The NY Times might have some fancy writers, editors and such but the LA Times has a secret weapon: Edward Padgett, pressman, blogger, and relentless teller of truth. And the truth comes out, when he answers those “so random they must be profound” questions of ours.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? LAObserved, LA Biz Observed, Fishbowl LA, Media Bistro, Los Angeles Times, San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? Fling.com

3. What job do you fantasize about having? Tour guide on the Island of Cozumel for non Spanish speaking tourist.

4. Last movie you saw? I-robot with Will Smith

5. Last book you read? On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross M.D.

6. Best show legendary biz/movie star encounter. Met Debra Wilson from MAD TV at Naja’s in Redondo Beach, we danced, drank, and laughed. Just met Danny Bonaduce at the 2007 Love Ride, and found him to be much calmer than portrayed by the media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As Fashion Correspondent for E! Networks The Daily 10, Amanda Luttrell-Garrigas is not only a disher, she’s a dish. You’d think Viacom would give her a series. Until then, she answered our kinda new and semi-improved questions.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? My emails then nytimes.com
2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? People.com
3. What job do you fantasize about having? The one I have only more of it.
4. Last movie you saw? Shampoo
5. Last book you read? Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
6. Best show legendary biz/movie star encounter. I’ve had many, Leonardo DiCaprio who is wonderful and Kate Bosworth who is lovely, Cate Blanchett who is so elegant and radiant, but Tom Hanks tops my list. We crossed paths on the shuttle bus to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation carnival. He is a force of nature.
7. Proudest media moment? I’m working on it.
8. Ever had a brush with the law? Describe. Nope. I’m the good girl.
9. If you got a unicorn what would you name it? Intrepid Lavinia Shenkunde of the African plains and Irish Moors
10. What does your TiVo think about you? It thinks I love football… hmmm maybe it thinks I’m my husband…
11. Character of fiction you most resemble? It changes depending on the day, perhaps Tatyana Larina from Eugene Onegin
12. Who plays you in your bio-pic? I do. Or Angela Bassett
13. What’s your ringtone? Marimba
14. Favorite electronic device? iPhone
15. What do your friends say is your best quality? kindness
16. What do your enemies say is your worst? kindness
17.What natural talent do you wish you had? A more flexible body
18. What’s your theme song? It changes depending on the day. Today it is the theme song from Star Wars. Nobody does it like John Williams, except maybe Alexandre Desplat
19. Do you believe in love at first sight? No. But I am a romantic.
20. When’s the last time you volunteered? Where? This morning at my daughter’s school.

Earlier:
FBLA 20 Questions

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Nancy Rommelmann, formerly of Los Angeles, now of Portland, writes frequently about food, life, loss, and love. Her compassion for her subjects never cloys; her probing of their foibles never crosses the line into cruel exploitation. And thus, she kindly answered our probing, exploitative questions.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning?
Currently: War and Peace, the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.
Eternally: The New York Times

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? Dlisted

3. What job do you fantasize about having? Novelist

4. Last movie you saw? Beowolf, about ten minutes ago

5. Last book you read?
Steve Almond’s Rants, Exploits and Obsessions (Not That You Asked)

6. Best show legendary biz/movie star encounter. At age fifteen, I stopped Paul Newman on Madison Avenue, knowing full well it was him behind his mirrored shades, and asked, sweetly, “Can you tell me what time it is?” At which he took a two-second pause, drank in my long, bare, mini-skirted legs, and slowly pulled off his glasses.

7. Proudest media moment? Winning AAN and LA Press Club awards back-to-back was pretty good, but really, it’s every story I’m working on where I sense the greatness and just keep chipping away.

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So, if you get off on hearing the insights of complete strangers, then you’ll want to close the office door and dim the lights before you read this:

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? The graffiti on the ceiling of my apartment

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? www.farmersonly.com

3. What job do you fantasize about having? Key grip

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Journalist Mark Ebner has investigated Scientology, pit bull fighting in South Central Los Angeles, the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, celebrity stalkers, missing porn stars, sports groupies, college suicides and Hepatitis C in Hollywood. He’s got a book deal with Simon & Schuster and a tv deal with Court TV. Despite his busy blog, he yielded to our muscle and answered those deceptively duplicitous questions.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? The cereal box.

