Aggregation Goes Ass Backwards

We’ve only just successfully lured the Greatest Generation onto the internet, enabling grandma to throw a sheep at you any time she wants. There are finally enough reliable aggregation sources that we need only hit a few sites to get a good overview of the news each day. Life 2.0 is nicely streamlined and in sync with technology. Which is why you have to applaud a visionary like Joshua Karp for wanting to take a great leap backwards!

Wired’s “New Media Venture Turns Bloggers Into Print Journalists” tells the tale of an entrepreneur who is launching a twice-daily print version of blogs:

“Why hasn’t anyone tried to take the best content and bring it offline?” said Karp, who thinks print media is far from dying.

Hate to break it to you, Karp, but taking something from the web and turning it into print is hardly a revolutionary idea, and rarely a lucrative one.

Unlike other End of Nighers, I don’t think print media is completely doomed, not necessarily anyway. But the march towards digitalization will continue, and reversing the successful web aggregation formula for print? Well, were I the kind of person prone to posting pictures with humorous text overlays, I’d show you one that implies they are not going about this in the right way. But I’m not that kind of person, so you’ll just have to wait until you can pick up a copy of The Printed Blog on your morning commute.

Media Mashup: Eyeball Eaters, Bee Agitators, and the Real F-Word

Here are some Sunday afternoon links to kill some time before the Golden Globes:

A few years ago, a friend of mine was in an amateur production of Oedipus Rex that made such gleeful use of corn syrup blood and gelatin eyeballs that even my dangerously-desensitized-by-massive-exposure-to-horror-movies self was moments away from fleeing the auditorium in queasy horror. This? This is so much worse:

"Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it," agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday. [...] "He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one."

Oh, for the love of...did that actually need stating? I mean, really, the man who pulled his own eyeball from his head and ate it - twice - is mentally ill? Really? You don't say.

That story is almost as horrifying as this one: Tumor Found In Newborn's Brain Contained A Foot:

A pediatric neurosurgeon says a tumor he removed from the brain of a Colorado Springs infant contained a tiny foot and other partially formed body parts. [...] "It looked like the breech delivery of a baby, coming out of the brain," Grabb said.

Oh god. Oh god. OH DEAR GOD. Why, why, why do the interviewees with the least-writerly-jobs always feel the need to get extra imaginative in their quotes? Can't they find another way to unleash their creative side, like taking a pottery class or trolling on Digg or something? I'd normally have the urge to scrub my brain with bleach to eradicate that horrifying image, but now I also have the urge to mix in a little Gold Bond. Just, you know, in case.

Moving away from Things That Are Horrible into the land of Things That Are Awesome, you might remember David Thorne as the guy who tried to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider. He specializes - to use the word lightly - in engaging in protracted and hilarious e-mail exchanges with unlucky, unwitting souls, then posting the results to his too-cool-for-a-functional-splash-page website. Well, he's at it again, e-harassing a motorcycle salesman with typical motorcyclist concerns, like getting attacked by swarms of bees:

According to one [web]page though, bees are technically unable to fly due to their wings being too small for their body weight but I have seen them do it so this can't be true. Somebody should check the internet and make sure everything on there is correct.

Over at The Hathor Legacy, Jennifer Kesler wants to know whether intent matters when judging the sexism within a piece of media:

Not only are we not claiming to know the writer’s (or director’s, producer’s or network’s) intent when we criticize their product, but I would go one step further and argue that intent doesn’t matter.

And finally, Amy Siskind did a very interesting article for The Daily Beast that's well worth a read, How Feminism Became the F-Word:

Who is looking out for the women of this country? Well, I will tell you who is not: Ms. magazine.

If my friend's apartment has wireless internet that I can tap into, I'll try liveblogging the Golden Globes the way I did the Emmys, so check back in later tonight. And if that fails, well, coming up this week I'll be talking about Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, my best and worst movie picks for '08, and the new season of Scrubs.

Pete Wentz Apologizes For Swoosh Haircut

Breast milk-taster/Fall Out Boy frontman Pete Wentz has come out with a list of gripes and loves for 2009, and on the list of gripes is the swoosh haircut popularized by, well, Pete Wentz:

6. the “swoosh” hair cut
i apologize for my participation. god, these pictures are gonna be like ones of my dad from the 70’s when he had long hair and a beard, just bad. i have no excuse.

I'm sorry, but Pete Wentz apologizing for his "participation" in the swoosh haircut phenomenon is like an arsonist apologizing for his "participation" in the burning down of your house. The house, in this metaphor, being my eyeballs. Alas, Pete, the damage is done, which you would have known if you had walked past a high school or mall any time in the past two years. Damage. Done.

Time Warner to Stewart/Colbert Fans: Sucks to Be You!

Time Warner Cable decided to give its customers a special New Years treat: cutting off their access to all Viacom channels. Without Dora the Explorer, what will stoned fratboys watch at night? Oh, no worries, Viacom doesn't own Cartoon Network. Aqua Teen Hunger Force to the rescue! Anyway, Nikki Finke has all the details here if you are inclined to read the whole back and forth.

This time last year, this might have upset me. But these days I'm calmer, wiser...and I switched to Comcast in June, so whatever, not my problem. I'm inclined to side with Viacom on this one, though, even with their shitty business practices, because Time Warner is kind of a pain in the ass. When one of my crazy roommates wanted to get cable in her room, instead of letting her get her own account they made me put it under my account (that I had opened a year prior) because of how our building was zoned or whatever - there couldn't be two accounts or something like that. I don't know, they didn't explain it well and after two hours on the phone I finally said screw it and authorized the charge because I had stuff to do and my roommate was whining. And though she was never late with her half because I scared the bejesus out of her - you thought I didn't see you crossing yourself every time I walked past like I was Rosemary's damnassed baby strolling down the hall, and yes, I was also surprised to learn that "Whore of Babylon" doesn't have a direct translation in your language, either that or you wanted me to hear you say it. I'm sorry that American girls wear pants and tops that are not full-on turtlenecks and makeup and jeez! Chill! - it was still annoying.

Also, they would update the software on the cable box, like, every week, and the TV would be unavailable for a few hours in the middle of the night, which was the only time I had to watch TV at that time so that sucked. And the resetting would mess up my Tivo because the cable box would be off post-resetting and I wouldn't notice for a while because the whole point of Tivo is to not have to watch live TV, and that glitch made me miss the final sign off of the WB network that my Tivo was supposed to record, and yes, it was a bunch of programs I'd already seen a million times before but it was the signing off of the network I'd spent most of my formative teen years watching, and I would have been home to watch it but my magazine meeting ran late because my EIC assigned the cover story to a literal crackhead who smokes crack and, big surprise, it came out like it was written by a crackhead and since I was the editor I had to spend the whole night at the office trying to figure out which interview quotes were with real people and which ones were with the voices in my crackhead writer's head! And then rewrite the whole thing so that it no longer looked like it was written by a crackhead! That was awesome!

