U-S-A! U-S-A!

Did you know that America owns space? Because according to the last page of the new passports, we totally do.

Suck it, Canada.

hokies

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Nothing funny about the last couple of days. Our favorite g15 gives his thoughts. All of our hearts go out to everyone affected. Love goes out to Catelyn at Tech. We'll be back next Wednesday with a new episode of the funny.

g14productions

I'm totally famous, y'all!

Okay, not at all. But still, a girl can dream, right?

It's funny how I don't talk about the stuff I've been doing for g14 because I'm crazy self-conscious and David loves putting me in uncomfortable situations and making me embarrass myself all over the internets.

However, when he told me that g14 had been featured on blip TV, I was excited for them. They spotlighted The 80s Son video as well as Stone & McGregor, in which I play Miss (don't call me crazy) Parker. So here you go. G14 is featured about two thirds of the way in and there's a 3-second clip of me with the camera practically up my nose on a website that isn't run by my friends.

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Dina Kaplan, a co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of blip.tv, reviews cool picks of the week the The Ointment, Sweaty Robot, and g14 Productions. (3 minutes).

Cufflinks!

I distinctly remember sitting around the house for years, watching TV and never being able to answer what I thought was a simple question: why are local commercials so god-awful? It didn't seem so difficult. You write a commercial, it's good, so it gets produced. The end. Right?

Not even close.

It wasn't until I graduated college and actually got a job writing local commercials that I realized that they were inherently bad--it's the nature of the medium. Business owners do not trust you. They know what they want, and what they want is for their neighbors to say "Oh, I saw your baby on TV. She is adorable!" You can try to steer them in a different direction, you can cajole, you can tell them outright that they are wasting their money if they put what they want on the air. 99 times out of 100, they will not listen to you.

Invariably, customers will choose to have all of their employees out in front of the store saying, "come visit us today!" in unison. Never mind that you can never understand what the hell people are saying in unison, they want their employees in the spot, dammit! They also want their daughter with the speech impediment to list every single thing they have in their inventory in thirty seconds. It'll be amazing.

After a while, you die inside and you give up. You forget how to write anything that doesn't include the phrase "for all your ________ needs." This is why local commercials suck. This is why local commercials will always suck. It's a depressing fact, but a fact nonetheless.

It's been nearly two years since I've written a commercial, but there's still a small part of me that hurts every time I see a bad one--because I know what the people went through who made it. So when I went to the UCB Theater earlier this week and saw the video below, my first thought was "FUCK YOU."


Not fucking funny. Except, totally funny. Damn you, Krohmpf.

Blogger: The best editor I could hope for

So I was writing a post yesterday about my love of Fall and the season premieres of The Office, Desperate Housewives and Greys' Anatomy. The post ended up being a little on the long and bloated side and at one point trailed off into a conversation I had with someone about Pumpkin Spice Frappucinos. I read it over, wasn't thrilled with it, but thought it had some good points. I was posting the accompanying pictures when Blogger decided to eat the entire post.

Shit.

I spent the next five minutes trying to make the post come back, which of course it didn't. I cursed myself for not saving a copy like I usually do. I debated whether or not I was going to rewrite it. Then I understood.

Blogger knew.

Blogger thought my post kind of sucked and said, as it picked its teeth, "I wasn't really feeling it."

Fair enough. Thank you for keeping my shit together, Blogger.

Next post: the severely truncated version of my season premiere post.

Okay. So if Suri turns out to be a puppet, MK overdoses on "anorexia," Leinart says he's not the dad, and Nicky gets knocked up by that elf, I'm good

I'm not going to try to do one of those, "I know I should write more, but I haven't been because of xyz and I promise I'll do better" posts, even though...yeah. Anyway, we're going to talk about when obsessions become tangible.

I love celebrity gossip. I know it's not important, that there are events in this world that usurp whether or not Suri Cruise a) exists, or b) was birthed by a glassy-eyed runaway deep inside the bowels of the celebrity center.* From what I understand, there's a war or two happening somewhere...over there, and the Silver Fox keeps on talking about some sort of water-damage in New Orleans. I don't know much about it, but he seems really worked up about it every night on CNN.

None of this, however, changes the fact that ohmygoddidyouhearjessicaisdatingjohnmayer? She has a creepy father, ditched her sweet, understanding husband, turned orange, and is dating a dude with fish lips--while her ex is dating a hot lady who regularly appears in Maxim. Delicious.

So when I heard about Fafarazzi, which is basically fantasy football for celebrities, I, of course, became immediately obsessed. Knowing nothing about fantasy sports, I of course, screwed up my first round draft picks and missed out on the sacred tabloid cows of Paris, Jessica and Lindsay. Little fake Cruise, however, has proven to be quite the boon. After an ill-advised and sentimental draft of Pete Wentz, I dropped him, along with Owen Wilson and others and shook up my roster last night. I'm currently third in my league, but only one point separates me from second.

