Remeber how I talked about women bloggers and what not?  Ok we’ll I’ve run across one that wants to do a advice column for wetwired.  So, I am going to introduce Lisa who no doubt has an interesting out look on things.  I hope she can put up with us.
 
Welcome!

In case you didn’t notice - wetwired had a celebrity post on the site. Well I consider anyone who’s affiliated with the movie industry some sort of a celeb. at least. Even the janitor… ok well maybe not. Anyway in the comments section of Fnliii’s post about our Wetwired trip to see Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle, you’ll see one of the screen writers commented. In this comment he not only says ‘hi‘, but he somewhat apologizes for what happened when Fnliii asked a question that Harry Knowles completely turned around. All I can say is thanks Jon. Its not often someone comes back and sets the record straight. And its really, really rare for someone in Hollywood to come back and do it for a small time Austin website. So Kudos to you my friend you went up in my book.

In case your wondering just who this guy is, you won’t find much information out there about him YET. IMDB only has his first professional movie listed as H&K. As I understand it he is also behind some of the writing in Scary Movie 3, American Pie 3 (American Wedding) and a few others. Interesting enough as they discussed in the Q&A session after the screening they (meaning:Jon and his writing partner Hayden Schlossberg) have several more screen plays in the works. One of which they said they already had in the planning stages: Harold and Kumar go to Amsterdam. The other projects they said revolved around eating at some place or drinking. You can only assume that these will be very funny comedic stories judging from the success of Harold and Kumar.

Now, for those of you looking for additional movie trailers “r” rated ones you can go here. I’m not sure whose site it is hosting these links but you’ll see something differnt here than you will from their official website.

And no. This Jon Hurwitz is not the screen writer. He just happens to have the same name.
 
Update: I got an email from Jon stating they didn’t have anything to do with American Wedding.  He did thank us for the props though. 

Just so you know, Hayden and I had no involvement in American Wedding.  I’ve read on the Internet elsewhere that we were involved, but that’s incorrect.  Thought I’d give you the correct info. - Jon

Anyway, my only regret is that I bought a movie poster - a $40 value (to have it shipped in time for the show) and I didn’t get it signed by any of them.  When we were at the show they asked everyone to please not pester for autographs.  So not wanting to be “that asshole” I took my poster and went home.

Wow, it seems that everyone is stopping blogging these days. Helen even pointed it out yesterday on her site. Amazingly her post was somewhat of a catalyst for Rob over at Xset to start blogging again. Emily also took time to stop and now she has come back.

Wetwired from time to time has stopped for a month or two or more whilst I got my life in order, or did a site re-design. The thing is, we as humans need change. Even when we state we need some sort of consistency or static thing in our lives. Deep down, we still need change. Whether it is a new site, a new story, a new pair of shoes. We crave it. So when we find ourselves staring at a blank entry with nothing to write about. Most of us come up with one notion. “I can’t do this any more.”

So here are wetwired’s tips on how not to stop blogging, but merely to take a break and reassess your blogging situation.

1. Stop posting more than once per day.
If that’s not enough, take a full week break from your blog. Take time away from the computer all together if needed. Before posting - why don’t you browse some of the many other blogs out there and enjoy what they have to say.

2. Accept that you are the author of you blog and that YOU call the shots. Yes you may have a fan base (readership) that seems to be dependent on you, but they will still be there when you come back. Er… well most of them will be. Your readers don’t tell you how to live your life. They don’t tell you when to post and when to have an opinion on a subject. Which brings me to my next point.

3. You don’t have to have an opinion on every little event out there. Some things get talked about over and over again already by the media.

4. Take time before you post something. Maybe just work out some ideas for posts a week in advance, and work on them like you would a project, add to them but don’t post them until you have them tweaked just the way you want to.

5. Redesign your site from time to time. A little spring cleaning never hurts. Usually with a re-design you re-vitalize your commitment to blogging and writing in general.

Of course there are lots of other things you can do but these outta start you off on the right track. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to please anyone, only yourself.

(hat tip to Lynn for this one.) It appears that Mr. Moore has pissed off the Canadians eh?

Michael Moore (noun): An American Jackass who likes to meddle in other countries’ affairs; someone who violates other nations’ laws in order to promote his double-speak; a phony.

On a sunny day in June 2004, Michael Moore was ranting and raving. Yes, we know — par for the course so far. However, what he was ranting and raving about was of significant importance. On this particular day, Michael, the self-proclaimed defender of the little guy, broke the very rules that are meant to protect the little guys, i.e. us Canadians.

See, according to Part 11, Division 9, section 331 of the Canada Elections Act, it is an offence for “[Any] person who does not reside in Canada [to], during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate unless the person is (a) a Canadian citizen; or (b) a permanent resident.”

