the audience is listening. and questioning

so lets do this

krista wishing she was watching nacho libre with me

Chuck asks: Loosely tied to your last post, What is the strangest dream that you can remember (yes, sleepy dream) as of late?

i really dont like sleepy dreams. i believe they are lies told to our souls when we are at our most vulnerable. if you have a bad dream and you wake up you have been robbed of peace and shaken in the morning. if you have a good dream and wake up you have been teased by nonsense and forced back into reality in the morn. therefore i have trained my body not to dream while asleep, and instead dream while awake. sometimes through this very blog. i feel like that is better for ones well being.

i havent dreamed lately. blessed be. however i do remember my last dream. i dreamed that i was flying above malibu in a metal suit to the pixies song “tonys theme”.

zona wonders: okay, think of the leap from buzznet to LAist, then from LAist to L.A. Times. think of them as steps up, each more meaningful than the last and answer me this. in order to eclipse the previous step where would you have to go from the level you’re on now jobwise?

ucsb publications director. a position currently held by jerry roberts. or cubs manager if sweet lou cant win it with this amazing team.

Keira-Anne says, I have two questions, both related and equally gay: 1) So, it’s Friday night and Bill and Ted zap into your living room in their phonebooth and tell you to come along. You get to choose anywhere in history, so which time period had the hottest and most bone-able babes?; and

2) You guys have to stop in at the Circle K to meet up with Rufus and grab slushees, so what’s your choice of liquor of choice to mix with?

you really should have been to coachella this year. this is the time and the place if you are looking for those things. with facebook and myspace you can “network” with pretty much the entire world. and i dont think anything is better than todays fashions, thanks american apparel. i do, however think, that canadian women are a tad more willing to try new things, which is why i wouldnt ask for that phonebooth to go back in time, but *to* a certain locale.

im a rum drinker, when im not taking shots of makers mark or jose cuevro or sipping baileys.

ashley slipping into something a little less comfortableMike finally asks a good one: How many all stars are the Cubs going to send to Yankee Stadium this July?

the cubs have eight players batting over .295 (nine if you count Zambrano) and one of them is not the guy with the $147 million dollar contract, so he is pretty much the only one who shouldnt get to go. derek lee has 13 homers. fukudome is the rookie of the year. kerry wood could be the best closer in baseball right now. Zambrano has 7 wins and a 2.33 era. the riot is leading the cubs in hitting and stolen bases (9).

even though the cubs have the best record in baseball, and this is the 100th anniversary of the last time they won the world series, i bet you only zambrano and lee will represent the best team in the game.

ashley* rubs it in: dear tony, are you heartbroken now that i’m married? haha jk jk jk.

dear tony, is your apartment still as messy as it was 6 years ago?

dear tony, why do you think every guy i’m attracted to is gay?

dear tony, when are you going to start dating girls in your age bracket?

deeply, pretty much, cuz most of them are (dont lie), when im in an old folks home.

Duane Storey who now hosts the busblog, thanks Duane, queries: Dear Tony – do you think the new Hulk movie is going to suck?

ed norton has a pretty good track record. i like this trend of having really good actors as superheros. therefore i think it will be really good.

4rilla passes and alley-oop: NBA Finals. Pure nostalgia. Let’s have your pick. Celts in 7.

yr dreaming. the celtics peaked about three months ago. meanwhile the lakers nearly swept the defending champs, only letting them win once in their own building.

there is a rush on brooms here in LA cuz everyone knows the lakers are about to sweep garnett and his fellow ladies in green.

gage is canadian so she puts extraneous but cute U’s in words: is it age that makes you a cougar or behaviour? I always thought it was age + behaviour…I’m confused.

youre right. cougar is a state of mind. also and application of makeup. i call the cougar the cougar for many reasons, most of which relate more to the age of the women i normally date, not much having to do with her, really. shes good people.

Dan asks two easy ones: if kurt cobain were alive today, do you think he would be blogging? And if so, what do you think he would’ve blogged about in regards to the shoes?

kurdt would be rocking. although he kept a lot of notebooks and journaled a lot, i dont think he was the type who made those ideas available to the public the way courtney did through hole.com. kurdt was more traditional rocker, those words were private. which is why i bought Journals but i never read em.

i think he would have shot those shoes. he wasnt a sellout.

panajane is sweet: Dear Tony, I have no question for you, but wanted to wish you a nice weekend.

muchas gracias chica!

top photo of krista via oceanaria, pic of ashley slipping into her wedding dress via her lj

its friday im in love

– four japanese gang figures got liver transplants at ucla by their best surgeon

– trailer of the new drew barrymore, jennifer anniston, scarlett johansson, jennifer connelly movie via fimoculous

– lesbian couple nearly kicked out of seattle mariners game for omg kissing

– the 50 hottest female athletes of all time

two of the ten baseball players not earning their salary play for the la dodgers

– there are still people in the world who use bow and arrows to shoot at helicopters

– if you saw LOST last night and are all OMG OMG OMG you should come to our LA Times Lost Chat at noon today hosted by Patrick Day our Lost writer who will fill you in on that kickass episode and answer your questions.

