Last week I was telling a friend about the fact that two women had been found cut in half in garbage bags in Homewood. He response was “that sounds very Dexter.” Honestly, I had no idea what she was talking about - I assumed it was some reference to the cartoon Dexter’s Laboratory. Not wanting to admit to cultural naivety, I just changed the conversation. In the past few days I have seen some promos and now understand that Dexter is a show on Showtime. The show is about to start it’s second season and the first season received some great reviews.
According to Wikipedia - Dexter is “serial killer Dexter Morgan, who works as a forensics analyst specializing in bloodstain pattern analysis for the Miami-Dade Police Department.” The series is based on the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.

Some Dexter Trivia:
- Jeff Lindsay is married to Ernest Hemingway’s niece.
- Dexter’s girlfriend is played by Julie Benz who was born in Pittsburgh and attended Franklin Regional High School.

So it was serendipitous timing that I received an email today from someone at Showtime (who also has a fondness for Pittsburgh). There is going to be a promotion of sorts for Dexter in Pittsburgh (and in 14 other cities ) tomorrow.

Area fans can meet us at PPG Place, Downtown to pick up Dexter goodies
including a preview DVD with the first episode of Dexter season 2.
I suggest you bring your camera to capture the scene ­ should be pretty
colorful!

We¹ve created a Flickr group so anyone who stops by can share their photos
with Dexter fans around the country.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/dexter/

All they would tell me is that something will be happening between 11am and 5pm tomorrow. I will stop by and try to take some pictures. If you are in the area snap some pictures and send them over to the Flickr group.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have a real problem when it comes to local news - essentially, I can’t get enough of it. For instance, you know those severe weather marathons that take up an entire’s evening worth of television as they highlight summer thunderstorms descending into places like Sligo and Vandergrift? While most people are so annoyed by them that they might take the opportunity to turn off the tube and say, read a book, I’m totally there on the couch with a tub of popcorn relishing every moment as I flip between Schwenneker and Verszyla. Needless to say, I’m on pins and needles with anticipation for the latest local news station to hit town - Channel 9 WURG, the fake Pittsburgh channel to be featured on Fox’s upcoming sitcom “Back to You” starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton.
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Sadly, the stat counter seemed to show that not that many people are very concerned about the important Youtube Man boob issue. This concerns me because the word boobs has always been one of the best ways to attract web traffic. Here is another video about the exploitation of women to get web traffic.If I was not here nothing important would be talked about.

It is late August once again, the time when newspaper columnists’ thoughts turn to getting their columns in quick so they can get to the park and enjoy the weather. As such, it is list time at the Post-Gazette.

Columnists love lists because they are simple to compile and fill space quickly. As Tony Norman says in today’s column:

[I]n lieu of actual work, I present a list of fiction and CDs I’ve picked up over the last year that I’ve enjoyed.

This is an error on Tony’s part. He should have gotten two columns out of this premise, one of books and the other of records. As it is, he is only able to discuss the books in any detail, and the records section is nothing but a list of names, indicating nothing except perhaps that Tony Norman listens to far too much college radio for a man of his age.

Brian O’Neill, known on the streets as Bone-Ill, takes Tony to school. he got not just one but two columns out of a much more limited premise: lists of Pennsylvania movies. Now that is opinion-writing excellence.

When you see these fellows out on the frisbee-golf course, you can ask them for the secrets of their success. They will tell you:

1. Listing things.
2. Writing them down.
3. Typing them into a computer.
4. Commentary, if there is time.
5. Out of the office by eleven!

In the interest of driving up traffic on this si/ um, I mean keeping you informed about important Internet issues; I am posting this video and this one.

I have spent hour after tragically painful hour watching women who feel that they have to expose their breasts to attract viewers online. It’s been a very very hard experience for me.

In conclusion, this issue is important because it drives traffic to this website.