Also according to Section 500 (3) of the same Act “Every person who is guilty of an offence ?is liable on summary conviction to a fine of not more than $2,000 or to imprisonment for a term of not more than six months, or to both.”

Sign that petition. Even if you’re not a Canadian…

At least in the blogger world… So you want to open up a website and draw a crowd? Want to have massive numbers of visitors each day? Simple. Be born a woman. The vast majority of web surfers are still men. Men who have the unfortunate (or fortunate) issue of thinking with two heads rather than one. So if you have boobies.. and you’re a woman (we’re not talking about the movie dodgeball.. don’t go there), You can build up a fan base fairly quickly.

Men don’t even care what you write about as long as you show some pics, or a hint of nudity every once in a while. Bamn, instant readers.

I’m not saying that sites that men write don’t get tons of readership. But those sites take an uncanny amount of time. I mean IMAO has got to be a full time job. But Helen, who posts usually once per day and doesn’t dwell on the site continues to grow in her readership. Part of the reason for her success is that her posts are very in depth and descriptive and very very personal. Although, some of us actually care, others just go waiting to see new pics and really don’t read her blog.

Other sites like Hot Abercrombie Chick! are very insightful and well written, but its this authors opinion that if she was Hot Abercrombie Dude! She wouldn’t’ even have a sliver of her 109k hits that she does now.

About a 9 months or so ago Dana posted her Bloggers with Boobies for the anti-feminists. These are the chicks who are proud to be women bloggers and proud of their boobs.

It’s not a cult; you won’t be asked to vote in a bloc or wage war on the Bloggers With Pee-Pees or anything; it’s just a badge of pride for all strong, self-assured female bloggers (like me) who refuse to be ashamed about their femininity. We’re the anti-feminists.

These are the women that have it easy. Now they could say that oh, they get harassed every day by horny men and its not as easy as it looks. But we’re not talking about harassment here, were talking about how easy it is for you to get readership on a daily basis just because you have boobies.

In the process of writing this it was made apparent to me that there was a conspiracy afoot. To explain: I have investigated something that I thought as just a myth or rumor before but now, with more concrete evidence I am stunned. Ok, not so much. The internet is full of anonymity. I will not personally say anything until I have unequivocal proof. Which I may never have. Anyway, It appears that there has been some controversy weather or not Hot Abercrombie Chick(HAC) actually is a chick at all. This guy has it out for her/him. He even went so far as to post IP address traces of the guy who could be using pictures of a girl and posting his own thoughts. Justin, goes on in his research about how he determined that HAC is a dude.

Daniel Zeigenbein last updated his website on January 14th, 2004. You may think he had abandoned it, but it is more likely that he has little time to maintain it anymore with all the work he is doing as the Hot Abercrombie Chick.

About 2 weeks after his last update, the HAC was thrust into the blogosphere. Since then, it has been a relentless onslaught of drudging articles about god, philosophy, evil, and ontology. Concurrently, the HAC was trolling every weblog that had anything, or even nothing, to do with the content on the HAC website and posting comments. Copious comments. Off-topic comments.

Traceable comments.

Since my last post about the HAC’s use of an anonymous proxy server, Cameron Marlow and I have procured the IP source addresses from the proprietors of certain A-List weblogs for comments made by the HAC.

These comments were made during the period known as “before all rational webloggers determined the HAC was a hoax.” It was therefore also known as the “hoaxster’s careless phase.”

This shows us two things. One: You can never fully know who is posting through the internet. Two: Daniel posing as HAC got more hits than he could ever imagine because suddenly he had boobs. Now as stated before, he could merely be cashing in on the idea that women bloggers get more readership or she could just be caught up in a vicious conspiracy by some stalker.

My post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Gigglechick(tm). She has slowly gained a hefty following as well and, as of recent events surrounding the officespace wars fiasco, has jumped in status of hits and readership.

This site has been around for oh.. 4 years and aside from the ups and downs of the site, really only averages a fraction of the readership that the other sites do. We’ve put our heads together and come up with a couple ideas in order to have what we’d like to call a “readership drive”

a. We actually write longer and better articles
b. Hire a hot chick to take pics and write on occasion (or we’ll write and we’ll just claim its her)
c. Just have a wet t-shirt contest
d. The contest would consist of women bloggers and there would be some sort of incentive… er prize..
e. Scrap a,b.

As you can see, we at wetwired simply want to see boobies. Stay tuned for details of the wetwired t-shirt contest.

So, The Amazing Race began last week and I decided to watch it this year. I’d heard a lot about the show from others, so I’m giving it a shot.

The show comes on at 9 PM CST every Tuesday on CBS, and tonight I called Pylorns and advised him that he really ought to watch the show next week. Why, you ask?

Well, it’s because of Sharla and Mirna.

