The Breakfast Meeting: N.F.L. Quickly Reverses on Referees, and Satire Gone Wild

September 27, 2012, 9:12 am

By NOAM COHEN

The debacle of an ending to “Monday Night Football” on ESPN apparently was enough to propel a settlement Wednesday night to the lockout of N.F.L. referees, Judy Battista reported. Under the eight-year labor deal, pensions will remain in place for current officials through the 2016 season; new officials will get a 401(k) instead. The average official's salary will rise to $173,000 in 2013 from $149,000 in 2011.

• The league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, is lifting the lockout Thursday to allow a crew of regular officials to work the game on the NFL Network between the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns. The new contract is expected to be ratified on Saturday to allow regular crews to work Sun day's games.
• Sure, the replacement referees were putting the reputation of the league in jeopardy, but while it lasted, the controversy was good for ratings, USA Today noted. The 90-minute SportsCenter on ESPN immediately following Monday night's game, as late as it was, had more than six million viewers and was the most-viewed Sports Center in its history.

David Pogue took a drive with the map application Apple provides users of its new iPhone 5, having booted the Google maps app that was installed with earlier iPhones. Suffice to say it didn't end well. The iPhone 5 maps, he writes, “may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.”

In a sign either of how eager commentators are to repeat embarrassing stories about the Romney campaign or how difficult it is to write successful satire, or perhaps both, a column by Roger Simon on the Politico Web site now carries an editor's note: “Some readers were confus ed that this Roger Simon column was satire.” The Times columnist Paul Krugman and MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell were among those who took the juicier, if ultimately fabricated, details from Mr. Simon's column, and ran with them, Trip Gabriel writes, including the “anecdote” that Paul Ryan had taken to calling the man at the top of ticket, Mitt Romney, “the Stench.” In a note appended to the column, Mr. Simon alludes to Swift's “Modest Proposal,” but perhaps in this hotly contested elections season, Orson Welles's “War of the Worlds” is the better example.

The new novel by J.K. Rowling, “The Casual Vacancy,” is decidedly adult fare as “suicide, rape, heroin addiction, beatings and thoughts of patricide percolate through its pages,” Michiko Kakutani writes in her review Thursday morning. Ms. Rowling's urge to leave the world of wizardry for Muggle-land is understandable, Ms. Kakutani writes, but “unfortunately, the real-life world she has limn ed in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that ‘The Casual Vacancy' is not only disappointing - it's dull.”