The Coolest Kids in Town: a blog about Baltimore, DC, and the misadventures of two-city life.

So I spend 64% of my time pretending to be wise, intellectual, and just generally not woefully unprepared for graduate school. However, I spend the other 26% of my time reading gossip blogs and telling people about Brangie's new vacation spot in Cabo. (I spend the other 10% drinking.) Yes, yes, it's true. I am a fucking trash-media junkie. So now that it's all out in the open, I can tell you about four of my favoritest gossip hotspots ever, in obsession order. 1. If People Magazine were the Queen Mother, Hello! was the unceasingly irrelevant girlfriend of whichever son, and UsWeekly was the poor showing of Camilla, Dlisted would take over England, fire them all, and hire on Michael K. to do its writing. Dlisted is some serious coolness - it's clever, catty, easy on the big words but hard on the pop culture references, it manages to be trashy without seeming trashy, and it's a definitive source for all things Hollywood (and beyond!). It's also an equal opportuni...

Now me, myself, personally - I like to start my day out with a hearty belly laugh over my morning whiskey. So naturally, these are two of the first sites I turn to: You may remember Cracked from such childhood grades as 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th. Then it was gone, a poor rip-off of MAD , drifting away on the breeze and forever gone from our candy-encrusted, easily-distracted minds. Well, bitch is back, and with a vengeance. Re-debuting itself as a more serious political satire, it kept the on-point hilarity and occasional goofiness, while (thank f---in' hell) losing the fart jokes and cheap ads for sea monkey palaces. Whether or not it sticks around is a matter of debate, but enjoy the lighthearted intelligent humor while you can. Tip : You might want to start here: The 6 Most Over-hyped Threats to America , The State of the Afro: The Best & Worst in Music Today , and The 7 Most Insane Moments from Cable Access TV . You're welcome. These guys. These guys. These guys. These g...

So today will be all about the music. I've got three awesome sites for you: Musicovery is a free in-browser music player that can create playlists for you based on mood and genre. It's a great ay to listen to music when you've got internet access, but not much else. It's got a cool, futuristic layout that's really easy to use, a wide variety of music, and a smooth interface. All in all, it's just some really cool shit. Pandora Internet Radio is the brainchild of the Music Genome Project , a group that seeks to - you guessed it - map the origins, connections, and influences of music and music genres. Here's how this works for you. Pandora plays a song. You like the song? Pandora plays more like it. You no like the song? Pandora tries again. After just a few like/no likes, it gets a pretty good approximation going of the best DJ ever in your life. There's always more work to be done, but the more you play, the more it learns. Give 'er a shot, see wha...

Pippi selects some of the most hideous and unnecessary articles of clothing she can find and presents them for your consideration. Because, as she puts it, "You know what we need in the world? More frivolous sh#t." My personal favorite? This post.

OK, so sorry about yesterday - I was too sick, no post. Which means you get a double whammy today: a retroactive cool post, and an Awesome Blog of the Week (tm) post! You can go to Overheard in New York to submit weird, funny, crazy, insightful, and faith-in-humanity-destroying quotations that people next to you say on the streets! It gets updated about 6 million times a day, so it'll even keep up the most boring day at your desk ever. Tip: Also check out Overheard in Athens , one that's a little more suited to the college crowd, and Eavesdrop DC , for all you snooty Districtarians. Then, if you are not in a library/funeral/the cubicle closest to your boss' office, you can check out some movie trailers over at Apple Trailers: From the same fine folks who screwed you on your iPhone purchase. Last, but not least, here's some coolness for my engineering/architecture/computa sciencez friends (shout out to the Bill Collector!): Go here to design your dream home, settle p...

You'll have to forgive me; I can only halfway stand up straight, and I'm just trying to hold it together 'til my 5:30 lab time. First this morning: Zafu is an online jeans-fitter, and it's a pretty cool little guide to make jeans recommendations, for guys and girls. Since every pair of jeans fits differently, Zafu's compiled some of the standard measurements and body types for different brands, and helps you find what you want accordingly. It's like having a personal shopper, only you don't have to tip. Awesome. At one point, this was a small, underground snarky writer's community known collectively as Mighty Big TV . They've since moved on from their small, underground ways, moving first to a cool little loft as Television Without Pity , then on to where they are now: in a corner office, working as a still-clever-but-less snarky guild of Bravo-sponsored TV cappers. Go here to get your fix for whatever show strikes your fancy. Indvidual writers do ...

