maybe youre trying to seduce a girl in canada. maybe youre trying to seduce a media outlet. maybe youre trying to seduce good while drive away fear.

whatever your reason, you should write tonight.

very smart girl the other day told me that evil is seduced by sadness. if evil is trolling around the planet it looks at auras and those auras are either saying hey ho lets go or theyre saying woe is me woe is me. since evil is a lazy fuck guess who it will try to find a home in? guess where it will try to find an ear it can whisper in? and guess the sorts of things evil will want to whisper?

things like: no you cant, god you suck, everyone else is better, youre so boring, youre so old, youre too young, youre so dumb.

meanwhile beautiful magic is attracted to happiness and wonder and possibilities and omg love.

so send your birdcalls of joy out into the world and keep that radio station of power blasting at 50 thousand watts. will there be some who call in on the request line and tell you that you suck. of course. thats evil telling you that youve beat him again. thats the devil saying hes defeated. hang up on him and play some zeppelin.

write something good tonight. write the way you wanna write. write about the one good thing that happened to you and then write the next thing tomorrow and rinse and repeat. do it day after day until you have a week of nice things. until you have a month of rock. until you have two months of joy. then tell me that the girl next door doesnt climb off the pages of playboy and into your heart.

today i got to see the donnas play at LAX and it was pretty fuckin rad. i will have more pics up tomorrow at the LA Times Travel blog called The Daily Deals blog, and because im a positive thinking im going to believe that the video i uploaded of the scene and a song and my interview with the CEO of Virgin America will get processed properly too and i might even put that up on here, the world famous busblog

home of the brave

land of the loved.

its our group blog written by the staff writers and editors on the Health desk.

it has been quite a pleasure working with all of these journalists who have more than embraced blogging. lots of people said that i would be met with all this resistance but im telling you, i havent seen hardly any.

everyone gets it that blogging is merely an extension of the writing that theyve been doing their whole life. maybe it took some of them a while to get to this realization, but theyre here.

since ive been at the Times the hits on our blogs have doubled. im not sure that i had a lot to do with that, but it is nice to be at the right place at the right time for a change.

most of the credit has to go to my boss who has given me so much freedom. it also has to go to the entire building who have been very welcoming to me and extremely open to my ideas. and i have some crazy ones.

Funny Pages 2.0 was an idea that i didnt think would come to fruition for a year. and i really didnt think that theyd let me use Christie to do it. but to have that blog written by her within just a few months of me being here is a huge confidence boost to me.

this weekend the La Plaza blog was the most popular page on the site and that popularity spilled over to today. you will also see some changes over at the UCLA blog, the USC blog, and as the Lakers get into the playoffs expect to see some cool things happening on the Laker Blog and the Kareem blog.

its so hard to believe that a year ago today, or even six months ago today i would have never expected that i would be writing you those things from my office at the LA Times.

tomorrow i have to go to LAX to cover The Donnas playing at a gate at Virgin Airlines. apparently the carrier has never had an LAX to Seattle nonstop route before and to celebrate the Donnas are gonna play at the gate and Cisco Addler and some others are gonna play on the freakin plane, and then the Donnas will play up in Seattle.

id take the rock plane if i didnt have a gazillion things happening here at the office but i will have pics and video from their LAX concert tomorrow afternoon for your ass. and for the LAT Travel Blog.

we can make shortcut urls at the Times, so the shortcut for Booster Shots is
latimes.com/healthblog

and the shortcut urls for Unleashed is either latimes.com/woof or latimes.com/meow

the first blog is one that i didn’t think would take off so quickly, but there was a lot of energy and love behind it. and its being written by some pretty excellent people.

when i first came to the Times and i was talking about what i liked and didnt like on the LAT blog roll, someone joked about an animal blog. i laughed but then i was all, wait whats so funny? they said oh its just something that the people at the Metro desk wanna put together but, you know, it’ll never happen.

apparently the good folks on Metro would come across wild, crazy, or just somewhat intriguing stories about pets and animals that they’d email each other, but they knew the paper had no room for.

after a few meetings with several editors, with my boss, with metro and their editors, we all decided to see if Unleashed could happen. as they “blogged in the dark” it turned out that there was story after story that could fit into the blog, and it turned out that it didn’t take all that much time to write the post, find a pic, have it edited and posted.

so today we officially launch L.A. Unleashed, a blog that all you animal lovers, like you Mr. Zell, will love, im sure.

the other new blog i will announce in a few

i made you a mixtape. cept its a muxtape. dont ask me why.

all it means is you can click on the tape up there and listen to 12 songs that i love right now. right this second. yep you.

all these songs are very special to me and theyre arranged in a particular order. if listening to them in this order makes you want to fall in lust with me, dont fight that feeling.