I'm betting on some more Couric news leading up to her putting on her serious face and talking about explosions and stuff, John Mayer's side of the story/fan-saving denial, and I'm really hoping that the Go Fug Yourself girls are right about the less-skanky Hilton girl.

Obsession is bad enough, but when you're actively rooting for Maggie Gyllenhaal to be pregnant with her brother's kid just because the points that would garner would be phenomenal, your mental state is probably less than desirable. But seriously, Scarlett. Where's the sex tape?

*Seriously. There is no third option. It's one of the two.

Ooh, Booker is going to hate me

So not only do I stalk people over the internet, but I stalk them in person as well--and put it on the internet. It's official: I'm a Gawker Stalker (last item.)

Also, suck it, Clooney.

The only difference is you have integrity, I don't.

Okay, so let's just go ahead and get this out of the way: I am not a repressed homosexual--but I may as well be. What I mean is, you know how people say that homophobes only go after gay people because they are full of fear and self-loathing because they themselves are gay? Well, I'm like that--except with privacy; not so much with the gay.

I've always been secretive. Ever since I can remember, I've kept things to myself. I don't like people knowing things about me. If I thought about it hard enough, I could probably pinpoint the reason behind this, but I'm not interested in any of that touchy-feely Dr. Phil/Oprah "Remember your spirit-"type claptrap. Besides, the why isn't what's important. The point is, I compartmentalize. I have separate groups of friends with whom I have different roles. Sometimes I'm the shy one, or the loud one, or the drunk, or the prude. Regardless, I have a tendency to be kind of squirrelly.

I've kept entire relationships secret for ridiculous amounts of time for no particular reason, other than the fact that I didn't feel like talking about it (Hi Harrisonburg guy!) So basically, you get it. I like to keep things close to the vest. Privacy is one of the most important things to me. My privacy, that is, not yours.

Like the guy who calls everybody else a fag and is secretly sneaking peeks in the locker room, I tell you to stop asking me questions while trying to learn everything about you. I want to know who you're dating, who you used to date, what your job is like, who your favorite band is, the last book you read, everything. No matter how seemingly pointless. And sure, most of this is pretty innocuous, and I could probably find out most, if not all, of this information by talking to you. But if I do, then you'll know that I know these things; you'll know that I care, and I don't wnat you to know that about me.

So I'm an e-stalker. Instead of actually talking to people, I look them up on the internet. I learn little things from your messageboard posts or your blogs. I learn these things and I keep them to myself. I'm J. Edgar Hoover-ing your life, one Google search at a time.

And then there was MySpace. MySpace is something I've been struggling to understand ever since the more photographed of the Digico guys introduced it to me all, "Rivers Cuomo has his Harvard admission essays up there." MySpace simultaneously repulsed and tantalized me. MySpace pages were like blogs, but unbelievably, they had even less of an actual purpose. Some of these people didn't say anything at all. They were just kind of...there, all posting pictures of themselves in their underwear. It was basically an entire community of e-whores and stalkers; a virtual Disneyland for the self-obsessed. It was right up my alley. Unfortunately, no one I actually knew was on MySpace and Rivers' academic exploits could only hold my interest for so long.

I stayed away for a couple of years, as it's popularity continued to grow. Any time someone would talk about MySpace, I would feel kind of old, and sad, and a little bit nauseous. Then I randomly went on a few months ago and made an amazing discovery--suddenly everyone I know is on this thing. Hell, their companies have MySpace pages now.

I eagerly caught up with people I haven't seen since high school, kept tabs on guys I dated, visited the pages of friends of friends I will never meet, all without their knowledge and without telling them anything about myself--just the way I like it.

But after a while, I started to feel kind of skeevy, which surprised me, as my threshold for self-skeeviness is extremely high. I started to look at MySpace in a different light. Instead of just crouching outside in the proverbial bushes, spying on these people, what if I actually talked to them? What if I used this as a tool to keep in touch with those friends I keep on meaning to call but never do? It's the lazy man's way of giving a shit!

So here it is: The just created holy-shit-I-honestly-thought-I'd-jump-on-the-"become-a-cokehead-"
bandwagon-before-I'd-jump-on-the-MySpace-bandwagon MySpace page. Feel free to mock me. I'd do the same to you--and for some of you I already have.

"Whether you cheer for Tucker, or you wish he’d get syphillis and die, it doesn’t really matter."

Internet writer Tucker Max is being sued. The case basically has no merits and is the action of a sue-happy blueberry heir who threw a shitty new year's party and got his feelings hurt when people called him out on it. The reason I bring it up is that if this case actually goes to trial, it has implications on internet free speech. Read more about it on his website here.