Screw-ed-Up Priorities

As many New Yorkers know, Page Six has turned bankrupt pornographer Al Goldstein into a supporting character of such regularity that it's become difficult to tell whether they enjoy kicking a guy when's he down or feel the need to repay some sort of karmic debt or just know an easy source of filler when they see one. Frankly, it's getting kind of annoying...and there's a lot better things the folks who compile p6 could be doing with their time than trying to remold a down-on-his-luck asshole as Joe Gould to their Joseph Mitchell. (Which is not, I hasten to add, to suggest that Goldstein deserves the chain of events that has befallen him, or to feel joy in his downfall.)

But now--well, last week, anyway--the New Yorker itself is getting in on the act. I vaguely noticed Nick Paumgarten's Talk of the Town piece but didn't really pay much attention past the second graf's opener: "Goldstein, as every schoolboy knows, founded the magazine Screw..." Not every schoolbody does know that, of course, and one rather suspects Mr. Ross would have written quite the note to that effect, so having hit such an obvious clunker I just skimmed the rest and moved on. (And, yes, perhaps my standards are impossibly high.) So I missed most of the commentary from Paumgarten and Goldstein on Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk that became a New York cause celebre in December... commentary that really pissed Robert Winkler off but good:

"There's a bit of a problem in comparing a hawk without a nest to humans without a home [writes Winkler]: it's a false analogy. Pale Male is not homeless—never was, never will be. He's a wild animal. He lives outdoors. He captures live squirrels, rats, mice, and pigeons with his bare talons; kills them; and eats them raw (and in the case of mice, probably whole). He needs no shelter as we know it; his "bedroom" might be a treetop or a building ledge. He wears no clothes yet can probably withstand a temperature of -50 degrees F. The destruction of his nest was a criminal act, but a bird's nest, while crucial to reproduction, shouldn't be called a home."