scribblista

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.

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.

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.

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.   

 

Days of Reckoning

Tut tut.

Studio heads really should know better.
First, they let Tom Hanks walk around with that hair. Then they overhype the Da Vinci Code to such a degree that surely no one on the planet is excited about this movie anymore. And --  being that we're largely oblivious to things Judeo-Christian --  that whole *controversy* they've generated & milked had to contend with seems kind of ho-hum.

However, it did lead us to spend some quality time poking around Apple's Movie Previews, because we suddenly feared that there'd be nothing worth seeing in the coming months.

In terms of the summer's most anticipated duds movies, the only flicks that catch our eye are Johnny Depp in that pirate movie and The Omen, mostly because of our longstanding crush on Liev Schreiber and their fun marketing campaign.

But this is the movie we really can't wait to see.

Don't Hold Your Breath

And what are we to make of David Blaine?

We actually had no idea that this bozo was up to another one of his televised gimmicks until we read about his failure to hold his breath for five minutes or something.

But we quickly made up for our ignorance. Not because we're interested in his stunt or the multiple maladies that resulted from his stunt. We read a bunch of articles & posts because we were fascinated by how different publications -- respectable and otherwise -- chose to describe Blaine.

Check it out:

• The New York Times called him a modern day Houdini.
• The AP called him an illusionist.
• The NY Post called him the water bubble-boy. [Gotta love that.]
  
• E! called him an endurance artist. [Try saying that with a straight face.]
  
• The normally scathing Gawker & Defamer called him a magician. [Ouch! Actually, if one reads further down, Defamer regains some snark mojo and dubs him a "sopping wet attention whore."]

In the end, we believe there's one simple word that captures all that is David Blaine: He is a boob.

Five Lame Excuses

We apologize for the infrequent posts for late. We could take the high road, ignore the issue and/or actually come up with five reasonable excuses for this breach.

Instead, we'll present you with five lame excuses:

1. The dog ate our computer. [In fact, he does have an annoying habit of licking our computer a lot. And we have seen him eyeing the corner like it's a potential chew toy.]

2. It's really nice outside. [This implies that we actually go outside.]

3. There's a lot of turbulence in our off-line lives [More incentive to stay online?]

4. New York Times crossword puzzles. Babble. WEBoggle. [At last, the truth comes out.]

5. What good is the web, if the mainstream media can now openly bash Tom Cruise? [OK, seeing as we actually have very little interest in Tom Cruise, it probably is time to shut up and re-enter the blogosphere.]

Four Things in 505

Sometime back, we noticed Four Things on Kottke, thought it was kinda cool and flagged it. While cleaning out our "Flagged" folder the other day, we rediscovered this meme game that's something like blog tag, and thought we'd revive it on a local scale.

We've tagged bloggers -- some we know, some we don't -- who regularly leave us comments. And, if you don't have a blog, but want to play, we invite you to cut, paste and respond in the comments section.

Four jobs I've had:
1. TA for a Hitchcock film class
2. Saleschick at The Limited 
3. Staff writer at the New York Post
4. Girl Scout cookie seller

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Lost in Translation
2. Clueless
3. Garden State
4. Pretty much anything, being the movie slut that I am.

Four places I've lived:
1. Brooklyn
2. New Delhi [too young to remember much]
3. Claremont, CA [too stoned to remember much... jk]
4. Paris [too blissed out on cute boys, cheap red wine and Nutella sandwiches to remember much]

Four TV shows I love:
1. Twin Peaks
2. Dog Whisperer
3. Top Chef
4. It changes constantly

Four concerts I'm glad I went to:  [I made this category up]
1. Neko Case/Calexico
2. Pretenders
3. Pete Yorn
4. A couple Dead shows with my buddy Steve

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Cabo San Lucas
2. Vernal, UT
3. Chincoteague Island, VA
4. Disneyworld

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Blue corn enchiladas at the Shed (put under the burner twice)
2. Pepperoni pizza
3. Spicy tuna roll
4. My mom's aloo parathas  with chat masala

Four sites I visit daily:
1. google.com
2. nytimes.com
3. playbabble.com
4. pagesix.com

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Central Park, Manhattan
2. On a bike somewhere in Maine
3. A market in Barcelona
4. Afterwords Cafe, DC

Four bloggers I am tagging:
1. Scot from Burque Babbler  
2. Met from Metrospective
3. Maggie from M-Pyre Girls
4. Greg from FiveZeroFive

Yet Another Reason To Fear Corn

We're afraid of corn.

We've said it for years, and blissfully ignorant souls who have failed to grasp the dangers of corn just laugh or give us a quizzical look or confess their own silly fears [heights, spiders, planes, etc.]   

But every now and then, we run into a fellow cornophobe, who gets it. They know, for instance, that cornfields are a hazard, what with all the snakes, claustrobia-inducing stalks and crop dust residue. They're aware of the high probability that an axe-wielding psycho is laying in wait just around the next stalk, and, for those of us who grew up on the Little House on the Prarie series, of the perpetual and catastrophic threat of grasshoppers. 

Recently, our fears have been validated. The New York Times has proclaimed that corn is "an agent of evil." [This is a direct, somewhat-in-context quote.] It's all part of the new wave of anti-corn hoo-hah now that the chattering classes have finally recognized the evil lurking in our heartland, thanks to a new buzzbook, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Why the uproar? Among other things, corn is responsible for the existence of Chicken McNuggets and Twinkies. We'll try not to say we told you so.