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| Money for the ambitious... |
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| Fri Apr 15 2005 15:14:26 EDT - link to
this post. |
To the ambitious artistic Appalachian soul who wanders upon these words first: Your fortune awaits.
“Are you sick of being told not to go outdoors, constrained in your home because of a level 5 smog alert? Do your housemates smoke inside, regardless of your wishes? Got the black lung?
Well have I got the cure for what ails ya!”
“Ma’s Ol’ Timey Air – Calm down and take a deep breath of organic backwoods Appalachian air, hand collected in the beautiful woods of Southeast Ohio. Nothing beats clean air – just like it used to be! Give your lungs that much deserved break from the polluted air plaguing much of our country.”
“Speshly good aft’r vittles!”
The only difficult piece of work you need to do is make a label. You have to do it proper, nice and glossy, evoking an image of Appalachia and memories of fresh air, and looking like something you would find on the supermarket shelf. On the label you have a paragraph about the quaint backwoods cabin and life with nature. You should have a deadpan mimic of a typical corporate image-building sales pitch, with some wit intertwined, without being offensive or vulgar. Hell, I’ll write the label script for ya if ya want. Include a small footnote(such as an *), saying, in very small print, “All Claims are Facetious, Non-certified, and Not Guaranteed.”
Get a small run of these nice glossy, labels and place them on 12 oz canning jars. You can get them printed at any print shop. I’d suggest getting nice, embossed glass jars, with a gold lid. If you want to make more money per jar, buy some ribbon and tie a bow around the neck right under the edge of the lid. That bow will kick up the price quick as hell, cuz it’s more quaint, see. Middle class suburbanite moms eat this shit up. Make it country as hell, like something that belongs in the motherfucking cracker barrel. City folks will also eat this shit up, cuz they breathe shitty air and they know it. Aim to market to the heavily polluted cities. A few appropriately placed e-mails will spark some interest. If you don’t get a response, keep sending the e-mail to different cities, TV/Radio stations, newspapers, etc. It’s quaint & quirky enough to get mentioned. Tell them it will be on the auction site.
If you don’t live in the woods, go hiking into the woods, let the jars sit out open for 5 minutes, then cap the jars. If you live in the woods, just do it on your front porch. Go buy small boxes to fit one jar each into, with a little room for padding, so they won’t break. Go to the post office and get a shipping estimate. Go to your favorite internet auction site. Place an ad for Ma’s Ol’ Timey Air. Keywords for this item could be “air, practical jokes, novelty gifts, fresh, Appalachian, country kitchen.” Avoid making it sound like it’s some kind of FDA approved shit, cuz the FBI will think you’re gonna put some anthrax in it, and will be scoping you out. You don’t want to be scoped by the FBI. For god’s sake, keep your hands clean when handling jars. Don’t get germs all over. That’ll get people sick and you sued. In the space you have to advertise the air, place the first paragraph of this passage (“Are you sick of being told…”) in that space. For a picture, show your label, or a picture of the label on the jar if the auction site requires it.
I would prepare 2-3 cases of jars for the first round, until you see how well this takes off. It’s easy to get more air. Once they start selling, get a larger run of labels done. Ma’s Deep Breath Ol’ Timey Air, in the 24oz or 32oz jars. After that, run some of Ma’s Spring Breeze, and Ma’s Winter Chill(delivered packed in dry ice – shipped cold to you overnight!). Place a few local flowers in the jars and run Ma’s Scented Air – Rose, Lavender, etc.
Have a template so the labels have the same feel, but include items to differentiate them. Add pictures of the flowers for the scented, Appalachian winter forest for the Winter Chill, etc. Run the original plain air until the idea catches on, and word starts spreading. You should seek a little press—TV News is ripe with 30 second clips that are quaint, and the first smog alert the big cities have, they’ll mention your product. Once you move a few hundred plain units, run off small numbers of the labels for the specialty air. Make them a limited quantity, and advertise them as such. Only X (100) in existence for the season! Drive the bidding up a bit. Set the minimum bid you will take for any of these products at what it would cost you. If you don’t get more, at least you won’t lose money. If you need to set a sale price, I suggest 5 dollars. Put the item up for bid and see what happens!
Ed Note: While this may seem a ridiculous farce to some, to be taken lightly as if the proposal of a three year old, but I tell you with all earnestness that I AM DEAD SERIOUS about this. If you want my recommendations before printing, I will be glad to help. If you have some free time, it could produce a fortune. At the most you should be out $20, a minimal risk considering the high success of internet auction sales for the kitsch. If you do really do this and make a million, please remember the kind soul that showed you the possibilities of your fortune. You can get a hold of me right here. Best Wishes, Me(preferring to remain as anonymous as possible).