Dear Forbes,
I can’t believe that you didn’t pick me as Pittsburgh’s most eligible bachelorette. Seriously, what were you thinking - a fiftysomething CEO over a twentysomething grad student/research coordinator/occasional blogger? Why, Forbes, why? I’m not only totally single but I’m, like, totally fun. I mean, I bet Michelle Fabrizi has never even danced on the bar at The Matrix or rode on the bull at Saddle Ridge (okay, I’ve never done that last one either but I totally would if it meant a better shot at winning next year).
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Earlier this week I chided the Post-Gazette for claiming to be “ready” to upgrade their website, but not doing so.

Now that I see the new look, I realize that I was completely wrong. I will long pine for the time when the P-G used the old, handsome design. The new website, renamed “Post-Gazette Now” due to the frequent misapprehension that the P-G website existed outside the flow of time, can only be described as nauseously butt-nasty.

Not only is the color scheme ripped from Miami Vice, as you can see above, but the banner is a huge wash of white space. The photos are distorted, with the exception of this picture of Joe Hardy, which only appears distorted because Joe Hardy is in it. There is significantly less content available, so while you could once get a sense of the day’s stories in seconds, now you need to click into various sections, indicated in a links bar stolen from the old New York Times website.

This is a debacle. The P-G would be wise to cut their losses, fire their new web designer, and return to the old pleasant to look at and easy to use design.

The Post-Gazette website has this notice shoehorned into the middle of the main page:

TO OUR READERS:
post-gazette.com is ready to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a fresh look, better navigation and new features throughout the site. In the days and weeks ahead, watch for exciting changes at post-gazette.com, where you’ll always find the latest local news and the region’s best online coverage of sports, lifestyle, business and entertainment.

Good to know that they are ready. One hopes they are also willing and able.

I should be kinder to the Post-Gazette. Their web presence blows the city’s other daily out of the water. The Tribune-Review’s nausea-inducing interface and infuriating screaming advertising are best avoided (note to Trib: I link to the P-G stories rather than Trib ones, even if yours are better, because I will not subject readers to your noisy banner ads and pop-ups if I can avoid it. I am willing to guess I am not the only internet writer who feels that way).

Except for the City Paper, which had the good sense to spend a few bucks to upgrade from their old, baffling web design last year, the P-G is a lot stronger than the weeklies in town too, each of which has its own weaknesses (the Courier lacks decent archives, the Pittsburgh Business Times is clunky, the Jewish Chronicle just plain stinks).

So, anyway, they are good. I am happy that they are planning to get better, with the caveat that I worry that “getting better” to them means making their reporters carry around DAT recorders to make mini-podcasts as Dennis Roddey has done of late. Why, though, are they telling us they are “ready” to do it? An old saying pops to mind about what one might compel oneself to do, with the alternative of getting off the pot.

Is that the Post-Gazette appears to have decided that the Morning File must never be funny or interesting again. I suppose it is a kind of mourning process at One of America’s Remaining Newspapers.

They do have their rose-colored hindsight glasses firmly librarian-chained to their heads:

Gramps was the custodian at the grade school I attended. To Grandma the school principal, Mr. Mitchell, was always “the Professor.” Many sentences started with “The Professor said …” The current president was always “Mister Truman,” “General Eisenhower,” “Mister Kennedy” or “Mister Johnson.” She couldn’t have imagined the kind of heckling and disrespect our presidents get today.

Right you are, Grandson Richard. No one could have imagined that the President of the United States might be heckled or disrespected during, say, the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration.

Everybody else in the world is talking about it, so I would be remiss if I didn’t include some mention of Pittsburgh’s very own vlogger superstar and her massive phone bill.

Justine Ezarik (of ijustine.tv, Tasty Blog Snack and occasionally MacBreak Weekly) recorded a video of herself opening the bill AT&T sent her for her iPhone use - it’s such a big bill that they mailed it to her in a box.

It came in as about 300 pages long, partly because Justine is a veritable text messaging savant - she racked up 30,000 of them.

You can see the video of her unboxing the bill below: