( By the way, this is what the Platinum Weird album was going to look like. )

Their continued nonexistence is a fucking travesty.

OMG IT IS SUPER TUESDAY I AM SO EXCITED FUCK

I don't know why I'm so excited. I'm certainly not going to watch the coverage, and I'm slightly less certainly going to get my heart broken (ilu Hillary, you cry if you need to) and spend the next week raging about people who vote based on music videos, but whatevs. It is Super fucking Tuesday.

It is also Giants parade day, which means there are fucking Giants fans everywhere, just standing in the middle of things. Sidewalks, subway platforms, my goddamn life. GET OUT OF THE WAY. Also, it's the Empire State Building Run-Up, which means that once I get to 34th, for every Giants fan I step around, there is some douche in yellow running shorts jogging in place behind him. MOVE. MOVE. WHY DON'T YOU PEOPLE MOVE??? I hate everybody who isn't from New York. You know who's from New York? Hillary.

I'm not sure yet what bothers me so much about this piece on Amy Winehouse from the New York Times. Perhaps it's the assertion that, were he alive today, bloggers would have branded Kurt Cobain "krazy Kurt." Oh. No. Give 'em some credit, come on. They could do better than that. But I see what you did there! Oh, those krazy kids on the Internet, with their snarky nicknames and wacky spellings! Lollerskates!11!!

Or maybe it's the utter retardedness of this: "Addiction might start with experiments by performers so young they feel invulnerable; it might seem to be, at first, a way to ease the stress of a peculiar job. It might be a way to act out the old Romantic image of the artist as daredevil." Thanks for the insight.

It's at least a little bit the stupid idea that if you are concerned about a celebrity having her problems splashed across the mass media, the best thing to do is write about her problems in the mass media -- which, admittedly, is not unique to the Times, but combined with the house style of addressing subjects by a title and last name, it seems doubly condescending and hypocritical, like she's getting scolded by a particularly obnoxious headmistress: "In the era of total exposure Ms. Winehouse would serve herself and her listeners best by working behind closed doors."

It's partially the name-checking of Facebook to suggest that ours is becoming a surveillance culture -- a suggestion which is promptly not followed up at all.

But it is definitely, definitiely the fact that we a get a full five paragraphs re-stating the same fact: back then, celebrities did their dying in private; now, because of the Internet, we see it in real time. Five paragraphs! Of the same thing! That's space you could have used to talk about surveillance culture! How we are rejecting, or at least re-defining, the notion of privacy! How maybe the reason we are so obsessed with posting our lives on the Internet is because we have seen celebrities' lives posted on the Internet, and the boundaries between celebrity and civilian are blurred, and like nine million things more interesting than five paragraphs of the same goddamn sentence! Did somebody drop an ad or something? Why were you so desperate to fill this white space? What is fucking wrong with you? What is fucking wrong with me, that you have to write this way?

Remember the '90s, when everybody cared about the environment in a non-political way, and children in Keds and brightly colored sweatshirts would go to the UN and make-guilt trip speeches asking why adults were ruining the planet for us? Stop polluting journalism! Fuck! Jesus!

In the TMZ video player:

We are all officially bad people.

I started reading Gawker in 2005, about a month after I started my internship at CosmoGIRL. It was mostly out of necessity: I was commuting out of Jersey with no prior internships, the other girls in my cubicle were in the NYU journalism program, and Gawker was a crash course -- no, an entire crash degree -- in the world of New York media. I was genuinely fond of the Gawker Stalker, though -- and, maybe not coincidentally, I finally stopped reading when they rolled out the Gawker Stalker Map, which promised concise, realtime updates of stars' whereabouts, as opposed to a lengthy, end-of-the-week compendium of snapshot nonfiction.

For all the complaints about the map, nobody mentioned the real problem, which was that it missed the fucking point: the pleasure of the Gawker Stalker was the meta double voyeurism -- watching people watching themselves watching people -- the prose and the thought, not the stargazing itself. Nobody reading Gawker (media folk in Midtown offices) was going to get up and go down to SoHo to try and catch a glimpse of Claire Danes eating a taco, especially since Gawker was all about how we didn't want to do that, anyway. How we were too good for fame, how we hated the people who thought it mattered, how we were hilariously ashamed of ourselves when we found ourselves staring at Uma Thurman in Whole Foods. And it ended up not being realtime anyway, or even particularly useful (thanks for showing me where 23rd and Broadway is, Gawker, because I totally forgot) and the whole thing was just the beginning of Gawker's downhill slide into being hostile and hypocritical and tail-eating above all else.

