or i could write about writing. i think i know which youd prefer to hear about, so lets rock.

i look at blogging the same way i do about tv. it should be free to the normal person. the companies should pay the writer. i dont think thats a difficult concept and i dont care if its never happened before in blogging. lots of things never happened before in blogging and if theres one blog that does its best to bring new concepts to this incredibly new medium, its me.

photo essays the way i do them are new to the web and even though ive been doing them over Two years now, nobody else does them regularly because theyre not easy to do. plus you need to have a hosted web site, and people who have hosted web sites dont seem interested in photo essays, oh well. maybe theyre afraid that people will think theyre stealing from me.

steal away, people. in fact i dare you. make a better photo essay than me. to be quite honest as a voracious reader of blogs, i would love to see more photo essays out there and i always get a kick out of people giving me the proper props when they do borrow from me in one way or another.

the photo essay, i think, would be the easiest way for a sponsor to get a click-through. there could be a banner ad on the top of the page, or a huge ad at the end.

and text ads, as google has shown, can be just as effective, especially when they come across as subtle.

god i could use a diet dr. pepper right now.

nascar is a good example of how fans loyal to a particular driver will frequent the drivers’s sponsor more often because the fan + driver + sponsor relationship is such a close-knit one.

if the busblog was sponsored by cadillac, for instance, not only would i talk about how i drove my caddy to this place or that place, but odds are Awareness of caddys would increase among my readers as being something that truly isnt just for granddads and gangsta rappers.

i could go on and on about how corporations could and should take advantage of blogger and the medium, but i dont want to give away all my secrets.

plus i just got a diet dr. pepper and its treating me so good.

tastes just like regular doctor pepper.

and only has one calorie.

wait, NO calories.

you know friends, ive lost near 10 pounds this year from changing over to diet sodas, i mean diet dr pepper.

ten pounds.

and i dont exercise. at all.

ok, i gotta go back out there and save some lives.

cubs will sweep the marlins this weekend and clinch it on sunday.

cadillac + dr. pepper + xm radio + tivo, my love

shonen knife is playing tonight. the cubs are playing tonight. life is alive tonight.

its friday night in rocktober. this is the time when dreams come true. this is the time when we get to see what we can do. tonight also seems to be a night of choices.

what will i do if the cubs are playing when tsar is ready to rock the knitting factory in hollywood, just feet away from the simpsons’s star on the hollywood walk of fame? i will watch the cubs play, thats what i will do.

the cubs are the rockstars of my youth. tsar is simply my favorite band of all.

all the playoff games that the cubs have won, except one, they have done so while the lead singer of my favorite band sat on my couch and watched the game with me.

tonight, unfortunately, he has made the choice to follow through on his commitment to rock and attend his own concert instead of helping dustiny take place in south florida.

we all have to make tough choices, i suppose, and i wonder what i would do if i had a great band who were playing at the same time as the cubs played in the playoffs.

i guess i would have to have a tv on stage with me.

once i saw sonic youth in ’91 and they had a tv on stage with them that i swore they were going to destroy but instead of that they simply turned it on right at the end of their set and let ted koppels “nightline” echo into the mic sending out feedback that blended perfectly with the barbed wire kisses from their creaming amps.

once i saw elvis costello in ’86 and he had a tv on stage allegedly showing lou reed via satelitte. elvis had a go go cage on one side featuring his wife at the time, the long legged cait o’riordan. on the other side he had a little bar with three stools and a tv. during the show he would bring members of the audience on stage and allow them to spin a wheel that had song titles on it. when the wheel stopped, the band played the song and the audience member was allowed to either dance with cait, or sit at the bar and watch lou reed on television.

tonight i am going to watch my beloved chicago cubs on television.

it’s october tenth and did you hear what i just said, im going to watch my beloved chicago cubs on television.

my apologies to my favorite band, who i love almost as much.

if only the knitting factory had a $5 webcast of the tsar show, but i guess that would be too much to ask in 2003.

the script to the princess bride + marketing wonk + everything is wrong

of Course he doesnt want me to be happy during the month of love. of Course he wants me to be distracted while the greatest storybook ending of a baseball season comes to its utterly delicious climax.

