not unless you kill me first.

i thought you were a gentleman.

gentlemen dont get laid, anna.

au contraire, i’ve known gentlemen.

betcha theyre not any more.

shoot me in the face, baby.

it’s just tennis, honeybunch.

you have no idea how it feels.

to be rich, gorgeous, blonde, twenty one, and famous? sure i do. ive had orgasms.

it’s terrible. losing. its the opposite of your joke. it’s like being impotent. the goal is right in front of you and you cannot acheive it. and you never acheive it.

have you been drinking anna?

no.

you should, you sound terrible. monotone. insane. youre twenty one. capriatti got it together, and what is she 40?

i look at bridges in a much different way, recently.

thats a mighty pretty plate they gave ya.

yeah, but the winner got a real ming vase.

youre kidding me.

nope.

fuck.

i was thinking about elbowing it.

i woulda married you.

whoops.

if it makes you feel any better, i found a guy who does what i do better than i do.

nobody writes like you.

nobody loses like you.

does that make me the best at something, or something?

only in a dumb way.

oh well.

are you gonna come to la and play at staples?

maybe, but probably not.

if you dont, lets go up to isla vista and get high.

k

stay away from bridges, second place girl.

stay away from the girls, my favorite boy.

with a hot chick last night, but she stood me up.

we sorta had an agreement that said that if i didn’t finish my proposal for my dream job that she wouldn’t go to the movies with me. but it was sorta a joke agreement. she knows that im terrified to write the proposal and ive been procrastinating it for quite a while.

but she didn’t even call or email me to tell me that we weren’t gonna hang, and that made me sad, and it didn’t motivate me to write last night. it just motivated me to drink alone and watch tv.

kissing motivates me.

when girls come over to my house and lift their shirts, that motivates me.

if some girls came over and said, hi tony, we’re here to help you. first we’re going to show your our magical boobies and then we’re going to sit here while you work, that would get me to work.

some people are motivated by money or power or job titles or merchandise.

me, im very visual. and i like to kiss hot babes.

if one of those girls saw that i wasn’t typing and she came over and sat on my lap and said, “god i love your writing and your style, and the way that your apartment is messy, but still cozy,” and then kissed me and then went over to the couch and said, “i’ll give you another kiss after you do 5 good paragraphs,” i would do 5 good paragraphs.

some writers cant write with other people around.

not me.

some of the best stuff that i wrote in college was in a very busy loud crazy sexy cool newsroom where people were yelling and dancing and arguing and kissing and skateboarding and playing wiffleball and nerf basketball and drinking wine and telling lies and changing the radio stations and all that.

i forget what motivated me back then, but im sure it wasn’t the cold shoulder.

anyway, im sure she didn’t know all this. im not sure she knows me that well.

but now that she does, i’ll let you know about the progress of .. well, everything.

speaking of which, i got some of my proposal done, and ashley is coming up here a little after midnight to tuck me in and wake up with me in the morn to watch da bears win their second straight game.

tomorrow evening is going to be interesting. you don’t mind if i ramble, do you? hope not.

tomorrow evening on tv i have to choose between my beloved raiders playing the espn evening game, anna nicole smith on E! and then on the howard stern show, or the season premiere of the sopranos.

something tells me im gonna watch the raiders since the other two will be rerunned.

today bob dylan tickets went on sale for his three night stand at the wiltern theatre, a venue i see every day on my way to work.

face value of the tickets are $75-150.

the wiltern is owned by Clear Channel who owns many radio stations.

why is it that i have the feeling that lots of radio jerks are going to see bob dylan play for free and the general public are going to make up the difference by paying the ridiculous prices?

sometimes i do wish i was a millionaire.

id see a lot more shows.

okay, gotta shower. a hot blonde twenty year old girl is gonna come here and make me forget all about bob dylan and whisper sweet things in my ear which will then turn into beautiful blog entries for your asses.

nite!

i didnt call her either.

everyone is nervous and sketchy and superstitious and freaked out.

anna kounikova, 21, on sunday will enter just her fourth singles final in her seven-year professional career and her first shot at a WTA title since Moscow in 2000.

