Meet the Parents That Form MamaPop™’s Team Of Snarky Writers

THE BEST OF TODAY'S CELEBRITY GOSSIP AND ENTERTAINMENT NEWS, MAMAPOP IS SMART POP CULTURE ANALYSIS, COMMENTARY, MERCILESS FUN-MAKING AND OTHER SUNDRY AWESOME, DISHED UP DAILY BY PARENTS, FOR PARENTS, AND ANYONE ELSE WHO UNDERSTANDS THAT PLAYTIME IS BETTER WITH VODKA. PLEASE TO ENJOY.

Song credit to The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights"

MamaPop Founders, Editors & Tyrannical Overlords:

Tracey, aka Sweetney, is a member of the dangerous left-wing cultural elite, belonging to the Jon Stewartified faction that stalks Joss Whedon [pours a little out for Buffy], feels near worshipful of HBO original programming ("The Wire", we miss you!), and could very possibly go gay at any moment for Tina Fey (oh yes, you know the kind). A single mom to an evil genius 7-year-old daughter (think the girl from "Little Miss Sunshine" meets Dr. Horrible), she designs awesome blogs and twitter backgrounds at Sweet Blog, Covets consumer goods at We Covet, and is an Editor for Kirtsy (she likes to keep busy). She's a prototypical Gen-Xer, a mouthy broad, and will out indie rock nerd you any day of the week, emo kid.
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 Amy, aka Amalah, has terrible taste in television and sometimes needs to be reminded that the characters are 1) not actually real, and 2) cannot hear her yelling at them, the stupid morons. She has two children, both boys, both of whom already find bodily function humor HILARIOUS. She is very proud. She successfully convinced AlphaMom.com to let her write an advice column, a pregnancy guide and a whole column about how having a baby will ruin your life. Her secret dreams include appearing as a contestant on both Project Runway and The Amazing Race. She cannot sew, but does know how to drive a stick shift.
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MamaPop Brain Trust, Contributing Writers & Snark For Hire:

