The Real Lance Brown

I think this photo speaks for itself, but in case it doesn’t…

BIGFOOT IS HIDING IN AN ANTHILL IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD!

Click image to see shocking larger version

Or maybe it’s BIGFOOT CAPTURED BY ANTS IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT!

I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s clearly something. Theories are invited.

Last night I “live-tweeted” the movie Valley Girl (1983), starring Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman, as I watched it in full for the first time (on DVD). I really enjoyed the movie, and had fun tweeting along with it.

Here’s what came out, unedited:

22:34:51 Watching “Valley Girl”. I know, I’m like, such a fad whore. #grody
22:36:00 bitchin
22:36:42 totally
22:39:02 Nic Cage’s chest hair is in the shape of a Nerf boomerang. I don’t remember that fad. #ValleyGirl
22:39:22 gross me out
22:39:42 I’m so sure!
22:41:40 Wow, what’s Twitter got against “get real”? I tried to post that twice. Totally not bitchin, Twitter. Get real!
22:44:51 The music at this Valley Girl party is nearly inaudible. I get a real sense of what it’s like to be a dancing extra in a movie.
22:45:32 He’s such a total pukeoid…
22:46:31 Freak me out, freak me out, it’s him!
22:49:03 I may be live-tweeting Valley Girl for the next little while, in case you haven’t gathered. I’ll stop if you donate $10K to Japan relief.
22:49:58 “Like, it’s sushi, don’t you know?” I shit you not that line was said within 30 seconds of my last tweet.
22:52:59 Nic the Nerf boomerang-chested just spotted our Valley Girl. Maybe this party doesn’t suck so bad after all, say his eyebrows…
22:53:32 He saw her earlier on the beach, but she didn’t recognize him without his Nerf boomerang chest hair out.
22:54:49 Tommy, the coolest asshole in school, just got Valley G’s BFF to betray her, then shit on her. (Not literally…this was the 80′s, folks.)
22:56:57 I guess they were able to get DVD rights for “Electric Avenue”, because that was cranked up nice at the party.
22:57:53 (Nerf-chest Nic is heading back to the party to re-fight asshole Tommy.)
23:03:13 Nic used the old hide-in-the-bathroom gambit to bypass Tommy-fighting and romance Valley G.
23:04:33 I am simply gonna freak out and die!
23:05:00 Like I’ll be totally bummed out if anyone outside this car finds out about this!
23:07:03 “Hey Harvey! I thought you were gonna get the mohawk!” “Nah, I pussed out.”
23:08:05 Nic, his punk friends, and Valley G and her high-strung friend are cruising the streets in the convertible.
23:08:30 Just one punk friend, sorry.
23:09:28 Reminder: I’m live-tweeting Valley Girl; donate $10 to Japan relief efforts and I’ll stop immediately.
23:10:13 Oh my God, like don’t you have a straw? Totally out of touch with civilization.
23:11:16 In the punk club. Valley G and tight-wound are looking down their noses at Nic’s “home away from home” crowd.
23:11:48 Nic: “that techno rock you guys listen to is gutless!” Valley G: “I’m sure!”
23:12:43 “You’re like her! And all the rest of her friends! You’re all fucking programmed.” -Nic #ValleyGirl
23:15:51 Valley G’s starting to melt. “It’s like I can’t explain it, you know. It’s like my brains won’t stop going! You know?”
23:16:38 They kiss.
23:18:22 Now out at make-out point. Even tight-wound friend Stacey is letting the veil down, if you get my meaning.

Read more…

Online humor site Cracked.com has compiled a series of quite funny simulated Google searches:

If Google Search Results Had a Sense of Humor

Enjoy!

I entered the Outside the Beltway Thursday Caption Contest this week. I’m hoping the prize is like a million dollars or something, but regardless of any money or fame that may come from my entry, I achieved “first commenter” status for sure. And no one can ever take that away from me.

Once I win, all of America will of course know my winning caption, and it will be taught to schoolchildren around the world, but if you want to get ahead of the curve, you can find it at the top of the pile here.

There may still be time to enter (if you’ve got the guts); I’m not sure if it’s Thursday only or what. (Or if there is a prize, or anything else about the contest, for that matter.)

The winner is announced Monday. Then: glory, fame, and all my dreams come true. One would assume.

I listen to quite a few comedy podcasts, all of which are included in Joe Berkowitz’s A Seriously Comprehensive Guide to Comedy Podcasts.

His guide starts out with a lot of detail, and then the size and depth of the reviews shrink as you get nearer to the end. I’m assuming this is because for Joe to truly listen to and fully review all these podcasts would take a great deal of time. As it is, I’m sure his guide is a work of passion that has eaten up at least a few minutes of his day. Because it really is seriously comprehensive. (Though I don’t see the Onion News Network’s hilarious podcast there, so it’s not completely comprehensive. Just seriously.)

