Thank heavens for my old freshman year roommate, who saved me from my future Puppy Cam depression with this new link: Puppy Stalker. It's like the old puppy cam, but four times the fun, so you can be four times the slacker during work hours.
You're welcome.
The seven-page questionnaire being sent to those seeking high-ranking positions in the Obama administration is being called "considerably more detailed than we had to fill out" by a former Clinton aide and "invasive" by other Washington insiders.
Among the 63 questions – some of which have multiple parts – are queries about gun ownership (of you and your family), Internet aliases, embarrassing experiences at work and embarrassing family members (above).
Thinking of applying? Keep this in mind: your drunk, gun-owning cousin who can't get his shit together is going to be loyal to you far longer than the US government.
As if she's not busy enough — starring in Saturday Night Live every week, working on a new television sitcom and being pregnant — the magical Amy Poehler is starting a Web series titled Smart Girls at the Party. The show is basically what we all needed as preteens: It "aims to help girls find confidence in their own aspirations and talents, and to prove that you don't have to be famous to be interesting." We truly can't find one bad thing to say about Amy. That is one lucky baby in her womb.
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One year after distributing its latest album, In Rainbows, via a pay-what-you-want system on the Internet, Radiohead has released information about how well its revolutionary sales method was received.
If you'll remember, whether a person should pay for the album was once a point of contention for myself and a former Jossip editor—I said one should, she said one shouldn't necessarily. Turns out that the millions who downloaded the album were similarly divided.
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WHY THE INTERNETS EXIST "… how can we possibly explain the seemingly useless interest that we have in the lives of reality-show contestants, movie stars and public figures of all kinds? One possible explanation may be found in the fact that celebrities are a recent occurrence, evolutionarily speaking. In our ancestral environment, any person about whom we knew intimate details of his or her private life was, by definition, a socially important member of the in-group. Barkow has pointed out that evolution did not prepare us to distinguish among members of our community who have genuine effects on our life and the images and voices that we are bombarded with by the entertainment industry. Thus, the intense familiarity with celebrities provided by the modern media trips the same gossip mechanisms that have evolved to keep up with the affairs of in-group members. … Research published in 2007 by Charlotte J. S. De Backer, a Belgian psychologist now at the University of Leicester in England, finds that young people even look to celebrities and popular culture for learning life strategies that would have been learned from role models within one’s tribe in the old days. Teenagers in particular seem to be prone to learning how to dress, how to manage relationships and how to be socially successful in general by tuning in to popular culture."
WEB GOSSIP LINKED TO CELEB SUICIDES IN S KOREA "Choi Jin Sil, a movie star … was the closest thing South Korea had to a national sweetheart. So when the actress was found dead in her apartment on Oct. 2 in what the police later concluded was a suicide, her grief-stricken homeland sought an answer to what drove its 'national actress' to suicide. The police, the media and Parliament immediately pointed fingers at the Internet … Choi, 39, apparently succumbed to a suicidal impulse provoked by malicious online rumors, the police said after studying memos found at her home and interviewing friends and relatives. … Choi's death followed a string of high-profile suicides attributed to cyberspace harassment. Two young female celebrities, one a singer and the other an actress, killed themselves last year after insulting comments about their alleged plastic surgery flooded the Web."
YEP, TV'S STILL DYING "More than half of the viewers for 'Saturday Night Live's' recent skits featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin watched the sketches on the web as of Sept. 29, according to a survey conducted by Solutions Research Group. About 51% of viewers who have seen at least one of the skits are watching on the internet, indicating that viewing preferences for this type of content are shifting toward the computer. About 23% of all views came from YouTube, including video of other talk shows that showed clips of the skit, with 17% of views attributed to NBC.com and 4% to Hulu.com."
Further proving the theory that most people successful in traditional media are like monkeys faced with calculus when it comes to the Internet, Ashton Kutcher, actor and reality show producer, and his production company, Katalyst Media, give us Blah Girls.
Part gossip blog, part episodic comedy program, Blah Girls attempts to dally in the difficult position between mocking celebrity culture and heralding it. In the videos, the Girls prattle on about Hollywood rumors while frequently interjecting the conversation with crude jokes; in the blog, the Girls attach one-liners to famous photos of the day; and oh how terrible it all is.
