tell me, who doesnt love morrissey? chris called me this morning telling me she was on her way over to the westside pavillion to see the jullianne moore movie. i told her that the academy would just send it over, and she said she wanted to see it on the big screen.

i said cool, and she asked me to order the quiet american for later and i said ok.

then the phone rang again and it was a very famous fashion model.

famous in certain circles, i guess because whenever we're out drinking and smoking people always ask her her name and when she tells them they go, "ooooooh yeah! thats right!"

of course it's right, tourist.

she confided in me that she hasnt had sex in months. months and months.

i said what about bro?

she said, me and bro dont do it. he doesnt like to wear condoms and youve convinced me that i probably shouldnt have sex without a condom. ever.

and i was all, but i thought you...

she said, we do everything but.

i said, youve been doing everything but for this whole time?

she said yep.

and in some way i thought it was terribly sexy.

she said, i can get on top of him and totally get off fully clothed.

then i told her to shhhhh. i told her she was killing me.

then karisa called to ask me if i was getting coachella tickets.

whos playing coachella?

just the beastie boys, queens of the stoneage, the donnas, n*e*r*d, blur, blue man group, the red hot chili peppers, the white stripes, sonic youth, g love, ben folds, johnny marr, the soundtrack of our lives, and dirty vegas.

and about twenty other bands.

it's two days in the desert on some huge polo fields outside of palm springs. $141.

chris already got two hotel rooms 9 miles away. a bunch of people are going to pack in there.

i told karisa that id pass. im too old for that shit.

she said just drop some acid or something.

i told her acid? im straight edge.

and she laughed.

she fell over from laughing so hard.

34. paul

ev's page is still huge on daypop, but jason shellen has the pictures you've been looking for.

meanwhile, christopher scheer's blog is getting some mighty impressive coverage.

what's also impressive is the constant flow of flow into the busblog car fund. if things continue to go as they are, we'll raise $16k in three and a half years. thats the light at the end of the tunnel. and you know what? i think thats awesome.

and finally, i agree with sarah crabtree who says that heather is a better writer than me. heather gets the quote of the week with this one that she says of her own Rabbit blog:

"I write stupid shit and post it, end of story."

# | |

this week was very tough on me and i was quite self-absorbed.

so much so i didnt mention that there will be another Blogger panel discussion here in Hollywood. this one is tonight! Saturday night.

the american cinema foundation seems to be hosting this shin-dig. it's free, it's hosted by LA's own Cathy Seipp and stars America's newest newspapermen, Ken Layne and Matt Welch, UCLA law professor and incredible pizza maker Eugene Volokh, Mickey Kaus who gets paid to blog, Luke Ford who swears he isnt interested in porn any more, my bro from Forbes RiShawn Biddle, Heather Havrilesky who hopefully will put a cam on her page, and the sexiest import from france since the Emmanuelle series of fine films Emmanuelle Richard.

very little can convince me to leave my house on a saturday night, but this might.

oh look it's free.

and theres drinking afterwards.

if i can score a hot date perhaps i will make it after all.

annessa

# | |

democracy means you

# | |

one of the reasons i was a little bummed out yesterday was because the marines didn't like my haircut. which is ironic because now my hair is shorter than theirs.

the marines aren't really the bosses of the xbi, but they have a lot of influence because somehow they are considered the voice of reason in our opera of castaways.

my argument has always been that if the marines knew what they were talking about they'd be fbi not xbi, but since i didn't come from the ranks of the military, or the cops, and because i was a college boy, and a poetry major at that, pretty much nobody listens to me in these matters.

so when they saw me stroll in with a shaved head, they began their whispering and i was invited into the glass meeting room in the center of the building.

nice hairdo, agent.

why, thank you.

any special reason for the change?

nope.

what inspired all of this?

nothing, really.

nothing?

well ive been thinking about dying it red for the longest time but i figured just shaving it would be way easier.

red, huh?

yeah, but i figured it would be hard to be undercover with bright red hair.

none of these answers sat well with them. so you know what they did? they grounded me.

which meant they grounded Chopper One.

funny thing about the top secret underground movements of the xbi, nothing is so very secret. later last night there was an old fashioned car chase.

where do you think this guy ran around in?

hollywood?

home of Chopper One?

