Todd Stadler's blog

Twinkie, Twinkie, I'm a star

For some strange reason, I have experienced a rash of Twinkies fame recently. In past days, I have talked to C|Net radio (something only a geek could consider fame), the Learning Channel, and Carsey/Werner productions. The latter apparently were producing some "best of the web" TV show, but I didn't end up signing the contract as days after they contacted me, the show was cancelled after one episode. The people at the agency were sadly optimistic that they would be able to sell it to some other channel, but after seeing the review it got on CNN, I really hope they don't. I can't understand why anybody would watch a TV show about the Internet. If there is anything good about the Internet, it's in your ability to control what you experience. This doesn't exactly filter through the TV. It would be like watching someone read a book about some wacky people. Whee! Besides, if you're really interested in the Internet, you're probably already on it, following some list of links from someone you trust.

The Learning Channel production sounded only moderately better. It was a series called "Best Kept Secrets", and the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project was to appear on the "Best Kept Secrets of the Internet" episode, natch. What a dumb title. It's clearly not a secret, since it's a popular enough site to earn the attention of somebody working on the show. And once you air it on the Learning Channel, I doubt it's really all that much priveleged knowledge. But, hey, they're letting me in on a secret...how fun!

As for the C|Net radio spot, I think I may have to consider not doing any more interviews. I'm just really bad at them, and they're all awful! I always assume that, now that the site is five years old (and getting older every day!), people might want to ask me more interesting questions than "so why did you do this?" or "what's your favorite test?". Sure, those are fine questions, but I can't pretend to be excited about the site anymore. I can't fake a laugh every time I remember joyfully what wacky things I did when I was in college. This interview especially grated on my nerves. She would just ask me to describe the experiments. Um, well, see, I already did that on the webpage, and it's probably a lot funnier than I'm going to be as I sit here in my cubicle at work, trying not to say the word "Twinkie" too loud so as to make my co-workers think I'm giving less than 100% for the team. Besides, in what is apparently only my opinion, what we did isn't very funny at all. Any idiot can - and has, repeatedly - done something stupid with junk food, some before we did our thing. If there's any value in our site, it's in the writing, but no one cares about that. As if to prove she was a bad interviewer, my pal at C|Net actually had the gall to call me back and ask me to say a quote that she had written. I just can't believe that.

I won't deny I love the whole fame aspect to all of this. It's a great ego-boost, and it usually makes for a nice story at lunchtime. But I have only lost respect for all media through my experiences.

Whine, whine, whine. Let's try to find a moral to all this. Hmm: if you want to learn about the web, go to the web. Sure, works for me.

Turkey Day In Stumptown

I forgot to mention that Thanksgiving was nice. It kind of feels weird not going home for a holiday whose sole purpose seems to be "family time", but it was never a big deal in my home.

Even when I was in college, my parents usually drove down from Dallas and would stay in the Wyndham Warwick. They got a nice break in a hotel, we all got nice food somewhere (sometimes in the hotel restaurant, sometimes at a Japanese restaurant ... never let it be said that the Stadlers are slaves to tradition), and no one had to do dishes or eat leftovers.

Still, this Thanksgiving was a nice one. All the "orphan" kids - and there were many, comprising most of my friends, really - brought a nice dish and we sat eating in every possible chair at Morgan and Aaron's house. There was some choice food there, let me tell you. Dr. Todd brought some authentic (as far as southern poser me could tell) chicken 'n' dumplings, Doug brought his famous green beans 'n' bacon (equal portions of each... mmm), and I brought basil/feta phyllo triangles. What the heck, right, I'll work with phyllo once a year if it's for friends.

The main attraction this year, of course, was the Turducken. It's the second time our group has consumed one, and I must say they're quite popular, at least for the carnivores. I actually wasn't as up on this one for some reason...maybe the sheer amount of meat just didn't call to me. In fact, I was curiously driven to devour Jerry's Tofurkey instead. I'm not a vegetarian, but fake meat just calls to me. If nothing else, the Tofurkey is a masterpiece of really weird marketing. The box advertises the fact that the Tofurkey has four "drumettes" (analagous to drumsticks, I suppose, but tempeh isn't really going to fool anyone), compared to a turkey's lame old two, and that the Tofurkey has two Wishstix(tm) (again, analagous to the wishbone, although these are nothing but pieces of "tofurkey jerky" that you can pull apart and claim, "I won!") to the turkey's one. And let us not even mention the lame "Tofurkey-drawing contest". As if all this wasn't enough to drive me into a soy-crazed fit of gastrointestinal delight, Jerry, inspired by the Turducken, had placed the Tofurkey on a bed of other soy-based meatesque products, including braised tofu and Gimme Lean sausage. His name for this concoction was a combination of the words Turducken and Tofurkey that I won't say here because it's not a polite Thanksgiving word. But even though I still enjoy my bacon, it was tasty, I tell you.