So yeah, I don't really care who's right and who's wrong in this Time Warner/Viacom imbroglio. All I know is that Time Warner sucks. If you're geographically able to, I highly recommend you switch to Comcast. Their customer service is awesome. (That's the non-sarcastic "awesome" this time - you can tell by the lack of italics.) Last week, I called to drop down to the basic package on account of being unemployed and brokeass, and the guy instead found me a promotion that lets me keep my HBO/Showtime/Starz and pay the basic rate. And if I had a psycho roommate now, I bet Comcast wouldn't make me share an account with her crazy, hatin' ass.

Lyons and Mankiewicz Desecrate Corpse of Siskel, Laugh

Earlier this year, Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert were booted from their syndicated movie review show At the Movies and replaced with Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies and the embryonic Ben Lyons, who comes from E! but whose best credential for the job comes from being the loinfruit of film critic Jeffrey Lyons. While Richard Roeper lacked the dearly departed Gene Siskel’s gentle intelligence that was a nice balance to Ebert’s tottering loopiness, Ebert and Roeper were at least solid reviewers whose show was entertainment in its own right. Then came Ben and Ben.

I put a finite amount of stock into movie reviews to begin with because my own taste runs idiosyncratic to most mainstream tastes, and the things I love tend to be universally loathed by critics and even my friends. Someone recently suggested I have bad taste, and I countered that maybe I’m a maverick, and they counter-countered that maybe I’m a maverick with bad taste. Fair enough. Either way, it doesn’t make movie reviews very useful for me personally. I like Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, because their reviews are informative and well-written even if I don’t ultimately agree with many of their verdicts, but they’re about the only ones I can stand. And yet, as I’ve mentioned before, every week I watch At the Movies. Why? I can’t fully answer that question myself because this show is just terrible, and there’s not even the schadenfreude value I derive from, say, certain Fox News shows.

Then again, that’s not fully true. After all, it is kind of fun to watch Mankiewicz and Lyons snipe at each other like passive-aggressive little bitches for thirty minutes a week. Lyons, who’s about two decades Mankiewicz’s junior, for example, has lately taken to calling his co-reviewer “Mank” and “Manky” on air. Next week, I swear he’s gonna tweak Manky’s nose. It’s amusing to see the vein in Mankiewicz’s forehead throb a little every time Lyons does that. And Lyons has always been ludicrously soft in his reviews, mostly because he clearly has his eye on being more a part of the movie world than just dishing out reviews. To be an effective reviewer, you really do have to euthanize your dreams of actively participating in the field you’re reviewing. But this week, Mankiewicz took Lyons to task after he positively reviewed Bedtime Stories (which is produced by Disney, which produces At the Movies, FYI): “I don’t know where to begin. I didn’t like one part of this movie. You weren’t right, I believe, about any single point you made in this entire review.” To which Lyons chuckled in the vacant way frat boys tend to when you’re verbally castrating them, and they’re confused because you’re using hard words and, hey, bro, can’t we just hug it out or am I gonna have to roofie you again?

Not that Mankiewicz is without fault either. He kicked off his review of Special with, “The name of the movie is actually Special, unfortunately, the movie itself is not.” That’s just...I can’t even.... I can’t. I can’t. Jesus, that’s bad. That’s the kind of clever line you come up with while on hour five of an all-night bender, and you write it down because it’s oh my god so brilliant you’ll make millions off this...but then you sober up in a day or two, look at it, and go, “Oh man, thank god I didn’t drunk text that to anyone.” Then you burn it. And scatter the ashes to the seven continents lest it reform itself. You do not say it on national television.

But Lyons is just the worst, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Two months ago, Ebert chided Lyons for, well, being an insatiable starfucker. Which again goes back to needing to separate yourself from whatever you’re reviewing. This is a problem with any TV show that reviews movies, though, because there’s usually some kind of ethical problem afoot when the same studio putting out a movie is bankrolling your cushy reviewing lifestyle. (This is, of course, becoming an issue in print media as well as more conglomerates stick their fingers into all sorts of pies, but it doesn't seem nearly as rampant yet.) But watching At the Movies, I sometimes want to break out a flowchart of who-owns-what to figure out why Lyons and Mankiewicz pan or praise movies seemingly arbitrarily. I’m sure following the moneytrail will clear a lot of that up. Lyons is just...unsettling. He looks like that intern you don’t ask to get you coffee because you’re pretty sure he’ll spit in it, or worse. He recently summed up his review of Yes Man with “I say ‘no’ to Yes Man,” which is almost as bad as Manky’s Special quip. He’s just vacant and entitled and...no.

There is one good thing about the show, however. Mankiewicz has taken up Ebert’s mantle of creepy overshares. He ended his review of Marley and Me with, “The film got sweet and tender and finally focused, and at the end, in a crowded theatre, I hugged a total stranger.” Thanks for the nightmares, Mank!

Morning Show Madness

What the hell is wrong with morning news shows lately? Back in high school I'd watch The Today Show every day while getting ready for school, and I seem to remember it being somewhat normal, with Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann having fun but acting like regular human beings, not Bellevue escapees. And then I worked evenings for a while, then went to college and scheduled all my classes around my nocturnal habits, so I went a long time without watching any television before noon. But my current internship requires me to watch a copious amount of morning TV, and holy heck is it all insane. Over on The Today Show, Katie's gone, Matt peaces out halfway through the broadcast, and they've added a fourth hour hosted by Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb that regularly devolves into alcohol-fueled shenanigans. And the other morning shows aren't faring much better, either. Here are just a few of the recent wacky morning show clips I've found and edited:

*On Good Morning America, a disgusting demonstration of a Baby Alive doll causes Diane Sawyer to double over in embarrassment while her co-anchor mumbles "I know this is important, it's not good television but I know it's important...". The producer then cuts suddenly and inexplicably to commercial.

*In The Today Show's hilarious fourth hour, Kathie Lee decided to teach the world all about Irish People when Enya comes to visit. Specifically how we all look alike, and how we can all play either the flute or the violin. I took lessons on both when I was a kid, and my kindest act of altruism to date has been the cessation of said lessons. I'm not completely musically hapless, however - I sing very well, which is more than I can say for Kathie Lee, whose lack of pitch doesn't stop her from joining in on a gleeful slaughtering of Silent Night! A week prior, she'd made a joke about rising to fame via the "casting couch" that suddenly doesn't seem so jokeish.

*I've written before about some of the insane stuff on Fox News that I have to watch for my internship, but my favorite by far is their morning show, Fox and Friends. The anchors simply do not give a shit what they say, they're just there to have fun, man! Don't harsh their buzz! Like all media everywhere, they did a piece on Twilight the day it was released. Unlike all media everywhere, they claimed that 81% of all females - "better known as babes" - planned on seeing the movie. They also claimed that most teen girls were turned on to the series by their mothers, which, no. But I found my new favorite Fox and Friends clip on Friday, when a Hooters girl came on to promote something for the restaurant and the anchors pretty much kidnapped her and made her read half the sports update, then dragged her over to the couch for a segment. The girl clearly looks terrified, and as soon as they cut to a graphic for the "annoyance law" segment she flees, and the male anchors instead turn their attention to their female cohort. They begin literally poking her for an awkward amount of time. Later, she has what sounds like some kind of seizure on air while doing a voiceover.

