Somali movie goers attended the Mogdishu premiere of Black Hawk Down last night (actually, it was a bootleg copy being shown outdoors for 10¢ a ticket).

Quote:

Audience members seemed to take delight in scenes of U.S. defeat. Each time an American chopper went down in the film, the audience cheered. Every time an American serviceman was killed, the audience cheered some more….”As you can see, Somalis are brave fighters,” one man said. “If the Americans come back to fight us, we shall defeat them again.”

I predict he may soon get to test that theory of his.

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Addendum posted on January 24: As I said, I predict he may soon get to test that theory of his

Jimmy Breslin on the demise of “Tina Brown’s” Talk Magazine.

Quote:

Once, American publishers, simultaneously intimidated and jealous of the British accent, loved to hire women from London as receptionists and office assistants. You dazzled these harsh, slurring Americans with voices of class. But then they made the mistake of hiring all Brits, men and women, as editors and writers. And we found that underneath the lovely accent were large swatches of horrible taste, outright illiteracy and, probably worse, stories that read like college term papers, and average ones at that.

The WSJ today profiles SparkNotes, a “quirky online rival to Cliff Notes,” which publishes crib notes, er, “keys to learning” produced by a staff made up of recession-hit recent graduates from elite universities.

Quote:

Free-lance SparkNotes writers earn a few hundred dollars per 15,000-word file. The work has expanded from a summertime cash cow into the hottest odd job for many newly unemployed graduates. SparkNotes Executive Editor Justin Kestler, 25, says he doesn’t even have to seek out writers — they find him. When SparkNotes added four full-time jobs last spring, it received 250 applications from grads of top colleges.

The WSJ also looks inside Sports Illustrated’s shake-up.

Quote:

Mr. Huey, 53 years old, oversees Time Inc.’s weekly magazines but picked Sports Illustrated as his first project. A charming but blunt Southerner who still spends most weekends in South Carolina, he’s also a sports fan. That distinguishes Mr. Huey from his predecessors, most of whom had little interest in sports and left Sports Illustrated alone.