I haven’t listened to most of these podcasts, so I hesitate to suggest my favorites as preferable to what may be equal or better alternatives on the list. I will say that I look for and look forward to new episodes of the following regularly: WTF w/Marc Maron, Doug Loves Movies, Pod F. Tompkast, Never Not Funny, The Nerdist, and most newly, Judge John Hodgman. All of which are linked to in Joe’s guide. (And the Onion News Network, of course, which as of this writing is not. Which doesn’t make my first sentence here false, BTW, because the ONN podcast is a video one, and I said all the ones I listen to are in Joe’s list.)

<demystifying>A “podcast” is simply an Internet show (audio or video) that you download, or view or listen to on the Web. The name comes from the fact that they originally grew popular via iPods, but they are just regular .mp3 files, usually. </demystifying>

I’m definitely not one of those people who sticks my nose up at folks posting relatively ordinary occurrences from their day on Twitter.

I’ve been on the Internet for a long damn time, and one of the things that makes it great is its ability to bridge the invisible divide that has grown between “strangers” in the world. (And between the haves and have-nots, and the powered and the powerless, and so on.)

As we become more distinctive and narrowed in our daily lives–honing in on what we know and love, and excluding the rest–it’s more important than ever to remember that we’re all still human beings, and we all have a lot in common. Including mundane things, like eating, dealing with traffic, flying on planes, watching TV, whatever.

Mini-mountain, yes...but self aware? Not yet-- maybe.

Especially with the flattening power of social media, where people who were formerly at a mythical distance from us are sharing themselves directly with fans and followers on a daily basis, it’s the mundane commonalities that help us to restructure our thoughts in a way that helps demystify the unhealthy societal hierarchies of the past. (Reality TV does the same thing in a way, but we’ll save that for another time.)

Put plainly, it’s a hyper-extension of the old mantra “we all put our pants on one leg at a time”. While I don’t know if there is a social media site yet that focuses on that specific mundane activity, people are sharing so-called “boring” details, vignettes, pictures, and snippets from their lives all the time…and while it’s popular and easy to sneer at such sharing, it’s also short-sighted and snobbish.

So don’t let anyone tell you that what you’re having for dinner, and how you feel about it, isn’t important. It is. I’ll explain more why that’s so as the year goes on, but for now, just trust me. You go ahead and share whatever the hell you want, and screw the haters. Send your frustrated partner, friend, or parent here if they have a beef with it. (If you’ve been sent here in accordance with that instruction: I know better than you about this stuff, and the person who sent you here is right about the sharing. Get off their case!)

Wow…I had no idea what was going to come out when I started to introduce my salad tweets from today, and the salad of which they spake. And I ended up creating a bridge of healing for divided couples everywhere. You never know what you’ll get when you tap into the Lance well!

Predecessor to the salad that will eat your family

Anyway…I’ve been on a major salad jag lately. I’ve always been a big fan of vegetables–I was one of those kids who was easy in that regard–but as a marginally-domesticated bachelor, I haven’t always managed to get salad into my life as much as my tastes would seem to support.

But, having decided to go the salad way for a while, I have been plunging in with earnest dedication–almost to a fault. (If we want to blame someone–and let’s assume we do–we should probably blame Robin Mallery and her call to create “6-color salads”.)

It takes about an hour to whip up one of my super-salads these days, and until today I was using a normal-sized wooden serving bowl and just ridiculously over-filling it, to the point where trying to serve from it, or toss or stir the salad, became a messy ordeal. And with my escalating madness, I was reaching the point where I ran out of space before I ran out of ingredients, so I’d end up with a giant-but-incomplete salad, with any new ingredients just spilling off the sides pointlessly.

So today I bit the bullet and went with the big plastic bowl–which, if I end up over-filling the way I did its predecessor, will be holding a salad that could potentially threaten a mid-size city, or more.

Such was the subject of a series of tweets from me today, as I realized the full consequences of my descent into Frankensteinishly hazardous food-preparation shenanigans.

WARNING: This is your last chance to back out before I pull away the curtain to expose the sad truth behind the inevitable hellscape future that I have unintentionally set into motion. You can still remain blissfully ignorant of your impending doom if you back out now. Read more…

In an extremely unexpected turn of events, I have launched a site dedicated to jokes about the new Republican National Committee chairman with the funny name, Reince Priebus. The site is called (surprise!) ReincePriebusJokes.com. It’s mostly based off of tweets that I have skimmed off of the Internet – some 250+ jokes have been re-tweeted at the Twitter account @jokesonreince, and 150+ of them have been copied over to ReincePriebusJokes.com. (Technical difficulties have made the others not get copied over, but you can see them all at the Twitter page. I will get them all on the site soon enough.)

