White People--Christian Lander's Got Your Number

Yesterday I mentioned Christian Lander's blog, Stuff White People Like, but said I hadn't really read it yet. I subsequently went and read it and have to say that it may well eclipse my former favorite website of all time, The Best Page In the Universe.

It is hilarious and so, so true. This post about how white people like free healthcare is one of my favorites.

Other stuff white people like: having gay friends, recycling, multilingual children, coffee, expensive sandwiches and microbreweries, to name just a few.

I must not be all white because the only thing on this short list (here's the full list) that I like is having gay friends--I am the anti-recycler, don't drink beer and, if I had a personal motto, it may well be "Welcome to America. Now speak English."

Blog-to Book-Deal #92

Ok, not really--I'm not sure if the actual number of blog-to-book deals to date is 92; I just stole "92" from the title of this article that appeared in the March 30, 2008 New York Times.

Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer, has a blog called Stuff White People Like. I would have given the guy a book deal for the title alone. I have to go read it but at a super quick glance (who, me--offer an opinion based upon a mere glance?) it looks hilarious. Hilarious, apparently, to the tune of $300,000, according to the NYT article.

Look at it this way--turn on your TV on any given evening and chances are you will find a reality show of some sort. Dating shows, beauty contests, a million different takes on the theme of survival, people battling it out to lose weight, people crammed in a house trying to annoy the shit out of each other, etc. You name it and there's a reality show about it. The whole premise is that people are entertaining enough just by themselves; no need for writers to sweat it out trying to write scripts or come up with ideas.

Isn't the same thing true of blogs? I'm certainly no literary agent yet I spend an inordinate amount of time reading various blogs. If I were in a position to make money by translating interesting ones into book deals I'd be set for life. Sit back and surf the infinite number of unsolicited book pitches--what could be easier? It's like being a modeling agent sitting at a pool filled with hot young girls--just sit there with a cocktail and take your pick of the ones who would make you the most money.

At any rate, is this not yet more evidence that FIO is the way the world operates now?

As is this, for that matter--my new FIO poster child, Penelope Trunk, blogging about how writing without typos is totally outdated. I say poster child because she embodies the spirit of FIO--that is, fuck rules--make your own, then laugh all the way to the bank.

Augusten Says You Must Go Buy This Book

If you read this blog you know two things about me:

1) I am obsessed with Augusten Burroughs--I love him, his writing, think he's redonk smart and funny and he just rocks. He is living proof of the "if you want something badly enough and believe it will happen theory." My favorite quote of his: "When I was 34, I decided to stop being an alcoholic and become a New York Times best-selling author."

And just like that, he did.

And,

2) I'm all about recommending--and even reviewing--books I have yet to read.

At any rate, I was reading his blog just now and he was raving about his good friend, Haven Kimmel (lucky girl!!) and praising her upcoming book, Iodine. He says she's hilarious and a brilliant writer, and naturally he's one to know. I we should all take his advice and read this book when it comes out, and in the meantime, read the other books she's written.

If you decide not to heed this advice, fear not: I will read them all and you know you'll be reading about it here. And I promise to actually read them.

The F Word

I'm laughing because I submitted an article to ezine and got the following email response:

Thank you for your submission to EzineArticles.com.

We would like to help you get this article approved but there is an issue which needs to be resolved first.

Your article is in violation of our Editorial Guidelines, Section 1.g.

We do not accept articles that contain excessive or unnecessary profanity. Please edit your article, removing all profanity, and resubmit for Editorial Review.

Yikes--I must have become so jaded about my language that I didn't even realize I had submitted an article containing "excessive profanity." I went to edit it and, after reading through it, couldn't find so much as one bad word. Thinking I was missing it, I read it again--and again. I did say "hell"--was that what they were talking about?

No, there it was--the last line where I said "...let the "f" word fly." I didn't say "fuck;" I said "the "f" word." Apparently "f" by itself is considered--by EZine's lofty editors--to be a bad word.

Fuck that shit.

Guess What?!











Ok, sike--April Fools! I don't want to give my mother (or Patrick!)heart failure.

I'm so busy laughing at my own cleverness that I'm just going to repurpose my post from my other blog today in case you actually want to read something.

Sexy Superlatives

So I'm eating lunch and reading Us magazine and, two pages after an article about Sarah Jessia Parker's reaction to being dubbed "Unsexiest Woman Alive" by Maxim magazine (totally unjustified--or at least I hope so, because more than a few people have told me I look like her) is a poll asking readers who they'd rather date, Domenico from That's Amore or this hot British bloke, Matt, the new Bachelor from Britain.

Is this a joke?

