Variety: “That blogger at TMZ.com, which is owned by Warners’ own AOL, doesn’t fit the common stereotype of a lonely geek in sweats hunkered in a dark basement staring into a glowing computer screen. In fact, he was a trade reporter who was competing with his ex-colleagues at Variety for scoops. His advantage: as a blogger, he could post his items faster online.”
There are several questions that must be asked:
1. Is there anything wrong with basements?
2. Why is it that bloggers are associated with basements? Which blogger set the precedent? Have any bloggers been found dead in a basement?
3. Was the first basement-observed blogger based in Terre Haute?
4. Are they any journalists in New York now working in basements?
5. Is the preferred blogger basement a daylight basement, a walk-up basement, or a look-out basement? If we are to carry out a stereotype, I think it’s important to be specific about it.
6. Are there any known cases in which a blogger working in a basement has been bitten by a rat or a spider or a creepy crawly? Asbestos?
7. Are most of the basements owned by Warner?
8. Why would one wear sweats or pajamas in a basement?
9. Is the basement really that ideal of a spot for a desktop or laptop computer?
Not only do I not blog from a basement, I don’t have a basement. Not only do I not blog from a basement, I blog from an upstairs room that is so hot in the summer it might as well be the attic. But that’s not to say if I had a basement I wouldn’t blog from it. I might. And while I’ve never been to Terre Haute, I used to have a basement in one of the places I lived in in another midwestern “I” state, the great state of Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses. And yet, I never blogged from that basement. It was dank, unfinished, had an unused heating oil tank and the ghosts of many miserable writers. Plus, there were no blogs back then. If there had been, I might have blogged from that basement. But I didn’t.
Don’t go in the basement!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Z6SOlWbds
Basements. Who has a basement on the west coast?
In South Florida, there are no basements, either. You’d be under water. In this case, of course, it’s the MSM cliche that’s all wet.