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From the category archives:

Social Issues

My Handwriting

by Brian on September 23, 2009

in Blogs, LeBron James, Misc, Social Issues

ControlCenter2(Over at Cavs: The Blog today giving my interpretation of the movie Lebron recently signed to star in, Fantasy Basketball Camp.)

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how I write numbers.

This started late yesterday afternoon when I signed the document to your right, and took a good look at my interpretation of “22″.

What is that all about.

I’ve always known that I can swing both ways on my twos, but at worst, I thought it was a swing that took place maybe month-by-month, if not year-by-year. Never, ever, ever have I seen myself do this in an execution of a “22″.

If you have time, I’d love to see your “22″ – can you please write a “22″ and then like scan it into your computer and make a poster of it, and put that poster for sale on Amazon. Let me know when it’s up and I’ll buy one.

Also, do you think this means I’m a bad person.

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{ 8 comments }

The Next Twelve Posts

by Brian on July 10, 2009

in Readers, Social Issues, racism

THUNDERBREASTINYORKINSHIRE(I made it to the new domain…adjust your RSS feed accordingly.)

Okay, so in response to GOt’s backlash, these are all the proposed topics for the next ten blog posts, as submitted by you.

Since these were all so wonderful, I decided I’m going to cover every single one. There were twelve sets of submissions overall, so each set will get its own post. This will begin on Monday, and then nobody will ever be allowed to complain again.

These are listed in no particular order, although I’ve saved GOt’s for last, so that I can explain to him why exactly he doesn’t like what I write anymore.

This goes on…for awhile:
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{ 43 comments }

Internet Married

by Brian on June 13, 2009

in Blogs, Girls, Marriage, Money, Social Issues

KEllie Simpson(This is @kelliesimpson, my first Internet Wife.)

I don’t know if stuff like this goes on in like Second Life or those other online community games, but as all this social networking gets more real world, ie people are online who they are offline, I’m convinced there’s money to be made somewhere in the concept of Internet Married.

Whether it be a venue for heavy flirting as it is now (I’m Internet Engaged to at least 5 girls), or an actual non-legal but formal arrangement wherein you can only be internet married to one person at a time, there’s just something there.

For example, let’s say InternetMarried.com had like a lot of traffic, and the gist of it is that two people (who met on Twitter or wherever) decide they want to get Internet Married. It’s submitted to the community for a judgment, and then like some kind of something is issued.

(Naturally, you have an offshoot site called Internet Divorced.)

So like someone go run with that and get rich off of it. I think the real money would come when a real marriage came out of it, and then you started doing talk shows and writing books, pretending you’re some kind of relationship expert.

Oh – another idea I have is called Nuclear Internet, which is like the regular internet, but nuclear, and everything has like plutonium dripping everywhere. I don’t even think you need to issue judgments or have a central website for this, so like you could get started like immediately.

Thoughts on all of the above?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here – it’s available in paperback, or iPhone/Kindle for only 1.99.)

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{ 30 comments }

mc-bias(I had a typo doing a search for the explosion in this creation to your right, and typed out “oxplosion”. I’ll let you decide what one of those might be.)

I know some of the more vocal of you hate all the Twitter/social networking stuff when I bring it up, but I firmly believe it’s an essential representation of the next phase of the net, and the net as a whole is too large a part of how the world functions and communicates to just blow off as stuff for nerds.

Being the proponent of it that I am, old sports blog friend MC Bias wanted to take issue with me about the whole thing, since he feels it’s some kind of trendy fad for Generation Y on down.

He posted Part 1 of our IM chat yesterday. Today he’s posted Part 2, in which I lay out a very plausible scenario for what might be called Private Cleveland-Tokyo Party 2020.

If you’re at all interested in this stuff and where I think it’s headed, I recommend going over to look at it. (You may remember that I called “online video” a year before YouTube existed.)

Wow, today is so serious on the Fake Action Dot Com Website, isn’t it? That’s okay, because I’m building up to my full summary of Saved By the Bell Begins, which is the greatest movie not yet made, after Brad Radby’s The Exploders.

What are your thoughts on my thoughts? Would you like to attend something like the Private Cleveland-Tokyo Party 2020?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here – it’s available in paperback, or iPhone/Kindle for only 1.99.)

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{ 32 comments }

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about different ways to attack other countries, and I came upon the idea of giant water missiles.

Like you could hover them over the grid and be like really threatening with them, and all the countries would be scared because you’re just like, “Yeah, you guys are our enemies and you’re gonna be drenched.”

Just a thought.