of Course he wants me to focus on the things that i dont have instead of the overflowing riches that i do have and have had for a damn long time.

sometimes the angels in my life have to take a few days off and cant whisper in my ear that im the luckiest man alive, and that im not as bad as the demons say i am, and that i can do some things good, and there is a future for a nutcase like me, and that life is beautiful, and that the cubs are going to win the world series and its going to happen this year the year of the miracle.

time magazine probably wont do it and newsweek wont either, but instead of making arnold the man of the year it ought to be a brotha named dusty cuz dusty took a far less talented cubs team and this weekend will get them into the world series, something that hasnt happened since dubya dubya two. and he did it with dudes like alex gonzales and randall simon. and did it without corey patterson or a $140 million payroll.

i noticed that fox showed the guy in new york singing God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch last night, a tradition that has gone on in yankee stadium since right after 9/11, and its emotional and touching, but 9/11 happened over two years ago, buddies, either its time to move on or its time to Also show the guest celeb singer who leads the wrigley faithful in take me out to the ball game during the seventh inning at the friendly confines.

cuz thats also entertainment, and more importantly, a much much longer baseball and cub tradition.

went to bed early last night but not before wishing my true love a happy weekend as she jets off to vegas to spend a girls-only weekend with her sister and it was then that i remembered how many angels are among us.

this morning i saw two little kids who were probably in first grade. both of them were being accompanied by their dads. both of them had huge cardboard signs hanging on their little frames strung with yarn. on the outside of the signs were their homework assignments, and inside the signs were papers with shapes like “rectangle” and “square.”

next to me sat a little junior high school korean girl who had homemade flashcards written on paper that she had cut out herself. not 3×5 cards. cut paper.

as president i promise you that instead of spending a hundred billion dollars in a war over oil, school children who quiz themselves on a city bus on their way to class will be provided with as many 3×5 cards as their little hearts desire.

kerry wood will shut out the fish tonight in miami.

i love being linked in foreign languages + sheila + raspil iverson

left a lengthy comment on the post regarding my imminent sellout.

as he is the welcomed guest, his comments will be normal, while mine will be in italics.

Tony,

One point you may have overlooked in my quote from that article is the following: “[I]t comes down to ‘versioning’ the content. A walled-garden approach to charging for all your content would be a disaster for all but a rare few kind of online publisher (e.g., porn sites or wsj.com). But many sites should be able to find some versions of their content people will be willing to pay for.”

That is, I’m not suggesting you charge an entry fee for the main blog itself, but rather, charge people 50 cents to view your famous photo commentaries, or let them have unlimited access to them for a year for $5.

i can understand this way of thought, but my site and my blog will always remain free. i’ll make my millions somewhere else.

You could, of course, let them see the first five pictures in the series for free and have to pay for the whole thing, and maybe even let one in five of the photo spreads remain freely available. But why shouldn’t you charge for those? The main blog would still be free, so it’s not like you’re cheating readers out of everything.

a few problems about charging for the photo essays, besides the hippie moral ones for me. biggest one is a lot of the best photo essays – the ones people would pay for – are created using photos that i didnt take. last thing i would want to do is profit from someone else’s art.

if i did compile a few photo essays using original pictures, i wouldnt want to run into a problem with having to pay my models. and let me tell you, karisa has a hard ass agent.

But aren’t your photo spreads — truly unique content in the blog world — worth 50 cents per viewing? For anyone who’s seen them in the past, absolutely they are. They obviously take you hours to prepare and are wonderfully creative, so why shouldn’t you be compensated for them?

they do take a long time. usually an entire day or two. i would love to charge 50 cents per viewing. especially for the ones like the Anna Penthouse one where 4 million people showed up. only problem is i dont know of any way to charge 50 cents through paypal and not have them charge me a buck per transaction.

