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Five Reasons To Love The Blogosphere

Among other things, today marks Scribblista's first anniversary. [Ironic that this should be a paper anniversary.]

The fact that we wrote our first post on 9/11 is just a coincidence. This blog's real origins lie in our anger and frustration over the events that unfolded during Hurricane Katrina. The upshot was that we suddenly dialed into a phenomenon that the mainstream media dubbed "citizen journalism."

And then, we plunged head first into the e-mud bath known as the blogosphere. Here are five reasons why we like it here:

1. Breaking news on Suri Cruise
2. Complete coverage of celebrity nip slips
3. Snarkiness triumphs over facts, fairness and all the news that is fit to print 
4. We get our own soapbox from which to tell CNN that their bizarre and self-important decision to replay their news coverage of 9/11 really sucks. [Note to CNN producers: It ain't news if it's a re-run.]
5. Our attention span -- previously about as long as gnat's -- is even shor... Oh, and did we mention that the blogosphere is  our new office.

On Vacation

We'd like to take off for the entire month of August, like all those civilized Europeans. 
However, since we're not all that civilized, we'll just be gone for two weeks. 

We'll be back in September... hopefully with a tan and a hangover.

Ah, Ecstasy

If you're not quite ready for the week yet, you can stall a bit longer with this interactive quiz at Details. Can you tell whether these people are having orgasms or foodgasms?

Starring your favorite Food Network chefs and assorted porn stars. Our only question is: How'd they forget to include Nigella Lawson?

You're No One Till Someone Thinks You're Gay

Just ask anyone who's anyone: Oprah, Jake Gyllenhaal, Marcia Cross, Anderson Cooper (er... well, nevermind), some football player named Michael Strahan, Superman, Spongebob Squarepants, pretty much everyone who's ever been on ET, and of course, Tom Cruise. (er... well, nevermind.)

The New York Times has a fun piece about the fine art of denying the gay rumor and how celebrity publicists finesse the tricky balancing act.

The article did not, however, look into whether publicists start the gay rumor themselves to get that much more buzz for their client. Not that there's anything wrong with it. 

Celebrity Playlists Rock

We spent a good hour the other day procrastinating surfing through the Celebrity Playlists on iTunes. [We'd provide links, but can't onto iTunes]

Part of our fascination with the playlists stemmed from the disconnect between the stars' personnas and their musical tastes. Sometimes, there was none [Jennifer Garner digs Destiny's Child.] But we also found plenty of surprises. Here's what we mean:

Amy Sedaris
We Expected: We lovelovelove her and secretly believe that we should be best friends. Naturally, we thought we'd lovelovelove her playlist just as much.
We Discovered: A dream destroyed... unless we were best friends in elementary school.
Big Shock: Joni Mitchell, fer chrissakes!
We Both Love Know: Windy, by The Association. It was her favorite song as a kid. I vaugely remember it. 

Russell Crowe
We Expected: Something like '70s classic rock... Hendrix, the Stones, etc.
We Discovered: He's a cupcake! A hunky, tough guy cupcake who'd beat someone silly just for us. Our long-dead crush is so rekindled.   
Big Shock: Closer to Fine, by The Indigo Girls
We Both Love: Wuthering Heights, by Kate Bush; Constant Craving by k.d. lang.

Wikiality Doesn't Bite

Reality is harsh. Wikiality is easy. 

Wikiality is what exists if you make something up, add it to Wikipedia and a bunch of people decide that it's true. [Bloggers should be ridiculously wealthy, don't you agree?]

Anyhoo, Stephen Colbert coined the term last night on The Colbert Report, just before he decided to reorder the natural order of things by super-imposing wikiality over reality.

He asked viewers to pop online, find wiki articles about elephants and add a fact that he'd invented: The world's elephant population has tripled in six months. Naturally, lots of folks went onto Wikipedia and edited the online encyclopedia to say that the world's elephant population had tripled. The video clip is up on YouTube.

We haven't verified this with the National Geographic yet, but we're pretty sure that the world's elephant population did, briefly and spontaneously, triple for about 20 minutes last night.

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert has been blocked from Wikipedia. [And the Wiki-king wants a free ticket to New York so he can appear on the show.]

We Still Like You, Jews

And in our continuing coverage of how everyone else covers and/or mocks Mel Gibson comes the following:

1) Comedy Central took out this hilarious full-page ad in Variety yesterday. No joke.

2) Some bloggers got together to conduct a controlled scientific experiment: How many drinks does it take to turn them into bigots. We believe they're still drinking.

And while you're here, please take our survey:

Who's had the most awesome crash-and-burn career disaster? 

* Mel
* Tom Cruise
* James Frey (the writer who got ripped into a million little pieces on Oprah a few months back)

The Gray Lady Tries Hard To Stay Gray

Not only is the New York Times [aka The Gray Lady] the nation's paper of record, it's also one of our favorite targets topics.

So, we're pretty amused that the Gray Lady has opted not to cover the Mel Gibson incident for the scandal that it is. Instead, they ran with a long, heady think-piece about the anatomy of a scandal. It also just happens to contain lots of juicy rumors about the drunken Nazi movie actor.

The real story here, they insist, is this: Scandals spread really, really fast these days. Especially because of this new gee-whiz thing called the Internet.

