Guess who's got a face for radio?

Check out my radio show, Heart2Heart. It aired on Thursday to intense critical acclaim.

You can download it here.

Let me know what you think--I know that I talk too fast but hopefully the unadulterated sincerity will make up for it.

And if you're really all into my Internets, the good people at YTMND have sponsored a discofinger contest. Remind yourself of what discofinger is again, and get cracking.

The new generation, on the other hand, was raised on Facebook and Bebo and Myspace and loves nothing more than to revel in the flushed glory of putting it all out there. They don't like to compartmentalize. They find our views on anonymity quaint, antiquated, the way we feel when our parents tell us that buying things over the world wide web isn't safe. And now, one of these internet demons has come of age, and she's got the same name as me.

I noticed it coming on gradually over the last few years. The Google alert I have set up on my name were arriving more frequently, and now they weren't just about long-dead German women. There was a new Lina G. in town, and if the school sports pages were any indication, she was just hitting high school. At first I ignored it, pretended it wasn't happening. Then I realized that I was getting to watch another Lina G. grow up without having to actually go through the horrors of actually doing it myself. She started joining sites and using her, our full name to post inane comments about teen celebrities to forums. I cringed, and prayed that no potential employers thought it was I that had gushed about how Josh Harnett was lyke, totally talented. This may seem like a small thing, but with only two Lina G.s in the world, when one Googles our name, the results give the impression of one, if slightly disjointed and insane, person. This other Lina G. could ruin my rep.

And as the sports victories piled up, I started to realize that as this Lina G. reaches adulthood, her potential to disrupt my life grows. When will she, I wonder, ever stop using our name on the Internet? Doesn't she realize that being born into a unique name engenders responsibilities? I realized the time had finally come to register my name as a domain, if only to preempt the other Lina G. from doing it. And now that she's started posting slutty pictures of herself on Facebook, I know that I made the right choice. I look at them, and sigh in frustration. This girl is just learning the pain of being Lina G., something that I've been living with for decades.

I love Real Genius

I love 'I'm a funky robot'

I love Hiberno-English

I love Intergalactic Gary

I love Child of Glass

--Lifehacker is like, the best site ever. I realized this long before I realized that it was created by an awesome girl who used to sit a few desks down from me at my old job. This has made me depressed. Why? Because I'm bitterly jealous.

--When I heard that Heavy Metal Parking Lot was being released on DVD, I was delighted. (Heavy Metal Parking Lot is a 1986 documentary that interviews fans in a parking lot before a Judas Priest concert.) Then I heard about Neil Diamond Parking Lot and I was really excited in a sort of post-ironic way, and then I felt a little sick. Then I took a nap.

--The New York Canon: Books From Norman Mailer to Rem Koolhaas, 26 works of lapidary New Yorkitude.

--A tribute(?) to my old neighborhood, The Tenderloin. This site is amazing, it really captures the essence of one of the most horrific places in America. I look at these pictures when I'm writing and it inspires me. To bathe. This was the neighborhood that I once got mugged by a topless transgendered woman who was holding a hammer and had 2 henchmen with her, also carrying tools. I sort of miss it. I mean, where else would you get a story like that?

I really have a bone for that sort of thing, though. (Faux-anything writing, not scat videos.) David Sedaris does it a lot, and it's some of my favorite work of his.

I tried my hand at writing a few wiki entries for YTMND, but control freak that I am, was unable to bear the whole "community-edited" feature. If you know the YTMND community, you'd understand.

Here's part of one of the site histories I wrote. (It's about the site Ridin' Spinnaz, but be warned, it's very not safe for work).

The clip is allegedly from a transsexual pornography movie, more commonly known as a 'Chicks with Dicks' film. In the full length version of the film, it appears to be to be a man and woman engaging in anal penetration, until, in what can only be considered an interesting plot twist, the transsexual's penis comes into the shot, and the scene shown in the 'Ridin Spinnas' YTMND begins.

The musical accompaniment was the song 'Ridin' Spinnaz' by Three Six Mafia, a song that pays tribute to the phenomenon of 'spinning rims' on cars often found in predominantly poor neighborhoods.

The site was seen as an ironic commentary on the 'down low' or the act of African American men engaging in homosexual acts in secret.

Nearly 300 Spinnas spin-off YTMNDs have been created, many of which include the term 'also ___.' Additionally, many 'straight' spin-offs were created to battle the potentially homosexual influence of the site.

I wish I could find a job where all I did was talk/write bs all day long. You'd that working in advertising would sate that desire, but no. I want a career in pseudo-history, or faux-law. I'd like to be able to say, " I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet."

I have a confession to make. I've been cheating on shutitdown. My friend Rene has a site dedicated to documenting the more positive things in life, ilovethisworld.com, and I've been posting on it. I'm sorry.