As for your comment, “…there are companies and advertisers who are more than willing to align themselves to personalities, writers, and now bloggers,” I’d venture that you are not an expert in the online ad sector. I challenge you to name one advertiser lining up to sponsor bloggers.

i am no expert in anything, really. but just because it hasnt happened yet, doesnt mean that it wont happen soon. there was a time when no one ever considered to pay nba players millions to wear their shoes, or sponsor devil worshipping rock bands to go on tour. i wouldnt consider it outrageous for computer companies, sugar water giants, and software manufacturers to find ways to influence big time bloggers into talking about their products and keeping them loyal.

And the idea that Nike would pay you $2 million is especially absurd, particularly when you’re saying nasty things about them.

fuck nike.

my price now to sell out to them is $3 million.

There are two key problems to going down the ad route for bloggers: 1) You actually have to work like hell to sell the ads (ask Rafat Ali, who spends all day doing so). Talk about distasteful work for most bloggers. Even then it’s hard as hell, as the number of page impressions most bloggers generate aren’t enough to make the average big advertiser look twice. 2) You have to either corrupt your morals and stop saying nasty things about your advertisers like Nike, or quickly lose their contracts in exchange for your freedom (again, ask Rafat, who’s lost three advertisers because of his independent-mindedness).

fuck nike.

As for hoping to get hired to write a blog for someone, I would think any publisher would be only too lucky to get you, but I would also venture that it would be a loss for BusBlog readers, as I suspect you’d find it very difficult to blog substantially in two places at once. Talk to Elizabeth Spiers about that one.

i agree. they would be lucky. as for difficulty blogging for two different things, what you see here on the busblog is done during my two 15-minute breaks and a quickie little entry before i go to sleep. not only would the blog i write professionally be way better than this one, but the happiness that i would have with a job where i could be creative would make the busblog an even happier place.

Frankly, I think charging espeically loyal readers for premium content would be the best way to assure both your independence and your ongoing commitment to this blog. The attitude among many bloggers that “information wants to be free” harkens back to the early days of the dot-com bubble, and we all know how that ended up.

wanting things to be free goes back further than that. and further than the 60s. there were a lot of great things about the dot com beginnings and idealism was one of them. trying new things is another. neither of those was the cause for the crash. but i hear what youre saying. still, the busblog will be free, especially to my loyal readers.

Finally, as for a micropayment system, it already exists.

then hook me up and claim your percentage.

bruner blog + inluminent + viral planet

the cubs had just won and she was going through mlb.com and trying to find out what i liked and i told her that all i wanted for my birthday was for the cubs to be in the world series and she said im sorry but i dont see that here on this web site.

so i said for her to look harder. shes the best mom. i didnt have the heart to tell her that theres nothing i need any more. me and karisa were saying the same thing last night. she said if the red sox won the world series that she’d be done with her lifes goals and i told her that just the cubs being in the world series was enough for me, but having them win…

im pissed off as fuck right now. can you tell? i am. im steaming. here i am trying to go over the analysis of chopper one. they just did a bunch of quote unquote fixes to something that wasnt even broke. then some asshole was an asshole to me because hes an asshole and im supposed to be responsible for everything.

i have never hated a job so much as i hate trying to save los angeles from itself and its not because the good people of la dont appreciate it, they do. they dont see us, when they do they scream and cry cuz they dont know who we are, its the marines running the xbi that make this such a pain in the ass. i am literally in danger half of the time that im working. and then some. the bad guys see me when im doing my grocerying they see me drag my laundry down the street in my granny cart, they see me getting frozen yogurt with the cheerleaders. at any time they could avenge the death of their father. and thats all during my off hours. and still these jackholes who are supposed to be helping me hurt me at every turn. and all i want to do is get in a hippybus and get the heck out of here.

why is that so hard to have come true?

arnold can be governor if he wants and hes not half as qualified for doing that as i am for what i want and he gets it. why. because hes rich. because his friends are rich. because he says hes a repub. because he made movies about killing and death that made people somehow feel good about themselves about and i and committing violence with grammar right now im sorry but i am so pissed off right now and i dont know what is wrong with me but if you saw me in the halls right now i would have the biggest smile but thats so fake and so not true that i just have to do another day of this its killing me.

