VanityFair.com: best. faq. ever.

Just like my house! 

-I think James Wolcott is fab. [seriously, who among us doesn’t have a crush on Jimbo?] I’ve tacked his contributor’s picture to my wall, and every night I read some sonnets, such as “Woman’s Constancy,” to my Little Jim, as I call him. I’ve bought these cutouts of Ken-doll clothes and sometimes dress Jim up. Could you let him know green corduroy works best with his skin tone?

Comments and questions should be directed to . Please note that because of the volume of feedback received, not every message can be answered individually. Press requests should be directed to .

VF Hollywood IssueAs always, read all FAQs before even thinking about framing a question in your minds, much less taking up the valuable time of their well-bred and expensively-educated interns with a misdirected or simply misguided query.

Such as:

-To whom would one submit Frequently Asked Question questions?

What? 

-My Aunt Verity wants this old issue of Vanity Fair. It had a story on some rich guy who dated models. He had gray hair, if that helps. Aunt Verity can’t remember the month or year of the magazine—or who was on the cover either. Can I get a copy of it for her?

If you can’t remember the date of the issue in which a particular story appeared, please call 212-286-8180, and we will try to help you. All requests for back issues should be sent to . You can also call 800-365-0635 for issues dating from January 1999. Individual copies are available for $9.45 each (including first-class postage and handling) and should arrive within four to six weeks. To expedite your order, you may include a personal express-mail account number; the charge per issue is $4.95.

-Right. I’m in cashier school in Modesto. I can’t possibly fork over 30 bucks to reread that Michael Shnayerson piece on Ira Rennert.

Why not try your local library instead? Look for the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or use your library’s Web site by clicking on the periodicals link and using the search function.

-I’ve got a scorching-hot tip for Dominick Dunne. I really can’t say what it is, but it involves a very famous cousin of a really rich daughter of this high-society lady who recently had her bejeweled Pacarana stolen by an Oscar-winning set designer. Whom can I call?

Gems such as these should be e-mailed to . If they sound credible, they will be presented to the diarist, who will either follow up on your lead or dismiss it as imaginative drivel.

-Graydon Carter’s “Editor’s Letter” really got my goat, who ate it and became quite ill. I’m appalled and want to let him know.

To send letters to the editor, click CONTACT US, or e-mail us at . You can also fax your correspondence to 212-286-4324. In all cases, be sure to include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Vanity Fair reserves the right to edit your submission and publish or otherwise use it in any medium. All submissions become the property of Vanity Fair.

-Man, I love that Proust guy‘s questionnaire. So probing. Has he got any books out I can buy?

To purchase books by contributing editors and photographers, as well as copies of classic covers, click V.F. STORE.

-Our glee club hopes to perform a choral version of a Vanity Fair story. We were thinking of Bruce Weber’s photo portfolio on Scandinavian lingerie, “Swede Surrender.” How does a club, company, school, or organization get a reprint of a previously published piece?

To ask permission to reprint a picture or article in any medium, please fax a request to 212-630-5883, contact , or call 212-630-5656. For press requests, contact . For personal reading purposes—if you know the article’s issue date—e-mail or call Back Issues at 1-800-365-0635.

-I’m the publicist for Glom Altoidov, the Uzbek sausage king. How can I get him into the Vanity Fair party the night of the Oscars—along with his Afghan hound, Follicula?

The party is by invitation only. Prostration, self-flagellation, or coquetry will hold no sway with V.F.’s editors, though such behavior is wildly entertaining. Animals are not admitted. Press inquiries regarding the party, and press inquiries only, should be directed to .

And so on…I really wanted to close this with the pic of Parker and Benchley forming an archway of mops, under which presided Conde Nast, with a doily for vestments, but it’s not out there and my scanner’s not working. Ah well, of such suffering is great art born. Right?

The Round Table by Hirshfeld

Operation Global Media Domination: the avatar and blogworth situation

TIASee my lovely new avatar? WordPress has just added a feature that allows you to upload an avatar which appears in “Latest Posts” and also on the forum when you post a question or response.

I know you’ve seen it before: it’s my icon for Operation Global Media Domination, my relentless pursuit of fame across the blogosphere. If you’re American, you may have seen it even earlier than that, when it was the logo for the US government Office of Total Information Awareness. Nice, eh, and not at all Orwellian. Wasn’t he an immigrant? Don’t worry, at some point someone grew a set of brains and deep-sixed the Office and its logo, at least publicly.

I should really co-opt their motto, too, “Scienta est potentia,” Latin for “Knowledge is power.”

In any case, now that I have a logo and a motto (49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude! fits me so well!) I should be all set to conquer planets, beginning with Pluto, for lo, it will love me because I called it a planet and will fall willingly, at least after a couple of good, strong girly drinks.

I’ve already started playing one blogworth counter against another. Surfing Latests Posts today, I came across a post called “How Much is Your Blog Worth,” which, given recent events, was bound to attract a laserlike focus from moi. It’s from Gauravonomics, and introduces a much more sophisticated blogworth calculator than the aforementioned Pingoat‘s.