they don't call it organized crime for nothing. but here's how they do things with the local cops. they get one guy, typically an illegal who is due to go back to whatever country he's from. they put him in a car and let him get chased by the cops. then they get a bunch of cops and helicopters to follow him.

then they do some gnarly ass shit on the other side of town.

car chase in hollywood, some nasty shit is probably going down in long beach. but normally you don't see car chases in hollywood because chopper one would pounce on the illegal, smash his car and then jet over to the LBC before the networks even get their birds in the air.

i was bummed out yesterday because there was a major disturbance in the balance of power, all due to my stupid hair cut.

needless to say this morning we were given some information about goings on in riverside last night at the exact same time as the car chase in west hollywood.

so guess who's back from being grounded?

33. gunge

the subastral lilipad

# | |

ken + matt + dick =



if the new york times was better

and weekly

and surrounded by palm trees

los angeles examiner

# | |

thank you, sweet people. of all the things that i love about the internet, the number one thing that i love is you.

pedro started his day at the gas station like he always did, with a quick trip to the repair bay in the back where they kept the mop and the bucket and the soap and the bong.

got everything together and cleaned the mens room and then the womans room.

then he put the mop and bucket back and flipped over the signs to read Full Serve, asked the white girl in the booth if the gas prices are right and she told them that she changed them at 5.

it was six a.m.

he filled up his water bottle with pink windshield wiper fluid, unfolded his clean blue long handtowel and tucked it into his backpocket, leaned up against a gas pump and tried to watch the sun come up but was disturbed by the bell of the day's first motorist.

pedro worked with 7 other guys. it was an all full-serve gas station in beverly hills.

the power window zoomed down and a man who looked strangely familiar to charles bronson hissed, "super," and handed over an american express platinum card.

black chevy tahoe. up high. no bumper stickers. no valet stubs. no jack in the box antenna ball.

pedro unscrewed the gas cap, put the hose into the side of the truck, remembered to click Super Unleaded, clicked the trigger into the lock, stepped over the hose and walked the card up to the cashier window and slid it into the slot.

the white girl saw the name on the credit card and flinched and then strained out at the tahoe at pump four.

pedro returned to the car. he walked happily because he is so fucking positive about everything it would make you puke.

he removed the squeegee from the bin. one of the fellas had just completed his morning chore of cleaning the bins, filling them with hot soapy water and hanging them back on the islands.

just as he was about to throw the sponge edge on to the windshield he heard and then saw the driver's side window zoom down, noticed the motion of the hand slitting the throat, as a director would if he was yelling "cut," and pedro froze in mid motion.

unfortunately, the momentum of the squeegee produced a wad of hot soapy water which was flung directly on the center of the newly-detailed windshield.

the wipers began, two straight squirts of blue wiperfluid shot perfectly from under the hood onto the glass, went left to right once, twice and then back under. that quick. no streaks and then the water evaporated.

the driver's window zoomed back up.

pedro returned the squeegee to the bin. checked out the truck from afar, returned to the driver's window and pointed at the hood.

he heard it click. unlocked.

reached under, lifted it up and saw absolute perfection.

lots of computerized boxes and wires and steel and hard plastic, and all so clean.

a little man appeared out of radiator overflow reservoir and tipped his top hat at pedro. the little man was about six inches tall.

"just top off the wiper fluid," the man said, bowed, and hopped back into the empty plastic tank.

pedro topped it off, finished up with charles bronson, and returned to the cashier booth with the signed credit card receipt.

the white girl chewing gum in the bullet proof glass booth took the receipt from pedro and smiled at him.

so he squirted a little window cleaner right above her voice box slit and returned his bottle to it's holster, otherwise known as his back pocket.

manny wiped it off a minute later.

buffoonery

# | |

hi, my name is xavier, and i can get emotional.

men have a hard time with emotions. for the most part we're not suppose to show them. it's ok until we have to be tough guys, and then it's either bottle it up more or let it out in a horrible howl.

im lucky, i have a job where i can just yell and yell and yell. and the more times that i do it the more the people love me and the more the kids respond. this wouldn't work in a place like, say, the nba, where the people i would be yelling at are all millionaires and half of them have their names on the sides of their sneakers, but in college athletics, where i presently am employed, i can get away with it. like i said, im lucky.

i didn't always used to be like this.

