The woman who once described in detail her uncle’s vagina (you didn’t read that wrong), brought a level of dirty/gross/hysterical/wonderful wit to the Weekly. We have no idea why she left or where she’s going.

Ever the cryptic little c**t, she gives her fans only this:

Today I turned in my two weeks’ notice at the OC Weekly.
I was escorted from the premises an hour later.

Love you all,
Beccalou

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

FBLA found this interesting item in our tip box:

To: Editorial Staff
From: Peter Bart

Dana Harris will assume her new duties as editor of Variety.com, effective January 29. She has done an outstanding job in several roles here at Variety and I am delighted to welcome her to her new position. She joins Michael Speier and his growing team, which includes Phil Gallo and Stuart Levine, in spearheading our assault on the web and accelerating our formidable progress in that arena. Unlike the Los Angeles Times, we do not need to apologize for a “bunker mentality” nor do we need to appoint an Innovation Editor.
All of our editors, and reporters, are “pro Innovation” and both our newspaper and Variety.com reflect that.

FBLA wonders if Variety will publish this exactly as written. Knowing Bart, we bet yes.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We asked Holzman for the 10 top Web sites he visits daily. Here, for the second time this week, Matt gives us “The Business“:

KCRW
“KCRW Presents, music playlists and DJ picks make me seem a LOT hipper than I actually am.”

Je Suis Supercool
“My friend Alex’s blog is never relevant but always interesting and thoughtful. Thanks to her, I’m now a fan of ghost towns.”

Interactive Hank
“Photography is my interest but my friend Hank’s livelihood and obsession, and what is the web but a place for the obsessed? Plus, you can see what’s happening with his kid Jack. They have an awfully good time together.”

Time and Date
“YOU try arranging for a call with a reporter in Nairobi or London without a tool like this! Not only can you find out what time it is anywhere, but you can compare your time zone to their time zone to see where your working hours converge. God bless the web.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Vanity Fair might want to rethink having the office boy write the Oscar blog. Julian Sancton tries to sell us the old canard that comedies can’t win Best Picture, and then tosses most of those that have won aside, so he can make his point that Little Miss Sunshine is doomed. You Can’t Take it With You is DQ’ed as being adapted from a play, Annie Hall is too bittersweet, Going My Way is a musical, which it’s not, and his film history class must have skipped The Sting. Whatever.

Fortunately, Johnny Lopez explains exactly what’s wrong with Little Miss Sunshine and why it’s not winning anything close to Best Picture:

That Steve Carell’s character would dash his nephew’s Air Force Academy dreams on the spot by telling him they don’t let in guys who are color blind. REALLY?! You mean you wouldn’t google the Academy rules first to be sure or at least wait until you get home.REALLY?! And since when are rebellious goth teens clamoring to get into the Armed Forces? Do they not make Dungeons & Dragons anymore?

He’s got whole list.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Singer Brandy has hired Allan Mayer, the crisis-management guru. She’s being sued for $50 million by the parents of the woman killed in last month’s crash.

The wrongful-death suit claims the actress-singer was driving recklessly when her Land Rover struck the back of a Honda driven by Awatef Aboudihaj, whose car hit another vehicle, slid sideways into the center divider and was then hit by another car.

Celebrities involved in car accidents usually end up apologizing, which Brandy has already done, and then letting their lawyers take over. KCAL 9 has a handy reference guide.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By costing taxpayers million in over-billed fees, Dowie brought the kind of shame to Fleishman-Hillard that would call for self immolation if he were in a kung fu movie. But he’s not in a kung fu movie. So he’s going to appeal.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times reviews E!’s new spin-off from True Hollywood Story, Blvd. of Broken Dreams and compares it unfavorably to VH1′s Behind the Music. The show’s just not mean enough. However, Niki Taylor has slapped the network with a federal slander suit, alleging emotional distress. The suit, which also includes fraud, breach of contract and invasion of privacy, said that

E! falsely claimed that the show would focus on Taylor’s current life and professional endeavors, including her signature fragrance, clothing line, upcoming cosmetics line and charitable foundation

Instead (surprise, surprise) the network and its producer focused on Taylor’s past hardships and characterized her as a celebrity

who risked everything … and lost.

Nothing like a lawsuit to get an producer noticed. THS is basically cancelled, and EP Suzanne Ross needs to develop something, anything to either solidify her position on the quicksands of E!’s executive offices or have an original series on her resume when she leaves. Any show at E! has to do three things: make use of the existing footage, come in under budget, and not piss off anyone off. To quote Meatloaf:

Two out of three ain’t bad.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Strange that a blog would beat a network, especially as CBS shares the same corporate parent as Time Warner Cable, which made the announcement.

(For further illumination of the hierarchy, the announcement landed in our in-box eleven minutes after CBS’s announcement went up. But that’s probably because they knew sports talk makes our eyes glaze over).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Bob Saget was graced by the presence of those adorable all-growed up moppets, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson at the release party for his DVD spoof, Farce of the Penguins. The parody follows two penguins hot for hook ups as they trudge through frozen waste. The disc also features a twisted making-of featurette. Saget told reporters

I talk about all the things we did to the penguins to make them work better. It’s really wrong.