By the way, in case you can't tell, one of my favorite parts of making these videos is finding the perfect still teaser screencap to encapsulate the insanity contained within the clip. If you want to see all the clips I've pulled for Gawker to date, I've been keeping a list here. That list is a mix of clips I was assigned to pull for the editors who needed them and clips I found and pitched myself that the editors chose to pick up for the site, but all of the morning show antics I linked to in this post are ones I found myself.

But that's not all! I put two Fox and Friends clips I pulled that didn't get used up on YouTube. This one is from November 21st, featuring a "new craze" (a dubious claim at best) called chain surfing, which involves jumping on a chain and trying not to fall off. It's about as safe as it sounds and I can only assume the F+F crew is trying to force the hand of Darwin and kill off some of their less intelligent viewers. (Does Fox even believe in evolution?) At any rate, the best part is at the end, when one of the anchors calls the weatherman "white boy" which serves only to confuse the oft-confused weatherman:



This next one is from December 12th, when Fox and Friends took a moment out of reporting the "news" to reassert their douche supremacy. Apparently, McDonald's put an anti-Starbucks billboard in front of Starbucks HQ in Seattle, and the Fox and Friends anchors would like to remind you that they pulled the same lame move first, with CNN, in Atlanta, back in who the hell cares because these people are insane:



I don't know when it became mandatory for morning news show anchors to drop a boatload of peyote before going on air, but clearly it's something that reaches across all channels. Look for Fox and Friends to do a trend piece on it in 2009.

I'm Dreaming Of A Christmas Where I Don't Fall On My Ass

I think this is the first white Christmas/December 25th we've had in the northeast in a while. And frankly I don't find it all it's cracked up to be since my natural klutzery combined with evil sidewalk conditions led to me sliding so epically down an ice sheet on Tuesday that I only avoided luging into oncoming traffic by grabbing onto the bumper of a parked car. So I didn't get mangled or anything, but in the brief, icy moments where death seemed absolutely imminent, I couldn't help but think: "Crap. I'm going to die wearing purple boots with little yellow ducks on them."

Next year for Christmas, I'm asking for soccer cleats.

But hey, you know who does love the cold weather? Late night comedians! Or so it would seem, judging from last Thursday's dispatches from David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, and my new favorite, Craig Ferguson. Because they all told cornball jokes about the weather. (And only the rakish, devilishly handsome Ferguson seemed in on the joke of the joke.) I put together this clip, which will probably get TOS'd off YouTube any minute, so enjoy it while you can:



I also uploaded this clip I filmed at a The Academy Is... concert at Roseland Ballroom last month. It's William Beckett performing their new holiday song "Winter Passing" for one of the first times in public. It's a partial clip because my camera is lame and only does video in 60 second increments, and it's shaky because I tend to bop around a lot, but it should give you a nice woozy just-enough-vodka feeling that's perfect for whatever holiday you celebrate (or don't):



You can also see the less-vodka-y official video here.

Anyway, if you're lucky enough to not have familial obligations (or can get out of them) tonight, you can always head to your local cineplex and catch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which opens today, or Slumdog Millionaire if you haven't already. (And if you haven't, why the hell not?) As for me, I'll be loading up my car with presents and German girls (well, okay, just the one German girl, my dear friend who is spending the holidays with us) and driving out to Pennsylvania, where I'm more likely to hit a deer than luge into oncoming traffic. Really not sure whether that's a win, loss, or wash. As long as I survive long enough to see Benjamin Button (and don't perish while wearing dorkish boots) I'll be happy.

10 Most Annoying Commercials of 2008

Earlier this week, Gawker highlighted some of their picks for the most annoying commercials of 2008. While their picks are good, none of the commercials that have been vexing me all year made the list. Annoyance is, after all, subjective. If it wasn't, Miley Cyrus wouldn't have a career. So here are the ones that usually have me lunging for my Tivo remote to skip ahead.

1. Optimum Triple Play's Creepy Puppet World

Oh, god, this one wasn't going to be my number one pick, but it came on just as I was typing this. Most Saturday afternoons, in between running errands in the morning and going out at night, I watch Fox 5 for a syndicated House rerun, the evening news, and At the Movies. (Yes, yes, I live on the edge.) And over the course of those two hours, I am subjected to this commercial at least three times. I thought the Optimum reggae commercial was as annoying as they could get, but whenever I think things like that, I get proven wrong. In other news, I think Heroes cannot possibly get any worse. Anyway, this commercial is just...unsettling. I think it's the anthropomorphic angel numbers and wig-wearing chihuahua that really put it over the top.

2. The T-Mobile Companion Flight Stooges

Admittedly, I am ignorant to how this whole "free companion flight" thingamawhosit works, but if it's just a basic "buy one, get one free" deal, wouldn't it be smarter to buy two tickets and get two free so your whole family flies half price rather than buying four tickets for your family and using the freebies to blackmail someone? Oh, but then you couldn't have passive-agressive tea time with your Stephenie Meyer-lookalike friend and her mentally challenged companion!



3. Nissan Versa Makes Marc Anthony Even More Teeth-Grating

Small. Big. Minimum. Maximum. Kill? Yes.



4. Le Male Aime Le Male

I don't object to the commercial for Gaultier's Le Male cologne on an artistic level. I mean, it's pretentious and French Art Housey, but so are most perfume ads. I do, however, wish they hadn't made the cologne look like a one-way pass to Team Rainbow, because it's already hard enough convincing insecure straight guys that wearing something other than Axe won't make them gay.



5. XBox 360's Head-Splitting Adverts

There is actually a series of advertisements that pan around an XBox 360 user to show that the back of their head can hinge down and reveal...I don't know, how cool XBox is or something. All of them creep me out, but this one creeps me out the most because the woman smiles so slowly and with only one half of her face that it pretty much looks like she's having a small stroke. Not exactly what I want to associate with a product that I already know can cause seizures.



6. The Febreze Huffers

The only examples I could find on YouTube are from 2007, but Febreze is still coming out with similar commercials so my point stands. I'm not a fan of advertisements that make it seem like I'll turn into a drooling moron if I use that product. The Febreze commericals are a big offender on that front, as they seem to imply that using Febreze will cause me to throw myself down onto the Febrezed item, snorting at it like a socialite on a coke-coated toilet seat. I'm not saying that adverts that tell me I'll be instantly cool and popular by using their product are any better, but I don't see the upshot of selling brain damage as a side effect.



7. Glade Candles

Again, it's the drooling moron paradigm, with the added bonus of making Glade Candle users seem like the kind of people who would pronounce Glade as Glahday, Target as Tarzhay, J.C. Penny as J.C. Pennay, and Cabernet Sauvignon as Please Kick In My Teeth.



8. Bleeding iPods

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm actually usually a fan of iPod commercials - hey, I've discovered some great music that way! - but this one bugs me because all the paint is clearly supposed to start flowing at the same time on the "you" but the red jumps the gun and it bugs me every. Single. Time.