"Rousseau in the course of his Confessions narrates incidents that profoundly shocked the sensibility of mankind. By describing them so frankly he falsified his values and so gave them in his book a greater importance than they had in his life. They were events among a multitude of others, virtuous or at least neutral, that he omitted because they were too ordinary to seem worth recording. There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones.This is the type that most often writes about himself. He leaves out his redeeming qualities, and so appears only weak, unprincipled, and vicious."
--W. Somerset Maugham

My mother has a certain whine that one expects only to hear out of the mouth of a teenage girl--the sort of girl that would end all conversations with the word 'whatever.' She uses this whine only rarely, but when she does, it is usually accompanied by a slight shake of her clenched fist or a stamp of her dainty hoof. "Lina," she cries, regretting whatever it was that she just said, "Don't put that on your web page."

"Oh Mother," I sigh, "I'm a journalist. I'm obligated to tell the truth," I say, sniggering behind my hand.

"But," she squeals, "you only post when I say something offensive. You don't mention all of the nice things that I do."

My thoughts are that since I mention that she's my mother, the clear implication is that she gave birth to me, which was a pretty nice thing to do. This, despite the fact that she continues to complain about the birthing process twenty-six years after it culminated in my glorious entrance into this universe.

And perhaps she's right. It is possible that I don't repeat every single thing my mother says to me because frankly, most of her popular topics don't appear to be as interesting to the general public as when she talks about anal sex.

It hasn't occurred to her that the easiest way to get me to stop posting every time she says pudendum is for her to stop saying pudendum--at least in the presence of her daughter. This however, is a pleasure that she cannot forsake. She appears to receive no greater joy than to say naughty things in front of an ever younger audience.

Just a few weeks ago, she was holding Holly and Rene's baby. He was only weeks old, and she was cooing softly to him while Holly and I talked about the issues of the day. "Just like the BBC!" I exclaimed.

Holly innocently asked,"What does BBC stand for anyway?"

"Big black cock!" my mother crowed, overjoyed. She cuddled the baby closer, satisfied with both her nurturing and acronym-deducing abilities.

She's not the only one that has had her values falisified on shutitdown, though.

"Your page isn't real," my ex-boyfriend used to claim spitefully, "That's not what you are really like."

I tried to explain that the main difference was that on my webpage I was clothed, whereas in real life I was occasionally disrobed, and therefore he should count himself lucky. He didn't see it that way however. He was enraged by my apparent glibness about the problems that he felt were serious, the jokes about gangbangs (which he also thought were serious). He didn't like the fact that I didn't mention my relationship with him until our break up.

I thought perhaps, in the face of these complaints, that he would prefer that I write about him, so finally one day, a year into our relationship, I offered to include him here. "I want to read the posts first, and I don't want you to mention what country I am from. And don't imply that I'm a homo." These were just a few of the rules that he initally set down, and in the face of this, I decided that he wasn't very good material anymore, and never wrote about him.

As a side note, it was me repeatedly using the term "big black cock" in his native tongue that led to one of our most embarrassing (and public) fights. Fran can verify both the embarrassment and the publicness. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.

Apparently this fellow didn't want to get painted by my writer's brush, one which reduced him to a caricature with little more than a limp wrist and a questionable nationality. And although my mother complains, I know that she enjoys the fact that she's a popular, cartoonish character. It's hard to be honest on a web page, and it's even harder to be interesting. It's too easy to fall into the trap of detailing one's food consumption and cd-buying habits. Luckily, my family keeps me in enough material to avoid writing about anything (or anyone) too mundane. Even more fortuitously, most of them are weak, unprincipled, and vicious, so I'm not often forced to exaggerate.

And perhaps he's right. Due to the fact that I signed about 38 non-disclosure agreements, I've chosen to not write about my work life. And since I'm wagering no one wants to hear about how he looks just like Christopher Robin, I'm left with a serious dearth of potential topics.

And really, what it comes down to, is that I hate writing. I once confessed this to my mother (a writer), and she said, "Oh honey, all real writers hate it." After reading a number of biographies and interviews, it turns out that in this case, like so many others, she was lying. Most writers don't appear to hate writing. Many of them seem to enjoy it. They make special rooms dedicated to doing it much like S&M aficionados, and they they spend time each day doing it and reveling in it. Whereas I sit around watching Friends, and dreading the time that I force myself to sit in front of the keyboard, pecking away about things that no one cares about, namely myself.

And I haven't quite figured out why I do it. I decided recently that I would actually submit something I wrote to someone that determines the worth of such things, i.e. an editor. I decided that it was high time I was rejected creatively as well as sexually. What would be only be better than this, was if I could meet an editor who could reject me sexually and creatively at the same time.

"I'm sorry, but your breasts sag and your work is crap," he might growl while ignoring me in favor of a vodka tonic. This fantasy of mine, which grows much more intense over time, is similar to one once expressed by my pal Iris.

"My ideal man would copyedit my love notes and send them back to me," she sighed wistfully once, over dinner. Just thinking about her round cursive hand, nearly eclipsed by his marks correcting her grammatical and semantic errors makes her shudder with delight.

Perhaps overhearing this conversation, my latest fling replied to a pages-long essay I sent him by saying merely, "It's an infidel, not a infidel, Lina." I've since suggested that although this form of foreplay may suffice with Iris, it's not the quickest route into my pants. I guess I should be grateful though, for any minor insult thrown my way which I can use as "material" on my website or in my latest craigslist post about how mean boys are.