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? Gallery of The Absurd The artist known as “14″ is a genius, and twice the woman of the LA Weekly’s “Seven.”

3. What job do you fantasize about having? Sidewalk Sign Flipper.

4. Last movie you saw? In The Valley of Elah. Surprisingly, Paul Haggis can actually make a good film and, not surprisingly, Tommy Lee Jones can act. Too bad few will see this film until they’re reminded to around Oscar acting awards time.

5. Last book you read? Aftermath, Inc. Cleaning Up After CSI Goes Home — a fascinating participatory adventure in the nasty business of bioremediation by crime writer Gil Reavill. The author takes the Discovery Channel’s conceptualization of “Dirty Jobs” to a whole new level.

6. Best show legendary biz/movie star encounter. In 1985, I spent a night sniffling, shaking and watching bad movies with Liza Minnelli at a resort in the Land of Ten Thousand Rehabs.

7. Proudest media moment? I have three:

Accepting the Genesis Award (for humane reporting) for Pit Bullies
(New Times, 1996); appearing as a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote Hollywood,Interrupted and hearing that South Park’s infamous Trapped In The Closet episode (the Scientology expose I consulted on) was nominated for an Emmy award.

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Hanna Pantle has what must be considered a dream job. She’s Assn’t VP of Corporate and Media Relations for BMI, and yet, she answered our old-skool prying questions. Which is just as well, because how could she possibly choose a theme song?

1. What newspapers do you read? LA Times, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, NY Post, LA Weekly, Tolucan Times (seriously)

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading Wall Street Journal

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites bookmark? All of them? I am a bookmark junkie so the ones I visited recently were American Express (gotta pay that bill), Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Nordstrom, BMI.com, American Airlines, Trip Advisor, Dressage Daily, Zappos.com, Drudge, ebay, LA Times, LA Daily News, New York magazine, Angels.com (Anaheim Angels), Freetranslation.com, youtube, Digital Hollywood, Simpsonizeme.com,

4. Where do you get your car washed? The car wash in North Hollywood at Burbank and Lankershim or Studio City car wash.

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? yes, Jackie

6. Do you believe newspapers are going to die? If so, when? No. They won’t become the La Brea tarpits. They’ll figure out a way to do both– print and online. I am just more concerned that the days of a trusted beat reporter will be gone–so many reporters are having to cover 10 beats, blog, edit and take photos every day. Well, maybe not take photos, but multitasking journalists aren’t always the best, trusted, focused voice for the community.

7. What was the last book you read? All the way through? Kite Runner. Half way through–the Motley Crue book. It really disgusted me so I stopped.

8. What’s the last book you say you read? Where The Wild Things Are.

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Kim Cooper is a cultural historian, as well as founder of Scram (the journal of unpopular culture), Esotouric, the 1947 Project and third generation Angelena. We’re guessing she needs little sleep. She also answered our provocative yet puerile questions.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? The emails my husband Richard has sent in the three hours he’s been up, then my local bloglines feed.

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? Ask.metafilter.com or the Rigorous Intuition boards.

3. What job do you fantasize about having? International art cop.

4. Last movie you saw? Walk on the Wild Side (script by John Fante, and truly a shocker)

5. Last book you read? The Family by Ed Sanders (boning up on Manson Family connections to the Sunset Strip scene for our new Esotouric rock and roll tour, Where the Action Was)

6. Best show legendary biz/movie star encounter. Nastassia Kinski teaching me to walk a tightrope on the set of One From the Heart.

7. Proudest media moment? Front of the LA Times with a 76 ball in my hand.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Investigative satirist Paul Krassner dropped acid with Groucho, founded the Yippies with Abbie, and is in the Counterculture Hall of Fame. He also writes for High Times, Huffington Post, and is in hot demand as a standup comic. He writes:

Just returned from the Austin Film Festival which opened with a screening of “Chicago 10″ followed by a Q. & A., during which I pretended the vibrator in my cell phone went off, I took it out of my pocket and said hello, then said to the audience, “It’s Rudy Guliani’s wife.” I couldn’t resist the impulse.