the only woman in anna’s way will be anna.

anna smashnova, that is, the top seeded israeli who has coasted through the Shanghai Open, thumping Angelique Widjaja of Indonesia 6-1 6-1 in her semi-final match today.

kornikova didnt have it as easy, barely squeaking past Japan’s Ai Sugiyama 6-4 7-5 in todays other semi final– which set up tomorrow’s anna versus anna final.

anna k. continued her winnings ways today in china when she took the court a mere few hours later with new doubles partner Janet Lee and clinched a second finals berth with a tremendous win over unranked Li Ting and Sun Tiantian 2-6, 6-4, 6-4.

so could this be a doubles and a singles tourney championship for our favorite blonde comrade?

i say yes.

too bad its not going to be on tv.

too bad it wont be on tv at 11pm tonight pacific time, not even on pay-per-view, which i would pay money to see.

wishing you luck, ms. kournikova

i believe oj because i want to believe oj.

like a lot of black kids in the early 70s, oj was my hero.

he had style, grace, flair, and soul.

and like lots of black people, when oj was declared not guilty, i breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

unlike a lot of people, i actually was able to watch most of the trial.

my particular job at the time, had me working the evening shift if i wanted to. and why wouldn’t i want to?

i watched the whole thing on E! who had commentary during the breaks, pre- and post-coverage, and a nearly gossipy approach to the proceedings that made it more of a live action soap opera than a legal tussle. they made it easy to follow. they had all the best guests. it started around 9 or 10 in the morning and was done around 3 or 3:30. it became part of my daily routine.

as someone wanting to believe that he was not guilty, i raised my eyebrows when the LAPD couldn’t account for nearly half of the blood that they collected from OJ to compare with the blood found in his bronco and at the scene and on the blood. i scratched my head when marcia chose to never include the slow chase (pictured) where oj hid in the back of the bronco and called his mother sobbing. allegedly.

and when the glove didn’t fit, i had to acquit.

E! gave me a new hero: johnny cochran.

Blacks were rooting for OJ because he represented a Black man on trial. not only that, but of a Black man killing a skinny young blonde white woman. none of us wanted to believe that any of that was true.

currently i am telling myself that it was drug dealers who killed nicole after she built up a healthy habit that oj might have financed in the past, but for whatever reason had stopped paying for. this would explain why oj went on the slow speed chase with a passport, cap, fake moustache and wallet (he thought the drug dealers were going to kill him too) crying to his mother.

i don’t think that oj, a guy who had never had a problem with women, infact the new E! True Hollywood Story about OJ (which gets rerun this afternoon) says that one reason that Nicole wanted a divorce was because of his infidelity. wasn’t oj was dating a playboy model? how many 49 year old guys dating playboy models stab their ex-wives over a lover’s quarrel? you have lover’s quarrels when you’re deeply in love. when you’re deeply in love you don’t bang other women. the prosecution cant have it both ways. not guilty.

i think that nicole didn’t pay her drug tab. i think that oj once paid these tabs but once they were divorced stopped paying. maybe he would pay now and then, but this time he said no. i think the drug dealers called oj on a last ditch effort to get the money and said theyd kill her if they didn’t get it. i think oj called their bluff, and lost. and when they were done, they went to the back of oj’s house, knocked on kato’s wall and dropped their bloody glove in his yard.

both ron and nicole was slashed across the neck. nicole, in such a way that she was nearly decapitated. those people were not stabbed in a way to be punished, they were stabbed in a way to be killed. emotional killings, i would think, would include shouts, tears, cries of grief. none of this happened. Ron was stabbed 9 times, i think, nicole 19. that’s pretty efficient for a first time double murderer, if you ask me.

anyway, in the new True Hollywood Story, we hear that OJs dad just might have been gay. we hear that OJ dated a 21 year old during his last stay in California and she moved to Florida with him, she, getting an apartment in Miami.

i also learned that OJ has an income of at least $23,000 a month, which cant be touched by the courts. and he has a personal 401k for his retirement.

not a bad two hour recap of the whole thing.

they also claim that he was a ticket scalper of 49er games when he was in junior high.

and a pie stealer.