FBLA wonders if he tried same those techniques on the twins, back in the day.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Jessica Hoffmann, one of make/shift’s three editor/publishers (along with Stephanie Abraham and Daria Yudacufski)tells FBLA, “While we aim to represent a variety of feminisms (plural), we do see ourselves as specifically representing feminist work that is consciously antiracist, informed by queer theory and its challenge to binary gender norms, and rooted in an intersectional analysis that sees the connections between feminism and, say, environmental justice, economic justice, imperialism, and more.”

Hoffman, clearly, is smarter than us. So we asked her to dumb it down — way down. Down to the East Coast-West Coast culture war. With magazine editors as smart as her, why doesn’t LA have a better rep in the literary world?

“There’s an exceptional group of LA-based contributors: Erin Aubry Kaplan, who is also a columnist at the LA Times, is doing a regular column for make/shift called ‘Centrally Located.’ Staff writer Irina Contreras is a brilliant local activist/artist/writer who has contributed a photo essay and interviews of hotel workers near LAX for Issue 1. Local writer/performance artist Raquel Gutierrez (who performs with Butchlalis de Panochtitlan) wrote a smart, funny piece about children of immigrants’ love for Ugly Betty. There are so many smart and talented writers in LA; it’s really a silly myth that they’re not here,” Hoffmann said. “And when we’re talking feminist writers and artists, there’s a thriving community — several of them, really, that overlap and do different things. You should see the list of events planned to happen in this city around the huge feminist art retrospective that will open at MOCA in March (WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution) — wonderfully exciting work is being done here by very talented feminist artists, writers, and thinkers.”

Who knew?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Is Justin Gay? Maybe. But it doesn’t matter. Right?

In D Net: Apparently the LAT’s new commitment to latimes.com involves dumping 37 uninteresting photos of celebrities at sporting events into a Web-only photo gallery. Yawn.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Variety

Scott Rudin has offered one of his former development guys, Craig Perry, a first-look deal, thus gaining an opportunity to “generate mainstream comedies and family films.” Perry produced the American Pie and Final Destination movies.

Sidney Sheldon, the prolific author and producer, has died. During his extensive career he wrote several Broadway musicals, screenplays and televisions series, in addition to a multitude of novels. His television career included producer of The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie, and Hart to Hart, in addition to a number of his novels produced as made-for TV movies including Rage of Angels, Bloodline and Memories of Midnight. His career awards included a Tony for Best Musical: Redhead in 1959, an Oscar for his original screenplay of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer starring Cary Grant, two WGA awards for Easter Parade and Annie Get Your Gun, and an Emmy for I Dream of Jeannie.

Hollywood Reporter

Television is the new feature, according to a CBS development exec. Pilot orders are running towards nighttimee soaps and high-cncept dramas, while the networks are avoiding open-ended serials–Lost being the only hit out of the current crop. Big name directors, like Spike Lee, Brett Ratner, Guy Ritchie, and Barry Sonnenfeld are directing pilots.

The Police will perform at the Grammys in February. Sting had hinted at this during the TCAs, where he was promoting his PBS project, a collection of 16th-century classical music called Songs From the Labyrinth, as the 30th anniversary of the band was approaching. THe group will open the show on CBS.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club blog is basically an on-line club for the pressmen (and women) of the paper. It’s folksy, with postings of jokes, recommendations for lunch spots, and the occasional criticism of what’s in the paper.

But check out Ed Padgett’s post about the flow of information within the company:

If your wondering why I post messages from the movers and shakers at the Los Angeles Times and Tribune Company, its for the benefit of my fellow employees that do not have access to company emails.

and check this out:

The Spring Street Project requested input from Los Angeles Times Employees, yet, if you did not have an internal email address, you could not submit your ideas. We were given an email address to submit our ideas three days before the project ended, but by that time, the workers in the pressroom knew our input was not wanted.

Considering what lousy ideas the paper has had in the past, you’d think the editors would be begging for ideas–from all over. FBLA is going to be pissed if this guy catches any flack for his blog.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Food & Wine is pretending that they didn’t spaz yesterday by posting a spoiler interview with the winner of Bravo’s Top Chef. From the site:

Yesterday, an intrepid reality tv fan found a Top Chef story on Food & Wine’s server. Food & Wine prepared profiles of both Top Chef finalists in advance of the last episode so that we had a story on the winner ready to publish immediately after the season finale.

How intrepid must one be to type in their url? There’s no Wayback Machine involved here. And as FBLA knows full well, glossy magazines regularly assign two stories to cover all contingencies: Presidental races, Best Picture Oscars, you name it.

Eater LA thinks for a minute that it could be a fiendishly brilliant plan:

F&W did the whole leak thing on purpose to see how rabid everyone would get over a supposed spoiler and watched as the fan base spun itself into a tizzy before the finale.

But it’s not, and we all know it.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

John Waters, in what must be an example of publicity gone wrong, as agreed to answer questions at Nerve.com. From the site:

Send us your questions as feedback to this post or email them to scanner@nerve.com–please leave your first name, age, and location-and we’ll pick the best questions to ask Waters on Friday. You’re welcome to reach back into the murky depths of his career, but be sure to ask about his new CD, A Date With John Waters.

What’s to ask about the CD? Is there a secret surprise inside? If you need help with a question cheat sheets abound.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.