Maybe WVAG-TV is looking for a partner

I passed through Vermont Wednesday and stopped to check out its statehouse. There was a local television reporter there doing a live shot, and I laughed when I saw his station’s call letters.

Imagine that read by someone with a Boston accent: “W-Cacks.” Huh huh huh.

I wonder what their sign-off is. “This is Tony Smith in Montpelier. Our cacks are all over the place!” “This is Jim Stuart in Burlington. Check out our cacks, Vermont!” “This is Billy South with today’s food review. Open wide for cacks!”

Meanwhile, the front-page news that day was so stereotypically Vermont that I had to take a picture:

They’re alllll right. The only thing missing is a picture of, say, kids giving the thumbs up. Tomorrow’s front-page headline: “Hey man, awesome!”

Permalink: 10:10 AM | Comments (1)

It,s a barely literate world out there!

I recently had a bag of Jungle Crackers, which weren’t very good. But these jungle-themed animal crackers got even worse when I noticed that a lion apparently ate the company’s copy editor. Or maybe it was giant mosquito. Or something else big and scary.

Anyway: Roar with delight at the comma mistaken for an apostrophe! Growl with frustration at-the-incorrect-use-of-hyphens! Scratch your head like a confused chimpanzee at the claim that these crackers are “naturally low in fat.” (How is that possible? Do low-fat Jungle Crackers grow on trees?)

Permalink: 08:28 AM | Comments (3)

Give an inch

Here’s an amusing post-script to my post about the Heat parade.

At the front of our barricade, before everyone broke free and flooded the streets, we stood next to a rather humorless fellow wearing a Heat-decorated hard hat. He’s the guy on the right of this picture, standing next to my dad.

He seemed to be by himself, and barely said a word. But he clearly had a mission, and that was to get closer to the Heat -- inch by agonizing inch.

There was a cop keeping watch over our barricade, and every time the cop would turn away, the hardhat guy would scoot the barricade an inch or two forward. He eventually enlisted a woman on the opposite side of the barricade to help him, and so after he pushed it a bit on his side, she’d even it out. Then we front-row barricade people would step up an inch, and this incremental shift would ripple back through the hundreds or thousands of people who were behind us.

I don’t know what he thought he was accomplishing. Inches don’t matter -- and if he moved the barricade forward in any significant way, we’d all be in the middle of the street. Somehow, I think the cop would notice that.

My dad and I joked about him as we stood there, and I don’t know what happened to him after the crowd broke free. But three days later, I was flipping through the special Heat edition of Sports Illustrated and, on the top corner of page 12, in a spread introducing a story about Dwayne Wade, was a familiar face:

There he is -- that damn guy, still stone-faced and wearing his hardhat. His photo is an inch or two wide, and now, I admit, I envy that tiny amount of space.

Permalink: 08:12 AM | Comments (1)

He may want to start with the moustache

I saw this guy on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach over the weekend. I'm guessing he lost a bet.

"I wish you luck," I said after I snapped this picture.

"Will you help me?" he said.

"Maybe later," I said, and hurried off.

Permalink: 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

How, in the course of three days, I went from a lonely basketball fan to touching the NBA trophy

I’ve been a Miami Heat fan since its early days, back when the team was populated by lovable palookas and baskets didn’t come easy. This was my dad’s doing: Although I was never a sports fanatic -- I wasn’t popular on my local youth soccer team after I kept sitting down on the field during games -- my dad took me to see a bunch of local teams, and the Heat stuck. I became a die-hard fan, sitting in the car to listen to radio broadcasts when the games weren’t televised. I even wrote fan mail to the team’s mascot, a bird-like thing named Burnie. (He sent me signed photos of him which read, “All my glove, Burnie.”)

But now that I live in Massachusetts, following the Heat is harder. Sports are about community -- about talking of the team in terms of “we” and “us” -- and it’s just not as fun without other people who care. I still watch the nationally televised games and listen to others on satellite radio, and that’s a fine solo venture. But during the playoffs, when excitement was high, I could barely muster friends’ enthusiasm. I had company for a few of the games, but mostly watched them alone, happily pounding the carpeted floor so as to not wake up my girlfriend.

When the Heat won the championship on Tuesday, I stayed up until 2 a.m. talking with a friend in Florida who is also a fan. When we hung up, I decided I needed to go down for the victory parade. If I didn’t, this win -- this first ever success of a team I’ve rooted on since middle school -- would be the experiential equivalent of a good television show. It’d be distant and contained: The last game was won, I turned off the TV and it all went away. It was kind of sad. I needed something to savor.

So I flew down for Friday’s parade -- an event that would go from controlled blandness to beautiful mayhem.

