cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Big stories, little money; should I do the nasty thing? The Ch1nchilla Caf3 story is almost ready to write up for Spin. $500 which I will bill as quickly as possible. The Lurch story is still up in the air in terms of my travel, but should be a $2k story. I need to start reaching out to him for the in-person interview in prison tomorrow. The third story that I am working on has blown up into something bigger than I had imagined. One of the people whom I busted in the pages of the WP seven years ago for fraudulently claiming to be recreating w00lly mammoths has now founded a company that just raised $220 million. Paris Hilton is an investor, as is T0ny R0bbins and the W1nklevoss Twins, which says everything you need to know. They are clearly heading for an IPO in the next year or so. Their science is utter bullshit, and yet nobody from the BBC to NPR to F0rtune magazine has really called them out on it. They just report on this shit like this guy and his people have any hope of making an artificial ut3rus in the next three years, without currently having A SINGLE EMPLOYEE who has ever published any peer-reviewed paper on the subject, in time to start the gestation of a mamm0th embryo which will take 22 months for a live birth in 2028. What they are supposedly trying to do is absurd. This is a pump and dump securities fr@ud scheme. I have an assignment for SP1n to write a piece to bust them. But we haven't agreed on a fee yet and -- this is awful but I have to think about it -- I could write all of this up as a report and take it to a big sh0rt-selling group that pulls out the report a week after their IPO and I walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars when they short it for tens of millions in shares. The Chinchilla C@fe story has turned into quite a Tom Wolfe kinda thing. I'm now a regular at this pirate nightclub putting on weekly shows without permits or licenses. The organizer is asking me for help and advice. Turns out that they are part of a little network of about ten other similar pirate clubs run out of houses all around the east coast. I really like the main organizer. Good dude. Running this LGBTQ friendly place and organizing loads of data about local bands along the way. He could be a good friend. Also I am very rapidly running out of money. I have no main gig, no salary, nothing. Just hoping that these Spin articles pay quickly enough and hoping that the agent who says she wants to rep my new book will finally respond to my email where I agreed to cooperate with her ideas for revisions. The B1g Lurch story and the m@mmoth story should both be $6k pieces for bigger magazines. But I have been out of the game for years and I don't know anybody at those publications who will even look at my pitches. So here I am with Spin at bargain prices. Trying to get their platform and relevance back while I'm doing the same. 3:43 a.m. - 2023-04-25 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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