Three comedians write about things they hate. Targets include Ferris wheels, "White People who try to enlighten Black people about the Black experience," Diet Dr. Pepper, hipsters, and (excerpted below) Mythbusters. Not Hating Just Saying is the antidote to "Stuff White People Like" spinoffs, and it's my favorite blog today.
"The Gawker is the modern day version of Playgirl, a 'straight' publication gay men feel good about buying because they're tired of low quality faggy stuff the pink media puts out." That's former gay porn star and current conservative blogger Matt Sanchez's take, and no facts will get in the way of his analysis! We asked Sanchez, who believes all contributors to Gawker are homosexual, to comment on today's post about all the gays working at the New York Times. And the former Freshmen magazine cover model blows the doors off liberal media lies such as "the Gawker's stance that it is a non-gay website"!
We didn't want to just let conservative blogger and gay porn veteran Matt Sanchez's unprovoked gay-cusations against all of Gawkerdom sit out in the blogosphere with no explanation. So we emailed him to get some clarity on his position. His first response to us: "The gawking subtleties of propaganda. The beleaguered gay activist is so sensitive and marginalized, that the only way to feel normal is to call everyone else defective. Can there be any wonder why a social subset with a life expectancy 20 years less than the majority of Americans is so bitterly suicidal?" Ha, WHAT? We didn't give up on understanding his subtle philosophy, though; we pressed him for the basis of his gay obsession. And he sent us not only a new picture of himself (pictured!) but these deeper thoughts on "gay jihadis" like YOU:
A certain right-wing blogger has a question for us, via email: "Are all of the contributors to Gawker homosexuals, because there's a level of superciliousness that must be directly tied to sexual frustration and the inability to bond with other human beings." Whoa! We'll have him know that Gawker employs a veritable handful of heterosexuals. This guy was ostensibly upset that our coverage of Absolut's pro-Mexico ad (which the company has now apologized for) was not quite xenophobic enough. But what led this Republican internet soldier to target us in our vulnerable gay spot? It's probably his own past as a gay porn star—that does have a tendency to color one's perceptions.
"Nat Idle, a medical student turned journalist, sits in a San Francisco cafe when a woman puts a folded note on his table. Nat picks up the note, walks to the door to follow her, opens the note and reads: Get out of the Cafe, NOW! The cafe explodes." So begins Hooked by the Timesman who warns blogging can kill. [Matt Richtel]
Political pundit and NYT "On Language" columnist William Safire is blogging for Oxford University Press, and he's also wondering who the "original blogger" was. Who committed the original sin? "Hundreds of weblog pioneers will compete for that title, and it will be interesting to see who they will consense upon." Whoa. He used the word "consense" in a blog! Other than that victory, Safire's inaugural post is just as circular and confusing as "On Language."
Sex writing is, at this point in the zeitgeist, the ghetto of journalistic topics. "Who am I?" begins the anonymous lady behind "Sex and the Street," the new Princeton sex column. "I'm just an ordinary girl with an extraordinary preoccupation with sex." Not so extraordinary to be preoccupied with sex: our biological drive to mate and procreate is very strong. To build your notoriety as a dude writer, it's important to have big ideas, or at least think you have them. For postmodern girls, however, it seems the fastest shortcut to getting attention is writing about sex or relationships, faux-frankly.
A blogger put together a visual cloud of tags that pop up most frequently on AngryJournalist.com, the rant-laden site that is the most accurate current summation of the journalism industry. The visual illustration makes it very clear what reporters hate the most: fucking work! Click to enlarge. [Eric Ulken]
Be forwarned, youngsters: the magazine industry has no room for you any more. Also, it can't find you! You're all out there working on the blogs and not learning how to do real journalism. Which makes you suck! "These people don't leave their fucking laptops," says elderly writer Gay Talese. "It used to be, you would go outside." My, how things change for the Gay. The Observer's attempt to capture the magazine freelancing zeitgeist in article form is written by former Gawker blogger Doree Shafrir, a fact which does not seem to register with the irony-proof older generation quoted therein. So the aspirational young magazine crowd either succeeds quickly or withers away into bitterness at the closed doors of the industry, while old veterans of top-tier magazines grow increasingly out of touch and bemoan every little change since their golden days. Isn't this how things have always been?
