Core Samples

Sample the First:

Tour the Blogosphere in all its warp and woof via the "Next Blog" button. This unassuming link, located in the upper-right-hand corner of this and all blogger blog pages, is your world tourguide.

I was looking at my traffic numbers (which are pathetic but that's OK and not the point), and saw that all my visitors today had come from other blogs. Other blogs so unrelated to mine that they could only be connected via a randomizer. Sooo, I embarked on my own brief Bloggyssey. Sole rule: must progress via the Next Blog button.

In my wanderings I found Gardenpoet, a liberal-minded mom who reads a lot and works in marketing, and I enjoyed the jejeune ravings of Sugarlounge, a self-anointed "relatively comical young black man" who writes about being a teenager (fashion, dating, self-discovery) somewhere in England. Clicking right along, I glanced in on an Arabic poet in Australia whose name I've forgotten (when did my PC learn to display the Arabic alphabet?), and a depressed soccer-playing twerp of a girl, and a worried grad student, and a daffy Grecian who lives in Chile and doesn't shower as much as he'd like to ... and about a million gibberish-stuffed marketing sites created to improve search engine rankings by linking to other sites.

And the Next Blog button links keep changing. Oblique Strategies Gone Wild.

Sample the Second:

"Easy." Rented this spectacularly good movie last night and found that I know or used to know or work with the editor, the music supervisor, the music consultant, and the unit publicist (formerly a snooty entertainment journalist). And I don't work in movies. But having lived and worked here for two decades, I've accreted endless acquaintances, and an independent feature made in this city turns out to have employed several of them.

Sample the Third:

MOCA openings used to serve a mnemonic function, stirring up half-forgotten former neighbors and co-workers and friends from the silty depths, but as more of my contemporaries recede into the middle age distance, the crowds grow younger and less familiar. (And over the deafening ambient chatter they silently scream "What are you doing here?")

Feh. The blog is going steadily downhill as I become less of a writer and more of a blogger. It's been drizzling since last night. A milky cloud bank has settled in above the Pass and obscured the Hollywood Sign. And I am off to practice spelling or grammar or reading with Victor, Jose, Josito, Fanny, et al.