Tag: stupid things that i do

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What To Do When You Want to Bob Your Head But Cannot Because You Are Trapped Inside an MRI Machine.

I’m not supposed to move. My right leg is inside an MRI machine, one that’s designed only for limbs. So the rest of me is sitting on a piece of hard foam, flipping through the issue of SI with Stephen Strasburg on the cover. The MRI technician has the local Jack FM station on the radio, and the Jack station is playing their usual blend of non-sequitors. Tom Cochrane precedes Whitesnake precedes, I believe, something from “Aida.” There is no logic to defend what is happening, but I’m immobilized inside an MRI machine. I’m forced to sit there and take it.

At which point “What is Love” comes on the radio.

You know the song I’m talking about: it’s the one that spawned a recurring Chris Kattan/Will Ferrell sketch on SNL, and eventually, an ill-conceived movie. It’s impossible to imagine the song independent of Kattan and Ferrell, or their signature move: bobbing their heads in unison to the song.

I want, badly, to begin bobbing my head to this 1993 dance classic. But I’m trapped inside an MRI machine, knee immobilized, and if I move, they’ll have to restart the MRI machine, and maybe then Jack FM will begin playing the YMCA, or Cotton-Eye Joe, or the Macarena, and then I’ll be trapped inside this machine forever.

A 1993 dance classic plays, but I do not bob.

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When You See Me Sprinting Through an Airport, Please Step Aside.

There’s this amazing moment in one of Carl Reiner’s and Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man” sketches, when Reiner is moving through a line of questions about the early days of man. He’ll get to the good stuff in a second — questions about Joan of Arc, questions about the secrets to longevity — but first, he’s got a softball. “What was the main means of transportation back then?” he asks.

Brooks’ response is classic deadpan, and he crushes it. “Fear,” he says. “You’d see a tiger, and you’d run a mile in a minute.”

We don’t have such sources of transportation inspiration anymore. Except for one, really: the fear of missing an airplane.

On Thursday, I was nearly confined to the multi-thousand square foot beast that is Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

So I ran.

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The last time I made the airport sprint was in San Francisco. My shuttle to the airport was late — by an hour. My flight was on time. From curb to last-call at my gate, I’d been given 14 minutes. But San Francisco International is a relatively easy airport. Each wing has its own security checkpoint, servicing just a dozen or so gates, and I didn’t have any bags to check in, so I butted in line, apologized profusely and then ran — my left hand keeping my pants up, my heavily duct-taped roller bag and belt over my head and waving behind me. I ran like Reggie Bush on a punt return, dodging travelers, spinning away from golf carts, my eyes upterminal at all times. I made it to the gate — the very last gate in the terminal, of course — in time.

I gasped.

I heaved.

But I was on the plane.

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My sense is that Americans, in general, love to procrastinate. We also love to be lazy, to lounge around and to waste time.

So it should follow, logically, that getting a few hours to kill at the airport would be an American pastime.

That’s how I used to feel, actually. When I was young, I’d to ride the subway down with my dad to National Airport in D.C., and we’d sit by the windows and watch the planes take off. Some fathers and sons went to baseball games or the zoo to relax; we went to the airport.

But most Americans don’t see the airport as a relaxing place. That’s why we have a phrase for the occasion: stuck at the airport. Or worse: stranded at the airport.

In all your years, have you ever heard anyone outside of a first class lounge talk excitedly about an extended airport layover? Don’t worry about me, honey. I’ve got four whole hours to spend at Boston Logan!

As a society, we are not claustrophobic, but we fear airport-based confinement, and all of its trappings: patience, non-reclining chairs and doubly-overpriced Starbucks.

Maybe it’s just the way we define airports. We break them up into sections — Terminals, we call them — but we view them with a lower case ‘T.’ As in: beyond curable. Beyond suffering.

As in: the stage just before the light.

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The first sign of trouble hit my inbox on Thursday. There they were two e-mails from Continental Airlines informing me that my flight to Houston had been delayed. I looked at the details. Both said my 8:35 flight had been delayed to…. 8:35. Whatever.

By the time I’d gotten to San Antonio, the departure monitors told a different story. The 7 a.m. to Houston still hadn’t taken off yet. The 8:35 was delayed until 10:15.

My connecting flight in Houston left at 10:30.

I’ll fast-forward for you: I got on a non-delayed 9:15 flight, due to land in Houston’s Terminal C at 10:10. The connection was over in the B gates, no. 75. High numbers are never a good sign, and when my San Antonio flight stalled on the runway for 10 minutes — broken radars in the control tower, the captain said — I wasn’t optimistic about getting to B75 in time.

But we touched down at 10:04, and I was sitting in row 8, and the flight attendant said that since so many people had been delayed that morning, please, for the courtesy of your fellow passengers, let’s have only the passengers with urgent connecting flights stand up when the plane stops.

The plane stopped. The first eight rows stood up.

One guy was connecting to Kansas City. Another to New York. Someone else to Albuquerque, I think.