In case you have no idea what That's Amore is, I'm ashamed to say that I watched it (only once!) and honestly thought it was a parody of a show where girls vie for the attention of some hot guy. The dude the girls on That's Amore are fighting for is one Domenico Nesci, and he looks like a flabby version of that guy who sometimes plays a monkey on SNL.

Take a look for yourself:



You've got to be fucking kidding me. Where do I even start? Ok, well since we're talking about a guy who is presumably heterosexual, what's up with the Italian pride booty shorts? In case you're thinking maybe he's actually not hetero because of the shorts, think again: no gay guy would wear black socks with whatever you want to call that garment--bathing suit, shorts?

Apparently either I'm stupid or the women of America are wearing beer goggles because this guy has all kinds of fans. I guess the guy's allure is that he's supposedly a) good looking, b) exotic because he's Italian and c) presumably rich? Or did I just make up c) and that's not even a premise of the show?

Back to poor Sarah Jessica for a minute; here's what Maxim magazine said about her when they voted her "Unsexiest Woman Alive":

"How the hell did this Barbaro-faced broad manage to be the least sexy woman in a group of very unsexy women and still star on a show with 'sex' in the title? Pull your skirt down, Secretariat, we´d rather ride Chris Noth."

So let me get this straight: Sarah Jessica Parker=unsexy; Domenico Nesci=sexy?

WTF?

Do you think that if I spend enough time writing about blogger success stories the universe will just see fit to turn me into one?

Dooce® (are you impressed I know how to produce that little "R" in html?) is more fodder for my just do it even if you don't know why you're doing it and eventually it will pay off theory.

In case you are not already aware of what Dooce is, it's the blog of Heather Armstrong, notable apparently because writing it at work apparently caused her to lose her job and she managed to turn that frown upside down and transition from, in her words "making a lot of money as a web designer" to being able to support herself writing about the details of her daily life. Now her website--through advertising revenue as far as I can tell, plus I think some products--brings in enough money to support her family and enable her husband to be a stay-home dad.

Oh, and of course she got a book deal out of it, resulting in "Things I Learned About My Dad: Humorous and Heartfelt Essays, edited by the creator of www.dooce.com." That's a new level of FIO publishing/fame that I hadn't previously considered: Editor. As in, get other people to write it then get your name on the cover and most of the royalties. A+ Heather Armstrong--you go girl!

Check it Out

I haven't really been keeping up with the other blog I started a month or so ago--Mizz Information--but the other day I wrote something and figured I'd post it there instead of here. I had just figured out how to do trackbacks and tracked back to a post on Webinknow, David Meerman Scott's blog. It was the first time I used trackback--fyi, Blogger doesn't support trackbacks so I had to figure out another way to do it (hey, I can write about that in the other blog!).

Long story short is David Meerman Scott read my post and said it was an excellent post.

How psyched am I?

Put That Cash Away!

Last week I wrote about the Visa campaign suggesting that people who pay with cash or checks bring business to a screeching halt. My personal take on the spot is that the point isn't to promote use of the card in the check card sense, but in the credit card sense. Yes, it's called a Visa check card, but come on--everyone knows Visa is a credit card. Using the card as a check card is the same as using it as an ATM card--and incurring the same fees you're charged if you use your ATM card at a machine other than your bank's.

I think the commercial is absurd and advocates the "charge it!" mentality that's leading many Americans to the poorhouse. Incidentally, there was an article yesterday's Washington Post talking about this same mentality and the resulting consumer debt--$2.52 trillion!

Anyway, today in MarketingProfs Daily Fix, one of the many marketing newsletters I subscribe to, there was an article talking about that same Visa commercial. The author, Jeanne Bliss, had a very different take on it than I did--namely, that the ad is all about speed and efficiency with no mention of the fact that many people use it as a credit card, not a check card.

Happy Easter!

F*ing It Off, Huffington Post Style

Forget blogging your way into a job or a book deal--now you don't even have to be a blogger to gain respect and renown. The Huffington Post has a system that allows top commentors to become featured bloggers on the site.

Basically all you have to do is comment on someone ELSE'S blog, then you in turn will become a respected blogger, right up there with the likes of Barack Obama, Bill Maher and, well, Candy Spelling.

By the way, I love the term "opinion journalist", as used by Arianna Huffington in the above article about the commenter-to-blogger system. "Journalist" used to mean a skilled professional who went to school for a long time and worked his/her way up the intellectual publishing ladder; now you can become an "Opinion Journalist" by just writing whatever you want to about whatever you want-- no research, fact checking or advanced degree necessary.

And the beauty is that, if what I read more and more frequently (yet don't have to cite specifically where because I'm an opinion journalist) is true, 10 years from now traditional media will be extinct and f-it off journalism--I mean opinion journalism--will reign.