9. eTrade's Talking Baby

This commercial is annoying and creepy because...no, you know what? If you need me to tell you why this commercial is annoying and creepy, I don't want you reading my blog anymore.



10. Axa Equitable's 800 Pound Gorilla

This is a metaphor many people already seem to have a lot of problems with, and now thanks to Axa, the wrong version will be even stronger to the weak minded. Guys? Seriously. The elephant in the room is the unpleasant thing you intentionally ignore. The 800 pound gorilla is the thing that can do whatever it damn well pleases because IT'S AN 800 POUND GORILLA. Different metaphors, different damnassed metaphors!




Sigh.

But all is not lost in the land of commercials! Most of the good ones have just gone to cable - such is the way of television migration. Two standouts this year came from Showtime, one for Weeds and one for Dexter. These are commercials that often prompted me to halt my incessant Tivo fast forwarding to watch every time they came on, they're like little works of art in their own right.

In Other News, the Sky is Falling

Do you like books? Reading? The publishing industry? Well then, my friend, the line starts here to throw yourself off a cliff because the world as we know it is coming to an end. So says the gloom and doom "publishing veteran with more than a decade of experience" on GalleyCat. According to this anonymous insider, the ground will shake, the sky will turn to blood, fire will rain down, and Borders bookstores will all shut down. This will set off a horrifying chain of events:

Agents will either go out of business or severely cut their staffs. Fewer books means less money and many agents will not be able to make a living. Some might say that fewer books will mean more time and attention will be paid to individual titles—not so said the wise man. Why? Because publishers will have to reduce their head counts if they sell fewer books and the axe will cut across sales, marketing and editorial depts. The glory days of book publishing are gone.

Not that anonymous is all too sad to see it crumble, because apparently the whole business is full of vipers and rats trying to screw each other over. I'm sure my friends who work in the industry would have some choice rejoinders, but few could match the spice of literary agent Janet Reid:

Well I have more than a decade of experience in publishing. In fact I have almost two. And I've got one thing to say to this: shut the fuck up already. [...] If you've worked for ten years in an industry you don't value or respect, with people you find distasteful, that says more about you than it does about the industry.

Listen. Literature exists beyond publishing. Some of the greatest works in our canon found their ways to an audience before the existence of moveable type and literary agents. And while it's sad that John Kennedy Toole didn't get to reap the rewards of his posthumously-published A Confederacy of Dunces, the fact is that his work went on to find an audience and influence other writers long after he'd died. Times have been financially good for a while now, and as a result, most facets of media have gained some unnecessary bloat. Vanity books have been published, vanity imprints have been opened, vanity magazines have been launched, vanity web startups have come and gone. Some genius got the bright idea to relaunch Knight Rider. This recessidepression is simply going to cull some of the excess. Some genuinely good works of art will alas suffer as collateral, but ultimately I think each industry will come back healthier than before, having shed some dead weight. I saw a lot of the same distress in 2001, when I was working in theatre in New York City before and after 9/11. For a while there everyone was convinced the NYC theatre scene was doomed (once we stopped fearing the world itself was going to end, of course), and for a while things did look dire, sure. But here we are, seven years later and still kicking. Okay, Broadway is clogged with crappy jukebox musicals and movie-to-stage adaptations and more revivals than original plays because everyone's too financially scared to take a risk on something new, but cool things are happening Off- and Off-Off-Broadway. The theatre industry survived despite weathering something terrible, and I've no doubt the media industry will do the same.

Which isn't to say it won't be hard for some genuinely good works of art to get published in the coming days, weeks, months, years. But if you want to write - not be a writer with all the perceived trappings and fame that are available only to the lucky few in even the best of times, but to honestly just write - you will continue to do so in between your shifts at Starbucks, when you have downtime from answering phones, after your EMS shift, and you will do so even knowing your works might not reach anyone in your lifetime. If you're smart, you'll set up a literary will to make sure they have a solid chance of making it out even after you're toes up. Neil Gaiman has a good guide to setting one up.

I understand the impulse to run through the streets shrieking that the sky is falling, I do. I graduated college in May, and the awesome entry-level media position I thought I'd snag by now has yet to materialize. But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. In August, I went on a job interview for editorial assistant at a pretty awesome publishing company. I ultimately lost the job to someone who'd been working as an assistant editor at another company before she'd been laid off, and obviously someone whose B.A. ink hasn't yet dried can't compete against someone with 3+ years of real world experience. I now feel less bummed about losing out on the job because the company just did a major round of layoffs so chances are I would have been out on my ear by now even if they had picked me anyway. At the interview, the editor asked me whether I was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the industry. I told him I'm an optimist by nature, but a pragmatist by experience, and I know that the only sectors of the publishing industry that will survive the coming lean times are the ones who are willing to re-think the way they do business and adapt to our changing culture. For many sectors, this means embracing online media. And there may be hope on that front, as the annual Best American Short Stories compilation and the Pulitzer Prize will now start considering online entries, which nicely dovetails with several literary journals and magazines going digital-only. It's Darwinism at its finest - adapt or die. Adapting, soldiering on, these are all good ways to cope with our changing industry. Running around like a headless chicken is not an efficient way to cope. It does, however, give me a hilarious idea for a short story. One I'll work on in between temping gigs and job interviews.

Media Mashup: Twilight gets new director, release date, Isaiah Washington defects, and nobody drinks anymore.

An update to the story of Catherine Hardwicke getting dismissed from the Twilight franchise, Summit has found a new director, Chris Weitz. This is the guy who drove the last "next Harry Potter" would-be franchise, 2007's dead-duck The Golden Compass, into the ground. So, you know - good choice. And now they've announced the release date for New Moon - November 20th. Of next year. Which is pretty ambitious considering they haven't yet finalized the script or cast (it's still up in the air whether Taylor Lautner will reprise his role of Jacob, who has a much larger role in the sequel and is supposed to be at least a foot and a half taller than Lautner), or even started filming. The date is probably not the best choice, either. Richie Fay, of Summit's distribution department, told THR: "Same time, same place. If it's also the same gross, we'll be very pleased. Hopefully, we'll have even better results." That's all fine and well, but they seem to be forgetting a few things. Like how Twilight dominated its release largely because its only competition was Bolt, since Twilight assumed Harry Potter's abandoned release date. Proven-performer Harry Potter had already done all the work of scaring off the competition, leaving that date wide open. 2009 is a different story. That date is already occupied by the Guy Ritchie-directed, shirtless-Robert Downey Jr.-starring Sherlock Holmes, which might siphon off some eyeballs from Twilight. (Hell, Holmes has already got my opening night ten-spot.) And something tells me the rushed sequel schedule isn't exactly going to improve upon the laughable effects of the first movie. But, hey, if I had a successful franchise with a built-in audience, I'd probably do everything in my power to run it off the rails, too!

In other movie news, AFI has announced their Top 10 films of 2008, and I was happy to see that Iron Man made the list. The rest of their picks are pretty predictable, but it was nice to see Man getting some love.

