Other shoe, meet floor

When Imus, AKA Snarly McCryptkeeper, got fired, I had an inkling that the situation was bound to become more interesting. Honestly, I expected his public apologies to become gradually more emphatic as the gravity of his situation sank in. Let's face the truth here, Imus had the most cushy and best-paying job you can imagine, one that left him with plenty of time to devote to outside projects geared to play on his celebrity. The only drawback I could see was having to wake up and go to work at such an early hour. At any rate, at the time I was thinking he had to be panicking somewhere behind that foam-latex countenance. He does not want to lose that swank job, thought I.



Now Gail at TestPattern reveals that the I-Monkey is already hatching a Plan B scenario:

Don Imus was all apologies when the fire was raining down on him for calling the Rutgers' women's basketball team names. But he's not taking his firing sitting down, according to Fortune.com. They report that the DJ plans to sue CBS radio for the $40 million remaining on his contract.



At first, the alleged suit seems laughable. Imus messed up, he got fired, and now he wants his big paycheck for doing nothing. But nothing is that simple. A source tells Fortune that Imus' contract urged him to be "confrontational and irreverent," and that he was promised a warning before he was fired. I'm no contract lawyer, but if that, especially the last bit, is really in Imus' contract, he may have a case.

I should submit a cartoon to the New Yorker, one of those two-old-guys-in-chairs deals, with one coot saying, "I used to be just a cranky old SOB, but now I'm confrontational and irreverent." Don't you dare, Robert Mankoff, I thought of it first!