The New York Times is friggin pathetic

Seriously, this is just so lame. They got beat on the liver story by the Journal, and now they’re desperately trying to put some spin of their own on the story to sort of redeem themselves. So they run this incredibly stupid piece suggesting that maybe I jumped the organ donor line. “Whenever someone rich and famous receives a transplant, suspicions inevitably arise about whether that person managed to jump to the head of the waiting list and take an organ that might have saved the life of somebody just as desperate but less glamorous,” they say — only to assert, a paragraph later, that every doctor they talked to says there is no reason to cheat because these days anyone can pretty much sign up for a liver and get one.

There’s no evidence suggesting I cheated. Nobody is quoted in the story saying I cheated. There’s not a shred of anything in the actual story about that. I mean, yeah, as they point out, if you’re rich and you own a jet you can sign up at different places and zoom in on short notice. And you can buy a big friggin mansion and just camp out waiting for some motorcyclist to go splat and leave a nice juicy set of fresh organs behind. So what? This is news? As I’ve said before, what is the friggin point of being obscenely rich if it doesn’t gain you some advantages in life? Why would anyone want to be rich if you didn’t get anything out of it? Duh, New York Times. Think about it. Anyway, they’ve got no proof that I did anything wrong — in fact they’ve got no actual information about me at all, but nevertheless they can run a photo of me and a headline that says, “A Transplant That Is Raising Many Questions.” Oh really? It’s raising many questions? Where? From whom? I haven’t heard any, except from the newsroom of the lame ass New York Times.

Then, as if that’s not bad enough, they pack right next to it an incredibly boring piece by our hero Brad Stone and his ladyboy sidekick Ashlee Vance about how Apple is so secretive, even though some pinhead academic guy says everybody else is trying to be more transparent. You can read it here if you want a good laugh. Thing is, these secrecy complaints have been around forever. It’s not news. But let me offer a quick response on this: a) Yes, everybody else is talking about being more transparent, but mostly they’re full of shit, and oh, by the way, Apple isn’t everybody else; and b) last time I looked, we’re kicking everyone’s ass. So hey, Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, did it not occur to you that maybe we know what we’re doing? You know, there’s this little thing called an “income statement.” And something else called a “balance sheet.” Have you heard of them? Worth taking a look sometimes. Ours is pretty impressive.

Fact is, what’s really going on is the Times is pissed that they got scooped on LiverGate by their big rivals at the Wall Street Journal. According to the person we’ve got embedded at their Silicon Valley bureau, their boss Damon Darlin has been going apeshit ever since the Journal liver story broke on Friday at midnight. Now they’re desperate to break some kind of second-day news on this.

For what it’s worth, you want to know what Brad Stone was doing last week when the Journal was busy digging up the liver story? He was calling around to fellow hacks asking if they had galleys to some forthcoming Ben Mezrich novel about Facebook. According to Brad, Fortune had locked up some exclusive deal to run an excerpt of the novel — and Brad wanted to pee on their shoes and ruin their exclusive by obtaining the galleys and running excerpts first. In other words: Classy. Now he’s bothered by the fact that I don’t want to tell the whole world every little detail about my liver. Seriously, what would you like to know, Brad? You want video of the operation?

I will tell you this about iLiver 2.0: It’s nanoengineered, and it kicks ass. I wake up every morning feeling like Shaft, Superfly, James Bond and Kung Fu all put together. I’m bench-pressing twice my body weight, and I am so friggin ready to kick some low-rent tabloid hack wannabe ass that’s it not even funny. So bring it, Brad Stone and you other jealous, sanctimonious gits at the New York Times. Seriously. Bring your A game, you clueless, classless motherfriggers. I will be alive long after every one of you is dead. I know this makes you crazy, but it’s the truth. I’m back, bitches. Deal with it.