before the dot com a few years ago i looked twenty years old. that crazy job and this one equals five years and i swear to you its aged me thirty years. if it wasnt for rogaine and rum and the kindness of the readers of the internet i would look like charles bukowski right now.

i chatted last night with splinky who i really should travel with cuz shes just as nuts as i am. i love my house as much as she likes hers but we both feel the same way about traveling. the answer is yes. lets go. who the fuck cares where. who the fuck cares how. just go. get out. get away from the demons tapdancing on the dreams. they dont fly first class and bunk in a hostel. they are crushed by adventure. they are destroyed by new friendships found in a tavern where nobody speaks english and nothing is familiar. they get lost in the train stations where all roads lead to everywhere. if theres one thing i dont know about its geography and last night she said lets go here and i said wheres that and she said indonesia and i was ashamed to say wheres indonesia cuz im supposed to be all smart and shit but i asked mr internet and he said indonesia is where bali is and the more i looked and read i realized that bali isnt a country its a city the country is called indonesia and its far as fuck away from this nightmare and i saw the news reports about bali and indonesia and they said something about a bus blowing up and you know what my bus nearly kills me once a week so whats the difference. the difference is better weather and leeches. the difference is the leeches dont pretend to be helping you in indonesia.

and beer costs a quarter.

cubs have the day off today and if you think this didnt help me and i dont feel better and i wont look at evil in the eye today and smile and move on move on dont stop and save the world then you dont know me at all.

artlung + makeout city + totally kickass job last night red sox fans

of course, i dont believe it.

they say if the velvet underground werent so far ahead of their time they woulda sold way more records.

they say that sometimes being ahead of your time is just as bad as being behind the times.

they say a lot of things. sometimes i feel like thats all they do. blah blah blah. yapping away with their meatflaps. but what are they saying. theyre not saying anything except here i am here i am

here i am.

here i am looking at my new playstation 2 that i got off ebay. im back to reading a lot of bukowsk, raymi, and he spent most of his life in a totally worthless job while living in hollywood getting drunk and fucking at night and going to the grind in the daytime. but mostly he waited for everyone else to catch up. to get it. to begin the beguine.

68. dan

and while he waited he typed his pretty poems and ugly stories and fascinating novels and he got better. rote i was once told will not help you and i said what will then and he said you just have to get it. and of course, i disagreed. rotes everything.

me and this one chick. not a cheerleader, but still hot because theres only hot girls in hollywood. tan eyes. bazooms like for bedays. lots of times we would just look at each other and say the dirtiest things trying to turn each other on. the things that would seep out her her pouty lipglossed smirk would raise more than your eyebrow and she knew her power but she didnt know that i knew it cuz im the great. tony the great. id say something like ive seen it all baby what makes you so good and shed tell me and shed turn herself on by telling me and then shed show me how turned on she was. and our eyes would be locked onto each others and the game was called chicken and chickens cluck which rhymes with luck and im soaking in it.

cubs beat the living shit out of the fish which makes me happy because every day at work im basically the spokesperson of the chicago cubs and today i had to explain the loss, spinning it, telling people it wasnt really a loss. someone would pass by me in hall and see my cubs hat and say sorry or say whats happening to them and id say eight runs we scored. and tomorrow i can say we scored twelve and coulda scored more but we wanted to save some for the fish.

shes saying come to bed and im saying im writing and she said i didnt say come to sleep and i said i know what you said see through everythings perfume soap sparkle shine hair from somewhere wonderful perfect skin lips tongue hips sort of girl the crude would say was built for it sort of girl who would agree asks to see then puts her nothing next to my knee and then on it. wants it. hates being ignored and overlooked. hates being put on the backburner and i tell her theres something here for you and i say a playstation 2 and she sits down on the lazyboy and rolls her white things up one leg and then the other and she says arent there enough toys in here for you.

and my friend the internet says yes. and the tivo boings yes. and the cd changer says yes and the french girl says oui but she says it so fast it sounds like a whistle fashizzle. last night i walked down hollywood blvd and then tonight i did it too. walked past the clubs. the hotties love to dance, doesnt matter what day the paper says it is. they dress up like no where else, maybe new york but f new york todays all about boston who did what needed to be done tonight and deserves a shot on the house.