I take at least a little pride in the fact that the new site was the #1 result at Google for “reince priebus jokes” within 24 hours of launching. Unless something weird happens, I expect it will hold that spot for a long time to come. That’s part of what made me decide to go ahead with launching the site (after it loosely crossed my mind, when I invented the idea of the site in a tweet about all the Reince Priebus jokes from the day). I may discuss the reasons behind the site’s genesis more soon. In the meantime, feel free to check out the jokes, join in the fun, follow the site on Twitter if you want, and certainly pass the word to anyone who you think might enjoy this strange combination of comedy, wordplay, politics, and social media.

I have no idea where this might go. My goal is to automate it as much as possible, or maybe to delegate to folks who want to keep building the library and the community around it. We will see. I do know that as long as Reince Priebus is a national political figure, there will be Reince Priebus jokes, and as long as there are Reince Priebus jokes, there will be ReincePriebusJokes.com. Unless I get bored with it or sell it for hush money. (Big hush money, any of you hush-money dreamers.)

Here are the tweets that led up to the site’s formation… Read more…

The following will not appear in the “Lifestyles of the Natural & Professional” section of the upcoming issue of The Simplifier:

————————

Oh, to be the young upstart! The new guard, the fresh blossom; it’s so inspiring and exciting…to beat the crusty, lame, old, creaky…

I’m speaking, of course, of the feud between the Project Simplify and Natural Professional Facebook “fan pages”. We (The Natural Professional) are totally crushing Project Simplify! I mean, they’ve had a fan page since like 2009 (and I don’t mean December 2009)—and we already have more than twice as many fans. And we’ve only had a fan page since like 2009 (and I do mean December)!

Just to be clear, we (Project Simplify) are proud to see our little N.P. having such early success, and we’re totally not jealous at all. (Because, of course, we know we’re largely responsible for said success.)

Well, that’s very big of you, Project Simplify, and we (The Natural Professional) would like to point out that PS is totally not old and dusty and archaic at all. And we will absolutely try to remember them when we get rich and famous.

Hey—no need to get nasty! We Project Simplify have a few cards we could play too—you The Natural Professional might want to remember that…

You see what we (the Shawn Tuttle and Lance Brown) have to deal with here? Simplification can be so ironic!

I don’t know exactly how to settle this feud, but I can tell you—and this is confidential—that Project Simplify is genuinely happy to see the blossoming of The Natural Professional’s presence on Facebook, and would like to encourage you to become a “fan” if you aren’t already. It will work out its jealousy issues in time. ;-)

B.L. Ochman’s blog: Why You Should Stop Sleeping With Your Laptop

Recently, at a Tweetup, several of my online buds admitted that they sleep with their laptops. They said they check their email when they get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Sorry guys, but that’s just nuts.

I’ve rebelled. This summer, for the first time in a long, long time, I unplugged for a couple of weeks. Two weeks – count ‘em – unplugged. No computer. No email. No compulsive tracking of Twitter. No updating any of the three blogs I write. No FriendFeed, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Flickr, or iPod Touch. No Seesmic. No Skype. No TV. DIdn’t even read a newspaper most days.

A curious thing happened.

…

Read B.L.’s whole blog post (keep reading far enough and you’ll even find me, in the comments section.)

I like that Ben Stilller (@redhourben on Twitter) took this humble-yet-funny approach to introducing his online presence to the new Web:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCt6XcxemKo&amp;feature=channel

His short video where he introduces Mickey Rooney to Twitter is cute too:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f30D3LSe-kY&feature=channel

Palo Alto  – In a move sure to send shockwaves across the Facebook universe, Facebook executives announced early this morning that the company would be purchasing social media giant Facebook, and would begin folding its features into Facebook as soon as possible.

This move, which was announced via an updated status message on Facebook, comes right on the heels of the 250-million-member site’s purchase of competitor FriendFeed, and their subsequent announcement of “Facebook Lite”. Company executives say the timing of this third move was intentional.

“We really wanted to find a way to build on the momentum of our other two big announcements this week,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “And what better way to demonstrate our commitment to being Internet game-changers than to buy our own company? I don’t think anyone would disagree that we look like a great investment. And Facebook met us at a price we couldn’t pass up!”

Initial buzz among industry watchers was positive. @SocialMediaKING tweeted, “FB + FF + FL + FB > TW”, and @Top_SEO_Guy replied, “Right? I’d totally buy Facebook right now, LOL. #nobrainer”

Similar sentiments were echoed in comments on people’s messages at FriendFeed, and even at Posterous and Tumblr. Facebook’s fan page on Facebook gained nearly 200,000 fans in the hours since the buyout, and the resultant 200,000 wall postings on members’ profiles have received an unprecedented 3 million “Likes” in that same time period.

About this last bit of news, technology maven Robert Scoble was initially rumored to have tweeted, “3 million – that’s a lot of likes”, but it is now believed that quote was a fake retweet.