Brian Alvey

My first thought when I saw TMZ headlines months ago next to the new AOL mail client was, “Why aren’t they showing any from our blogs?” Of course, headlines from Autoblog and Slashfood get a 0.5% click-through while a headline about Lindsey Lohan’s latest cocaine-related carjacking chase gets a 125% click-through, so I didn’t complain. Much.

Reading all of this news about how Facebook is the new AOL Buddy List and seeing how many people can only understand what I did in blogging when I tell them that my platform is what TMZ runs on, I am now convinced that AOL will be undergoing another name change by the end of the year.

Last year it changed from America Online to AOL and this year AOL will rebrand itself as “TMZ.”

Soon we’ll all be using TMZ Mail, TMZ Messenger, the TMZ Client and TMZ Space (formerly known as AIM Pages).

TMZ will gain members at a rate AOL could never have dreamed of.

It’s going to happen.

I can feel it.

Niki, the boys and I spent the last four days in Cape Cod and on the last day of our trip I completed The Cape Cod Triathlon. I’m not sure if that’s its official name, but in the morning we played miniature golf, then Niki and I hit the batting cages and after that I did several minutes of intense trampolining at Jump On Us in West Yarmouth.

After beating me by four strokes the day before, Niki and I tied at golf. We both had a blast at the batting cages and did respectably well considering neither of us has swung at a pitch since we’ve known each other, which is more than eleven years. Surprisingly to me, I actually broke a sweat on the trampoline. I had no idea it was so much work.

Jump On Us has 16 trampolines arranged like pool tables in a pool hall, but level with the ground over five foot deep pits. You pay four dollars per person for ten minutes of jumping so money-wise I’m sure it’s cheaper than digging a hole in your backyard, building an enclosure with a roof and maintaining a bunch of trampolines.

On Mother’s Day, I made a last-minute trip with my boys to get Niki some cards. We got a nice one from the two of them which basically said, “For Mother’s Day, we wanted to get you a gift certificate for the best dinner in town, but since it’s your special day, why should we make you cook?” How sweet.

For the one from me, I was looking at musical cards while the kids were running around. I listened to a couple of them before finding James Taylor’s How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You). Our wedding song was James Taylor’s Your Smiling Face, so I figured this would be perfect. We bought our cards, raced home and gave them to Niki.

Niki opened the one from the boys first. Then she opened mine and it started playing a really funky riff. James Brown started grunting. I couldn’t make out what he was singing, but later on I flipped it over and read the name of the song. It was James Brown and he was singing Mother Popcorn:

Some like ’em fat and some like em tall
Some like ’em short
Skinny legs and all
I like ’em tall
I like ’em proud
And when they walk
You know they draw a crowd!
See, you gotta have a mother for me
Yeah, yeah, yeah, ah come on!

Good grief! I can’t believe I opened and listened to three other cards and then didn’t make sure the one I was buying was filed under the right label. What crazy Mother’s Day lyrics.

Live and learn. At least it wasn’t Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag or It’s a Man’s World.

Tonight my oldest son was singing “woo hoo, wee hoo” over and over. I asked him who sings that song and before he could stop singing and answer me my youngest son who is not yet two answered, “Gwen?”

Gwen Stefani. That is correct!

It reminded me of when Jack first recognized a Foo Fighters song.

You have to blog the milestones.

Hy Zaret, who wrote the haunting lyrics for Unchained Melody died at age 99 this week. Unchained Melody was one of the most recorded songs of the last century. The version most of us knew was the Righteous Brothers one that had a resurgence in the movie Ghost.

According to stories I read about the song, he was asked to write it for the film Unchained and he did it without using the word unchained in the lyrics. My personal favorite version of the song is Willie Nelson’s.

Seven or eight years ago, Niki and I took my mom and her husband to see Righteous Brothers in Atlantic City a few years before Bobby Hatfield died. Mainly I did this because Unchained Melody was my mom’s favorite song. Afterwards I asked her how the show was. She loved it. I asked how she liked Unchained Melody. She loved it. I said, “That’s your favorite song, right?” She said, “No. I do love that song, but my favorite song is House of the Rising Sun.”

Argh.

So I kept an eye out for Eric Burden shows and ended up taking her to see him at B.B. King’s in New York City. We watched a great show that included House of the Rising Sun. I got to cross that one off of my list.

A few weeks ago I took my dad to see Chicago at Jones Beach for Father’s Day. I knew they were one of his favorite bands when I was a kid and at least he didn’t tell me after the show that he’d rather have seen The Doors.

Last night Niki and I saw Rush at Jones Beach. We met up with Craig and his friends and family and we had a blast.

I’ve seen the Canadian trio at least twice in the past, with Tommy Shaw opening for them once and King’s X another time. Last night there was no opening act, only a short intermission. My expectations were low since I’ve seen them and had heard just about every Rush song I’d ever want to hear in concert already and maybe those low expectations helped them blow me away.

