hi mr. big shot

hi super cool tennis chickie

i see you got linked by who many consider the Biggest Blogger on Earth, Dave from the Scripting News.

i see you won again in China over Zheng Jie 6-4 7-6 to advance to the quarter finals.

it was easy.

really?

no. but i also see that you were linked today by the inventor of Blogger, Ev!

i’ll wake up tomorrow and none of this will be true.

shit, do you think we’re both dreaming today?

never know. yesterday Doc and Instapundit linked me and i thought that was cool. but to have these guys today… i’ll stop, sorry, anna.

it’s okay, you can geek out on me.

i wont, hey hows the food.

you know i hate chinese food, i just put soy sauce on the rice and munch on carrots and drink beer.

are you gonna win this tournament, anna?

i dont know, i feel pretty good. it’s weird.

i’ll pray for you tonight, if you want.

please do, tony.

i cant believe youve never won a pro tournament.

i know, you think just showing up to enough of them i’d just win one out of dumb luck.

maybe when God was handing out dumb luck, he passed you up and gave you a double heaping of hottness.

you sound like youre in such a good mood tony.

i am!

did the LA Times really do a story on Bloggers and not even interview one LA Blogger?

yep. didnt you click the links?

aaaaah, i never click the links. i just like to stay and read your whole thing. plus im only on a 56k modem here at this Internet cafe.

they have those out there?

yeah, well, its really a store that has computers and phones and faxes. it’s hot in here. they have warm Cokes in cans and bottles of water. not plastic bottles, real glass bottles. it’s really interesting but i cant wait to get out of here.

homesick?

no, just out of this Cafe – im getting a little crowd. the kids are telling me to say hi to you.

hi Chinese kids!

they are all saying “death to the LA Times and lazy puff peice journalism.”

God bless the kids.

wish me luck tony, i’ll need it.

good luck anna, eye of the tiger, hot babe.

byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

bye!

dear LA Times,

 

hi. you suck.

today you had a los angeles staff writer try to educate your readers on the phenomenon of Blogs.

your writer did a shitty ass job. nothing new for your paper. but today it’s my turn to tell you how bad you are.

let’s see if i can do this in 5 minutes, which, i imagine is how long it took your paper to throw together this mess.

okay, you write about Blogs, you’re a paper in LA, you assign it to an LA writer, you interview several alleged bloggers and let me guess how many LA bloggers you interview or write about?

how about none.

instead of interviewing actual LA Bloggers, 200 of whom could have been found via LABlogs.com (#1 google result when you type in “los angeles blogs”, rocket science, i know.), you choose to interview former LA Times journalist ::cough::lazyjournalism::cough:: Larry Pryor who is the director of the Annenberg Online Program at USC.

fair enough, but where’s Larry’s blog? oh that’s right, he doesnt have one.

onlinejournalism.com, which the Annenberg students churn out is beautiful, but who reads it? no one. why? because look at the softball old “news” OJR gives us today (Yahoo went grey yesterday … oooooh — thanks for telling us today) the LA Times interviewed the Managing Editor of it Melissa Milios, a graduate student, but where’s her personal blog? the LA Times shows a peppy picture of Annenberg’s Joshua Fouts but where’s his blog “Dangerous Monkey“?

oh, it’s gone.

Is this a matter of those who can’t do, teaching?

never.

people do read matt welch, and ken layne, and emmanuelle, and heather and moxie, and laura crane, and ben sullivan and his sister kate sullivan, and greg and molli, the mighty mc brown, hollywood producer brian linse, and even a slick motherfucker named pierce whose site got 752,009 hits last month (down from 906,344 in July).

and how can you forget LAExaminer.com which is a Blog that focuses on the ineptness of the LA Times?

why would you dare to be interesting?

we live in LA. we blog. many times a day do we blog. some of the above, most on my lil list, are even paid journalists.

why not ask paid journalists, not teachers of a crappy ass (but pretty) quasi-blog, if blogging is journalism. that is, if you want to keep asking the same dull questions about this phenomenon repeatedly like an entertainment writer sitting down with Mick Jagger and asking, “so how did you and Keith meet?”

heres some other ways to write a shitty peice of dreck that exposes you as the dinosaur that you are:

+ call Slashdot a blog.

+ use the word “blog-o-sphere” a half dozen times in the first few paragraphs and not give credit to The Daily Pundit who coined the phrase “blogopshere“, but use him in the article anyway.

+ by all means reference that tech guru William Safire’s column about the word “Blog” in the NYT

+ talk about the class at Berkeley that will be all about Blogging

+ dont talk about the inventor of the Blogger, Ev, who has a great blog

+ ignore the Blogfather Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit who got 200,000 hits yesterday

+ and when you put it online, make sure not to link to anyone

LA Times, you will go down.

I cannot wait for that day to come.

Will it be by your own hands or at the hands of others is anyone’s guess.

But keep shooting yourselves in the foot by this sort of sloppy reporting and your enemies and critics will just have to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

and the bloggers will type it all up.

the Blogger phenomenon is happening stronger in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world and you wouldnt know it if it slapped you in the face. by the way, im slapping you in the face.

meanwhile you’re nothing more than a formerly beautiful woman, who is now showing her age and trying to hide the bags under her eyes as her boutique-bought hat sags along with the rest of her as she slouches towards irrelevance.

all the botox redesign will not help you.

the only thing that will help, im sorry to say, is to start hiring us.

and pay us loads and loads and loads of cash.

although most of us will work for just loads.

::update:: professional journalist and los angeles blogger Matt Welch handles this subject much more delicately in this new post, and doesnt once use the word motherfucker.

show off.

karisa greets me each morning with an email of love

and how do i repay her? usually with tawdry tales of my previous evening, lies about my future, and exaggerations of my prowess on the softball field.

last night our team won its first game. we’re now 1-1.

i didnt make many errors, i got two hits, drove in a run.

i attribute my good play to the newly applied pregame ritual of a long walk, followed by two monster tacos at jack n the box, followed by a nice visit to the mens room for a good 10 minutes.

when your mind, soul, and colon are cleared you can play softball with reckless abandon.

the aztecs taught these lessons.

after the game i took the 217 fairfax to hollywood blvd and saw a prosititute take the subway to north hollywood.

she was a beautiful black woman with long blonde braids. me and this other guy were staring at her. he more than i. i was reading some short stories by jeff noon, “pixel juice.” my friend just stared at her.

he had a sweat suit on, a raiders cap tilted sideways atop a red dew rag. $200 jordans. gold rolex. pardon me, but i thought he was her pimp until she got on the northbound red line and he and i waited in the breeze for the southbound train.

he stared at her the entire time.

“you’re gonna burn a hole in the back of her head,” i told him.

he didnt say anything.

finally he said, “was that a woman or a man?”

“oh that was enough woman for both of us.” i said. and went back to my book.

she was a woman.

today i have to do some really nasty terrible fucked up shit that will probably take all day.

so only expect a half dozen entries.

sorry.

p.s. to see ken and matt sing the song (below) click the picture of them. it’s my favorite song of the year.