Soylent Reality Television is PEOPLE!

In the wake of the news that homoerotic will-o-the-wisp Sanjaya Malakar might have been (gasp!) a performance art character, I felt compelled to invent 9 more shocking bits of TV news:

1. Rosie O’Donnell is actually three small lesbians inside a giant automaton, feverishly working the levers & gadgets.
2. Sig Hansen from Deadliest Catch? Terrified of the ocean. All his scenes are greenscreen/rotoscoping.
3. Tim Gunn? Hates fashion, loves rebuilding homes. Lost a bet in 2004 to Ty Pennington, his one time lover, and has been forced to job swap until one of their shows gets cancelled.
4. The original Regis Philbin died in 1994. Frank Gifford killed him when he thought Reg was getting fresh with Kathie Lee. This misunderstanding later led to Gifford’s own affair, and the related blackmail scandal. In the wake of the tragedy, ABC hushed up the crime and hired relative unknown Steven Yahblonic, an elderly but spry Queens native who was an uncanny Philbin doppleganger. Plans for a similar replacement for the long dead Roger Ebert (coincidentally, ALSO murdered by Gifford, for reasons yet unknown) continue to this day.
5. On the show “Dancing With The Stars,” many of the contestants aren’t actually stars, but rather faded has beens, reduced to celebrity talent show travesties that strip away the remaining dignity they had in exchange for a few more minutes in the warmth of public attention.
6. America’s Next Top Model & America’s Most Wanted have been on a collision course for several years; one day the same contestant will win both shows.
7. Three members of the cast of Grey’s Anatomy have clauses in their contracts (driven by whether they hit ratings benchmarks) that allow them to perform actual surgery on etherized, terminally ill patients on camera. For two of the actors, both trained in the Method style, it is to improve the realism of their performances. But in the case of Patrick Dempsey, it is to allow him to continue the decade-long serial killing habit he acquired on the set of Can’t Buy Me Love.
8. In an attempt to keep his “Jack Bauer” persona in character, Keifer Sutherland refuses to respond to people who call him by his given name, in lieu of his character’s name. Also, he has not taken a piss in seven years.
9. The guy in the bee costume on Sabado Gigante?
   HE’S NOT WEARING A COSTUME.

My Favorite Comic

It’s childish, but pretty much every time I look at this single panel cartoon I laugh.  Something about the look on the masturbator’s face, or the accessories (the propellor cap & wheelie duck)… maybe the casual attitude in the caption… I dunno.  Who can say for sure?  My mom once mentioned that Charles Addams would routinely draw a never-published picture of a man at a deli counter being handed a baby and asked if he wanted to eat it here, or take it to go.  Addams would chuckle to himself, and people close to him would fear for his sanity.

That’s right. I got a Dragon Bonus.

A year or more ago, I was playing a stupid flash game and comparing my score with a friend who kept beating me.  Eventually, when I realized I just couldn’t match his skill, I decided to take a screenshot of my final score, add a ton of points to the total (via photoshop) and write “DRAGON BONUS!” on the screen.  I emailed him the screenshot and told him I’d received the elusive Dragon Bonus, and my score was now out of reach. 

Now, maybe this guy’s gullible, but I like to think he’s just too noble to even consider that malfeasance had taken place, and so he struggled for a bit to obtain a Dragon Bonus of his own.  “How did you get it?  I’ve never even seen that option” etc.  Needless to say, I was delighted & spent the rest of the day emailing him taunts & other images I had manipulated, once he claimed that he no longer believed in the mythical Dragon Bonus. 

Today was cleanup day at our office, and while most of my co-workers took it to literally mean “clean up your workspace”, I actually just defragmented my hard drive & dug through some of the folders on my desktop.  Which is where I found these:

 

The cumulative effect of all the childishness is striking, to say the least.  Still, at the end of the day, I did get a Dragon Bonus, which is pretty impressive.

