Wonderwall's Alex Blagg was just trying to be social, geeez.

Print media is to remain in its room until it feels well enough to stop destroying the company. Wired.com's Brian X. Chen didn't specifically say that, but it's the sort of Si Newhouse conference call we like to imagine.

Ubiquitous Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling, recently tweeting from Mexico, got burned by some kind of suave foreigner.

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy, recently tweeting from India, said overemotional self-centered Americans could learn a thing or two from waking up in another country. Let's hope so!

Lt. Dangle's R&B career was stillborn

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Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling must have a $1,000 tiny pig. And not for breakfast, either.

The New York Times' Nick Bilton can't believe some idiots will pay $1,000 for a tiny pig. And not even for breakfast or whatever!

Paul Carr learned to love San Francisco cabbies all over again on his way (apparently) to lunch with fellow TechCrunch contributor Sarah Lacy.

GigaOM's Om Malik is loving his new 'hood. So many friends. So few bloody tourists.

SF Appeal's Eve Batey loves Oakland and environs for their avian kink. We think.

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Joel Madden, the Good Charlotte vocalist, has already been eclipsed by his infant son.

Franklin Kramer refused to tell the Atlantic anything about his interview to be America's top cyber-spook. So he's definitely qualified for the job in one regard!

Our dear departed nigh editor doesn't think this Mexico City circus deserves to even be mentioned in the same breath as Entebbe. Now that was a hostage situation.

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy is worried she's turning into some sort of flake! Hard to imagine.

Not only does "conservative" columnist Amanda Carpenter shop at Whole Foods, she also totes an Apple laptop. See you at the Birkenstock store, Amanda!

Susan Orlean would like you to know that a certain book party is going to be significantly less awesome.

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TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy couldn't get into Brazil this week, supposedly because the country's visa officials are incompetent. And yet somehow the New York Times' Jenna Wortham finagled herself entry into that exact same country. It's enough to make Peter Kafka think Lacy's problems had more to do with her than with the entire nation of Brazil being somehow incompetent!

Lifestyle blogger Terri Potratz will spend this weekend knitting, and she's both stoked and proud.

BlackBook's Tricia Romano wasn't feeling very bipartisan about health-care reform.

Gizmodo's Brian Lam saw his long weekend erode before his very eyes. This frightened at least one of his Gawker Media compatriots!

MTV's Maya Baratz was impressed by nerd gear during a coffee break.

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"EPIC-EST FAIL EVER," reads a headline superimposed on the flag of Brazil and attached to Lacy's latest post on TechCrunch, in which the Yahoo Finance anchor admonishes Brazilian entrepreneurs to "blame your government" for the terrible tragedy of... not being allowed to meet with Sarah Lacy. Amid all her jet setting, Lacy apparently failed to apply for a visa in time, because she was forced to turn to an expediter. But the computers at the consulate were being upgraded that week, so Lacy was shit out of luck.

Her response? Some angry tweets, followed by today's lengthy TechCrunch post, which makes sure to mention how dangerous and underdeveloped Brazil is, as well as how a PR company helped orchestrate her visit, to a place "no one in the Valley" particularly cared about:

It's particularly ironic given that the Brazilian government has recently hired the PR firm Fleishman Hillard to go around talking up its commitment to IT and entrepreneurship. You want foreign investment and attention, Brazil? Here's an idea: LET PEOPLE ENTER THE DAMN COUNTRY. You want to show your IT prowess? How about outfitting your consulates with computer systems that work? ...The country should be embarrassed.

This is definitely the worst thing that has happened in Brazil, ever, Sarah Lacy not being allowed to visit.. "Epic-est fail" indeed. And what's weird about this whole situation is that the word "Brazil" has never before been associated with bureaucratic dystopia. And it's not like the U.S. has a dysfunctional visa system. We're sure if any of this were the case, Sarah, as a professional writer, would have made some reference to it.

(Pic by lunaweb on Flickr.)

Though she once praised Twitter, Lacy has since become disillusioned by the amount of skin-centric span that's clogging her and her friends' feeds. Yes, there are ways to block the site's cabal of sluts, but Lacy argues it's far too hard, so she's offering Twitter her own advice — and knocks Tila Tequila in the process:

There's no reason why Twitter shouldn't be catching spam, or at least making it easier to report.

