It’s hard to argue with the selection of Janice Min for this week’s LA Weekly issue celebrating “the most interesting people” in Los Angeles. The name-brand editorial director has completely re-invigorated a moribund Hollywood trade, showed Jay Penske the way with her weekly glossy print edition and essentially steered clear of Nikki Finke‘s core beat.

So much so that a New York Post story today about the contract renewal status of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter mentions Min as a logical successor. Here’s a taste from Gendy Alimurung‘s LA Weekly profile of the “tiny, friendly” 43-year-old:

The new Hollywood Reporter launched in November 2010, a scant four months after Min took charge. The compressed schedule forced her to think clearly, she believes. Sometimes too much time muddles your thinking. The proof is in the numbers: Online traffic is up 800 percent. More importantly, revenue is up 50 percent.

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Oh my! George Takei clearly wins Twitter for the night. There will no doubt be 8,000 “Draft George Takei” Facebook pages by this time tomorrow.

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Friday was another bittersweet day for Rick Polito. Actor George Takei posted a screen grab on Facebook of the Boulder, CO freelance journalist’s hilarious bygone Wizard of Oz gag synopsis. However, because Takei sourced a Reddit user’s errant crop job, tens of thousands of people initially liked and shared an item that attributes the summary to the wrong guy: the late Lee Winfrey. (To Takei’s credit, this morning he added “Credit: Rick Polito.”)

Jay Leno first quoted Polito’s 1998 synopsis on The Tonight Show a decade ago. When the talk show host revisited the same material for a “Headlines” segment in late October, a Reddit user launched the synopsis on its merry viral way. With Polito’s name as the source author cut out. (It was visible on Leno, although somewhat cryptically, the attribution reads: ‘Inquirer Television Writer Lee Winfrey and Rick Polito of Universal Press Syndicate contributed to this report.’)

“Part of what bothers me is that both times, Leno presented this as a mistake in the newspaper, when obviously it’s a joke that I wrote,” Polito tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “My Marin Independent Journal TV column was syndicated at the time to the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers.”

Jim Romenesko was the first to point out the viral mistake. “Romenesko did his homework,” Polito explains. “He called me up on that Friday [October 26] and then FishbowlLA picked up on it, as did Gawker, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly and some other places.”

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George Takei is a lot of wonderful things: Sulu on the original Star Trek, unofficial king of Facebook, gay rights activist, and a delightfully catty queer with a tendency to purr in his rich baritone, “Oh Myyy…”

Now Takei is turning his catch phrase into a ringtone to benefit the new play “Allegiance,” a musical about the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. The show, in which Takei stars, will open in September at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.

The ringtone costs $1.50 and all proceeds benefit the theater, so it’s a pretty cheap way to support the arts. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than going to the theater – tickets for “Allegiance” start at $39.

We’re just a few months away from the three-year anniversary of the NOH8 campaign. Run by West Hollywood photographer Adam Bouska and partner Jeff Parshley, the stylish protest sparked by California’s Proposition 8 has grown to more than 14,000 individual photos of famous and ordinary people, snapped in close-up with their mouths duct-taped shut.

The NOH8 digital photo bank could soon grow prodigiously. Per an interview with UK’s Pink News, Bouska says he is busy putting the finishing touches on a very logical do-it-yourself component:

“Right now we’re working on a free app so that people can take a NOH8 photo using their iPhone,” says Adam. “Looking ahead I think NOH8 can innovate to grow outside of just being a photo campaign. So many people have come to us with songs they think capture our message that we’re thinking about producing a NOH8 CD.”

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Star Trek actor George Takei and his beau Brad Altman are according to Huffington Post, going to be the first gay couple on the new Newlywed Game.

Last year when the plans for a new version of the classic couple quiz show was announced, we here at FBLA wrote:

Anyway, the show will be filmed in New York – because nothing says “lots of married people” like New York City.

When FBLA asked if the New Newlywed Game was going to include gay couples, the flack said, “Let me check on that.”

For the record, we never heard back from her. But now we have our answer and there’s a very easy “final frontier” joke in there, which made our Friday brighter.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) released an ad about storms and being afraid of the gays. You can watch it here. The kind of stuff that may have resonated back before Melissa Etheridge came out – before Ellen Degeneres was a day-time icon, before gay marriage was legal in four states. Anyway, the point is – you don’t want to compete with the gays for wit – they win every time, people. There are about a zillion spoofs of the NOM video and this seems to be the best one we’ve seen…today.

Via Huffpo.

20th Annual GLAAD Media Awards
April 18, 2009
Nokia Theatre L.A. Live

The GLAAD Media Awards recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the issues that affect their lives.

Honoring Kathy Griffin, Rt. Rev V. Gene Robinson and The L Word
Special Appearances By: Jennifer Beals, Ilene Chaiken, Wilson Cruz, Alan Cumming, Thea Gill, Pam Grier, TR Knight, Megan Mullally, Peter Paige, George Takei, Bruno Tonioli, Gus Van Sant, and many more!

Event Details:

5:00 pm Cocktail Reception & Silent Auction
7:00 pm GLAAD Media Awards Show
9:00 pm VIP Dinner & After Party
For Tickets and Information Visit Here.

Live & Silent Auction
Preview this year’s live and silent auction items, donate or place a proxy bid, go here.

Be the first person to send us an email with “Go GLAAD” in the subject and a pair of tickets to the event is yours.

Mary McNamara notes in today’s LAT that the TV news coverage of gay marriage was boring. Gay people. Getting married. Legally.

And yet the “stories from various California courthouses were so uniform in their well-wishing tameness that they bordered on dull.”

We’re not entirely sure what she wanted out of the coverage, but anything involving George Takei is not, by nature, going to be too exciting.