Letter-writing advice from an 11 year old

Last night I was at Rite Aid with Mimi, searching for my favorite Easter candy: Cadbury caramel eggs. You can only get them at Easter so you have to stockpile them so you can have enough to last until next year's Easter candy hits stores.

While I was searching in vain for the caramel eggs--NOT to be confused with the gross cream eggs--Mimi was talking about something which I admittedly wasn't listening very closely to. Then I heard her say "Shining pillar of urgency." What? What the hell is a shining pillar of urgency?

She backtracked and told me how a kid in her class (who, let's just say, is not a native English-speaker) was writing something explaining how to write an effective letter? I didn't really understand the point or what exactly the kid had been writing, but the upshot is that this kid's advice for writing an effective letter boiled down to this: if you use the word "administration" in a letter, it turns the letter into a "shining pillar of urgency."

I'm not sure what this kid was trying to say--who knows what "shining pillar of urgency" lost in the translation from Chinese to English--all I know is that I'm now obsessed with the phrase. The only thing that comes to mind when I think "shining pillar of urgency" is that it sounds sort of X-rated.

Speaking of X-rated, while I searched the cold medicine aisle for a cold pill small enough for Mimi to swallow, she had wandered to the "family planning" aisle. When I walked up to her she ticked off the names of various types of lube and vibrating condoms, and asked why they came in flavors. She then proceeded to pick up every bottle and ask me "what flavor is this?" "how about this one?" Who knows what the appropriate response to those questions is--I just went with "I don't know."

Luck O' The Irish

How did I spend my first St. Patrick's day as a bonafide Mc? In the freakin' ER with what I assume was a ruptured ovarian cyst. I say "assume" because even though I spent over 5 hours there, all they did was take bloodwork--not so much as pass an ultrasound wand over my abdomen.

The best part was that my discharge instructions--given to me by the nurse because an actual doctor couldn't be bothered to come speak to me or examine me--say that if I experience sharp, shooting pain and shakiness to immediately go to the ER. Um, isn't that what I already did and they didn't do anything for it the first time?

So no green beer at the McGary house last night--although I don't drink beer anyway so I guess it wouldn't have mattered.

And can I just say that it boggles my mind to have a husband who leaves work to come to the ER just to sit with me for 5+ hours? Contrast this with my former life--for instance when I was in labor with Mimi. Let's just say that Patrick wouldn't have been sleeping in the recliner the whole time without so much as a "hey, how you doing over there giving birth to my child?"

Why Americans Are Fat And Broke

If martians landed today and wanted a 2-minute synopsis of American culture, all they'd have to do is watch this commercial:



and familiarize themselves with the concept of Taco Bell's "Fourth Meal"--"the meal that's served between dinner and breakfast."

To sum it up: Americans are greedy and fat....and apparently stupid because we aren't particularly alarmed about either of those facts.

According to this website, the average American household carries almost $8,500 in credit card debt. We need big houses, big cars, big everything--and have discovered that we can have these things even if we don't earn enough to pay for them. As long as we can have them we don't care what it costs--witness the whole sub-prime mortgage crisis and the fact that during the twelve month period ending June 2006, there were 1.5 million consumer bankruptcy filings.

Alarming, right? One would think so, but Visa knows better--they know that people are in debt specifically because they buy into the message that credit is good and cash is bad. You pay with a credit card and everything is a breeze--no thought to the bill that will arrive at the end of the month. As for the moron who insists on paying cash--he's holding up the line and keeping the next guy from his immediate gratification--what the hell is he thinking? He better get with the program.

And why stop at material goods when it comes to excess? We don't, which is why, according to the American National Center for Health statistics, about 63% of Americans are overweight and that number continues to rise every year. We constantly hear about the "Obesity epidemic" in the US and what we need to do to combat it--then we head over to Taco Bell for fourth meal. Same concept as the money thing--why stop at 3 meals when you can have a fourth?

Once you get to Taco Bell you get to merge the best of these two worlds: you get to pay for your $3 fourth meal with a credit card--no cash necessary!

That's what I call American ingenuity.

Want to Help a Girl Out?

I am still boss-less at work--actually, that's not really true--I do have an interim boss who is very cool and some projects I'm working on. However, contrary to the "team" environments I've always worked in (definitely not without their own pitfalls) this job is basically me and my two computers and not a lot else as far as interaction. Yes, weekly staff meetings or "team building" exercises are tedious but at the very least they make it feel like you're interacting with a group and getting some validation that your contribution matters. As hokey as the "team" concept is, when you're in a team-free job you kind of miss feeling like part of something. Or at least I do; I'm sure others would envy me sitting here in utter silence all day, every day with just my 24" Mac (and other, inferior, computer which does not bear mentioning) to keep me company.