i used to be a mellow dude. i used to just kick back and let life happen and then i found out that for the most part life likes to eat up the mellow people for lunch and the assholes are the great white sharks that roam this dirty hole.

my first wife didn't really appreciate this change and left me pretty early into our deal.

it was too bad too because we had such an incredible sex life you wouldn't even believe it. not only was she the prettiest girl in town but in the sack she was an animal, and at times deeply loving. for a while she was even my best friend. but something happened one day and i snapped and let her have it, verbally, and the next day i promised that i would never say those sorts of things to her again. and a month later something happened again and i wrote her the nastiest note i ever wrote anyone.

as i got older things only got worse.

im a man of dozens of successes and very little regrets and if there was one regret that i still have to this day it's saying all the nasty things that i said to her on those two occasions because even though im happily married right now, to be honest with you, i blew it with the best girl on earth and it gnaws at me every day.

but im lucky. i can take it out on the officials and my players and the press and the necks of power forwards, and of course chairs.

but some scars never heal.

and some people never get any better.

just older and grayer.

and some, like me, just get meaner.

now normally i don't answer these sorts of questions, but tony asked me today to list my three favorite movies of the year 2002. i don't know what it is about that knucklehead, but i like him. not in a gay way. i don't know, i just smile whenever i see him or get a phone call from him. so what the heck.

1. Rabbit Proof Fence
2. 25th Hour
3. Gangs of New York

oliver willis, valley girl

# | |

hi

today would be a great day to say something nice to me.
thank you.

# | |

hi happy mr. lobster man.

hi, tony. im not a lobster, im a crayfish, and im a self-reproducing female.

please just send me back to hell.

i have a bone to pick with you, mister.

skip it. just shoot me in the head. right now.

what do you do for a living, really.

im a butler.

come on, really.

im a sous chef.

here i am a self reproducing crayfish, a talking one at that, and youre going to sit there and bullshit me?

im telling you, i make some badass sous.

what you arent is a writer. and i want to know why.

probably because if i actually wrote for a living, i probably wouldnt be talking to a fucking crayfish on my blog at ten thirty at night.

im a non-fucking crayfish.

you're annoying.

you are what you eat, i suppose.

what do you eat, anyway?

shit.

what are you talking about?

im a bottom dweller, holmes. a janitor of the sea floor.

ok, gross.

exactly, now if i had anything other than shit-plucking claws, dont you think i would do something other than what i have been doomed to do each day?

like had what?

like had HANDS, asshole. if i had hands, i wouldn't eat fish turds each day. i would eat sandwiches. tostadas!

you'd probably need a bigger mouth though, too.

go ahead and rub it in, why dont you?

sorry, crayfish.

my point is, you have hands, not claws.

yeaaaah....?

so dont eat shit for a living.

instapundit

# | |

pretty girl sent me a picture of herself naked last night. these things didnt happen to me before i began blogging. let me think, did it? no, it definately didnt.

and shes young, america, youn-ung.

probably too young.

funny thing is, so much that we boys do in life is so that beautiful young girls will pay attention to us and want us to see them naked. it's why i took saxophone lessons in grade school, and why i dress so damn fly.

still, theres something inside me that says for me not to go for it.

i think deep down im a scientist stuck in the body of a slacker.

i am very interested in so many things and i like to see how they work. once i was tangled up with a pretty girl and all i wanted to do was trace the outline of her leg with my finger. it was the closest i felt comfortable getting to her. some girls i just want to kiss. some i just want to look at from across the room.

young girls couldnt possibly understand this behavoir.

hell, i barely understand it.

plus the idea of human guinea pigs isnt a very popular one, but it's not like i mean any harm by it.

to me everything is an experiment. everything is fiddling with something to see how it reacts, see how it works, see how i work. timothy leary said he didnt do drugs to see what drugs did, he did them to see what his brain was about. lots of times either im trying to figure out what my heart is about, or my brain, or other people's hearts.

you can learn alot about people by kissing them or by trying to sell them something.

try it.

im sure quite a few of the women that ive been involved with were experimenting, in one way or another with me, and when they were done with me, they dumped me like a heavy bag of laundry. my feelings were a little bruised at first, but when i got my senses together i realized that i just got to spend two amazing nights with a firey redhead direct from dublin. why on earth would i consider that a bad thing?

it does become a bad thing when feelings get involved and the catch 22 of kissing is that feelings are bound to get worked up, which they should.

which is why i just sit at home most days working on my web page, alone, on the other end of an aol chat window where some of the hottest women in north america say some of the sweetest things and show me all the things i could have if i merely hopped in my flying car and zoomed away.

last night i worked on indexing a bunch more photo essays.

nobody got hurt.

in other news, this chick just writes whenever the hell she damn well pleases, doesnt she?

