Tribecalicious!

The Tribeca Film Fest is launching Tuesday and I'm coordinating HuffPo's coverage, which will be awesome because I've tapped some awesome people to help with it. I know these tomatoes have been withering on the vine but if you check out HuffPo there will be cool TFF updates every day. Regular-ish posting will resume after the fest, and possibly before if I am struck by inspiration and/or time. I just had a mental image of me being bonked in the head by a clock, and it made me giggle. Get it? Struck by time? Yes, you really are going to miss me.

(A clock! Time! On the noggin! Ouch!)

Yikes

I knew I would catch heat for this. NB: I definitely did NOT say that White House press secretary was a good job - honestly, it looks like a giant churning ulcer waiting to happen. Well, we'll see how this all plays out. In the meantime, maybe I should stick to writing about American Idol.

Game, set and match to the kid in the fancy apartment!

Wow, two thumbs up to Loren Kreiss, the not-unwealthy kid profiled in the NYT Real Estate section and predictably lambasted on Gawker. (NB: As usual, I blame the NYT and its obsession with class and money). In subsequent items, however, Gawker started coming around, lauding his actual-workingness, and throwing in some Spanish. Today they put him on the spot with a game of Ten Questions, and he performed brilliantly, with a perfect mix of candour and self-deprecating quippery (plus managing to make me misty for a travertine console. So that's where I could put my keys!). Maybe it's just the ghostwritten wisdom of a publicist, but he plays the game like a pro, throwing appreciative props to the NYT and to Gawker commenters, bringing wealth and privilege back to family and hard work, adroitly skirting the $6,000-per-month rent issue, making his Mom sound cool, and showing humility in the face of Swedo-hegemony. Throw in a bit of raunch at the end and you've got a winner, especially paired with this kind of level-headed gentle-hearted blue-state attitude:

First off, I don’t consider being called gay an insult, and of course I see how people would make assumptions. I wouldn’t have moved to Chelsea and worked in the interior design business if I wasn’t comfortable in my sexuality. I also wouldn’t be ashamed if I were gay, the truth just happens to be that I’m straight. Sorry if that’s disappointing to your readers.

And THAT, Jared Paul Stern, is how one makes good use of Gawker.

Love and Taxes

Happy Day-After Tax Day! Hope you're all getting a big fat refund, or at least can add. I tried to post this yesterday but had to figure out the video code (read: ask someone) so I'm a bit laste, but no doubt the memory of yesterday's fun-and-form-filled day of stress is still fresh. To celebrate, and because you already know that these I think these guys are funny, here is a thematic video from my pals at Party Central USA. Enjoy!

Forestalling the Journey to the Heaviside Layer*

Look, a new day
Has begun...

(Hooray! Molly the Cat is free!)

* Though I'm guessing this probably didn't help: "I hear you, sweetheart," the therapist, Carole Wilbourn, cooed. "Come on, Molly, you can do it. Everybody wants you to come out. Nobody's going to hurt you." This is that person's job.

**Thanks to Dania for the spellchecking and this helpful info!

One more reason to love Tina Fey

"I honestly think I'm not working any harder than any working mom anywhere else," she said, seriously. "I'm at least getting to work on things that are exciting and fun."

Yes, we have no bananas

...we have no bananas today!

(We do, however, have blog synchornicity. I swear to God this was a total coincidence. Ironically, I've had the "Yes, We Have No Tomatoes" post in draft since Saturday, and was going to offer a few paltry links instead except was annoyed to find that I couldn't do so on a Mac. So instead I decided to complain about Macs. Don't feel bad for me; think of all those people without bananas).

Yes, we have no tomatoes

I know it's verboten to apologize for light posting, but while I get into the swing of things at HuffPo I may not have the time to put my half-baked ideas into half-baked posts (I have about five to ten posts languishing in drafts right now). My bad, please forgive and continue to rejoice in the delight of yummy fruity juicy tomatoe-y goodness in the reality-based community (i.e. in the kitchens and restaurants of your world) and I will endeavor to match that with on-line deliciousness in the near-ish future.

I'm gonna wash that national newspaper right outta my hair

Seriously. Why am I still reading idiotic statements like this in the New York Times?

"And isn't it a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman would sooner give up her colorist than her doorman?"

Sadly, this is not an idiotic quote by an idiotic source, it is a failed attempt to be witty by the author of an article on the value and appeal of New York City doormen (Harvey Mansfield has some ideas about doormen. He loves his colorist, too!).