So maybe it was my kneejerk reaction to Gawker Media that made me hate Idolator. (Although I was still reading Defamer on and off -- probably because they still stalk celebrities in periodic digest format.) Maybe it wasn't as pompous and one-note as I thought. Or maybe it was terrible and I had good reason to stop reading. (I've also started re-reading Gawker, and they are just as awful as I thought back then, despite good coverage of the MTV permalancers scuffle and that Army Times piece.) Whichever it was, at some point while I was passionately hating them, they stopped sucking and started being pretty fantastic, and someone, I think it was koganbot, shut me up and alerted me to this fact, and this morning when Jess made a post about blogging unbathed at 10:30am and watching ER reruns, I thought, "I want to work at Idolator." And when I came across this article about Nick Denton possibly wanting to sell it off, my heart gave a panicked flutter of "oh God, no!"

None of which stops me from mispronouncing their name.

From an ABC News article on the paparazzi:

Hilton was captured sobbing in the back seat of a sheriff's car while being returned to a jail cell for repeatedly driving with a suspended license. But as Holly Millea of Elle magazine points out, even more telling than the photograph was the identity of the photographer, Nick Ut.

"What really shook me about that photograph was that the photographer who took that picture was the same guy that took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the girl running down the street, napalm having burned her clothes off, in Vietnam. And it's like, well, congratulations, this is what civilization has come to."

Elsewhere in that article, Adnan Ghalib (a.k.a. The Photographer Who Hung Out With Britney) notes that the women yelling "Get a job!" in every video on TMZ are "the first ones to be seen in a nail salon, having a pedicure, reading Us Weekly." I went to the store today and I couldn't decide between Life & Style and Us Weekly, so I bought them both, and that is why Adhamiyah isn't on the front page of The New York Times.

I am taking a quiz entitled, "What Sex is Your Brain?"

Prior to the section about attractiveness, it asks, "Which do you find most attractive as a sexual partner?" The choices are as follows: "I prefer men." "I prefer women."

OH WHAT THE FUCK? THAT IS NOT FAIR.

This section of the test is supposed to take three minutes. I've been pondering the prep question for like, nine now. Who do I choose? WHO DO I CHOOSE???

In addition to having a list of Trivial Things to Do Before I Die, I should probably also have a list of Trivial Things to Find Out Before I Die, which would include such burning questions as:

- What those things are next to the Ikea in Elizabeth?
- Which members of Platinum Weird thought Erin Grace was a good idea?
- What was the name of that game show that aired every afternoon on The Family Channel, just before Punky Brewster and The Black Stallion?

But I think I'll end up knocking off Trivial Things to Find Out faster than Trivial Things to Do, because sometimes I read Wikipedia, and my path through Wikipedia usually goes something like this: recent crimes leads to the Stanford prison experiment, which leads to a BBC show that recreated the experiment in an actual prison, which leads to a list of American reality shows, where I finally found out the name of that short-lived show on FOX where they locked people in a bunker and made them write each other's names on ping-pong balls or something, which leads to, like, Kiddie Survivor, which leads to a list of children's game shows. And I thought, oh my God, maybe they will have that game show that aired every afternoon on The Family Channel listed! And all I remembered was the end segment, where kids ran through a dingy-looking set, picking out prizes they wanted, so I read through the whole list looking for anything that sounded familiar. And, lo and behold: I'm Telling! Thank you, Wikipedia! Special bonus: Sean Astin and his brother running around the aforementioned dingy-looking set.

A while back, I bought a pack of Eclipse Lemon Ice gum, and it turned out to be the best gum in the entire universe.

You'd put it in your mouth, and at first it was kind of minty, and then the lemon joined in, and then it became this full-on lemon/mint experience, which was perfect because ever since the Altoid craze of '98 or whatever, "mint" has become a code word for "burns your fucking tongue off and also makes your sinuses hurt," but the lemon flavor kind of tempered the mint, and the mint made it less apparent that "lemon flavor" tastes like Pledge, and behold: a gum that freshened my breath without fucking torturing me, and was also tasty enough that I could chew it for a few hours after lunch. And so Eclipse Lemon Ice became a part of my life. This was back when I was working at Hairstyles of the Rich & Famous, or rather, "working" at Hairstyles of the Rich & Famous, and the highlights of my day were as follows: breakfast, lunch, Eclipse Lemon Ice. If I ran out of Eclipse Lemon Ice, I would go immediately to the deli down the street and buy more Eclipse Lemon Ice. If I had to do a phone interview while I was chewing Eclipse Lemon Ice, I would stick it in the cap of my water bottle until I could go back to chewing Eclipse Lemon Ice. I was like fucking Violet Beauregarde with my Eclipse Lemon Ice. I don't even like gum, but I loved Eclipse Lemon Ice.