The highlight for me was the South Park video leading into Tom Sawyer. Cartman and his buddies are in a band called Lil Rush and they’re doing their own version of Tom Sawyer, including Cartman’s lyrics, “Modern day warrior, named Tom Sawyer, he floated down the river on a raft with a black guy.”

I’ve seen plenty of great drum solos, with Mick Fleetwood and Phil Collins being way up there, and I’ve seen Neil Peart’s solos before. I considered myself immune to drum solos, done with them for life, but Neil’s last night was off the charts.

“I am Geddy Lee and I will sing whatever lyrics I want!”

What a great rock show!

We were driving along in our car and Jack said, “I wish there was a jump button in our car for if someone was going to hit us.” So do I, little man!

One of Jack’s two betta fish is dying. He has swim bladder disease, basically a big air bubble in his body that keeps him floating at the top of the little tank no matter how hard he tries to swim down. I showed Jack that the fish is in pain and will be dying soon and he asked, “Can we fry him and eat him?” Nice. The last one “hitched a ride on the porcelain express” to quote Gil from Finding Nemo. I explained that he’s too small for us to eat, only another fish would eat a fish that small. When Niki got home, Jack told her, “Rocky is going to die. Can we feed him to a dolphin?” Hah. We were just doing that at SeaWorld last weekend.

My boys and I picked up some takeout last week and as we were leaving the restaurant two men who were outside said good night to us. Jack yelled back, “Smoking is not good!”

Jack loves inchworms. He found one right before we were going for a car ride and wanted to keep it inside the house. I told him that he cannot leave an inchworm inside the house to run around while we go to lunch. Jack said, “He will not run, Daddy. He can only inch.”

Niki got Jack an ant farm a few months ago. The ants come in a little tube, separate from the farm. You pour the ants into the top of the farm and remove the ones that died in transit with tweezers. I asked Jack to hand me the tweezers once and he said, “Those aren’t tweezers. Those are called Ant take outers.”

Update: I forgot another recent one. We were at Barnes & Noble and I pointed to a baseball book and asked who was on the cover. He correctly answered “Derek Jeter.” I was thrilled and asked if he was sounding out the name on the cover or if he just recognized the face. Jack said that he didn’t really know who it was, he just thinks every baseball player is Derek Jeter. Then he pointed to a Babe Ruth book and said, “I think that man is Derek Jeter, too” and smiled at me. He cracks me up.

I guess I didn’t quit AOL in time to be eligible to enter this mind-blowing Autoblog contest — and I even knew the contest was coming.

To coincide with their redesign, Autoblog is giving away an all-new 2007 Dodge Nitro.

It’s good news, bad news for me. The good news is that one of our blogs is giving away a car and the new site is rocking with those four category tabs at the top, the Breaking News and Featured Stories boxes and a new comments system, but the bad news is that the old Autoblog site was one of the ones that I had designed and now it’s gone.

I am happy that the new logo uses the same speedometer theme. Matt did some fantastic design work on this one and Autoblog’s John Neff put like 5 years and 50,000 miles into making this sweepstakes happen.

Congratulations!

It’s not because they got rid of my old Autoblog logo and it’s not an April Fool’s joke involving Twitter this time.

About a year ago an old friend of mine asked me if I wanted to be involved in a comic book publishing company with him. We discussed it off and on and I was hooked. After all I had wanted to be a comic book artist since high school. Where did I go wrong?

We incorporated last summer and had plans to launch a site last fall. Mostly because my day job at AOL running Weblogs and Blogsmith takes up every online minute I have, that launch was delayed until February and even then we launched with just a news site and not the whole sprawling comic site I had envisioned.

Having a site described as the “Huffington Post of comics” is flattering, but it’s not what I want to build.

So I’ve been planning for a while to leave AOL and I’m way past my own personal limit of “Shoot me if I’m still working there in March.”

Next Friday will be my last day. If you have any favors you’ve been waiting to ask me for, let me know soon. After June 1 I will not be able to stuff the free car contest ballot boxes for you or get you those high-traffic links from Engadget, TMZ and Cinematical.

I’m leaving my companies in the capable hands of Brad Hill and Gavin Hall and they’re working for the two best people I’ve worked with recently at AOL, Marty Moe and Ted Cahall. The only drawback to me leaving AOL is I won’t get to work more with Ted or have a front-row seat as he tries to revamp AOL’s entire technology foundation, but I’ll do that vicariously through Gavin.

Actually, there is another huge drawback: I’ve built two amazing teams for Blogsmith and Netscape and I’m leaving them all behind at AOL. I always imagined I’d be working with these guys for years and years on many new projects and now I have to see if I can continue my winning streak and put together a third bunch of geniuses for the publishing platform at ComicMix.

At least I’m smart enough to not try and build it all by myself.