Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor
Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.
Appetizer: Name a trait you share with your parents or your children.
I don’t have any children, so I’ll have to talk about Gordo and Bonnie. I share my father’s penchant for food and drink, and my mother’s sensitivity. Recently, my father’s temper has been wheedling its way into my personality – so I just suppress it with more drink. Other traits from Dad: computer love, cartooning, emotional disassociation. More traits from Mom: animal love, awesome with children, inconvenient empathy.
Soup: List 3 qualities of a good leader, in your opinion.
The ability to listen, the ability to admit that you’re wrong, and the ability to listen. Save all the “inspire” bollocks – learn from your mistakes, and don’t treat your team like they’re manning a deep-fryer. There’s probably more than one person working under you who is way smarter.
Salad: Who is your favorite television chef?
My main man – Wok with Yan. He is a Chinese chef who had a TV show in Canada starting in the early 80s – and I believe he’s still going strong up there today. He had a great gimmick – every day he would have a different Wok related saying on his apron. I don’t know how they came up with so many. My favorite, from 1981, was “Raiders of the Lost Wok”. For some reason, I’m afraid I’ll never forget that. He was on in the afternoons right before Spiderman, so I rarely missed a peek at his apron.
Main Course: Share a story about a gift you received from someone.
My sister has this uncanny ability to buy clothes for me. She’s even shown up at my place with shoes. The thing is, I would never even try on any of the stuff she gets for me were I alone in a store, but once she gives it to me I always love it. J – please never buy me any presents other than clothes. You have a gift for getting me gifts.
Dessert: How do you react under pressure?
My productivity skyrockets. When a client is angry, or I have something stressful going on in my personal life, I jump into action pretty frighteningly effectively. If I could harness this ability, and have it extend into the everyday – I’d be a millionaire by now. There’s always hostage negotiator school.
Just to recap, I have had Roach Brooch acting as an affiliate site for Black Chandelier – where they sell the live cockroach brooches you’ve been seeing on TV and reading about. This means, if someone clicks through to their site from mine and buys a roach, I get credit for the sale thanks to a tracking system, and I get 10% of the roach bounty. Obviously, I ran several test orders after I set it all up to make sure that it worked.
The problem is, they sent one of these things to me by mistake. Actually, I’m not entirely sure it was a mistake because the guy emailed me yesterday and said he wanted me to have a mascot. Either way, when I got up Tuesday morning, there was a package waiting for me from Utah and I knew exactly what it had to be – A live Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.
Not wanting the thing to die, I ordered a terrarium online and it arrived yesterday at my office. I brought the Utah parcel into the office, set up the tank, called a few of my coworkers over to observe, and carefully introduced the ginormous beast to its new home. “Hissy” as I named him is currently chilling on my windowsill eating the heck out of a piece of banana from the Park Plaza Au Bon Pain.
I’m not one for bugs, but it’s a pretty cool creature. In addition to it’s size and girth (it doesn’t look much like a traditional roach) it has the accoutrements that warranted it a place on America’s Top Model and bring it’s price tag up to $80 before shipping – it’s encrusted in a pattern of multi-colored jewels, and also comes with a silver chain you can clip on to this belt it has which acts like a leash. You pin it to yourself, and the critter can roam around your shoulders and chest unchecked. Hence, it’s a roach brooch.
I edited a bunch of photos of the adventure last night, which I am going to use on Roach Brooch, so I figured I’d upload them to my own galleries so my readers can see the full drama unfold. I’m still not sure what is to become of Hissy. I am in talks with a friend to give him to her daughter as a pet. Your first thought is – what would a 5 year old girl want with a cockroach? But then you have to remember the jewelry angle – it looks like a demented, post-apocalyptic My Little Pony. So stranger things have happened. Enjoy the photos, and remember – my ownership of Hissy was an accident. I swear I don’t own any wizard hats or 20-sided dice.
It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the untimely demise of Wednesday Wadio. I hope that the hiatus will be a temporary one, but the software I use to play the songs also makes them searchable in a big worldwide network. This wouldn’t be a big deal if people who wanted to listen to songs I’ve featured actually came to the site to do so – but they don’t have to. My bandwidth is simply sucked away to God knows where, the source completely anonymous.
Last month, songs from Wadio Pye were download over 20,000 times by various people around the world. They type “Gorillaz” into the search engine, for example, and 2.5 megabytes of my bandwidth are used to play the song for a 13 year old girl somewhere in Spain. Now that I think about it – that’s kind of hot. But – no – it’s still an enormous strain on my expensive bandwidth.
There’s always another tool to use. If it hsn’t been thought up, it will be soon. I may also resort to just posting MP3s on my server and giving interested parties and friends the password to get access to them. That way, as opposed to the current Radio.Blog system, which converts the MP3s into smaller Flash files, you’ll be able to get proper MP3s of the songs for use on your own iPods. Perhaps that’s the best course of action. I mean, who hasn’t wished they could listen to Liquor and Whores while jogging? I’ll make it happen, you lucky people.
I mentioned yesterday that my Sopranos lens had been featured and was getting mad traffic. This morning, Squidoo sent out an official “Lens of the Day” release, and I thought I would share. I added a couple of bulletpoints for comedic effect. See if you can sniff them out. Should be quite a challenge:
After a long hiatus, the critically acclaimed HBO series THE SOPRANOS is back. And the fans are going wild. Dave Pye’s lens, Bada Bing: The Sopranos Central, puts any “official” site about the show to shame. This is where you can look up what’s going down on Sunday nights:
Dave‘s no slouch when it comes to his other lenses, either. He’s a top-notch lensmaster with a humorous tone and a great sense of the creativity and flexibility of a lens. Our community guru, Heath Row, did a recent Q&A with him. Here are some interesting comments and bits of advice from the profile (thanks, Dave!):
Read more about Dave and his lenses at SquidU, our center for better building and promoting of lenses.