Fall Out Boy did an a capella performance in Washington Square Park yesterday, to help promote their new album Folie à Deux, which drops today.

Isaiah Washington has gained dual citizenship with Sierra Leone. His ex-Grey's Anatomy castmate T.R. Knight, who was effectively outed by Washington a couple of years ago and who is possibly eyeballing his own Anatomy escape, would probably love to see Washington full-out defect to Africa.

Some production company has tired of reality shows about (relatively) poor people acting stupid and is now casting for a show about rich people acting stupid.

The potential SAG strike is still looming on the horizon. Tom Hanks, George Clooney, and other SAG members are speaking out against a strike. The Writer's Guild strike earlier this year crippled the industry, and we weren't even in the throes of a recessidepression at the time. Another strike could be devestating for all the below-the-liners who count on steady employment to avoid becoming, you know, homeless.

And in real world, non-media news: did you know nobody in New York drinks anymore? Funny, I seem to recall witnessing a whole room full of people drinking just last week. Then again, maybe we're cutting back because we now have to pay for our own drinks, or because we're all on medications that are contraindicated for alcohol. (I'd venture that the former is more of a deterrent than the latter. I'm sure nothing bad can come of mixing Adderall with Red Bull and vodka.)

Finally, in the grand (yawn) tradition of end-of-the-year listicles, enjoy this Time magazine round-up of 10 Oddball Stories from 2008. Nothing like reading "Night of the Corpse Skull Bong" to make you feel better about yourself. Hey, maybe you're unemployed, uncreative, unchallenged at your job, unpantsed, whatever - at least you don't snort coke out of baby skulls! Just don't celebrate your restraint by having a drink, because goodness knows that's just gauche these days.

This is an Ad-Man's Brain on Drugs

If drug ads are supposed to make doing drugs look like a bad idea, then these two British PSAs fail. Fail delightfully, in a droll British way. Because they seem instead to have the effect of making one want to do enough of whatever the ad departments did that led them to this:





What child wouldn't be delighted to find their own Pablo the Drug Mule Dog under the tree/menorah this holiday season?

Entertainment Weekly and the Cliché Cliché

Now that Entertainment Weekly’s got a few more issues with the new redesign under their belt, I figured it was worth revisiting. As I predicted, familiarity bred comfort and the new look doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it initially did. I like the way the graphics are popping and either the layout is less cluttered or I’ve acclimated because I find that I can focus a bit better on reading the charticles and listicles in the front-of-book. I do, however, stand by my initial gripe over splitting up the TV and movie DVD sections. The graphics department has been doing a really stellar job lately, with the drawn artwork and assorted accompanying graphics - they're really churning out some attractive stuff. And Diablo Cody's nostalgic-but-sharp column on Judy Blume made me fall in love with Diablo Cody all over again (hey, when is Jennifer's Body gonna be released, anyway?).

I’m also glad that EW is back to arriving on Fridays for me. For a while it was coming on Wednesdays, and since I use EW to plan my upcoming week-in-pop-culture, a five-day delay in arrival was crimping my style, but whatever was causing the delay seems to have been resolved because it's now landing on my doorstep on Fridays as usual, giving me ample time to set my Tivo.

I was happy to see the return of Stupid Questions in the September 19th issue with House on the cover. (I was also happy to see House on the cover!) Stupid Questions was always one of my fave features, because let’s face it – most celebrity interviews are choked with stupid questions (and I say this having occasionally been the one on the stupid-question-asking side of the tape recorder), let’s at least be honest about it. And Jerry O’Connell (of the first-cancellation-casualty of the TV season, Do Not Disturb) provided some hilarious answers.

So yeah, thumbs up on the new design. Either it's better than I initially thought or I've got Stockholm syndrome, but either way, it's working for me.

But all is not entirely well in my relationship with EW. No, unfortunately, I am feeling the sting of betrayal. You know how sometimes you have one really, really awesome friend who you love, and another really, really awesome friend who you love, and you assume that when they meet they'll love each other but when you introduce them at a party one shows utter, inexplicable disdain for the other and it just breaks your heart because you want these two awesome forces in your life to mesh and they don't?

Yeah, well, that's a long-winded and overly dramatic way of saying that I am beyond bummed that my favorite magazine panned the new album by my all-time favorite band.

As I flipped through the current issue, with Stewart and Colbert re-creating that infamous Obama New Yorker cover, I landed on the music section and the review for the new Jack’s Mannequin album, The Glass Passenger, due out this Tuesday. To my immense chagrin, I saw that the reviewer gave the album a C+.

My initial reaction was along the lines of, “Bring me the head of the reviewer on a pike!” But now that I’ve had some time to calm down and reflect, my reaction is more like, “Bring me the head of the reviewer on a silver platter! Throw me down some Salomé shit, hardcore!”

Okay, I know, maybe I’m being harsh – the album isn’t out yet, right? It could suck, right? Maybe the reviewer knows something I don’t? But this isn’t the knee-jerk reaction of a die-hard Jack’s Mannequin fan. Okay, this isn’t just the knee-jerk reaction of a die-hard Jack’s Mannequin fan. Between two EPs and one instant download with an album pre-order, they’ve released seven tracks. There’s also an additional song on their MySpace, clips of some others available early to Verizon phone users, and YouTube concert footage of new material. So when I say that the new album is fantastic, I’m not just making assumptions based on past love, I’m basing it on the substantial portions I’ve already heard.

Granted, EW’s reviews could sometimes be accused of being overly effusive so it’s always nice to see some actual con-crit, but in this case I feel like the reviewer was being way too harsh with some unfounded complaints. The biggest complaints seem to be that “frontman Andrew McMahon sticks to his formula of friendly piano and new-wave-influenced beats on his second album” and “he sounds a bit bored as he tries to force clichéd metaphors into power ballads” and “the ratio of cheese to sincerity is just too high” which, just, ouch. I know that reviews are largely just well-stated opinions and you can’t really argue with opinions, but I really don’t get where the reviewer is coming from. For one, from what I’ve heard, the new material sounds quite different from the songs of the first album, Everything in Transit, and McMahon’s work with Something Corporate. Okay, I’ll admit that The Glass Passenger’s “Miss California” sounds a lot like Everything in Transit’s “Miss Delaney”, but “Miss Delaney” is one of my favorite Andrew McMahon songs so I’m not gonna complain on that one. But “Bloodshot”, “Swim”, “Cell Phone”, and “Sleazy Wednesday” all sound quite different from the earlier songs. I also feel like this is an openly honest album – almost painfully so – exploring McMahon’s post-leukemia struggle to return to normalcy. With lyrics like “And the hill’s still left to climb/ It's just so high/ And I'm so tired/ Come on look me in my bloodshot eyes” from “Bloodshot” and “Swim for the music that saves you/ When you're not so sure you’ll survive” from “Swim” and “I have become increasingly/ Overwhelmed when I’m in public/ I’m not so patient when they stare/ There’s a fighter/ Somewhere underneath this skin and bones” from “Cell Phone” (which granted is a B-side that might not have factored into the EW review), I can’t fathom the sincerity not ringing out for any listener.