Catherine, aka Her Bad Mother, was exploiting her bad motherhood for attention and beer money before Kate Gosselin was even a twinkle in some TLC producer's eye. After spending more than a decade getting advanced degrees in political philosophy, she discovered that she much preferred mothering, gossip-mongering and navel-gazing to teaching Plato. She now spends most of her time writing, wiping bums and cruising the Internet in search of breaking gossip and stupid cat pictures; the rest of it, she spends watching America's Next Top Model and wondering whether Western civilization really is in decline, or if that's just her imagination. She believes that devotion to pop culture is a sign of higher intelligence, that cupcakes are nutritious, and that bad really is the new good.
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Kelly, aka kdiddy, lives in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA with her husband and six-year-old son. She very ungracefully balances a full-time job, her family, a big, old house, and the beginning, tentative steps toward a master's degree in writing. Her vices include the internets, reading everything in sight, compulsive writing, TV, watching as many movies as possible, and being a pinko.
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Jodi, aka Jodifur, is one of the few native Washingtonians still living in the DC area. She is a TV junkie, and is ashamed to admit how many of the CW shows she watches. She works part-time as an attorney in child abuse and lives with her husband, preschool age son, and a dog with many, many issues. She looks forward to using her very expensive legal education to analyze the legal woes of celebrities.
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Miss Banshee is a rabid monkey masquerading as a 31 year old woman. She has lived in nine cities in seven years, was once fondled by Keith Richards, and almost broke her back in the name of Black Sabbath. She was once a timid, blonde Catholic school girl, and now she is a foul mouthed, ill-tempered, black haired pierced, tattooed freak. Don’t worry, she’s still a dork. Her voracity for pop culture and gossip is all consuming and the source of so much glee that it worries her friends. She abandoned the entertainment industry to work with people with severe mental illness, which is not unlike working with actors at all. Miss Banshee enjoys coffee, cigarettes, big black boots, the musical stylings of Tom Waits, making fun of her cats, and never turning off the TV. She pities no fools, and will not tolerate any smacktalk about the great state of New Jersey or the power of the Boston Red Sox, so you best ackrite. You can read her psychotic ramblings over at Inverse Candlelight, where you can find a picture of her dressed as Boy George for her 2nd grade Halloween parade.
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SnarkyAmber is a full-time student at a crunchy, liberal college of interdisciplinary studies in the Pacific Northwest where she will receive a completely made-up degree in June, 2010. When she is not attending classes on how to become a better Marxist feminazi, Amber is likely either pushing the gay agenda, rocking some faces at a karaoke bar, or at home nagging her husband to do some home improvement thing he said he'd do like six months ago, for chrissakes. I mean, really, just turn off the Playstation and stain the damn shelf, already.
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Sarah, aka Goon Squad Sarah, lives in the Washington D.C. suburbs and spends a lot of time obsessing about football, beer and Top Chef. She likes to think that she was a fairly rational person before giving birth to twins in 2004 but really she was probably messed up WAY before that. Sarah spent the years of 1981 - 1992 watching MTV. She blames her inability to do math on too much useless music knowledge.(Example: NiKki Sixx's birthday is December 11th.) Sadly, her extensive music trivia knowledge ends aburptly in 1995. She blames the radio for sucking so badly. (Please send Sarah new music.) On a typical day Sarah wastes at least 45 minutes of her time trying to win free stuff on the interweb. She spends the other 23 hours on the internet and watching Bravo reality television occasionally pausing to yell at her kids.
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Schmutzie hails from Saskatchewan (which is just above Montana and North Dakota for those Americans in the audience), where she lives with her husband and three cats.  No one-hit wonder, she also blogs at Milkmoney or Not, Here I Come, Five Star Friday, and Schmoetry, knits a mean arm warmer (she is honestly planning on knitting the other one soon), does occasional web design, sells her photography, and will challenge you to find anything more ecstatic than eating bacon, or anything wrapped in bacon, or eating spoonfuls of bacon bits right out of the jar.  Although world domination is proving difficult from her present location in a beige cubicle, she is a hopeful soul.
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BHJ both fears and embraces the notion that popular culture is the new Nature. For instance, the television is way more relevant to him than bushes. He uses fuzzy logic to reason that imagining fictional characters from novels and movies is the same as hanging out with them, leading to various controversies surrounding the authenticity of his statements. He lives in this hazy world with his wife and four children, a boy, a girl, and two little black kids he adopted, Arnold and Willis.
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 Jennie of She Likes Purple spends most of her time whining about the cancellation of Veronica Mars and spending quality time with her jam-packed DVR after her nearly-one-year-old son (!) goes to bed. Kyle, her 9-month-old son already watches One Tree Hill with her, though, and the pride that gives her is ridiculously unhealthy. In addition to that squishy, sweet baby boy, she lives with her redheaded, Discovery-channel loving husband and her dog Molly in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. She takes both her jobs in publishing and rooting for The Office's Pam and Jim equally seriously.