The doors opened, and we ran.

We ran through the jetway, where the emergency alarm had sounded when the gate agent had goofed in a rush to open the doors for us. We ran through the noise and into….

…Terminal E. Not, as I’d been told, Terminal C, only a quick one-hop subway connection away from my B gate. Instead, I was in the third-to-last gate in the terminal farthest away from where I needed to go. I’d have to cover over a mile of airport in about 12 minutes.

Naturally.

But my next gate hadn’t changed: B75. At least I knew my destination.

Houston Intercontinental Airport

❡❡❡

There are three keys, in my opinion, to surviving the airport sprint:

1. Use the Reverse Jinx: Sitting in San Antonio International on Thursday, I knew two things:

A. If I didn’t eat, I’d make my connecting flight but not have enough time to grab a bite in Houston, and I might not eat anything until 2 or 3. That wouldn’t do.

B. If I did eat, I’d miss my connecting flight and have three hours of waiting in Houston, with plenty of time to eat. And I wouldn’t be hungry, because I’d already eaten. That wouldn’t do, either.

So I grabbed a sandwich and secretly hoped to reverse jinx my way into the perfect scenario: eat early and make my connection. (Spoiler alert! It paid off — except for the part where I had to sprint through an airport terminal with a belly full of McMuffin. But more on that later.)

2. Be Loud: When you’re running, make sure people hear you coming. Be loud, and people will clear a path for you as you run. An airport sprinter is a wrecking ball-in-waiting, so make your presence known. Yell, holler, wear clogs — whatever it takes. There’s a reason those airport golf carts have sirens on them.

3. Look Desperate, But Don’t Panic: If you only take one piece of advice here, take this one. When you’re clomping down a terminal, you want people to look up and instantly know which person is rushing to a flight. Your face needs say, Please, for all that is holy, don’t make me stay one second longer than I need to in this place. But internally, you’ve got to stay poised. I’ve seen roller bags go flying out of control in airports. Stay in control, and let your legs do the rest.

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I ran right, then left, then across a moving walkway. My roller bag skidded behind me; the duct tape on the handle seemed to be holding things together nicely. I wheeled past the international terminal, passengers from Guam and Guatamala looking both groggy and very much not on high alert for me, this 6’6” thing cannonballing into Terminal D, where I could catch the inter-terminal train. Up the escalator, passing a couple on the right — sorry! — I made it to the train.

If the Google Maps tool over at WalkJogRun.net is to be believed, I’d just sprinted just over a quarter mile. In sandals. While wheeling a bag and hauling another one over my shoulder. Through an international terminal.

We reached Terminal C at 10:19. I had a chance, but the train pulled away slooo….. ooowwww…. wwlyyyy. We inched along. Terminal B arrived at about 10:22. My gate was just closing, if I was lucky. Maybe the airport door hadn’t shut, too. I had two minutes, tops.

Out on the platform, there were two escalators, both headed down. The guy going to Kansas City was a step behind me, and I beat him to it. I was in full-on “American Gladiators” mode, demolished the escalator and spun onto the main concourse. Lesser airport gladiators would crumble at the sight of the Houston Intercontinental eliminator; I hung in.

I should say here the floors in Terminal B are different, older. They’re a thin layer of carpet over concrete, and I was running in sandals. The thwap of each step echoed behind me, like “Riverdance” in snowshoes.

Terminal B opened into a square-shaped area, with four corridors leading out from each corner. Gates 76 and above were up on the side next to the train.

Gates 75 and below were not.

So there was another run, this time through the square, past another food court and to the right. It was the home stretch, the last tenth of a mile sprint through the B concourse, and my legs sagged. I wanted to quit. I wanted to stop sprinting. I was defeated.

And then, the tunnel turned. There was light.

❡❡❡

“Breathe, honey, breathe.”

I continued to pant, gasp, sweat. The gate agent, Rosetta, printed out my boarding pass. “Oshinsky? Coming from San Antonio? No way I thought you’d make it. Where’d you come from?”

E22.

“That’s amazing.”

The airplane door hadn’t closed yet, so she walked me down the gateway. I was still sucking for air. She mentioned something about wishing that she had my speed, and I laughed. No one had ever called me fast before.

I tried to tell her that, but it came out something like, “Eyyyee [gasp] mmmm not [gasp gasp] thaaat fass [gasp] ttt.”

I was boarding a puddle jumper, so my roller bag had to be checked plane-side. My breath was coming back, and I asked Rosetta if airport employees had a word for what I’ve just done.

“You know, we used to call it — well, before the trial — we used to call that the O.J. sprint.”

I looked back at her before I board the plane. I got here, I wanted to tell her. But I won’t go there.

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When Suggesting That a French Man Needs to Move Lands You on New York Sports Talk Radio.

Posterized.

The first thought was that I was being pranked. Sure, I’d just written a fairly controversial column about why the Spurs should trade Tony Parker for Kens5.com. It had generated quite a few hits on our website, and I’d gotten plenty of e-mail feedback from readers about it.

