Which superhero are you?

You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Superman 70% The Flash 65% Green Lantern 65% Catwoman 65% Iron Man 55% Supergirl 53% Robin 52% Hulk 50% Wonder Woman 48% Batman 40%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz…

iJeans

Is that an iPod joystick in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

From Reuters via CNN:

Call it the 21st Century watch pocket.

Denim giant Levi Strauss said Tuesday it had designed jeans compatible with the iPod music player, featuring a joystick in the watch pocket to operate the device.

The Levi’s RedWire DLX Jeans for men and women, which will be available this fall, also have a built-in docking cradle for the iPod and retractable headphones. Pricing was not immediately available.

(Source.)

Journalism 101: The new entertainment reporter

A copy editor friend of mine has been assigned the duty of assembling and filling her paper’s entertainment page. It’s normally taken care of by freelancers, but freelancers aren’t full-time employees, and they can’t really be relied upon, as a general rule, the same way you can rely on someone whose entire livelihood depends on you. (This is the only reason I’m employed full-time by the media, I’m convinced.) So, this self-described “natural introvert” is concerned she might have to do a little entertainment reporting. As she falls on the writer side of the writer/reporter continuum, she wanted to know what to do if she got stuck holding the bag some week.

Here’s my reply, as a former entertainment and features reporter:

Start with stuff that you’re interested in. If you’re interested in it, so is somebody else. Look through the listings of who’s touring through the area, for instance, or who’s got a gallery show or whatever, and whatever jumps out at you personally, give them a call. You’ll find it’s a lot easier to turn in a good story that you care about than the more advanced stuff.

One of my first big entertainment interviews was Neil Gaiman. While I was very nervous talking to him (more than with, say, Pat Buchanan), the fact that I knew what I was talking about when asking him questions meant I did a pretty good job at it. Naturally, I had to cut the comic stuff down so that it fit into a mainstream paper (which is why there’s a more comic booky version on my blog nowadays), but it’s better to have too much material than too little.

After that, when looking at the upcoming choices, try to find a hook that you do care about. Maybe you don’t care about, say, “Joey,” but maybe the plight of an actor who’s risking being forever typecast is interesting to you. Or, conversely, you could look at how few spin-offs of hit shows succeed. There’s a massive amount of flops out there, many of which look like they should have succeeded, on paper.

Don’t be afraid to talk to experts — you won’t always have the ability to get past a publicist to talk to the creative person yourself — but experts, especially at colleges in your area, want to get their names in the paper. Your paper may have a big book of expert sources for the media to contact. It’s worth asking. If not, call up your nearest universities and contact their public information officers and ask them if they have a list like that.

If you hate talking to people yourself, doing reviews is also always good, since you can sit in a dark room with a gun (or maybe that’s just me) and do your work that way. Local theaters and galleries never feel they have enough coverage, and both lend themselves to this kind of approach. You can also do straight stories this way, although there will have to be some actual talking to human beings, once you’ve gone and gotten the color info yourself.

Finally, remember that it’s all fishwrap. While the goal is to make every paper a jewel, you’re only as good (or bad) as your last story. If you stink it up one edition, just focus on the next and don’t obsess about something that’s already lining a bird cage anyway.

Maybe some of the other reporters who wander through here periodically, like Todd, might offer some words of wisdom of their own?

I edited my first Wikipedia entry!

I feel so very 2004. I just updated the Wikipedia entry for the Women in Refrigerators concept. I added the new URL (the old one now belongs to someone in Estonia who has the strange sense of irony to put porno on a site discussing the brutal exploitation of female characters for a quick kick of drama) and changed the name away from “Girlfriends-in-Refrigerators,” which is a baffling change that seems to have come from the misremembering of whoever posted the original entry.

I’m not a huge fan of Wikipedia in general — I think it represents itself as being far too authoritative despite being open to a whole lot of monkeying around (I didn’t have to register to make any of the changes to Wikipedia, despite their announcement that would be required) — but it’s useful for quick and dirty info, or informal distribution of information, so long as you go into it knowing that they’re possibly full of crap. If they’d move their disclaimer link up from being the very last word on the entire page up to near the top, I’d be a lot happier with it, since people might click it and realize why there has to be a disclaimer there at all.

I also notice that Gail herself has a Wikipedia entry. Damn it, I want to be interesting enough to merit one.

• Update: Fred has stepped in, fixed the name of the WiR entry, greatly expanded it, and put in an homage to the late, great Rob Harris, whom I think all of us who knew him still miss regularly and terribly.

Josh’s cancer

Given how this blog began, it seems appropriate to eavesdrop again on Josh Friedman’s great blog, which had been about anything but cancer, but life tossed the screenwriter a major plot-twist, unbidden:

I do not believe in God, and I do not believe in fate. The last two months have been tough on this particular atheist, but as an infinite monkey I have little choice but to bow down to the powers of natural selection and mutation, even when it’s happening inside my own body. There are those who suggest a greater power must be looking out for me. But the greatest power I know was doing last minute post-production on Munich so I didn’t bother calling on him, either.

I do believe in poker. I was addicted to cards, and so I quit. But they converted me to their ways. I believe in math, random chance, probability, and mostly, luck. Professional card players understand that poker is short-term luck (good and bad) eventually balanced out by long-term skill. Living, more likely, is long-term luck balanced out with occasional bouts of short-term skill. In this case, the luck is all mine and the skill belongs to those who found my tumor and took it out.

I did not fight cancer and I certainly did not beat cancer. One night cancer came and grabbed me hard by the arm, yanked me down the stairs and stood over me on the landing while I begged for mercy and waited for the rain of blows to come. Some did, enough for me to know I couldn’t have withstood the whole barrage.

And then without explanation it disappeared. And let me live. Like some monsters do.

Incidentally, if you don’t normally read I find your lack of faith disturbing, it’s probably the most interesting blog out there, for my money. Other than, you know, mine, which is riveting.