Q. What’s better Blogging Bull-pucky… or straight truthin’?

as you may have noticed the tagline of the busblog is “nothing in here is true”, and the busblog has provided me with pretty much anything any blogger could want: wine, women, and a good paying job.

i say set up your blog the way that will allow you to write as well as you can. for me that tag line allows me the right to flat out lie. do people always believe that line? nope. does it mean that people may not trust everything written on this site? sure – but who cares – you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the web (unless it’s from a trusted site like latimes.com)

but some people wont write Anything on their blog because they are afraid of the repercussions from their friends family or bosses. if thats the case then they should get a private blog and/or just write fiction. but for the most part, blogging can be an exercise about baring ones soul and being honest to oneself and the world. thus keeping it real and telling the ugly truth, to me, is the better way to blog.

Q. What are your top 10 directors of all time? (any time period, genre, country)

1. Stanley Kubrick
2. Buster Keaton
3. Alfred Hitchcock
4. Woody Allen
5. Spike Lee
6. Quentin Tarentino
7. Orson Wells
8. Akira Kurosawa
9. Spike Jonze
10. Andrew Blake

all of us. it’s our one unified shared experience.

we might not all kiss the prettiest girl in school.

we might not all find our true love.

we might not all live the california dream of a house, two kids, a mistress, and a nanny.

but we will all die.

and yet most of us run around like there is not an invisible expiration date stamped on our foreheads.

most of us float through life like we don’t influence each other.

most of us coast through our days as if we have infinity to make a difference.

this video game, this rock show, this slow dance ends with worms eating us.

the end.

so while we have this sliver of time of animation, no matter what the losers in your social circle tell you through verbal and non verbal means

you have a chance to rock.

you have a chance to be the led zeppelin of your block.

you have the chance to be better than every one else who has ever done the thing that you do.

and as cheesy as it sounds, its all up to, and only up to you.

if you work at a college newspaper, if you play in the marching band, if you volunteer at a shelter, it doesnt matter. whatever it is, you have the tools, you have the spirit, you have the chance

to kick it up a notch.

not because you are so special, but because, and you know this, because everyone else is playing this game in slow motion.

everyone else is waiting for a time out on the field.

everyone else is waiting for a distraction in their day to allow them the coffee break of their lives or the shiny keys to jangle.

they say they want to rock, but they dont really.

they say they want to be the best, but come on.

they say they are committed to excellence, but the only thing they’ve ever committed to is dragging their feet and indirectly dragging everyone else down a step with them.

so the question is when will you stop the cycle of mediocrity in your life, shift out of second gear and

floor it

if you say “today” you still dont get it.

the only correct answer is now.

because “today” is the day people will die.

now is the time we live.

everythings a drinking game to me

like every time sarah palin said you betcha or winked i drank a shot.

every time someone makes the Dumbest Mistake on the Internet Ever i drink a shot.

or every time i miss Harry Caray while watching the Cubs lose, i drink a shot.

when i sober up and make it out into the real world i take “virtual shots”.

like the other day at Target i saw a lady with a super tight shirt on and i took a shot for each of her rolls that she could have easily “hid” with, i dont know, clothes that acutally fit her.

tonight running i took a virtual shot every time someone annoyed me: like the cars that exited Barnsdale Park at 10pm forcing me to run on the grass

or the bike riding down the sidewalk when all day when im driving they seem to have no problem “sharing the road” with the cars.

one guy without a water bottle in his hand tried to race me down this one street and i let him win for a block but i knew he’d die trying so i upped my pace just a tad and got him over by Bukowski Square.

and i took a virtual shot.

these are some of the lessons i wont be able to share with my children until theyre at least eleven or twelve.

which is another reason why kids are not nearly as fun as people make them out to be.

and such boring light weights.

we have one blog that we launched on WordPress, our photo blog, where this behind the scenes video has a home

and tomorrow we are launching another blog on WordPress that is also beautiful and can do some stuff that even our photo blog cant do.

for years we have used Typepad which is fine but lacks some features and benefits that WordPress excels in.

so before every goes gaga about the new blog launching tomorrow seriously embrace the lovliness that is our photo blog, Framework, and bask in its glory.

heres a gallery to get you going.

i like to spit. i like to wear bathing suit shorts with pockets. i like to listen to heavy metal created as close to Hell as possible. i like to bring pretty girls flowers.

i like to eat meat, drink dark beer, and watch ESPN.

i enjoy the Miss Universe pageant. and farting.

i drive a car thats japanese and has dents. it was made in 1994.

its a good car. a reliable car. but when i crank my metal it doesnt sound evil.

and the cup holders cannot handle the girth of the beverages i receive from the drive thru

when i honk my horn it sounds like a duck on its last days.

i want a horn that will make people pee their pants.

i want a car that says get the eff out of my way THIS IS THE FAST LANE.

i want a car with a back seat so i can say come on baby lets live the american dream.

i dont care if a car is a hybrid. i dont want an SUV.

i dont want a car with a video camera pointed backwards because unlike oh so many i know how to parallel park – i am a man.

strangely there are very few cars that make me say: yes, you deserve me.

but this car, despite being a dodge, caught my attention.

prepare to be test driven, retro american beast.