C'mon, Gray Lady, just admit: You're addicted to People.com's RSS feed, aren't you?

We Love Ourselves

Yes, yes, we know that you think the only reason that we're back is because Mel Gibson got busted for being a drunk, anti-semite and all-purpose boob. 

But in fact, we're back just because we love ourselves and we missed ourselves. We've been busy in our new gig as a professional blogger [try saying that with a straight face] over at Lime.com. [Pop over & check it out.]

Anyhoo, speaking of loving oneself: Marie Claire -- one of those formerly decent chick-mags that's turned to drivel -- just got burned by Ashlee Simpson. She's that pop tart who's most famous [apart from being the sister of someone a lot more famous] for her lip-synching scandal on Saturday Night Live.

Seems that after spewing out a bunch of gibberish about how much she loves herself in Marie Claire, she went off and got a nose job.

This apparently outraged the editors so much that they decided to adopt a no-fluff policy.   

So, instead of fluff, the new editor graced their September cover with Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is perhaps most interesting for her naughty turn in Secretary or being close to her brother Jake or the fact that she's about to get hitched and have a kid with the ever-swoon-worthy Peter Sarsgaard. Oh yeah, and she starred in that little cult sensation called Donnie Darko. You decide.

Meanwhile, thank you for coming to your senses, Marie Claire. Thank you for giving your magazine this desperately-needed Before and After-style makeover.

We don't know if the magazine is actually any good yet. But we are truly glad you now see that no smart chick would ever be even remotely interested in Ashlee Simpson.   

Zoom Clouds

As we were cruising around M-Pyre [or was it M-Pyrical?] earlier today, we noticed a nifty-looking box of words in the margin. Turns out it's a Zoom Cloud and we started chasing it until we learned that a zoom cloud builds  a "tag cloud" or graphic representation of notable words that appear on any given blog.

As it turns out, the three most notable words on Scribblista lately are "corn," "beever" and "pencil." Yep, that pretty much sums us up.

Scroll down to check out our Zoom Cloud, which we hope will be as ever-changing as the real thing.

iPotty

At first blush, this iPod dock/TP holder struck us as a bit ... hmm, how should we put this? .... silly.

But then we remembered that, historically, people have been too quick to pooh-pooh genius when it involves bathroom paraphernalia.

For instance, a lot of narrow-minded, bourgeois folks once scoffed when artist Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and called it art.

Yet, almost a century later, Fountain has been hailed as the most important work of modern art, beating out Picasso and Warhol, according to some 500 artists, curators and other assorted twits experts.

So, even though whoever invented this little masterpiece claims that it's merely a clever gadget and not a visionary piece of art, we refuse to believe it. We also refuse to go on the record and call it ridiculous.

In fact, we'd like to be the first to say that we believe it's worthy of a permanent place at the Smithsonian. At the very least, it's destined to become a collector's item.

Reason #284 To Wish We Had Graphic Design Skills

Slate recently commissioned pulp covers for classic books and honestly, we can imagine no better tribute to the great works of literature. You may think we're kidding or being smart alecky, but we're not. The idea totally appeals to our respect for things both high and low.

In fact, we're so charmed by the idea that if we were graphic designers, we'd be hard at work right now, crafting pulp covers for our favorite books. 

Imagine all the bodice-ripping, scandal-insinuating possibilties for titles that sound juicy [The Lover, The House of Mirth, Portrait of a Lady] or abstract [One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Speak Memory] or just plain dull [Housekeeping, In the Lake of the Woods.]

But Is It Art?

Is it just us, or does it strike anyone else that it's totally weird that the military flaks opted to put this photograph in a frame?

Or perhaps while we've been busy grousing about the war, bombing became an art form.

And We're Back.....

We apologize for our slacking of late, but we recently gave up a gig as a highly-paid bullshit artiste communicatrix and our time management skills are shot have been put to the test as we down-shift back into the life of a freelance writer.   

We realize that this development should mean that we have ample time to devote to the care and feeding of our blog. But to our complete surprise, the freelance life has proved to be both busy and demanding.

One new gig that we're happy to brag about is Lime.com, a exceptionally cool site devoted to the care and feeding of oneself. [We hear that is important, too]

Amazingly enough, this mind-body-spirit-focused site lets us write for them even though our exceptionally cool editor is well-aware of our penchant for dirty martinis, processed foods and our stubborn hope that an unexamined life is totally worth living.

On a personal note to Rupert: If you're reading this [and we know you are], you already know that we love you. So if you want to pay us slave wages the big bucks to write for you again, you just let us know.   

 

Beever Art

[As personal dominatrix physician to Scribblista, I have prescribed her a couple days bedrest for a recent carpal tunnel flare-up. Now that she is tied to the bed indisposed, I am making a one-time guest appearance.
--- Enjoy! Dr. Oll]

If seeing is believing, then Julian Beever—famous English artist—has just added you to his list of republicans fools. Using pavement as canvas, Beever bends two-dimensional chalk drawings into startling 3-D objects. This sidewalk performer is not working for nickels either; he counts Coca-Cola, Sony, and Rembrandt art supplies among his patrons.

[Ed. note: We here at Scribblista would like to  thank Dr. Oll for the guest post. If she ever gives up her day job involving whips and chains treating sick people, she is welcome to join our staff, although blogging does pay a bit less than medicine.]