happy birthday me.

I'm done. Only 49 hours late. Damn, i couldn't even make the self-imposed two day late deadline. Why do I think this will magically correct itself once I go pro? Because...

"Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M get the money, dolla dolla bill y'all....."

Comic genius Chris Farley reincarnated in a young Korean girl.

This is a masterpiece.

Ondal, India
Teoma will surpass Google as the search engine of choice. You heard it hear first.

Blog Links

--Interesting article in Wired Magazine about blogging. You too can turn a profit. By Andrew Sullivan.
--Former MTV VJ Adam Curry's blog. He got fat. Damn, that takes me back to 1989, back when we used to walk to sook kyung imo's house after school and watch Back to the Future until it was time to go to Tae Kwon Do. Damn they had a lot of movies.
--Just in case you get into a tight jam, here's a diagnostic tool at CurlyFries.com. I will never, ever, need to use this.
--Blog search engine: blogdex

Damn
So it's 5 a.m. There is some curly haired guy crashed on our couch and he stinks of BO. It was worse before but that shit still lingers. My roommate ate all my damn chinese food and all I got are these damn Drake's Pecan Spins. 99 cent special. I bought Mountain Dew Code Red because I wanted to spice up my life a little bit but now I'm just gonna get cancer. My story needs 1000 more words and I have seven hours to do it. Actually, I have -41 hours to do it since it was due on Wednesday but I'm going to use the old amnesia excuse. I feel bad because everyone knows Prof Blum is a pushover, him being a first year professor and all (and esp since he's a writer not an editor, magazine at that), and I am the worst offender. Still, I was given the Greatest Story Idea award during class, too bad I ditched that day. I have to clean my room. I have five days to finish the Korean kyopo murder story from start to finish, we were given two months.

I love New York. Now more than ever.

Drumroll please. .........[slowly builds up].............[louder]..................bah!


Photo courtesy of Susan Kim.

the spot's gettin' hot...it might be time to switch to Harriet Tubman mode...

X - Rearrange the whole game with my rugged sound
X - Won't even say your own name when I come around
X - Stay on top but remain from the underground

So I'm sniffing out this story. Damn, it smells good. Another murder story involving Korean kyopos...it's very complicated.

We had to write a trend story for my Cultural Affairs class. Since I didn't think of a topic until the last minute, the only trend I could think of was blogging. So, I tried to twist it to have an arts angle and this is what came out. Not my best work, but considering I came up with the topic less than 12 hours before deadline and wrote it in about 6 hours, it's not that bad. But it lacks original quotes and is basically a piece of shit. But it has potential. I might fix it and pitch it somewhere, then again, I might not. Whatever.

-------

Britney Spears was drenched in urine. She had been shooting a video near a Los Angeles apartment complex late one night last month when enraged neighbors finally decided they had had enough with her late night crooning and threw a bucketful of their own version of non-carbonated Mountain Dew at the pop princess. Needless to say, Britney didn't come out smelling like roses. Bad jokes aside, the bad joke played on Britney Spears went totally overlooked by mainstream publications. Pop-obsessed fans got their information from a different source, from something called a "blog."

"Fed-up and sleepless, some residents took it on themselves to shower buckets of urine on her hot bod. Their apparent goal was to clue Britney in to the quality of life for me, thereby causing her to lose all hope and ambition," writes 'Plaid' co-operator of a web site called "BlogHop," in a March 12 entry titled "Britney's Golden Showers.' "Well it worked... the teen queen, movie star, and Bob Dole temptress fled the field, giving the residents some peace and quiet. Filming apparently did not resume that morning. The young pop diva was unavailable for comment about what she now understands my life to be."

Ask a random person on the street if they know what "blogging" is and chances are they will either give you a blank look or punch you in your stupid question-asking face. But although blogging may sound like something a winter Olympian might passionately pursue, it's actually a red-hot craze that's changing the way people get their news and swap ideas or opinions. And for Britney Spears, it may change how some of her adoring fans see her.

Blogs, short for web logs, are a cross between online diaries and independent news services. Led by industry leader (yes, it's an industry) blogger.com, anyone with the ability to use a mouse and stare listlessly at a computer screen will be able to sign up for a free account and within minutes be publishing anything his or her heart desires, with the whole world watching. Well, maybe not the whole world, at least not at first, but so goes the nature of grassroots internet publishing, which falls under what net heads like to refer to as "peer-to-peer" applications, where people share information one person at a time. Sort of like a phone call. But similar to party lines and conference calls, blogs can work the same way. The content of blogs runs the gamut, ranging from emotional and highly personal diary entries to film reviews and Hollywood rumors and gossip to insightful political commentary from the nation's top pundits. Washington Post and New York Times columnist Andrew Sullivan's blog, andrewsullivan.com, draws tens of thousands of devout readers daily. Some blogs, like BlogHop, specialize in providing hundreds of links to other blogs relating to pop culture.