Permalink: 02:14 AM | Comments (5)

The bad singing continues

Defying all rules of taste, my intentionally bad video continues to gain steam. Linked above is the latest cover, this time a capella. Meanwhile, this experiment got mentions in Mental_Floss Magazine's blog and The Morning News's headlines. Sweet!

Permalink: 11:09 AM | Comments (1)

And they live happily now, and after

I was watching television today and saw a commercial for the DVD release of some recent horror flick. "Wolf Creek," maybe? Anyway, it started out with some pretty girl saying something innocuous like, “All I want to do is sit back, relax and enjoy this vacation.” Then, of course, there’s a shot of her at a window and some scary attacker crashes through, and the rest of the commercial features hell breaking loose.

I watched this and thought about how weird it would be if, in that window scene, she just pulled out a gun and shot the intruder. Just: bang, dead. She’d say, “Jeez, that guy could have really ruined my vacation,” and the rest of the commercial would feature her and her friends hanging out and having fun.

Then it occurred to me: I’ve just come up with the perfect advertising campaign for the gun lobby. Imagine if they put together mock trailers of real movies, but always featuring the victim/hero quickly killing off the evil bad guy before anything truly bad happens. Hockey Mask Jason appears at the campground for the first time and -- bang! -- he’s a menace no more. The first person gets caught by the “Saw” guy, pulls out his handgun and -- boom! boom! boom! -- says, “What the hell was this guy about to do to me?”

Then the tagline could be, like, “Guns: Bad for horror movies, good for your life.”

I have mixed feelings about gun laws, but I guarantee this would be a popular campaign. NRA, you totally owe me for this.

Permalink: 02:15 PM | Comments (1)

Well hey, it's sorta like a gossip column

Britney Spears passes gas and gossip columnists are all over it. Me, well, I've got to be a little more creative. In Boston's Weekly Dig's "Media Farm" column this week, a short item ran (second to last) about my needling Jared Paul Stern, including a tid-bit I didn't reveal on the blog. If the paparazzi are outside my window today, I'm so flashing them.

Permalink: 08:10 AM | Comments (0)

Miamiiiiii Heeeeeeaaaaaaattt!

For Rony Seikaly! Ron Rothstein! Glen Rice! Matt Geiger! Tim Hardaway! PJ Brown! Zo and Shaq and Wade and all the brilliant men on this year's team! For all those shaky trips to the Miami Arena! Go Heat! Whooooooooooo!

I've been a Heat fan since my dad started taking me to games in the team's shaky early days, it's the only team I really care about, and this win is like sweet, final vindication. I've been up late every game night, often by myself, slamming my fist into the carpet so I don't wake my girlfriend. Oh, man. I want to hug Dwayne and then get a beer and catch up with Rony. Thank you, Pat Riley! I've been waiting for this.

Permalink: 01:41 AM | Comments (3)

Comic rule #162: Every reaction needs an equal action

Look at Hi in the last panel of today's strip -- eyes exaggeratedly wide, mouth small and taut. He’s pulling off the classic Hi & Lois look of shock and sadness, as if a little part of his idyllic world just became infected with the cold, sour reality of life. We see this in other comics as well, particularly Blondie, when characters lean backwards and an exclamation mark appears atop their heads. These people have been wandering around their timeless, Donna Reed worlds for decades, and it’s still the little things that get them. You’d think they’d grow some sense after a while.

Problem is, what Thirsty says in panel two isn’t really saddening, even for Hi & Lois’s standards. A driving school called “Fender Bender Enders”? Corny, sure, but is it really enough to maim Hi’s soul? Shouldn't the punchline be at least a little bit jarring? Let’s do a tiny re-write here...

See that? Are we taking notes here, Brian and Greg Walker?

Permalink: 08:27 AM | Comments (1)

Consumer reports, up close and personal

After suffering through bad cell phone reception in my apartment for the last two years, I finally went out to buy a new phone yesterday. I walked up to a Verizon kiosk at a local Circuit City, a head full of steam, and waited for an employee to approach me. Quickly, one did.

“Do you need any help?” he said.

I whipped my phone out of my pocket, held it up and said, “Yeah. I need to replace this piece of crap because it doesn’t get good reception.”

Then I looked at the counter in front of me, and saw the same crappy model phone, boxed up and ready to go. I looked to the right of me, and there was the guy buying it. In essence, I just walked up to a guy buying a phone and told him that it sucked.

I felt a little bad, but decided I was doing the guy a service. I’ve already tested it for him. He should know he’s buying a bad phone. And anyway, it’s not like it mattered: He still bought the damn thing. Enjoy it, sucker.

