Annual thank you to friends of my blog

For the third year in a row, I'm going to pretend like I just won an Oscar for blog-writing and deliver an annoyingly long thank you speech:

First off, I'd like to thank a wonderful young copy editor named Edison Russ who has helped me out through the severest cases of writers block and crisizes ovrer how To spell, weed out typous abd capitzalize (see how much my sentences fall apart without Edison?) I'm not sure what Edison's employment status is but some employer out there is sorely missing out by not snatching up Edison.

I want to thank all the big people out there in the world of TV and film criticism who take time to throw me some love in the twitterverse. Will Harris, a fellow Virginian writer, has the supercool job of interviewing C-level stars (the best kind) for the random roles feature of the AV Club. Has been open with advice and managed to fake being impressed when I showed him my list of famous people I interviewed. Daniel T. Walters is kind of a big deal on Twitter and in the world of TV writing  with the Pacific Northwest Inlander and has occasionally given me feedback in 140 characters or less and I accidentally omitted him in the last two editions. Sorry Daniel and thanks for the support. There is also someone out there named Emily Nussbaum who writes brilliant pieces for the New Yorker and is quite generous with us little people when it comes to distirbuting the love on Twitter.

I'd also like to thank a writer named David Simms for being a good sport. I once randomly decided to pick someone at the AV Club and repeatedly campaign for them as a follower so thanks David and a big thank you to Kenny Herzog for actually following me.

I'd like to thank Cory Barker for putting me on a round table and want to congratulate him as well as two other twitter acquaintances Noel Kirkpatrick and Les Chappell on becoming professional TV writers in the past year as well as on the success of their new site "This was TV."

Christine Becker is a Professor of TV and film studies at Notre Dame and she is so full of support and advice, I'm pretty sure I will be needing to pay student tuition fees at Notre Dame.

There's also Matt Zoller Seitz who recently took over as the head critic for Roger Ebert and he's tweeted a couple of my posts for his audience and was very complimentary. Knowing that he might be reading encourages me to try to write something amazing.

I'd also like to thank a certain PR person at CollegeHumor named Jaime. The first thing I said to her when she called and I heard her voice was female was "So now the mystery is solved over whether you're a Hispanic man or a woman" and rather than hang up the phone, she kept talking to me and let me interview some famous people that I can add to my "famous people I interviewed" list. My communication with Jaime this past year has probably totaled more minutes than any other professional correspondence which Jaime probably is unhappy about so hopefully this makes up for that.

I'd also like to thank Ben Relles the head of Barely Political for being generous with my interview as well as Sam Reich of CollegeHumor for hearing my script idea over the course of our interview and not telling me it sucked. I also would like to thank all the people who cooperated with me on interviews this year: This year I got to interview an expert on the Nazi party in Arlington, a puzzle maker, an SNL auditionee who now imitates Mary-Kate Olsen for a living, two major heads of production in the internet world, a group of DIY bike collective owners, a food cart owner illegally operating on the streets of Arlington, a Jewish boy scout troop, a hand-crafted violin maker, a collector of Pez dispensers, the owner of a historic cemetery, a 36-year veteran of the CIA on the TV show "The Americans", the Arlington County Assistant Manager, the staff at Americana Hotel in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, and a bunch of people in Arlington who claim to have seen coyotes.

[The orchestra is pushing me off the stage but I must keep going]

Some miscellaneous thank yous:
I'd like to thank my former editor at the Connection, Steven, for continuing to give me advice and counsel me, I'd like to thank Eddie "Mr Puma" Rodriguez for his belief that I might eventually get back into Cracked's good graces and being awesome in general (I don't remember if Eddie has a site of his own, but I remember he has some mad editing skills and he can be found here). Also, a thank you to Kathy Benjamin at Cracked for giving advice and giving me a recommendation for Mental Floss Magazine. She has a great book out right now. Meg Miller Reydzewski also helped me as a freelancer for ArlNow with coordinating a lot of information. If I'm not mistaken Meg has a book out so everyone buy that immediately once they figure out the name of it. Also, Jason Iannone has made the quality of articles at TopTenz.net a lot better through some great editing and also gave it to me straight when I needed an intervention so thanks for that buddy. And a little thanks to a user on twitter named @AdmiralChristy who gave me a little reading when I needed it most today.

Speaking of editors, I'd like to thank all the editors who've given me a place to publish (to avoid muddling their digital foot prints, I'll just give first names). Some of you have a sense of confidence in me that means a lot, some of you make me work hard for my stories, some of you are insightful and collaborate with me in a way that's a lot of fun, some of you are pleasantly down-to-earth, but you all have one thing in common: Giving me money to write stories, which is pretty heroic of all of you:
Philippa at The Pink Line Project, Steve at Nostalgia Digest (check out See You on the Radio), Jenny at Arlington Magazine, Scott at Arlington Sun Gazette, Adrienne at Teaching Tolerance, Alexandra at Washington City Paper, Shell at TopTenz.net, the ever-so-patient Brendan at CBS ManCave, Jason at Mental Floss Magazine, Scott at Arl Now, David at Reel SEO, Cindy at Richmond Times Dispatch, and last but not least, Tina at Richmond Style-Weekly. Would you believe these are all actual newspapers and that I'm in all of them (technically all but one this calendar year)? I would not have guessed that as recently as 2012.

And thank you to all the people who rejected me too: The internet commenters who tell me I suck and are frustrated to see me continue being published need some form of validation and it's nice to know that you're there for them.

Stephanie Norton is a recent partner in crime of mine who has been on movie sets and worked with movie stars before landing in the D.C. area and she writes screenplays and does a bunch of stuff. She taught me a lot about social media and clearly knows what she's doing.

Thank you to John Lehr and Jay Martel for following me on Twitter. Are you sure it was me you wanted to follow? You guys make (pretty good) TV, I just write about it.

And lastly thank you to anyone who reads my blog and is forgiving of my lack of correct spelling because I just rattled off this entry on my cell phone and probably have a lot of misspellings in here including the names of the people I'm thanking.

For past editions, click on the tag "Friends of Blog"