As for the accusation of clichés, well, the reviewer just happened to hit on one of my pet peeves. This is a term that critics love to bandy about and it gets misused so often I think it’s lost all meaning. I saw it a lot in writing workshops when I was in school, I’d get crits of my stories back and sometimes one of the critters would write “too many clichés” but, oddly, when pressed (and I would press them on this) they couldn’t point to any specific examples. So the complaint was that I had used words people had used before? Well, yes, there are a finite amount of words in the English language that I can use without inventing new ones or being accused of using large words for the sake of using large words. I won’t disagree that there are indeed clichés and they can be overused in writing, however, I feel like they have their purpose, when used sparingly. For example, if I was writing something and wanted the background detail of a mangy cat to set the scene, I might describe it as “skin and bones” (as seen in, say, “Cell Phone”) as a kind of shorthand. Sure, I could strain my brain thinking up some brand new metaphor to get across the cat’s skinniness (though when I have tried that, I’ve usually gotten comments like “that’s a weird way to describe that…” proving there is no winning either way), but when I’m writing I’ve usually got a lot to say and why waste time and divert the narrative when I can just use a familiar phrase to get your mental image of the setting snapped into place so I can move on with the actual story? And songwriters have even less space to work with – I’d say an average of 5 minutes and 200 words. If you really examine most song lyrics, most contain “clichés” – even Fall Out Boy’s labyrinthine swaths of wordage – simply rearranged in a way that’s fresh and melodically pleasing.

I dunno, maybe I’m just lazy or unimaginative. But honestly, I usually see the cliché criticism leveled by unimaginative critics who use it as a catch-all, so much so that it’s become a cliché itself – oh, irony.

At any rate (wait, is that a cliché, or just a transition?), I’ll be doing my own review of The Glass Passenger sometime this week. It (probably) won’t be just a gushing fangirl’s squeeage, and it definitely won’t include the word cliché.

Media Mashup: Tax breaks (that allow the rich stay rich), Clueless: The Video Game, and Sesame Street goes hipster

Some interesting entertainment news stories rolling down the pike today. First up, Nikki Finke reports that Jon Favreau has appealed to the Governator to get some tax breaks in place for Iron Man 2 (and all of H’wood, really) in an effort to staunch the flow of recent runaway productions. It brought up an interesting point I hadn’t even considered and now I feel kind of bad. See, when I heard Ugly Betty was enticed by the NYC tax breaks into jumping to the east coast for the upcoming season, I was happy for two reasons. One, I hate shows that are very NYC-centric but obviously film in Los Angeles, because as authentic as the citycentric storytelling may be, the look is always so fake. (See also: Seinfeld.) Second, I’m always buoyed by the hope that I might actually be able to someday work in television without having to relocate to Los Angeles, because I am very, very pale, and it’s not yet clear whether I could habitate in such sunny environs for a long period without suddenly immolating. But my little happy bubble was pierced when I realized that, as usual, the below-the-line workers are getting screwed in this deal. And while it’s easy enough to shrug and say, “Hey, at least there are plenty of other productions in Los Angeles, and with Ugly Betty in NYC, now all the city crew members won’t have to jockey for same few jobs on Gossip Girl and the Law and Orders,” and while I’m sure the left-behind Betty crew will quickly find work elsewhere, it still sucks to work somewhere for two years, get attached to your coworkers, then suddenly get the boot.

And then, hey, here’s some bizarre news. Variety reports that Paramount is ramping up for a slate of casual videogames aimed at girls. First up, adaptations of Clueless, Mean Girls, and Pretty in Pink. Mean Girls: The Video Game? I think I’ve played that one already. It’s called “working in media”.

I don’t know. I mean, I personally think videogames are best when they let you do something you can’t – or at least shouldn’t - do in real life. Like smack a ho and boost some rims. Personally, the only video games I’ve really ever enjoyed are the two Buffy games for Xbox and the Silent Hill franchise. They’re fun because I have always tried to limit the amount of time I spend running around the streets bashing in heads with a steel pipe, but in the games I can bash away with total impunity (except to maybe my thumbs and overall brain function). But I don’t see the point in playing a video game that lets me drive to the mall and be a catty gossip. Isn’t the reality of those activities depressing enough without making me pay $50 for the game, too?

Finally, if you’re not a regular viewer of Sesame Street (and if you’re reading this blog and in the show’s target demo, we’ve probably got some issues here), you might have missed these recent cameo appearances: Neil Patrick Harris as the singing shoe fairy, Feist singing a Sesamied version of her song "1234", and an oddly unsettling appearance by Jack Black (that sadly doesn’t feature Robert Downey Jr. whaling on his ghoulies with a hammer). That's definitely some indie cred-baiting stuff there, which confirms what we've all long suspected - Sesame Street is located somewhere in Williamsburg.

Teflon Celebs

Curious as to whether Rilo Kiley had released any more music videos off last year’s Under the Blacklight since "Moneymaker" and "Silver Lining", I hit up YouTube. After a few RickRolls (yup, sad to report they’re still out in force) I found that the sad answer is no. So I re-watched "Moneymaker" instead. That video never fails to crack me up, although I suspect that wasn’t the intention.

See, with Under the Blacklight, Rilo Kiley went from the contemplative folksy rock we knew and loved from earlier albums (Take-Offs and Landings (2001), The Execution of All Things (2002), and More Adventurous (2004)) to synthy sleazy crass and gorgeous poprock. And though the album took a while to grow on me, I think it’s since surpassed More Adventurous to become my new favorite Rilo Kiley album.

So why does the "Moneymaker" video make me giggle? Because, spliced in among shots of writhing guitarists and unsavory locations, there are shots of lead singer Jenny Lewis cavorting with real (I assume) porn stars, trying to look all badass and instead looking…. How do I explain this? Okay. So there was this girl I knew in high school. She had such a sweet, unassuming comportment and a perfect, cherubic face. But she’d do these horrible things in a really guileless manner. She borrowed one girl’s car and wrecked it, borrowed another girl’s boyfriend and gave him the gift that keeps on giving, crabs, which he passed back on to his girlfriend. Stuff like that. Stuff that would get most girls kicked in the teeth, or at least socially blacklisted. But this girl just had such a way about her…let me put it this way. The newly-crabbed girlfriend ended up letting this girl cry on her shoulder about the injustice of it all. And that’s how it always went for her. Oceans parted in her wake.

Now, I’m not saying Jenny Lewis gave anyone crabs or totaled any cars, she certainly seems like a very down to earth and normal musician (rumor has it they do exist), but even if she had, who would believe it or care? Look at her. She has a face that says “I can do no wrong” and, you know what? Judging from her career, I’d say that’s accurate. So when I see her cavorting with porn stars and trying to look disaffected, I just wanna pinch her cheeks and laugh. She can do no wrong and damn anyone who says different.

Lewis isn’t the only teflon celeb around, either. Look at Will Smith. He could be photographed standing buck naked on Wilshire Boulevard, holding a bucket of dead kittens in one hand and the half-devoured corpse of a small immigrant child in the other, and everyone would just go, “Aww dip, Will, you’re so funny! When’s your next movie coming out?”