But a radio station in New York City calling to ask if they could chat about the column? That’s a first.

And yet, I made my Big Apple debut on ESPN 1050 Wednesday night, talking with Bill Daughtry about, of all things, San Antonio Spurs basketball. And for a full 10 minutes. For loyal danoshinsky.com readers who missed it live, I’ve recaptured it below. Next week, I hope to land 20 minutes talking all things Matt Bonner on a morning show in Milwaukee.

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My Scoreboard.

Soon, I found myself keeping score. About to graduate, aimless, preparing for joblessness and possessing a degree worth about as much as the paper it was printed on, I realized — belatedly — that I wasn’t exactly a modern guarantee of potential.

I started searching for something tangible, something worthwhile to get me through my remaining months at school. As a college basketball obsessant, it’s no surprise that the end of the NCAA Tournament had something to do with it. With the games over, I felt a sense of emptiness. During the Tournament, a one-too-many-beers promise to follow a favorite team had suddenly turned into a road trip. (Dude, we’re going to Phoenix!) I had goals and aspirations and dreams. Most importantly, I had more games to watch.

But the Tournament ended, my team lost, Phoenix turned out to be a hell of a drive — who knew? — and I was facing the unthinkable: graduation. So it came to be that out of a month of non-stop basketball watching, I started keeping score.

It was innocent enough at first. I decided that I’d make up goals to distract me from my life as a writer of failed cover letters. These daily goals were my way of staying sane, of finding blips of success hidden amongst routine.

I started with a small one: every day, make someone laugh really hard. I wasn’t going to make milk come out anyone’s nose — you’d be surprised how rarely one sees college students consuming milk in public — but I could try. Do it once a day, and I could enjoy the scoreboard at the end of the night: Dan 1, Failure 0.

I liked coming out on the winning end so much that I added more categories to my day. The points started trending upwards, the scoreboard spinning like an odometer on a cross-country trip (to, please God, anywhere other than Phoenix). Being thankful for little things wasn’t hard; I could rack up a dozen points a day doing that. Being punctual was even easier. Soon, I was running up the score. 5-0, 10-0, 20-0.

It only got worse from there. I had started out seeking moral victories and joy in day-to-day moments, but the high from those little wins faded faster with each day. I craved even bigger wins.

In one day, I decided to start being more spontaneous and to start speaking Spanish more often. But I abused the system. Getting a haircut at a barbershop run by Spanish-speakers and discussing mullets fit both requirements. Or: Look! I’m ordering a chalupa without sour cream!

I decided to stop skipping breakfast, and I was earning easy points there, until I decided that I wanted to start sleeping later, which meant that I wasn’t waking up early to eat breakfast anymore. But the scoreboard took no notice. I’d only ever created one rule: complete the category and earn the point. There was no penalty for breaking the rules, because there really weren’t any rules.

The points piled on. I had created my own metrics for success, and by my own best standards, I’d become wildly successful.

With so many paths to success, I’d guaranteed myself blowout victories with each new day. I’d been giving myself points for reading books, for creating esoteric theories, for watching new movies, for blogging, for napping — all at odds! — but the scores kept going up, and it didn’t matter how hollow my victories had become. I found myself saying odd things in the morning, like, “Right here, in this moment, this is where the day will be won.” When had I started talking like a member of the Roundtable? When had I become obsessed with winning?

Then graduation came closer — first weeks away, then days, then looking back as I crossed the dais — and I wasn’t any closer to getting a job. But I’d still been finishing my day completely convinced that I’d spent it well. I was a success, but only in a world in which I controlled the definition of success.

A few weeks after graduation, I was lucky enough to take a job that I actually wanted. Everyone wanted to know: how much money would I be making? In a world where success can’t be easily measured, salary seems like the simplest way to understand value. But I’m not sure that’s what really constitutes success.

I’d like to think my daily scorekeeping — at least my initial efforts — came close to defining two key measures of success: chasing ambition and building a better community (one in which, I’d hope, success can be further nurtured). But I’ve started to realize that we can’t attach a number to success, and we probably shouldn’t try to.

So I’ve stopped keeping score. When I make a friend laugh, I’m not declaring it a personal victory. Happiness isn’t tied to some internalized competition. I’m not winning, but I feel sane.

Though part of me still thinks that I’d need a scoreboard to know for sure.

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A Brief Commentary on Why Today is Not Important, Even Though Everyone Keeps Telling Me It Is.


Two things — important things — are happening to me today. I am a very passive observer in both events.

1. I turn 22 years old.

2. I graduate from college.

I know that May 16, 2009, is supposed to be a monumentally important day in the life of Dan Oshinsky. A half dozen of my relatives are here to pinch my cheeks and remind me of how they knew me when I was twenty minutes old. My mother has brought along framed photos of me in rare childhood moments in which I was not napping or eating. My father has been basically beating me over the head with regular, all-caps emails that read “YOU’RE OLD” and “MOVES FAST, DOESN’T IT?”

