Seeing IS Believing

 A fictitious yo-yo champion named K-Strass has been featured no fewer than 5 times on Midewest morning news shows to the horror of the anchors and amusement of audiences. You see Kenny Strassberg pulled a fast one. And he is brilliant.

  In e-mail solicitations, K-Strass claimed to represent the world's only green yo-yo manufacturer and to be a professional at the obscure sport. His press release of sorts detailed a history of phony championships and awards and a positive message to people. And everyone loves a hard-luck story like the one K-Strass came with.
  News shows, always hungry for a space-filler in the mornings, jumped at the chance to book someone of such a magnitude without bothering to check out the facts. For example, there is no Walt Greenberg award in yo-yo for K-Strass to have been nominated for. And those duped outlets quickly discovered he was absolutely terrible.

  K-Strass vanished after discovery and everyone wants to know who he is. Turns out his agent Joe Guerke is really comedy filmmaker Joe Pickett and K-Strass may well be Pickett's business partner,Nick Prueher. They tour the country showing strange films and outtakes for the purpose of laughs. Mr. Prueher denies that he is, in fact, K-Strass. However his Found Footage Festival was not far from where the last news program placement took place. Curious.

  This con was pure genius. Everyone wants to know who this guy is. Like Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron Cohen before him, K-Strass pulled a comic sneak attack on the masses and wound up with a TON of free publicity. And the quick denial plays into the sense of want that we have to find out everything about a person and will just magnify his spotlight while he concocts his latest and greatest gag. This is elementary level marketing stuff kids. Give people a taste and leave them wanting for more.

   The duped news programs feel slighted by the ruse, but they need not be, for they too garnered more national coverage than they could ever dream of in an instant. While they may feel stupid for failing to fact-check they scored laughs and ratings that only such a character can provide. This is indeed a fraud, but one calculated in such a non-malicious fashion that all benefit from it. If the message is a cautionary "don't believe what you read" tale, it has served its purpose. If it is a ploy for publicity, it worked. If it was simply for fun, it is classically hilarious.

  Look out for Kenny Strassberg/Nick Prueher to lay low and then launch more similar gags to brighten his own star. He might just be the American answer to Borat. Or he may vanish into obscurity if that is what he desires, however I doubt that entirely. We love a good gag that borrows from the masters and is just different enough to make us take notice. If the character known as K-Strass markets himself correctly, he will be laughing all the way to the bank with the rest of us along for the ride.

  Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously, and the Mystery Man is just the medium to convey the message.

WTBlue FUCK of The Weak

 Some people don't do well with emotional wounding. Whether they have been scorned by a lover or ripped off by an old buddy their ire will not be calmed without exacting some sort of punishment on the person who has done the perceived wrong. With that in mind, some industrious British geeks have come up with mail-order revenge of the uncomfortable kind.

  For 15 BPS plus shipping (or more, depending on how many people have pissed you off) , they will send you crabs in a vial so you can infest your objects home or vehicle with the creepy crawlies. Not soft-shelled Boston crabs, but Pthirius Pubis. The itchy hellfire known as crotch crickets.

  The creators of the enterprise known as CrabRevenge.com claim that their site is no joke and include testimonials from satisfied customers. Their tagline is "Make That Bitch Itch", making it clear that their target audience is comprised of young men. They have employed their geek skills to selectively breed lice that are Kwellada-resistent so that the money spent isn't wasted by some pesky pharmaceutical. There is also a U.S. based website that sells them called revengecrabs.com with more direct and sinister marketing.

  That's really disgusting, but is it legal? Essentially it hits that grey area of the law. It is not illegal to infest someone with lice, nor to mail eggs. While one could conceivably be sued or charged with criminal mischief, the burden would be on the other person to prove where the infestation originated. I have never heard of a case of someone successfully suing someone for giving them any form of lice for any reason. A court won't hear it because every kindergartener's parents would be suing other ones for their kid getting head lice off of the other kid. Even if the parents intentionally sent an infested child to school as a form of payback, the case would be tossed.

  On a serious note though, if you feel the need to infest someone with ass-hair bungee jumpers, you need serious help. While it may be REALLY tempting to dump these things in your sleazy pool boy's F-150, just dump your old lady and move on. Besides, the little bastards are barely visible  and you can easily infest yourself. And from a particularly embarassing 1994 incident, I know that these things are the party in your pants that all of your worst enemies have been invited to. And it's mean, and acting like your ex isn't going to make your life any better.

   So come one, come all to the Circus Internetus- where everything from ham to porn to pubic lice is bought and sold. I'd like to say this is shocking, but I've seen 2 girls-1 cup.

Be well.

Twitter vs the Geeks

  Those who spend too much time on their main Twitter page looking at their follower numbers were put in a state of confusion last night as their numbers were temporarily set to zero.
  This was not a glitch, more it was Twitter fixing one.

