It's a boy for Teresa Strasser

Chatter on her Facebook page indicates and a Twitter posting confirms that Teresa Strasser has given birth to a boy.

Teresa is the writer, television and radio personality former Tabloid Baby adversary (she took up the cudgel against our criticism of The Adam Carolla Radio Show, where she once toiled) who turned Tabloid Baby pal about six months ago, after she sent us the nicest note and began a correspondence that made us realize she's actually a very sincere, very genuine person.

And now she's a mom.

Teresa has been chronicling her pregnancy and expectations in a very engaging fashion on her website. Check it out. And mazel tov and congratulations to all.

SEPT. 27th UPDATE: Teresa writes on her Facebook page: "Nathaniel James was born Sept. 24th at 2:57 p.m. He has long feet, a full head of light brown hair and dimples. Thanks so much for all the love. I'm overwhelmed." To Tabloid Baby, she adds: "Thanks for this... Yep. I'm a mom. Writing to you from the hospital where baby and I are doing great."

We like Teresa Strasser now. We heard from Teresa Strasser and now Teresa Strasser is a Tabloid Baby pal.

We like Teresa Strasser now. We had a problem with Teresa Strasser about a year or so ago, but we don't have a problem any more.

The Emmy-winning writer, Emmy- nominated television host and journalist walked into our sights after she was hired to replace Rachel Perry as the "news girl" on the Adam Carolla radio program that took over Howard Stern’s timeslot in Los Angeles and other cities, a show that could only be an also-ran in comparison to the colossal enterprise that betrayed its listeners by moving to a private paid channel, but which sank lower in our estimation through its determined arrogance, amateurishness, boorishness and bullying. Teresa then accepted a job on the whitewashed syndicated television version of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, and after we criticized her role on that fetid platform, she “called us out” on the radio:

“… this media blogger, for some reason he just hates me, and he never writes about the contents of anything I do or my writing, he just writes about how ugly I am…. This guy has a site. I don’t want to say the name of it….But he writes about media... that’s his beat. He writes about our show here, the Adam Carolla Show, and he writes about TMZ… He’s written a book in the past and I think he used to work on Hard Copy. But he can’t work in television any more… I try to put it out of my mind because I thought this is just one guy and I’ve been really lucky I’ve had nothing but mostly nice things written about me. But I woke up this morning and the first thing… I just thought. 'I’m so ugly, I’m too ugly for television.' I started crying.”

Words to that effect only got us going...


So we had an old-fashioned media feud. And while it’s worth mentioning that at the time of our tiff, our online pal Luke Ford chastised us for our “low blow” criticism of Teresa (whom he described as “smoking hot”), we eventually moved on from the Carolla show (she'd left the whitewashed syndicated sister of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site after a few months). We probably last mentioned Teresa in April 2008. Earlier this year, the Carolla show was moved off the radio.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, from out of the blue, we got a Facebook message from Teresa, explaining why she hadn’t accepted our “friend” request.

We won’t reveal the exact contents of the note or the exchange that followed, but will say that we rarely get feedback from celebrities and that she dropped us a note because Luke Ford had vouched for us. We’ll also say that Teresa Strasser is not a phony, manufactured sob sister. What we heard on the radio is apparently what she is in life.


Teresa Strasser is a very nice woman.

She’s now a Tabloid Baby pal. And we are her pal.

Teresa, by the way, is married and, we’re very happy to announce, expecting her first child.

She writes about the impending birth, and reveals that Meredith Vieira smells of “powder, lilacs, and poise” (we’d have expected Grey Goose, Dermablend and Jeff Zucker), in her latest column, which you can read here, and which we hope will lead to a book.

Check out Teresa Strasser’s website here. She celebrates the typewriter, which makes us like her even more.

Carolla's "news girl" brags to the lovelorn

From this morning's
broadcast of
The Adam Carolla
Radio Show:

Bobby Slayton: "Valentine's Day was on a Thursday--"

Carolla: "It was a Wednesday."

Teresa Strasser: No. Thursday. That was the day I got engaged."

Teresa Strasser, the former cable television hostess, short-lived reader on the inconsequential whitewashed syndicated television version of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, and "news girl" and self-proclaimed "co-host" of the radio show that replaced Howard Stern in LA and a few other markets, is using her recent engagement to relaunch her sideline career as a stereotypical, pre-liberation, unlucky-at-love, single Jewish girl sob sister columnist.

Her latest essay appears this morning in The Jewish Journal:

"There's nothing more smug and insidious than a girl who has finally fallen in love and thinks she now has all the answers. She can save you from your sad, pathetic, damaged love life and cure you of your nasty man-repellant habits. No matter what condescending tip she's giving you, it always drips with the self-satisfied knowledge that the spinster bullet she so artfully dodged is headed straight for you.

"I hate that girl.

"I can't turn into her, and maybe that's why I haven't written for the past nine months, since I met and fell in love with the first man I've ever been sure about. When it finally happened, it felt much more like dumb luck than brilliant man maneuvering. More dice than poker. I can't be gloating all the way to the altar because the fact is, I'm just a girl who left the house one Saturday night to have dinner with her girlfriends, saw a cute guy across the room and hit the jackpot.

"The only magical insight I can share with you has to do with the leaving the house part. Even Eli Manning can't throw a touchdown if he doesn't break out of the huddle. That's really all I can tell you for sure..."

"When I ask myself how I finally stopped screwing up my love life, the only answer that comes to mind is the same one famously used by one of Ernest Hemingway's characters to explain how he went bankrupt: 'Two ways, first gradually then suddenly.'

"The gradual part was the usual therapy in Tarzana... The suddenly part was meeting a guy who is so boundlessly good-natured and patient that he makes me want to bake him cakes and write syrupy e-mails..."

Teresa moves on to the cliche of connecting creativity with her neuroses and happiness, confirming the bond, by name, to Sixties columnist Erma Bombeck, and though the column ends on the cute-- "Three days after writing this column, she got engaged. She is very happy -- hopefully, not too happy."-- repeating the claim that "love" has kept her from writing "a darn thing" in nine months, hinting that in a passive-aggressive fashion, she's blaming her new beau for her lack of creative output (rather than focusing on months of abuse in Carolla's shadow), which doesn't bode well for the writer's-blocked days to come. We wish her the best.

(And a tip of the Tabloid Baby hat to our pal Luke Ford...)

Free advice for radio host Adam Carolla

#101: When doing a phone interview with a heavyweight comedian like Larry The Cable Guy, don't cut him off and then keep him on hold for four minutes while you go into a bit about comics being forced to do the acts of others, cracking yourself up the entire time while Larry's mic is shut off. Generosity is a key to being a good radio host and getting guests in the future.

Note to his "news girl" and self-proclaimed "co-host" Teresa Strasser: While it certainly serves you well to polish the apple of your sexist boss Carolla by chirping in with repetitive words of reinforcement, as in...

Carolla: "Larry, we have to do a television show where every comedian has to spin a wheel and do the other comedian's act..."
Strasser: "The wheel of comedy!"
Carolla: "Blather blather blather..."

...this is not exactly Robin Quivers-level radio work.

Adam Carolla, the personal trainer-turned-quasicomic and former sex show wisecracker who was handed Howard Stern's radio slot in LA and a few other markets two long years ago and has driven it into the ground ever since, has recently shown himself open to change, with a reported feminization of his anti-entertainment show and a very "gay" upcoming stint on Dancing with the Stars. So we're sure he'll be open to suggestuons from a group of frequent listeners.

Stay tuned here for more Free Advice for Radio Host Adam Carolla...