Michael Grass, an editor with the Washington Post Express, almost immediately responded to our post about the gay fitness blogger who wondered why his posts always get selected to be in the paper’s “blog log” section. We intimated that Grass might have had something to do with it, since, well, he’s the big cheese online editor over there. But that is not true!

“For the record,” Grass writes, “I wasn’t working on Sunday, therefore, I’m not responsible for the Vividblurry quote. There are multiple people at Express who put Blog Log together. Check your facts.”

Noted! Mike Grass does not like Vivid Blurry! Vivid Blurry is evil! Mike Grass would never think to link to Vivid Blurry!

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Everybody’s favorite celebrity fitness blogger - aka Toby at Vivid Blurry - notes that seemingly every time he writes a post, the editor of the Washington Post Express seems to pick it up for his “blog log” summary.

This notation brings up a good question: How exactly are the items selected for the daily round-up? Do you have to be on editor Mike Grass’ good side to get a mention? Or do you simply have to be a flamboyant fitness blogger? If that’s the case, we just might have to dust off our pink leotards. We need more love!

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Let’s just say it: Sommer Mathis used to write about a lot more interesting things on her personal blog. Now, however, she just talks about horses. And! She talks to The Washingtonian’s Garrett Graff (who kind of looks like a horse, now that we think of it). In a wide ranging interview, on stands now, she shares some golden nuggets:

Last year she became the first paid editor of DCist. (No wonder Mike Grass got the hell out of there.)

She loves to sit by the big fountain outside the Hirshhorn Museum to snag the Smithsonian’s free wireless Internet . (No one ever said DCist paid well.)

Her favorite book is Lolita. (If you read her old blog, you’ll know why!)

And, finally, she heads to the Outer Banks every Memorial Day. (Now you can schedule around that.)

Earlier: Should DCist Editor Sommer Mathis Be Fired?

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Mike Grass, of Read Express fame, yesterday lamented that “in the past year or so, some of D.C.’s most prolific local bloggers, El Guapo in D.C., First Date D.C., D.C. Direct Current, KathrynOn and Rock Creek Rambler, among others, have closed down shop for various reasons, including, in some cases, the kind of factional online warfare most of us haven’t seen since middle school.”

Ha! What does Grass mean by “factional online warfare”? Blog wars?

Big Head DC covered the goings on at blogs like KathrynOn and Rock Creek Rambler like it was our job, or something, and, believe us, things went way beyond blog wars. In fact, one of the bloggers who co-wrote First Date DC took his online aggressions into reality, showing up at a blogger’s house in the wee hours of the morning on a cold winter’s night this past winter. That blogger has since left the country. Literally.

Grass also quotes Pat Thibodeau, the operator of the DC Blogs site aggregator, and calls his site “comprehensive.”

Again, ha! As we’ve seen from coverage over the years, Thibodeau selectively befriends certain bloggers, excludes others for inconsistent reasons, and has toiled in blog warfare as well.

We even hear that Grass, too, has engaged in behind-the-scenes blog wargames.

It must be an epidemic! And everybody got sick. Except us. 

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Look! Two of the best darn DC bloggers you know turned 21 this week. This was the least we could do:

But please - please! - don’t eat too much cake, guys. 

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Whine, whine, whine. He got potato salad instead of the coleslaw he craved. His onions weren’t cooked. The carrots were old.

Now, the Washington Post blogger is calling for the Chinatown Hooters to be shuttered.

Sheesh. And we though Tom Sietsema was tough!

One word, Mike: Boobs. They’ll make it all better.

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I get a lot of sass for once appearing in a pic with him looking sweaty (as if!), but I’ll have you know that it was pouring rain that evening, and I didn’t have an umbrella. I never have an umbrella. But, pardon my bon mot, that’s not my point. My point is that the former editor of The Michigan Daily and current blogger at Read Express deserves a big congrats this morn – for FishbowlDC, in all of Inky’s infinite wisdom, has nominated the Oculator with “rising star” status:

Michael Grass: “[I]f you know his work infusing blogging and journalism at Express’ Web site, along with developing Google Map mashups, you know why he should be nominated. To me, he is the “local” blogger of record, which started when he launched DCist.com, a blog that was ahead of the curve long before every mainstream media outlet started launching blogs. He’s transforming The Post from the inside, but nobody realizes it yet.”

As I understand it, if he wins, he gets to go to dinner with Patrick Gavin. Yum.