I know you’re asking who the hell these two are. Well, Mirna is a nice looking blonde woman who is doing this with her cousin, Sharla. Sharla has inspired Mirna to put forth her best effort, and despite everything they’re in second place now.

Oh, and I forgot to mention- Sharla’s a midget.

…

I’ll repeat that.

Sharla’s a little person.

The two are in second place in this race at this stage, and the only reason they’re not in first is- and I’m dead serious- Sharla couldn’t run fast enough for the two to beat another team to the end of the leg. Every so often on the show you’ll hear Mirna scream “Sharla, come on!” and Sharla will shout at times “Mirna, hold up!”

Now, while Sharla ends up bringing up the rear in physical contests she usually manages to make Mirna look every bit the blonde that she is in mental activities. Mirna’s not dumb- well… Not entirely dumb. I’m sure that outside this game she’s very intelligent. However… Ditzy doesn’t quite cover it.

And these two would have been in first place tonight. That pretty much says it all, folks. All the pretty people and fine physical specimens in this race, and a ditz and a midget are schooling them all- well, all except for the Christian and his girlfriend, last year’s Miss Texas USA.

Beerslinger, I ain’t gonna defend this one.

Out.

Yes.. I’m buying tickets…Rokum Sokum Midget Wrestling Featured on MTV, WWA, NWA - TNA, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Thunderbox, owner & creater of Bloodymidgets.com, and many, many movies, is coming out with a new and outrageous show for your local bars, clubs, and festivals. Puppet performs everywhere from 300 to 16,000 seat locations. Puppet the Entertainer will provide a 1 to 1 1/2 hour show with a comedy routine, midget games, dance contest - how low can you go?, midget shots on the bar, and a night of hosting with the local DJ’s. The humor will have the crowd rolling.

After like 3 months of being down, the tucker max site is finnally back up. Check it out here.

Only gonna say this once, folks.

Many of you may not be aware of who Rick Reilly is. If you don’t know, he’s a writer for Sports Illustrated who has also written several books. Once of these books is the remarkable Who’s Your Caddy? released in 2003.

This is possibly one of the funnier nonfiction books I’ve ever read. You don’t have to be a golf fan to appreciate the stories he tells of those he caddied for in researching this book. You should pick up a copy in a bookstore, if only for the chapter on Donald Trump. It’s one of my new favorite nonfiction books. Take a chance on it, folks. You won’t be disappointed.

Out.

If you have gotten tired of fluffer haiku, then try this one on for size: it

Oh, oh, look at number 4.. top search string - Fluffers. That’s right, fluffers is up there.

1 19 10.61% tennessee titans players
2 5 2.79% white castle austin
3 4 2.23% austin texas blog
4 3 1.68% fluffers
5 3 1.68% texas blog
6 3 1.68% texas ren 01
7 2 1.12% chuck e cheese cam
8 2 1.12% fnliii
9 2 1.12% harold and kumar go to white castle
10 2 1.12% hitchens michael moore telluride
11 2 1.12% hooters tennessee
12 2 1.12% lsuchat
13 2 1.12% michael moore christopher hitchens telluride
14 2 1.12% pictures of old people
15 2 1.12% teemu selanne helsinki news
16 2 1.12% telluride film festival
17 2 1.12% telluride film festival hitchens
18 2 1.12% toilet cam
19 2 1.12% where di d the movie fahrenheit 9/11 get it’s name
20 1 0.56% 14 old people photo

On a recent wired magazine article they discussed the pressures of running a popular blog and posting on a daily basis. I know all too well the pressures of running a blog and trying to keep fresh content up.

For Glenn Reynolds, a professor at the University of Tennessee and the author of InstaPundit, one of the most widely read conservative blogs, the best thing about blogging is interacting with his readers.

“There are a lot of smart people everywhere,” he said, “and I think it’s easy for people who work at universities, where there are supposed to be a lot of smart people, to forget that there are a lot of other smart people out there in all walks of life.”

But having such a forum can quickly become a demanding habit.

Several bloggers contacted for this story noted that their readers seem to look at their regular, consistent posting patterns as somewhat akin to a sign of physical health. And any break in that pattern is sometimes seen as a cause for alarm.

Although Wetwired is just a glimpse of a shadow of what Glenn’s site is, it is still a part time job between the three of us (myself, fnliii, and beerslinger - currently). We try to write original content and not borrow from other sources and try to point out what others are not pointing out. Or bring a fresh perspective to those issues. A lot of times it really just comes down to - you either are on or your not.

If you liked Boogie Nights, or Magnolia, or even Punch Drunk Love, you’ll love Hard Eight. The director Paul Thomas Anderson has a unique way of writing/directing that stands out from other directors. I like to compare him to M. Night Shyamalan as far as uniqueness goes. Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) actually wrote/directed Hard Eight several years before his big success with Boogie Nights. He also casts a lot of the same characters, ie. John C. Reily, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman. All three of these guys have been in his other movies. Also in Hard Eight are Gwyneth Paltrow, and Samuel L. Jackson.

