS gives this responsibility to Last.fm (which is owned by CBS). This would turn the Web 2.0 world upside down. During its heyday, Yahoo was acquiring all the cool web 2.0 properties, like Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, Webjay, and FoxyTunes. It would be quite a turn of events if Yahoo music was taken over by Last.fm.

DENVER (Billboard) - Chalk up another Internet radio casualty of significantly increased royalty fees for airing music online. Yahoo Music, once the top music destination on the Web, is handing over the bulk of its Launchcast Internet radio operations to CBS Radio.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=9hGE2vGR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=qQkuPung"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?i=qQkuPung" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=QvaoZjCb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?i=QvaoZjCb" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Reuters/InternetNews/~4/8O9YubLrX8U" height="1" width="1"/

a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/spicer/sportlife.html"The poet is a radio./a a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/spicer/thisocean.html"The poet is a liar./a a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/spicer/pchicago.html"The poet is a counterpunching radio./a Jack Spicer was a poet, linguist, amp; early gay rights activist. For a long time, his poetry was out of print and difficult to find, but now Wesleyan University Press has (finally!) published his collected poems. The book takes its title from Spicer’s last words: ema href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upne/0-8195-6887-2.html"My Vocabulary Did This to Me/a/em. br / You can read reviews of the new Collected at a href="http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_04/2979"bookforum.com/a and a href="http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Jack%20Spicer"Silliman’s Blog/a.br / br / There’s more Spicer at a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html"PennSound/a and ema href="http://jacketmagazine.com/07/index.shtml"Jacket Magazine/a/em. (The feature in emJacket/em is from 1999, but it's still excellent.)

This is easily one of the nicest PC mods I have seen in a long time. The retro styling and top notch craftsmanship make this HTPC something anyone would be proud to have on display in their home. Kudos to "slipperyskip" for a mod well done.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/69710?ns=guardianpageName=Stage%3A+%27My+whole+life+has+been+a+black+comedy%27ch=Stagec3=The+Guardianc4=Theatre%2CCulture+section%2CJoe+Orton+%28Playwright%29%2CStage%2CTelevision+%28Culture%29c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CTelevision+Media%2CTheatrec6=Catherine+Shoardc7=2008_12_04c8=1128305c9=articlec10=GUc11=Stagec12=Theatrec13=c14=h2=GU%2FStage%2FTheatre" width="1" height="1" //divpIt has been a while since Doon Mackichan was last hung, drawn and quartered for laughing at the suffering of children. There was a week in August 2001 when you couldn't pass a newsstand without seeing her handsome, sparrowhawk face, forehead partially obscured by the word "evil" or "depraved"./ppThe Brass Eye paedophile special is now mostly remembered as virtuoso satire, so it's easy to forget what a stink it caused at the time. And it was Mackichan, who played TV presenter Swanchita Haze, who bore the brunt of it. People expected that sort of thing from Chris Morris, but Doon was a woman with - gulp - children of her own. "[Mackichan] had seen herself as a major comedy force in the making," wrote the Mail. "She even dreamt of becoming a film star. But with the Brass Eye disaster as her epitaph, all those plans lie in tatters."/ppLooking back, it's hard to say her career didn't suffer. There were two more seasons of Smack the Pony, the girly Channel 4 sketch show with Sally Phillips and Fiona Allen, but to diminishing returns. There were wifely roles in ropey sitcoms. There was theatre. Then came a two-year break for unhappier reasons (of which more later). And now she's back, in a play that, well, laughs at the suffering of children. Adults, too. Especially those six feet under. /ppJoe Orton's Loot, like Brass Eye, is comedy that sets out to shock. Don't be fooled by its age; although the play was first performed in 1965, Loot has weathered better than, say, a TV parody of late-90s news shows. Death doesn't date as a cultural taboo; likewise religion. Rereading Loot is like having a shower when you hadn't realised the boiler's broken: unexpectedly shocking./pp"Yep, it's full on," says Mackichan, eating a tuna sandwich between rehearsals in London. "There's this one line about a really great brothel run by Pakistanis who pimp out their kids for Mars bars." She smiles: an attractive smile, heavy on the lippy. "I'm like, 'Oh we'll cut that, won't we?' Well, no, we can't, because what about all the other things people might find offensive? Cut them all and you won't have much of a play left."