Clicked around the blogosphere, and found lots of people saying, “Oh, that’s terrible” or “Here’s my analysis of this or that Zevon lyric, and aren’t I clever for noticing its hidden genius.”

But I already wrote something like that myself; I mean, I read a couple, but how many can you read?

Checked the L.A. Times. Glory be! They had an actual interview with the guy, with lots of new information.

As Reynolds says (or doesn’t say), Advantage, Big Media.

Nance

Dear Nance,

Any time you’re looking for something Hollywood or music-related, please just drop me an email or leave a comment or ask.

The same goes for the rest of youse.

Hollywood is an incredibly small place where thousands of paths cross each day and millions of paths cross each night.

I had the great opportunity of being at a party that Warren attended this summer. ironically, it was the last LA Blogger party that was held at movie producer Brian Linse’s hollywood bachelor pad. Warren and Brian are friends.

The guests of honor were Eric and Dawn Olsen. That’s dawn with warren in the above photo. advantage warren.

Eric, a record producer, and author of books regarding record producing, has since formed the amazingly diverse and important Blogcritics.com, to which you can find this amalgam of offerrings about Warren’s fine career.

As for the LA Times, I’m still mad at them for not mentioning my name in that story about bloggers, and I will remain mad at them until they do a feature about me and the dozen or so major bloggers who reside mere miles from their ivory tower.

and yes, i am still sticking my tounge out at them.

anyway, i rememeber that blogger party very well, because thats when i got to meet a lot of cool people whose blogs i hadn’t met, but that was also the night where everyone first met moxie.

i get more and more depressed.

there used to be a time when i thought that many of these people were some of the smartest people around. now i just wonder.

i know it’s friday the thirteenth, but it still worries me when others just dont get it.

and strangely enough, even smart people dont understand the beauty of blogs like this one.

i dont say that in a conceited way, i say that in a stylistic way. what i think this blog represents, as chris c. (who turned me on to that LA Times story first, thanks Chris) stated one of his comments, is that it fills the gap between analyzing hard news and talking about very mundane personal trivalties.

one of the best things about blogging, in my opionion is that you can get a glimpse of a real live person and what theyre up to and how theyre living, minus their personal politics. not everyone wants to know these things, but i do. i totally love people. i love humanity. i want to know what it’s like for 16 year old Nay who is being homeschooled in Orlando. i want to know what its like for thirtysomething year old flagrant to be 6 feet tall and 97 pounds and yet still jet setting.

i couldnt give a rats ass what life is like for Bob Greene, or Oprah, or Dr. Phil or Sally Jesse because in lots of ways i think those people are huge fakers who are living a life so removed from me that i couldnt identify with them or learn from them if i wanted to– and i dont want to!

on 9/11 i was watching mtv and suchin park was on one of the phones and she was talking to a teenage girl who lived in new york and she was asking her “what is it like to be 16 and living in the wake of all this?” and i wanted to yell at the tv and say, “suchin, just get on the damn web and check out a blog, or an open diary, or live journal and it is so easy to see!”

hell, kids today tell you what theyre listening to, what theyre wearing, what their boyfriends got in a fight with them over, everything.

here we are in the Information Age and you’re using a corded telephone on national tv to ask someone a mile away “what is your life like?”

and the girl on the other end said just like i said,

“uh.”

where to begin.

one of the metafilter kids questioned my preminition that the LA Times will go down one day if they keep writing crappy articles like the one i will shut up about. that worried me.

in the last twenty years we have seen a lot of things fall, literally and figuratively, that we would have never expected. communism, billion dollar companies, oj, michael jackson, the berlin wall, russia, and the twin towers.

no one could have ever predicted any of that.

we’ve also seen in the last 20 years the rise of things that were equally unpredicatable: free music, free porn, the Internet, cheap long distance, $50,000 pick up trucks, white rappers winning grammys, and the incredibly inept bush family dominating american politics.

so in the wake of all of that is the idea that a silly newspaper in a no-newspaper town going down such a ridiculous speculation?