she feels so ignored shes getting bored and when shes done fiddling with the video game she says you know youre going to get something out of this too and i said what, you, and she says nothing she just keeps her mouth wide open like she cant believe i said that but of course i said that my team has scored twenty runs over two games in the playoffs they peaked when they should have peaked. everything is timing. who cares if you score twenty runs in two games in april or may or june or july its in october when the freaks come out when you have to score twenty and then some and if you lose one then keep hitting and see how many times you lose again and she leaned her head back and closed her eyes and she wasnt complaining any more she was doing what she wanted to do and it was cute and then it was hot

and then it was irresistable and then the christmas lights clicked off cuz it was past one twenty and the timer does that and all i could see was the light on her curves from the bulb over the sink in the bathroom and i said what on earth am i doing with a girl that hot in my hottub and if anyone was around to esp me they would have replied back with a smartass remark like

timing. and i dont care what happens tomorrow, i love you, and i always have, and there will be a time in the sun and until then remember your sunscreen of fun.

21mm + recall totals by country + moxie is so fine

bring on the red sox

fuck you.

let me tell you a few things about programing baseball. namely baseball at wrigley field.

and specifically baseball at wrigley field in the playoffs.

during the seventh inning we do a little something at wrigley called the seventh inning stretch. you might have heard of it.

in the old days my hero, harry caray, would put down his beer at the end of the top half of the seventh, stand up, and pick up the PA microphone and he’d say something along the lines of

Let me hear ya!

and then he would say, a-one, a-two, a-three

and no matter if the cubs were getting their asses handed to them, or if they were winning by a bunch or if it was a close game all the cub fans would stand up and sing along with that drunken old man and everything would be great again.

the song he would sing is called Take Me Out To The Ballgame.

when harry was dying, he wasnt able to make it to some of the cubs games. so some of the local celebrities like Bill Murray and Walter Payton would work their way up to the broadcast booth and sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame for harry.

after the Lord called him up to the Big Leagues they hired his grandson to broadcast the games, but even he knew that he wasnt harry, so they started a new tradition where they would let local stars like mike ditka and big names like ozzy osbourne lead the crowd in song.

sometimes the renditions are horrible, sometimes theyre wonderful. usually theyre laughable.

last night during one of the most exciting playoff games imaginable, jimmy buffett stood up in the middle of the seventh inning to sing to the friendly confines.

fox, thumbing their nose to history, raising their middle finger to sentiment, and putting their head into the sand of sense of place, cut to commercial and robbed the millions of baseball fans of those thirty seconds of charm that you can only get at wrigley field, and chose to sell soap. or beer. or whatever the fuck they chose to sell like the dirty whores that they are.

yes im emotional about this sort of thing, but not ridiculously so. i understand business, and theres money to be made in televised sports in postseason, but that 30 seconds can be made up. youre already pimping out the green screen behind the plate so my perfect baseball scene is bastardized with a budweiser ad when all im trying to do is watch the batter and the pitcher.

why must you also take away my seventh inning stretch?

fuck you fox sports.

and another thing, whats this shit with not telling us which game is going to be on Fox tonight and which game is going to be on FX?

i live in Hollywood. Los Angeles. New York and Boston will get the game on Fox in their towns, and Chicago and Miami will get the game on Fox in their towns.

Just fucking tell us which game we’re going to get in LA on Fox so we know which channel to tivo. is that so hard? you people love those damn scrolls at the bottom of the screen. scroll that shit for us. are you all on crack?

Have Tim McCarver announce, “game two of this series will be seen in the following cities…” and it will be shown on FX in the rest of the country.

simple.

simple for me because i care about the baseball viewer. simple for me because my entire fucking life isnt devoted to selling out the national pastime so i can get a better toupee and eat more beef.

cut to commerical tonight and feel the wrath of harry when your soul gets sent to hell cuz thats my mans moment and you cant broadcast a cubs game in chicago without paying your respect to the man, and the man is all about the stretch, so quit being fucking little bitches about it.

you are sooooo lucky to have the cubs in the playoffs right now, and if they play the redsox in the world series it will be a cash cow like youve never seen before. so knock off the greed move.

for once in your sorry lives.

mark prior will shut florida out tonight. check your local listings since fox has its head up its ass.

tina + adrants + bitchen + kate sullivan

and to be honest with you, i hope it happens sooner than later.

and to be completely frank, ive been trying to sell out seriously for the better portion of this year.

this morning i woke up and read a good article on ClickZ Today called “Paid Subscription Blogging” where the idea of making money from ones blog was discussed.

