HOT OFF THE 'PRESS': The "New York Press" Billboard has a couple of notable items today:

Students are stealing newspapers on college campuses again, and John Strausbaugh is pissed off about it:

On Monday, black students at Purdue held a press conference to protest an Oliphant cartoon that ran in the campus paper, The Exponent. The issue, predictably, was identity politics and the perception that the paper had "disrespected" black students by running the cartoon, blah blah blah. In a rare show of balls from the usually mild-mannered editorial cartoonist, Oliphant’s strip makes rather wicked fun of both the slavery reparations movement and this year’s Academy Awards for Denzel Washington and Halle Berry—both surely fair and open targets for an editorial cartoonist. Two of these kids are sophomores, the other a junior. Maybe Purdue doesn’t get around to teaching the Constitution, and specifically the First Amendment, until senior year. I’ve got news for that Black Student Union president: In a democracy, the free and open expression of political and social opinions in a newspaper is not only "acceptable," it’s fucking essential. Only fascists, old-school commissars and college students have the power to demand that everyone else in the world "respect" them no matter how silly they act, or get to live in a world where the only opinions they hear on important topics of the day are ones they agree with. And as for the editor who apologized for having the temerity to publish a paper that upsets someone: you’ve got a job waiting for you at nytimes.com when you graduate, you scheming careerist you.

Then, check out William S. Repsher's take on the state of indie record stores:

Generally, when I walk into an indie store, there's some snobbish dweeb behind the counter wearing his limited taste in music like a STOP sign and snickering at any customer who doesn't buy CDs meeting his archaic "cool" criteria. Frankly, if your average indie-store worker suggested an album to me, I'd be prone to cracking open the jewel case and flinging the CD at his head like a frisbee. It's a rare record-store employer who sees the big picture musically—usually just the store owner, the rock of sanity in his ever-shifting sea of minimum-wage loser employees.

The article's best quote is from Mike Phillips, owner of six Schoolkids Records shops in North Carolina for more than 20 years: "We haven't gone the bong-and-belt-buckle route, but I will if that's how I'm going to pay my bills."

Buddy, we may all have to go that route, sooner or later, no matter what our line of work. I've already picked out a stars-and-bars belt buckle the size of a Doberman's head from the local Señor Frog, have this huge blue bong Mayor Bloomberg gave me on the subway this morning and got a VW van with a Molly Hatchet album cover painted on the side. Worst of all, I've figured out how to dub my old Ted Nugent and Uriah Heep eight-tracks to MP3. Woe unto the stiff suits of the music industry!