earlier this week i partied with some LA bloggers

at a swanky club near the times

the edison is so popular on weekend nights that they wont let you in if you dont have a collar on your shirt or if you have jeans (if youre a dude), or if your not super hot (if youre a babe). ok that last part might not be 100% true but it sure seems like it.

on tuesdays they do this little back room action. its a throw back to the prohibition times, which is sorta the theme of the edison anyways as the hostesses wear sassy flapper outfits and the gents dress as gangsters. 20s gangsters. on tuesdays they dress like that too, they just shut down most of the spacious club and present entertainers and serve a limited choice of hand made $14 fancy drinks.

cant say i was impressed with the fancy drinks but i appreciated that the host stoked us with some food since there were so many of us and we were, after all, bloggers. thus royalty, duh.

being from uc isla vista i can pretty much drink anything, and i gotta say the mini hamburgers were probably the best mini hamburgers ive ever eaten, so thanks bro. meanwhile the belly dancer, the blue angel-ish chantruse dominatrix singerwas really funny, and the magician sorta freaked me out with how great he was with his close up illusions.

i got to hang with joz joz joz, jeff from thrillist, rachel from kcrw, moye from the wb, and many others including caroline on crack who put it all together who i should thank cuz it was super fun.

but i wont.

instead i will steal her picture without giving her credit.

but i will link to her gallery from that magical night.

photo of some bald dude, a magician ruth, and rachel of kcrw at the edison by caroline on crack

sarah palin on katie couric

as wonkette says, the first exchange and the last exchanges are the best, but somewhere in the middle you get the idea that maybe this is why we havent seen too much of the hockey mom meeting the press.

if sarah barracuda is right and america could be heading to a great depression, i wonder if that means that canada and mexico would also experience a ripple effect. if not i wonder if anyone would notice if i started a chain of soul food restaurants in the great white north and in baja while waiting for this gray cloud to move away from the home of the brave?

related: the 700 billion number was made up?

i drive home late at night and wonder

why these women make out with me. the roads are quiet and dark and peaceful at this hour. my head throbs from over-stimulation. i still listen to the music of my youth and the fact that it sounds so much different than todays sounds makes me feel so old.

age is a good thing sometimes. like after a while you learn how to avoid arguements, you learn how to do certain things, you learn how to see warning signs. you learn when to drive home.

its a bad thing sometimes because you get sleepy faster, you daydream about the oddest things, you have a hard time with patience.

when i was younger, i remember this one time i was kissing a girl in the park. we had been drinking, but not too much. but enough. it was sunny out still so maybe we had been playing sloshball. we rolled down this hill making out. only the second time we had ever hooked up. we knew we werent in love. we knew it was just a drunken hookup. but still when i kissed her that day she caused me to see visions when i closed my eyes.

i saw a museum i had never been to. i saw baseballs hall of fame in cooperstown new york. i saw babe ruths bat and ty cobbs old glove. i saw a ball hit by hank aaron.

we reached the bottom of the hill and i opened my eyes and she was still kissing me. so pretty. way prettier than she shoulda been. same age as me but older soul, wiser, girls can be like that sometimes. and when i closed my eyes again there i was back in cooperstown looking at old bases and the first world series rings. all these things.

tonight i kissed a girl who wasnt even walking the day i saw cooperstown. and she too had my mind racing into places that i never could have imagined. i thought about how black sparrow press should create a complete collection of bukowski books. i thought that they should have two sets, one which would be the complete set of everything that would cost a ton. and another set that would be half the size, a hand selected, curated set, that would cost half a ton. the half collection would be all the classics – ham on rye, post office, women, etc.

she got on top and i thought they should ship the books in boxes that look like cases of beer. then i got on top and thought they should start making beer called bukowski and stop changing the covers of those great books and give his estate the proceeds from the beer and leave the great works alone.

i wondered what this young woman, girl really, wanted with me. she was already rich. she was already smart. she already had lots of friends on facebook. it wasnt like our conversations were all that amazing. it was like she just wanted someone to listen to music with. nakedly. and have something to do with her hands.

driving home i didnt want to stop. i didnt want to get home. it was the same feeling i had in high school in the morning. i didnt want the bus to get to the school. i wanted it to hit an ice slick and crash into a fire hydrant, burst in flames and get put out by the hydrant water and freeze all in seconds as we kids watched in safety. an odd feeling because i liked school. and i like my home.