The story has some sort of a plot twist at the end because we all are curious why an older gentleman would be this altruistic to a punk kid (John Reily). The plot summary is thus: Sydney( Phillip Baker Hall) comes across this young guy John Finnegan (John C. Reily) at a truck stop outside of Vegas. Sydney offers him a cup of coffee and a cigarette and then brings him back to Vegas, gives him a $50 bill and shows him how to win money. Then Sydney walks out of his life or so it seems.

The story next unfolds 2 years later in Reno where Sydney appears again in John’s life and helps him and his g/f out of a jam. It becomes apparent that Sydney and John have developed some sort of a father-son relationship and at times it is awkward between them because of this. Hard Eight is not too long of a film, but the acting in it is superb. When finished, I watched some of the special features of this DVD where they did practice labs on several of the acting scenes and it is easy to tell why PTA is an awesome writer/director and has an eye for human interaction.

And with a strange turn of events we have two winners, Lynn and Jimmie. So we split the prizes. I dont know if we’ll have another survivor III or not. At least at this point we won’t any time soon. Something tells me that if we do anything else Jim and I will cook up something more interesting.

Whats next for wetwired in the coming months? Well, of course there is a lot more work to be done to the site so keep your eyes peeled for little subtle changes. Also if you are linking to this site but I haven’t linked you or you’ve been linked in the past and aren’t now let me know. We’ll get that link exchange worked out. I’ll give a shout out to the Hot Abercrombie chick who linked to us. You can check out all the other people in wetwired’s blog roll here.

So, the Wetwired crew went out on a road rally yesterday.

This was a promotion for the world premiere of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, which we spoke about a couple weeks ago on the site. Our team consisted of team captain Pylorns, MJ, and Angela (who is a really cool person, and I found out in our initial meeting) and myself. The rally itself would have been much more successful for us had the crew handling the directions for us not completely screwed up. True story- we found out at one point that the dispatchers repeatedly confused our team with another, thus giving us the wrong directions a few times.

At the end of the rally, we find ourselves at an undisclosed location where the real fun begins. 5000 White Castle burgers are being cooked for the rally participants. Local internet celebrity Harry Knowles showed up as the host of this little soiree. I’d heard of Knowles for years, but had never seen him before.

Now, I don’t like to kid people about their size or weight. I’m a large man myself, so it’s kind of off limits for me to really attack. So, when I say that Knowles is easily twice my size I don’t say it lightly. The man uses crutches to get around, as he cannot support his own weight (hasn’t been able to for years). This wouldn’t even be brought up, were it not for the events that transpired after the movie.

The movie itself was not too bad. What I liked most about it was that it was an unconventional coming-of-age kind of movie. The writers decided to focus more on the humor and the lighter aspects of the story, and as such it doesn’t come across as heavy-handed in the way that our two main characters grow and change. These two guys aren’t looking for a new direction in life- they just want the White Castle burgers. They happen to experience growth in the process, but it comes across organically and it doesn’t feel forced. It’s not the primary focus of the story.

This is what I was trying to say. What happened instead wasn’t put across as well.

After the movie, there was a Q&A session. I tried to ask a question, but the guys onstage couldn’t hear me at all (The writers, the director, the two main stars, and Knowles himself). Determined to put my question and compliments across, I headed up closer and got to where they could hear me. Knowles saw me, and pointed to me to ask my question.

I freely admit, I’m not the best at putting across my thoughts verbally. I tend to think faster than my mouth moves, and as such my spoken words can sound stilted or meandering. It’s one reason why I like to write more than I like to speak- behind the keyboard, I can keep up with the pace a lot easier.

I started to ask my question, which got interrupted midway by Knowles. I got up to the point where I was saying that their growth was not the primary focus of the movie and that the change wasn’t the primary focus. Knowles jumps in at this point, and with his rephrasing of the question my compliments are turned into an implied insult on the writers, the director and the two actors onstage. (For those of you that were there- yes, I was THAT guy.) I found out later from Pylorns that the guy behind us said “Man, shut the fuck up and sit down” sometime during my question.

MJ pointed out later that the question I was asking wasn’t really the question you’d want at this kind of event, and to an extent I’d agree. We had just finished watching a stoner flick. It was a lighthearted movie attended by people of a similar mindset. A serious commentary wasn’t really appropriate at a movie screening where at some point, I’m damn certain several people flared up the chronic in appreciation for the entertainment provided (at least one person did, as the smell I caught a whiff of suggested).

Despite the embarrassing moment, the night turned out to be quite fun. We watched a decent flick, saw some cool actors, and I didn’t have any problems after eating 16 sliders. All in all, a pleasant outing.

Out.