Miscellaneous, etc.

Omar’s comment over at Videogamey last night reminded me of an old game we used to play, in real life and then on my now-largely-abandoned discussion forums:  Junk Food Girls.

Junk Food Girls is sort of like Death Is Not An Option, Team-Changer or Marry/Fuck/Kill, in that it’s a game that involves difficult confessions and brutal recrimination, and it gets more fun when everyone’s had a lot to drink.  The rules are very simple:

1. One person throws out the name of a potential Junk Food Girl
2. The group, in turn, agrees or disagrees with the nominee (thereby admitting their own attraction)
3. If the Junk Food Girl gets the majority of votes, those in the minority drink; if the Junk Food Girl is voted down, the nominator and supporters must drink.

No game of Junk Food Girls ever goes past about three turns before it breaks down into lively debate and heavy drinking; however, the opening rounds are still recommended, as few things lubricate these kinds of admissions more than a few ounces of hearty booze.

At the heart of Junk Food Girls is a simple equation, but one that requires the player to weigh their heart carefully.  On the one side is raw attraction at a base level; on the other is sickening shame and compromised dignity.  When evaluating who your Junk Food Girls are, you must calculate along these lines:

Sexiness - Shame Factor = Want To Get It On Anyway

• When the WTGIOA is greater than zero — that is, when sexiness still outweighs the drawbacks — then you’ve got yourself a Junk Food Girl.
• When the WTGIOA is less than zero — that is, when you just can’t bring yourself to be attracted to someone — then the nominee is rejected.
• Finally, where the Shame Factor is a negative — that is, when there is positive social value to a nominee (such as, say, Rachel Weisz) rather than crippling drawbacks (such as those emanating from, say, Paris Hilton) — then you have a Crush.

Junk Food Girl sounds pejorative, but it isn’t meant to imply the individual in question is trash; rather, they represent the same kind of guilty, unhealthy, furtive appeal that junk food does.  They are to sex what Kentucky Fried Chicken is to your waistline — unhealthy, penalizing, but irresistibly compelling.

When Omar admitted that he “might have a crush” on the catastrophically bone-headed Ann Curry, Today Show co-host and overall dipshit, I realized how hard a habit this was to break.  I immediately wanted to jump in and correct him: crushes are sex appeal plus other goodness!  Junk Food Girls are sex appeal despite badness like idiocy and shitty reporting! 

Consider:

Ann Curry

Pros: 

• Dutch-Irish-French-Japanese ancestry, combined to good effect
• News broadcaster smile
• Sat pretty close to Angelina Jolie one time.
• Can really wear the shit out of a low-cut business suit
• Let’s just admit it:  Pretty hot.  You’d stare at her in a grocery store, c’mon.

Cons:

• Vapid.
• Seriously, inane even for a morning show reporter.
• 300,000 results in Google for the query, “Ann Curry hate“
• Oh my god she’s annoying.

Final verdict:

It could be that Ann Curry has some kind of Secret Hotness reserve that I haven’t seen.  But as it stands, she has that pleasant exterior that you might notice on someone who rides the same bus route you do, who is appealing right up until you have to listen to her on her phone for five minutes.  And then you want the bus to crash, just to … just to make her stop.

Rejected.

It’s just that easy!  Naturally, Junk Food Girls can as easily be applied to men, though it is less common — women find other things to discuss in graphic detail when they’re drinking, I’m scornfully told.  All the same, as we head into the holidays and with bountiful liquor soon to be flowing into the cups of the merry, there are few ways to better break the ice and really expose (and ridicule/join in on) the guilty pleasures of your friends and family.

So!  Whose turn is it next?

Hey Moms!

Is your daughter starting to reach that special age, that magical time between when her adult teeth have grown in but no secondary sexual characteristics have? 

Are you looking for the perfect role model for your little girl, the friend who will never let her down, the one who will never be prettier or threaten to diminish her self-esteem?  The one who will dress conservatively and look polite for all eternity?

Have you ever considered mummifying your daughter to preserve her innocence, but found state and federal laws too constricting?

Then you might just be interested in a MyTwinn (the just-like-me doll)!

Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!

Easily the creepiest thing I’ve seen on the internet since the Fleshlight, MyTwinn dolls are custom made to your (and by “your”, MyTwinn is very specific in meaning “affluent moms’”) specifications.  Everything from the clothes right down to the number of freckles can be specifically ordered, processed and hand-painted by a MyTwinn artist, in order to produce a doll that is an exact plastic duplicate of your daughter.

Let’s check out the sales pitch:

Ooooookay, who wants to start? Me? Nobody has a comment? All right then.