Permalink: 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

Choque de la Operación No y Tremendo

The subject of this post probably doesn't come close to a Spanish translation of "Operation Shockless and Awful," but blame Babelfish for that. Doesn't matter: The only translation that really matters is the one contained in the above-linked video -- that is, an energetic Spanish version of my stupid song from some dude in (I think) Venezuela. Who knew this would be an international hit? Now all I need is Shakira shakin' her hips to it. That'd be the sexiest people-eatin' ever.

Permalink: 12:46 PM | Comments (2)

Some call it slums, some call it nice

As a long-time Green Day fan, I'm happy to hear any good news about them: a new album, a new sideproject, and now their artwork saving a little girl's life. From the BBC:

It's not often that rock and roll saves your life, but Ruby Wilson should thank Green Day after their artwork kept her safe from a dangerous hand grenade.

Ruby, 12, from Halifax, was clearing leaves when she found the device, and recognised it from a picture on her Green Day t-shirt.

Hey, that's great! She must have pictured the blood dripping down from the grenade-holding hand on the "American Idiot" album cover, and not picked it up. Right? Right? Because, uh, that's the only way Green Day could be credited with saving her life. Right, BBC?

Here's the third graf:

Her dad saw her with the grenade, told her to put it down and called the army, who then blew it up.

What!? Credit her dad with the save here, not the band! The only influence Green Day apparently had was to make this little girl think, "Hey, that's like the blood-soaked thing on Green Day's album cover. Weee!" Holy credit where credit ain't due, Batman.

Permalink: 09:04 AM | Comments (0)

What, did he bribe them for this?

As you see above, this month's issue of Zink Magazine lists disgraced Page Sixer Jared Paul Stern as a contributor. I'm shocked any publication is still willing to use him. Even worse: The first line of his bio is, "Jared Paul Stern is the former editor of Page Six magazine and the New York Post's Books section." How... lacking. It's a bit like writing, "Saddam Hussein is the former president of Iraq and leader of the Ba'ath Party."

With standards this low, it must be pretty easy for any schmuck to waltz into Zink's contributor page. Oh wait...

Update: Gawker picked up on this post and put it in hilarious context.

Permalink: 01:08 AM | Comments (0)

Table scraps:

♣FOR RSS LOVERS: This site has been RSS-capable for quite some time, but it hadn't occurred to me to actually make that link readily available. For your convenience, it's now featured on the bottom of the sidebar.

♣OY VEY! THE Florida Marlins focus their celebration of Jewish Heritage Day on first baseman Mike Jacobs -- a guy who, it turns out, isn't Jewish. Funny enough, the story cites Jewish baseball historian Martin Abramowitz as an expert, but doesn't mention that Abramowitz, who I've written about, made the same mistake once: He included a non-Jewish player in his first series of Jew baseball cards.

♣FUN VIDEO TIME: My friend Mike plays intergalactic colonizer. Steve Martin is The Great Flydini. The mentos-soda experiment gets extreme.

♣HOW DID IT take this long for someone to put two blue-footed boobies on a t-shirt? (via Not Myself)

♣THE MILITARY MAY be doing the grunt work, but it turns out that Newsweek was the one who actually took out the big guy. Way to go, guys!

♣THIS MADE ME laugh out loud: A student council president at a British school took some heat for a proposal called "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead," in which he wanted there to be a celebration when former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dies. A band I love, Hefner, has a song called "The Day that Thatcher Dies," in which the chorus is, well, take a guess.

♣LEGAL SYSTEM ABUSE of the day: Some jerk is suing because, during his botched robbery of a store, the employees beat him up.

♣AND THEN, THERE'S this.

Permalink: 12:56 AM | Comments (3)

On YouTube, every loser can be a winner

One week ago, at almost exactly midnight, I uploaded this stupid video and officially launched Operation Shockless and Awful, an experiment to see if intentionally crappy videos would gain any traction on YouTube. Since then, it’s been viewed more than 7,000 times, it was once the day’s 38th most discussed video, some heavy metal dude did a cover of my song (that’s also him in the above photo, right), and a girl named ohmyitsstephie offered her hand in marriage.

Verdict: success!

I can’t take full credit for this, though. I got an immediate, unexpected boost from Brooke, a.k.a. Brookers, an ultra-popular YouTuber who I recently met and got to know in the real, non-Internet world. Brooke’s got a great sense of humor, and when I told her what I was up to, she immediately championed it. She sent out a bulletin to anyone subscribing to her stuff -- a number I estimate at four gazillion -- declaring my video “the best video in the history of mankind.” In the YouTube world, this is like Angelina and Brad naming their child after me. I was set.

When I turned my computer on the next morning, a mere nine hours after first uploading the video, it had been viewed 620 times. Comments had come flooding in, almost all of them positive -- and this was what truly perplexed me. I could understand that people followed Brooke’s link, but these people actually seemed to enjoy this thing. Some compared it to Adam Sandler. A typical comment went like this: “HAHAHA ur funny as! ur awesome. (In fact, this particular person, perhaps feeling as if he or she hadn’t gotten the point across clearly enough, followed that comment up with another one: “my stomach hurts now lol to much laughing.”) People started subscribing to my videos. Twenty people requested to be my YouTube friend -- a concept I’m still not clear on, but which I approved anyway.

The numbers continued to rise. Every day, another 1,000 people seemed to check it out. Eventually, I figured, this can’t fueled entirely by Brooke’s bulletin. Instead, I think two other things happened: One, all the comments propelled the video into the “most commented on” section, at which even more people found it and commented. Two, a bunch of people listed it as their favorite video or posted it on their blogs, which inspired their friends to watch it.

After that, the spread was obvious. The standards for comedy on YouTube are clearly quite low, which makes sense considering the entertainment there is free and short. While a Hollywood movie has high standards to meet -- you paid money and you’re devoting two hours of your time -- a YouTube video is quick and painless. You can watch garbage and not feel ripped off. And with so many millions of videos on there, people must filter it somehow or else they’ll feel overwhelmed and lost -- and so they end up filtering it by popularity and reference, not by actual quality. People came, they enjoyed, they made it more popular. And the more popular it got, the more people it attracted. On YouTube, like the real world, the rich just get richer. Their currency is views and comments.

Fun stuff. I plan on continuing the experiment and creating a few more intentionally bad videos, but haven’t had the time yet. I’ll post them when they’re up.

Update: There have been more covers: One in Spanish, and one a capella.

Permalink: 08:12 AM | Comments (2)

It's good this didn't run on Veterans Day

Hey, I'm in an op-ed page in Florida today. But first, a long-winded explanation:

Earlier this month, I was thrilled to read about a court case in Florida, in which a federal judge struck down a Florida law mandating students stand for the pledge of allegiance. The case was brought by a high school student who refused to stand for the pledge -- which, as far as I'm concerned, is his right. It's something I feel strongly about because, 10 years ago or so, I also challenged the pledge as a Florida high school student. I've thought differently of the pledge ever since.

Republican state Sen. Mike Fasano told the Palm Beach Post that the federal court decision has "taken away patriotism from our schools." That's irritatingly absurd, and I planned on writing him to say so. I even wrote myself a reminder to do it. But then I thought: Well, he won't take my letter seriously, and there's a good chance he won't even read it.

So, I decided to get louder: I wrote my story in the op-ed section of today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel. This is a lot of fun for me, because my parents get the Sun-Sentinel and I read it as a kid. Also, this is my first appearance on an op-ed page.

Now I'm just waiting for the angry e-mails from vets and the invitation to be berated on some right-winger's talk radio show. I've already gotten one e-mail -- this from a WWII veteran's wife who says, "you certainly would not be my idea of a role model for my grandchildren!" Oh well.

Permalink: 09:20 AM | Comments (1)

Our house is a very, very, very fat house

I'm not enthusiastic about art museums. It's probably because I don't enjoy decyphering the meaning of art, and so I tend to stare blankly at most paintings and photographs. That's what I was doing today at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University... until I came upon the "Fat House." It's pictured above. For your enjoyment, I also took a video of it.

I'm sure there's some greater meaning to Fat House, which is the creation of the Austrian-born artist Erwin Wurm, but the hell if I know what it is. Nor do I care. All I need to know is this: In a building full of conceptual photographs and abstract paintings, there is a giant, bulbous house that talks. How outstanding is that? This crap is made for people like me.

Permalink: 07:50 PM | Comments (4)

Hold on to your pants!

From the front page of the AP's ASAP website, circa Wed. night.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's official: I’ve been paid to watch porn. How’s that strike your fancy? Huh? Huh? Anyone jealous? Sure, the check hasn’t come yet, but I’m not worried. And anyway, it’s for a good cause: my very first piece in the Associated Press.

That’s not a joke, either. I wrote about a French clothing company’s pornographic summer catalog for the AP’s ASAP service, which offers content geared for that ever-elusive youth market. And hey, what better way to reach the kids than with sex?

Permalink: 09:09 AM | Comments (3)

Yo homie, it's a political rizzle razzle!

