New York Times

I just about spit out my coffee Sunday morning when I read that you are going to start charging for access to the online version of The Sun. The Sun website is the worst website I have ever tried to use. Have you ever looked at the Washington Post or the New York Times websites to see how it's done? You couldn't have or yours wouldn't be the way it is. It is very difficult to find any article when one clicks on "Print Edition. " Unless it is an article that is also available online, it is virtually impossible.

Good thing Ron Shapiro isn't a told-you-so kinda guy. Not after The New York Times reported recently on how Chinese companies are finding a back door into the U.S. stock market . Shapiro, a prominent sports agent-attorney whose clients have included Cal Ripken Jr., warned about the same sort of stock market shenanigans 42 years ago, as lead author of a Maryland Law Review article titled, “The 'Going Public Through the Back Door' Phenomenon...

In the spring of 2006, as Katie Couric was ascending to the CBS Evening News as the first woman solo anchor, Jill Abramson - who just happened to be the first woman managing editor of The New York Times - wondered aloud in a Times essay when the qualifier "first woman" would no longer be worth mentioning. We have women Supreme Court justices and women heads of corporations, and we pretty nearly had a woman president. But when Ms. Abramson was elevated early this month to the executive editorship of The New York Times, all the headlines proclaimed that she was the first woman to hold the most hallowed job in American journalism.

It took The New York Times, in its April 18 obituary, to put William Donald Schaefer's career as Baltimore mayor in perspective. He didn't help the city's schools, nor the city's economy. Bernie Steinberg, Baltimore

The New York Times admitted today it was fooled by The Onion and ran fake material based on the satirical newspaper's article.  In an article published last week called " Tiger Beat: Still Squeaky Clean After All These Years ," the NYT ran a photo of the magazine with a photo of President Barack Obama on the cover.  The Times' correction today said:  A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with...

Obsessed with how people dress, New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham unfailingly dons the same shapeless jacket; a chronicler of ritzy charity events, the octogenarian tools around Manhattan on a bike. Cunningham's two weekly spreads in the Sunday Style section form complementary opposites: "On the Street" features everyday Gothamites decked out in eclectic fashion statements, while "Evening Hours" captures the rich clad in haute couture. Whatever the Times-produced, TV-ready tribute, "Bill Cunningham New York," lacks in tension is amply compensated by the pleasure of watching an enthusiast ply the craft he loves.

"America's first condom store," Condomania, has apparently "just unlocked its huge database of penis sizes." Excited yet? What that means is that the store has ranked the 50 states and largest cities by average penis size. Finally! "After 20 years in business, Condomania knows perhaps more than anyone else about the nation's penises," according to a press release. So what did they find? New Orleans tops cities in penis size (insert your own Big Easy joke here), followed by D.C., San Diego, New York and Phoenix.

T allulah's back, and she's as bawdy as ever. Well, sort of. For the past 42 years, the real Tallulah Bankhead, who will forever be remembered for her baritone-laced husky pronunciation of the word "Daaaaaahling," has been sleeping away the ages in a quiet corner of a Chestertown churchyard, perhaps sipping celestial bourbons and smoking cigarettes while dressed in her trademark full-length fur coat. Last week, she stepped back onto Broadway, courtesy of actress Valerie Harper in "Looped."

If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness -- and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right to set your clock for you? It's tyranny. So you join the Free Time movement. You go to meetings. You tune in "The Bob Glenn Show" every day on Fox for your marching orders and set your clock as you darn well please and feel liberated from lockstep uniformity.

Fred Shoken, a Baltimore preservationist and planner, wrote to me several weeks ago after I had written a piece about Roland Park author Jill Jonnes' new book on the building of the Eiffel Tower. "I was disappointed that it made no mention of Baltimore's little-known, if not spurious connection, to the landmark structure," he wrote. What Shoken was talking about were 1894 newspaper accounts stating that Baltimore capitalists had purchased the Eiffel Tower and were planning to have it dismantled and re-erected in Clifton Park to celebrate Baltimore's centennial in 1897.