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Aidan, aka The Palinode, is the savior of the human race and the author of the weblog In Palinode's Palace.  Alone in his space station, he sends his blog entries back from a nightmare future in which Gary Busey has yoked humanity to his dark purpose.  Aidan's weblog is actually a complex code that will inoculate your brain against the will of Busey.  Go read it if you value your freedom, because you won't enjoy life as a drone in a Busey memorabilia factory.  When not saving the world, Aidan takes refreshing jogs around the station perimeter and raises plants with two adorable robots.  Sometimes he dreams that his life as the standard-bearer of humanity is a fiction, that he can't even save a few bucks for cab fare, let alone humankind.  He dreams that he's a government speechwriter in his mid-thirties who staves off the vacuity of his job by writing about the dark meaning behind Happy Days.  In that dream the world is a fitful shadow behind a scrim of pop culture, and Gary Busey is just a minor celebrity stumbling around the mazes of his own mind.  Then he wakes up in his space pod orbiting the ruined Earth, and all is well and post apocalyptic once more.  Aidan's other claim to fame is being married to fellow MamaPopper and blog imperatrix Schmutzie, which is great fun if you like cats, plaid blankets and an insatiable lust for ravioli.
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Kurt from The Monster Apathy was crated-trained until he was 17 at which point he learned the value of furious justice (which is the only valid kind), by driving his oppressors before him. Okay, that was actually "Conan the Barbarian"...he just went to college and got laid, but like as a metaphor? Totally crate-trained and rebellious. He would like to believe that you are wondering if the name of his website means he is apathetic on a monstrous scale or if maybe, just maybe... apathy ITSELF is the monster! But he's also a realist and knows you're probably just killing time until "Lost" comes on, and who even cares that he spent like infinity hours coming up with that cool name. Not you. That's who. Kurt loves long walks by the seaside whilst being pursued by a horde of flesh-eating undead and talking about himself in the third-person. He lives in Upstate New York with his ego and 2 children.
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Marsha, aka Sweatpantsmom, hates writing bios because she finds it weird and uncomfortable and they always come out making her sound incoherent, but here goes.   She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters and is the author of the blog sweatpantsmom.  She also mercilessly skewers celebrities on FameCrawler; in spite of that she has interviewed Mischa Barton, Jessica Alba and Paris Hilton, none of whom had Googled her name beforehand, thank God.  Marsha starts way too many sentences with the phrase, “And another thing.”  She loves pop culture, especially when it gives the universe things like People magazine and Mary J. Blige.  And another thing, writing this has done nothing for her hatred of bio writing.
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Katie, aka motherbumper, s one of those sneaky Canadians who was raised on a steady diet of American pop-culture and this, in her opinion, gives her to the right to call herself a Certified Celebrity Gossip Monger. Her tutelage consisted of reading endless copies of People magazine and other assorted gossip bibles as a sickly child in doctors waiting rooms and later evolved into religiously watching Entertainment Tonight -- aka "the news" -- as a self-imposed shut-in during university. How she got her BSc is a mystery even to her. These days she lives in big bad Toronto with her husband and daughter, a celebrity gossip protégé in her own right. Katie blogs at her personal site motherbumper, is all patriotic at Canada Moms Blog, flexes her design muscles at Sweet Blog and is an editor over at Kirtsy. She figures she will sleep when she's dead.
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TwoBusy was raised by wolves. Fortunately, the wolves had a small black & white television — and from this, he learned the basics of human behavior: violence = humor, love = pain, giant monsters = Tokyo. In the years since, he has fleshed out this understanding by delving into the highs, lows, and bulbous midsection of popular culture. His turn-ons include shoegaze and sadcore music, movies in which large carnivores eat people, and books about murder and the search for truth and the murderous search for truth. When not dealing with his three kids (often by locking them in the basement) or trying to earn a decent wage for a day's work, he types for Dadcentric and Polite Fictions.
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Charlie Downs once had his ass kicked by Gandhi.  It all started, over cocktails naturally; Single Barrel Malt for Diamond G and bourbon for Charlie, when Gandhi said that he was "overjoyed" that FOX canceled Charlie's (then) favorite show Greg the Bunny to make way for American Idol.  Charlie told Gandhi that American Idol was a smoldering pile of Ponyloaf.  Charlie never knew Gandhi was a Southpaw, either.  Since then, he has been sticking to talking shit through the Interwebs at the Goat and Tater.  He also contributes to UpTake and DadCentric and sometimes tattoos his 2 daughters with Sharpie upon request.  As an aside, Gandhi and Charlie found common ground through MST3K and Jailhouse Tattoos.
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Karen, aka Karen Sugarpants, writes from StrathVegas in Canada where she is outnumbered by her two boys & husband, wild turkeys, deer, and enough nature to seriously choke this Toronto-born girl. Still a sucker for men in music (and on HGTV & Food Network if you want honesty), she crushed hard on so many metal heads in high school, she can get up to 3 radio stations broadcasting from her labia. Oh HAI Joe Elliot I LOVE YOU! She's a sucker for any and all medical dramas except Grey's Anatomy because these aren't doctors, they're porn stars and OH EM GEE they whine a lot - somebody call the Wahmbulance they all have The Herps! You can also find Karen writing at KarenSugarpants.com, Craftastrophe.net, & Canada Moms Blog; as well as designing websites at Swank Web Style.com.
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Adam P. Knave once wrestled a mountain lion into submission using only a ball-point pen, three feet of pink ribbon and a donut. He then proceeded to head home and punch an ostrich right in the face. There was no call for it and the ostrich still holds a grudge. No one remembers why the ostrich was in APK's home in the first place. In his spare time he has been writing novels, comics and columns for about a decade now. Born and raised in Manhattan, he fights crime with his fists and his mighty beard. Like a superhero. Without the tights. Thank God.
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