Carlsbadistan

Valishia, the 32-year-old homemaker from Carlsbadistan who was hoping to win the heart of airline pilot Jake Pavelka on the ABC show The Bachelor: Wings of Desire, was cut from the herd last night according to a story on Reality TV World.

“All I know is I put it all out there and I put my life on hold to be here and I’m not the woman he wants,” said Valishia after her ouster. . . “I came with a heart that was open to finding someone that would love me the way I would love them. But I’m used to things not going my way, and that’s something I’ve learned to live with.”

We’re not exactly sure if we think more of her for not getting chosen or if she’s just the bottom of the bottom of the barrel.

[Link: Reality TV World]

Carlsbadistan’s favorite local iPhone applications developer Appy Entertainment has just released its newest game, Zombie Pizza for the iPhone.

The basic premise of the game is that flesh eating Zombies have taken over. As a player you have managed to become an apprentice pizza chef whose main goal is to keep the hungry zombies at bay with your pies.

Make the brain, stomach, and other body part covered creations fast enough and the zombies will stay full and leave your corpus intact. Take too long, and you become the lunch instead of the pizza.

Zombie pizza is a light hearted, easy to play, addictive game that has been a hit with the kids as well the adults. The progressively challenging, and funnier levels keep the attention for more than the first round. At 99 cents it’s a bargain and easy to throw on the iPhone for some quick entertainment. Thanks Appy!

[Link: Zombie Pizza]

At this moment some of the biggest names in digital technology are cueing up at Carlsbadistan’s The Four Seasons Aviara (if that’s what it’s still called) for The Wall Street Journal’s D | All Things Digital Conference which runs May 26-28, 2009. And that means it’s time for our annual All Things Barged expedition. We’re not as excited this year because the line-up of tech players this year while strong isn’t exactly a list of people that we’re interested in, but there are still some extremely heavy hitters. Here’s who will be speaking in Carlsbadistan over the next three days:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment
Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla
Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft
Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo
Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures
Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day
Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia
Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion
John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla
John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation
Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners
Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.
Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm
Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T
Biz Stone | Co-Founder of Twitter
Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace
Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post
Evan Williams | Co-Founder and CEO of Twitter
Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal

Now that we think about it, if we made a list of people in the tech business who had some serious explaining to do it would look a lot like the D7 speakers list. Here’s a little of what we mean:

• Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo needs to explain what happened to Nokia’s business after Apple stepped in with the iPhone.
• Palm’s Jon Rubinstein is going to do the same thing, though he will be disguising his excuses as a presentation of their new webOS.
• Twitter’s Biz Stone and Evan Williams need to explain some kind of end game for a company that has raised close to $300 million, has 30.1 million users and zero revenue.
• Mark Cuban has some seriously SEC issues that we’re sure he’s just itching to explain.
• It would be wise of Carol Bartz to explain why Yahoo has a future
• Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker should explain how money can be made with a free browser
• Steve Ballmer will likely attempt to explain the roll out Mircosoft’s next marketing failure (Bing)
• And finally, The Washington Post’s Katharine Weymouth will be faced with the “what ever happened to newspapers” question that we’re sure she’s extremely tired of answering.

We would love to hear many of these explanations, but the conference costs $5,000. We’ll let you know how it goes. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher were very cool to us last year as was a certain PR person from Google.

If you’re interested in following along click here to get the All Things D iPhone app.

[Link: D7 | All Things D]

It is rare that Carlsbadistan gets a real literary treatment. But, as several readers have pointed out, the April 6, 2009 issue of The New Yorker magazine features a piece of fiction by writer Brad Watson titled Visitation. Watson, who is a creative writing professor at the University of Wyoming, placed his sad story of an estranged, unemployed father visiting his young son right in the heart of Carlsbadistan.

The fictional father and son stay in a local motor lodge (with some Gypsies) and walk the “wide beach at Carlsbad. Carlsbad was far too cool, but what could you do?” While on the beach they watch a military helicopter nearly crash land. Later the two go to Pizza Port for dinner. Here’s how Watson describes it:

The place was crowded with people who’d been at the beach all day, although Loomis recognized no one they’d seen when the helicopter had nearly crashed and killed them all. He’d expected everyone in there to know about it, to be buzzing about it over beer and pizza, amazed, exhilarated. But it was as if it hadn’t happened.

The long rows of picnic tables and booths were filled with young parents and their hyperkinetic children, who kept jumping up to get extra napkins or forks or to climb into the seats of the motorcycle video games. Their parents flung arms after them like inadequate lassos or pursued them and herded them back. The stools along the bar were occupied by young men and women who apparently had no children and who were attentive only to one another and to choosing which of the restaurant’s many microbrews to order. In the corner by the rest rooms, the old surfers, regulars here, gathered to talk shop and knock back the stronger beers, the double-hopped and the barley wines. Their graying hair frizzled and tied in ponytails or dreads or chopped in stiff clumps dried by salt and sun. Their faces leather brown. Gnarled toes jutting from their flip-flops and worn sandals like assortments of dry-roasted cashews, Brazil nuts, ginger root.

Visitation is a great piece of short fiction, but Watson’s story isn’t the only Carlsbadistan reference in the issue: on the back page in the Cartoon Caption Contest (one that we should have won at least once already) Carlsbadistan’s own Ben Russak has a caption (one of three finalists) that we believe will be the winner.

Damn him.