its famous. for a reason.

for a while i just promised myself that instead of going to church id read a passage a week as that was always my favorite part of church: the reading of the Gospel.

i started at the beginning of Genesis and was on a quest to read the good book all the way through to the end. something i had done my senior year of college.

but when i realized i wasnt making much progress, and i was forgetting what i was reading, i upped it to reading for an hour each Sunday.

this week i started Job. its a lot easier to read than i remembered. maybe because its sorta a poem. you can blaze through a chapter in Job in about 3-4 minutes. as most people know it’s a story about a very successful man who really loves God and is super obedient and then one day Satan (or The Accuser) says “well duh God, of course Job is really sweet and prays to you all the time, look at him he’s rich, has a lot of animals and servants, and has this huge wonderful family, take all that stuff away from him and i bet you he renounces you and hates your freakin guts.”

so for some reason God allows Satan to kill his kids, demolish his animals, and put boils all over Job’s flesh. then they both see how Job reacts.

in an hour, because i have ADD, i only made it through the first 14 chapters. so far Job went from it’s ok, it’s ok because “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” to omg kill me already this blows.

his friends have shown up to listen to his moans and groans. they give him advice but when all your animals have died, your kids have died, and you cant even sit straight because of your boils, you dont wanna hear any damn advice from your stupid friends.

it made me realize all the stupid advice i have given my friends was probably equally annoying.

so any friend who i have tried to counsel lately, and strangely i have quite a few who probably could relate to Job right now, sadly, i am very sorry. i dont remember exactly how Job ends, but probably the best thing a friend can do is say i love you im here for you and together we’re going to figure out how best to ease your pain.

amen

by working at the LA Times, there are some real annoying ones too.

today we will discuss the people who email spam us.

for some reason people think that when they spam the Editor and all the famous writers and me, that we read their crazed ramblings. they think “ah, i see their email structure – firstname.lastname@latimes…. i wonder if i just took all their names and put them in the To: field if i could really get my message out to them?”

in some situations its actually sad because they are delusional and think they have something insightful to say, or they think they are breaking news to us about UFOs and conspiracy theories about the oncoming race wars. im sure every news agency gets these types and some of them are actually so crazy that they are entertaining for a line or two

but most of them are annoying.

so annoying that they require the flick of a finger to mark them as Spam.

the latest in the parade of the insane is a woman who lives on the wesssside. she claims that because she has canceled her subscription but still receives the paper that we have somehow wronged her. and because of that she will now spam us from her daily diary/blog.

“tit for tat” she quips at the end of the intro to her work.

and then proceeds to bore us with her insights about spirituality and blah blah blah.

todays she wrote a post about not having anything to write and then sent that out to god knows how many times staffers, most of whom probably never saw it because they marked it as spam weeks ago.

lucky me, my filter doesnt appear to be working.

i wanted to write her to tell her that 9 times out of 10 i do my best to encourage bloggers to keep writing because there will be a little treasure chest at the end of th rainbow,

but she is clearly that 10th writer who should give up the hobby because there will never be a reward in her future.

and frankly spammers do not deserve my tutelage. they are uninvited guests in the house of love.

so heres a tip i would have given her but the problem with working where i do is people pretend that our emails back to them are Important. people think that everything that we say Means something. and therefore if she actually got the attention that she is begging for, then my bitter pessimistic reply would be the fodder for her next yawnworthy post and i would have only fueled her fire and given her some weirdo Purpose.

when indeed she should just go back to making crystal necklaces for her friends and leaving the rest of the internet alone.

heres the tip: you always have something to say. you always can go deeper. you can always risk with your writing.

instead of skating around the edges of emotion and breakthroughs, grab that pickaxe and chip away at your walls.

delve down into the hidden rooms of your psyche and unearth the feelings that scare the crap out of you.

the reason you dont want to write is because you know theres something there if you do. the reason you bore people with you bull crap is because you are unwilling to actually serve up the good stuff that we can all relate to: fears, tragedies, evil, pleasure, indulgence, and sin.

al gore did not invent the internet so you could apologize for not posting or write about how you dont have anything to say.

this platform is here for you to high dive off cliffs that will kill you.

and if you are truly spiritual you know that when you die you go to heaven.

so jump.

this commercialization so soon, this sellout of pop culture, this auction of almost everything important within LOST

one of our reporters was given a tour of an auction being held this weekend in santa monica of thousands of props used on LOST

$45 if you want to view it. hundreds if not thousands if you wanna buy it.

my question is, why sell it so quickly? is ABC hurting for cash that badly? why not put it in a museum? the wheel that turned the island is for sale – where could that go?

what they didnt show, that is even more precious, but still for sale is the metal cup that Jack drank out of as part of the ceremony before he was made protector of the island.

im all for capitalism, and TV shows are meant to be commodities, but something about all of this seems so tawdry and tacky. and too too too soon.

you should never not have grilled chicken for your drive thru customers

you should never ask me to pull out of the drive thru and wait as you make the grilled chicken

you should never have kids making minimum wage raising the mcdonalds flag because a pissed off stranger might hand them each $20 to let him raise their flag as he waits for his grilled chicken to cook

there are very few things that piss me off, but when im hungry and you eff with me, things can get real evil real fast