O.J. Simpson Book, TV Special Canceled
NEW YORK — After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and television special “If I Did It.”

It’s rare that, mere days after a daring (well, okay, not so daring–it seemed like a foregone conclusion before it happened) prediction, I get to say that I called it.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. “We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

A dozen Fox affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, planned for next week before the Nov. 30 publication of the book by ReganBooks. The publishing house is a HarperCollins imprint owned–like the Fox network–by News Corp.

Justice has been served. A little. I mean, he’s still a free man and everything… but it’s still nice to see that global megaoutrage is still powerful enough to get horrifying television off the airwaves. Next: Carlos Mencia.

“If everyone lived at the lifestyle of Americans,” says Jim McMillan, who works on alternative energy for the Department of Energy, “we’d need five planets.”

That quote is from Joel Achenbach’s pretty scary cover story in this weekend’s Washington Post Magazine, which basically suggests that it’s about time we start listening to Al Gore. It chronicles life at Earthaven, a semi-commune near Asheville in western North Carolina. If you happened to catch last week’s My Name is Earl you pretty much know what you need to know about this place. But not really; they generate their own electricity and use phones and computers, and they’re not all knee-jerk idealist hippies. They just think it’s time to start walking the walk where environmental responsibility is concerned. All that being said, though, they sort of remind me of the Others on Lost. And it seems like despite their good intentions they aren’t the self-contained, self-reliant, self-sustaining village they would like to be. At least not yet.

FOR A PLACE DEDICATED TO BEING SUSTAINABLE, Earthaven has a fundamental problem: It’s not. Not even close. No one pretends otherwise. There’s not enough money, not enough labor.

“There’s just not enough people here,” longtime member Sue Stone says.

You can’t buy a sandwich at Earthaven. You can’t even buy a loaf of bread. You can buy a dozen organic eggs from a little farm in the center of the village, but no orange juice. There’s a trading post that doubles as an Internet cafe, but it doesn’t have enough of a customer base to carry much merchandise. For a quarter you can buy a cigarette, but you have to roll it yourself.

A dentist would be nice. Greg Geis has a cracked tooth. “I haven’t had my eyes checked for nine years,” he told me.

And it goes on like that.

At any rate, the piece touches on a bunch of different issues related to energy use and conservation and I thought it was interesting. Maybe you will too.

He did an online chat about it today.

And as a sidenote, Catherine already posted on this but I want to add my own two cents: Japan’s annual dolphin hunt is an appalling and brutal anachronism. How can we tolerate such utter cruelty and sadism toward creatures of such intelligence? I’m not against eating meat or the industries that requires, but there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it. It seems pretty clear that slowly and painfully slaughtering a self-aware mammal and then (maybe) using the meat as fertilizer and pet food is fundamentally inhumane. I really hope this practice is stopped soon.

The Redskins still can’t play defense, but Duckett averaged over five yards per carry and Campbell was good. This means, of course, that I’ll have to start next season with high expectations yet again, and almost certainly have my hopes dashed by week seven again… but I can live with that. Just please, please, please, leave Brunell on the bench forever. It’s sort of liberating to not have to worry about winning or losing (since we’re completely toast, playoffs-wise) and just get to think about whether we’re getting better in the big picture. Maybe Clinton Portis will have enough time to actually be healthy before next season starts, and our receivers will learn to make catches, and our offensive and defensive lines will learn to block, and our cornerbacks will learn to cover receivers, and, and, and Joe Gibbs can ride into the stadium astride a glistering unicorn!

Jay-Z’s new album, Kingdom Come, comes out tomorrow. The first single, “Show Me What You Got,” produced by often-namechecked Just Blaze, is pretty terrible. But the title track, also produced by Just Blaze, is pretty awesome. You can viscerally feel Danger Mouse’s influence on hip-hop production, and it is a good thing. Word on the street (i.e. Amazon’s editorial review) is that the last half of the album is a lot more experimental–collaborations with various people, including Coldplay’s detestable Chris Martin–and I’m a bit apprehensive about that. But we’ll see. I may write more about this album if I listen to the whole thing and determine that it is excellent or awful. You can interpret radio silence as a tepid review.

Tomorrow afternoon I fly to Denver, Colorado, to spend Thanksgiving with my family. I get back to Boston on Sunday.