Todd Stadler's blog

Jalousie

My friend Beeman is in France now on a two-week vacation. He recently wrote me an e-mail which told of how well the trip is going, especially his good fortune in staying in the houses of very nice locals: "Provence has been fabulous, a very enlightening look at why people yearn to be very wealthy. This house is a palace, the countryside is beautiful, the pace of life is slow, and the food is rich."

I always make sure to write to my friends when they're traveling, because I know what it's like to check your e-mail when you're abroad and find that nobody seems to have noticed you're gone. Below is an excerpt from my e-mail to Beeman.

Anyhow, since you left, America in general and Portland in particular has become fabulously fascinating. Don't bother looking for any mentions of the fact on any Web sites — it's all so fascinating here that nobody bothers mentioning it, either because they're having so much fun or because they don't want any losers coming over here and mooching off how great it all is. Anyhow, the food is just amazing, ever since that new cuisine style was discovered and perfected last Saturday. Wow! In fact, the since-last-Saturday cuisine (as I call it) was just certified as "five times better than even the best food in France", which is pretty amazing, since until last Saturday, I had heard French food was pretty good. And it's interesting that you're in France now. What a coincidence. Anyhow, all the French restaurants in Portland have closed (yes, all of them), because all people want to eat is the since-last-Saturday food. I think all the French restaurants were sold to a sanitation company, because now when people think of French food, they think of garbage, so it was only natural for people to take their trash to the French restaurants.

Let's see, what else? Well, the Democrats finally got the 15-hour work week approved, although right now most people are enjoying their mandatory eight weeks of vacation, so it's just really relaxed here. Of course, Bush is threatening to overturn the whole so-called "relaxed legislation" sometime within the next week or two. We'll see.

And finally, the housing bubble in Portland finally popped — big time! — and Julia and I were able to scoop up a nice 4,000ish sq.ft. place up in the West Hills for just under $150,000. It only has three bathrooms, though, and I'm not crazy about the giant Italian marble soaker tub.

Anyhow, it's a pity you've missed all these changes. I guess I'm happy for you that you're on vacation, but frankly France just seems so provincial now, I'm not sure I'd want to go. I hope I'm not making you feel envious of our fun time here in America. I'd hate to make you feel jealous while you're over there, slogging through the boring French landscape and choking down French so-called food. I mean, I know what it is to feel jealous, and it's a real bummer, so I hope you're not feeling it — jealousy, I mean. Because it sucks. Jealousy does. Or so I hear.

I find that subtlety is often the best way to get a point across.

Least appealing spam subject line

I found a spam in my filters the other day with the subject line "Experience puberty again (the sex part)".

Ah yes, thank goodness for that parenthetical clarification. Had they not added it, I would have assumed they were peddling a cream that made pimples break out all over my face and made hair grow in places it had not previously (forehead? palms? what's left?) And clearly, the demand for such a cream would be great.

But no, they're talking about the sex part of puberty. Oh, those heady days! Yes, whatever product they're selling, it allows you to relive that halcyon era when I had no sex whatsoever and was, in fact, terrified by the same girls to whom I was attracted, living perpetually in fear of kissing the wrong way. I think I'd actually prefer the acne.

I suppose that there are those for whom puberty was, sadly, the high point of their sexual life, but I imagine they are few.

In conclusion, this spammer clearly lacks marketing acumen. This subject line has none of the appeal of, say, someone telling me "declaimg Med Hist PLo", as another spam recently enticed me. I can only assume that this poorly crafted spam signals the end of the spamming era.

Gettin' snarky with the journalists, part 3

I don't know which is more pitiful: that I continue to be contacted by journalists wanting to write stories about Twinkies (especially the Twinkie's 75th anniversary), or that I continue to rely on my correspondence with them to fill up my otherwise terribly sparse blog. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Date: May 16, 2005 10:02am
From: xxxxxxxxx@newspress.com
To: Todd Stadler
Subject: Story for Santa Barbara News-Press

Hello,

I am working on a story about the 75th anniversary of Twinkies. I saw your Twinkie PROJECT Web site and thought it was hilarious! Would you be available to talk to me by phone briefly about your experience?

I'll let you call me, but I'll be more straightforward with you than I have been with most other journalists: while I'm always excited about the possibility of milking this thing even further, I'm a really lousy interview. I tend to respond to questions as if they aren't really exciting, because, well, usually they aren't. I may have made some people laugh with what I wrote over a decade ago (!), but I rarely get those kind of chuckles when I'm talking to people.

This is likely because when I'm writing, I'm able to edit and re-edit my wit down to a razor-sharp edge that slices through the tedium of people's lives, causing the blood/laughs to flow freely, and eviscerating, the, um, fun. See, that metaphor, which is funny because it's crude, took me some time to think about. And sure, it was worth it. But when I'm talking, I'm stuck with my first draft, and people realize me for the boring fraud I am. Oh sure, I've tried editing my conversation while I'm talking, but people get really tired of my saying the same thing over and over, changing a word here and there, and the impact is lost. Of course, that's a lie, but the point is it's the kind of clever lie I can never come up with when responding to a request to describe "what the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project is all about" when it's my opinion that the Web site explains that much better than I ever could.

I'm also a terrible interview because I can never decide if I want to suck up to the media ? in the hopes of making it my friend and having it tell everybody how great and funny I am ? or if I want to sarcastically dismiss the whole lot of journalists who write about snack foods and those who play with them as if they were news. The latter path, of course, allows me to earn near-infinite street cred with all my fellow Web Celebrities, who might otherwise decry me for "selling out" and forever refuse to invite me to any more of their Web Celebrity parties. But seeing as I'm making up the whole Web Celebrity thing anyhow, the suck-up path has lots to recommend it, such as yet another possibility of seeing a banal quote that only somewhat resembles anything I said being attributed to me in an article that is largely indistinguishable from all the other articles written about me. Aha! I fooled you, because I was talking about the suck-up path, but I managed to be snarky in doing so, thus traveling down the sarcastic-dismissal path. This is what it's like to be a conflicted member of Gen X, or so I've read.

Anyhow, irony and self-reference aside, it's my opinion that this e-mail is likely the most interesting thing you'll get from me, but I'll probably be much nicer on the phone and more likely to say something that resembles what you're looking for. I'm just like that. It's the magic of personal interaction, so easily ignored in an e-mail.

The not-so-secret secret is that what I really do these days is not work on the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project, but rather write rabid screeds to journalists who contact me for information on said project, not so much because I bear any antipathy towards said journalists or even journalism in general, but because it's an excuse to write, and I don't have much else going on in my life to fill up what I suppose I'd call my blog. Which is to say that I just have too much free time, something that people have been telling me ever since I got famous for putting something on a Web site that allows them to waste their copious free time.

You may be interested, if you haven't looked already, in reading my other correspondence with journalists about the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project on cockahoop.com. Not all of them get snide, late-night tirades ? some of my e-mails actually contain information!

Oh, and you can call me at 971-XXX-XXXX, preferably at hours that are almost certainly not when you want to call me, which is some time after 5:30pm. Before that, and I'll be more reticent than usual, because my co-workers find it odd when they overhear me talking about Twinkies so much. I've heard them whispering about my "Twinkies problem", and I think they're planning an intervention.

To summarize: this e-mail almost certainly shouldn't have been this long or this snarky, and you really should ignore everything except the phone number. Thanks.