The beauty of the system lies in its limitless connectivity. For example, let's say you love Britney Spears and decide to devote an entire blog to worshipping her and each one of her fabulous hip-hugging outfits. Someone in Brazil can go on any search engine, let's say google.com, and type in "spears hip-hugging outfits." Your site pops up and in a few seconds they are reading your intelligent analysis of the singer's inspirational booty-shaking. Except that you don't say it crudely like that but with a style and grace unique to you. Brazilian Bob reads it and likes what he sees, so he puts up a link to your site on his own Britney-loving blog. Pretty soon, you have a loyal following of readers from Brazil, Australia, and Portugal (yes, even Portugal!), all very eager to read your daily interpretation of the Blonde One. Sometimes they disagree with you ("they're real!"), and they let you know in a little section on your blog designated for comments. Arguments ensue, and the Aussies decide to hack into your site and replace all the sexy pictures with black-and-white photos of Gertrude Stein and her sporty Julius Caesar hairdo. It could happen, hypothetically.

But in reality, you don't need computer hacking skills to become a blogger. This is one of the main appeals of this new medium: anyone can do it. Back in the pre-blog days, guerilla writers and artists often resorted to making photocopied "zines" of their personal work. These projects required a substantial commitment and the fruits of their labors often went unharvested, exposure is often minimal in such ventures. In the mid 90s, electronic zines began surfacing but only those with a mastery of internet programming languages like Java and HTML could participate. In 1998, a handful of web journal sites began cropping up, homemade programs intended to allow people to add little comments to the linked stuff they found online. The programs soon spread and in 1999 in the thick of the dot-com boom, a company called Pitas offered the first free build-your-own-weblog tool. Blogger.com came into the picture not long after and while Pitas was easy to use in comparison to the proto-weblog programs, Blogger was child's play and soon became the industry standard.

"By searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day," says Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, in her widely-known history of blogging.

People accustomed to following Roger Ebert's reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times or on his TV show will begin to question his ideas with their own, finely-honed personal opinions. While it may take some time the majority of blogs are from young people, the computer generation. But soon it will become mainstream, or rather, there is a possibility there will be no mainstream. Tastes will diversify and genres in film, music, television, and theater will be divided into subgenres and so on at an exponential rate.

But there are problems. Free online journal hosting sites like Blogger face profitability issues, particularly in the wake of the dot-com bust and have been experimenting with upgraded versions for a small fee, which may turn some bloggers away. In addition, corporate advertisers will not release their grip on public opinion. Still it is a fairly safe bet to say that the beginning of a Cultural Revolution looms in the distance.[None of this shit makes sense. I line edited this shit during class and made it sound better, but since i didn't put any of the corrections into the word file, it's shite. I'll fix it later. Ed. ]

At popdirt.com, a blog specializing in celebrity gossip, readers are arguing over the validity of the urine attack on Britney which the site also reported and included two blurry photos lifted from a Swedish tabloid. The first picture showed an unidentifiable liquid cascading down on her, the second showed the pop star moments later, looking rather unsexy, walking gingerly in an undetermined direction.

One irate reader posted a comment in reaction to the story.

"That is not piss being trhown (sic) at Britney! In her US video for 'Overprotected' she gets stuck in a rain shower. The picture is that scene." argues Linda Lou. "Morons!"

Two hours later, a comment was left by "Brentwood_Babe" who challenged Lou with, "Then why did she run for cover into her trailer???" Lou did not leave a rebuttal.

It was not completely clear whether Lou was a Britney Spears fan or simply a truth crusader. In the photos, Britney is indeed wet but results are inconclusive. In a perfect world, photos would be scratch-and-sniff. The only other news sources besides Hollywood gossip sites (professional sites not blogs, by the way) to report on the pee incident was Sky News, a Rupert Murdoch-backed news organization in the UK whose credibility is a far cry from The Washington Post. So who do you believe? The bitter blogger, sneering at Britney's misfortune with smug contempt? The conscientious objector? Sky News? Not bloody likely. Then again�
Blogging expert Rebecca Blood's echoes in your mind.

"Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand."

Question everything and blog on.

-30-

Peter is on vacation. He will be back later this week.

The Bitch

Damn that bitch was a bitch. I hated her from the moment I laid eyes on her. One of those judgmental fuck-off types that really doesn't have the clout to be acting that way. There we were, chillin at Forte in K-town, me and my brother. He just wanted to hit it, I just wanted to sock her nose.

I hate her type and everything she stands for. One of those non-Korean speaking korean bitches who gets on your nerves with her fucking career and her fucking Fendi bag. Back in the day, I woulda told her straight up to fuck off but that's just not my style no mo. so I played it cool and subtly told her to suck it. Of course, being the dummy that she was, didn't get it and now continues to live in oblivion. me and my brother discussed his game with her and i warned him to be wary, she was a definite My Lalh, or a girl that will make your life a living hell.

In other news, went to Jersey, ate a nice filet mignon. It was good to have a nice dinner for once. Shit, it's crazy to hang out with my cousins and their married asses and their kids and their minivans and shit. But it was fun. They are all so fucking smart and witty and just good people...Including me and my brother and my two cousins and their husbands, there were four B.A.'s, two B.S.'s, two J.D.'s, one P.H.D., one P.H.D. candidate, and four M.A.'s if you count my graduate degree which I'll be getting in a month. I had the bright idea of gettin my niece and nephew presents, julia loved the piyo piyo stuffed animal and little nick showed his appreciation for the pillow thing we got him by throwing a french fry at me and screaming...it was great.



In still other news, I feel like eating some cholymelon. Dont' ask me why. peace.