Things That Actually Exist, #1-7.

This is not a philosophical discourse on what it means to exist, nor is it meant to investigate whether it is possible for anything to exist at all. It seems obvious enough to me that things and people can (and in fact, do) exist. If you disagree, and somehow believe that our existence is actually more perception than reality, I'd recommend you find somebody with a masters degree in philosophy and talk to them about this. I'm sure they'd be more than happy to regurgitate some Kant, Aquinas, Rosseau and Descartes (but not Plato -- that would be too obvious) to you, and you could both be profound, deep, and scholarly together. And best of all, I wouldn't have to listen to any of it. Might I suggest as a way to spark this breathtakingly interesting and productive discussion, you pour boiling coffee on each other's laps, and then you could talk about how you both perceived those third-degree burns on your infant-sized genitalia, and how comically not-real they were. [Note: This blog is also not a discussion of philosophy lovers and their embarrassingly small genitals.]

Now that I've explained what this blog is not, let me explain to you what it is. Quite simply, this blog is a list of things that actually exist. I say "actually exist" because at times it is hard to imagine someone taking the time to create/plan what you are about to see. Or at the very least, wanting to take the time to create/plan/construct these things. Regardless of how surprising, or how seemingly pointless they might be, my primary concern is that these are all in fact in existence -- as real as cholesterol.

The format will go something like this: I'll show/explain to you the thing that actually exists, and then I'll follow up with some thoughts and questions that these existing things raise [in my mind at least].

So, without further ado, here are things that actually exist, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise:

#1 - This posting, taken from the "rants&raves" section on craigslist.org:

"Any American who is concerned with what is happening in this country should educate themselves first before forming any opinions. This country was only meant to benefit the rich, not the average guy. We don't live in a Democracy, but a Republic governed by an Oligarchy of the rich and special interests. If there was such a big difference between Democrats and Republicans, then why do things continue to get worse regardless of which party is in power? The ONLY color that matters in this country is GOLD! If you are a racist, then you play into the hands of others. Try reading "The Creature From Jekyl Island" and learn what the Federal Reserve Banking System is and how we are all slave-collateral to it. Go on the internet and read "The Iron Mountain Report" and learn what the Powers That Be have in store for all of us (even though it was published as a work of fiction to protect the authors' life). Don't believe anything the media presents, they are ALL owned by the Powers That Be. Stop fighting each other over petty crap like race and gender and start talking about what is going on and how to change it before it really is TOO LATE? Hope this stays up long enough to benefit people."

I started the list off with this excerpt from our anonymous author because not only was I

a) surprised to find a paragraph loaded with so many of these amazing, loosely-tied conspiracy theories coupled with a few recycled fear-mongering phrases from Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, but I was also

b) floored at the idea of the person who takes the time to sit down, write this out, and then decide they must share this air-tight political warning with the online community.

Perhaps technically, this should be entries #1 and #2, for both the entry and the author, but for the sake of organization and brevity, we'll just keep it as one item.

For those of you who don't visit the "rants&raves" section on craigslist, all you need to know that it is a forum that allows anybody with an internet connection to post their "rants&raves" on any issue, and to be able to do it anonymously. And the result are contributions like the one above.

But once you get past the sweeping generalizations, the errors in punctuation, the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, there is strangely enough, a level of skill in AA's [anonymous author] piece. In one not-too-lengthy paragraph, AA managed to touch on:

-Oligarchies, Democracies and Republics.

-Racism.

-The Federal Reserve Banking System.

-The "Powers That Be" and their ownership of the media.

-An author who has to publish non-fiction work as fiction on the internet in order to save his life.

-"Slave-collateral"

I think the term "slave-collateral" might be the highlight for me of this paragraph. It is just so beautifully paranoid and serious. I almost wish I knew what it meant.

I find myself reading this over and over again, laughing at the buzz words that drench these distraught sentence. All that's missing is a line about global warming and a warning about divine punishment because of gay marriage and you've pretty much covered all that's wrong with the world.

It's like a child who's heard adults use these important words before, and they so desperately want to sound smart by recycling these big and important words, but in the end it doesn't quite work, because they don't quite know what they mean.

And then I read over it once more, and I remember that AA has a vote.

#2 - Sexybands.

Where to begin with this one?