Unless, of course, Twitter wants to be the new MySpace (NWS). After all, a lot of that site's early growth came from call girls, strippers, and purveyors of porn. Tila Tequila, who has been pictured in Playboy, Penthouse, and other publications, even got an MTV show out of MySpace.... If Twitter wants growth for the sake of growth, porn will do that.

But knowing the founders, my guess is that the site doesn't want that kind of success. Lewd content helped hobble MySpace's advertising efforts.

With The Olds leading the Twitter revolution, Lacy insists the site do something about this madness or face the consequences. But we say there's a far easier solution: don't "follow" or click on links to people you don't know, especially if they have whorish names like "Kiki" or "Cocoa" or feature pictures of bikini-covered breasts.

Even if Lacy and other worried people do leave the site, it shows no signs of slowing down, especially since a federal judge just launched a page that educates kids on civics and DePaul University is offering a class all about the site. If anything, Lacy's arguments will only help the site: you're nobody until somebody tries to stir up a frenzy of "family values" outrage.

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy is having a huge geopolitical passport issue and WTF, NATION OF BRAZIL? YOU MESSED WITH THE SARAHCUDA ONE TOO MANY TIMES and seriously she's been learning Portuguese and you just WAIT until she gets to the swears.

And also? People who run mind-numbing conferences about the future of media and whether newspapers are dying or maybe they're just turning into blogs or maybe we should just let cyborgs write everything? MARK GLASER'S INVITATION GOT LOST IN THE MAIL. AGAIN. He writes for PBS and dies for these endlessly boring things and besides can you really even call it a media conference if he's not there?

John Aboud just pitched a movie, and doesn't even know it. Someone option this thing.

Oh, so here's something positive that came out of the Great Health Care Panic of '09: Otherwise non-foodie conservative pundits like Amanda Carpenter are finally eating non-poisoned vegetables and non-tortured cows! At Whole Foods! Probably because Whole Foods opposes Obama's health care plan! Delicious!

TechCrunch's Milo Yiannopoulos was made sick by the breakup of Oasis. Or at least made plans to be made sick.

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Dropping off their Twittering this summer are such familiar Twitterti as music writer Touré; Air America snarker Ana Marie Cox; New York Times Oscar obsessive David Carr; Times "conceptual scoop" artist Jennifer 8. Lee; celebrity journalism diva Bonnie Fuller; Yahoo vlogger Sarah Lacy and Digg perpetrator Kevin Rose. See the chart above, assembled with help from tweetstats.com (until we melted their servers by asking for numbers on Times Twitterer-in-Chief Brian Stelter).

Summer vacations could well be playing a role; Carr went on a bike trip to Colombia this month, Rose was inspecting tea in remote parts of China. But that would seem the ideal time to use Twitter, which lets you talk to all your friends back home at once, without much time commitment, and even to share pictures and videos with services like TwitPic. Maybe media and tech types have Twitter firmly slotted into the "work" category and don't want to touch it much on break.

There are some outliers: Salon's Joan Walsh, whose been on a cable-news punditry tear, has spiked her Twittering; the New Yorker's Susan Orlean has been manically chronicling her animal obsession in recent weeks; and Kurt Andersen got a burst of posts out of his trip to the White House. Everyone else should hop to and follow their examples; what else can America export to save its useless circle-jerk of an economy, if not narcissistic navel-gazing media?

• Julia Allison, professional lifecaster/shill blogger.
  
• Sarah Lacy, noted interviewer, interrupter, and lover of junkets. (Speaking of which, we're told this LA trip is all expenses paid. With a swanky hotel!)
  
• Shira Lazar, who hosts TV shows on KNBC and "Reelz," dated Kevin Rose, flirted with Mike Arrington and was Julia Allison's date to the inauguration.
  
• Brigitte Dale, video blogger for ABC Family.
• Scoble. We hear manic blogger/Twitterer/FriendFeed-er and ex Microsoft flack Robert Scoble is to contribute his insights as well.

So basically, all the top brain power in one spot.

Allison uploaded the picture above of this dot-com Algonquin Round Table, in their flip-flops and beach clothes. We cannot wait to read their report.

Wall Street Journal editor Alan Murray hilariously lampooned the state of mainstream business journalism in a pithy tweet that married weak sourcing with a ridiculous and sensational headline. Ah, the joys of satire.

New-media commentator Reed Kavner was taught a lesson at the gym, presumably having to do with determination rather than pity.

After the long-anticipated firing of NBC's Ben Silverman, even straight-laced Brian Stelter at the New York Times couldn't resist a dash of snark.