Look, I get it. I’m a year older than 21. I’m graduating from college. These are big moments. And if I was a generation older, I’d probably be writing this in a diary, or maybe on a CompuServ message board. But I don’t have a diary; I just have a blog.

And moreover, I have no reason to believe that this day is important.

In terms of life’s little narrative arcs, I suppose my family has a point. But it really only means something to someone who’s seen the entire arc. Context is everything.

A birthday hasn’t felt significant to me since I was nine years old, when I realized that I was soon moving out of single digits. It felt significant then; it still does today. I liked the fourth grade; I miss kickball.

And a graduation hasn’t felt important since I was 11. The Wood Acres Elementary School graduation ceremony was a big deal. As kindergartners, we’d filed into the gymnasium for something called “The Clap Out.” All of the other classes from all of the other grades were packed into the gym, too. Someone had created an aisle through the middle of the gym, tiny orange traffic cones marking the path of least resistance, and we pressed up against those cones, looking like mini-Moonlight Grahams, wondering if we dared cross the demarcation line. We watched as Ms. Hall, the Principal, called out the name of each fifth grader, and we reached out our hands into the aisle as each fifth grader ran through it and high-fived everyone within wingspan. And we vowed that when fifth grade came around, we’d do something infinitely more cool than just running down the aisle and high-fiving the rest of the school.

So for six years, we thought about incredible feats that could be achieved while running through a gymnasium at top speed. We planned. We plotted. We schemed.

Then fifth grade came around, and Ms. Hall called my name, and I burst out of the hallway and down the aisle, doing the only thing you can do while sprinting through a crowd of 500 people: high-fiving everyone in sight. Then I went into the aisle and high-fived all of my friends. It took an hour for the swelling in my right hand to go down.

That felt like a big deal then. But this? The Dan Oshinsky Story — a heartwarming tale of a suburban-bred kid who graduated thanks to some very favorable odds — isn’t coming to a theater near you.

So today is one of those days that really only means something if you’re looking at the big narrative arcs. That’s why my mother will be crying today, though, to be fair, my mother would probably cry if I told her that I had a buy-one-get-one-free coupon at Waffle House.

And here’s the thing about narrative arcs: sometimes you’re not sure where they’re leading. Sometimes, you’re not even sure where they’re starting.

Sometimes, you just don’t know that much at all.

———

H/T to Carbon NYC for the photo at top.

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My Mother and Her Puta Grande

The family

**I told this story live at Ignite NewsFoo in December 2011. You can watch it here.**

Right now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you a story about my mother.

Eleven months ago, I was returning home. I’d spent six months studying abroad in a very pleasant beachside town in Spain. I was well-tanned and full of doner kebabs. My town was just a week away from celebrating its annual bullfights-and-sangria-and-fireworks festival, and the Spanish national team was in the semifinals of the European Championships. I very much did not want to leave.

But it is out of this — just before the crescendo — that I found myself leaving. I boarded a plane in the heart of the country and landed nine hours later in Atlanta, where the heat index was topping three figures. Baggage claim at customs was slightly less packed than a Mumbai rail station. The customs agents were surly, as their baggage sorter had just broken, which left thousands of bags piled up at the gates, looking surprisingly like the Agro Crag on Nickelodeon’s “Guts.” Atlanta, I should note, is really not the kind of place that America should be using to greet our foreign guests.

But soon enough, I found myself leaving Atlanta and heading home to Washington, D.C., where temperatures were cooling into the high 90s, where the humidity just sort of wicks away from your body until you’re left stewing like a game hen in a crock pot. I was flying into Dulles Airport; my family was meeting me there.

It is here that I must remind you that this is a story about my mother.

She had decided earlier in the day that she would make a sign with which to greet me at baggage claim. At the time, this seemed like a good idea 1..

She went to my younger sister, Ellen, and my brother, Sam. Both speak Spanish. She asked them to do a bit of light translation for her 2.. “I want the sign to say, ‘Welcome home, my big boy,'” she said. Ellen and Sam told her that they could help her with that. My mother, so overwhelmed by the return of her eldest, most prodigious son, neglected to realize that her two youngest children have a sense of humor more twisted than a licorice rope.

It is into this that I arrived at Dulles Airport. Over my shoulder, I had two bags. One was a guitar case that bulged in the middle and looked unusually like a Kirstie Alley “before” photo in a Weight Watchers commercial. The other was an LL Bean backpack that was only being held together with scotch tape and safety pins. In my rush to pack, I had attempted to load nearly 4,000 lbs. of souvenirs into four bags. My two checked bags had tipped the scales at 48 and 46.5 lbs., respectively, just under the 50 lb. airline-mandated limit. The remaining 3,905.5 lbs. had been stuffed into my carry-ons and maneuvered into overhead bins for my flights.

I mention this because, ordinarily, I am a fairly spry individual. And on this day, it would have been nice to have felt youthful legs beneath me. Instead, I was essentially anchored to the ground by my luggage.

This was an unfortunate break. Leaving the terminal, I saw the unmistakable figure of four Oshinskys. Behind them, a small crowd had seemed to gather around my mother. I mistook this for coincidence; unbeknownst to me 3., it was not.

The crowd was waiting to find out for whom this woman was holding her sign.

Minutes earlier, an Aeromexico flight from Mexico City had landed at Dulles Airport. One by one, the crowd had passed through baggage claim and seen my mother — a white, Jewish, non-Spanish speaker — proudly clutching a white sign with thick black lettering.

On its front, it read: “Hola, Dan, mí puta grande.”

Which, even if you’d spent your entire vacation inside a tequila slammer at Señor Frogs, you could accurately translate as “Hello, Dan, my big bitch.”

And so the entire adult male population of Mexico City — or something close to it — had collected their luggage and then moved toward my mother, waiting for her puta grande to appear.

It is into this that I appeared, some 3,905.5 lbs. of luggage dragging me down the hallway. I remember looking down the hall and seeing my mother, bouncing up and down, holding her sign. I remember getting close enough to read the words. I remember processing the words in my head, six months of Spanish still very fresh in my mind. I remember taking off, my legs breaking free from the ground, looking not unlike the Beast breaking his chains in “The Sandlot.” I remember my mother moving at top speed, setting what must’ve been a world record in the 60-meter dash, the sign still waving above her head. I remember her catching up to me at about baggage claim #7. I remember looking back; Ellen and Sam were laughing. The entire adult male population of Mexico City was laughing.

I remember looking up, into my mother’s eyes. She was crying.

“Do you like the sign?” she asked.

I smiled back. She wouldn’t know why until later. We’d wait until we were onto the highway, the TrailBlazer cruising along at 70 miles per hour, before we’d teach her her first four words in Spanish. We knew she wouldn’t throw Ellen and Sam out the window at 70 miles per hour.

I looked back up at my mother. Her eyes were fogging up. I smiled back and told her the only thing she wanted to hear.

“Yes, yes I do,” I said.

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1.) N.B.: The phrase at “at the time” can not and will not ever be followed by a clause of a positive nature. No one has ever used the phrase to introduce a pleasant memory. I have tried to find a way to do such a thing; I have failed. It is, at this point, my linguistic holy grail. >back to article

2.My mother, who does not fully understand the Internet, had never before heard of Google Translation. >back to article

3. “Unbeknownst to me” is the second most ominous phrase in the English language, only behind “at the time.” >back to article

That photo at top, from left to right: Sam, me, and my mother.

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No Matter What You May Have Been Led to Believe, I Do Not Have a Rabbinically-Related Bacon Sex Obsession

A serious, actual warning: this blog post contains material that is mildly pornographic. If you are my parents or anyone who is seriously considering hiring me — with the exception of the fine editorial board over at the Adult Video News family of publications — I advise that you just click here to read my more, uh, kosher material.

End of warning.

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I am writing today because I am concerned — as many of you are, I imagine — that millions of American men are under the impression that Jewish youths fantasize not of Catholic schoolgirls or slightly-submissive cheerleaders but of bacon-wielding Rabbinical scholars.

Perhaps I should explain.

Where to start is a hard question 1.. When I was a kid — in the clean, wholesome 1990s — companies were in the business of using sex to sell Pepsi or Chris Rock albums instead of, well, sex.

Even when the President decided to let the other zipper drop, all the American people got were a few Slick Willy jokes. Those were simpler times.

But as Y2K closed in, something changed: doctors at Pfizer realized that their new blood pressure medication wasn’t doing what they they thought it would do. And now they needed a megaphone to tell everyone of the side effects they’d discovered. Meanwhile, the NFL needed a new sponsor; those 1-800-COLLECT ads weren’t going to survive. So if you’re looking for a moment when Americans became weirdly okay with talking about sex in public, I’d nominate Viagra’s first TV ad campaign as the tipping point.

A decade later, we’re completely unimpressed by overt displays of sexuality on television. If you watched the NFL Draft this weekend, you were probably exposed to equal amounts of Cialis advertising and draft analysis 2.. If you watched on a satellite provider, like Dish Network, you saw an additional dose of ads for something that’s called — with all irony intended — Extenze. And may I remind you: in 2004, a famous entertainer exposed herself to nearly a hundred million Americans. It is no coincidence that the incident took place at halftime of a football game.

Lately, we’ve been channeling our sex obsession towards pornography. Two weeks ago, an obituary for an adult film actress was featured on the front page of The New York Times’ website. The Washington Post ran a multi-part series about the Maryland state senate’s quest to squash a public showing of a pornographic film titled “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge.” Porn isn’t taboo anymore; it’s actually headline news.

Even today’s sex advertisers are evolving with these social changes. They’ve actually started to — and I cannot believe I am typing this — microtarget to consumers.

Microtargeting is a technique that only slightly predates Viagra. Give much of the credit to Mark J. Penn — a political consultant for the Clintons, among others — who coined the term “soccer moms.” He started a movement among political-types in which society is fragmented until you’re left with only homogeneous groups of people. Those people — soccer moms, NASCAR dads, Rednecks for Obama, or whomever — are then sent as many political mailings as the USPS will legally allow.

Then there’s another side of microtargeting: localization. Specific advertisers — say, supermarkets — want to be able to advertise to the people who live within a few miles of their store. So they’ll mictrotarget their ads only to those consumers. It’s easy to figure out who those consumers are, too: your Internet IP address is basically a Lo-Jack for your computer.

What’s frightening about today’s sex advertisers is that they’re microtargeting to both specific demographics and local markets; they’re actually customizing their smutty ads to your liking and locale.

On a theoretical level, microtargeting makes sense. If you can gather information about an Internet user — Dan, age 21, Jewish, enjoys baked goods — and can pinpoint his location — Columbia, Mo. — then you can deliver an ad that cuts directly to what I like and where I can buy some of it.

But this really only works well if you’re looking to get me a good deal on hamantaschen in mid-Missouri. It does not work as well when you’re trying to sell sex.

Which, finally, brings me back to the matter at hand: a disturbing new series of Internet advertorials that have brought together Jimmy Dean breakfast meats and shiksas in a way I never thought was possible.

(N.B.: The following screenshots have been reproduced directly. With the PG-aged in mind, I have edited in leavened distractions to block any unsightly parts of the photo. Other images have been slightly Photoshopped to blur out 3. what matzah could not.)

The advertisement features a number of slides that progress every few seconds. I’ll start with the first slide:

Initial thought: what’s with the fake beards? And I don’t even want to guess what they’re trying to sell. To the next slide:

First things first: I belong to a synagogue in Washington, D.C., that’s lucky enough to have not one but two excellent female rabbis. So I’m not entirely sure what this ad is getting at by asking “if.” But to answer the question at hand: no, even as a young Jewish man, no, I have not had that fantasy.

Also noteworthy: I still have no idea what’s being sold here. Next slide:


Now’s the point where I start to really wonder how customized this ad is for me. I mean, ass-slapping? With pork products? And it’s not like the Google search that led me to this ad was “Lesbian rabbis AND ass-slapping AND the other white meat.”

And I’m completely clueless as to what’s being sold here. From what I can gather, it appears that Johnsonville may have finally gotten into the kosher breakfast meat/sex toy industry 4.. Still, there’s no way I’m clicking away now. To the final slide:

Now here’s where microtargeting can go really wrong. Sure, I suppose that there’s enough Jewish stuff about me on the web to figure out that I like Tu Bishvat as much as the next guy. Yeah, I’ve written one blog post too many about matzah, I suppose. And I’ve managed to slide a Shabbat mention into my work before.

But there are ZERO Jewish women in Columbia, Mo. Trust me: I’ve been looking for them. And now some smut advertisement is telling me that there’s a cult of slutty, Rabbinically-dressing girls 5. somewhere in this town?

I’ll believe that the day someone convinces me that Catholics guilt their children better.

Now, the ads turned out to be for a website that’s kind of a Match/eHarmony/J-Date-gone-smutty. I wasn’t previously aware that such a service existed. I suppose it would make for an unusual answer to the “So, how’d you meet?” question at the wedding, though.

Regardless, there is a lesson here for advertisers: be careful with microtargeting. You can’t always be sure that you’re actually reaching your target audience. Personally speaking, I prefer pastrami to ham.

And another thing: are there really that many Jewish-taboo-breaking-ham-lovers to even warrant such a targeted ad?

I’l leave you with a final thought: this ad could’ve taken a page from the 1990s. This decade, we’ve been using sex to sell sex. I think that’s the wrong tack.

Sex sells others things pretty well. Had I been shown the above ad — and then been asked to click through to buy a honey-baked ham — I think I just might have considered.

❡❡❡

1.) Yes, that’s what she said. And if you get bored of that, add the words “in bed” to the end of a sentence. That also works well with fortune cookies. >back to article

2.). Why it seems like a good idea to mix Mel Kiper, Jr., with subliminal sex advertising doesn’t fully make sense to me. His mustache must have something to do with it. >back to article

3.) I do not think it is a coincidence that when blurring out the less suitable parts of these photos, I used a Photoshop tool that measures the strength of the blur in something called “hardness.” Hey, it wasn’t my idea. >back to article

4.) And if there ever was a company to get into the breakfast meat/sex toy industry, you’d want it to be named Johnsonville. >back to article

5.) Also: I really cannot imagine how the company solicited actors for this ad. “Wanted: 36-24-36 non-vegan for photo shoot. Experience working with large, salted meats preferred.” >back to article

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My Resume, in Brief

I was looking at my résumé this afternoon and struck by a strange realization: the thing is three pages long, including references and clips. Ideally, I’d like it to fit on a page. So what follows is an exercise in brevity: my work in journalism, in one — albeit very long — paragraph.

