"I think it was the Sunday Style section that brought us together," say Ken and Barbie.

"Just $4.70 a week delivers the world to your home," and the world is that described by the New York Times, which world would be very familiar to a proctologist.

"The Times has the best reporters in the world. There's no denying that." How quickly they forget Jayson Blair.

"How many sections are you fluent in?" asks an Asian woman in knee boots doing nothing for her legs. A bald man in tortoise-shell glasses responds, wriggling with pleasure, "I'm fluent in three sections: business, travel, the book review."

No one can make that up--it perfectly demonstrates the snotty insularity of the paper of record--to assume that they are the language that people can aspire to. The demotic of the good and the great, or the patois of people who can pay money to be informed by them, to adopt a style, for only $4.70 a week, which will somehow let them peer through the windows into the offices of the Good and Great, or those who feel that they are, against all evidence, Good and Great.

"Please sir, can I have another section?" Will we have Berlitz courses on reading the Old Gray Corpse? University of Phoenix Courses on how to approach the Style Section? To the blacking factory with them.

We can all take comfort that more and more people are seeing them as being the sniffing, insular New Yorkers that they are, and these commercials to foist their fishwrap on fly-over country are pathetic with their desire to be seen as cool. We all know the rather sad person from long ago who still has the sideburns and wears the polyester and thinks of himself as cool--time stopped when he decided he was cool, and he was so satisfied with himself that he managed, for a while, to make other people think that he was still cool. And all of his close friends still think he's cool and don't notice the sideburns and the polyester. But the rest of the world does, and quietly slips away, his coolness eroding until only he believes in it. Fewer and fewer people come to his party and the few guests that are there, relatives and employees and fellow-travelers all, are louder and louder in their denial and sneering at those who didn't come.

"How many sections are you fluent in?" The arrogance.

Their circulation is declining, and they were forced to mortgage their building to meet debt obligations. One of my fondest hopes is to wake up one day and to see a picture, in some respectable paper, which is of course not the paper of record, of Frank Rich on the sidewalk, like the madam in Pretty Baby who was drunk on absinthe in bed when the New Orleans bailiffs came to repossess the furniture. They tipped her out of bed and she lay in the floor, drooling. Of course Rich would be shouting imprecations against Republicans through the slobber, blaming them, inter alia, for the Black Death.

A fitting end for a once-great paper sunk into the irrelevance brought by its own preening, snooty liberalism. A paper way past its sell-by date, whose only asset seems to be its own opinion of itself.

Which other people aren't buying. See the mortgage, above.

The NYT, the Los Angeles Times and all of the other great, and great cough here, papers in severe financial distress, taught people not to have values but to throw attitude. Which made them vulnerable. I wonder if they will ever appreciate the irony as I do? Nah. At all? Nah. They positioned themselves as being fashionable instead of being honest and guess what? They gave a paper and nobody came. They're selling bustles and no one is buying. See the old whore above.

Pinch, before you throw stones at the CEOs of the Big Three, look in the mirror.