/ppOther lines trouble her. Orton's gleeful description of a sexual assault, complete with tooth-breaking detail. "That specific image is just really horrible. Do you lose a portion of your audience when you leave that in? Do people stop thinking it's a great play? Or as my mum would say, 'Ooh, Orton's so kinky; yes, I love all that.' " /ppDoon plays Fay, an Irish Catholic home nurse and a prolific serial killer (87 in one week alone). She has lately buried her seventh husband and has her eighth in her crosshairs, having just dispatched his wife with a syringe of poison. Loot takes place on the day of the wife's funeral, and charts the power struggle between Fay, Hal (whose mother is being buried), Dennis, Hal's boyfriend, with whom he has robbed a bank and put the money in mum's coffin, and Detective Truscott, the sinister inspector who comes calling. /ppOrton's stage instructions put Kay in her late 20s; other than that Mackichan, 46, is a good fit. She is Celtic, by nurture at least. She grew up in Surrey but moved to Fife with her family when she was nine. She survived the transition, she says, by acting, specialising in "posh bitches". This is something she still does: she is a natural authoritarian, physically pneumatic, temperamentally tough - a few years back she swam the English channel with a team of paratroopers. /pp"Yes, I could kill someone," she says, without thinking too hard about it. "It must be so easy to just nip a needle in, or hold a pillow over an old person's face. The power and the buzz you'd get." She has been boning up on True Crime magazine to further understand her character's homicidal motivation. "But I just can't read the books. There's such an orgasm about they way they're written. 'Women who kill! Viciously!' When it comes to sex and violence, we're an island of obsessives. I mean, how does it help people to know the details of how someone was physically tortured?"/ppTen years ago, Mackichan got her fingers burned over an Anglican sketch on her Radio 4 show, Doon Your Way, but it hasn't left her any more on-message when it comes to religion. "It's been extraordinary finding out what Catholics actually believe!" she says of the research process. "All the rituals and superstition. The whole voyeurism of talking to someone behind a little screen. The idea that you can think, OK, I'll be a bitch, then on Sunday I'll say, 'Oh, I was a bit of a bitch' and then feel great!"/ppShe is not religious herself, "but I don't think I'm in an atheistic universe. I do think there's a higher power". Has she ever prayed? "Oh, I've been down on my knees many times." She pauses and then roars with laughter - it's a genuine, accidental Orton-ism. /ppIt turns out that Mackichan has had an extremely tough few years. Her father recently died. She is in the process of getting divorced from her husband, Common As Muck actor Anthony Barclay, with whom she has three children, India, 11, Louis, 10, and Ella-Rose, four. And, three years ago, Louis contracted leukaemia. Much of the past three years has been spent with him in hospital. He is now in remission, but shadows still hollow out her face. She wells up frequently, and there is something frayed behind the raucous laugh and actorly tics. "I do find authority hard to deal with now," she growls, after an assistant gives us a 10-minute warning that she needs to get back to work. "I feel a bit of an anarchist. I don't think I could work for someone who was an arsehole any more." She gulps down some fruit juice. "I can't actually have confrontations with people. It's too much. I'm a single muvva with three kids and a show to do." She laughs but she's dead serious./ppWhen things were at their worst, she says, her monopoly on heartache was hard to handle. "People would tut behind me in a supermarket queue and I'd have to go, 'Please, go ahead of me, you've obviously got somewhere to go. I'm just going back to the children's cancer ward.' I once had an actress telling me her hair was falling out because of her new kitchen and I thought, I'm not going to say anything, because this is quite interesting, because I remember how I was before it all." And how was she before it all? "Quite selfish, neurotic. Up my own arse. It's made me very tough. I do think I have endurance beyond the pale." /ppWhen Louis was well enough, Mackichan took her children with her to Africa to shoot a BBC2 series, Taking the Flak, loosely based on John Simpson's reporting from poverty-stricken, war-ravaged places. After such harrowing experiences, how she can cope with her relatively comfortable existence? "You walk into your house and you go: I'm a millionaire. I'm a princess; I live in a palace. And you think: I don't have a lot of shoes, but I do have too many shoes. You look at yourself and think: Party's over, mate. Time to be useful."/ppAnd yet she is not an aid worker in Africa. She is in north London, rehearsing a play. "I did think, I can't go back to acting. It's too vain, too ridiculous. I was going to retrain as a play specialist in Louis' cancer ward. But this is what I've done for 20 years. It's what I do." /ppShe's right. Mackichan is a natural born thesp, right down to her floaty black blouse and stripy woollen leg-warmers. Slice her in half and you would see "actor" written right through the middle of her. "I have a real mission now to be in work that will be cathartic for people. [Work] that's really honest about just how fucking hard it is to stay afloat."