Stupid is The New Awesome

This flyer turned up in my mailbox yesterday … I lived in NYC for seven or eight years and in New Haven for four, so I thought I knew a lot about how pizza’s supposed to be done … Thank goodness I was given this free correspondence class in the art of selling pizza. Some of the most important lessons I learned are below:



First, note that they offer “FAST DELIVERY” with “NO PORK!”



They also “Deliver Cigarettes and Cigars”

So, if you want your pizza WITHOUT pepperoni, sausage, bacon, (or even canadian bacon) or any of your other favorite pizza meats, but you DO want a pack of Marlboros and a stogie, this is the place for you!

After you’ve tipped your delivery guy and you’re lighting up a smoke, you look over your order and happily discover that there must have been some mistake … You ordered a large cheese pizza (and some cigs) and yet, here’s a mass of hot, greasy fried dough in the bag as well! Oh no, no mistake my friend: along with the giant disc of fried dough smothered in cheese we call “pizza pie,” an additional helping of Fried dough is FREE with your order.



So light up and dig in! This is pizza the Hartford way!!

UPDATE: Apparently I was too hasty when I posted this, and at Arija’s urging I have gone back to the well to discover even more. It’s important to know that when you’re trying against all hope to figure out how to call for your pizza and smokes (notice phone number @ top), that no one’s taking responsibility for the problems you’re having:

So I’ve finally finished a personal project since moving to/adjusting to Hartford, CT. Please enjoy …

A factoid I picked up while watching nature shows on PBS late at night:

Leopard seals can eat penguins at a rate of six per hour.

That’s a whole lotta penguins!

It must have been horrible to be the researcher that had to observe and tally this slaughter. That is, unless that particular researcher hates penguins. Then, it must have been deeply satisfying.

More than a year ago, when I was hard up for money (unlike now when I’m simply rolling in it) my friend Jeff hooked me up with some copywriting work for this guy he’d dealt with before. The assignment was to come up with some headlines for a series of ads for a European lingerie line called “Passionata,” and the guy in charge wanted something that was “playful” but also “dangerous.” He showed me a mock-up of the image the headlines would be going with… what do you know, it was an image by David LaChappelle of a woman in her undies (natch) riding a rocking horse made out of ice. Okay. So, I went home and I came up with some lines, including the one that the boss finally actually liked: “Play. With all your heart.” I thought it was kind of a take off on inspirational sports mottos, and for whatever reason, the guy really liked it. So, last night I’m randomly putting past things I’ve worked on into Google, and what do you know, there’s no images but there is a video. There are no headlines in it, but my line has been incorporated into a jazzy little Nouvelle Vague-esque song. The woman is still there, riding the ice rocking horse.

My line comes in at about the 30 second mark. Quite a while after the absolutely incomprehensible/kinda scary “my heart beats like a child” which I did not write.

Pretty nutty, huh? Although not nearly as nutty as this: A crafter on Etsy has started making custom corsets based on the outfits they wore on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Photo, Corset and Model(?) from EveningArwen at Etsy

I don’t really have anything snide to say about this, other than that it makes me laugh to look at it, and not entirely contemptuously. I love that someone out there is so in touch with their geekiness AND their sexuality to actually build/buy/own/wear one of these. I love that there are people out there for whom being a geek and being a sex object are not mutually exclusive.

Apropos of nothing, I would like to take a moment to defend David Spade.

I think David Spade gets an unfairly bad rap, which is especially obvious in the anonymous posts of millions of bloggers and blog commenters.

Sure, these days the Spade brand is associated primarily with crummy sitcoms like Rules Of Engagement and the archetypal douchiness of Axe body spray, but this was not always the case.

Or maybe it was… Spade’s entire brand is actually based on this snide douchiness. But I would like to propose that Spade is, or was, a pioneer of the predominant form of comedy today… ruthless, unmotivated snark.

The Miss Future Snark Awards ceremony is held each year in front of a chain-link fence.

