• by John Gaffney , March 14, 2003

OPRs For the Week That Was:

Frenchie Bashing Part I: My two year old son (this is no joke, now) calls McDonald’s french fries “chickenfwise.”

Can I Get Product Placement On The Podium? To present its daily briefings to the world, rumors in several newspapers say that a Hollywood art director has been hired to create a $200,000 set for General Tommy Franks and other American commanders to give daily updates.

Which Forced Dan Rather To Bite His Lip Before Saying ‘Lara. Who’s Yo Daddy?’ The Media Research Center went nuclear over CBS Evening News this week. It cited a report that showed Saddam Hussein was “looking remarkably relaxed, almost paternal,” as reporter Lara Logan asserted from Baghdad on Tuesday's CBS Evening News as she described his “daily appearance on Iraqi TV” to lecture “his top military commanders to prepare their men for war.” Logan added that men are coming to Iraq “from across the Middle East to defend the capital and carry out suicide bombings against U.S. forces.”

They Only Came Back On Wednesday Because American Idol Was On: According to the Associated Press. two dozen monkeys escaped from a research center and holed up in a forest, where animal-control workers used bananas and oranges to try to lure them out. The monkeys are classified as disease-free and posed no health risk to humans, but workers trying to capture the animals wore protective gowns and gloves as a standard precaution, said Fran Simon, a spokeswoman for the Tulane Regional Primate Center. By Wednesday, eight of the 24 rhesus macaques remained on the loose. "When they get hungry enough, they'll come back," Simon said.

Frenchie Bashing Part Two: Don’t quit your day job, Philippe. You’re no threat as a copywriter. The French designer Philippe Starck, known for his bizarre re-creations of everyday objects from toothbrushes to lamp stands, was let loose for one day on the centre-left newspaper Libération yesterday. Starck designed a conventional newspaper, except that generally the headlines were white-on-black, the illustrations were squashed underneath them and across the bottom of all 40 pages were slogans reminiscent of the scrolling news used by 24-hour news channels. The mostly anti-US slogans included: "Let's get radical", "Refuse the new totalitarianism" and "Fight monopolies."