Daily News begins blogging

It's starting out slow, but blogging has begun over here in the Daily News Features department, where I ply my copy-editing trade. It's kind of hard to find at the moment, but hopefully that will change soon -- and I hate when one graf of a post appears and you have to click to get the rest. That's what I hate most about L.A. Voice, too, which I otherwise think is pretty great, by the way.

In today's entry, the wonderful Valerie Kuklenski challenges readers to guess who the anonymous torsos are in the new Oscar posters. We'd all love to know.

Anyway, the Daily News blog is called Red Carpet, presumably to compete with the L.A. Times' much-hyped The Envelope, which, among its "stable" of writers includes recently-ex Daily News Tinseltown Spywitness correspondent Elizabeth Snead. She bequeathed the Daily News column to her husband, Joel Stratte-McClure, but they supposedly troll (or is it trawl?) the beat together. Sounds like a sitcom pitch, no?

Elizabeth wrote a great story for us on her double hip replacement. She's 52, but sure doesn't look it (no pictures with the story online, unfortunately). She had a new, minimally invasive form of the surgery that they don't offer at Cedars-Sinai. Her recovery was swift, to be sure:

Even with an attentive husband/nurse, the first week home was challenging. But I did twice-daily neighborhood walks, tossed one crutch at day five and the other at day nine. At week three, I was swimming with a kickboard in the West Hollywood pool and seeing personal trainer/therapist Paul Drew. He'd long treated traditional hip replacement surgery patients and observed traditional HRS but devised a new drill for me, his first anterior client.

"The anterior surgery lets you rotate your hips at all angles with no fear of dislocation," Drew told me. "Using fitness balls and bands, you'll be able to restore your balance, strength and flexibility much faster."

I got back on track - weights, yoga and spin classes - fast. And at six weeks, I hiked the French Riviera, climbed the Maui volcano and snorkeled the Molokini Crater.

Mannnn. That's the jet-setting life all right. Double hip replacement, then traveling around the world. Such is the life of a high-powered gossip columnist.