We just came across this outraged, spittle-flicked item in Slate written by Chatterbox Timothy Noah. It’s called “Breakdown at the New York Times.” Sounds pretty serious, right?

The Dec. 4 New York Times contains the single stupidest sentence to appear in that newspaper since I began reading it more than three decades ago.

We won’t spoil the surprise, but we’ll give you a hint: it has to do with musical theatre. Also, new rule, since this is the second time the problem of musical theatre has emerged. We will never feature music in a post of this kind. That would be an abomination.

We’re too busy playing on the Internets to watch television, but we’ve read on the blogs that NBC is sort of down and out these days; scraping the bottom of the barrel, you might say. Even so, we were completely unprepared to read this in today’s Washington Post:

In January, NBC will replace football on Sundays with a reality series in which viewers pick the two leads for a Broadway revival of the musical “Grease,” hosted by President Bush’s cousin.

Wow. That may prove to be more stupid packed into a half hour of television than the American public can handle. We don’t mean to suggest that we know more about programming than the career experts over at the National Broadcasting Company, but that idea seems like, really fucking stupid.

Featured Music:

None. Grease is intolerable, even when it’s an ironic punk cover.