Sexy Bandz are, according to their website, "Silly Bandz for adults." For that sentence to make any sense, you need to know what Silly Bandz are. Silly Bandz became incredibly popular last year; the follow-up to the "Livestrong" bracelet phenomenon. Silly Bandz are much thinner than your typical "Livestrong" bracelet -- much more like your everyday rubber band. But what made Silly Bandz special was not only that they were colorful and cheap [and cool/hip enough to make the plural form of their word end with a "z" instead of an "s"], but before you wore them around your wrist they were shapes -- whether it be a heart, a square, a peace sign [at the UT Co-op, they even had Silly Bandz that were burnt orange and the shape of a longhorn]. Once around your wrist, they looked like any other colored rubber band [perhaps slightly wrinkled] -- but when you took them off, you could show your friends that you had a dinosaur, a star, and a seahorse all living on your wrist. As you could probably guess, Silly Bandz were marketed/intended for young adults/teenagers, who actually give a fuck about things like this.

Sexy Bandz, in their most basic sense, are shaped rubber bands as well. [I guess I should say, "shaped rubber bandz"]. But instead of the innocent seahorses and stars that you can find in normal Silly Bandz, Sexy Bandz offers you the chance to wear a penis, a butt, a set of boobs, a man with an erection, or a naked woman around your wrist. It's not hard to imagine where this million-dollar idea sprouted from. Some drunk guy, watching his daughter talk on the phone and play with her Silly Bandz, decides that the untapped adult market is begging for some adult-themed silicone fun. He cracks open another can of Natural Light, sketches a penis and a nice rack on a piece of scratch paper, and the rest, as I've never heard anyone say except when they say "as everyone says", is history.

The idea and product alone make this list-worthy. But like the entry above it, Sexy Bandz almost deserves two slots. One for the idea/product, and one for the god-awful animated commercial. The voice-acting is terrible. Their dialogue is painfully rigid. The animation is somehow worse than the voice-acting and dialogue combined. The background music isn't music at all, but rather some stoned guy tooling around on a $20 keyboard from Toys 'R Us. And the premise for this commercial -- that wearing sexual colored rubber bands will somehow make members of the opposite sex take notice and want to fuck you -- I mean, seriously?

Yes. Seriously. It all actually exists. The commercial. The bands. And they can be yours for $4.99. Plus, they glow in the dark.

#3 - Carlashes

This again should be another duel entry -- for the idea and commercial. The commercial itself is much better than Sexy Bandz [though I'm not sure how much of a compliment this really is]; it's still 80 seconds of unsteady camcorder footage and cheery music that should really be fifteen seconds at the most. I understand what your product is. I understand that it sparkles in the sun. You don't need to club me over the fucking head with it. Just give me a couple shots of the lashes sparkling, perhaps another shot of the eyelashes as you're driving, and then bam, go to black, give me some ordering information, and end with a catchy line. But no. Instead, you make some poor girl try and sexily pose on the hood of a red VW beetle in a t-shirt and jeans, while she smiles awkwardly and tries to draw attention to the eyelashes glued on to the car. The commercial needs polishing, for sure, but at least the music sounded somewhat professional, and thank god it wasn't animated.

Perhaps the best thing you can say about the commercial is that it's better than the idea itself.

It's not like the carlashes serve any functional purpose like real eyelashes do. They're not shielding the headlights from water or debris. They don't keep the headlight covers clean, or enhance your driving experience in anyway whatsoever. It's a fucking novelty item for people who desperately want to personify their automobiles. But the problem is that the only people who think of their cars as people are little kids, and guess what -- they don't own real fucking cars. At about the age of eight [or twenty-three if you're my brother], you realize that Thomas the Tank Engine was great, (and so were his buddies Percy and Gordon), but trains and cars don't have personalities nor eyes, and that in the end all they really are, are fucking inconveniences that cost you money and miserably pollute the earth we live in. Cars are things that break down, that get towed, that have parts you've never heard of, but cost $700 to fix when you finally do hear of them. They're not your fucking friend. You don't invite them for sleepovers. And you certainly don't buy it fucking mascara.

What market were these people trying to corner? I'm guessing not many truck drivers are desperately looking for ways to humanize or feminize their rides. And people who own economy cars and Pruises will drive twenty miles just to save ten cents a gallon on gas, so they won't be lining up to shell out for some decoration [which if you really think about it, could potentially hurt their precious fuel economy]. And oh yeah, we're in the teeth of a fucking recession where people are cutting every unnecessary cost they can -- and guess what ranks right up on the top of the "we don't really need this, do we?" list? You guessed it. Bedazzled artificial eyelashes for your car.