All my sports blog friends – please don’t take offense to the following at all – it’s not a condemnation on the work you do. It’s simply what TOO MUCH INFO has ultimately resulted in for me.

Those of you who try to talk sports with me in various venues may be finding that it’s increasingly difficult to determine whether or not I have any idea whether or not I know what I’m talking about.

The cold, hard, harsh, viral truth of this tempest is because I probably don’t. I have, as of lasterday, dropped the last of the sports pages/blogs/sites from my feed reader. The only thing I do is go to NBA DOT COM to see when the big game is on.

(If you must know – that last one was Henry Abbot’s TrueHoop. It’s not a reflection on Henry – he’s a great writer and I like him tremendously. And I do still have Trey Kerby’s the Blowtorch on there, because if you look close, he’s not actually writing about sports.)

Somewhere I just found I was enjoying the games more, the less I read about them.

Now that I’m riding totally knowledge/analysis free and instead spending my time talking to girls on Twitter, it’s amazing. When it really hit me was when I found out Jason Terry was Sixth Man of the Year from the ABC broadcast. Like, a full day or so after it was announced, even.

I love trophies.

Anyone else experimented with living a life of under-saturation in the Age of Over-saturation? What’s your experience or thoughts on this in general?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here.)

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{ 58 comments }

3 Jobs I Could Never Do

by Brian on April 26, 2009

in LeBron James, Misc, My Art, NBA, Social Issues

(Y’know what’s weird? This little piece of Photoshop work I did in 30 seconds is actually kind of cool, and I bet people would think it was real el arte, if marketed correctly.

Like, wouldn’t you want a series of these hanging side by side in your office? “el kobe arte”, “el dwight arte”, “el shaq arte”, etc? It could be like all fake pretentious and stuff.)

I know some of you hate Twitter, and how I talk about Twitter, and how Twitter has stolen much of my attention, but here’s one time when Twitter just wasn’t enough.

Yesterday my fingers made this happen at some point:

3 jobs I would be horrible at: Cop, Teacher, Lawyer.

Being that this is a true statement, and one that I feel a raw, savage need to expand on, I will do so here. Think of it as a Twitter spin-off.

Now, many of you may think, “You just wouldn’t want to do them – if it was your job, you would.” This isn’t true – I’m incapable of doing things I don’t want to. Ask anyone I’ve ever worked for – given a task I can’t find some way to make myself in favor of, I quit.

That said, I can be creative in terms of finding ways to sway my own interest, so it’s not like I’m a perpetual quitter.

Way, way back in history, I spent a week doing basement waterproofing. Being that I wasn’t qualified to use any of the tools, my job was to carry buckets of broken cement from the basement to the truck. This was easily up there with “broken face” and “95mph car-rolled-over-three-times accident” in terms of awful things I’ve had to endure in my life.

I got through it by just moaning, “OH…THESE ROCKS ARE SO HEAVY…OH MAN…” at intermittent moments throughout the day, much to the annoyance of my white trash pot-smoking co-workers who all had cousins and/or wives in jail. (This was the main topic of conversation for the entire week.)

The moments between saying my mantra was filled with recalling and/or imagining how they would react when I said it. It usually involved swearing or smoking cigarettes or talking about the time they got shot and/or stabbed by their own sibling.

Anyway – I’ll try and keep these short:

1) Cop: I’d think every crime was hilarious, I’d let everyone go, I’d never want to wear my hat, and I’d shoot inanimate objects in random places for fun. I’d also be open to any and all forms of corruption. I’d have a gross misunderstanding of whether I was allowed to pull over girls just to flirt with them.

2) Teacher: I’d never stick to the lesson plan, I’d spend most of the day just hanging out with the kids instead of teaching, and I’d have a gross misunderstanding of whether I was allowed to flirt with the female students who were over 18 (or 16, depending) already. Nobody would ever get in trouble for anything, and my main concern would be whether or not I was considered the coolest teacher in school.

3) Lawyer: I’m a horrible negotiator, and I’d spend 90% of the time in court finding ways to scream, “THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!!” I’d have a gross misunderstanding of whether I was allowed to flirt with the female jurors, and once again, corruption would reign.

Now, I suppose pretending I have these “gross misunderstandings” is incorrect – I’d really just do whatever I wanted. But again, I would never have these jobs in the first place, so this isn’t necessarily a worry.

Cavs by four million today.

What are your three jobs you could never do, and why?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here.)

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{ 48 comments }

Due to increasingly being tagged in this over on my Facesbook, and in honor of the 250th post on BTAA, here is my official “25 Things You Didn’t Know About Brian Spaeth”.

