Category Archives: Work

how to stuff a blog

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blogwars! 

from Gawker, who helpfully shares some blog-stuffing tips for the sake of their Dark Lord, Nick Denton, who is slumming it this week as a writer for Valleywag (fluffing the VC’s, Nick?). One gawktease commenter has requested my email, claiming many and varied interesting Gawker tidbits, but has yet to put out for me. I’m not going to wait forever, baby; show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

Meanwhile, I appear to be the only one who reads these tips and thinks “those would work for blogging drunk, too.” See the rest of this blog for examples.

  • Photoshop and other graphical tricks can often disguise the fact that your posts have little or no information in them.
  • “This thing looks like that thing” never gets old. Ask Kurt Andersen!…
  • Engage the commenters. Sure, some of them can be truculent or deliberately obtuse, but the involvement of a comment community can really make any post – no matter how vapid or desperate – appear to be a riot of activity.
  • Don’t be afraid to be hypocritical. Worried about castigating someone for committing the exact same practices in which you usually engage? Don’t give it a second thought! Who remembers? And if someone does, and e-mails you an angry response, hey, free post!
  • Naked chicks amp up clickthroughs. Rock ’em…
  • When all else fails, never underestimate the power of a screengrab to masquerade as actual content. It’s quick, it’s easy, and requires little effort on your part.

    • Mission Improbable: The Overly-Serious Fishing Guy

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    The Mission: to infiltrate Verizon’s corporate campus and score some sweet largemouth bass. The only man for the job: the Overly-Serious Fishing Guy!

    do ya wanna get lucky? Here’s how!

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    Lucky Strike...or not?It’s big news in England that a bunch of amateur math nerds recently won the lottery. They’re pleased, of course, and rather proud of themselves for being so smart as to figure out an algorithm that turns out to be worth quite a lot, although that is, of course, in some dispute from math professionals and fearful lottery officials. It appears that you have to play the system a long time before you’re likely to hit a payout, if you get one at all and the result wasn’t, as most people imagine it to be, pure luck in the first place.

    Here in Canada we prefer sure things to probable things, so we’ve developed a fool-proof system. Be related to the guy checking the tickets.

    Lottery ‘insiders’ win big bucks
    Odds of Ontario results are astronomical, investigation by CBC program reports
    SHANNON KARI

    More than two hundred lottery “insiders” have won prizes of $50,000 or more in Ontario since 1999, and more than two-thirds of these wins may have involved the deception of a customer who bought the ticket.

    The allegation is made by the CBC program the fifth estate, after an investigation into the number of “insider wins” in the province in the past seven years.

    A statistical analysis of the number of insider wins concluded that fewer than 60 insiders, such as ticket retailers or clerks, should have won major prizes during the period that was investigated.

    The odds that the 214 insiders who claimed major prizes — $50,000 or more — since 1999 won as a result of pure luck, is one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, said University of Toronto professor Jeffrey Rosenthal, who conducted the analysis.

    Now THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call a system.

    Lucky you, MAYBE

    vid o’ the day: David Lynch and his cow

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    “Cheese is made from milk. Cheese is made from milk.”

    and this was stolen from Defamer, just like yesterday’s pic.

    Quiz: the Interview interview

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    Be a journalist; or smell just like one!

    This is the pop culture quiz given to hopeful job applicants at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Ah, remember the Eighties? Well it seems so does whoever wrote this quiz: I’m a little surprised it doesn’t have Peter Beard and Maud Adams on it, but maybe there’s a Page Two I haven’t located yet.

    See how well you do, and yes, it appears that the last one is a typo. I thought it was that scam artist John Hawkins but no, they really meant Stephen Hawking, with whom we are, of course, intimately familiar, featuring as we do his Christmas album. Oh, and did you hear Romeo is divorcing his wife? No idea if it’s for another nurse or just for physical protection, but if there’s a god in heaven Elaine Hawking will end up with David Gest.

    I have ticked off the ones I can identify; how’d you do, and if it’s “not well” can I have your job?

    From The Smoking Gun:

    Barry Diller Checked box symbol
    Joel Schumacher Checked box symbol
    Bridget Hall Checked box symbol
    Ellen Von Unwerth Checked box symbol
    Phillip Taaffe
    Michael Roberts
    Faith Popcorn Checked box symbol
    Helmut Lang Checked box symbol
    Karole Armitage Checked box symbol
    Joe Dolce Checked box symbol
    Kevin Aucoin Checked box symbol
    Julian Schnabel Checked box symbol
    Wayne Maser
    Donna Tartt Checked box symbol
    Hamish Bowles Checked box symbol
    Francesco Clemente Checked box symbol
    Harry Evans Checked box symbol
    Miuccia Prada Checked box symbol
    Michaelangelo Signorile
    Bob Colacello Checked box symbol
    Polly Melon (sic) Checked box symbol
    Douglas Coupland Checked box symbol
    Jack Pierson
    Tibor Kalman
    Juergen Teller Checked box symbol
    Rei Kawakubo Checked box symbol
    Tina Brown Checked box symbol
    Gabriella Forte Checked box symbol
    Liz Smith Checked box symbol
    Billy Norwich Checked box symbol
    Sophia Coppola Checked box symbol
    Jason Weinberg
    Lillian Hellman Checked box symbol
    Terri Toye Checked box symbol
    Steven Klein
    Victoria Bartlett
    Peter Lynch Checked box symbol
    Steven Hawkin (sic) Checked box symbol ?