EJ's. R.I.P.

I went to one of the last concerts at local punk club EJ's tonight - the "last blowout", as it was billed. They're closing for reasons that are unclear, but seem to involve evil landlords and rent increases. It's always like that.

And it reminded me of a funeral. Here was something I hadn't paid enough attention to in recent years, but I had to go to pay my respects, not because of what was going on on stage.

What was going on on stage was fairly dull punk rock. There are a few punk bands I love, mostly because they can write a pop song like nobody's business, and they just happen to crank up the distortion. But I'm no longer accepting submissions for favorite punk group. There's just not much more to be said out there, and tonight's show failed to prove otherwise.

But we were there. Maybe just to say we had been there. Maybe because hey, they serve PBR's there as well as anywhere else. Which is nice.

It made me sad, though. I had moved within a five-minute walk of EJ's a few months ago, and yet almost never went there. I guess I don't go to rock clubs for anything but to see a particular band, and they hadn't been booking my favorites or I just wasn't in the mood. I had seen plenty of amazing bands there, though, such as the Dismemberment Plan, and the Danielson Famile.

Ah, well. The music plays on still. Just somewhere else now.

Am I a voyeur or not?

[Editor's note: This is a really old entry in this journal. As such, it was written before I, um, knew what I was doing. So I clearly intended to fill in the links below with HTML that would take you to the actual pictures. But I never did that, for some reason, and now, over a year later, I have no clue where those pictures are. So it goes.]

I have of late, to my own intense shame, become infatuated with AmIHotOrNot. There's something about sitting on high, casually casting numeric judgment on legions of anonymous people with access to a scanner or digital camera. Or maybe it's the ability to glimpse at often-unglamorous normal folk. Maybe it's just the girls. I don't know, but I'm hooked. I'd like to think that I engage this site in a more high-minded way than most, trying to figure out what average score a person will get before I give my own, and trying to figure out what makes a person "hot" according to the fans of this site. With women, it seems fairly obvious that showing any skin or shapeliness will mean a high ranking, no matter how conventionally attractive you may be. And yet, some girls I find attractive - those with unnaturally-colored hair or piercings or such - don't always do well, no matter how pretty they may be. Maybe it's the Midwest sensibilities I know little about.

Ever the scientist, I set out to see how different photos of me would do. I picked images that I thought looked pretty good, although they probably painted vastly different portraits of who I was and what I really looked like. At first, I was told that I was fairly unattractive, since this photo got a 1.8 out of 10, and this one got a paltry 1.2. Ouch! Maybe bleach-blonde hair doesn't go over so well out there. Maybe I should have shaved. In an effort to appeal to the masses, I submitted this photo and received a more encouraging 4.2. Is it the appearance that I am "a little bit country", or merely the fact that you can't see my face as well in that one? Is it the two watches? More research was needed, so I submitted this guy and did even better - a whopping 4.8! I was genuinely not unattractive now! Did the overalls make me look less threatening, more rural perhaps? Is it the red hair? The barely-visible Spitting Image hand puppet of Ronald Reagan that gave the picture a compassionate, conservative tone? I had to do one more experiment. I posted this image and received a astounding 6.1! The people had spoken, I was attractive than more than half of AmIHotOrNot's pool of flesh, and I decided that before the hoi polloi came to their senses (and realized I was just a fad being pushed on them by my massive marketing machine), I would stop posting any more pictures of myself.

Clearly, this shows how fickle people are. Or maybe just stupid, but you don't need an experiment to prove that. Maybe it just shows how one picture isn't enough to tell you what a person looks like. Maybe it shows what an egotistical dork I am. I'd take a vote on what the true conclusion to this experiment is, but I already know the answer, and besides, science don't work like that.

How to make $$$ calling 1-800 numbers

But I must say that I do love that every company has an address you can write to or a phone number you can call to talk to somebody about, well, anything. They get paid to listen to your rants about food quality, package design, rumors of sinister ingredients, and, of course, the prognosticative abilities of one's victuals. Too few people take advantage of such an opportunity to be heard, and to receive free stuff in the mail.

A simple question to M&M/Mars (related to a to-be-published research project) resulted in a nice package containing stickers, coupons, "the history of chocolate", and more. A more time-intensive tape containing a potential product theme song resulted in a t-shirt for every member of the band and fourteen (!) boxes of Cap'n Crunch, even though the lawyers told us they couldn't accept unsolicited submissions. There's a gold mine here - you haven't heard the last from me on this!