Ed. Note II: We all know which internet auction site I was referring to, I simply avoided naming it to avoid this page popping up when said name was googled. You should use said circumlocuted auction site for best results. Yes, I’m a paranoid fuck. Get over it. |
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| Pitching |
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| Fri Apr 15 2005 15:15:16 EDT - link to
this post. |
Music:
www.bisonardisorder.com |
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| Liability for the Libelers |
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| Tue Apr 12 2005 14:01:51 EDT - link to
this post. |
So what’s the deal with these things anyway, eh? Am I supposed to tell the truth all the time on here? Can I be sued for slander? I’m worried that I’ll just bust off a sermon and have it be taken seriously, when I’s just kidding, cuz I’d never do anything like that. How can I deliver dead-pan delivery without putting false immediately before truth, immediately followed by false? At what point does tongue-in-cheek become foot-in-ass? Internet: Fact or fiction?
Personalities don’t mean shit if you can’t see they eyes, they face, they body motions, they twitches. Everything about someone you “interact” with online could be lies. It’s almost like TV: whatever the other “user” wants you to know comes straight from him/her/it, and you can’t tell whether he/her/it is fact or fiction, person or character. How to earn a reputation of truth if your facts can’t be checked? How do you tell if this is worthy script or all rubbish if ye not truly know the mind it comes from? Is this truly me? These late night gutterals clacking at the board? Does it hold any significance, to me or anyone else, either the real world, or in this fucked up space cipher the X’s,Y’s, and Z’s jabber on, jabberin on?
If I were to type things here that were “frowned upon” by my profession, could “they” use that against me to “relieve me” of my duties?
This is now, and forever shall be, the script of _______________ . Anything in it may be held against her/him/it in the courts of law. Sucker punch reputation, claim all losses and head to Loserville, or Gary, Indiana, whichever is closer to you.
It would be hard to start looking for jobs after rallying passionately against the corporate overlords, whom you call “boss” from 9-5 M-F, often on Saturdays, and sometimes on Sundays. “’We are the dead,’ they repeated.”(ed. Note: am I required to footnote that?) That little quote, combined with very strong language describing exactly WHERE you thought your copper-covered lead would be best stored, came back to bite you when “they” proved you edited one of your posts while using the company computer systems, and cited you as the author of the BLOG, all in one fell data-mining swoop.
You remember it clearly, after reviewing your post from the late night before, and realized how you’d reck the whole creation of BLOGdom bliss you’d created over time with the perfect posts. You HAD to edit that post, and how. Instantly, dammit, even if it meant using the company machine. A quick cut here and a paste there during “water cooler break time,” that lovely ten minutes you get at 10:15, and you feel confident that your place in BLOGdom has suffered only minor, superficial damages, and losses could quickly be regained with a few choice posts, using some mighty powerful wordage.
Internet crack fucked you up! Concerned with an image only other hyper-geeks are gonna see anyway, you violated corporate policy, and Ka-BLAM! BUSTED! Whinin’, down like, “I didn’t mean it, honest, suh, I didn’a! It was a…a…a big joke! Yeah, I thought it would be great to see what kind of folks hated our company. To get inside their brain you know, so then we could figure out the way to win them over. I got some real good scoop for ya, honest. I didn’t want to tell anyone until I had finished in case someone thought they could steal the idea from me and take all my fucking credit. You know how it goes. Gotta have secrets to play in the card game.”
Holy shit, that’s some real nice Huck Finnin’ there, if I ever seen any. They bought it. It was the appropriately timed “fucking” right before the “credit” that sealed the deal. Boss men love a little gusto in their subordinates. Promotion’s on the house. You’ve saved your job! Now you just gotta keep spilling your hatred for the company, and get paid more to do it. Somehow doesn’t feel as good as it ought to; this, what should be your dream job. Those fuckers co-opt everything. It’s sickening.
Can’t get my feet out the fucking quicksand. |
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| E-Vandalist |
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| Mon Apr 11 2005 18:09:42 EDT - link to
this post. |
Where to begin this freak journey into hyper-nerdom? Give the kid some weed, give him a typewriter hooked up to the phone, let him rant and rave till the world turns blue and the feds are knocking on your doorstep because, whoops!, your kid is ranting about white supremecy, supporting the jihad, putting out come-ons to forty-year old lechers, and illegally downloading copyrighted movies, of various depraved natures, all at the same time while you thought he/she/it was sitting quietly in his/her/it’s room doing homework.
This internet’s a fucked up place, and now someone’s given me a corner of it to fuck it up more? Hello???? |
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