[Link: The New Yorker]

We don’t mean to be on a “reality TV” tip, but it seems like Carlsbadistan is showing up all over the place. On Sunday night Carlsbadistan’s bachelorette Naomi Crespo finally got the boot from ABC’s The Bachelor.

“My date with Naomi was a real roller-coaster ride… almost literally,” Mesnick wrote in a blog entry following ABC’s Monday night broadcast of The Bachelor, which ended with his elimination of Naomi, a 24-year-old flight attendant from Carlsbad, CA. . . . “[Naomi] and I are very similar in so many ways,” Mesnick explained. “I made my decision because I realized in my heart that Naomi has huge wings and she needs to fly and experience more in the world. She is a great girl and I know I made the right decision for all of us.”

We agree. And we’re going to cut it with the reality TV for now.

[Link: Reality TV World]

Sadly, one of the two remaining KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) cars from 80s TV show Knight Rider has been in a Carlsbadistan storage facility for years and we never knew anything about it.

In a story on Staten Island Live about the car making a guest appearance at a car audio store next week we learned the following. . .

The car also had a brush with real-life drama. . . . Before Barris reclaimed the car, which he had worked on during the series, it belonged to Greenwich, Conn., real estate mogul and car collector Andrew Kissel, who was stabbed to death in his basement in 2005. Kissel had never picked the car up from a storage facility in Carlsbad, Calif. . . . KITT is now on its way to Staten Island from California, traveling by truck.

Oh, KITT. If we’d only know. How lonely you must have been all this time. And now, you’re gone. . .

[Link: Staten Island Live]

Transworld Media, the longtime Oceanside-based publisher of seven action sports magazines (including Skateboarding, Snowboarding, and Motocross magazines) is pulling up its business and moving to Carlsbadistan at 2052 Corte del Nogal according to a story in the North County Times.

It will be a big shift for Transworld, a popular niche publisher that has called Oceanside home since Larry Balma, a manufacturer of skateboard parts, started TransWorld Skateboarding magazine in 1983. . . .”It’s going to be kind of a hard thing” to see the Oceanside building shuttered, said Balma’s wife, Louise, a former Transworld employee and city planning commissioner. “But they’re going to a new building —- it’s going to be all fresh and clean, and everybody’s all excited.”

Welcome to Carlsbadistan. It’s about time you got out of the slums and moved uptown. Free stickers for everyone.

[Link: North County Times]

We’ve been messing around with twitter for a while now. But we initailly wanted to wait until we were absolutely sure that we had something important to say before we announced it to the world.

If you have a twitter account, and you know what we’re talking about, please follow us and we promise that we will occasionally tweet. It may simply be about the weather, the waves, or who we just saw getting arrested, but at least it will show we care. And, you can tweet us back. We’ll be one big happy tweeting, twittering, Carlsbadistan family.

[Link: Carlsbadistan on Twitter]

The PBS show Everyday Edisons features passionate, sometimes comically misguided inventors as they attempt to bring their new products to market.

Carlsbadistan resident Michael Diep (who escpaed from from Viet Nam by boat with his family in 1980) is one of the inventors the show will follow in its second season, according to a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune. His product: Emery Cat scratching post.

Michael Diep, who makes his living as a salesman and an entrepreneur, welcomed the chance to work with the program after seeing what happened with the products from the first season. They’re being sold in stories, through mail order or on the Internet. . . .The scratching post came to him after he helped his brother take a cat to the vet for a nail trim. The cat didn’t want to go, which meant a chase, a wrestling match, scratches, flying fur.

You can catch the first episode of Everyday Edisons today at noon on KPBS. The show will continue for the next 13 weeks.

[Link: San Diego Union-Tribune]

The new issue of Carlsbad Magazine features a list of the Top 10 things to do in Carlsbad. What’s number one? The editors really reached on this one: The Beach. Apparently, there are “at least 10 different things to do at the beach.”

The only actually interesting thing on the list is the Museum of Making Music, and it was number seven. Oh, and number 10? Shopping. Right.

For the real goods check out the story on the Locals’ Top 25. That list is for people who enjoy Carlsbadistan.

A couple activities, however, were apparently left off both lists. Here are a few of them:

1. Get all mellow and post artistic observations to a blog.
2. Ride a cruiser home drunk from Dinis
3. Talk loudly about how rad things used to be on the patio at Pizza Port.
4. Set up lawnchairs and umbrellas with all your salty buddies and oogle young mom’s as they push strollers past OffShore.
5. Park your monsterous motorcoach on top of the seawall, put all your furniture on the lawn (including your TV, electric grill, and inflatable pool), and pretend you live here.
6. Set off fireworks every night of the year, just when people are getting to sleep.
7. Let your dog take huge, runny dumps on the sidewalk and then leave them there for everyone to admire.
8. Speed up and down Coast Highway in your 2007 Chevy Malibu and gas it whenever you see people stepping into a crosswalk.
9. Get into late-night arguments with your boy/girlfriend outside someone else’s window at 1:30 in the morning.
10. Spend the day sitting at Starbucks frightening people with your leering, creepy glances.
11. Let all five of your dogs loose to run on the beach.
12. Have a romantic Carl’s Jr. dinner on the beach, then leave all your trash on the sand.
13. Race up Garfield like you’re in the Indy 500.
14. Kayak into the lineup at Tamarack.
15. Yell into your cellphone during dinner at Jay’s Gourmet.
16. And at least once a month, move your bowels under the Hemlock Stairs.

There’s more, but we really need to go get some coffee.