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy explains just how rich the Zappos founders are, and figures "wealth managers" are reading her pronouncements. Yes, and still waiting for her past predictions to pan out.

The question isn't why Twitter's Biz Stone misspelled an abbreviation for "oxygen," but why he was typing it in the first place. Likely answer: His burning hatred of the English language and its lengthy glory.

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Vanity Fair's Michael Hogan thought for sure he was going to get to watch some police brutality, all live like, but the mouthy driver Hogan was watching got off without so much as a black eye. This was intended to illustrate white privilege in action, part 946.

Macworld's Jason Snell refreshed his ego on Facebook.

Mark Glaser didn't like to think of Mark Glaser as a brand, according to Mark Glaser, but Mark Glaser got over it. For example, the PBS writer sometimes refers to others as "some people" rather than with a name or link that might dilute the brand of Mark Glaser. Not that we're saying Mark Glaser planned it that way, or anything.

Yahoo video journalist Sarah Lacy indirectly let her publisher know she's at least trying.

New York's Jessica Coen is coming for you, self deprecators.

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We suppose this whole episode lends credence to Arrington's irritating "blogging will kill you" argument. Or maybe not. Regardless, even though Rwanda is nowhere near as hostile as SXSW discussion panels, be safe out there Sarah—Even our gay British overlord thinks you're hot.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

via TechCrunch

Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney experienced retrotech.

Lazy gadfly Guardian columnist Paul Carr continued to dine his way through the ladybloggers of San Francisco, following Kara Swisher up with Sarah Lacy.

Alt-weekly veteran Mark Athitakis saw the future of journalism.

Blogger-entrepreneur-venture capitalist Om Malik felt the recession funk.

New York Times eclecticist Jennifer 8. Lee crowdsourced penury.

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Lacy conducted an interview with Musk that appeared last Friday. But instead of probing Tesla's uncertain future, she invited Musk to talk about the past. The column that sparked his outrage, published last November, asked whether taxpayers should subsidize a company which makes $109,000 electric sports cars for the wealthy. Musk claimed that the Times had retracted the story. In fact, the newspaper had corrected a minor bit about Tesla's application — still not granted yet — for $350 million in government loans. Randall Stross, a San Jose State University professor and Times contributor, initially wrote that the loans would go to the production of Tesla's expensive Roadster, as opposed to funding its vaporous plans for a $57,400 sedan, the Model S.

The New York Observer has the he-said, she-said between Times Sunday Business editor Tim O'Brien and Lacy, a former BusinessWeek reporter who freelances for TechCrunch, Yahoo, and other publications. Here's O'Brien:

I think Sarah Lacy was too busy giggling to do Journalism 101 and call Randy or me for comment to make sure what Elon was saying was accurate. Because it was not only inaccurate, it was flat-out wrong. We wrote a clarification of the headline. We didn't retract the story at all; we stood firmly by the story, and I still stand by Randy's column. You can't help but watch that interview and marvel at the squishy familiarity between Lacy and Musk. And I wonder whether or not some journalistic blinders had popped off.... It was so ridiculous that it was entertaining. It was so misguided and inaccurate and I was stunned at the poor quality of the journalism.

Lacy's response:

I think it's embarrassing that The Times would try to throw me under the bus because they did shoddy reporting that they wound up correcting. If they want to throw me under the bus to make up for their own column that they massively rewrote, you know, go for it.

Actually, that was an error, too. As the Observer notes, the Times removed one sentence from the story and rewrote another.

In her defense, Lacy implied that the Times was sexist for criticizing her. But then she goes on to defend herself on the grounds that she's a girl:

I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I'm a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions, and break a lot of hard news.

Another error. If you look at the body of Lacy's work, you'll see a pattern of oblique references to unspecified insider knowledge trotted out after someone else breaks a story. Lacy knows far more than she reports, she always implies — and yet this knowledge never seems to make its way out to the public in a way that benefits the reader.

Lacy is right that the Times is making a lame critique of her journalism. Here's what the Times should have said.

First of all, it ought never have corrected the story. Because the truth of the matter is that if Tesla persuades the government to give it loans, it will in fact spend at least some of that money on ongoing production of the Roadster. It plans to open several expensive new showrooms in the U.S. and Europe. Until late 2011 at the earliest, those showrooms will have nothing but the Roadster to sell. If the Roadster is profitable now, it is barely so. Tesla's overhead will almost certainly have to be funded through the loan proceeds.

