Messi-fi Media

Here at Discord/Harmony Inc. we like to recognize the online acheivements of our various friends and associates. And our friends and associates have been quite busy as of late, so let's recognize Juan Pepe and Jack McKinney for furthering the careers as blog celebrities.

I stop by Jack's place daily to check out the newest and most important hard hitting news. The fact is, if I wasn't up on Lindsay Lohan's (LiLo to her friends, by "her friends," I mean Jack) life, mine would come crashing to a halt. But Jack is more than just a hard hitting news reporter. The man works tirelessly at socially significant research. Nothing will stop Jack's committment and hard work counting celebrity appearances for his weekly US Weekly Photo Death Match. Jack counts up the appearances in the newest issue of US Weekly, and counts them down, recognizing the reigning king or queen of the week, and predicting next issues winner like it was the Super Bowl. And now Media Orchard has recognized Jack's hard work and dedication. See the article here. Congratulations Jack on this great leap for blog fame and fortune.

Juan Pepe is a brilliant innovator, which in lay speak means he just makes stuff up. This time he made up a word and submitted it to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary. You too can submit words, just as many others have. And like many others you'll see, you can misspell the same word more than once in the same paragraph. Juan Pepe however, unlike this blogger, knows how to use spell check on his computer. Hop on over the Merriam-Webster to see Juan Pepe's new word: messi-fi. Use it in a sentence this week! (“Donnie Darko is an unconventional example of messi-fi” “If Harry Potter dies in the next book, we could accuse J.K. Rowling of trying to tap the messi-fi market.”)

And, why not toot my own horn a little. I too have been quoted. About a year ago I wrote a less than flattering review of a band called Pushstart Wagon. I then learned what it was like to be publicly derided. The band linked my review on their blog and their fans took to my flesh like a pack of velociraptors to an abandoned slaughterhouse. In the end, the band's response was appropriate. I'd made some assumptions about their intentions in recording the album, and those assumptions turned out to be wrong. Still, the music wasn't really my thing. I would have written the review differently if I were to do it all over again, and hopefully it would have been fairer than I was. Anyway, that is neither here nor there. Despite this, the band decided to quote me on their website. My first reaction was “Am I being mocked?” I doubt it at the moment. But there it is! Years from now, when I am editing Rolling Stone Magazine and nursing my alcoholism with a bottle of Maker's I keep in my left desk drawer, I will look back and think to myself "Pushstart Wagon was the first to quote me!" Then the name Aaron Burkhalter will invoke the same looks of awe and slight wariness that Lester Bangs does today.