Spade hit the scene on SNL in 1989, but he hit American consciousness three years later on the same show with his Weekend Update bit, The Hollywood Minute. As a young, impressionable 13 year old who loved SNL and though he was the funniest guy on the playground, these minute long venom-spewing sessions remain my earliest clear memory of what I would later know to be called snarkiness… and I bet it was to many of my peers as well, although they haven’t taken the time to pinpoint it yet.

Check out this quote from Spade in the SNL geek bible, Live From New York (Little, Brown)

I was just basically sitting at the table in the writers room, bored, reading People magazine, commenting out loud about what was going on in the world, just making fun of everyone. Someone was like “Why don’t you just do that on the show? That’s what you’re good at.” And that was Lorne’s opinion too. He said, ” You’ve finally found a unique voice, just do that.” […] And I did it every couple of weeks. It was crazy, I didn’t care who I took out, I was just an unknown guy making fun of million-dollar celebrities for no reason, just to take their legs out.

Just making fun of celebrities because you can… being as mean as possible to people you don’t know just to get a laugh … sounds hilarious to me. It also sounds to me like the same stock-in-trade as Bestweekever.tv, Go Fug Yourself, The Superficial, and the still-reigning kings of snark, the Gawker Media family. Were it not for Spade, I will go so far to venture, that this form of comedy wouldn’t have become so huge in the 1990s, and would never have reached the saturation point that it has in the ’00s. You, feisty, holier-than-thou bloggers, owe a debt of gratitude to David Spade that I don’t imagine you’ll repay any time soon. And that’s okay, too.

Do I ask that you lay off David Spade? Not really. He wouldn’t have done it to you in his prime, and you carry the torch for him even as you use it to try to light the kindling beneath the pole he’s been tied to.

Also, he should still get a pass for a few more years at least for The Emperor’s New Groove!

Hey everyone! The latest season of America’s Best Dance Crew has finally begun! I am not even slightly sarcastic about this… I love this show. ABDC3 (as Mario Lopez insists on calling it, rather than just “Dance Crew”) comes in right after 30 Rock on my list of best shows currently in production. But, unlike 30 Rock, Dance Crew gets me excited and emotionally involved in ways that border on shameful. You don’t understand, even just watching the little choreographed intros of the new crews on the season premiere made me giddy and emotional, and I don’t even know enough about any of them to get attached to them yet.

Maybe why I love this show so much is that I’m such a sucker for everyone doing the same thing at the same time. Who wants to see one talented dancer compete against another on So You Think You Can Dance? when I can watch two bunches of dancers go head to head on Dance Crew? Part of what I thought was so brilliant about the season 1 winning crew, JABBAWOCKEEZ, was that they all wore neutral masks when dancing. This seemed as hokey as it sounds for only a moment before the masks make the group seem even more identical and robotlike when they moved together. As someone with two left feet, herky jerky limbs and a nonexistent sense of rhythm, I base my opinion on the quality of a dance crew almost exclusively on the ability of its members to all do the same thing at the same time, like amazing dancing robots. So, bear that in mind when reading the following random thoughts, compiled while watching the season premiere of ABDC3…

The first group to perform, Strikers All Stars, from Howard University are pretty great. There are a lot of them, and they all pretty much do the exact same thing at the exact same time for their whole routine. Also pretty great was this shot of the their leader at the finish of their routine, acting all intimidating …

… followed by this reverse shot of his most ardent fans in the audience, a bunch of hormonal white teenage girls.

The crew of Puerto Rican art-saved-our-lives street urchin cliches go by the name G.O.P. Dance, which means Gang of Peace Dance whichzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz … Gawd, everything about them is boring.

SPOILER ALERT!! G.O.P., Your dancing was good enough to get you off the streets of PR, but not good enough for you to make it on American television.

In their intro video, the self-consciously artistic Quest Crew look like the type of people who would be cast on an episode of Friends as the “cool street dancers” that Ross meets in Washington Square Park and that, no matter how “cool” he thinks they are, the other Friends just don’t click with. To put it more succinctly, they look like a joke about lameness from 1998. Still, they totally threw down as dancers. So many things all at the same time!