A tipster, who's given us inside info on Tesla before, has sketched the back-of-the-envelope numbers for what it will cost to get the Model S sedan into production and thinks, even with the loans, Tesla's more than $500 million short of what it needs. The Model S "prototype" Musk showed off last month was a "show car": a one-off model of what a car will look like, but far from a finished design that can be sent into production. The tipster thinks the earliest Tesla can go from concept to delivery is 2013 — not 2011, as Musk promises, which means another two years of peddling high-end sports cars for the wealthy, as some "douchebag" dared to point out.

Here's the tip:

The untrained observer and the Government may be persuaded by typical industry show car building tricks, but insiders and auto experts know that the Model S that was revealed was a reworked Mercedes CLS. To top it off the components and parts on the vehicle are not even those ever considered in the design.

The fact is Tesla had an agreement with an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] to use their off the shelf parts in the model S. Unfortunately that agreement expires in 2010, a good three years before Tesla can get the Model S engineered (assuming they get federal money). No other OEM has been willing to give Tesla the rights to buy parts or component CAD to design to, hence Tesla would need some additional $300M to develop all of the necessary hardware (suspension, air bags and sensors, modules etc.)

Cost:

D&R the Model S $250M
Build the Factory $300M
Components to put in the car $300M
Retail outlets $50M

Asking Musk about that would have made for a fascinating interview, though Musk probably would have lobbed his insults at Lacy rather than Stross. When we asked Musk about whether he was going to personally guarantee the deposits his company's collecting on those Model S sedans, this is what he said:

I'm not going to answer your questions until you start caring more about creating a truthful picture of Tesla. I know you think you are doing good by offsetting what you see as positive spin with negative spin, but that doesn't count as being honest.

That's the moral universe of Elon Musk: Only positive spin counts as "truthful." Lacy seems very comfortable in that world.

D.C. videoblogger Andy Carvin rendered himself unfit for the camera.

Chicago Tribune reporter Wailin Wong discovered that magical Susan Boyle singing clip.

Formerly relevant Web-video personality Amanda Congdon made progress in her quest to become a crazy cat lady.

Wired.com's Priya Ganapati hit up a Twitter user as a source. And another. And another.

TechCrunch contributor Sarah Lacy displayed the toxic aftereffects of exposure to Julia Allison.

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Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara reminisced.

Freelance writer Glenn Fleishman quite possibly spent more time concocting a metaphor for his work on a feature story than he did on the story itself.

Sassy conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin craved junk food, and not just the intellectual kind.

Boing Boing space-princess blogger Xeni Jardin seemed to mock her coworkers' obsession with copy protection.

Globetrotting tech-book author Sarah Lacy unleashed her gams on an unsuspecting Middle East.

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Yoga instructor/reporter Liz Glover prepped for some interviews.

Tech author Sarah Lacy pursued a fad detox regimen.

North Carolina journalist Beth Brooke suffered through the afternoon.

New York Times eccentric Jenny 8. Lee had a manicure disaster.

Facebook spokessister Randi Zuckerberg experienced a fit of Jewishness.

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Twitter-loving food writer turned dubiously qualified Web entrepreneur Amanda Hesser dished out advice to Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby.
New York media scenestress Caroline Waxler bought something as seen on TV, and CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy bullied us into informing you.
Multimedia tech opinionator Sarah Lacy just couldn't leave the studio.
Gossip blogger Perez Hilton did, like, some reporting, kinda.
New York Times Detroit reporter Micki Maynard found a lone supporter of the domestic auto industry.

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Founding Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers suffered Flight 1549 flashbacks.

Self-crowned empress of tech media Sarah Lacy believed she was being willfully deprived of gadgets.

Guardian writer Bobbie Johnson, exiled to San Francisco, feared he'd been left alone with bunny-boiling lunatics.

Silicon Alley Insider blogger Nicholas Carlson spied on his colleagues' indiscretions. (He was so much worse at Valleywag.)

Rocketboom videoblogger Andrew Baron was mistaken for someone actually famous.

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Wired editor Joe Brown lived large on Si Newhouse's dime.

Gawker alum Choire Sicha gave an actor the hairy eyeball.

Slate columnist John Dickerson got in quality time with the kids.

Attention-seeking omnimedia entrepreneuse Sarah Lacy primped for a fellow pundit.

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof even enjoyed a funeral.