The Hero Machine Classic: Make your own superhero! It's a fun way to make yourself look completely awesome, and if you happen to have a signi-other who's a gamer/comic book geek...well, people, this baby's more handy than a cameraphone. Afterwards, you can satisfy the little happy fat kid in all of us by becoming an M&M . Mmm. Chocolate. After this, you will probably be feeling fat and weird. Try designing some super cool kicks by Converse to compensate! Oh, yeah. And you can make your own snowflake. But I honestly don't know what the hell you'd do with that. P.S. Read the little disclaimer at the bottom: "Report offensive snowflakes"?? Who the f--- is on here cutting dirty pictures into snowflakes? Oh...wait, actually, that might be kinda funny. Be right back.

To start: McSweeney's Internet Tendency is the online home of the McSweeney's quarterly literary journal, and it is fifty-seven kinds of awesome. It is filled with current events, interesting articles, and fresh&delicious fiction writing. Best of all, it's effin' hilarious. Plus it makey Tex feel smart. Tip: Try starting with the Short Imagined Monologues . Also check out: Urban75's Useless Games is an entire page of the best worst days to waste your time. Go ahead, sign on. Play tic-tac-toe with George Bush and a monkey. You know you want to. P.S. Urban75 itself is a UK-based site about all things cool in the United Kingdom - football, music, drugs, technology, drugs, news, and drugs. It's also got a New York info site, full of club listings and decent party scenes, and it gives the same treatment to London and Brixton proper. Tip: Check out their Panoramas section for some awesome photographs of familiar cityscapes.

Street Peeper is a nicely designed, posh little site - perfect for checking out what's getting worn on the streets of Amsterdam, São Paulo, Chicago, Copenhagen, London (oh, those crazy brits!), New York, or Miami. You know, if you care. Or want to pretend you don't care, but secretly do. And for when the self-awareness just gets to be too much: Take a minute. Breathe. Relax.

Be Jackson Pollock This site's a pretty cool little daily distraction from the artless mundanity of the academic/corporate/any other world. Scribble, splat, change colors, and just generally enjoy expressing from the heart. Then, when you are done, check out . It's an archive of graffiti more impressive than the best exhibit at the Gugg. Find a new screensaver, desktop background, or just generally rediscover your faith in the endemic art of the urban landscape, and the inherent ability for expression in the human soul.

Ok, ok, I know everyone probably already knows and uses this one, but just in case... del.icio.us is a quick, easy way to make bookmarks that you can open on any computer. This is particularly awesome for a) showing your friends an awesome random site you found next time you stop by their house to eat some more of their Special K (that ish is expensive ) b) not keeping your bonnaroo, lollapalooza, austin city limits, or other various drunk-hippy fest bookmarks on your work computer or c) just saving a lot of really cool sht that you couldn't possibly be zoned out enough to stumble across again.

CopyRanter A gentle mastication of some of the finer elements of really crappy ad-making. Awesome, hilarious, and best of all, invoking appropriate comma use. Good Grammar Costs Nothing, people.

alright, I got wore down and I'm doing two posts in one day. Don't get used to it. More cool shit: 1) Virb∘ is just about the coolest, best, most awesome amazing thing to ever cross the net. Believe it - I'm saying that and I'm not even on commission (...yet - wink, wink, unborn media). 2) SlothRadio's site is excellent for us OCD Mp3 tag-fixers. Perfect for all those obscure or improperly named albums in iTunes, it's a directory of about a bajillion album covers, from the early days of the American record scene to now. 3) Scribd is an awesome resource for...well, just about anyone who doesn't mind reading the typed-in version of all those books you had to buy in high school. Scribd, so far, isn't great for much else. Anybody need The Odyssey , Huck Finn , or Invisible Man ? You can save yourself the $6.99 - take that , Penguin Publishing! - although, admittedly, having a dog-eared copy of Dostoyevsky holding down your TV Guide does make you look rea...

ok, if this works, and i can blog post from my email, this will officially be the coolest shit ever. love, Texas

Check this out if you haven't already; I've made it the homepage on my beloved thesis-cradling work computer. It's a super-fast way to get the buzz on what went down while you were in the bathroom at work/eating a lukewarm lean pocket/watching Beauty & the Geek reruns on VH1/quietly sobbing into your 7th edition Statistical Methods and Practices of the Anal-Retentive Researcher : I think it's awesome. It keeps me updated in the 0.5 minutes of down time I have between writing theses, reading massive british journal articles, and gently laving the balls of my graduate committee.

Having tried (and failed) numerous times to blog like a real live person, I'm giving it another go in another form. This site will not be used to track my egocentric progress through a series of inane experiences, nor will it be a forum for political diatribe or eco-urging. It's just going to be a lot of really cool shit, all put together on a mostly-legible site for everyone to share. Enjoy. - Texas