it isnt.

and la times, i know you read me. i see you in my referal logs. im serious when i tell you that you should hire me and my friends. but the problem is there is no such thing as the LA Times. there is no one “thing”. the Times is merely a collection of perfectly fine human beings who all happen to get a paycheck signed by similar people.

the building downtown is not the Times, robert hilburn isnt the Times, the newsprint isnt the Times, the ghost of Jim Murray isnt the Times– that paper is a collective of professional writers and artists and editors and ad people. if some new paper rolled into town offering similar money and called itself something different and everyone moved over to the new paper, the new paper would be the LA Times with a different name.

what the Times needs, and what LA needs are different people, different writers, and a different objective. the objective shouldnt be to simply put out a paper, it should be to put out the finest newspaper in the world.

as someone who has lived in LA for more than half of my life, it doesnt sit well with me that new york has what is regarded as better Anything than LA.

the LA Times can put out a better paper than the NY Times without competition. in NY if someone wants to leak something, they have a half dozen newspapers to go to. Here in LA, if they want their story to really hit the masses, they only have one.

But it rarely happens here.

And I think it’s because the Times, now owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Corp. doesnt really give a fuck. unless they do something completely offensive they will continue to get subscribers and advertisers, and as long as they keep buying up the small community papers they will avoid competition. but unfortunately their product suffers and so do their readers.

thankfully, the Internet has arrived and if we want to know whats happening in LA we are no longer tied to the teet of the Times, who have been far more interested in news items outside of the 213, 310, 323 and 818 for more than a decade.

this weekend go to LABlogs.com and click around. i bet you that if you give yourself an hour, you will have a greater grasp of what is really happening here in tinsletown than if you spent an hour with our local page.

me, i will be in my computer room trying to change the world

for the better.

on the blog-o-sphere.

the good news is thousands and thousands of new readers might actually check this shit out and dozens might actually get what i’m up to.

the bad news is a couple hundred might not get it at all.

my new best friend, guffzilla, didnt get it, and its not his fault. but i would like to introduce myself to him and the rest of you good people out there who don’t understand my come-from and are interested.

in my opinoin there are two sorts of ways to attack bad writing: you can carpet bomb or you can surgically remove the virus.

me, i like to carpet bomb. i don’t care who gets hurt, i don’t care what happens to me, i don’t care how out of control it looks, i don’t care. i have a real job to get back to and be slightly better than mediocre at. here is one of the few places where i feel like i have the freedom to be completely mediocre.

apparently the Times feels the same about their Living section.

even though i now get tons of traffic, i still write the way i did when i got none: poorly.

do what got you the notoriety. thats one reason i keep doing the photo essays.

stick to what youre good at.

find your audience and write to them.

my audience might be varied, and i welcome everyone, but i write to girls who i want to date and girls who i sorta date and girls who i dont date any more.

they never ever ever tell me that i grammar bad, probably because they know that i do this from a flying car above Hollywood on a voice activated Palm Pilot while working for an underground renegade group of overpaid former federal agents called the xbi and i should pay more attention to that.

dont be suprised that i admit to my sloppiness or that i am sloppy, be suprised that im still so much better than so many of the writers you read in big time papers.

one guy im not better than is welch who wrote about the fucked up Times piece yesterday too. he’s a pro. he got into the details, he used Lexis-Nexus, he spelled everything right, he got all the facts together, he probably even had a buddy or two edit it for him.

i did just what i told you i would do: i spent 5 minutes (ok, i spent 10) and i spread my cheeks, and i let the LA Times have it.

i misspelled like crayz, i got my numbers wrong, i made mistakes, but i got the point across which ws: when the LA Times lets the interns write practice stories to test out the new software they shouldn’t let the slop get in the paper. my slop is in a blog. i get paid zilch for it. their slop is on newsprint. the Times gets paid zillions for it. huge difference.

could i spellcheck this mofo? sure. do i sometimes? yes. it all depends on how much time is left on my government mandated 15 minute break at work.

but to be honest with you, guff, and all the others out there who seriously care about details in a blog, i had no idea that I would be the most-linked writer about yesterday’s big topic.