So, why is it tough running a political campaign? Many reasons, I'm sure. But here's one of them: Because every time you try and have a little fun, there's some jerk in the media calling you out on it. Today, via Boston's Weekly Dig, that jerk is me.

The bottom line: Two prominent black politicians hold a rally, and one of their PR people announce it with a press release that employs washed-out hip-hop slang. Tacky, tacky!

Permalink: 08:30 AM | Comments (1)

Introducing Operation Shockless And Awful

I've been spending a lot of time poking around YouTube lately, and have been perplexed and amused by the seemingly indiscriminate ways in which some videos become popular. There's no pattern, no sense to be made. In addition to the legitimately quality stuff on there, the world is apparently hungry for bad lip-syncing and aimless blabbering. What's going on here?

In the interests of finding out just how randomly fortune may shine upon YouTube videos, I've decided to launch Operation Shockless And Awful. The goal: Create and post intentionally terrible videos, and see if anyone watches. I encourage you to spread my crappy videos around, and I'll report back the findings. In this, my first (and, hell, maybe my only) installment, I wanted to set the bar extremely low. And so, I put on a vampire mask that barely fit me when I was in fourth grade, grabbed the guitar and, well, you can click to suffer through the rest.

Will anyone watch this piece of crap? Time will tell.

Permalink: 12:00 AM | Comments (9)

Age ain't nothin' but an interviewing handicap

A Time Magazine reporter got smacked down during an interview with author E.L. Doctorow:

Time: Are you surprised you're still writing great books in your mid-70's?

Doctorow: How old are you?

Time: Um, 36.

Doctorow: Ah, yes, well, that's a 36-year-old question.

I laughed when I read that, and then thought better of it. I had an extremely similar exchange with Tre Cool, the drummer from Green Day, when I interviewed him in 2000. It was easily one of the worst interviews I've ever done: I was still in college and hadn't developed any real interviewing skills, and was also super nervous because Green Day had been one of my favorite bands for a good five years. To top it off, Tre Cool is a pretty wacky dude. But the true low point came when, like the Time interview, he called me out on a question by invoking my age. The exchange didn't make it to print so I'm going on memory here, but it went something like:

Me: Do you have less control of your music on a major label than you did on Lookout! Records?

Tre: How old are you?

Me: Uh, 20.

Tre: I figured. That's something a 20-year-old would ask.

Oh, I was mortified. But six years later, I totally know what he means. That question just screamed, "I'm a young kid who doesn't know how the music industry works!" If I was Tre, and I spent half my waking hours talking to reporters who ask stupid questions, I'd probably have said the same thing.

Permalink: 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

Love her and leave her -- the cashier, that is

On Saturday, my girlfriend bought some little hair accessory at a Marc Jacobs store in Boston. Yesterday, she received a thank-you note from the cashier. When she told me about it, I was shocked. “What!?” I actually said, my voice rising two octaves, as if something really important had happened. I had to think: Why do I find this so offensive? A waste of resources? A waste of paper? The burden upon an employee?

Now I think I have it: It’s because, in trying to build a relationship with the customer, the store is acting like a person. And that’s kind of weird.

Companies are heavily focused on building relationships. It’s why they offer cards and e-mail lists, why their advertising has become more about branding than individual products, why they make their employees do insincere things like yell, “Welcome to Moe’s!” But despite the effort, all that stuff occurs from across the great divide between consumer and company. It’s a business acting and thinking like a business. It’s easy to process.

But then along comes this letter, and its recipient is no longer thinking about the store; she’s thinking about this girl Lisa, who signs her name with a little heart atop the i and send you the type of letter you usually only get from friends after a party. She writes in a personal tone -- “thank you for shopping with me” -- and identifies what you bought, so as to personalize it further. You almost expect her to toss in some little remembrance of your exchange, as if it were an inside joke the two of you share: “And don’t forget, red shoes are the hotness! Hehe!” Just imagine if every store did this: Thank you for shopping with me at CVS! I hope you’re loving the new wart remover. Please come back again soon!

This concept is just too personal for me. I’m allowed to come into the store, but I don’t think the store is allowed to come into my home. It reminds me that stores have a customer's address -- after all, my girlfriend didn’t consciously give it to them -- and that they remember purchases. If I were the shopper here, it’d make me think of the effect my purchase has on the employee -- that we’re not just two ships passing in the night, but that she has to linger on my purchase afterward and actually write me a note about it. I’d feel like a burden, like I have some obligation to the this person, like I’m not free to just come go without leaving an imprint.

Personal relationships are complicated. Customer-company relationships are simple. When we’re shopping, I say we stick to the latter.

Permalink: 11:28 AM | Comments (9)