THE BATTLE FOR IDIOT BOX SUPREMACY "Fewer Americans are reading newspapers and are instead getting their news online, but television remains the leading source of news in the country, according to a survey released Sunday. Not surprisingly, younger people tend to get more of their news on the Internet, while older folks use traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Pew Research Center's biannual survey on news consumption habits said. … Pew found that the largest group of news consumers — 46 percent of those polled — have a 'heavy reliance' on television for their news at all times of the day. This group is the oldest, with a median age of 52, and least affluent, with 43 percent unemployed. They are unlikely to own a computer or go online for news."
Cityfile, a new Web site devoted to detailing the lives of New York's media celebrities, thus allowing people who are already narcissists to catapult their obnoxiousness to heretofore unseen heights, is something a rational person might not believe exists. ("Why?" "For whom?" Who's paying for this?") But this is the bluest state, friends, where undergrad degrees and company rivalries actually matter to people. And where public masturbation can pass as a reasonable business venture.
At right, Cityfile's "Top Lists" list for today. It's the most succinct explanation of New York City we've ever seen.
PRINT PUBLICATIONS DIE LIKE THIS "For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies. … Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week. Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May."
Tall, glum, forgettable actor Brad Garrett will star in and executive produce a new online reality program called Dating. Set to premiere on digital platforms like Hulu and YouTube, Dating will follow Garrett on 10 blind dates with women culled from an online search.
Yes, this is a bad idea. But Garrett, still high off the incomprehensible success of Everybody Loves Raymond, thinks it's gonna be great:
"An online dating show seemed like a logical choice given that I'm in the midst of a midlife crisis and averse to pain, which makes getting my ear pierced out of the question," Garrett said. "And since I'm not picky about my choices, I hope women of all sizes, shapes and colors will be compelled to submit their videos."
Confused, single and desperate—what a catch!
It really is amazing how quickly tired hacks were able to piss all over the possibilities of digital episodic entertainment.
We've known for years that we hate Perez Hilton, and it's quite obvious that Perez Hiton hates Perez Hilton, but who knew that Perez Hilton's readers also hate Perez Hilton?
After the jump, some fan reactions to the news that the Gossip Gangster is the subject of an upcoming musical.
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WHAT'S AMAZON'S TIME WORTH? "You expect it to happen to fund-strapped start-ups such as Twitter. But Amazon? The e-commerce site went down this afternoon around 1:30 EDT and stayed down for at least an hour. Attempts to access Amazon.com were met with the following message: 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.' It's hard to know exactly how many dollars a minute Amazon loses in sales for every moment its site is down, but simple math pegs it at about $1.8 million an hour …"
Here's a good idea: Develop a video game to encourage the pedophilic tendencies of the Internet community by challenging them to take naughty photos of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus. We would like to talk to the person who makes it through the entire game and doesn't feel the urge to take a shower.
Oh, for fuck's sake:
Coolspotters.com, a new Web site that presents what products celebrities are using, launched Wednesday in beta with Pepsi signed on as the exclusive launch sponsor.
The site … has pages for products … and connects them to actors, athletes, business icons, musicians and politicians.
For example, Jessica Alba's page features links to pictures of the actress wearing Timberland shoes or using a Sidekick 3. Pepsi's page has links to YouTube clips of Pepsi commercials featuring celebrities and candid photos of Lindsay Lohan and Alba with the soft drink.
Because it shouldn't taste good to you if it doesn't taste good to Jessica Alba.
TomCruise.com, a Web site devoted to Tom Cruise and his 25-year career, is up and running, and it's very weird. Go there to be inundated with theme music from several of Cruise's films and really pertinent information from the man himself like, "I love movies." Oddly, no mention of Scientology anywhere on the site. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Madonna threw a "thank you concert" (whatever that means) for her fans last night at New York's Roseland Ballroom, but it was also broadcast live through MSN for all the Internet trolls. From the looks of things, we're glad we neither stood in line nor took a break from watching American Idol to watch this nonsense. When will this woman learn that she is no longer 25?
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