BREAKING: Chris Kelly has a concealed-carry permit

We'd been in a bit of a funk after seeing Green Ridge's own Joe Biden do so badly in the Pennsylvania primary. Or maybe we were waiting for the right bit of news to resume our solemn NEPA Media duties. This may be it: Chris Kelly has a concealed-carry permit.

Christopher J. Kelly goes to Wal-Mart

Have you heard of these "Bratz" dolls? They are dolls that look slutty. They are called "ghetto dolls" by some, Christopher J. Kelly reports in his Times-Tribune column. Crazy! We stopped reading at the word "anyhoo."

How lazy is too lazy?

At the outset we'll say that we don't think this is plagiarism per se. But. Still. The Times-Tribune's Christopher J. Kelly wrote today about how the vintage Sesame Street episodes coming out on DVD carry a parental-warning label. Kelly, like many people, read this in the Sunday New York Times magazine a week ago. Kelly pretty much credits The Times and reporter Virginia Heffernan when he lifts a few lines from one of Heffernan's interviews.

But he goes on to write generally about the news -- and hits most of the same points Heffernan does in her writing.

Heffernan: "Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes."
Kelly: "Cookie Monster is not exactly a model of healthy eating and self-control. [...] And his diabetes risk? Let’s not even go there."

Heffernan: "Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but... well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies."
Kelly: "The “Sesame Street” of yore was a place where a nice neighborhood man might ask a young girl to come to his house for milk and cookies. Imagine such a scene being judged anything but sinister these days."

Heffernan: "The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating."
Kelly: "What about Ernie and Bert? Two guys living in a basement apartment for 40 years with no signs of girlfriends is the kind of thing that raises eyebrows...."

Like we said. This doesn't constitute plagiarism per se. But it's lazy as hell.

Read the NYT piece in full

Chris Kelly talks with a guy who showed up at the newspaper to talk about a piece of wood that looks like E.T.

"Journalists wait their entire careers for a story like this to stroll through the front door," Kelly writes." Since there were no journalists around, I went down to the front desk to talk with the man."

Chris Kelly has hard time coming up with this week's column

"Tired of reading lame spoofs of pulp novels and other examples of self-indulgent navel-gazing? Then help a hard-luck ink-slinger get his groove back."

Chris Kelly: Everyone reads weather stories

"Some people will read the stories on the commissioners, taxes and Iraq. Everyone will read the stories on the snow," Chris Kelly writes in today's paper. "Newspaper columns, like snowstorms, are measured in inches. In terms of substance, there’s not much to this one. In fact, I wrote it for no other reason than that it was snowing." Oy.

Kelly: Barbaro was just a horse

So who is "a certain veteran journalist whose opinion I would respect even if he couldn’t fire me for insubordination," as Chris Kelly put it in the Sunday Scranton paper?