There is, however, an inversely maligned creature roaming Hollywood, maintaining the balance in the entertainment universe. The best current example is Colin Farrell. He could single-handedly rescue a bunch of nuns from a burning convent and the tabs would still make it out like he only did so to secure the sexual gratitudes of the nuns. Poor Farrell. He’s so misunderstood in all his newly heroinhobochic glory. But it’s a small sacrifice to ensure that the sun keeps shining on Jenny Lewis.

Magazines: Even Whiter Than Before!

Thanks to the holiday weekend, my Entertainment Weekly arrived on Tuesday, instead of last Friday. I sat down to read it last night – because on Tuesday I was too preoccupied with hoofing it halfway across Manhattan because the Lower Upper East Side is a cesspool that is not easily reached by civilized transit (the subway) – and, holy cow, for issue #1001 they’ve totally redesigned. With a lot of whitespace and greyscale. And I am…not sure how I feel about it.

I love Entertainment Weekly. Most magazines, I flip idly through and read a few articles at a time over the course of a week or two before I toss it into the bin. But EW, man. I sit down and read it cover to cover, every week. And I have a hard time recycling old issues, as my cluttered coffee table and closet can attest to. So I take a redesign about as lightly as I do a friend getting a nose job. Whether it’s for better or worse, it’s still different, and acquires acclimating.

Is it better or worse, though? Whitespace is certainly trendy. When I worked as an editor on my college magazine, I remember a constant struggle to reconcile one designer’s love of massive amounts of whitespace versus my love of articles that were longer than, say, 200 words. It’s interesting, though, how this plays into the way EW has played with color schemes for a while. In the 90s, the layout was very modern, a lot of black with muted dark red and blue and green accents, very boxy and classy. Then, sometime between March 2003 and October 2004 (judging by the older issues I was able to dig up) they redesigned. It was a color explosion, bright everything, and a lot of the front of book articles eschewed borders. Really eschewed borders. Particularly low-rated items from weekly charticle The Bullseye (“They shoot, we score: rating the biggest hits and misses in pop culture this week.”) were relegated to the margins of the next two or three pages. I was not a fan of the new look, but it grew on me. I did appreciate being able to easily find the green-coded television section when I wasn’t sure what to watch on TV that night, and the FOB had a nice flow to it. But here we are, with a whole new design, and it’s back to being less colorful. But whereas the 90s-era EW was dominated by bold, dark splashes, this new version is very light and austere.

For comparison’s sake, I threw together some scans of the last two designs and the newest design of the News + Notes front page:

It’s a lot less colorful (not in terms of which colors are used, but where), though certainly not boring. In fact, the newly-muted design really makes the graphics and photos pop. Aesthetically, it’s gorgeous. But while the structure is back in the front of the book and the articlettes no longer look ready to float off into space, the pages are now a little too busy. In fact, I got a headache trying to read the FOB, because my eyes kept flicking from article to charticle to sidebar – three or four per page – only digesting a word or two from each. This is, of course, largely a failing of my ADDled mind, but the old design never gave me so many problems. It’s also no longer as easy to flip through to specific non-feature sections like books, movies, etc.

And in a head-scratching (no, not that kind) move, they’ve split the DVD section up into two parts, Movies on DVD (which follows the Movies section) and TV Shows on DVD (which follows the TV section). Are there people who just buy one and would rather not know of the existence of the other? I assumed everyone had the same mixed movie/TV collection I have and would appreciate getting the skinny on the new releases all in one place. It’s possible this change was implemented to allow them to fit in more reviews, though. In the current issue, for movies on DVD, there are mid-size reviews for 6 DVDs and a charticle of “Also in Stores” listing 9, and for TV Shows there are 4 (which oddly includes Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a movie…one that was made-for-TV, sure, but that seems like a weird place to split hairs) and “Also in Stores” charticles 5 more, bringing the total up to 24 (…yes, I had to use a calculator to total that up). For comparison’s sake, the June 13th issue featured one large review of Dirty Harry, 3 small reviews, an articlette on The Onion Movie, and the weekly top 20 sales chart (now missing in the redesign). So the new format certainly makes more room reviews and release blurts, but the category splitting still strikes me as unnecessary. What will happen to concert DVDs? Will they go under Movies, or will they wait until enough are released to make a Music on DVD section to accompany the Music section?

And, the biggest disappointment, Stephen King’s fantastic column, "The Pop of King", is now consigned to the barren wasteland between the front of the book and the features, page 22, instead of the last page, which is now taken up by The Must List (which, to be fair, was on the last page before King was, and filled in when he went on vacay). And while I am happy that this week’s Must List acknowledges the awesomeness that is Wipeout, I liked ending the magazine with King. (Or the wonderfully wry Mark Harris.) King’s columns always give interesting food for thought that leave my mind turning long after I put the magazine aside, but now I have to fight the mind-turning to continue reading past page 23.

Oh well. I’m sure this redesign, like the last one, will grow on me. And Entertainment Weekly still features the absolute best entertainment writing of any magazine – or newspaper or blog, for that matter. They were even wise enough to snag the adorable and compulsively readable Michael Ausiello from TVGuide. And it’s one of the proud few entertainment mags that doesn’t feature icky candid pics of celebs gracelessly shoveling food down their gullets and running to the store in ratty sweats and flipflops, lest we forget that stars are just like us (only more talented and attractive and wealthy).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, EW informs me that Mad Men Season 1 is on DVD, so I have to go update my Netflix queue in hopes of finally seeing what everyone’s been yammering on about.

Items No Longer Blind, Still Probably BS

Yowza. A follow-up to my recent post on blind items, Gawker just reported that Crazy Days and Nights is de-blinding a bunch of old items. So now names are attached…but there’s no more accountability or anything silly like that. Who needs accountability? Only lame people who are all hung up on, like, reality and stuff. And, even de-blinded, some of the descriptors used are still just...off. For example, CDaN constantly says “older, but not aging” – what the duck? I assume that means “no longer carded at bars but not yet eligible for AARP”, but to me it sounds like they all have portraits stashed in their attics, doing their aging for them.

I think CDaN squicks me out so much because it’s the blind leading the blind. At least when Casablanca or Michael Musto spout out blind items, or non-blind but unsourced bits of gossip, they’re putting their name behind it. But any jacko can start a blog (…clearly) and can post whatever they want. Hey, did anyone figure out who the mongoose-molesting actor is yet?

Ah well. There are some items I would certainly like to be true, like this awesome go-go-girl-power blurb about one of my fave actresses, Eliza Dushku. I’d like to think she’d help out a scorned chick in need.

And there are other items I simply assume are true, like the one about Gary Busey trying to buy stuff with gold doubloons (okay, CDaN said coins, but doubloons are way more fun) because “he didn’t believe in cash or credit anymore and that he was returning to the past.” I mean, come on, Busey has gone completely batty - of course he’s going around town trying to buy stuff with pirate money.

Gossip, girl.

