BY ALEX BLAGG
It's funny, looking at my picture on Drew's banner image, right up there next to the Ultimate Warrior, Mario Lopez, some football players and Carl Winslow. While I'm honored to be held in the same esteemed regard as such amazing human specimens, I guess I can't help but laugh at the notion that Drew Snyder has actually created a website in which all those people - and myself - share some sort or definitive connection.
But maybe the world - or a few hundred Ole Miss students - needed that, an online outpost where one can read the latest tedium of Mississippi politics sandwiched right between a nostalgic professional wrestling retrospective and one of my hyperbolic rants against Frat Culture or President Bush or whatever. And no matter how silly this might seem, I would say that whatever modest amount of success I've managed to achieve in my life as a comedic writer, somehow it started here, on Snydernews, back when it was just a message board full of morons (myself included) spouting off their ill-informed opinions about pretty much whatever.
It was the first time I felt the sickeningly seductive drug known as Instant Feedback. That incredibly addictive experience of publishing my opinions, and instantaneously seeing what kind of reaction they would cause. I truly believe that singular phenomenon has played more part than anything in shaping the kind of writer I've become today. And here some 8 or 9 years later, getting paid more than I ever thought I would to do a job that didn't even exist when I was in college, I am still a full-blown feedback junkie.
I used to post on Snydernews under a pseudonym I created (actually, stole from Ben Folds) called One Angry Dwarf. It seemed like the appropriate image for the written persona I was trying to cultivate: smart-assy, satirical, provocative, opinions from someone who was somehow an outsider. And while I have long since become comfortable enough to write the same kinds of things under my own name, in a certain way, I am still One Angry Dwarf. Replace the drunken misadventures of frat dudes in the Grove with the drunken misadventures of Lindsay Lohan in Hollywood, and I'm pretty much doing the same thing here at Best Week Ever.
In fact, if it weren't for this website, I probably wouldn't be sitting in an office in Times Square right now, agonizing over the best way to present to the world a clip of David Hasselhoff lying on the floor, drunk, shirtless, eating a cheeseburger, and mumbling incoherently to his daughter. So thanks, Snydernews!
I think.
Alex Blagg is an editor of VH1's Best Week Ever Blog and appears regularly on Best Week Ever's TV program and FOX News's Red Eye. We'll have more about Alex Blagg in a forthcoming story, "SNN Legends."
COMING TUESDAY: Reflections from WILL BARDWELL