1) I don’t want anyone to know anything about me.
2) I like to be an enigma.
3) I keep secrets about myself.
4) I have a bad shoulder tattoo.
5) One time, I didn’t tell anyone anything about myself.
6) I have been known to be private.
7) I have a twin sister.
8) My twin sister won’t tell you anything about me.
9) I wrote my entire family into the first and only novel I will ever write.
10) You can get $3 off that book through Monday with this promo code: JGPTR476
11) I make a wonderful chicken dish.
12) I use Twitter.
13) My Twitter feed is becoming more useful than my blog at generating humor.
14) I had to walk a horse around in the background of CSI:NY once, and Gary Senise told me I looked scared of the horse.
15) Gary Senise can see inside my soul with regard to horses.
16) I don’t like telling people things about me.
17) I don’t like you telling people things about me.
18) I like telling things about you, as long as it doesn’t involve me.
19) I don’t want anyone to know I am yoked.
20) I once had to kiss a girl on the set of Las Vegas, and I screwed up twice on purpose because her boyfriend was there.
21) Scoop Jackson is my favorite writer at ESPN, and I don’t think he gets a fair shake.
22) I ended Gilbert Arenas’s career. (Not on purpose.)
23) I once told a tall girl we needed to reproduce for the advancement of mankind.
24) I don’t want attention drawn to me that I did not initiate in some fashion.
25) All of this said, I love being the center of attention.

Really, my book has everything you could possibly want to know about me, plus it’s all fictionalized. Why haven’t you bought it yet?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here.)

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{ 83 comments }

So let’s start getting those sports blogger interviews out of the closet.

Up today is Cleveland Frowns – they write a blog about an alternate reality where all sports teams are named after facial expressions.

First though – this guy in the picture is like in his 30s – why are you dressing up like french fries? PP thinks he looks delicious, btw.

1) Your logo seems to be some kind of rocket, with a frowning football inside.

Why don’t you change the name of your site to Cleveland Browns Smiling Guys and have a picture of a boot, with a smaller boot inside of the first boot?
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{ 22 comments }

(The following is an excerpt from my book, Prelude to a Super Airplane. It can be purchased by clicking on any of the roughly 400 banners adorning this site, or by clicking here. It’s also available on Amazon.

I’ve posted the first 20 chapters (roughly 55 pages of PTSA) on this site. Links to each of those are at the end of this post, or you can download all of them as a pdf by clicking here.

I’m as excited about the election as anyone.

I wouldn’t paint myself as a political junkie – to be honest, I’ve never even voted. But look – how could you not be into all this “flying cars vs. airplanes” stuff?

The country hasn’t been this divided since The Civil War, and that was like, a long time ago or whatever.

Plus, for the first time in I don’t know how many years, we’ve got two over-60 white males running for President of These United States of America. This is historic stuff, and I’m not going to exclude myself due to apathy and ignorance again. Not this time.
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{ 3 comments }

So I was in the grocering store and noticed one of my favorite things – a new logo.

This one was for Sunkist, America’s most repected orange soda. (I had to check – yes, they still make Orange Crush.)

I don’t drink soda, so this could’ve happened years ago, although I have like a brain that makes new logos jump forward and highlight themselves in stores, so I doubt it.

(More checking – yes, this just happened last week.)

Now, because I’m weird, I checked to see if Sunkist had a Facebook group, and indeed it does.

Several people have left comments regarding the new logo, and that kind of passion for orange soda is amazing.

Check this out:

Skyler Hopf (Des Moines, IA) wrote
at 1:48am on November 18th, 2008
i hate the new design…its just not the same. but i still put it down just cuz its better than liquid gold, better than liquid platinum even.

Hate is such a strong word. I don’t like it either – it looks like a 1920s logo filtered through 2004. In any case, I need specifics, so I sent the following message to Skylar:

Hey man – my mom designed that new logo. I showed her your message and she’s pretty upset, but also curious how she could’ve done it better. Do you have any specifics on what you hate, or did you just think the old one should’ve been left alone?

No worries – let me know your thoughts, though. Thanks,

Brian

I know what you’re asking – “Hey, what’s wrong with you that you’re emailing some stranger at 4:30 in the morning, pretending your mom designed the Sunkist logo? Not only that, but you’re demanding some sort of justification for this person not liking your mom’s logo.”

The answer is, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really don’t.

(And Knicks fans…the Cavs lead the NBA in scoring. Not sure what more D’Antoni can offer, especially when LeBron is talking about defense being what really makes the Cavs a winner.)

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{ 9 comments }