The Business Card

Our office has an informal policy of circulating hallmarkish cards for key life events, like when employees leave, or have kids, or a member of their family dies.  We used to do ‘em for birthdays, but we have too many employees for that now.  The card is equipped with a list of employee names, and you get it, write your trite three or four word note & cross off your name, then find someone whose name isn’t crossed off and give the card to them.  This always poses a problem for me, because I have almost as hard a time resisting writing something funny once it’s occurred to me as I do saying something funny once it’s occurred to me, and bereavement cards are the wrong place for the uncomfortable joke.  Or rather they’re the PERFECT place for them.

Last week, our company dwarf resigned after years of working here, allegedly to travel the world in a series of tiny little steps.  This event necessitated the circulation of yet another card.  After three pages of “Best wishes [name of dwarf]“, or “Have fun on your journey, [name of dwarf]“, I felt compelled to write something distinct.  I ended up with “Good luck, [name of dwarf], we’ll miss the pitter patter of… well, you know”.  He’s been gone for a few days now, but the little stepladder he kept in the handicapped stall in the men’s room is still there.  Sometimes I use it to make myself feel like a giant when I pee.

A few months back, my boss’s father passed away.  He was pretty torn up about the whole thing, and when the card circulated, I was in a bit of a quandry.  I really like this guy, I’ve known him for a decade & he’s one of the better friends I have, so I wouldn’t ever want to write something to hurt his feelings.  That said, when I received the card, it was full of page after page of “So sorry to hear about your dad” and “Our condolences are with you” etc.  I wanted to write something that he would know was from me, and by way of how my logic worked, the one thing you’d wish for a friend in a time of sorrow is that they could move past it and eventually smile again.  I ended up writing “Hey [name of boss], I feel awkward asking this, but is it too soon for me to ask your mom on a date?”

Eventually I suspect they will stop circulating the cards through me.

Flickr Testimonials

For a website that seems to have made absolutely no missteps, I confess I’ve never understood the purpose of Flickr Testimonials.  It’s like the idea occurred to them that it would aid in the “community” aspects of the place, so they went ahead and implemented it without stopping to consider if it really made sense.  I mean, who pauses before viewing someone’s photos to see if a third party had good things to say about that person?  The testimonials all have to be approved by each user, so it’s not like you’d see a brutally honest one like “jrouse’s photos are absurdly trite, nothing but babies & pugs, with the occasional urinal shot thrown in to break up the monotony”.

Nonetheless, I feel that it’s only common courtesy if someone adds me as a Contact (it’s like the flickr version of subscribing to someone else’s photo stream, or joining an extended MySpace network), the least I can do is write them a Testimonial, even if it is completely useless.  The problem is, in many cases, the testimonial just sits in their in-box, unapproved for months, since the system is so poorly implemented.  Here’s a list of testimonials I’ve provided to date.  I’m running out of nonsense, and may need to borrow a cup or two from my neighborhood purveyor.

“We have a black, a woman, two jews & a cripple”

Disgraced lunatic James Watt’s famous quote about the diversity of his staff seems almost precognitive when you look at the photo on the “Who We Are” section of the TSA website.  So badly did they want to express diversity in their hiring policy (although I’m pretty sure every TSA person I’ve ever seen in either LAX or SFO has been African-American) that they made sure that the guy with only one arm was standing in the front row, with his missing arm facing outwards.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not extra comforted that the organization tasked with emptying out our hair care products as we try to fly anywhere hires one armed men for the job.  No wonder the line at security takes so long.  Besides, shouldn’t they be busy investigating that guy for the murder of Richard Kimble’s wife?

Male workplace restroom etiquette leads to scientific breakthrough

In an exciting scientific breakthrough, I believe I figured out how to slow down the passage of time at my office on Monday.  It’s complicated to replicate the conditions, so pay attention: for whatever reason, yesterday as I’m headed to the Men’s room at work, I notice that this co-worker who I don’t really know all that well is headed in at the same time as me, and purely aribtrarily, I end up walking into one of the stalls, instead of standing at the urinal, which is where he ends up. 