Krassner couldn’t resist our entrities, and answered those 20 innocent questions that have been the downfall of so many.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? LA Times

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? NY Post gossip

3. What job do you fantasize about having? Radio talkshow

4. Last movie you saw? The Lives of Others

5. Last book you read? Deer Hunting with Jesus

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The fragrant Mark Sarvas hosts the popular and controversial lit. blog The Elegant Variation. His debut novel, Harry, Revised, will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2008. He was able to find time to answer our pointless questions, and we hope that no weak, cowardly review escaped his gaze as a result.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning? The New York Times–it’s my home page–and email, to see who I’ve offended now.

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? David Lebovitz blogs about Parisian food, with which I am obsessed, and love to torture myself with his pictures in between my own Paris trips.

3. What job do you fantasize about having? Yours.

4. Last movie you saw? The Rape of Europa, a documentary about the looting of Nazi Art. I’ve wanted to see it for ages but it’s been hard to catch up with in guerilla distribution. It finally arrived in LA last week (for a day) but I saw it a week earlier in NY.

5. Last book you read? Hah! You’re kidding right? Books I just finished include Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty and Kevin Sites’s In The Hot Zone for a review I’m working on. The last book I finished for pleasure was Jane Gardam’s wonderful novel Old Filth from Europa Editions. Other recent remarkable reads include David Leavitt’s new novel The Indian Clerk, and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop.

6. Best show legendary biz/movie star encounter. Meeting Paul McCartney when I was sixteen. You can find the whole story here, replete with embarrassing photos.

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After a year, FBLA has revised our insightful yet banal questions. David Seidman comics writer, consultant, and publicist volunteered to test drive the new version.

1. What’s the first thing(s) you read in the morning?
My e-mail, followed by MediaBistro’s job listings and home page. (Honest. I’m not just sucking up.) Then it’s on to The Beat, Heidi MacDonald’s comics-related news column at Publishers Weekly, the blogs of my colleaguesPeter David and Mark Evanier, the day’s Doonesbury strip, and often the political blog Crooks and Liars.

2. What’s your favorite guilty pleasure website? There are two: Defamer and Go Fug Yourself. I don’t usually like celebrity gossip or fashion bitchery, but they’re both funny. And theyusually have pictures of good-looking women.

3. What job do you fantasize about having? I’m usually too busy for much fantasizing (about jobs, that is), but the most fun for me is conceiving and developing new projects, particularly in publishing. Put me in that job and surround me with people who want to do the same thing and have the talent to accomplish it, and I’m a happy guy.

4. Last movie you saw? All the way through? (I catch a lot of bits and pieces on TV.) Probably the HBO documentary ALIVE DAY MEMORIES.

5. Last book you read? 300 by Frank Miller.

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Sasha Pasulka entered our world when we auditioned for Hush-Hush, a VH1 blog gossip idea that never took off. Pasulka, the full time editor of The Evil Beet, recently left her benefits-intensive position in the software industry, thus sidelining her MBA, She’s busy launching a fashion site for RealNetworks, but still found the idle hour in which to answer our deceptively inane questions.

1. What newspapers do you read? I really don’t read any newspapers. I find newspapers unwieldy and I can never figure out where to click to leave my comments. I’m a child of the digital age; I get almost all my news from blogs.

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? I pretty much only do this when proof-reading an article I wrote myself, to make sure it would sound good if read aloud.

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites–besides FBLA? I have to admit I’m a Perez Hilton junkie. I also love Defamer and TMZ. Sometimes when I want to feel like my life doesn’t revolve around celebrity gossip, I read TechCrunch or Slashdot, but then Lindsay Lohan gets a DUI and I forget about them for a couple weeks.

4. Where do you get your car washed?At the five-minute drive-thru car wash on Sepulveda and El Segundo. I love that place so much.

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? No–in fact, I don’t even know his last name; he’s in my cell phone as “dentist” — but he has a TV in every patient room, and that’s all I need to know.

6. Do you believe newspapers are going to die? If so, when? Newspapers? Yes, probably. Not for another twenty or thirty years, but yes. I think magazines will outlive them, because there’s a pretty strong market for shiny pictures.

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Entertainment journalist and author Alex Ben Block writes a column for Hollywood Today but still gave in to our pestering and answered those “so vapid they must be insightful” questions.

