I introduced torgo_x to the nightmare world of Orange County’s Party Losers Website, a party promoter inexplicably named “Spirit World” whom I’ve mocked here before. A few minutes browsing their photo albums will tell you all you need to know about the phrase “Bros and Hos”. Sean of course found the “best” picture of all, featuring a mighty fly Accounts Receivable Manager and his crew:
The Sean John shirt makes it.
The lady in the foreground has the expression on her face that I would if my swimming hole filled up with tongue-wrestling famous beautiful people. Who the fuck are you? Where the hell are my cigarettes? I want to buy this lady a drink.
Another college guy showed up at the door with the exact same spiel.
ME: You guys already hit me up.
HIM: It’s not what you think, we’re not selling magazines.
ME: Right, you’re selling books!
HIM: …yes. Did he have something like… ::shows brochure::
ME: Right, exactly. Books for kids, in the hospital.
HIM: Well, crap. I’m just around the corner on Francisco. No one around here is in my class! What the heck?
There’s a pause and the poor guy looks genuinely lost.
ME: I’m not sure he was at UCLA like you. Maybe he is at a different school that’s doing the fundraiser.
HIM: Oh man, yeah. Crap. Yeah.
ME: So, anyway, this area has had the pitch already. Sorry.
HIM: Thanks, man. ::wanders off sadly::
This week’s Wittenburg Door newsletter alerts us to the fact that the web version of “God Stuff” archives this week has not only clips from Carman’s Bond-style thriller, but also the all time best clip from Benny Hinn’s wife offering a Holy Ghost… oh, I won’t spoil it.
In 1997 I had a very close call. I was living in Kansas City at the time. I went to the mall to get something you get at malls like underwear or light bulbs, and when I came out of a store I noticed lots of security guys and roadies, and something being set up that looked like a big stage. I asked what was going on and they said that current teen sensation “Hanson” was playing. I fled, and noticed as I peeled out of the parking lot that there was a mass of > 1000 teenagers being held in a sort of feeding pen in one corner of the parking lot about to be loosed into the mall. It would have been as bad as this disaster, I bet. I would have been turned into Chick Fil-A in moments.
Hey look everyone, it’s a big bike that holds seven upper-middle-class white collar workers in Office Casual clothing! It’s perfect for those painful rituals in which people are forced to be jolly and play along until their spirits are broken and they’ll say anything to be cut loose for a box lunch!
It’s so great working here at PleaseShootMeInTheFaceCO!
Found serendipitously on old memepool entry. “Thanks”, nrrd.
Podcasting is bad. I’ve bitched about it already. Mouth-breathing geeks droning about technology. Even the ones who are good writers (0.1%) are unlistenable like bad college professors. Fire it into the sun.
But something worse looms. The video iPod and its cousins, and the ease of making small downloadable portable video magazines, offers a future of what I’m sure they’re calling vodcasting. This unfortunately does not provide vodka, but may require it. The thought of tapping on my handheld video device and seeing Dave Winer or some person who has the best blog about Babylon 5 talk at me is, frankly, emetic.
My opinion is that mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks who insist on being media personalities should restrict themselves to text like the other mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks over the last 10,000 years and stay out of the public eye and ear. The reason we’re not all on the radio and the TV is not just that access to media is limited. It’s also that very few people have either the skills or the charisma to do either of those things without making others dizzy with loathing.
But I can deal with that just by not watching any of it. The second part of this is worse. Right now, blogging is a text medium, and I love it. I have maybe 200 RSS subscriptions to personal and institutional weblogs and weblog-like things and I get a lot out of it. I make fun of the bozosphere, but mostly it’s great.
Video may not kill it, but it’ll be a huge kick in the stomach. Video is seductive. It’s immediate and TV-like. It’s visual. It makes people feel like stars to be in videos. It’s dumbed down and easy. And it’s made for ad insertion. Video podcasting, when it gets to a certain point, will be adopted by just about all the commercially-run weblogs and a huge portion of the homebrew ones. And I see it as having an unpleasantly TV-like effect on the web. You might not think a three-paragraph blog update on one of the Weblogs Inc. or Gawker sites is a heavy chunk of ideas, but it’ll get smaller and dumber in a video. Instead of a galaxy of smart little snide magazine article squibs, we’ll have huge numbers of local news quality “segments” with stock footage and maybe 200 words of idea in them. Inevitably the commercial blogs will be done by prettier and prettier faces. And because there’s less money in blogging than in actual TV, the use of stock provided footage from commercial sources will be universal.
With luck, we’ll keep a core of text-based weblogging that has actual ideas in it, the way we kept an intelligent chunk of the Web after the flashmonsters and marketing droids ate most of it. But it’s not a good thing, not at all.
I hate video.
Courtesy Anna Pirhana, here’s an Amazon listing for How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men
The best review of this book is by Crazy Ed from Cupertino, who says:
I personally found the book lacking, in what I like to call “chutzpah”. I gave this book to a friend who needed some help and the “step-by-step guide” provided in this tome is anything but. In many cases he found the steps to be nebulous, ambagious, and even geared towards the derelict reader. The book, as a whole, was definitely not multifarious. I would not extol this literary work.
Thanks for the tip there, Ed. I like my racist sex advice books to be multifarious and loaded with “chutzpah”, and I wouldn’t buy anything you didn’t extol.
People who considered this book were apparently also interested in How to Date Young Women: For Men over 35 vol II (Advanced Skills)
Many thanks to rroseselavyoui for introducing me to the First Annual Myspace Bad Hair Awards.
Be My Blog 