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs IncDane Carlson of Business Opportunities has created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays a blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

Which is hella inflated, but enough about that. It says this blog is worth $30,000+, so do I give a rat’s ass that the numbers are puffy? Hell to the no! I’m not a buyer.

Wonder how soon someone will factor in blogger book deals. I say give MediaBistro four months, Huffpo maybe four weeks. Too much fun for those underemployed, think-tanking economists to play with. They will be powerless to resist!

quote o’ the day: Oscar Wilde on blogging

V“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

— Oscar Wilde

 

petting Coulter

Ann Coulter, 45It’s all so sordid. Not content with confusing Canada for Amerika Jr and recommending the proactive execution of American liberals, Metro tells us that everyone’s favorite 45-year-old Republican bottle blonde fake & bake twinkie harridan is smearing the reputation of an innocent 7-year-old, merely by association.

Is nothing sacred?

SFGate has the full report, including Coulter‘s location in a so-called “petting” zoo, plus the graphic proof that Coulter particularly enjoys the use of “toys”.

A follow-up visit shows that the similarities are Coulter enjoys toysplentiful: Both have a long mane of blonde hair and legs that are thin enough to comfortably slip a LiveStrong silicone bracelet on the lower thigh. And whether it’s fair or not, many a liberal blogger has pointed out that Ann Coulter‘s head does have some equine qualities.

Now, that’s not really fair. We all know where the true comparison lies.

Afghann Coulter

Judge for yourself, though:

Coulter, poor Coulter

operation global media domination: porn stalker!

TIAWell this is odd. Sometime in the last 72 hours someone (no idea who) labelled my blog as porn, using the handy-dandy WordPressLabel this blog Adult” feature. Someone on the forum told me this is supposed to flag it for review and, if the blog is indeed found to be porn, it’s taken off search engine updates, dropped from the “Next Blog” “Tag Surfer” “Blog of the day” “Top Posts” and “Latest Posts” rolls, and the blogger can no longer post comments, which I found out when I tried to inform whatsername with the Starbucks iced coffee coupon that it is, in fact, legit.

Well, now I have reason to believe that the instant someone tags the fucker with “Porn” it sticks, and only an appeal will get it out of the gutter and back into the starry sky.

So that’s what happened. Sometime last night it dawned on me that my hits were half, count ’em, half what they should normally be, and that for some reason my posts weren’t showing up where they should.

And this does not take me to my happy place.

I posted a question in the forum and sent in a Support Contact Form, as one is supposed to do. About six hours later (in fairness, it WAS the middle of the night) I get an email from Barry saying sorry, we checked your blog, it’s fine, it had been “porned” and it’s not, so you’re good to go.

Surely, I thought, surely that would have given me some kind of period of immunity, like a vaccination.

Silly me.

“Referrers” is a stat table that lists the links that people have come to your blog through, and how many came through each. For today so far, mine looks like this:

Referrer Views
wordpress.com/tag/porn 11
wordpress.com/tag/porn/7 8
colddesert.blogspot.com 5
topix.net/who/cloris-leachman 4
wordpress.com/tag/porn/6 3

Yes, someone has gone through 8 or more pages of Porn tags on WordPress, looking for mine. No doubt thinking if s/he can whine “oh but she has 22 posts tagged “porn” it’s an open and shut case. Well it’s not, because I have never posted porn on this blog and I defy anyone to say it’s not PG-13. Particularly since Photobucket took down my pictures of large public sculptures; okay, so the Boris Vallejo was a bit edgy. Believe me, I’m well aware of those boundaries, having dealt with that issue for several years.

Let’s take a look at some of the blog entries tagged “Porn” on the ol’ raincoaster blog, shall we? Because we know you like to look at porn.

BoingBoing on TWAT, which reproduced a BoingBoing post of a RyanAir ad about people (small, distant, probably Irish people) taking their clothes off at an airport.

Operation Global Media Domination: The Rear View, in which we discover I’ve been linked to by both LibertyForum and Nastyfuckingporn.com, a link blog.

If Men Wrote Advice Columns, a joke column I found on Fark.

Beaver Shots. The ever-popular. Beavers swimming in the Okanagan.

Check into the Paris Hilton, an SNL skit starring guess who? Dirty puns, nothing more.

Ah yes, the infamous Marketing Tips for Hookers, an original piece of humour blogging from the Downtown EastSide, featuring stories that were just too funny to go in my book.

The Shebeen Club: Book Banning, Free Speech, and Mein Kampf. How ironic.

Had a minor heartflip an hour ago when it appeared I’d been re-porned, but Barry now tells me that’s not the case and probably would advise me to take two asprin and get a life, if he weren’t such a polite lad, but he is, and he can’t help it.

UPDATE: all my comments, including the ones on this very blog, are now being labelled Spam and held for approval. Swellerific.