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THE QUOTE
The Countess: You are a great lover!
Boris: I practice a lot when I’m alone.
— Dialogue from Woody Allen‘s “Love and Death”
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FLYING SOLO
So, the guy who made that viral Kony video was caught in the self-service aisle in public in San Diego.
Man. Isn’t that the most humiliating scandal a human being could possibly endure?
Here’s the latest hot video on You Tube, (minus the tug action, natch):
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It’s even worse than the scandal poor Paul Reubens endured a little more than 20 years ago. Remember? Reubens was nabbed with his stage-namesake in his hand in a porn movie theater. Just in case you were living under a rock back then, Paul Reubens was Pee-wee Herman.
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If some evil mad scientist pointed a ray gun at me and said I’d have to make a choice between being torn to shreds by crocodiles or being caught masturbating in public, I’d still be sitting there in the crosshairs a half hour later trying to decide.
Reubens/Pee-wee at least was operating the joystick within the confines of an arena wherein that type of activity is considered sporting. This Jason Russell character, though, was scratching the itch while in the nude on a well-traveled big city street corner.
Russell
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The first reports on the Russell incident indicate that witnesses thought he was drunk or on drugs.
Trust me, if I were Russell I’d jump on that alibi like a hunk of floating debris in the middle of the Pacific. But his family hastened to shout out to the inquiring media that their dear boy has never, ever had a problem with drugs or alcohol and couldn’t possibly have been in an altered state at the time of the incident.
Gee thanks, mom and pop.
The statement issued by Russell’s family says he was suffering from dehydration. Now, I’ve suffered from dehydration a couple of times in my life and on neither occasion did the idea of yanking the package out for a little exercise cross my mind.
In fact, I’m willing to bet that of the seven billion souls alive on this planet at this time, the number who would buy that excuse is statistically negligible.
Anyway, my pal Anna in Los Angeles told me last night that she went to an Invisible Children event not long ago. Here’s the transcript of our chat about it (all sic):
Anna: invisible children had a screening of one of their films last year on campus…
this is when I was really broke, so i went for the free pizza…
and i can’t remember specifics, just that despite it’s obviously on the side of good, it was extremely manipulative and poorly structured…
i sat thru about a 1/2 hour of it before leaving…
and that 1/2 was more about the filmmakers than about the sudanese war and child soldiers.
but i’d had enough pizza by then.
me: At least you got pizza.
Anna: domino’s, but hey, food’s food.
The Kony 2012 thing has been called the single most viral video of all time. I have a feeling it’ll be a short-lived title-holder.
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SHE BOP
Out of the cesspool that was 80’s music (or should I say 80’s “music”?) Cyndi Lauper emerged as one of the very few recording artists whose cassette tapes were worth keeping.
For those of you who are younger than 35 or so, this was the fate of every music cassette ever manufactured:
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Now then, Lauper hit it huge with her song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” back in 1983. A year later, she hit again with her ode to masturbation, “She Bop.”
Lauper never explicitly mentioned the art of self-love in the song because she wanted it to get widespread airplay. She once told Howard Stern that she’d hoped kids would interpret it to be about dancing and then, as they got older, they’d understand what it was really about.
Cyndi Lauper has never been caught masturbating in public.
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My takeaway of the Kony 2012 mess is this: 1) we are tired of being jerked around, even by those on the side of the good. 2) if you are telling somebody else’s story, get yourself out ofthe picturet; let the people it’s happening to, do the talking and the analysis. 3) if you intend to go viral and global with your campaign, you have to be impeccable: cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, get an external audit done of your finances, be completely transparent about your structure and actions. 4) direct the emotions you’ve aroused in an audience towards actions that affect the problem; supporting you with donations is a side issue.