more photos of Biba the hottest ping pong player of all time at tabletennisdayton.com

in the last week ive spoken to two people who say they dont have dreams

not nighttime dreams, but life goals, life wishes, pie in the sky hopes for themselves that bring a sparkle to their eye.

whats interesting is both of these people are extremely intelligent, somewhat overachievers, and pretty much capable of anything.

and one of the best things about them is theyre both busblog readers. so babies, this ones for you.

i think you know youre dreams. i think you know in your heart what you want. fuck if i know what it is, but i think you do.

i think your heart does. i think if you look at a picture of yourself as a little kid, your favorite little kid picture, your favorite school picture, the photo of yourself when you were indestructible and filled with possibilities you knew even back then.

i say do a few things to summon the Truth from your soul. cuz you know it wants to come out. first thing id do is go do something you did when you were the age you were of that most favorite little kid picture. like skateboard or go to a batting cage or eat a sundae at baskin robbins or drink some cheap warm beer in front of a black n white tv with the cubs on.

then think about what youd do if you could do anything. think about what youd do after you ate a really good meal after you had really good sex after you had a really good nap. what would you do? what would you do if every day you woke up and ate sexxed and bam it was 8:30am and the whole day was open to you.

i would be manager of the cubs. or a professor at ucsb. or blog editor of the la times. and strangely i did the technique that im recommending for almost 100 years before one of those dreams came true. little did i know, but i was “making it happen”.

ok so thats one technique. the other one is to get on your knees and pray. i dont think either of you are religious so pray extra hard because the connection to heaven might not be so good for you and you have to tune that radio dial in just right. you dont have to pray very hard, just honestly. pretend hes up there. pretend hes listening. and just talk. say whatever you wanna say. say help me figure this out. then say, if i was my car keys where would i be. then say if i was my dreams where would i be. if that doesnt work say if i was really yours what would you want me to be with all my smarts and hotness and excellence.

dont be scared with the answers. lots of people sell out and dont actually follow their dreams, and if you become one of them its ok you will have lots of company. some people dont know what their dreams are until they look around and say fucking a bitches this is Exactly what i should be doing.

another technique is to drive with the radio off to vegas and if you dont have your dreams figured out you hafta keep dreaming till you get to salt lake city. if you still dont have a dream you hafta get married to a polygamist. hi.

in asia they meditate. i dont know anything about that. my buddy os used to do it though. hed sit with his legs crossed and perfect posture and try to get everything as quiet as possible. and then keep it as quiet as possible for as long as possible. now he has kids and nothings quiet. so be careful what you meditate for.

but heres the best thing about dreams. once you accomplish them new, weirder, cooler dreams appear to you. so fucking get to getting those first dreams. for example i used to dream that i would move from illinois to los angeles and make out with hot babes. waaaay sooner than i ever expected i was doing Just that. then i dreamed that i would live on the beach and make out with hot girls. did that for a while and several dreams later i wanted to just sit in my house and blawwwwg all day. sure enough one day i was doing just that. now i barely have time to blog any more but thats because a dream i totally gave up on totally came true when i least expected. but the thing is you have to open your heart to what your heart always wanted. you hafta be ok with it being cheesy or nerdy or fucked up stupid or whatevers. own the cheese of your dreams.

be that cheese cuz guess what all of us know that part of you anyways.

finally, if none of those things works. try this one. write down all the things that you want in your life. just the details. like i always wanted good bosses, smart people around me, respect, free parking, good food, a chance to be creative, i didnt wanna wear a tie, i wanted to be asked good questions, i wanted to be part of a winner. write down stuff like that that you want. every night. keep adding to the list. then read the list before you pray and cross shit off if it doesnt work for you any more. and when you read that list i bet ya a job will appear. magically. to you. dont worry if the job doesnt exist yet. dont worry if it doesnt pay very well. life isnt about money. well dreams arent, at least.

dreams are about fun. have fun in your life. have fun dreams, identify them and then go for them. and then help others get theirs.

photo of elvis costello at the el rey wednesday by joey maloney, used with permission. check in on LAist today for his photo essay review of the show

one of the biggest joys of working where i do is working with guys like andy malcolm

who just also happens to write on our most popular blog

today he got written up on PBS’s Mediashift blog:

I’ve spent 26 years at the New York Times and another 7 here [at the L.A. Times]. Outside of my family, I’ve never witnessed seeing someone reading my story in print. So I’m looking at the numbers for my blog post, and for nearly seven hours, we had seven new readers arriving on our blog every second. We’ve had days since then that have been several times that…When you tell that to a newspaper crowd, it’s like ‘Whoa!’ it gets a reaction.”

Congrats to Andy, who is also a new grampa!

