people ask me all the time to write about my job

i say, i told you, im not gonna write about the fbi while we’re at war.

they say nonononono, your real job. i say, oh, the real one. ok. well, me and this girl i work with were talking about True Hollywood Stories. We edit the closed-captions so that the deaf, hearing-impared, and hotties working out in the gym can keep up with the daliances of the famous.

my co-worker said the other day, “you know you have a rough life when it’s only the year 2000 and your THS is only half-way done.”

I think i’ve topped her. I’m doing the newest edit of the 2-hour Anna Nicole Smith truehollywoodstory. We’re only into the tenth minute of this story and she has gotten married, divorced, had a kid, lived in a trailer, worked at a fried chicken place, started stripping, had two breast augmentations, gone to the hospital cuz of an infection due to one of them, and been arrested three times for DUI.

after informing my co-worker of all of this, she says, wow.

now arent you glad to hear the behind the scenes goings on?

mariah called me like she does every night these days before she goes to sleep. we talk about the old days and she keeps telling me that i would love her movie cuz it’s set in the ’80s and i say i’ll go i’ll go and she says do it for America! and then laughs. shes got a cute laugh.

i tease her that her voice is getting deeper and one day it will be as deep as kathleen turner’s and she likes my jokes and rewards them with silence but it’s cool, she keeps calling, doesnt she.

i say, mariah, dont think that it’s a failure if yours was the only new movie that came out this week and you didnt even get in the top ten of weekend grosses. she asked why isnt that a failure? i said, cuz money doesnt mean nothin or popularity. she said but j-lo… i said, j-lo, whatever. she said, yeah, whatever.

then she gave me a hard time for writing about ashley this weekend.

i wouldn’t be much of a hippie, or a reverand, or bleeding-heart liberal

if i didnt bring up the fact that there’s always Plan B in situations like these: peace.

of course we need to find those responsible, and of course we need to bring them to justice. it is the means that i am typing about.

waving your dick in the eyes of a monster and demanding a bunch of shit that you know he’ll say “no” to is what daddy bush did to sadaam ten years ago and the day before the new bad guy allegedly masterminded the incidents last week, the old bad guy shot down some of our planes over iraq, so what has war done for us lately?

the president read a nice speech yesterday, pretty to the ears, but chock-full of holes, of course, frat boy.

i’ll get into more of this later, but in the meantime, let me say that if you’re going to buy flags at the corner and make God Bless America the latest catch-phrase, realize that God has blessed America plenty. and God would be far more interested in a peaceful resolution to matters such as these, because God is Love, not hate or revenge or terror. so do me a favor and just leave God out of it.

you too, Osama.

enjoy the telethon tonight.

+++++++++++

in other insights, layne and welch has turned it up a notch and as ive said before, these are the sites you should really be reading.

+++++++++++

email home

The ex- drove me down to Long Beach

and we saw Blink-182 – who were terrific, by the way – just three dumb skaters from San Diego who (for the exception of the drummer) aren’t very talented musically or other wise, but who write and sing happy little semi-punk songs.

And I don’t know who the fucked up people in the world are who don’t love America, and I’m not going to try to tell you What America Is To Me, but if someone saw me and chris the other night you might have gotten a good idea of what makes this country what it is. You had a white girl and a black boy in a honda eating mexican food in the parking lot of a rock show in long beach california where twenty minutes later, a dee jay from KROQ was about to lead the crowd of mostly-highschool kids into The Pledge of Allegiance.

I love America for lots of reasons, but I particularilly like it when, after the dee jay (the one above in the dress) fucked up The Pledge, they unmercilessly booed her literally off the stage.

I keep trying to tell you the kids are alright.

Times are rough

when you see me praising the now so-trim-it’s-sickly Rush Limbaugh, but the once-important syndicated windbag actually denounced the comments of Reverands Falwell and Robertson straight-up saying that they were wrong. And that deserves a link any damn day. Still, Rush, you are that close to being forgotten. Continue to fade into the ether. But before you do, you may want to change the cover of your “Limbaugh Letter” (left).

From my co-worker comes a link to a Spaces Invaders-type game called “Hunting For Bin Laden” where you get to be Dubya, Gen. Powell, or VP Cheeney with a shotgun blasting away as many turbin-donned Osama’s as you can.

Fun for about 45 seconds until you realise the creepy irony that the evil doers only get tougher to kill as the battles continue and eventually your guy with the shotgun gets nailed by a scud missle.

Good thing we don’t use shotguns to fight wars anymore, huh?

this site has gotten over 111,000 hits over the last week

Thanks. You get hits when people tell their friends to check you out, and I thank you for that.

When you get hits, you get letters and everyone has given me nice letters and this one was an interesting one, and since I’m brushing up on my Farsi so that I can help the cause, I figured today would be a good day to show you a letter that I got about my pages about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson preaching that lesbians and others were to blame for the terrorist acts, and my response.

To: heytony@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: your site

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 18:16:07 +0000 (GMT)

Tony,

just wanted to let you know that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are in

NO WAY representative of Christianity as a whole. Both of them are

intolerant reactionary assholes and true Christians scoff at their

deplorable attitudes towards just about everything. Of course they have a

small following, but so did Ross Perot, and who the hell takes *that* guy

seriously?

Feel free to disregard all of their bullshit. 99% of the Christians I know do just that.

Gentle Reader,

I agree with you wholeheartedly, except for the fact that they have a “small” following. Those two guys are two of the biggest Christian ministers of all time. They own a broadcasting network that spreads around the world.

Their political strength in this country is so mighty that they can say things like what I put on my page and they are not denounced by big-time Republicans or even other Christians.

I, too, am a Christian minister and I am outraged that they are allowed to spew such hateful non-Christian vitriol unchecked.