When I was 14, I decided I wanted to be a journalist. It seemed like a good idea at the time. ❡❡ At 15, though I had no idea what I was doing or how to do it, I got an internship working at States News Service in D.C. By summer’s end, I’d been published in The Boston Globe. This gave my parents the unfortunately false impression that I was talented. ❡❡ Then I started working as a stringer at Redskins games. I became good at interviewing people who were wearing towels. I still consider it one of my most developed skills. ❡❡ I spent the next summer working for The Nantucket Independent. While journalists from The Globe and the AP were mocking John Kerry for his windsurfing skills, they were citing my opus on Nantucket politics in their stories. I also improved my in-towel interviewing technique, only this time, I was the one wearing them. ❡❡ The Kansas City Star gave me an award for sports writing the next year. In K.C., I tried the local barbecue for the first time. I selected the University of Missouri as my college destination that same day. ❡❡ That spring, I interned at The Business Gazette in Maryland. Four years later, some of my articles still show up the later pages of my Google results. If you go even deeper into those results, you’ll find out that, apparently, I have children and am bald. ❡❡ I showed up at Mizzou in the fall of 2005 with a dream: to learn how to tell stories via any number of platforms. I also wanted to see ESPN’s “College GameDay” come to campus for a football game. I was ambitious back then. ❡❡ Soon after, I worked at The Washington Examiner, where I learned how to cover the Nationals in less than 350 words per night. Non-Nats fans still wonder how I managed to fill those 350 words. “They lost, again” is only three. ❡❡ Back at Mizzou, I became a student senator so that I could change the school’s ticketing policy for sporting events. I started DJing at the college radio station, too. In four years, I have still yet to figure out how to work the station’s phone line. (573) 882-8262 is the request line if you’d really like to test me, though. ❡❡ The next year, at CBS News, I produced radio stories about Presidential frontrunners Hillary Rodham Clinton and Fred Thompson. We were all quite sure that one of those two was going to win. ❡❡ Last summer, I worked as a political exile multimedia journalist for The Rocky Mountain News in Beijing. They let me do stuff that I’d prefer the Chinese not know about. ❡❡ Now I’m graduating from Mizzou next month with a degree in convergence journalism and minors in spanish and sociology. ❡❡ I’ve mastered a number of technologies — like Final Cut Pro and Photoshop and Flash and CSS/HTML and Audacity — as well as digital photography. ❡❡ The only thing I didn’t learn, I suppose, was how to get a job. ❡❡ Maybe I should’ve taken classes in that instead.

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The Cover Letter I’ve Always Wanted to Write

Dear Prospective Employer,

I am not particularly good at following directions.

Or perhaps I should say: it’s not that I’m bad at following directions. It’s that I tend to follow them too seriously.

I mention this because my professors seem to think that these introductory letters shouldn’t be about what I’ve done; they should be about who I am. Right about here, I’m supposed to say that if you’d like to know more about my experiences – about the time I spent as the Rocky Mountain News’ multimedia man-about-town in Beijing for the Olympics; or the summer I produced radio stories for CBS News; or the months covering pro baseball for the Washington Examiner – well, you should just turn to my résumé.

This, instead, is what my professors would like me to tell you:

I am a 6’5’’ Jewish kid from Bethesda, Md. I have the wingspan of someone who is 6’9’’. To answer your questions in advance: I do not play basketball, and I do not know what the weather is like up here.

After a lifetime of air guitaring, I started playing for real three years ago, though I haven’t given up on the occasional air soloing. I put Old Bay and garlic into nearly everything I cook. Two years ago, I spent the better part of a month training for a pizza eating competition that was later canceled when the restaurant ran out of oven space to cook the needed amount of pizzas. One year, I ordered the ESPN Full Court package, watched hundreds of college basketball games, developed an encyclopedic knowledge of every NCAA Tournament team, and still finished in the bottom third in my office pool.

I’m not particularly fashion-conscious, though I am the proud owner of a yellow, pinstriped jacket that I’ve worn to every University of Missouri football game since my sophomore year. I’ve never used the afro pick that came with the jacket.

I come from a large, lovable family of well-to-do Washingtonians who, for lack of a better term, are crazy. My grandparents used to paint their lawn green in the winter. We used to have a nanny who walked her pet guinea pig outside on a leash. My father has been known to bring back stacks of Waffle House waffles as his “personal item” on flights.

Which brings me to the jewel of my family: my mother.

My mother once wrote an essay explaining that her favorite Jewish moment involved the time Noah led the Jews out of Egypt. Once, upon my return from a semester abroad in Spain, she waited for me at the airport with a sign for me that read, “Hola, Dan, mí puta grande,” mistakenly believing that the words were a standard Spanish greeting. Recently, my mother fulfilled her lifelong dream of riding around on a fire truck dressed as Mrs. Claus. She is also a lover of animals, which is why this elephant currently resides on the front steps of my house.

I’ll cut this letter short now; I wouldn’t want to spoil any stories for future psychiatric visits. I do hope this letter gives you a more personal look into who I really am. And if for whatever reason any of this makes me more desirable as a candidate for this job, then I must say: journalism is clearly in worse shape than I’d ever imagined.