And then they stopped selling it. It was still listed on the Wrigley's website and everything, but nobody carried it anymore. I tried various other fruit-plus-mint gums: something by Orbit, that weird Trident leaky gum, but nothing was the same. And then there was this thing called Eclipse Lemon Burst, which was just plain lemon, but you could tell they were trying to trick you into thinking it was Eclipse Lemon Ice, because they used the same yellow-plus-green color scheme.

So finally I wrote to Wrigley's all, "Hey, does Eclipse Lemon Ice still exist?" and they wrote back: "Eclipse Lemon Ice is now known as Eclipse Lemon Burst."

NO. NO. THAT IS NOT TRUE. YOU ARE FUCKING LIARS. ADDITIONALLY, YOU STILL LIST LEMON ICE AS A FLAVOR ON YOUR WEBSITE. WHAT THE HELL?

I miss Eclipse Lemon Ice.

The North Denver News published a bit of "social satire" as a news article, except it wasn't particularly clever, or incisive, and so nobody got that it was "social satire."

The graceful thing to do here would be to publish an editor's note stating that the piece was meant to be satirical, but the joke, alas, did not work as well as they had hoped.

Instead, the editors of the News spewed forth this bunch of sour grapes, in which they stomp around pointing out that it was supposed to be funny, of course, duh, and maybe you would have noticed that it was a joke if you hadn't been so busy pointing out how the joke didn't make sense, whatever, and furthermore they are a big publication, in case you haven't noticed, and maybe you were just too stupid to get the joke, because it was full of references to Paris Hilton, and American media consumption, and Fox News, or "Faux News" as they call it in the newsroom (inside joke! high five!), and by the way, they know the Latin word for thumb--do you???--even if they still haven't noticed that their headline is kind of grammatically nonsensical, and you know who would have found this joke totally funny? Franz Kafka. They are just like Franz Kafka. Except not dead. You probably don't even know who Franz Kafka is. So there.

So today I call my doctor to make an appointment to get my knee checked out, and when the woman goes to put my insurance info into the system, she gets an error: "Cannot process. Inappropriate service ID number." She tries using my social security number. Same error. O...kay. She says she needs the insurance company to send proof of my coverage, since she can't get it through the computer system. She also says she will talk to them if necessary. I tell her I'll get in touch with the insurance people.

I go to the insurance website, and I'm able to log in using the same info I gave her, so...weird. I call the insurance company, and they're able to pull up all my info using the same info I gave her, and they say they can't figure out why she's getting an error. I'm like, "Well, she just needs proof of coverage, can you fax it to her?" They say they can't--she has to call them and ask for it herself. They give me an 800 number for her to call.

I call the woman back, tell her she has to request the fax or fix the error herself, and give her the 800 number. And she goes all WTF on me, about how I should have had them fax my info, and she doesn't have time to call the number, and it's an automated line anyway. And it's like...lady, you said you would talk to them! Also, you got the error. You need the info. So maybe you should take care of it, because I don't have fucking psychic abilities, and I can't tell them what you need or what your computer is doing. Crazy, I know, but it's true. And the best part is, she didn't even take care of it today, so it's going to take me at least two days to make an appointment, and then it'll be another two days before I can actually see the doctor, and what if I were actually sick? Why do I bother to pay for insurance? Didn't doctors used to, like, come to your house? What the hell happened to that?

I realized precisely how stupid I am the other day, when A Socialite's Life put up a post about the bridge collapse in Minnesota (right? that's where Minneapolis is?) and it occurred to me that I would not have known about it otherwise.

Then again, CNN was all "NEWSFLASH!" about the fact that Whoopi was chosen as the new co-host for The View, so...

I guess that, at some point, you have to end up drunk and crying on the floor outside someone's bathroom, or else you're just not twenty-four. So maybe, in the long run, it won't be a big deal. But for the moment it's just...changed some things. I don't know what yet. I don't have anything to say. In the meantime, the Pixie and I went to Romeo & Juliet at Lincoln Center, and left at intermission because we are not grown-ups. We ran around the building for a little while, watching people out in the courtyard and feeling like someone was going to give us detention. Then we went to Great Adventure and got really excited about "It's Gonna Be Me" playing over the sound system. No, seriously. Twenty-four to fourteen, in three days flat.

So the rest of this post is going to be about ILX. ( Begin tuning out...now. )

Speaking of things that require way too much effort, is anybody else bothered by the new Beyonce song being like thirty-seven minutes long? Cablevision ran an emergency broadcasting system test in the middle of it, and the song was still going. (Also, the test was better than the song: some robot chick narrating the weather report over rustly muzak with staticky dudes arguing in the background and a bunch of staccato beeps. I think it was produced by Timbaland.)

There is a Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a Samuel Coleridge Taylor.

Also: PEGASUS! THE MOVIE!

