The NYT is going to start charging money to read the NYT this month! Yikes, what the hell, they want money now, for whatever they do? We totally looked at that Black Swan ad with the Natalie Portman side-boob about seventy hundred times on the iPad edition because it was on EVERY PAGE for like two months, isn't that "doing our part"? No? Oh.

And they don't just want a little bit of money: The New York Times is demanding thirty-five dollars per month for Web/tablet/smartphone access. That is a ridiculous amount of money -- $420 a year, in fact, because they are high. We pay just $120 for a whole year's subscription to hundreds of channels of satellite radio, and it feels like too much. We pay $15 a month for wireless on the tablet and $30 a month for DSL, and those things allow you to reach an entire world of information and music and news. There's nothing in the NYT that's worth $35 a month or even $20 a month (the lowest subscription plan, for web only). The only reason we even read the Times is because it is, by default, the only semi-serious newspaper in this stupid country. It's not particularly well-written, it's often poorly reported, the iPad app is nothing special (just shovelware; it lacks even basic text formatting like italics, and NYT blog posts are just tossed over there without any links, etc.), the op-ed writers are for the most part an embarrassment, the arts coverage is icky, and the paper's editorial/journalistic approach is often morally wrong or just plain spineless. Sorry, we'll just switch completely to the Canadian and British papers now.

Whoops, what even was the point of this post? OH RIGHT:

Your former Wonkette editor Juli Weiner is helping with this painful transition by offering many completely free endings of New York Times articles, so you can glance at the headline and picture on the front page, and then pick a likely ending, and then you're done!

• The cab driver’s homespun wisdom is borne out by geopolitical developments.
• Despite record college selectivity, admission was not as unattainable as these teens thought.
• Maureen Dowd disapproves.

This way, you can save your "free 20 Times' stories" for the really important stuff, like this "think piece" by NYT pop writer Jon Pareles, about how some pop songs lately have a vulgar word in them, but he can't write what the word is, because that's not allowed in the NYT. Because you really want to read all of that one.