Sincerely yours,
Dan

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How and Why I Ended Up Stalking the "Cash Cab" Guy at Dulles Airport

So I’m at D.C.’s Dulles Airport tonight, waiting for my late-night flight to St. Louis and looking for an airport bar to watch the first half of the U.S.-Mexico World Cup qualifier. The bar near my gate is full and showing CNN, so I keep moving, down Dulles’ interminable Terminal B, an inexplicably long tunnel of white that may or may not explain the title of the new U2 album. The next bar is down at the other end of the terminal, about a 5k away. If I’m going to catch any of the game and make it back for my flight, I’ve got to hurry.

So I’m in full stride, pushing past the B gates when I notice a bald, Irish-looking fellow on the steps near one gate. He’s got a standard carry-on upright in front of him; he’s thumbing through something on his iPhone. And as I cruise past him at Olympic-qualifying speed, I start to recognize something in his face. Maybe it’s the jut in his chin, or maybe it’s the way the top of his forehead slopes forward with all the slickness of an Augusta National green. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, that’s so familiar.

About five steps later, I realize that I may have just walked past Ben Bailey.

For those who don’t flip anywhere north of MTV on their TV guides, Ben Bailey is the cab driver-cum-host of Discovery Channel’s “Cash Cab,” which is basically Trivial Pursuit on wheels. Contestants enter his New York City cab, ambushed by a disco’s worth of lights to discover that they’re on a mobile game show. They’re given a series of questions to answer during the ride to their destination. Miss three questions and Bailey tosses you out on the street. Keep answering right and you might end up with a few hundred dollars in winnings.

I come from a game show obsessed family. We were huge “Supermarket Sweeps” fans as kids. We were that family watching Regis each night on “Millionaire.” We’re the ones who plan our runs on the treadmill around “Price is Right” or “Wheel of Fortune.” “Cash Cab” is one of my most recent finds, and it’s quickly become one of my favorites. There’s just something about seeing New Yorkers struggling to remember what a quadratic equation is, all while fearing that they’ll be booted out in the rain 15 blocks too soon.

I watch the show casually, maybe once or twice a week in the early afternoon, but enough that I’m certain that the guy I’ve just passed at Dulles is Bailey. I stop and look back at him. He’s wearing a blue shirt with the word “STAFF” in huge, white block letters. It looks like the kind of shirt that you’d see TV tech guys wear.

I walk a bit farther up the terminal to a monitor with gate information. I scan for his gate number. A few columns over, I find it: a JetBlue flight direct to New York’s JFK International Airport. I’m no Clouseau, but I’m feeling confident so far that that guy really is Bailey.

Now, I should explain something here: for the last week or so, one of my closest relatives was in the hospital. On Monday night, she died. So I’ve spent much of the last week shuttling amongst Columbia, Mo., St. Louis and Washington, D.C. I’ve spent enough time in the air that I can probably recite line-for-line this month’s American Airlines in-flight magazine. (The profile of the gritty, resilient, never-say-die Paula Abdul is particularly nauseating.) I haven’t been sleeping much at all. So I’m slower than Don Adams to realize most obvious sign that Ben Bailey is sitting in Terminal B:

Three days ago, my parents – also huge “Cash Cab” fans – went to see Bailey’s stand-up set at the D.C. Improv. He was at the Improv all weekend.

I spin around. I know that Bailey’s coming to Columbia in about a month to do stand up. Suddenly, I’m struck by the urge to schedule an interview with him. So I come up with a plan. I’ll walk up to him and casually ask if he knows where I can find a bar to watch the game. And then, just before I walk away, I’ll do a little double take, play dumb and ask, “Hey, do I know you from a TV game show somewhere?”

It’s a flawless plan. I’m thrilled with my brilliance, even in the face of sleep deprivation. And then I turn around and realize that he’s on the phone with somebody else.

So I get take out my phone, call anyone who’ll pick up and explain that I’m basically stalking the “Cash Cab” guy, all while occasionally glancing back down the terminal to see if he’s done chatting. Soon, we’re essentially pacing in simultaneous loops around the concourse, Bailey just a hundred yards away from me, an unknowing partner in the evening’s cell phone walkabout pairs competition.

I keep circling, twenty minutes worth, waiting for Bailey to hang up. The gate agent for JetBlue starts to board the JFK flight. I make my move, down the hall, just idling while idly hoping that whoever Bailey’s on the phone with disconnects. I pass him, still waiting. I stall near the TVs showing CNN, only half watching whatever wall of monitors Wolf Blitzer’s standing in front of.

I stand and I wait, and wait. I wait as Bailey switches his phone from his right hand to his left, as he reaches for his carry on, as he wheels it toward the gate, as he hands the gate agent his ticket, as he boards the plane, phone still in hand.

I wait as Bailey disappears down the jetway, wondering how the $100 question I wanted to ask got away.

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