Okay, so, there's this really disturbing ad in USA Weekend. And at first I wasn't even sure why I was disturbed by it, besides the fact that one of the models looks kind of like a burn victim. It's one of those ads that looks like an article, and it's like, hey, even if someone's been Botoxed or had a facelift, you can still tell they're old, because their skin is splotchy and sallow, not clear and even like a young person's, and so you should buy these skin brighteners to make you look younger. Which, like, okay.

But then the accompanying graphic is two photos, each of one side of a face, placed side-by-side so that the features match up. And the left side looks like a mixed-race or Hispanic woman, maybe 20 years old, with brownish skin, dark eyebrows, long dark eyelashes, normal lips that are basically the same color as her skin. And then the right side is like...a white toddler. Slightly rounder face, eyebrows and eyelashes pale to the point of being invisible, reddish rosebud lips.

And then you notice that both eyes have been edited to be a bright, almost cobalt blue...so it's like this graphic wants to at least suggest that it is a before-and-after of the same person. So what the ad is really saying is: this product can make you into a white person.

Addison's Anatomy? Seriously? Well, fuck you too, Shonda Rhimes. I mean, Grey's is quickly becoming the second show on which I trust the writers completely--but only because it's so cracked-out to begin with, so every episode is like the Year in Baltar's Hair. But what about Addison and Alex? What about Addison and Callie? What about Addison and Chief? Ugh. This is McStupid.

Here's a topical rant! Dude, how much did the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade suck? Okay, back in the day, didn't they have some big stars on that? Like I remember 'NSync being on there, back when 'NSync was the biggest pop act in the world. And acts from the big Broadway shows. But this year was like, these super D-list stars, like Cheyenne and The Jonas Brothers (who?) and Darlene Love from some Broadway show nobody's ever heard of. And what was with the floats? They were all rolling commercials. They had barely any themes, or they were just piled with characters from children's TV shows I had never even heard of, like "Tutenstein" and something from Discovery Health Kids Channel. Literally every float and balloon I saw was geared toward toddlers. And not even smart toddlers. On one of the floats, you could see a puppeteer's arm sticking up the puppet's ass. And also the camera work was really bad. Everything was off to the left, or they'd catch a random person wiping their nose. I kind of feel like the parade woke up, went, "Ew, rain," rolled back over, forgot to put on the snooze alarm, and woke up two hours later in a panic, then jumped out of bed, tugged on dirty clothes and one sock, and ran down to Herald Square going, "Shit shit shit!!!"

I'm eating lunch. Peanut butter & jelly sandwich with Krunchers potato chips. The Boss just came to the doorway, stood there silently, and wrote something down while I awkwardly tried to acknowledge her presence and also turn completely away because I had just stuffed a hunk of peanut butter into my mouth. Then she gave me this look which was halfway between a smile and giving up on life, left something on Officemate's desk, and walked away. I...don't know what that was about.

( Things which have happened at work. )

On an unrelated note, I totally just dropped a potato chip down my shirt, and it went between my boobs and landed somewhere on my stomach. Awesome!

On the heels of the discovery that marine life is essential to climate control, we get this from AOL News: Stingray Leaps into Boat, Stabs Man in Chest.

Steve Irwin was just a warning shot, people! The battle has begun! And you don't want to piss these stingrays off--they can change the temperature of the Earth.

As that stingray flopped back into the ocean, his victim thought he heard it hiss, "Who's warming the globe now, bitches?"

I saw a rat in the subway and I thought it was cute.

Coincidentally, I emerged from the subway to find a giant inflatable creature resembling Mighty Mouse (cape and all) standing in the street, presumably shilling for some sort of exterminator, because he was holding a much less giant inflatable rat in his hand. Now, the Mighty Mouse may actually be a Mighty Cat, because it has pointy ears, but to me it looks like a rodent, and there is something disturbing to me about a rodent exterminating other rodents. Just saying. Maybe pick a better giant inflatable ad. (Also, clean the one you do have, because ew, I think a rat infestation would be healthier than letting Mighty Camouse into my building.)

The Big Boss lost two of my stories (well, packets), and although I've been asking for them back (to write up) for weeks now, she just notified of this last week. Which means I had to re-find photos for the story, get approval, re-pitch the heds and deks, get approval of those, and scramble to find stylists to interview. ("Hello, this is Nia from Hairstyles of the Rich and Famous. I'm working on a short piece about ponytails. Would you be interested in contributing some comments to the story? Great, so let's go ahead and schedule a short interview. How about...oh, five minutes from now? Perfect.") And once that's done (which it's still not), I still have to write the things and gather up product profiles to include. By tomorrow. The Boss is all, "Gosh, we really need those because we're shipping this week. Could you maybe come in Thursday instead of Friday? Is that possible?" Well, theoretically, but if you needed them done so bad, then maybe you should have given them back weeks ago, when I asked, instead of, you know, losing them. Just a thought.