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OMG! Eye roll. Tart has returned to Sour N Sweet after a sweetly-imposed exile only to write a nearly 800 word (!) tome on how much she hates fat people. We know, we know. She says she hates fat people, she says hates gay people, she says she hates oxygen. She’s sour. But, c’mon, 800 words? All to tell us that the definition of “quality time should include exercise.” Puh-lease. That sour baby should spend some more time in the corner.

Roosh V, the blogger formerly known as DC Bachelor, and, before that, DJ Rocking Horse, has been having problems with his increasingly less popular Web site. Not only has he forgotten its mission and resorted to writing haiku and talking about the price of tea (we do not jest), his little server is all backed up, going down three times since Friday, according to a post he wrote yesterday. Well, at least something in Roosh’s home knows how to go down. Shout out to Namaste.

A scheming local blogger keeps whining that no one has revealed who wrote the defunct blog known as Kathryn On, but, c’mon, she’s old news, hun. Remember, hers was the blog that many people found to be exceptionally verbose, written by a person who really came to believe that she was the queen of the DC blogosphere. Still, you can’t blame Kathryn for being wordy, kids. That’s the sensibility they’ve ingrained in her at MCG Capital Corporation. She’s a communicative kind of gal, and should be admired as such (as she’ll gladly tell you–as long as your name is Mike Grass).

This one’s less of a blogger snafu and more of a who cares/boo-hoo. Jessica…er, DC Cookie has become the latest DC blogger to go on hiatus, writing that she doesn’t have as much time to commit to the blog now that she’s fallen in love with exercise. On the outside, she seemed to be one of the few sane local bloggers. On the inside, however, we’re quite sure that she’s a big ole slobby mess.

Virgle Kent put some words together today to form a coherent question, asking, “Which one female blogger is so funny that you must go and read her blog every day?” Then he went on to answer his own question, saying that there aren’t any funny local female bloggers. He also asked to be reminded what’s great about being a woman besides having boobs. Tee hee. He’s so silly. Sadly, he mentioned his like for Sarah Silverman, so I must go shoot myself now. I refuse to believe that we have anything in common.

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A keen-eyed reader has pointed out that Express’ Mike Grass provided a pictorial of him cooking spinach this week (don’t ask), but he must have forgotten that he attended a rival daily rag’s party just days ago. In the pic, a bottle of Examiner’s Yeas and Nays wine — vintage cheap — can can clearly be seen. The drink was offered as schwag at the column’s big launch event last week. Isn’t this kind of cross-promotion Express-ly illegal?

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We are sick and tired of local bloggers claiming that they “crashed” one of the many media-focused launch parties that happen all over this town every month. Case in point, Kathryn and Circle V (we love them both, of course) go to painful lengths today to explain how they miraculously “crashed” the Examiner’s Yeas and Nays official launch party last night (after Jessica Cutler whored off her invite to V).

And then, surprise, it’s not a Blogger Happy Hour, but a real media event, so they didn’t know most of the people there (besides our new faves, Brunch Bird and her hubby). Thus, they ended up hanging out with Express’ Mike Grass and Wonkette’s Alex Pareene. Yawn. Been there, done that.

Gals, maybe you should be asking why the event was held at the oh-so-stuffy University Club (definitely not our idea of a young, fun gossip venue) instead of somewhere hip, like Lima, Topaz, Science Club, or anywhere else, for that matter. We know that Patrick Gavin and Jeff Dufour, the guests of honor, would not have picked that venue in a million years. But the aging Philip Anschutz (born 1939) and Vivienne “prim and proper” Sosnowski (age unknown), the paper’s head honchos, probably found the establishment to be right up their alley.

Most of the people in attendance that you didn’t know were likely older media establishment types — perhaps the Examiner’s attempt to bring out its “green book” list, in celebration of Gavin and Dufour’s coming out party (no pun intended).

We just hope that the event, complete with wine bottle party gifts, doesn’t signal a desire by the paper’s leadership to guide Yeas & Nays into boredom land. Please note, the column is regularly the number one article on the newspaper’s rapidly improving Web site. (Although, boys, if we told you once, we told ya a hundred times, you gots to be careful that your lead story on your launch party day is actually true — the TomKat retraction today had to dampen your after party glow just a little.)

And, yes, we were invited, but we had a prior engagement.

UPDATE 10/6: Ha. Now Alex Pareene, an invitee, says he “crashed” the party along with Liz Gorman, another invitee. It’s not crashing, if you’re invited.

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