On the surface, there isn’t anything wrong with what MyTwinn is selling.  The sane, logical Arial copy explains the process in straightforward brochure-style sales-speak, detailing their process while promising beauty, personalized service and craftsmanship.  One might find the same kind of promises for model airplanes, or hand-made jewellery.

No, it’s the other promises — the ones injected in random super-pink handwritten font — that expose the evil at work here:

• “She’s special, like me!” = “Thanks Mom, for investing me with self-esteem and positive values!  This simulacrum shows me how much you value me as a child!”
• “Her hair looks just like mine” = “Though I am special, it comforts me that someone else looks just like me, Mom!  Also your eye for detail tells me how much you really care!  I forgive you for struggling to split your life between home and career, Mom!”
• “Look Mom, she even has my freckles!” = “By seeing my freckles on a doll, you have turned my negative into a positive, Mom!  I doubt I’ll ever scrub furiously at my face again, sobbing angrily about what the girls at school say about how I look like I was shot in the face!  See how I appreciate the details you were upsold into spending extra money on, Mom?  I value how hard you work to afford stuff for us goddamned kids!”

It’s one thing to sell weird lookalike dolls, but it’s creepy to sell them to Moms, and it’s downright freaky to do it in the imagined voice of their soon-to-be-grateful daughters.  I know that parents are the actual buyers for toys — I have a nephew, I see what my sister goes through — but the fiction that everyone subscribes to is that toys are actually for the kids.  Here is the five-step, commonly-accepted toy concept flow:

1. Toy company
2. Marketing firm
3. Commercial advertising
4. Child
5. Soon-impoverished parent

Yes, parents buy the toys that they want their kids to play with, or enroll them in the sports they want their kids to play, or force them into the dance/song/arts they want their kids to be good at.  We get that, and generally speaking we as a society acknowledge that it is both common practice and psychotic.  Toymakers oblige them by marketing directly to children, trading off the nuisance of having to buy Yu-Gi-Oh in exchange for the privelege of foisting magic kits, train sets or telescopes on their kids as well.

MyTwinn, instead, does two things:

1. Preys directly on mothers who can’t think of a better way to bond with their daughters than modeling them in precise miniature;
2. Simulates a world in which 7 and 8 year-old girls care about hand-craftsmanship or keepsakes for tomorrow.

On the one hand, this is so optimistic that it’s heartbreaking; on the other, this is so weird that it’s heartbreaking.  Are there kids out there who are really thrilled when they’re confronted with a plasticized body double?  Are there parents who really expect to hear things like, “She’s special, like me!”?

Apparently there are:  “My daughter, Kara, received her MyTwinn doll for Christmas. Kara just stared at her in amazement.  She was so happy…” (emphasis mine)

Yeah-huh.  I doubt she had the words.

Incidentally, Dads (or Moms with no other recourse), MyTwinn hasn’t forgotten about you.  Whatever your race, color, creed or size, MyTwinn is ready to help build an exact duplicate of your son… as long as he’s a gay disco queen with baseball-themed pants.

Final rating:

THREE OUT OF FIVE SCREAMS OF HORROR

I’ve developed a pre-occupation with advertising music lately, particularly folksy, female-vocal songs that accompany fashion commercials.  Call it a quirk.

Waiting to get snowed in on Saturday night, Tina and I took in a broad selection of horrid cable programming — though nothing was topped by Sunday’s all-day marathon of Cheerleader Nation, which seared our souls worse than even Tila Tequila could –  while dinner simmered on the stove.  During a brief interlude, while Tina went in to stir the soup and I watched college football, I found myself in a shocking position:  I found myself paying attention to a JC Penney commercial.

I felt a little guilty about it at first, because JC Penney isn’t exactly my brand, but the song was so simple and lovely that I had to turn it up.  Covertly.  A little at a time.  Because, seriously:  A JC Penney commercial.

I didn’t have to be shameful about it for long, because not ten seconds later Tina called from the kitchen, “Who is that?  What’s that for?  I like that, rewind it!”  At first I panicked, because I didn’t realize she had a PVR; however, after furiously mashing buttons for a few seconds, I was able to both forestall any concerns about my competence with remote controls, and also replay the ad enough times for us to properly commence a Commercial Song Googlefight.

You know the game, you’ve played it enough times.  Upon hearing any music during a commercial, Googlefighters are required to:

• Listen intently to melody and lyrics, and retain whatever is possible,
• make no more than three semi-educated guesses at possible performers,
• propose their nominees for artist and song title,
• argue viciously against the idea of any performers that they didn’t think of themselves,
• and resort to pulling out a laptop to look up the song on the internet.

Bonus points to the person able to look up the answer first, regardless of how wrong they were.

