fredgraver.com

Check out the apps in the header. Need a password? Send me an email!!!

Fred Wilson and Buster Olney. Same guy? Very possible. They sound alike, they’re both amazingly smart, and — as we used to say in the midwest — “real good with the numbers.”

Or am I watching too much Baseball Tonight?

Fred Wilson

When I was at Letterman, we used to have a stand-by joke we’d use whenever we wrote something really really really dumb and / or crude — a representative from the Peabody Awards or the Humanitas Awards would come out and give Dave a statue “in honor of that last joke.”

Well, the Onion just actually WON that kind of award, for their Onion News Videos. And they deserve it. Here’s my favorite recent piece of theirs.

How To Wax Your Floors Without Slipping And Severing Your Spine

Is Britney Spears Trying to End Her Father’s Control? - Britney Spears : People.com.

Okay… just trying to sort this out…

Britney’s Dad and Mom kind of took control of her life. She obviously wasn’t enjoying the enforced parentage. Turned to her friend Sam Lufti — via a smuggled cellphone in a sauna — for help. Sam’s now in court for Britney trying to… lift the restraining order against her parents?

Are we really treating Britney fairly? If we were going to hand control of people who were a danger to themselves and others, then Grandma and Grandpa Fuld would have been given control of Lehman’s a year ago!

Shanna Moakler Blogs About Split from Travis Barker - Couples, Shanna Moakler, Travis Barker : People.com.

You know, our lives would be so much easier if all the celebs blogged about their lives and their breakups. And particularly if they did it in RDF or OWL! (Okay, 2 guys in the “Semantic Web Meetup” group are ROTFLMAO right now.)

OH — and gents, just take a tip from this: if you’re having an affair, DON’T get in a plane crash. Because stuff starts to come out that… well, read this from Shanna’s blog:

As for when trouble started between Moakler and Barker, she says that while she was helping her ex recover from his September plane crash, “I came across numerous romantic emails with MANY other women, some famous, some I personally knew, all heart breaking.” To the women involved, Moakler writes: “You know who you are and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Update the data on Shanna and Travis:

canoodled > dated > married > cheated> cheated > cheated> separated

Joba The Drunk - April 2, 2009.

From time to time, we’ll post in Popstra about sports figures, when they become Pop Culture figures.

I’d bet on Joba Chamberlain and C.C. Sabathia becoming Pop Culture figures this year. (IN FACT, there might be an interesting “Fantasy League” type thing to do with predicting who’s going to cross over…) My bet is based on A-Rod’s absence (for a while), Sabathia’s AWESOMELY LOVABLE family, and Chamberlain’s awesome DUI last October, which is chronicled here by the Smoking Gun.

Favorite quote from the police report:

Chamberlain told Trooper Michael Grummert that he began drinking 90 minutes before the traffic stop and had consumed “beer and vodka, approximately three beers, and four to five drinks.” A “cooperative and courteous” Chamberlain failed a pair of field sobriety tests, and a Breathalyzer test showed that his blood alcohol content was .134, above the state’s .08 limit. But the Yankee did succeed when asked to recite the alphabet and count to 20. And when Grummert asked if he was under the influence, “Chamberlain stated that he was.” (3 pages)

The TV Watch - ‘ER’ Goes the Way of Nurses’ Caps After 15 Years - NYTimes.com.

I really wish the site were up and running… the ultimate connection chart for all of the cast members of ER would be just great…

Ah well…

Scarlett Johansson’s Sexy New Moet Ads (PHOTOS).

You’d think, with Lost In Translation on her resume, Scarlett Johansson’s first “shilled for” gig would have been offshore somewhere… Oh, I don’t know, South America, Australia, somewhere…

NOPE. She’s shilling Moet in America. Oh, Scarlett! You had us at holding a glass with your foot. Julia Roberts can’t do that — her feet are WEBBED.

Rise ‘n’ Shine: Britney Spears & Kevin Federline Rekindling the Flames? - E! Online.

Oh yes.

Oh oh oh oh yes.

Oh don’t stop yes.

They’re back and, according to E! Online, they’re making out in elevators. (Making out in elevators is the gateway drug to running naked through the streets with an umbrella…)

Fix the databank… The chronology for Britney and K-Fed is officially

backup dancer > canoodled > dated > married > parents > divorced > dissed > canoodled

Oh yes.

Nic Cage Sells His Castle - E! Online.

Okay… okay… let’s get this right… Nic Cage has TWO castles — one in Bavaria (well, if you’re going to start shopping for a castle, I guess you go the obvious route for your “first one”), and one in Bath, England.

Turns out, he’s selling the Bavarian castle. E! reports:

The 45-year-old thesp put more than $4 million into the fixer-upper, but given the credit crisis, decided to unload the castle to his former lawyer. According to the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, he only spent one night at the place.

