Blogistan

Ha ha. Former Defamer and Yahoo! movie blogs overseer Mark Lisanti has got a typically subversive take on Sunday’s 84th Academy Awards, at his new Grantland home. In light of the fact that this year’s ceremony “is throwing off roughly as much heat as an ice-fishing Yeti snacking on a Creamsicle,” he chose – instead of some last-minute buzz-o-meter readings – to cue up and live-blog the upset winner for Best Picture of 2005.

Here for example is the second entry in his retro, Crash Angeles extravaganza, which assesses the kinder-gentler aura now given off by the opening credits:

1:12 — “A Film by Paul Haggis.” There was a time, namely a good four years after seeing this movie, when those words would instill fear/dread/rage, but now that’s gone. He did the good James Bond! He’s fighting Scientology! He was on Entourage! Pretty big turnaround there. (Well, not the Entourage thing.) I’m kind of into him now.

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It’s always a big deal when LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel heads back to his native Venezuela. Especially when he brings along the LA orchestra for their first ever performance there under his direction.

Traveling along with Dudamel is KUSC-FM producer and host Brian Lauritzen. He has been blogging and tweeting a series of lively updates, well worth following for any LA classical music fan.

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• UnBeige: Fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier creates a logo-emblazoned gold bullion bar.
• FishbowlDC: What journalists will miss most about the Jon Huntsman campaign.
• TVNewser: Gawker irks Brian Williams by publishing a private email to Nick Denton.
• eBookNewser: Rumor has it Apple is going to release the “GarageBand” of e-books.

In a post about Kanye West‘s new company DONDA, Seth Abramovitch joked that the name was an acronym for “Dis Original Nigga Dresses Aight.” Writing those words got Abramovitch fired from Gawker.

Granted, with a name like Seth Abramovitch, you really shouldn’t be throwing around the n-word, even as a joke. Even if that joke is about something a rapper might say, one who uses the n-word regularly. That being said, is this really a firing offense? From a website that once posted a graphic photo of a murder victim for the world and his grieving family to see? The blogger who posted that photo still works for Gawker, by the way, making this seem like a pretty arbitrary application of ethical standards.

But it could also signal a shift at Gawker. Abramovitch appears to have been canned by the site’s new editor, A.J. Daulerio, who may be intent on bringing higher moral standards to the website. Or he may just be playing into political correctness. Time will tell.

She’s already been crowned “America’s most popular mom blogger” by Disney’s Babble.com. Now, Rebecca Woolf (pictured) is preparing to expand the reach of her Girls Gone Child brand thanks to a new partnership announced today with HGTV.com.

In introducing herself to the Home and Garden TV faithful, Woolf outlined her Golden State credentials:

I’m a California girl (raised by the beach in San Diego) who has lived the last twelve years in Hollywood, where I make my living as a writer and blogger. I grew up in a home where most of the art was painted by family and friends and-or came down through generations…

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Even though Yifat Oren (pictured) prefers not to be referred to as a “celebrity wedding planner,” that moniker has stuck because of her A-list clientele. Today, in what appears to be her first and only blog entry on the HuffingtonPost, she criticizes the constant media frenzy that surrounds major Hollywood nuptials.

Oren feels that today’s constant coverage of celebrities chips away at the self-worth of the audience-at-large. She also recalls that while working the Kevin Costner wedding in Aspen, Colorado, she was astounded when she finally caught sight of a hillside filled with photographers wielding telephoto lenses:

I thought to myself, what is it these people are trying to capture? What story are they trying to tell? Having witnessed celebrity nuptials several times since that day, I can attest to the following; there is no special story, celebrity weddings are like all other weddings, they have snafus, annoying family members, bouquets that need to be fixed, toasts you could have lived a lifetime without. It’s a wedding, that’s it, no more nor less. If you are still vested in fairytales, may I suggest the Brothers Grimm, they were my favorite.

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TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington certainly thinks so. Heather Harde, the “business brains” behind TechCrunch, is leaving the company she helped turn into a multi-million dollar business. Arrington, who was noisily fired by Huffington in September, contends this most recent departure at AOL is another casualty “of Arianna’s ego.” The CEO of one of AOL’s most profitable properties should’ve “been embraced and treasured,” he says on his blog, but instead had to deal “with constant verbal abuse from HuffPo execs” who “refer to her by the ‘c’ word.”

Aol needs to decide whether it exists for the benefit of stockholders, users and employees, or whether it exists for the greater glorification of Arianna Huffington. She’s waging this political power war inside of Aol against anyone who stands “against” her. But no one’s fighting back because that’s not how they see the world. Instead they just drift off, to create real value at other companies who actually value them.

Harde became TechCruch CEO in 2007, and helped broker last year’s sale of the company to AOL for $30 million. Since the acquisition, she has also served as general manager of AOL’s technology properties. Harde’s last day at the company will be December 31.

Terrible news from the LA blogger community. Nearly a week ago, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin announced via Twitter that she has breast cancer. Today, she posted an incredibly brave piece about her diagnosis.

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor’s name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we’d hoped to find.

“The first thing you’re going to learn about working with me is that I’m a straight shooter,” Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

“That’s how you know you can trust me. I’m going to tell you everything, and I’m going to tell it to you like it is.”

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

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Social injustice has never been quite so festive.

Lt. John Pike, the UC Davis cop whose ridiculously excessive use of pepper spray on seated, peaceful protesters made him an internet meme superstar, has now been immortalized on a Christmas sweater. Handmade by the wearer, Abbie Heppe, the sweater features Pike pepper-spraying an adorable baby Jesus.

Photo via Reddit.

KCRW news program director Gary Scott is ending his media blog after four years.

The former reporter at the Claremont Courier, Pasadena Star-News and LA Daily Journal started the blog as a way to keep writing. With his current gig at KCRW taking up a majority of his time, Scott is pulling the plug for good:

Years have passed and I have moved into management at a public radio station. I don’t have time to offer the frequency of updates necessary to keep the blog moving.

Instead, I’m going to take what I learned from in the last few years, including from work on this blog, to do my job better. I’ll continue to write here and would appreciate to hear from people who to discuss what comes next. But I won’t be a reliable repository of job cut updates anymore.

Onward.