Because it was indeed a nasty snowstorm, and it’s traditional (or it will be from now on) for Tina and me to get loaded and eat hearty foods during nasty snowstorms, our Googlefight was more of a Googlespat.  We only felt wrath towards our internet connection, which simply did not operate fast enough for us to find our answer.

Eventually though, in time to save both our relationship and the cable modem, it came:

The Weepies are an indie-folk duo out of Topanga, California, and are made up of Deb Talan and Steve Tannen.  Their second album together was released in 2006, and most recently, they’ve had a song released on the soundtrack to the Ben Stiller flop The Heartbreak Kid, and co-wrote with Mandy Moore on her most recent stuff.  But it’s from their first record, Happiness, that the JC Penney song is taken:  All That I Want.

What can I tell you?  It’s a Christmas song, and Deb Talan’s vocals are the kind that surprise you and pull you in.  She has the kind of voice that makes you find yourself scrambling to rewind a commercial promising great deals on JC Penney sweaters, if that gives you any understanding of it.  JC Penney believes in it so much that it’s the background music to their holiday website, and one of the anchors to their Christmas charity campaign:

As part of JCPenney’s integrated marketing campaign, five percent of all qualifying downloads from iTunes of John Lennon’s “Real Love” and The Weepies “All That I Want” will be donated to the JCPenney Afterschool Fund. The JCPenney Afterschool Fund is a charitable organization committed to providing children in need with access to life-enriching afterschool programs that foster their academic, physical and social development.

Granted, Lennon’s music is probably considered the driving force there, but it wasn’t his stuff I went scouring the internet for on Saturday night.

Check them out, if you can.  Their MySpace page is full of music from both their albums, uniformly enjoyable and catchy.  If you don’t find yourself replaying All That I Want at least once or twice, I’d be awfully surprised.  It’s the first thing this year that’s actually snuck past my crusty, shitty 2007 shell to get a little Christmas spirit inside.

Bonus!  A live performance of All That I Want from a show at around Christmastime last year:

• A brilliant and explicit exposition of the Apple Product Lifecycle, as detailed by a long-time Mac user.  It doesn’t appear that much of the site has been updated since roughly five years ago, which only tells you how true and relevant his article really is.
• One in seven have found themselves dumped via text messaging, according to a recent survey from moneysupermarket.com.  In other news, Yahoo finds sites like moneysupermarket.com to suddenly be reliable, credible sources for current events.
• “He’s got what he wanted. He’s sitting in his mansion over in Rockcliffe chuckling.” Mulroney denies taking kickbacks, which I doubt; Mulroney accuses Schreiber of stirring hysteria to avoid his own extradition, which I fully, completely believe.
• CBC indulges in solipsism, generates sports-oriented headline.  I wasn’t aware that hockey references immediately translate into sly digs at Canada — especially given that there are actually 64 countries in the IIHF — but damn you for your cutting dis anyway, Al Gore!  First the wholly boring Live Earth concerts, and now this?  It’s on, you son of a bitch.
• Scott Ramsoomair put together a very slick Flash tribute to the end sequence of Portal, a game that I keep promising myself I’m going to get.  There are few games with a sense of humor enough to burst into song after you’ve beaten them, and he does a great job putting it to visuals.
• For those of you who’d like to see the original and don’t mind knowing the ending (spoiler: You beat the main villain to win the game), here is the whole catchy yet still eerie song:

Lyrics:
This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.
I’m not even angry.
I’m being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart.
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we’re out of beta.
We’re releasing on time.
So I’m GLaD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.
Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you.
Maybe Black Mesa
THAT WAS A JOKE.
HAHA. FAT CHANCE.
Anyway, this cake is great.
It’s so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking
when there’s Science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I’m not you.
I’ve experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are still alive.
And believe me I am still alive.
I’m doing Science and I’m still alive.
I feel FANTASTIC and I’m still alive.
While you’re dying I’ll be still alive.
And when you’re dead I will be still alive.
STILL ALIVE

I submit to you that on the day of December the 14th, upon posting about The Abominable Charles Christopher and extolling its virtues, I did link to PvP as an example of an “online heavyweight” as a contrast point.

At that time, one Scott Kurtz, writer and artist for PvP, caught my referrer and visited my website, only to discover the post about TACC.

Click here for a larger version of this shocking evidence

Subsequently, Kurtz went on to post about TACC on his own website, endorsing its quality and exposing it to his vast audience.

Click here for a larger version of this shocking evidence

There is some certainty that this will, in course, represent a much-deserved “pop” in TACC’s readership.  Thus I believe I have proven conclusively that had I not written my own post, Scott Kurtz’s discovery of TACC — and the subsequent traffic spike it will enjoy — may have been delayed by several days.

That… that’s it, really.  I just thought this was kind of neat, and this is the first thing to actually make me feel like a weblogger (no I will not use “blogger” forget it).