Yes, I socialize a little but as far as feeling like I actually work for a company with any structure--forget it. Maybe it's my need for validation--in every other job I've ever had I got a ton of ego-stroking and acknowledgement for the fact that I am not a moron and actually want to do a good job. Not that people tell me I suck here or anything--it's just that I barely interact with anyone so no matter how much of a kiss-ass I could try to be, there is no ass to kiss. Bottom line is I either need to get over it and enjoy my government mentality do nothing and accept this paycheck just because you show up to work every day job, or decide that I can't roll like that and get another job.

I've decided, at least for now, that I'm a fool to consider leaving I Do Next To Nothing And Get Paid For It, Inc. so I use the time not occupied by actually interacting with coworkers to act as if I'm in a job that actually engages me. Which basically means reading dozens of newsletters, articles, blogs, etc every day to the extent that I'm well on my way to earning a bootleg degree in online communications and marketing. That and trying to publish articles in whatever format possible so I can amass a resume that resembles that of someone who actually knows what they're talking about and gets paid accordingly.

Anyway....LONG intro short--can you go to this website and give me a "thumbs up"? If I get a high enough ranking I might get to become a "Rafter." Still not exactly sure what that means, but it still seems like a worthy enough endeavor.

So help me put my viral marketing knowledge to work and tell all your friends to go vote for me to prove that word-of-mouth is actually a viable marketing tool!

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Engrish of the Day

A combination of Engrish and the f word I've been abusing lately.

These Are My Kind of Rules

David Meerman Scott--a "Thought Leadership and Virtual Marketing Strategist"--has a great blog, even if you're not really interested in viral marketing and social media.

Go read this post then come back and resume reading here.

Hell yes this person is me! Minus, of course, the actual Marketing or PR background. But isn't what he's saying that it doesn't matter because in the age of social media the only thing that's required to succeed are an internet connection and a desire to learn?

The Rise of Collective Intelligence

Ok, at first glance this might seem like a very academic subject for me to be addressing after my two last posts centering around the "f" word, but actually it is just another take on the FIO philosophy (see my March 4 post and do the math to learn what FIO means).

My previous entries have talked about how FIO means, essentially, just doing something out of blind faith that you will succeed and waiting for success to come find you. The theory of collective intelligence seems to be the Mac Daddy of FIO-ism. Collective intelligence is the intersection of the FIO's out there, in some way devoting time, thought and/or energy to topics they are interested/talented in and companies then using their expertise to effortlessly profit.

This report gives some perfect examples of what I mean. Read the Lego example on page 18. Lego holds an annual contest to get ideas for new pieces. The winner receives not only the satisfaction of knowing that they--a total layperson far from being a trained Lego-maker--designed this great piece, but 5% of the sales of the piece as well. And the company, the article states, effortlessly enjoyed a 10% decrease in design and labor costs and a 10% increase in revenue. I'd say that's a win-win situation, wouldn't you?

An even better example is YouTube. Two 20-somethings basically set it up and let people populate it with their videos--then sell it to Google for $1.65 billion. Then, on the flip side, is my current FIO poster child--an amateur video producer makes a iPod fan video, uploads it to YouTube, where an Apple ad exec just HAPPENS to see it. The exec personally calls the dude who made it and asks if he'd like his video to be featured during the World Series. I mean, come on--how can you read that and deny that there is definite truth to FIO?

Funny Women

The other day I wrote about an article that proclaimed that women are not, as a rule, funny. When I wrote it I was at work and, apparently, brain dead because I wrote that I didn't really know any funny women. When I was driving home from work I was like wtf, of course I know funny women! My sister, my ex-best friend who never talked to me again once I was divorced (but who was, nonetheless, funny), and of course, my friend Temperance.

I totally don't mean this in a racist way but I realize it could be construed that way--so hopefully nobody will construe it that way. That said, I'm sorry but Temperance (who is black) is funny in a way that no white girl can touch. She is so smart and down to earth and just funny. She doesn't do like white girls--talk about people behind their backs but never have the courage to say how we feel right to their faces; if she has a problem with something or sees something a certain way she just tells it like it is to your face. In that same vein, she doesn't mince words or try to say things in a way that doesn't offend people like white girls who go to great lengths to have everyone like us and think only good things of us do.

For instance, I have never had a white friend answer, when asked "What are you doing this weekend?": "Hopefully, fucking," as Temperance once did.

But I digress....my apologies if you read that day's post and thought "What? She knows me and I'm funny!"