i truly thought that the LA Times piece would bring out all the best writers in the blog-o-sphere for a massive gang thrash. instead you got me and welch and pretty much no one else.

wtf bros?

are we all so used to second-rate features of the Blogger phenomenon that we don’t expect anything decent from the mainstream press any more?

im not used to it.

i trust welch when he says that he writes about the glaring mistakes in his local paper because he thinks that it will help make them better.

i trust him that he’s sincere, but i disagree with him.

i think there are only two things that will help the LA Times: true competition, and/or my friends.

my friends would have turned my little 10 minute rant into something suitable for framing.

my friends would have said, “great start tony, but why don’t you walk around the block, pump yourself up and polish the edges so that guys like guff wont be distracted by the crust on the bread… and throw in a few more zingers.”

anyhow. i don’t know if this explained much. but come here if you want carpet bombing. i lie in here. i make shit up. im not one to be trusted when it comes to numbers. im here just like glow in the dark condoms:

for entertainment purposes only.

my poptart just popped, so i gotta go,

love,

tony

(#16 on blogdex today, warts and all)

hi super cool tennis chickie

i see you got linked by who many consider the Biggest Blogger on Earth, Dave from the Scripting News.

i see you won again in China over Zheng Jie 6-4 7-6 to advance to the quarter finals.

it was easy.

really?

no. but i also see that you were linked today by the inventor of Blogger, Ev!

i’ll wake up tomorrow and none of this will be true.

shit, do you think we’re both dreaming today?

never know. yesterday Doc and Instapundit linked me and i thought that was cool. but to have these guys today… i’ll stop, sorry, anna.

it’s okay, you can geek out on me.

i wont, hey hows the food.

you know i hate chinese food, i just put soy sauce on the rice and munch on carrots and drink beer.

are you gonna win this tournament, anna?

i dont know, i feel pretty good. it’s weird.

i’ll pray for you tonight, if you want.

please do, tony.

i cant believe youve never won a pro tournament.

i know, you think just showing up to enough of them i’d just win one out of dumb luck.

maybe when God was handing out dumb luck, he passed you up and gave you a double heaping of hottness.

you sound like youre in such a good mood tony.

i am!

did the LA Times really do a story on Bloggers and not even interview one LA Blogger?

yep. didnt you click the links?

aaaaah, i never click the links. i just like to stay and read your whole thing. plus im only on a 56k modem here at this Internet cafe.

they have those out there?

yeah, well, its really a store that has computers and phones and faxes. it’s hot in here. they have warm Cokes in cans and bottles of water. not plastic bottles, real glass bottles. it’s really interesting but i cant wait to get out of here.

homesick?

no, just out of this Cafe – im getting a little crowd. the kids are telling me to say hi to you.

hi Chinese kids!

they are all saying “death to the LA Times and lazy puff peice journalism.”

God bless the kids.

wish me luck tony, i’ll need it.

good luck anna, eye of the tiger, hot babe.

byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

bye!

hi. you suck.

today you had a los angeles staff writer try to educate your readers on the phenomenon of Blogs.

your writer did a shitty ass job. nothing new for your paper. but today it’s my turn to tell you how bad you are.

let’s see if i can do this in 5 minutes, which, i imagine is how long it took your paper to throw together this mess.

okay, you write about Blogs, you’re a paper in LA, you assign it to an LA writer, you interview several alleged bloggers and let me guess how many LA bloggers you interview or write about?

how about none.

instead of interviewing actual LA Bloggers, 200 of whom could have been found via LABlogs.com (#1 google result when you type in “los angeles blogs”, rocket science, i know.), you choose to interview former LA Times journalist ::cough::lazyjournalism::cough:: Larry Pryor who is the director of the Annenberg Online Program at USC.

fair enough, but where’s Larry’s blog? oh that’s right, he doesnt have one.

onlinejournalism.com, which the Annenberg students churn out is beautiful, but who reads it? no one. why? because look at the softball old “news” OJR gives us today (Yahoo went grey yesterday … oooooh — thanks for telling us today) the LA Times interviewed the Managing Editor of it Melissa Milios, a graduate student, but where’s her personal blog? the LA Times shows a peppy picture of Annenberg’s Joshua Fouts but where’s his blog “Dangerous Monkey“?

oh, it’s gone.