#4 - A book titled: "Easily Despook Your Horse In A Way It Understands Using Herd Dynamics And Its Natural Instincts" by Marv Walker.

In case you were wondering; No. I didn't just make that cover using Microsoft Paint. That, as far as I can tell, is the real cover, with the real title, in that very real font. I can't comment too much on the book itself, as I've never read it, but I will comment on the title -- all 16 words of it.

When you think of great book titles, "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and "The Grapes of Wrath" come to mind. There are more of course [another one of my personal favorites is "The Road" -- the title couldn't be anything else]. These titles say enough, but not too much; they allow room for the story. It goes without saying that the effectiveness and impact of a title hinges on the story that follows -- but still, I think we can agree there is an art to a good title. A title should paint a grand but ultimately incomplete picture -- one that gradually becomes clearer as you make your way through the book, but even at the end might still be not completely apparent.

One definition of a title is a "descriptive heading or caption" -- and I think the problem I have with Mr. Walker's title is that he leaned a bit too heavily on the word "descriptive" when creating his own. It's far too "nail on the head" for my liking, or I think for anyone's liking. It's as though he wanted to tell you exactly what this book contained as specifically as he possibly could, in as many words as he needed to. And while I applaud his effort, I would like to remind him that there is something to be said for leaving things to the imagination, for hinting instead of clubbing.

But still, somehow I'm intrigued. Are "spooked" horses really a big issue? How do you spook a horse? What are the symptoms of the spooked horse? And perhaps the ultimate question: if a horse can be spooked, how do you de-spook it?

So I dug deeper and went to Marv Walker's website looking for answers. On it, I found that he's published multiple books, has links to commentaries he's written on a wide variety of topics [Bible passages to herd dynamics], and has even filmed and released some instructional DVDs for handling horses. But alas, I never really got to the bottom about the whole "horse-spooking" business. I guess he saved all that for the book.

Before I end, I must share with you my favorite page on his website. I would offer more context, but I'm not sure when it's Marv talking, or when he's speaking for the horse, or this mysterious "her" fits in to all of this. None of that makes sense to you right now, and when you get to the end, it still probably won't. But anyway, I was surprised to find something like this existed, so here are the screenshots:

There you have it. Marv has his horse back, despooked and all. They're heading back to the trailer, a friendship re-kindled, trust re-built. Let's leave them alone for now. We have a president to sodomize.

#5 - Obama inflatable sex doll

Ever find yourself watching Obama speak at a press conference and wonder what it would be like to have sex with him? Or do you find yourself dimming the lights as you watch news-clips of the President to put yourself in the mood? Do you record the State of the Union address just so can you stare at Barack's milky features for hours and hours on end? Well, you're in luck. Because now a company sells an Obama inflatable blow-up sex doll [Blow-Up Barack], so when you're done fantasizing about the leader of the free world, you can pretend you're having sex with the President himself.

As the company that sells it puts it so delicately:

"Blow-Up Barack presidential love doll... He fucked the economy, now you can fuck him back!... He'll batter your bush... Visit his oval orifice... He's got a presidential-size power tool!... He's the clear winner in this year's presidential erection... He's got the biggest presidential staff ever."

[Insert Barney Frank joke here].

One wonders, "where do you blow to fill up Blow-Up Barack with air?"

So many roads we could go down here. But it might be best if we follow Frost and take the one less travelled -- we'll say nothing.

#6 - Spam Scultpures

Spam is "a canned, precooked meat product...with the labeled ingredients including chopped pork shoulder meat with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as binder, and sodium nitrate as preservative." In other words, it's canned mystery meat, (and supposedly quite slimy to the touch). It's no wonder then, according to the SPAM website, on average 3.8 cans of SPAM are consumed every second in the US. Every second. 3.8 cans. It gets better. They've been canning this heavenly meat since 1937, and 70 years later, in 2007 [I had to stop and count for a second], they sold their 7th billion can. 7 billion cans of SPAM. Sounds like a title for a Dr. Seuss book. Speaking of titles again, I should probably pass along another title from the Marv Walker collection:

But we were talking about SPAM, not how to get into the psyche of a horse. If you have a hunger for some more SPAM knowledge [another pun bites the dust], there's a SPAM museum in Austin, Minnesota of all places, where you can plan group tours and explore and discover the history of SPAM as well as pick up some exciting new SPAM recipes -- like Creamy SPAM and pasta nachos... as real as cholesterol, my friends.