Tom Waits – I Don’t Wanna Grow Up – (2:31)
Kanye West – Throw Some D’s (Remix)- (2:36)
Ice cube – It Was A good Day (Remix) – (4:28)
Me First And The Gimme Gimmes – Nothing Compares 2 U – (2:42)
Victoria Williams – You R Loved – (4:50)
Teenage Fanclub – Norman 3 – (4:37)
The Replacements – Sixteen Blue (live) – (4:48)
Nina Gordon – Nobody’s Fool (live) – (3:44)
Backside Boys – Every Homo (live) – (2:29)
Pixies – Tony’s Theme – (1:52)
Tsar – Startime – (3:39)
Rollins Band – Do It – (2:40)

listen, make a mix of yr faves and if you do let us know in the comments below.

h/t lynne who just wrote about this cool site and that inspired me

while reporting

one of the more sensitive lines drawn at my workplace in regards to blogs are when journalists who have never expressed opinions in their work suddenly find themselves blogging. some think that blogging means injecting opinion into the story. while that is sometimes the case, its not always the case.

some bloggers think that they are fooling their readers when they let the subject that they present carry their water for them. the blogger will only link to stories that support their agenda, for example, or only blog about things that fit their theories.

in the example above a reporter for a site ive never heard of, but now will return to, is asked by one of her subjects what her opinion is regarding the anniversary of MLKs death. whereas many journalists would normally shy away from such a question by saying, this isnt about me, this is about you, the young lady who is now my new girlfriend, answers the question more eloquently and directly than any of her interviewees.

im not saying that journalists should seek out ways to pose their two cents, but when they have a chance to quit pretending that theyre not human, they shouldnt be afraid to just answer the damn question, because everyone has a point of view and its not always terrible (in my opinion) to express it – especially when called out.

so lets give the former nra president a 21 gun salute

one gun fired by a twenty year old, that is

but for some reason after watching andrew sullivan and christopher hitchens on tim russert i saw kravitz on unplugged do his latest single “i’ll be waiting” and it really moved me.

i have a feeling i was touched by it because i could finally actually hear it.

if you watch and listen to the album version, its so bloated and overproduced and radio friendly that it doesnt sound the least bit special or the least bit sincere

sure the strings during the climax are 70s and somewhat uplifting but its entirely forced and predictable and contrived. yes its symbolic of the romantic message of the song which is one day after the love interest recovers from her malaise and realizes that the hero is indeed the one she should be with violins and horns will provide the triumphant crescendo of their reunion, but how many millions of times have we heard that before?

added to that symbolism is kravitz alone in the studio, playing all the instruments alone, singing alone, until the breakthrough happens when he brings in the troops – is cheesy at best. lenny kravitz is one of the coolest rock stars alive – off stage. if he were to walk past you youd know instantly that hes a powerfully spiritual and talented star. the real deal. but his records are some of the most predictable pablum out there.

thats all changed when he steps back, lets the flat piano get replaced by subtle guitar, and allows his band to actually be a band, as in this appearance on Unplugged:

that bleating piano is gone, replaced with a warm guitar and organ. kravitz just sits there and sings the damn thing. and that fucker can sing. and what you get is a real rock song. you get depth. you can feel the soul. you can hear an actual ensemble.

im the one who really loves you baby for some reason sounds entirely different.

and how good is that saxophone? big man, assist me please.

and this is the reason why live music is what its all about, if you ask me. and why selling music and recording music to be sold is far different than playing music that youve written.

and why im glad that Unplugged is back on tv.

as great as he was in 10 commandments, michael moore probably captured him at his all time best saddesti loved him in The Omega Man

here he is talking about playing Moses

may the red sea part for you, oh man of the silver screen

and there was an interesting play where the catcher made a great catch that was an out AND and error. one of the great things about baseball, no matter how many years you watch game after game, something new is capable of being shown to you.

ive never liked san diego, but one great thing came out of that ridiculous town thru their baseball team: the san diego chicken, later called the famous chicken after that rotten town and team sued its most colorful mascot.

for all of you who said they dont like my baseball talk, heres a happy compromise, some video from the san diego chicken

wheres the famous chicken now? still doing his thing. mostly in the minors. check here to see if the greatest mascot in the world is coming to your town this summer.