1. What newspapers do you read? L.A. Times, NY Times, Wall St. Journal, Variety, Hollywood Reporter and online gossip columns at NY Post, NY Daily News, Washington Post and where ever else tea leaves are being read.

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? The LA Time-waster and WS Jerk when the articles are longer than the wars in Iraq, Vietnam and the Civil War combined.

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites–besides FBLA? Hollywood Today.net, of course; LA Observed, Defamer, Drudge, HuffPo, Roger Friedman (Fox News), Poynter, TV Newsday, CNN, LAPressClub.org, TCM, and for pure intellectual stimulation, The Sun from London.

4. Where do you get your car washed? If only it would rain in SoCal I wouldn’t have to do this at all but instead I go where ever they accept discount coupons.

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? Bella. She’s from Russia.

6. Do you believe newspapers are going to die? If so, when? No, newspapers will be around until the end of time. There will be fewer but print remains the easiest, most efficient, portable way to rapidly scan and receive masses of info. However, they will look different, have shorter articles, be more analysis oriented, more opinionated, more oriented toward service, and serve as the central element of a range of distribution platforms online, wireless and stuffed into intellectual multi-vitamins for your brain. Of course they will be delivered online as a pdf file.

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Journalist Darleene Powells, she of the three “E”s, keeps KCBS’s website news-a-licious. She blogs, she takes photographs, she’s all in love with her husband. She answered our uncannily revealing, albeit vapid, questions.

1. What newspapers do you read? It’s been a while since I regularly read a print newspaper. I, do however, get daily email summaries from the LA Times and the Daily News. I also read the Ventura County Star pages that my husband designs.

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? Heehee. I haven’t moved my lips to reading since my Baby-Sitters Club Days.

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites–besides FBLA? I’m obsessed with local LA websites. I always read cbs2.com (of course!), LAO, Metroblogging LA and Franklin Avenue. Cute Overload, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Basic Instructions and Go Fug Yourself always make me laugh. I also like to read Luke Ford, The God Blog and Friendly Fire. I often like to see what my buddy and coworker beFrank is doing.

4. Where do you get your car washed? Um. What does that mean? What is this washing of the car?

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? Heh. No. I hardly know his last name or the name of his practice. I think its in Calabasas?

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Pat Saperstein, as befits a food blogger (Eating LA won the LA Press Club award for best individual food blog) is by turns spicy, salty, sharp, sour and sweet. She’s also a senior editor at Variety as well as a working mom, so we’re doubly grateful for her answers to our trivial yet insightful questions.

1. What newspapers do you read? LA Times, New York Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter.

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? the Los Feliz Ledger.

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites–besides FBLA? LAObserved, Chowhound, BoingBoing.

4. Where do you get your car washed? My daughter washes it in the driveway to make money for her Forever 21 fund.

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? Dr. Brown … umm…Jonathan , but I had to Google it.

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FBLA so seldomly encounters Pynchon enthusiasts among our readers. But Matt Haley, one of the creative talents behind Who Wants to be a Superhero as well as a superhero artisthero, defied our admittedly low expectations when he answered our mythic questions.

1. What newspapers do you read? They still make those?

2. Which ones do you move your lips to while reading? Oh, the Onion, absolutely.

3. Which Web sites are on your favorites bookmark? The family-friendly ones are usually art sites, painters’ and illustrators’ blogs, people who are way more talented than I could ever hope to be. I bookmarked mine, too, just in case I get lost. The others, well…artists see naked people everyday, we’re like doctors. Right?

4. Where do you get your car washed?No car, I usually take the MTA. Don’t look at me that way.

5. Do you know your dentist’s first name? Wayne. He is the best dentist in the world. Dentists say they’re ‘painless’, this guy really is. First time I had oral surgery, I’m in the chair, and I’m envisioning that scene from Marathon Man where Dustin Hoffman is being tortured. He tells me to close my eyes (never a good sign), and I notice my jaw is starting to go numb, but I hadn’t felt that dry pinch of the Xylocaine needle. I pry open one eyelid and drunkenly ask if he’s using some kind of spray or brush to apply the painkiller, and he calmly replies, “No, I have a rather large needle in your jaw, I’m just really careful.” I’m putting his kids through college, now.

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