Wow. The Ringmasters are the ever New York City crew!? That’s pretty surprising. What they do, “flex dancing” or “bone breaking,” is something they themselves describe as gruesome. And it is. It’s a scary, joint-dislocating horror to watch. And yet, these guys made judge Lil Mama totally cry, in a good way. She was so proud that her own Brooklyn was finally representin’ that Lil Mama bawled like a lil baby.

HOLYCRAPPINGCRABS! CLOGGING!? So … Dynamic Edition, oh, you delightful fish out of water! This all-white group seems to be made up of the one gay in all of Alabama, and his four girlfriends. It must be hard to be weird everywhere. You don’t fit in on this show, I’m sure you don’t really fit in in rural Alabama, either… Although they’ve apparently won every clogging competition there is in the country for seven years running, they amount to no more than a novelty on this show. This producorial stunt is fun to watch right now, but is it really worth this fantastic visual punchline in the first episode for a sure-thing cut before the fourth show group? Anyway, thanks for keeping them around for one more show, allowing us to see this super-weirdness probably only one more time.

Awww, c’mon, Team Millenia. Don’t tell us that you’re a “super-sharp razor” of precision and then turn in a performance where virtually no one does the same thing at the same time for the whole routine! What kind of dance crewing is this??

I just heard the most intriguing, affecting quote from friend and burgeoning game developer Ian Dallas. And I heard it in the most roundabout way: From his blog I linked to a video of a talk he gave at the Tokyo Game Convention, in which he says this:

“I think comedy and wonder are very closely linked. They are both very much about timing.”

I would have never had the presence of mind to put this idea together in words so simply and elegantly, even though I do believe what Ian says is true. Also, perhaps it sheds some light on why my response to things I am pleased with or really amazed by is to laugh. It’s involuntary and sometimes causes some real misunderstandings, but it has always just felt sort of natural to me.

His game, The Unfinished Swan, looks really awesome too.

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

A nuclear-powered car!? WTF?! Yes. And …. yes.

The Cadillac World Thorium Fuel concept. Otherwise known as the Cadillac WTF. Created by Loren Kulesus, everything about the WTF has been created to last 100 years without maintenance. That’s the reason for the element number ninety, thorium: to act as a nuclear fuel powering batteries that would power the car.

I’d like to believe this is some giant cosmic coincidence of hilarious proportions, but there is no way this was coincidental. Someone on the branding team at Cadillac has a great sense of humor.

here’s the logo they’re going with. I know, right?

Oooohhh … so much …. mmmm …. weirdness …. too good …. to … be…. true!

Two observations made during last night’s SNL.

1. This, according to Nielsen Soundscan, is the biggest-selling musician of 2008… No, not the one with the gorgeous curves who looks like she’s dressed for the Oscar red carpet … No, I mean the one behind what we’re all looking at: unassuming little waif of a thing in last night’s nightie. The one who could barely project over her backing band and amazingly glam guitar.

2. During one of the commercial breaks, they ran an ad for Ambien CR in which the firm-but-friendly voiceover encourages you to “talk to your prescriber about Ambien CR.” They do it several times, as if to say, “who are we kidding? Your relationship to the person giving you your pills doesn’t have to be doctor-patient. It could just be a friend with a pad, for all we care.” They even make a point to tell you that if you have any extreme side effects that you should call your doctor immediately. You know, someone you can trust your health with. Not that guy who gives you your pills.

Ambien ad not embeddable. Follow the link for low-key weirdness.

Yeah, sorry, nothing about Neil Patrick, i know … guess I’ll just have to save my thoughts about the return of gay minstrelsy for a different post.

[Note: Best Week Ever Blog announced that they are seeking some new writers. This post is part of the original material for my submission portfolio.]

Lindsay walks out of my fantasy world and into someplace less repugnant

We’ll call this news of Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson breaking up a wash for my fantasies. While hearing that Ms. Lohan may no longer be a lesbian (a reversal I totally never cynically saw coming) means that my elaborate daydream of meeting LiLo, sweeping her off her feet and doin’ da nasty in an elevator, ScarJo and BenDelTor-style seems fractionally more likely now (score!) … the omission of the part where a second starlet joins in when the elevator makes an unexpected stop at the 7th floor really takes some of the overall bloom off this pretend rose… (oh well)