Whatup, Player

By Media Farm

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STUFF@NIGHT'S ANNUAL PLAYERS ISSUE—we've just got one question: Why no love for the guy from the Canadian tourist board who bought those two half-page ads? We see that player brunching at Banq all the time!

YVONNE ABRAHAM is back! So is that puss-filled boil on Media Farm's ass. We can't decide which we're more excited about.

THE HERALD'S EXHAUSTIVE COVERAGE of how the Common is full of crack-smokers got even more exhaustive Monday, when their new Michele McPhee and a staff photographer tagged along with a team of undercover narcs. The squad busted Omar from The Wire, along with some other dealers, for slinging rocks "in broad daylight as the tourist season swings into full bloom."

The writing in this installment—number 512 in a gazillion-part series—wasn't any more unspectacular than usual ("As with any good production, a seamless backstage operation drove the show"), but the photos accompanying the two-page spread were the tits. A dealer sitting in the back of a paddy wagon, gnashing his teeth and trying to kick the Herald photog's camera? Highly sensationalistic. More of this, please.

So here's our new plan for saving the Herald: The paper should give up writing about City Hall and Whitey and Joe Fitzgerald's endless parade of heroes altogether, and just publish pictorial essays of guys shooting up and getting cuffed and stuffed. The tabloid would jump right from dudes riding the horse in public to the Inside Track to sports, and we'd buy three copies a day.

ALEX BEAM spent half of Saturday's column rewriting an 18-year old column about small airplane pilots that might have been funny 18 years ago. It was so funny 18 years ago that the wicked old passages in question nabbed the pull quote atop that day's Living & Arts page (explain again how this differs from Living/Arts?).

At first, Media Farm was going to undertake an exhaustive analysis of just how sharply Beam's writing has fallen off in the years between the first and second time he wrote this same column. But then we figured, since he couldn't be bothered to actually work for his paycheck, why should we? So you choose, Alex: Should we rewrite the old punch lines from when we called you a lonely old man who'd lost his fastball, or from the time when we called you a racist and you didn't get the joke and sent like a hundred belligerent emails to Dig HQ?

Related: Why won't you just take the buyout and leave this town the fuck alone???

HOW COULD our award for Lede of the Week not go to the Globe's Sarah Rodman? It can't. So it does. Take it away, friend: "Colbie Caillat (rhymes with 'valet') is from California. But sometimes when she encounters fans of the laid-back, R&B-tinged pop of her 2007 debut album Coco they believe her hometown is MySpace." Wow. That doesn't make any sense at all.

PAUL STEWART, the most famous former pro hockey referee to ever skate without a helmet and be from Boston, popped up in this week's New Yorker. And boy did he do this town proud.

Stewy, who was at an Applebee's in Walpole, Massachusetts, watching the Yankees play the Sox, left a message: "Sean Avery is like a case of jock rash. It's there, it bothers you, and eventually you have to just play through it."

We're guessing the magazine's famed fact-checking operation had a great time verifying the particulars on that one.