If you’re not reading Top of the Ticket, trust me, you won’t be bored.

update: in February we announced that TooT made it into the Technorati Top 1000
… a mere few months later it is at #217.

dear canadians who will rock out with matt good tonight

i do wish i was there.

im not exactly sure why i get along so well with the kids up yonder but it was lust at first site. i feel extremely comfortable in canada. doesnt matter if im in vancity or to or any part in between.

whats weird about it is i couldnt live in a more different place than la, hollywood to be precise, where i also feel very comfortable, but it is all so peaceful and easy up there.

im very jealous that so many of you will get to return to massey hall and drink around the corner and party after the show and karaoke and eat and make out with my beautiful chinese twins.

im jealous that you all get to meet sass and give christie her 24 birthday spankings and pet raymis cute lil fuzzy muffin. im jealous that you will get to slam dance to apparitions with pitt and fil and dan and krista, im sad that i cant be with you to order molsens.

i do have one question though, whenever i order a molsen the bartender always asks “canadian?” as if i would want anything else. of course canadian.

tomorrow night after i get home from work i will put on my hockey night in canada shirt and my maple leaf toque and blast my two favorite triumph records (allied forces and never surrender”.

little known fact, when i was in high school i used to dream of being in a rock band and i would draw album covers as i waited for the bell to ring. i would draw these very detailed scenes where these creatures that were made of fingers would be rocking out. the band was called “hidden forces” as a tribute to triumph, in a way.

because i was young and i thought i was so amazingly clever the first cover of a hidden forces album was exactly the same image of the rolling stones sticky fingers.

whatever, i wish i could eat some bad poutine with you and afterwards drunk dial lowercase carmen. who has a new blog, btw.

two years ago yesterday i was fired at buzznet

even though for the last month that i was there i was vomiting every day and emotionally ill, when i was let go i was pretty much devastated. since i had been there i accomplished some ridiculous things over my eight months as community manager: millions of hits, over a half dozen parties in three different countries (with a budget of less than $500), thousands of photos, etc etc etc. so i never thought that i could be canned.

but life is a bizarre deal. and sure enough, despite my indisputable numbers, i was out. none of it made sense. least of all the fact that i was relatively unhappy in my job and bummed that i had been relieved of my duties.

theres a cheesy saying, though, that says “when one door closes another one opens”. and whattya know, just as i was trying to figure out what i was going to do with my newly found summer vacation (which i knew wasnt going to last that long because i hadnt made very much money over those eight months) carolyn kellogg was stepping down as editor of LAist. she sent jake dobkin and jen chung a link to this very blog, and less than two weeks later i was the new editor of that amazing blog.

i had gone from being totally unloved and vomiting and having to go to an office where i sat quietly and wasnt invited into meetings where i belonged to having my office be my couch. jen and jake actually meant it when they said that hits and quality was all they cared about and they left me alone to build whatever i wanted at LAist. they even let me do the one thing i had been trying to do for years – drive around america and write about it.

now here we are two years after being axed and im at the LA Times. in part because of not just what i was able to do at LAist but because of what i did at buzznet.

im not one who believes in luck. im not one who believes in divine intervention or karma or any of that crap. usually i simply believe in hard work and a little bit of prayer. but looking back over the last three years, especially what went down two years ago yesterday its hard not to believe that Good had a plan for me, professionally, which led to the unbelievable gig i have now.

which tells me that we should never give up on our dreams. we should never get too depressed about anything. and we should never stop trying even when it appears that those closest to us dont appreciate or respect what we’re doing. what we’re doing is growing. and sometimes we get transplanted at the exact right time in a place where we can really blossom.

one thing i would like to add: the day i got fired and wrote about it on my blog i got dozens and dozens of emails and comments. you have no idea how much all of that cheered me up. so thanks to everyone who was there for me when i was pretty much at my lowest. often i tell people at the Times that blogging has given me everything, and that day it gave me so much love when i felt so lousy. its one reason that i will probably never stop writing on this blog.

six years ago yesterday i got stung by a bee

karisa throws great parties if you’re a girl.

she swears that she doesnt really have that many girl-friends in LA but i think she does that on purpose. most of the parties that she and her hot roommate throw are what are commonly referred to as sausage parties or sword fights. 500-600 guys trying to impress karisa and becca.

both gals sent out invites at their workplaces, but of course, only the fellas attended. many of them recognized my name and said they read this blog, and for those lads, i say hello, and nice to have met you.

the only fight that i got into yesterday was with an insect and i barely won.

i got stung by a bee!

it was my first time ever.

i felt an itchy thing on my back and i reached for it and i felt a little sting and i saw the bee fly over my head and try to attack karisa. i said, “i think i just got stung by that bee.”

basart investigated and sure enough, bee sting.

i kept drinking my beer and looking at karisa.

im agent feels no pain, remember.

ken told her to get the tweezers.

there was much discussion about how to pull out the stinger without making the thing spread. i dont know what thing they were talking about, but basart is an expert at everything and this was one of the few times that it actually came in handy.

i drank more beer.

ken put an ice cube on the sting.

karisa quickly showed up with the tweezers and pulled it out painlessly.

i drank more beer.

she sat back down.

i looked at her some more.

no pain.

then ken saw the bee again, swatted it down fearlessly since it no longer had a stinger.

then he stepped on it.

when they all asked how i felt, i said, “a little buzzed.”