but i just wanted to enjoy the ride, and i didnt want it to end.

we had the best music in that school bus.

and now that music plays in my car.

david letterman gets stood up by john mccain

hilarity ensues

this is from tonight’s episode of the Late Show. apparently mccain called Dave and said he couldnt make the show because he had to rush to the airport, fly to washington, and save the economy.

but then dave found out that mccain wanted to go on katie couric’s cbs evening news.

rarely do events like this fall into place *before* the show in question actually airs, so i cant wait to see this in its entirety on a real tv. in the meantime, thank you you tubes.

im very happy to announce two new blogs to the LA Times family

A new Arts blog called Culture Monster which will cover all of the fine arts: Theatre, classical music, architecture, opera

And a new sports blog called The Fabulous Forum which will cover all sports from boxing to horse racing to the NFL and even the American League.

We now have 45 blogs in our stable of rock. And we have a few more we’re working on which will launch before the end of the year so stay tuned.

if i ever left LA, id have a short list of cities id live in

umqua oregon is on that short list. its beautiful, it’s cheap, a man can have land. i like that. i believe this guy would be one of my congressional reps. i also like that

and im glad that congress is saying wtf to the bailout. dont get me wrong, i wish i could find myself in the position where i could say, US government you should let me have 700 billion to do what i think is the right thing. but i also like our reps saying wait a second tonto. lets ALL think about all of this for a hot minute.

i can has homepage

lol

i swear i had nothing to do with this

not even in the slightest.

but i am laughing my cheezburger off

somewhat because the predictable haters will have a little ammo to pretend that omg this is the end of the worldz

but mostly because its proof that the show must go on in regards to telling our readers whats going on in the world, and that little website (the one with the cats who cant spell very well) is a damn phenomenon and its praise is overdue.

technorati yesterday gave its State of the Blogosphere. one of the more interesting things is that technorati discovered that in the last 24 hours about 900,000 blogs posted new content. thats more competition than tv, newspapers, radio, has ever had, combined.

of that new content, the LOL cats are in the technorati top 10 (and have been there for a while) meaning that they can count the blogs that are more popular than them on two paws.

we at the Times are thrilled and still a little stunned that out of 100 million blogs we have one in the technorati top 100, meanwhile those little kitties are still mopping the floor with us no matter how much marketing, no matter how much support, no matter what we cover, no matter how great our writers are.

that frigging kitteh blog is just lulzing its way to teh banks.

good for them.

they found a niche, they hit a sweet spot, and they didnt mess it up. bravo.

ive been more and more impressed by usc lately

not just because they keep inviting me to annenberg to speak

not just because their football team is amazing

and not just because ive always been slightly fascinated by their marching band

but check out this interesting tidbit caught by Adam Rose – former LAist sports editor and current LAT blogger of the All Things Trojan blog – the Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea is a freshman at USC – studying music!

The 45-year-old is listed as an “undergraduate visitor” in USC’s Thornton School of Music. Balzary probably has a leg up on most of his classmates, considering he founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music and, oh, yeah … is a rock icon. While he’s on campus several times per week, don’t expect any dorm sightings — Flea’s a commuter student.

Besides collaborating with legendary artists like Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, and Alanis Morisette, Balzary has appeared in The Big Lebowski, My Own Private Idaho, and one of the Back to the Future movies. His latest “appearance” was at USC’s football practice — he stopped by after class because he heard a commotion. The Trojans were playing simulated crowd noise to mimic their upcoming road trip to Oregon State, and the practice field is adjacent to the music school.

Adam also runs the Times’ UCLA blog, so when Jimmy Page enrolls over there expect to hear it on What’s Bruin first.

roger ebert on Creationism through q and a

but first this old clip where he makes fun of religion

in his sunday column for the chicago sun-times (i wonder if it made it in print) the author of Your Movie Sucks presented questions and answers in regards to Creationsim. here are some examples:

Q. Were there ice ages lasting millions of years?

A. No, but a recent and catastrophic Ice Epoch.

Q. Did the Colorado River carve out the mile-deep Grand Canyon over eons?

A. It was the result of Ice Epochs, the Great Flood and other catastrophes within the last 64 to 100 centuries.

Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?

A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.

Q: What about dinosaurs?

A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.

rarely will i link to the sun-times, as they seem to favor the white sox, but this column is amazing, to say the least.