What's with the NYT's hair-color fixation these days? Both of these articles speak to a New York experience that is definitely not universal; not everyone chooses to eschew doormen buildings because they don't feel like saying hi when they walk in, and - shocker - not every single woman has a colorist, needs a colorist, can pay for a colorist, or has the time to sit for three hours while being tended to by a colorist. So please, NYT, stop making these assumptions and parading them as universal experience. Your roots are showing.

p.s. So are mine, above; that pic was taken in mid-Feb/05 after having blonded (double process! Woo-hoo) in late Nov/04. I finally got around to dyeing it back to brown in late May/05. Classy!

Who blogs on Macs?

Seriously, help me out here. Is it me, or is blogging on Macs a ginormous pain in the ass? I'm doing it right now so don't expect any links, because the command icons don't show up here (and while I do love you, far-flung readers mine, I am so not hand-coding at 3:02 am). That happened the last time I tried to blog on a Mac, with Movable Type (that was a G4; this is a MacPro. So I'm surmising this is a system-wide problem). Also: links. How do you capture them? There's no such thing as right-clicking on a Mac! So if you want to link (as I do, 'cause that's the kind of girl I am), you have to open a new window (but not open IN a new window, 'cause that requires right-clicking!), then copy the URL, paste it into Blogger, and then hand-type in the link code around it. So much for blogging as a nimble, responsive medium. I'm sure Macs are lovely for things like photoshop and iMovie and whatnot, and I love the cute little shiny white ones, but come on! This makes no sense.

So I'll ask again: who blogs on Macs? Because if there are secret little tricks I don't know, I'd love to learn them. And if not, I'd like to let Mac-bloggers know that there is an easier way.

p.s. The timestamp shows up three hours early, btw. I'd change it but guess what? The button doesn't show up on Macs! Grrr.

UPDATE: I learned some VERY helpful new things: (1) Holding the "CTRL" key down and clicking is the Mac equivalent of right-clicking, which made doing this much easier; and (2) Apparently if you download Mozilla Firefox the icon keys become visible (this I did not try - I hand-coded all my links. Becaus I care, dammit).

Friday is such a slow news day

HOLY GUACAMOLE.

"Inching eternally off into the infinite Euclidean freespace of the grid"

The first blog I ever read was Clive Thompson's Collision Detection, an awesome science/tech/cool-stuff blog where he waxes smart n' funny on matters relating to giant squids, spam-bots, UFOs, and regularly writes things like "the first hydrostatically bipedal octopus ever discovered is now inspiring the design of cephalopodic robotics." Also, Clive Thompson is Canadian.

I post on this topic not only because the post referenced in the title evidences an astronimical geek-quotient, off the charts even for Clive, but also because I love strict poetic forms too, as evidenced by this and this. And, let's face it, Spock sells.

Related:
Best Blog To Make You Seem Smarter At Cocktail Parties [Village Voice]

I was particularly proud of "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy"

There is nothing more wonderful than having an excellent, excellent reason to make multiple Queen references.

If any of you are HuffPo commenters (or want to be!) head on over and rock me some Queen refs in the comments section - I'd love to see what other people can do with the many classics I missed, like this and this and this and this and this and this and this (and this).

p.s. I got another one: "To avoid complications, she never kept the same address" — that one goes out to Ann Coulter.

Memo to Howard Kurtz

...from John Burns:

"Only those who have experienced that kind of terror can fairly judge what it takes to survive it."

I will not throw up all over the New York Times. I will not throw up all over the New York Times.

"People check you out, and if you have black roots and your hair is fried, it doesn't matter that you're carrying a Bottega bag."

For the record, this is the first I have ever heard of a Bottega bag.
It is not the first I've heard of getting one's hair dyed, highlighted, lowlighted, brightened, lightented, or otherwise touched up by a colorist's deft hand. That's cool, go crazy, look your best, feel good and have fun. But there are limits. And 2,393 words on the subject more than pushes them.

p.s. Number of words allocated to South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli's recent statements on abortion: Still zero.

2 a.m.? We don't need no stinkin' 2 a.m.

Set your clocks - daylight savings time starts tonight, when the hour between 2 and 3 a.m. disappears into shadowy nothingness. Which means we're all going to be an hour more tired tomorrow and that much more productive on Monday. On the bright side, Sunday morning talk show guests will probably be more cranky, so maybe they'll say something interesting. Or maybe Eleanor Clift will bonk Tony Blankely on the head. You know she wants to.

UPDATE: Funny - I had written this on April 1st, but then manually changed the timestamp to 2:22 am for a meta-punchline. I just noticed this morning that Blogger had changed it automatically to 3:22 am. I just changed it back, let's see if it sticks.