The good news: Evil Beet’s grown by leaps and bounds in the past few months. Readership had sky-rocketed, and I love you guys for that.

The bad news: Lots of down time, as those of you who are regular readers have probably noticed. It’s become a little ridiculous in the past couple of days, and I’m sorry for that. So, we’re moving to a new server, better equipped to handle this traffic.

The really, really bad news: Starting at 11 pm PST tonight, the site will be down for up to 24 hours while the server migration takes place and the new IP address is propagated. Hopefully it will not take that long, and everything will be peachy by tomorrow morning, but I just want to give you guys a heads-up in case you can’t get on the site tomorrow.

xoxo,
Beet

Oh my gosh! This has been the craziest weekend! Moving into a place in New York City is definitely one of the more challenging logistical tasks I’ve faced in my life. Thankfully, everyone in my new neighborhood has been unbelievably outgoing, kind, helpful and … well … neighborly. I love L.A. and I always will, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I lived in a neighborhood before, so this is pretty cool. My roommates and I were blasting the very first Britney album tonight as we were setting the place up, and it made us long for the good old Britney days. I don’t care what anyone says, that was a great album.

Anyway, I’m all moved in here, and some anonymous tenant in my building was thoughtful enough to have an unsecured wireless network, so posting will be back to normal starting tomorrow. Many, many thanks to Lars and T for covering for me while my life was temporarily insane. Now … on to the links!

Brad and Angelina have their own stamp in Australia now. [popbytes]

Remember when Lauryn Hill was talented and crazy instead of just high and crazy? [Pop on the Pop]

Is David Beckham going to make his big Hollywood debut playing Robbie Williams’ gay lover on Desperate Housewives? Not if Tom Cruise has anything to say about it, I’m sure. [Holy Candy]

I’m really excited for the Ashley Tisdale DUI. [Celebrity Smack]

The pregnant Christina Aguilera cancels the remainder of her world tour due to illness. Get better soon Christina!! You have to have a healthy, adorable little baby so that Nicole’s doesn’t get all the attention. [Cele|bitchy]

I didn’t really need to see Leelee Sobieski in leather. [Drunken Stepfather]

Hello my loves!

Well, I know we have had quite a week, with all the drama with the layout changes, new advertisers, etc. I hope everyone can view the layout properly now. If the site still looks weird to you, do Ctrl-F5 on a PC, or Apple-R on a Mac. This should fix the problem. Thank you guys so much for hanging in there while we got all of that fixed, and for providing feedback. The poll is still pretty much all tied up, so I’ll be looking at it and making some executive decisions early next week.

In personal news, I am moving from beautiful, sunny Los Angeles to beautiful, sunny, sticky New York City today, which is very exciting but also enormously stressful. I won’t be around much the next few days, but you’ll have Evil T and Spiteful Lars around to keep you company, and I’ve invited a few other friends to join the mix, so we’ll just see how that goes. Make sure to heckle them lots, as they’re plenty nervous to begin with and should be easy targets. If all goes well, I’ll be back to spew my nonsense on Monday.

xoxo
Beet

There seems to be some difference of opinion on which background we should use moving forward.

The old one, with the faces of all the celebs, was popular, but it made for slow load times for people with slower connections (and on mobile viewers). The new one is definitely less interesting, but it loads a lot faster. Or maybe some of you like the solid color background, but you don’t like the pink. So we’re putting it to a vote. Let us know what you think.

Update: If you are still having trouble viewing the new layout, hit Ctrl+F5 (if you’re on a PC) or Apple+R (if you’re on a Mac). This will force a refresh in your browser and should resolve the problem.

Happy birthday, Evil Beet! This site was born a year ago today. Man, anything and everything has changed since then — The Beet has been about the only constant in my life over the past year — and I can’t stress enough how grateful I am to everyone who reads and everyone who links in here. You guys make my day, every day.

And thank you to Evil T and Spiteful Lars for coming along for the ride with me — you guys are talented and amazing as both writers and friends; I love you to pieces, and I couldn’t have done it without you!! Thank you also to the top-notch team at Film.com for all your support along the way.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEET! Looking forward to many more.

xoxo,
Beet

While we do love our international readers, we also love the USA, and we love having a day off from everything. So we’re taking the day off to hang out on the beach and BBQ and hopefully not sunburn too badly. See you all tomorrow!

Me: Oh, hi there. Strange running into you here. So, it seems like you really like The Evil Beet.

Spammer: Very interesting. Great resource. Thanks you much. Rape porn! Christian debt relief! Gourmet food baskets!

Me: Gosh, thanks. That means a lot. See, sometimes I feel like the information we provide here is a little bit shallow, you know? Like we’re more an aggregator than a genuine content generator. But you genuinely like it?

Spammer: Great site! Hope it will always be alive! I will tell all my friends about your site. Incest porn! Floor tiles! Bankruptcy attorneys!

Me: Okay, but I get concerned about the blog format. Maybe we should have it organized in a more traditional format, so visitors can easily find the information they’re looking for. I used to have a set of categories along the right-hand column, but the PHP script I was running seemed to use a lot of CPU resources and would occasionally lead to down time, so I took it off.

Spammer: Great site! Easy to navigate. I will return with soon. Replica Rolex watches! Bubble butts! Bed Bath and Beyond! Cheetos.

Me: That’s so reassuring. Because I’m basically like this girl who dropped out of high school and had a teensy weensy substance abuse problem for like ten years but in the midst of all of it I figured out how to use a computer and then I set this thing up so I could talk shit about celebrities and the whole world could hear all the funny thoughts I think that I used to wish the whole world could hear, but I look at all those sites out there being run by web development experts, and I get concerned that this thing just looks like a grossly amateurish effort.

Spammer: The site’s very professional! Great design! Keep up the good work! Hair loss solution! Free spyware! Father son porn. Russian horny woman.

Me: So do you feel as though I’ve effectively differentiated this blog? There’s so much competition in this space, and we’re all essentially reporting the same news, and lots of the other writers are smart and funny and knowledgeable, too.

Spammer: Good site – you’re a pretty good writer. I have been looking for sites like this for a long time. Thank you! Sexy boobs. Black boobs. Baby got boobs. Naked boobs. Teen boobs. Duran Duran.

Me: What would you say is your favorite part of The Evil Beet?

Spammer: Cool guestbook… Hairy teen. Pink teen. Hot teen ass. Naturalist teen.

Me: Naturalist teen?

Spammer: Yeah.

Me: Really?

Spammer: Yeah.

Me: God.

Spammer: I know.

[Jump in for the rest!]

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