  Geeks and those who feel slighted by the fact that the famous don't follow back their 3.2 million followers found a loophole in Twitter that could be exploited to force anyone they wanted to follow them back. It was a little-known annoyance that the more popular folks dealt with quietly. Until popular social media/geek blog Gizmodo got wind of it and published a "how-to" guide to the little hack and people were suddenly following thousands of people they did not want to. Fun.

  Twitter spent a few hours fixing the boo-boo and restoring everyone's counts and all is well once again, but it leads me to a few thoughts about why such a bug was created. If it was not for pecuniary gain by "social networking professionals", than what was it?

  I've seen tweets from people complaining that *insertnamehere* doesn't follow them back. Really, why do people care so much? Will your life REALLY be improved if Yoko Ono follows you back? If the answer is yes, you need to get a life. If it would make your day to get a "hello" from someone you admire at least say something relevant to the person. I'm sure Ashton Kutcher gets a million "I LOVE you. U R soooo kewl" messages a week, so if you want him to acknowledge your existence (a.k.a. tweet you back) make a reference to something relevant to an intelligent dude in his mid-30's. Exacting your revenge vis-a-vis hacking will only piss off the person whose attention you so desire, and it should because you are behaving like a creep.

  At the end of the day, people are individuals - with their own morals, world views, pastimes, friends, and even people they follow on social networks. Their real lives are often completely different from their work lives, but most of all, those lives are their own- identities that are personal property forged by DNA and augmented by life experience. We cannot force humans to do anything against their own will and as small as this hack is on the scale of pertinence, it is still a violation.

  Kudos to Twitter for continuing to thwart attacks on privacy and choice. Hey, Facebook- are YOU listening?

Dick of Death

 

  Liberal pundits are having a field day with the news that Dr. George Rekers hired male prostitutes and have likened him to Ted Haggard and others as fallen homophobes. But while Haggard may have said some contemplible things about gays from the pulpit, Rekers is a different beast entirely.

Dr. George is a man who is so evil, gays really don't want him as a member of our fold. George Rekers has used his self-loathing uber-Christian stance to undermine the rights of others. He has preached against gay adoption and his "medical" opinions reaffirmed the Boy Scouts of America's homophobic stances. Those things alone make him a bigot and a general douchebag, but George Rekers has made a living out of peddling misery to children of good christian parents.

  Dr. Rekers and his cohorts at NARTH make bank by selling "cures" to homosexuality. Their "research" involves selling false hope to parents of struggling teens and promotion and utilization of remedies new and old to cure what they see as a mental disorder. George Rekers believes that homosexuality is a gender disturbance that can be arrested through aversion therapy. As someone who was subjected to this from a psychiatrist who shall remain nameless, I will assert that there is nothing "therapeutic" about this process. You are shamed and punished into whatever the shrink feels is gender-normative. If you would rather play baseketball than wear a hideous dress, you will be imprisoned until you submit or are saved (as in my case) by a real doctor who discovers his coworker is a nutjob.

  So George Rekers hates gays and preaches intolerance to schoolchildren, and that is a big deal since he seems to enjoy the carnal company of very young gentlemen, but that isn't just what makes him scum. Dr. George has also testified in court that Native Americans should not be permitted to be foster parents and has published tracts vilifying working women and promoting very aggressive spankings of children. He has been the educated face of the racist, sexist, homophobic Baptist for a generation simply because he hates himself.

  George Rekers' greatest crime was not his views, his grandiosity, or even his hypocrisy. His most grotesque offense was convincing a generation of parents to hate their own children in the name of G-d. Thousands of families torn apart because they believed that their children suffered from a disease. After all, they aren't doctors, George Rekers is. The bad doctor is a hellish example of the power we give to men because they have an alphabet following their names. No public "outing" will alleviate the pain and guilt these families are feeling right now.

  So while you are having a laugh about the latest jerk caught with his dick in the wrong person's trap, consider who the idiot is and just how much damage he has caused. People use all kinds of things to remedy their internal distress- booze, drugs, prostitutes, and more. But when family values becomes a band-aid for self-hate, we all lose.

You cannot fall from grace when you never had any to begin with.

Mother's Day Vlog

An inconvenient truth.

Holy Shit!!

I bought a bunch of Rural Life magazines from the 40's to 60's and found this ad. Luckily I found it online so I didn't have to rip apart a volume.

But look at the advert! Do YOU want your micro looking like THAT? I suppose subservience when mum was getting into the workforce was important, but WOW. This ad was directed at medical personnel and stressed out parents.

But seeing what my parents were on as kids makes me understand why my generation is medicated for everything. I ALMOST understabnd why folks think I'm nuts for actually working through life as it is.

ALMOST.

Let's NOT repeat this with our grambinos.

Attn: Shane Powers

I'm not sure WHY you decided to torture yourself this way, but I'll support you.

However...
24 hours is a long time. In front of a computer, it is asinine.
xo

M