That's un-fortune-ate

I guess my friends and I eat at Asian restaurants enough to have a running commentary about fortune cookies. They're interesting for embodying such deception - they're questionably cookies, they're probably not authentic Asian fare, and they're definitely not fortunes. It's this last point that really sticks in our collective craw. We're far beyond being entertained - misdirected, some would say - by the suggestion of adding "in bed" to the end of our so-called fortune. So I wrote a letter and posted it on Lowfashion. Clearly, as is so often pointed out to me, I have too much free time.

The nightmare that is college

I had that dream again where I'm in college and I've skipped a whole semester's worth of classes and it's finals time. I know next to nothing about the class material, and if I don't pass this class, I'll have to take an extra semester, and my parents will be so disappointed. So I try desperately to begin cramming, but no one will help me because they already know the stuff and would rather play. Even the teacher has decided to not cover the normal material in the last class, choosing to instead have a discussion about the social implications of comic strips.

And then I wake up, vowing to myself that I will study as hard as I can over the next few days, and I'll never, never, never let myself get this far behind again. But then I look at the wall next to my bed and see that big diploma and slowly realize that I got out of college alive and don't ever have to repeat that scenario again.

Still, it's a powerful enough dream to make me second guess any thoughts I might entertain of graduate school. What's odd about this dream is how much it mirrors some of my college experience. There were some classes I attended a handful of times, occasionally sneaking into the professor's office to pick up the handouts so as to avoid being asked "who are you?", or picking up take-home tests without a clue as to what was being tested, hoping it was in the handouts. I mean, I loved college, but I don't miss any of that!

No longer a plaid, plaid, plaid world

I actually went clothes shopping today. I'm getting fairly tired of the clothes in my closet, which in large part haven't changed since the early-to-mid 90's. Since grunge, for heaven's sake! And, yes, there are too many flannel shirts in my wardrobe.

So I set out to do something about that. Since my favorite jacket (my dad's wool Pendleton from when he was a kid - from Portland, no less) is plaid, I wanted to purchase nothing with a grid on it. Or maybe no patterns at all. There's a lot to be said for solids. I also wanted fewer buttons. I'm sick of buttons.

So I found some pretty cool sweaters and other tops. But I began to worry. These new items, combined with my increasing weariness of blue jeans, kind of made me look like a yuppie. No matter your intentions, you can't wear a sweater and slacks and not look pretty nice - even if your hair is messed up! So I asked Miriam if I looked like a yuppie. Her response: "You look a bit preppy, but darling, you are a yuppie, try to not be though you might." It's true. Young, good job, urban. Sigh.

European dreaming on such a winter's day

Dang, I miss Europe. Who wouldn't miss three weeks of just wandering around in a new place with good food, meeting new people, all for cheap? But I find myself going back to the website I used while I was over there, just to remember things. It turns out that website is run out of Portland. So the home team was supporting me the whole time. Nice.

But I feel like there are now three cities in Europe where I am comfortable, where I know the streets and subways and how things work. Of course, these memories I have seem to conveniently forget that all of this took place in foreign languages, but hey, that's what memories are for - to conveniently forget things.

Tex?co Bell

My friends and I have always had an appreciation for both the absurd and unhealthy food. So when the new Texaco station opened up on MLK a while back, it was of great interest to us that their sign out front advertised tacos more prominently than it did their gas prices. Exactly what kind of tacos would a Texaco sell? It was only a matter of time until I ate there.

When I walked in today, I was impressed. The store was huge - a far cry from any notion of a mini-mart - and modern. Indeed, this was the dawn of a new era for inner city gas stations. Arrayed before me were the usual food mart suspects - Hostess products, chips, fuel additives - but it all seemed enticing to me now in this glorious setting. In fact, I wondered if I could live off of this Texaco's offerings, ignoring the reality that such a life would be, well, short-lived. Indeed, all four food groups were to be found, if not in the exacting proportions of the FDA. But I was a man on a mission, and would have to leave such scientific musings for another day.

The system for ordering food at this Texaco - henceforth pronounced Texáco, rhymes with taco - is kind of weird. You order your food at the counter where you buy cigarettes and pay for your gas, not over by the counter where they're making the food. Given that the menu was in Spanish with English subtitles, I ordered "one carnitas taco, one pollo taco, and one asada taco". The guy just kind of looked at me weirdly. "Dude, just say it in English," he said. Whoops. So clearly he wasn't the mastermind behind this whole Texáco idea.

The tacos were actually pretty good. Nothing like the American horror/beauty that is a Taco Bell crunchy taco. No, to my mind these were fairly authentic, or at least like unto other taqueria's tacos, with soft corn tortillas, cilantro, onions, and the meat of my choosing. It was a bit of a letdown in that it was a perfectly normal meal, coming from a perfectly weird place. But then, I can never be truly disappointed to have another place to eat good tacos.