/ppLoot isn't exactly what she had in mind, she admits, but its no-nonsense attitude to tragedy has been cathartic. "My whole life lately has been a bit of a black comedy." She snorts. Might she consider turning it into one? "There's a lot of mileage in a children's cancer-ward comedy. All the opening curtains and waving at people being sick into bowls. You could set it in the tiny coffin-like kitchen where only the adults are allowed. You see these little bald children running past the window. It was like suddenly being in a war."/ppCould she really bear to return there, even imaginatively? "I don't know. They haunt me, those nighttime corridors. The characters, too: the carers and nurses and staff and the petty quarrels. And getting high on Quality Street till 3am. But I would like to." /ppstrongmiddot; /strongLoot is at the Tricycle, London NW6, from December 11. Box office: 020-7328 1000./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatre"Theatre/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/orton"Joe Orton/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/television"Television/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/lAQCNb9eC0BbtenHfBz0jZUDjxo/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/lAQCNb9eC0BbtenHfBz0jZUDjxo/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/14725?ns=guardianpageName=Politics%3A+Speaker%27s+allegations+set+constitutional+crisis+rollingch=Politicsc3=The+Guardianc4=Michael+Martin%2CDamian+Green%2CConservatives%2CPolice+%28politics%29%2CPolitics%2CUK+newsc5=Policy+Society%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CUnclassifed+Contributorsc6=Nicholas+Wattc7=2008_12_04c8=1128407c9=articlec10=GUc11=Politicsc12=Michael+Martinc13=c14=h2=GU%2FPolitics%2FMichael+Martin" width="1" height="1" //divpA constitutional crisis was sparked yesterday when Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, all but accused the Metropolitan police of breaking the law by failing to follow proper procedures before searching the parliamentary office of Damian Green MP./ppAmid growing cross-party criticism of his handling of the affair, the Speaker took the unprecedented step in modern times of censuring the police. In a nine-minute statement he expressed his "regret" at their failure to produce a search warrant - and their failure to explain to the Commons authorities that the officials were entitled to demand such a warrant before allowing the search to take place./ppThere were signs last night that the Speaker's statement had failed to stabilise his position as the government refused to offer him support and the Tories said he was "severely damaged"./ppAsked repeatedly on BBC2's Newsnight whether she had confidence in the Speaker, the Commons leader Harriet Harman said: "Well I'm not saying I've got full confidence in anything or anybody."/ppHarman's intervention capped a dramatic day at Westminster. There were gasps when the Speaker said the police may have breached the law when they searched the parliamentary office of Green after simply persuading Jill Pay, the serjeant at arms, to sign a "consent form". Green, who is suspected by police of encouraging a junior Home Office official to leak a series of embarrassing documents, was arrested last Thursday and detained for nine hours./ppTo cries of protest, Martin told MPs: "I was not told that the police did not have a warrant. I have been told that the police did not explain, as they are required to do, that the serjeant was not obliged to consent or that a warrant could have been insisted on."/ppSir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said last night the police had failed to follow proper procedures. "They should convey to the individual that consent can be withheld. It doesn't appear to be the case that they did that," he said./ppThe statement by the Speaker set the scene for noisy parliamentary exchanges and prompted demands for police to be summoned to the Commons to explain their actions. The Speaker responded to these concerns with three commitments: that the police will never be allowed to search the Commons again without a warrant and his personal approval; that a Commons debate would be held on Monday; and that he would appoint a seven-strong committee, composed of senior MPs, to review the police action./ppHarman said she may push for even tougher restrictions. She told Radio 4 that MPs might be put "on the same footing as judges, which is not just a magistrate's warrant but perhaps a warrant granted only by a high court judge"./ppHer comments came after the Tories attempted to turn the pressure on to Gordon Brown, and Green used the occasion to defend his actions. "An MP endangering national security would be a disgrace," he said. "An MP exposing embarrassing facts about Home Office policy which ministers are hiding is doing a job in the public interest."/ppDavid Cameron, the Tory leader, offered support. "Parliament is here to call the government to account, to question, to challenge and to publish information that is in the public interest," he said./ppBoris Johnson, the London mayor, said he had a "hunch" Green would not be charged. Speaking as chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, he admitted speaking to Green after his arr