But the main reason that I have it on the front page on my page is to point out that we have some influencial religous zealots in America who preach more about politics and power than they do about spiritual matters from the Bible. And although it might not be as dangerous as others who would hijack planes on suicide missions because their religious leader instructed them to, it is nevertheless dangerous and needs to be outed.

I truly thank you for your letter.

Your in Christ,

Tony Pierce

i know this is a bummer of a time

and we’re supposed to be all patriotic, but i think that part of being American is the right to express one’s opinion. and i was born in Washington D.C. and so was my sister and so was my father and his father. so this is my opinoin of the day: somebody needs to shut up our president, George W. Bush. he’s a fucking idiot and that little sneer that he has is pathetic. i know he’s trying to be a tough guy, but he’s a fucking moron.

if you saw the Vice President on Meet The Press yesterday, it was a clinic. In between dry hacks of death, Dick released quick little blasts of subtle brilliance. I turned to my weekend companion and said, “why isn’t this guy our President, again?” and she said, “cuz he’s about one wrong heartbeat from heaven.” I have a much greater apreciation for Mr. Cheeney, who knows so much about how our government works, and is smart enough to answer questions and tell stories in a way that is informative without giving away any secrets or making it look like anyone fed him the information – or that he’s a buffoon figurehead lucky to even be on t.v.

And I agree with the amazing Doug Morris that instead of repeating the elementary idea of “evil-doers”, this is the speech the leader of the free world should have given. (kudos, shelia)

if you want a nice flag for your emails or your web page, go here.

over sixteen thousand hits to my page yesterday.

when people linked to it they said things like, try not to cry. the intention was to make you all a little happier, so maybe they were happy tears.

today the network is letting us go home at two so we can observe the national day of mourning. absolutely no disrespect intended, but didnt we mourn on tuesday wednesday and thursday?

i went to sleep early last night cuz i had a pretty bad headache. i have a very hard time accepting the victim role. i would like to stay at work until 5, thank you. in honor of the slain. and trust me, if anything tragic ever happens to me, please don’t mourn more than about 20 minutes. if you’re going to dwell, help out the poor or the sick or the starving or the ignorant. i know your hearts are full of love and strength. let’s reflect that. vh-1 had a special on grunge last night. that music is perfect for these black days, which is weird because as much as i love nirvana, it had always been very hard for me to listen to them for even a short period of time since that tragedy, but last night it sounded so damn good.

My subscription to the L.A. Times ended today. Thank you, Lord. Thank you!

Casual Thursday

for Bitter Businessman Guy. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that he sported a smart golf shirt tucked into khaki’s this morning as he fumed that the train was a few minutes tardy.

Almost 7,000 hits yesterday. And not one of them got to get linked to this dude’s spectacular pictures and story from the streets of NYC – thanks to Greg for letting us know.

Even though I understand that the NFL doesnt want to fly to the games, or play, or put their fans in possible danger, I’m bummed that there wont be football this Sunday. I really enjoyed it last week.

Today my company arranged for the Ben & Jerry’s truck to serve us all ice cream. They had Cherry Garcia, and the one that i chose, Chocolate Fudge Brownie. One of our freelance cameramen, Thomas Pecorelli, died in one of the planes the other day. He was 31. His wife is three months pregnant. Disneyland is opening back up today.

after a full day dwelling,

i seriously doubt that i will be writing any more about what every tv station is talking about. i hope that doesnt disappoint you, so in other news, the bus was not even crowded today and one of my favorite people was there, Bitter Businessman Guy.

This guy is white (a rarity on my bus), dressed in a shirt/tie/slacks/hard shoes (another rarity), has short hair and a cheesy moustache, and appears to be a sales professional or a middle manager. Whatever he is, he always looks PISSED.

whenever he is around I always hope that something breaks or the bus is late cuz i would fucking love to see him blow his stack.

the L.A. Times has 6 sections, of course all he read was section A, about the tragedy. you could see the skin beneath the stubble on the back of his neck grow red. I was loving it.

For anyone who is concerned, I emailed Genevieve Field of Nerve.com yesterday to see if she was ok, she emailed me right back from her penthouse office in NYC. (Little did I know about the cool website “I’m Okay”). And you know I don’t B.S. you about things like this, and I don’t, but how on earth do I not visit her site more often? Not enough titties for me? And beautifully photographed. What on Earth is wrong with me?

Also, major shout-outs to Ben who busted with one of the best headlines in a column that you really should read “Hollings to copyright violators: ‘I’m gonna git you SSSuCAs’

Finally, what have I done to deserve praise such as what Dangerous Monkey has heaped my way? But, thank you, it’s really nice. But don’t stop what you’re doing, you’ve turned me on to a bunch of cool sites that I would not have otherwise known about. Plus you’ve turned others onto me. So everything is sweet and lovely. Although I’m pissed that the Blink-182 show was postponed for tonight at the Long Beach Arena. I had floor access tickets and I’ve never seen them play.

And really, finally, why the fuck did Champion break-up? I liked them. Especially when they weren’t covering Sgt. Pepper.

>

the cheap shot
heard around the world


woke up this morning to my mom calling me saying, no lie, “stay away from any FBI buildings.”


here in Hollywood it is very eerie. i work at an entertainment network, not the FBI. there are televisions everwhere in this office. all of them are tuned to different stations. i have one on my desk right next to the computer that i write you and my boss is telling me that im tuned to the wrong station, that I should be on CNN where they are showing an Afghani press conference.

I click onto all my favorite sites to see what the kids are saying, and, unfortunately a lot of them are in school — or being evacuated from school. Fortunately 5ilver has an unbelievable link to her NYC pal who run’s Bertie’s Blog, who has some good photos from the scene.