Is this a matter of those who can’t do, teaching?

never.

people do read matt welch, and ken layne, and emmanuelle, and heather and moxie, and laura crane, and ben sullivan and his sister kate sullivan, and greg and molli, the mighty mc brown, hollywood producer brian linse, and even a slick motherfucker named pierce whose site got 752,009 hits last month (down from 906,344 in July).

and how can you forget LAExaminer.com which is a Blog that focuses on the ineptness of the LA Times?

why would you dare to be interesting?

we live in LA. we blog. many times a day do we blog. some of the above, most on my lil list, are even paid journalists.

why not ask paid journalists, not teachers of a crappy ass (but pretty) quasi-blog, if blogging is journalism. that is, if you want to keep asking the same dull questions about this phenomenon repeatedly like an entertainment writer sitting down with Mick Jagger and asking, “so how did you and Keith meet?”

heres some other ways to write a shitty peice of dreck that exposes you as the dinosaur that you are:

+ call Slashdot a blog.

+ use the word “blog-o-sphere” a half dozen times in the first few paragraphs and not give credit to The Daily Pundit who coined the phrase “blogopshere“, but use him in the article anyway.

+ by all means reference that tech guru William Safire’s column about the word “Blog” in the NYT

+ talk about the class at Berkeley that will be all about Blogging

+ dont talk about the inventor of the Blogger, Ev, who has a great blog

+ ignore the Blogfather Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit who got 200,000 hits yesterday

+ and when you put it online, make sure not to link to anyone

LA Times, you will go down.

I cannot wait for that day to come.

Will it be by your own hands or at the hands of others is anyone’s guess.

But keep shooting yourselves in the foot by this sort of sloppy reporting and your enemies and critics will just have to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

and the bloggers will type it all up.

the Blogger phenomenon is happening stronger in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world and you wouldnt know it if it slapped you in the face. by the way, im slapping you in the face.

meanwhile you’re nothing more than a formerly beautiful woman, who is now showing her age and trying to hide the bags under her eyes as her boutique-bought hat sags along with the rest of her as she slouches towards irrelevance.

all the botox redesign will not help you.

the only thing that will help, im sorry to say, is to start hiring us.

and pay us loads and loads and loads of cash.

although most of us will work for just loads.

::update:: professional journalist and los angeles blogger Matt Welch handles this subject much more delicately in this new post, and doesnt once use the word motherfucker.

show off.

and how do i repay her? usually with tawdry tales of my previous evening, lies about my future, and exaggerations of my prowess on the softball field.

last night our team won its first game. we’re now 1-1.

i didnt make many errors, i got two hits, drove in a run.

i attribute my good play to the newly applied pregame ritual of a long walk, followed by two monster tacos at jack n the box, followed by a nice visit to the mens room for a good 10 minutes.

when your mind, soul, and colon are cleared you can play softball with reckless abandon.

the aztecs taught these lessons.

after the game i took the 217 fairfax to hollywood blvd and saw a prosititute take the subway to north hollywood.

she was a beautiful black woman with long blonde braids. me and this other guy were staring at her. he more than i. i was reading some short stories by jeff noon, “pixel juice.” my friend just stared at her.

he had a sweat suit on, a raiders cap tilted sideways atop a red dew rag. $200 jordans. gold rolex. pardon me, but i thought he was her pimp until she got on the northbound red line and he and i waited in the breeze for the southbound train.

he stared at her the entire time.

“you’re gonna burn a hole in the back of her head,” i told him.

he didnt say anything.

finally he said, “was that a woman or a man?”

“oh that was enough woman for both of us.” i said. and went back to my book.

she was a woman.

today i have to do some really nasty terrible fucked up shit that will probably take all day.

so only expect a half dozen entries.

sorry.

p.s. to see ken and matt sing the song (below) click the picture of them. it’s my favorite song of the year.