And there's also a SPAM sculpture contest in Chicago, with the photo above showing the finalists from the 7th Annual competition. To me, it's not even a question -- the SPAM Stonehenge is a runaway winner. It's braver, larger, and the most clever of the bunch. Despite my best efforts I couldn't find out which SPAM sculpture actually won. It better not be the pig.

As laughable as this is, I'd put this right up there with Andy Warhol's soup cans and Brillo boxes, perhaps even a level above -- it's much easier to mimic than to create, especially if the creation is out of nothing, or in this case, out of SPAM.

I'm not quite sure how this made the list. Maybe because it's such a creative, yet unfulfilling waste of time. Maybe because I've always looked at SPAM in the grocery store and wonder who buys it -- and now I'll look at it and wonder who buys it so they can then turn around and shape it to look like Stonehenge.

One final thought -- what does it say about your product, when people start calling e-mail abuse and the flooding of inboxes with unsolicited message by your company name? If you're SPAM, I think half the battle is trying to disassociate yourself with the horribly negative connotation associated with e-mail spam. And the other battle is trying to convince people that they should eat processed meat out of a can.

#7 - A figure skating page on cnnsi.com

On CNNSI.com's main page, there is a header on a drop-down menu that says "figure skating" which you can click on:

Which, once you've clicked on it, will then take you to this page:

The obvious question seems to be: why do they have a header for figure skating if they don't actually have any news about figure skating? It's as though CNN [perhaps I should start referring CNNSI.com as The Powers That Be -- after all, they are part of the media] feels obligated to at least have a mention of the sport on their site, but since they know nobody really cares about figure skating, they don't bother to update it. I'm guessing when they do eventually post something, they'll make an intern write about the intensity and courage the sport demands. Back to the point, not a single article is up there. Not one. There are about six advertisements, and not one piece of journalism. Did they delete all the articles that were written about figure skating? And if so, when did that take place? Or did they simply not ever write articles about figure skating? [and if that's the case, that brings us back to the question of why do they even have a header for figure skating in the first place?]

I'm even more baffled as to why there's not an archive of reports done during Olympics past -- the stories of Michelle Kwan, Nancy Kerrigan and the mentally unstable Tonya Harding (who subsequently became a not-so-successful female boxer). There simply had to be stories filed and published. But still,  not one story about figure skating during the Olympics on the "figure skating" page. [I keep bringing up the Olympics because if we're being honest, the Olympics are the only time anyone cares about this activity, which is certainly not a sport -- and if you disagree, you can read my blog about the criteria for sports here].

Anyways.

Those reports that had to have existed -- that were banged out on a typewriter and filed, and now got lost among the the tidal wave of information available on  the internet -- those reports remind me of an old set of silverware. When you're moving houses, you look at this set of silverware with little to no attachment, and you think that maybe you could get a couple bucks if you washed and polished them and then tried to sell them, but at the end of the day, it's just not worth the effort, so you chuck them and buy a brand new set instead. That's what figure-skating reporting means to me. 

To be clear, I wasn't actually visiting the site in search of figure skating news. But once I saw they had a page for it, I wondered "what goes on in the figure skating world in between Olympics, when the sport ceases to be relevant?" The answer, as it turns out, is nothing. Quite literally.


Funnily enough, if you go to the "Olympics" page on CNNSI, you'll find articles about figure skating -- but nobody employed by the Powers That Be has seemingly made the connection yet and linked the two, so the figure skating page remains naked. A fitting commentary on how relevant ice dancing is outside of the Olympics.

The empty page seems fitting in more ways than one, however. The page itself is straight out of a Joseph Heller scene: a website has a link you can click on, which once you click on it, tells you nothing about what you want to know, so you have to go back to the beginning and start over. And that somehow meshes perfectly with figure skating itself. We watch this bizarre sideshow on ice, hoping not to see a perfect run, but to see the most imperfect of runs -- ones where they wipeout at least once, twice would be better, and three times followed by an emotional melt-down would be ideal. We watch for their ridiculous outfits. We watch not to be inspired, but to see a fall and a reason to laugh. We go to their webpage not for information, but rather to see what there could possibly be to report. I guess the answer, for now at least, is nothing.

*Numbers 8-15 on the "Things That Actually Exist" list will follow in another blog.