Victoria's Secret at The Grove is inviting women to try on their new "It" bra and pose for photos with super-underthingies-models Heidi Klum and Marisa Miller tonight at 7 p.m. As if the lighting in the dressing rooms at that place didn't make us look fat and flat enough, now they're going to pose us next to two of the most beautiful women on the planet?

Are they insane or just sadistic?

As one FBLA source put it, "Yeah, by 4:30, you should be power-ralphing that pint of Haagen-Daaz you scarfed just to make yourself feel loved..."

FBLA found a job on Craigslist that sounds so fun, and yet has the potential to be so awful. It pays $100K, and you earn every penny, we're guessing.

Executive Luxury Gift Buyer

EMPLOYER/FAMILY DESCRIPTION:
Executive/CEO and wife
(this is where the un-fun part starts)

Special Projects
Review 26 magazines monthly for ideas, inspiration, and new information--maintain library of back issues. Produce a monthly "luxury lifestyle" binder for Mr. and Mrs. that keeps them informed of current events, what's hot in wines, cigars, cosmetics, travel, electronics, cars, luggage, clothing, jewelry and accessories.
(Twenty-six magazines? We're guessing that this isn't one of those.)

continued...

How low-tech? This low-tech.

User-created content is all the rage!

Heinz, as in ketchup and Mrs. Kerry, is looking for amateur ad types, but it's expensive to wade through crap. And they should know.

ABC offers I-Caught, a magazine show using video captured by the unwashed and massaged into stories by those trained professionals at ABC News. David Sloan is the EP.

CNN already has I-Report up and running.

Topix gets some daily 40,000 posts since adding discussion groups and comments and local "editors". The Los Angeles news is still 3 days old, alas.

And then there's the downside: one nasty worm in a MySpace page can infect a million users.

Digg started taking down posts that broke the DMR encryption code for HD-DVD movies. Those users generated revolt; Digg backed off.

(Illustration from Wild Women Jewels.)

ClearPlay is very, very proud of itself. After distancing itself from companies that create "family-friendly" versions of hit films, the DVD manufacturer sent a press release with this headline:

ClearPlay 1, Steven Spielberg 0

Powerful words, little company. The press release goes on to tout ClearPlay as the stick-our-fingers-in-your-eye victor of a Congressional law.

As the company explains, the DVD players don't alter the movies people pop into their players -- that would violate copyright laws. Instead, they skip over certain scenes ... much in the same way, say, a broken DVD player would.

The press release follow:

continued...

Advertising-types and media-types met up with extreme-sports-types this week in San Diego for a roundtable discussion titled, "What Youth Brands Can Learn From The Action Sports World." The discussion was hosted by Y-Pulse and moderated by Y-Pulse publisher Anastasia Goodstein.

We usually recoil from these types of things, but Gregg Witt, managing partner for Premise, a San Diego based "immersive marketing agency" is a nice guy -- nice enough to answer a few of our dumb questions about youth, media and marketing. So here goes:

continued...

Know how when you see people protesting something really important on TV, you think, "Good for them!" and then fastforward through their protest your TiVo?

Well, every once in awhile one of those passionate do-gooders gets you on the phone and starts talking about incarcerated nuns in Tibet and Russian sex slaves and harp seals -- and you can't fast-foward and you can't hide. Especially when they start making art about their cause celebs. Particularly if that art is in film form and you happen to write about film.

The Artivist Film Festival, started three years ago by artist/activits (get it?) by Diaky Diaz address human rights, children's advocacy, environmental preservation and animal rights, will begin this weekend showcasing all the films you didn't make. Including the L.A. premiere of Fast Food Nation.

One of the artivists, rock musician Synthian of the LA-based Exit Ophelia, talked with us about his two projects and what it means to get involved. You could read this, or you could skip down and read about Mark Burnett.

continued...

The only thing we like better on Oct. 31 than naked men on Santa Monica Blvd. is social commentary on Santa Monica Blvd. Here's a roundup of the best of it.

From LA Observed: Some ingenious chaps skewer Google's plans to clean up YouTube.

We like to this of this as a commentary on the "tangled web" WeHo streets become every Halloween.

K-Fed didn't fare well. But that didn't mean the festival was without its mass-marketed male mascot. Kevin F. Sherry, Supervisor, Nintendo Editorial Services at GolinHarris happily reported that he saw eight Marios (Here's a photo he took of Mario and two of his friends). If he isn't doing his part to sear the Nintendo brand into the brains of unsuspecting Americans, we don't know who is.

Salon's Cary Tennis has a book deal, but not for the novel he's been writing since whenever. It's a collection of his Since You Asked columns, and here's his whimsical request:

In which the Author asks his Devoted Readers to name their Favorite Columns, in order that those columns might appear in a Book.

Even though he's been answering letters for years, many of the readers' suggestions include more recent columns, including the bare down there one.

And Stan Accrington suggests:

Include a few columns where you screwed up with some lousy advice (not hard to find), and much better advice was forthcoming from readers

FBLA doesn't ask for advice, doesn't give advice (except to the LA Times) and doesn't invite readers to comment. Thanks.

Up in Salon, Cary Tennis gets a letter from a distressed "child" whose parents took up a new hobby. The child must be around 30ish, and the hobby is geneaology. Tennis coins a new term:

relative narcissism, a projection disorder in which the ego, unable to countenance its own narcissism, projects onto ancestors all the idealized qualities it would otherwise take onto itself; it is harder to diagnose than traditional narcissism because its sufferers do not act grandiose and superior.

From the way the letter-writer carries on, one would think these parents joined the Aryan Brotherhood or were breeding babies to make sausage. And whoever taught Cary Tennis in Psych 101--you should be so ashamed.

Fortunately, the readers of Salon are a smart bunch, as this response proves:

OMG! My parents don't think I'm interesting

Dear Cary: Every time I want to talk to my parents about work, my new boyfriend, or the latest episode of 'Grey's Anatomy', all they do is yammer on and on about the family tree. What's up with that? Why don't they find the excruciating minutiae of *my* life as fascinating as Uncle Jonas' smallpox or Great-Grandma Enid's political activities?

Cary: Well, obviously they're narcissists. Because as we all know, only authors and self-absorbed letter writers are allowed to be interested in the past. And although you've given me absolutely no evidence for making this blanket judgment, I'm pretty sure that they think they're better than everyone else. Okay, back to playing Bejeweled now! TTFN.

p.s. Oh yeah--get professional help, because I'm telling everyone that these days.

Why does Salon keep Tennis around when its own readers give better advice, for free?