# | |

people have been pretty nice about the bald head. little did i know it would give me so much material for witty comebacks.

why did you cut off your hair?

1. bored
2. got in a fight with a skinhead.
3. to protest the war.
4. cuz i was sick of girls lusting me for my 'fro.
5. i wanted to look more mexican
6. cuz i hate the attention that my afro gave me.
7. why should cancer patients have all the fun?
8. cuz its trendy.
9. cuts a whole ten minutes off my morning routine.
10. cuz this one chick said she'd do me.
11. cuz my barber was in a hurry.
12. cuz i wanted to make you smile.
13. cuz im not dorky enough.
14. trying to keep it real.
15. i told myself that when i turned 100 i would do it and i flaked.
16. the girls now cant stop looking at me.
17. cuz George Bush would never do it.
18. to protest the Tribune's unfair treatment of the Cubs
19. wanted to see if the ladies would want to feel my head if i did.
20. tired of sex

funny thing happened last night. businessman came near the elevator, suit, tie, briefcase. couldnt have been dressed any better.

he sees me in the far elevator and takes a step towards it, then sees my shaved head and stops in his tracks and presses the button of a different elevator.

very interesting.

i liked it.

of course i waved him into my elevator and kept the door open for him.

until he got close and then the doors hit him as he walked in.

f the man.

got home and totally enjoyed the lakers double overtime victory over the rockets despite not having shaq.

mark madsen, the ming stopper. who knew?

31. brett lamb
32. blackmask online

how to be hip

# | |

the phone is ringing, the email is flowing, the hits are breaking records, even the la times reporter who i sorta dissed is writing me nice things, and i show up to go to work to save the world and the lack of respect just totally blows my mind.

i was polishing chopper one, detailing it, making sure everything was perfect. perfect is the only standard that we deal in at the xbi. no one admits to it because they know it's ridiculous but they dont ever correct you if you say it, and its not like they dont love correcting you. but perfect is what they want and perfect is what i give them and do they tell me that i did a perfect job last week, or yesterday, or today?

no. it's only things above and beyond that gets that sort of "praise", and since theres nothing over and above perfect, i get no praise.

whatever.

all i want to do is fly the bird and take out the bad element.

it barely pays for anything outside of food and lodging, but money has never driven me. it's always been fun thats moved me, and for awhile, keeping the mean streets of the city of angels safe was fun for me.

some of the big wigs at the agency called me into a conference room this afternoon. there was a report made out about me. it wasnt good.

we dont think youre taking your post very seriously.

i thought they were talking about the fact that i installed an mp3 player in chopper one. a sweet 100 gig jobber.

but no. they were upset at the tshirts i was wearing.

i said, im in a helicopter. who can see me?

they said, its a red flag. plus its a bad example for the younger guys.

my gwar tshirt only instilled fear in those who ever saw me running out of a flying car to come beat their sorry asses. they werent buying it. they wanted me to wear a tight tucked-in black shirt. i said, if i wanted to dress like a bartender, i would be a damn bartender.

other night i was in front of hundreds of people. strangers. i said stuff and they laughed.

at work, nobody laughs.

not one fucking person.

they told me they didnt trust me, or respected me, they told me that it would take a long while until they did. a long while of being perfect and taking on a ton more responsibility.

what youre doing right now, they said, is a very little peice of

and one of them took his thumb and forefinger and made a motion like he was taking a flea by its wings and removing it from the corner of his desk.

i forget what the rest of what the other guy said.

all i know is i have been working my fucking ass off and some guy was saying that it wasnt good enough, and it was little.

men know what the word little means.

it doesnt mean, fucking a tony, we love you.