Here in America, we take a lot of freedoms for granted. Sure, it's fun to get on the internet and talk freely, expressing our opinion about everything under the sun—whether the political issue of the day, or just popular music and culture. But we have to remember that those freedoms come with a price. Our brave troops overseas are putting their lives on the line in the War on Terror so that we can sit around chatting and making jokes. That said, the US Military understands the value of the internet—and blogs—as a communications medium. So when the US Special Operations Command comes out with a study [WIRED] that expresses interest in starting military blogs, co-opting existing bloggers, and hacking the sites of enemy bloggers whose message could be detrimental to US interests, should we really be so quick to dismiss it?
Lauren Goldstein Crowe, the Portfolio fashion blogger, posted her last post today. She continued the grand tradition of bloggers on their way out: the big fuck-you last post. Noted was Moe from Jezebel and other alleged meanies of the internet, who she had been advised to ignore. But she couldn't help herself!
It takes a brave man to get in the middle of TechCrunch's bloggin' VC Michael Arrington and PaidContent founding editor Rafat Ali as they duke it out over the future of their micromedia empires. Timesman Saul Hansell is nothing but brave. In a Bits blog post, he quotes Rafat Ali's new hired hand Nathan Richardson saying that PaidContent differentiates itself from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and our own Valleywag because it "has not gone down the road of following personal foibles." Then, towards the end of the piece, Ali himself suggeests that Arrington is thinking too small by gunning for CNET:
You'd think when a big famous band starts blogging, they'd be flooded with comments from slobbering fans. But The Roots, the live instrument-having hip hop supergroup that just about everybody likes, don't appear to have more than a handful of readers. Seriously, they barely have more comments than Ronn [sic] Torossian's blog. Meanwhile, Courtney Love's latest entry on Myspace has 32 comments already. Now The Roots are sending out blast emails in search of support! Will the internet respond to their outstretched hands? You ungrateful bastards. [Okayplayer]
Alex "Blue States Lose" Blagg is a pretty prototypical New York blogger, except for the fact that he used to wrestle in high school. That bit of athletic glory in his past somehow inspired him to arrange an actual, physical wrestling match with Quentin "Rampage" Jackson, the current Ultimate Fighting Championship champion and honest-to-god badass of the first order [Best Week Ever]. We won't give away who won this battle of equals! The full video is after the jump. Keep in mind that Rampage's favorite technique is called the "Power Bomb":
There was a ton of debate about the death of Paul Tilley, the ad agency exec who committed suicide last month. Some people charged mean bloggers with helping to push him over the edge—charges that seemed increasingly ridiculous, as people took time to consider the full situation. But Liberty Mutual, the huge insurance company, had another thought about Tilley's death: what a great way to promote our company! And that's exactly what they did, the sickos.
"What's Lewis Black mad about now?" Larry King asks the Daily Show frequenter and comedian-author-actor, and the answer is: blogs! "I will not blog... I hate the word 'blog,' it sounds like a condition." It is a condition, Lewis, and that condition is called "carpal tunnel syndrome." Black is in the Lee Siegel school of internets-hating, in that it lets total amateurs from Podunk Oklahoma dictate public opinion. The video follows.
PR firms are mighty enthusiastic to have relations with bloggers. Close, close relations. APCO Worldwide—a scarily connected lobbying and PR superfirm with all types of ex-politicos on its payroll (including former White House flack Scottie McClellan!)—just released a survey on "The State Of Blog Relations," that asked both bloggers and PR people about their ideas on how they can make nice with each other [via PRWeek, where I used to work]. So the flacks all came off like devious bastards, right? Well, some, but the bloggers also came off like money-grubbing sellouts!
Rupert Murdoch's investment in hard news at the Wall Street Journal is paying off—the paper recently covered the fact that that three Spaniards are the unlikely team behind HoopsHype.com! (Embarrassing silence.) Okay, explanation: Hoops Hype is the most closely read website of rumors and news among NBA insiders, and the fact that it's written by some random guys in Spain who had never even been to an NBA game until recently is indicative of the power of the internet to open the media's frontiers. The guys sold it for millions! Remember James Kurisunkal, the college kid from Illinois who turned out to be the writer behind Park Avenue Peerage, the socialite website that had New York society all atwitter last year? Yep, he was indicative of the same trend. This is probably all part of that Long Tail we've been hearing so much about. But Hoops Hype does have one advantage that Park Avenue Peerage never did: a blog by former Charlotte Bobcat Gabe Muoneke, in which he opines on religion and linguistics. Witness the power of the web at work:
