smallislandgirl: Have you seen The Ugly Truth movie yet? its my favourite movie so far this year..Have a great weekend.
i hate ryan reynolds. i hate this amazing body. i hate his good looks. and i really hate that he took scarlet johannson off the market. so theres no way im gonna pay money to watch him make out with sandra bullock all day. wait thats not the Ugly Truth? Fine then, i’ll go see it. although i hope the amazingly crappy 15% rating it got on rotten tomatoes is a typo.
Gage: When I was a child there were a few songs that made me feel weird and/or upset inside. Did you have any of those? Pink Floyd or Eddie Floyd?
even though we lived in the painfully dull suburbs of chicago, for some reason music was everywhere, especially in the school. my mom bought me a saxaphone in 3rd grade. i took lessons and was in band all through elementary and junior high school. and in high school she bought me drums and i was in the marching band in high school. meanwhile you had to sing in music class and play in the bands for graduations and all these occasions.
they always made us learn these cheesy 70s songs like the theme from Welcome Back Kotter, and this one thing from Cats. but at an early age we were given “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. and after we learned it i looked at the first chair sax babe, kristan burke, and i said is this the saddest song ever? and she was all yep and creepy.
because of that, i think ive never had any music that makes me feel weird or upset inside. that all came much later in the xbi. specifically there was an incident as Led Zeppelin’s “in the light” was playing, and another time involving a crying nude girl and her friend who was laughing, and a scratched copy of the Smashing Pumpkins infinite sadness… double lp. particularly “1979”.
one summer i learned how to do a backflip on a trampoline in frisco while this kid played the 45 of the eagles one of these nights over and over.
adriel: love the bleachers. what do you do when you want something REALLY bad that you know you can’t have?
i convince myself that its a lame thing to want. and then i pretend that its actually cool not to have won the world series in over 100 years. i tell myself that it adds personality and mystique. also charm.
Sass: If it could only go one way, take the one you love or the one that loves you?
i wouldnt wish unrequited love on my worst enemy. not only are you not getting what you want but youre slowly changing yourself to try to fit what that person seemingly wants. we live on a tiny globe with billions of people. why would we ever settle for anything less than who makes us sooooooo happy. resorting for anything other than killer in a relationship is like going to the same crappy burger place for dinner every day. we’d never do it with food or drink but we would do it in matters of our heart? the most precious place? ridic. so yes id rather deal with a groupie any day and try to figure out wtf is my problem.
Douglas Arellanes: Love the new redesign. It’s like when you get a new car and it takes you a few weeks to figure out that the mirrors can be turned by moving that little switch – I’m still discovering all the cool stuff going on.
My question is this: Now that you have a new redesign on the front end, what’s going on on the back end? Is the blog and non-blog content finally unified into a single system, or is there one silo for the blogs and one silo for what used to be called “news?”
The reason I ask is that I haven’t seen too many places where the blog content is fully integrated into the paper’s other content. It’s something we’re working pretty hard on, though, so stay tuned.
something miraculous and transformational happened about six months ago that has quietly influenced how blogs are viewed at our paper. what happened was the metro desk, the largest group of reporters and editors, really took ownership of their blog, LA Now. local and city hall stories were filed through the blog first and then at the end of the day they were considered for the paper. plus you had the city editor running the blog. and since he knows every aspect of all of the traffic of that local news, he was able to put the best stuff on the blog as soon as it was ready.
it was the perfect storm of timely reporting, expert coordination, and a firehose of interesting and wild LA news at one url: latimes.com/lanow the result was millions of hits and a bulletride into the top echelon of blogs, the technorati 100 where it is currently #44.
while its a little trickier for some of the other desks to do it that way because they dont have the numbers of people to draw in gazillions of page views, i think the basic concept of what makes for a successful workflow is galvanizing as we speak.
Mike: Are you psyched for the new Tron movie?
no because this guy isnt playing Tron.
Dan: Is it just me, or do the people who scream loudest always seem to be the least educated?
no its usually those who dont spell very well. as someone who has had to read thousands of comments at LAist, and now approve hundreds of thousands of comments at the Times, i can tell you that its usually the people with the lamest arguments who really have no appreciation for the dictionary. you really appreciate it when people can keep it short and spell it correctly. meanwhile i write in all lowercase and grammar bad, so whats that tell you.
Keira-Anne: What was your favourite game for each of Coleco Vision and original Nintendo? Also, why?
because im an old man i was already seriously playing with girls when those two video games came out so i was not that interested in playing with the sweet 8-bit graphics of donkey kong and mario. also arcade palaces were at their peak during that time. here in LA there was Captain Video on Pico across where the Westside Pavillion now stands, and in Westwood there was a great arcade which finally closed down recently. so i was good.
g/d: is to like to link?
or to link to be linked?
a gift of a link to you and a like,
and one or the other for me please.
youre now #34. rock on.
timmay!!!!!: did you read today’s “Doonesbury”?
no. i liked it better when he hated the president.
lily: do you think i should get facebook?
facebook is slowly becoming the digital media hub of yr life. you can check in on how your friends are, their birthdays, what theyre liking. plus you can meet new people. but the most powerful thing i like about it is Facebook Connect which lets you sign in to other websites and blogs so you dont have to register there. as long as you have a FB account youre good. Digg is probably the best use of this feature. so yeah i think its a valuable site in 2009.
zona: which two actors, male and female, living or dead, do you look at and say, now THAT’S how it’s done?
that kid in gummo, and buster keaton. and of the two id have to give it up to keaton cuz he directed too. and of directors id say stanley kubrick and buster. people dont take their trades seriously. they dont aspire to be masters. those guys were damn masters. honorable mention for that dude who did buffalo 66. love that movie.
female actors id have to say vivica a. fox and charlize theron.
john wayne maioriello: could you ‘splain in detail how you made your famous photo essays?
first you need your own domain. then you need something like dreamweaver. then you make a page – put up a photo – say something funny – link the photo to page 2. then repeat except link the photo to page 3. then dreamweaver will send the files over to your domain via the ftp and shazaam you have a photo essay.
Andrea: What band/musician do really want to see play that you haven’t yet (living people only)?
there are several: christina aguelara, willie nelson, stevie wonder, van halen with david lee roth, john mellencamp, and page & plant.
something miraculous and transformational happened about six months ago that has quietly influenced how blogs are viewed at our paper. what happened was the metro desk, the largest group of reporters and editors, really took ownership of their blog, LA Now. local and city hall stories were filed through the blog first and then at the end of the day they were considered for the paper. plus you had the city editor running the blog. and since he knows every aspect of all of the traffic of that local news, he was able to put the best stuff on the blog as soon as it was ready. 