29. john m.
30. joh3n

and i walked past the barbershop as i made my way to the busstop, and thought about the many times that they made a comment about my afro.

and an hour later i had no hair on my head.

none.

mad pony

# | |

Joh3n posted some questions on his blog that he would have liked to have asked during the Live from the Blogosphere to the attendees. i'll pretend that im qualified to answer some of these questions.

1) How much does the interaction with your readers, be it comments, email, trackbacks, or simple hit counts after a certain post, effect how you blog? My mind leaps to raymi the minx's observation that fewer people read when she doesn't post pics is an example of where I'm going with that.

Interaction is nice in its own vacuum. For the most part the hits and the comments and the email are steady to this blog. In my opinion, the spikes just mean that you were in the right place at the right time, or you were the first to bring up a topic, or you had done something better than normal. Sometimes you can shoot for those spikes to see if you can actually create them. But it's a game that might lose you just as many regular readers as it gets you.

For the most part I try to ignore all outside influences and just write mostly for myself. I suppose if I wrote 100% for myself I would talk much more about Fantasy Basketball and Baseball, and i'd try to write erotica, but it would be funny erotica, or disturbingly dirty.

many times ive had a young woman want to talk dirty and after a while it makes you wonder what dirty really is. most the times it means sexy. but this is hollywood. sometimes it means dirty. sometimes it means please let me know that my horrendously scary life isnt as ridiculous as im afraid it is, in which cases it does everyone a world of good if you can dig deep in the well and come back with some gnarly ass shit that you would like to do to her, gnarly because it seems possible.

but for blogging, im not at all interested in any outside influences other than what topics not to write about because everyone else is covering it wonderfully.

as for comments, if some anonymous asswipe drops some negative bullshit in your comments, you can react to it if you want, but all you'll end up doing is attracting people to write dumbass comments to watch you go off on them. And if you address all the nice comments, then you have this sticky sweet makeout session with your readers, which is gross, so fuck that too.

when in doubt, write what is uncomfortable.

2) How much time do you spend looking at your own blog? Not composing it, but after you hit submit.

not enough. lots of times i write during my two government mandated fifteen minute breaks. and rarely can i read what i wrote, or proof read it, or edit it, or even spell check it. if i go back to it later in the day, i wont read it, because if i read it and i dont like what i wrote i'll be bummed out at work, and my job is way to stressfull to get bummed out over a fucking blog. if i look at it at all, i will read the comments to see if someone wrote something nice. or i will look at site meter to see who's linking me.

at night i might read a little bit of it, but something usually doesn't sound right and it distracts me and i stop reading and go and read someone elses stuff. i spend hours and hours reading other blogs on the web. in the old days if you wanted to read all the good writers, you had to buy a dozen newspapers. now you just have to click around the web for a few hours.

3) You can try to pass of Shirky's analysis as '3 seconds after the big bang', but how do you address the hidden point that although anyone can blog, we have no real way yet of sifting through the mud to find the gold nuggets?

well no damn robot is going to be able to find these nuggets, which means that people will have to and once those people find them they will usually want to report them the way they are on boing boing and metafilter and slash dot.

or more instapundits will pop up.

but one of the best things about the web as it is right now with all these blogs is that if one person discovers something cool, he tells a few friends and it all spreads very naturally depending on its true worth.

if people really find cats singing white stripes songs, they'll forward it to their friends in email, or talk about it on their blogs.

if you read the instapundit, metafilter, and ten good blogs, you'll find most of the golden nuggets.

4) Is there a middle ground between personal blogs and larger constructs like kuro5hin? (question asked by lago, but with a slightly different angle).

there's so much middle ground it's sick.

buzzmachine

# | |

one reason no respectable newspaper has hired me is because i am a sloppy, lazy, ill-informed fiction writer, which is why i clearly state that "nothing in here is true."

but sometimes it is nice to set the record straight.

And in a stunning display of indifference, the world ignored me when I blogged it at 9:28pm. So, the speed of information distribution really means nothing if the information gets posted where no one is watching.
- lago

Tony,

In your list of how the news spread, you forgot me...I posted at 2/16/2003 12:30:30 AM EST...9:30P your time...20 minutes after Ev...then quickly emailed Rick Bruner....
So even though I am an obscure little advertising blog...I did break it before all the big guys:-)
-Steve

i also didnt properly thank Beverly and Xeni who hosted the event and invited me. thank so much!

and special thanks to
28. Xeni
who flowed the busblog ten bucks to the car fund. muchas gracias!

this weekend,
27. wKen and
26. adam also flowed, so thanks to you, too, gentlemen. and also thanks to the dude who handed over a real one dollar bill and gave it to me right out front the blogosphere door following the event.

that, i could get used to.