As I’m in the stall peeing, I think, “I wonder if he thinks it’s weird that I didn’t stand next to him.  I wonder if he’s taking it personally?”  As we both finish up and head to the sinks to wash up, I decide maybe I’ll tell him it’s nothing personal, and that I just randomly decided to pee in a stall for an exciting change of pace, but then I re-think that idea, because telling another guy your pee location strategy provides too much insight into the inner workings of your mind, at least, according to Sun-Tzu. 

So I don’t say anything, but then it’s really weighing on my mind, that he’s probably sitting over at his desk, thinking, “Jonathan’s a creepy urinater,” or he’s probably calling his friends and telling them.  Or maybe he’s prepping an email to the whole company, and then going in and unselecting my address, to let them know that I’m pee-shy and have to hide in a stall when others are present (which is totally not true, I can pee anywhere, anytime!). 

So in the end, I feel like the only thing to do is send him an email; but I realize that doing so will just be extremely queer, so I decide to go way over the top with it, and maybe, just maybe it’ll be so bizarre that he forgets the original incident that necessitated the email.  So I write “Hey, I hope you didn’t think it was weird that I went into a stall just now instead of using a urinal; the thing is, I have a really unusually shaped penis & I didn’t want any of my co-workers to find out.  So, now that you know… just don’t tell anyone.”

And I hit send.  And then I wait… and wait… and eventually, after 90 minutes with no response, I realize he’s probably prepping a lawsuit, or maybe he’s already in with the HR lady.  So I get up and go over to his desk, and he looks up at me, and as I’m waiting for him to speak, I realize he’s wondering what I’m doing there, like, maybe I’m there to show him my penis or something.  So I blurt out “hey, just so you know, I don’t really have an abnormally shaped penis“. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you slow down time.  What felt like three minutes passed over the next few seconds before he stammered out, “I have no idea what you’re talking about”.  Apparently, he hadn’t even read the email, because he’d been in a meeting & gone straight to lunch afterwards.  I explained, which I’m sure made everything 100% better.  Later on, we all looked back on it and had a good laugh, or rather, one of us wrote about the incident in his blog while the other one filed a report with Human Resources.

I’m totally hilarious

This may well be the funniest comment I’ve made in my four year Metafilter posting history; I’m amazed it wasn’t deleted by the admins.

Update re: Midget Dating

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier, but everywhere on the LittlePeopleMeet.com site, they ALLCAP the word “Little”, so it’s LITTLEPeopleMeet.  This made me think that there might be a “regular”, or “non-little” version of PeopleMeet.com, and lo & behold… Of course, this only gets my curiosity going, so I have to check STUPIDPeopleMeet (for simpletons, and those who enjoy taking romantic advantage of them), STUMPYPeopleMeet (for amputee fetishists) & SMELLYPeopleMeet (for people who smell horrible. Or people that want to fuck people that smell horrible), but no dice on all three.  I wish there was a simple way to see what other building blocks in the PeopleMeet.com empire there are.  Internet, you have let me down!

God Bless You, Internet

http://www.littlepeoplemeet.com/   Like JDate, only for Midgets, and they don’t have to be Jewish.  Tragically, they won’t let you browse the membership profiles without an account… so, despite being married & a new father, my midget lust overcame me & I created a free account.  Yes, they did ask my height, and yes, I totally lied.  I stopped short of uploading a photo, as the best photo I have handy is of my pug, Oscar.  I considered making up a story in my profile about how I had that rare asian pugface disease, but then I remembered - these are midgets, not retards. 

Needless to say, now that JailBabes.com is no longer in service, LittlePeopleMeet is now my second favorite personals site (don’t worry, WomenBehindBars.com you’ll always be #1 with me).  So many hot midgets in one location… fascinating… must… fight… temptation… to upgrade to paid account.  Would hate for the missus (who works in a powerful family law office) to find out I had a little something on the side.