Like most people, I have a complicated relationship with gossip. I kind of love hearing juicy gossip, kind of hate being the subject of juicy gossip, and occasionally I’ll hear something so salacious and privacy-rending that it will actually make me feel like a bad person for hearing it. But I’ll turn right around and pry again.

Listen, I think it’s coded in our DNA. I’m working on this theory, see, that the current culture of celeb obsession is a trickle-down result from when the majority of the world’s religions went from pantheistic to monotheistic. I like to imagine that, back in the day, the ancient Greeks were kicking it at the Acropolis, swapping stories about the latest misadventures of the gods. “Hey, Akakios! Whatup, dawg? You’re not gonna believe what animal Zeus transformed himself into to rape a maiden this time!” When cultures started going monotheistic, attention shifted from the gods to the gods on earth: royalty. What was Henry VIII if not the Brad Pitt of his day? (Uh oh – watch your neck, Angelina.) And so it went for a long time. But 232 years ago today, we Americans said eff you to Britain, sparing us a lifetime of ginger-prince stalking. Which leaves us with what? Our own brand of royalty, of course – celebrities.

Which is fun, in its own way. I mean, it gives a lot of people a common point of reference in discussions. If I tell you that my friend Louella, who went through a lot of trouble ten years ago to get rid of Lou’s pesky penis and grow herself a nice set of tatas, has decided to go back to being Lou but is saddened to learn it’s easier to dig a ditch than build a mountain, well, your interest will probably be limited because you don’t actually know Lou/ella. (Sadly for you, this disinterest will not necessarily stop me from regaling you with stories about people you don’t know. It’s a miracle I have so many friends, really.) But for better or worse, almost all of us know what Brad and Angelina are up to, and we know (or think we know) enough about their lives to conjecture what they’re like enough to join in a conversation. Even if most of the “fun Brangelina facts” we all know are about as realistic as Zeus transforming himself into a golden shower of rapetastic rain.

But, being America, we sometimes take it too far. Having learned nothing from the tragedy of Princess Di, the paps, no longer happy to simply document a star’s own spiral of self-destruction, now seem determined to orchestrate a grisly death for Britney Spears. TMZ and Perez Hilton will get into a bidding war for the footage, naturally. And you know what? That doesn’t even skeeze me out as much as blind items. Sure, they have a tradition in celeb media. Ted Casablanca has been spewing lots of odd, thinly-veiled bon mots for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Even now, he’s still coming out with some weirdo stuff. But blind items, recently, have gotten broad and gotten weird. Gawker’s been running a lot by Crazy Days and Nights, which seems to have as much industry cred as, well, I do. “This recent-movie-starring A-list actor with C-list name recognition was recently discovered in the bathroom of The Ivy with a blowstache and a mongoose down his pants. No, that’s not a euphemism. The restaurant employee who discovered him helped the star sneak out the back door in exchange for said star helping the employee dispose of a dead hooker left behind by another celeb that I’ll halfheartedly out in a blind item tomorrow.” There. Blind item. Disseminate!

And it’s not just that vague blind items are potentially damaging to celeb reputation, although at a recent job interview, a tabloid mag forever won my respect when my interviewer told me they double-source all of their stories, and you know what, it shows – the magazine is one of the few respected tabs and it doesn’t post the same kind of wackadoodle obv-faux shit a lot of its competitors do. But at heart, blind items are nothing more than the lame, quasi-grownup version of “I know something you don’t know!”

When it comes to gossip, best to go all-in or go home. Recently, I was at a bar with two friends. This was one of those rare instances where we all had a lot of mutual friends in common, so I said, “Okay, I know one of you must know something interesting about someone we know.” To my surprise, the straight guy piped up before the girl. He says something analogous to, “Oh, well, someone we all know recently had a really bad infection that caused one of her kidneys to be removed. But, um, I can’t tell you who it was.” I think the look that crossed my face must have given the impression that my brain was close to exploding—or maybe he realized not telling me would lead to me a) badgering him at every available opportunity, b) trying to find ways to “accidentally” lift up all our female acquaintances’ shirt hems, looking for surgical scarring, which would inevitably lead to me being the center of some really juicy and baffling gossip. At any rate, he did finally acquiesce and pony up a name. But man, it’s simply uncool to play coy with stories involving loss of body parts.

But seriously, which one is the philtrum?

I have a love/hate relationship with slang. I mean, obviously I trend towards love – this blog is named after an outmoded slang style, and I myself tend to unintentionally spew out my own brand of gibberish by recklessly portmanteauing, verbifying nouns and nounifying verbs, and performing other untold cruelties upon the English language, much to the abject horror of my hyperliterate friends. But at least most of what I say seems to make sense to the people around me. In fact, I am called to mat more often for the 100% bona fide, OED-vetted – but obscure and pretentious – words that I use than any of the times I have ever used “snarkpop” in a sentence. In fact, the one time I whiningly asked a friend to stop hectoring me as we were preparing to cross Broadway, she doubled over laughing so hard she almost got run over by an oncoming taxi and refused to believe that was an actual word until she got home and looked it up herself. Somewhere in that preamble is clear cut proof that the use of slanguage over legit pretentious words is 98% less likely to lead to automobile fatalities.

That said, I sometimes wonder if blogs aren’t changing the English language in ways slightly less fun.

For one thing, it’s too easy for new words to be invented and disseminated. But before one can catch a toehold, some other blog or media outlet has coined another hilarious word that becomes the hot new thing, and suddenly, everyone’s forgotten all about twatwaffle. It’s been three years since we’ve had a new “truthiness” hit.

And then there’s Variety. Most media slang can be easily decoded through context clues. If, say, I told you that the recent EW article made Mike Meyers sound like quite a twatwaffle, I’d like to think you’d discern the general meaning without thinking too hard about what part of Mike Meyers resembles a waffle or, well, you know. But Variety has, for over a hundred years now, intentionally cultivated an esoteric writing style meant to shut out all but the klatch of industry insiders at which the mag is aimed. Which would be just dandy if industry insiders actually used half these words. No, in fact, most are Variety-specific. And some seem to be holdovers from the roaring twenties. Though, credit where credit is due, the more recent issues I’ve skimmed have cut back on the V-speak a skosh – maybe a concession to the fact that print mags are in enough trouble without further alienating potential readers?

Worst of all, won’t someone think of the poor lexicographers? Somewhere out there right this second, some poor schmuck is embroiled in an impassioned debate with his fellow lexicographers over whether or not the slang meaning of taint should be included in the next edition of Merriam-Webster. And for the record, my vote is yes. Who the hell can remember a word like perineum? Linguistically, I can never remember which is the perineum and which is the philtrum. No worries - biologically, I can tell the difference between the two, despite a beloved but gruff professor once insinuating otherwise.

But maybe I’m Chicken Littling over nothing. After all, writers have long shaped our language. Lewis Carroll gave us “chortle”, another portmanteau. And on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon regularly twisted common English into something new but recognizable. I’m just hoping that the next word Gawker champions sounds less like a menu item from the IHOP adjacent to the Bunny Ranch.