Of course, Cage has another castle to fall back on. He also owns the Midford Castle just outside of Bath, England, an 18th century gothic style affair he purchased in 2007 for $7.3 million—the Superman lover’s own private fortress of solitude for him, third wife Alice and their 3-year-old son, Kal-El.

(Time out… Kal-El??? I thought the castle was the funny part of this post… OH… and he sells it to… his FORMER lawyer? Let’s think about that phone call for a minute… “Hey, uh… remember how you got me into that land deal in Florida that lost me like $4million? How’d you like to make it up to me and I’ll stop talking trash about you on the set of National Treasure 8.”)

Okay… time to update lots of Popstra data on Nic — homes, children’s names, former lawyers…

Which Fashion Femmes Shared a Smooch? - E! Online.

Okay… so now we get to work… New friend connection: J-Lo and K-Mo!

Drop7.

A couple of days ago, I posted screenshots from my iPhone, displaying all the apps I’ve been playing. Reader “Slavin” posted “Where’s drop 7″ or something to that affect. SO, being a sucker for any kind of attention, I downloaded it.

I missed my stop on the subway yesterday. Highest rating for an app, I’d say! It’s better than Tetris!

Here’s how they describe it:

Drop7 combines the easy fun of casual drop-and-break games with the smart, brain-stretching enjoyment of simple number puzzles.

Drop numbered discs into the grid. Whenever the number on a disc matches the amount of discs in its row or column it disappears. Keep the board open to keep scoring, and survive as long as you can. Clear the board or set off huge chains for big bonus points.

Trust me, you’ll LOVE it.

No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford - Boing Boing.

It’s time for me to seriously start thinking about the types of posts I’ll be putting up onto popstra.com, beginning in May. (Yes, I’m the kid in school who started his term paper the day the teacher assigned it.)

Popstra will be a living “six degrees of” website, showing you all the connections and relationships between and among the stars, and illustrating the top stories of the day. (Yes, there’s a better way to describe it, but I’m hedging…)

Anyway, first thing I did today, as I began researching celebrity dirt, was to go to … a site that has practically no celebrity dirt. BoingBoing. ANd here was this AWESOME painting called “No One Wants to Play Sega With Harrison Ford.”

Which leads me to think.. how would we categorize this relationship on Popstra? “Painted by?”

Something to think about… and I love the painting.

“The world is in a mess because the financial system was not capitalist enough.”

Ya know, when you start nodding your head at the WSJ’s take on things, you have to wonder just what you and the world have come to…

via G-20 Protesters Aiming at Wrong Target - WSJ.com.

Cellmania Gives Carriers Their Own Android Marketplaces.

(Via TechCrunch.)  At this point, the only way to get on the iPhone is through the Apple Store. It’s a pretty solid lock-up, and Apple has the upper hand… And as long as Apple can back up its claims that this is the only way they can maintain quality, it will keep the upper hand.

The best way, it seems, for Google or RIM to become competitive in the app area is to let other marketplaces bloom. That’s how you’ll end up with the killer app that builds buzz for the Android, or keeps BlackBerry people happy.

… an irregular review of what I’m reading on my reading device…

ESPN Baseball Report. It’s that time of year again — time to see how long it takes me to get familiar with the teams, see how long it takes me to stay excited, see how long it takes real life to take over my best intentions of staying involved in Baseball. ESPN’s baseball report on the kindle pulls together all their columns every day, and leaves them right there where I can fall asleep to them at 1 in the morning… Ah, life, why can’t you just let me enjoy baseball?

Baseball Musings. One of my favorite baseball sites… I’d say it was the 538.com of baseball, except 538.com has its roots in sabremetrics. It’s great stats, a delightful pov, and quick / short / sharp bursts of baseball wisdom.

… more to come.

… just got this email from him… what a riot!

NOT Tom Norgel

Well, you all know me…I tend not to brag about accomplishments.  In fact, I have a hard time with folks that do!
With that said, I need to Brag…
Yesterday this 54 year old completed a marathon on rollerblades…..26.2 miles, 70 laps inside the MetroDome!!!! 2:19:57
I don’t even hurt.
My first goal was to finish, my second was not to be last and thirdly was to finish in less than 2:20
And just for the record, I only started rollerblading in January!
so, there ya go

I’ve been madly testing all kinds of iPhone apps, trying to figure out what makes the good ones work and what makes the (cr)apps just that. Over the next week or so, I’ll delve into some of my favorites — but here’s what my phone looks like right now:

“there’s an awful lot you need to accomplish before you properly fail.”

– Nate Westheimer, looking back on BricaBox.