Ev's big announcement (pictured, thanks to Reverse Cowgirl) made me think that i should just keep this drive going until i get exactly what i want, which might not happen come christmas 2003. ev waited until the time was totally right and what happened seemed to be the perfect fit. i think i might wait until the proper funds are reached and no sooner.

katie saw me at the mall.

# | |

the only guy who had a better day than me yesterday was a fella named ev who sold his three and a half year old company, Blogger, to Google and got to announce it live from the blogoshpere in a packed crowd of hipsters and nerds in an overflow event on a sidestreet in Chinatown.

wanna know how cool ev is?

motherfucker's sitting three chairs over from me, theres hundreds of people looking at him, but they are slightly distracted by another member of the panel who's discussing the world of blogging. the attention comes back to Ev and he says, "oh, can someone put my blog on the screen again please, im sorry."

fucker had gotten a call on his cellphone, but, being the gentleman didn't answer it. instead, he checked his email via the wireless network that was in the building, updated his blog live and linked to the silconvalley.com column that broke the story that Google was buying Pyra Labs, the San Fransisco company behind Blogger.

and then he told us.

everyone cheered, as Ev was answering what was announced to be the last question of the two hour discussion that included Doc Searls, Heather from the Rabbit blog, Boing Boing's founder Mark Frauenfelder, the Reverse Cowgirl Susannah Breslin, and yours truly who didn't say fuck even once.

that's the only reason that i can figure that the los angeles times reporter who was assigned to cover the Live from the Blogoshpere story chose to interview me directly after the incredibly wonderful event, instead of talking to the only person in the house who has suddenly become a millionaire and a validated success right before our eyes.

while wearing a blogger tshirt.

while looking reportedly so cute that my ex, chris, and my laywer giggled the whole night and snapped picture after picture of him and blushed and covered their mouths with their hands.

It was the coolest culmination and synchronicity, wirelessness, and instantaneous publishing.
- evan williams2/16/03 1:28pm

why is that quote on the busblog and not in today's sunday la times? and why isn't it on latimes.com?

la times got to read Dan Gilmore's scoop before it even went to press! they were in the house! the story was there. the founder of the company was there. lots of other sources were there too. i would imagine that the la times had a camera and were taking pictures of the event, including when the founder made his grand announcement on this, his first trip to Los Angeles.

"see what happens when you come to LA," i shouted in the microphone a few seconds after he broke the news to us all.

if you want to know why Google bought Blogger look no further than this very story.

Dan Gilmore published his scoop at 7:41pm on his blog, Ev linked to it on his blog at 9:10pm, metafilter published the link to Gilmore's story at 10:08pm, followed by Ken Layne, and then Azeem Azhar, Rick Bruner, Henry Copeland, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, Jeff Jarvis, Shelley Powers, Mitch Ratcliffe, Emmanuelle Richard, Matt Webb, Slashdot, and even Chinese bloggers.

Still, because no major news source other than the SJ Mercury (who Gilmore writes for) has published the story, Google's (beta) News page only ranks it as the number 2 result, even though it's own data says that the Merc's story is fresher than the link that is getting the #1 return.

The value of Blogger to Google is, if Google had a faster access to blogs, it would have seen all the activity (above) pointing to Gilmore's blog, and to the Merc article, and to Ev's page and would have basically figured out that it's news.

Right now, even though the humans running it know that it's news, their own computers don't even know that it is happening.

So what's the LA Times' excuse?

They were there.

And so was MC Brown who takes wonderful pictures, except when theyre of me.

Thanks to Michael August Pusateri who took a great picture of me (above, speaking on the panel) feeling on top of the world, stoked to finally meet so many people who i admire and who's blogs i read.

Thanks to everyone who were nice enough to come up and said hi to me, thanks to the nice ladies who invited me to speak with such excellent and smart adults, and thanks for my pals for eating slippery shrimp before and getting drunk with me after.

It was a night i wont soon forget.

Doc Searls

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