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Legit Money, Printing Paper
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Idris Elba, best known for playing Stringer Bell in seasons 1-3 of The Wire, is now playing Charles Minor, Michael’s new boss on The Office. (Which, when you think of it, if David Simon had ever gotten around to telling the story of put-upon postmillennial office workers in America, is essentially the same story.)

Part of Stringer’s conceit on The Wire is that he wants to turn drug dealing into a modern business. He wants even his front businesses to run well. But it’s still dissonant, to say the least, to watch this Baltimore man-god walk among the paper salesmen in Scranton. Rex and the commenters at Fimoculous cracked me up.

Rex: Yeah, that totally threw me too: Stringer Bell on The Office last night…

kittyholmes: I guess he’s finally using all those business classes.

jed: Well, he did run the copy shop.

Rex: HAHAHAHAH!

True.


5 comments

It totally never occurred to me while watching it, but I bet that the Stringer character actually is supposed to be a very subtle reference to paper!

I love intra-television cross-references like that…

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Also (unless this is what you meant), a stringer is a newspaper freelancer. I’m pretty sure David Simon was a stringer for the Baltimore Sun when he was in college.

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More than that! He was a reporter there for many years.

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Yeah, but everyone knows that! I’m talking about the particular resonances of the name “stringer.”

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Oh, OK.

You know why they’re called stringers?

Because in reporters’ parlance, collecting facts and details around a story — even before you know exactly what the story is — is called “gathering string.”

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