At the very bottom of the article an industry insider said that charging people to read a blog will probably only be successful on a few blogs. He mentions Drudge, the Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Fark… and dumbass me.

Although the flattery of being part of that amazing short list is priceless, let me say here and now that you, precious reader, will never be charged a premium to read the busblog.

If someone wants to pay me money to write for their blog, newspaper, or magazine, I will gladly consider their terms. If someone wants me to tone down the busblog by not saying things like fuck the fucking president, or by not showing scantily clad women, or not calling bullshit on the bullshitters, and if they pay me the proper price, then i will tone down the busblog.

But under no terms will you ever be charged to read this brilliance that me and my hundred monkeys present to you each day.

That will never be part of the sellout.

One of my all-time heroes is Mr. Harry Caray, God rest his soul. The way the Cubs got Harry to be their announcer is that Harry was broadcasting for the White Sox and the White Sox decided in the early 80s to show most of their games on the now-defunct SportsVision, which was a premium addition to ones cable bill, similar to HBO.

Harry quit the Sox immediately saying that baseball is meant for the working person and it should be on free television. And he went across town to the Cubs where 90 per cent of the games were being broadcast on channel 9, WGN, for free.

I believe that it’s not only tacky, but ridiculous to think that readers should pay for the content when there are companies and advertisers who are more than willing to align themselves to personalities, writers, and now bloggers.

The Internet has always been about shit being free and we should continue to embrace that. I can tell you right now that I totally love and respect the Instapundit, but there is no way that i would go and pay for his content at Any price. on principle.

now macropayments are a whole nother thing. i would pay a nickle or even a dime for each web page that i went to in a day, even if ended up costing me 3 bucks a day. in fact it would be my pleasure because youve got to go to a hell of a lot of blogs that cost a dime a day to rack up 3 bucks a day.

im a gigantic fan of micropayments, but the only way that i would implement them on this blog would be by a volunteer basis only.

if i had the 1,000 people a day who visit this fork over a dime a day, i’d make $500 a week.

that car that im trying to get would be mine in a matter of 4 months. so yes, im a fan of micropayments and the man or woman who figures out how to bill people a dime for each blog that they visit will be a rich person. especially if they figure out a way to shave a penny or two for themselves.

until that day i will continue to try to develop working relationships with companies who i admire whose beliefs and business practices i agree with.

therefore if you ever see me pimping sweatshops like nike, know that they gave me at least two million dollars. and know that i gave a million of that to charity. i dont like nike. but i will take their money and give it to causes that they should be giving it to. especially since theyre making their zillions on the backs of the planet’s exploited. and whats worse about nike is that they dont need to be doing it since they already charge more for their shoes than any of their competitors.

but you know all this.

currently i have one ad. amazon. i like amazon. i like who they were when they were just starting out, i like how theyve grown, i like their service, i like their commission plan, i like that theyre still very much a dot com gone bigtime.

i dont make hardly anything off of them, but if i can get a book or two for free a year by having their link up on my page, then fine.

one day i will really sell out. i will blog for someone other than you. i will blog for a company. and when that day comes i will hopefully be able to keep the busblog as it is. but if i have to tone it down, i will still update daily, which isnt that hard because as long as this blog has been around ive had a full time job and ive still been able to make this page and all the photo essays and all the pictures and everything.

having a gig where i write for a living should make it easier to maintain this thing too, not hurt it. so fear not.

and how great is it that drudge is being called a blogger.

happy birthday nicky, the not-so-slutty, quieter, brainier libra hilton sister.

instapundit + the chicago tribune discovered blogs today + bruner blog