A Newfound Celebrity...Of Sorts

Google.

What a fantastic creation that links the world together and allows access to information at the click of a mouse.

Information like:

"Who won the first world series?"

Answer: The Boston Americans (Later renamed the Boston Red Sox).

or

"How many packets of Kool-Aid would it take to fill the ocean?"

Answer: 732 quintillion packets "Oh Yeah!"

or

How to curse in sign language.

Google is also incredibly successful. As of 2011 Google's net worth is $190 Billion dollars.

To put that into perspective, if you were to produce the movie Avatar, buy the world's most expensive house (Antilla), buy a private island, A Private Jet, and a Tiger, then donated $300,000,000 to charity, and purchase The Batmobile (The Dark Knight Version), You would still have $188 Billion dollars left over.

Google is so popular that it is now a verb (examples: Google the answer, Google the site, I just googled myself).

Speaking of googling myself, that is another amazing thing that Google supplies us with,

immediate self-masterbatorial narcissism. With a simple click you can search all of the information the internet has about YOU! Where you live, your facebook page, and even links to your blog.

The final item that Google is good for, apparently, is porking me in the ass.

TWIST?!?!?

You must be confused.

"But Neil, you were just saying what a great invention Google was. Why are you being so negative toward Google now?"

Well, let me tell you.

Yesterday when my wife googled my name she found something interesting.

She found this:

Now you probably don't see anything wrong with

this picture...so let me narrow it down for you.

WHAT?!?!?

What you see in that picture is a link to a website called www.icelebsdb.com

From what I can gather, www.icelebsdb.com is a bullshit site.

It is a fake site that takes information from anyone who has an IMDB.com page and then post it on their website in order to link it to a celebrity porn site.

So now, when you google search my name a link pops up and claims to have "Nude Pi

ctures" and "Naked Hot Scenes" of me. And on the first page. Make no mistake...it's me that they are talking about. They have my full name, birthdate, and home town on record.

So, obviously there are no nude photos of me on the internet.

I mean seriously, the closest thing to a nude photo I even have is this...

And while I am flattered that they have lowered the standard of the word "celebrity" to include this pudgy, 26-year-old college student, I don't appreciate a site claiming to have nude photos and videos of me. The funny thing is...why are they using my name to promote their site, and is that strategy even working?

In all seriousness, if they wanted nude photos, all they had to do was ask.

Obviously this is a recent picture.

I really don't know what my legal recourse is here, but for the moment I guess I could find the server that houses the site and hope to God it's in the U.S. Maybe the site will be short lived and get shut down by people even more famous than myself. Or, for now anyway, I could just leave it be and use it as a conversation piece.

I can see it now: I'm somewhere in time and space, talking to a prospective client or colleague and when that inevitable dip in the conversation happens, I can pull out my ace in the hole: "Hey, (insert prospective client or colleague here) if you Google my name you will find a fake link to non-existent naked pictures of me."

Then we all laugh and become friends.

Or something like that.

It's Just RUBBER BANDS!!!!

Trends are a strange thing.
We all follow them (even if you think you haven't, you have), we all notice them, and we even come to despise them.

At my current age I am not naive enough to believe that trends won't surpass my understanding. But that doesn't keep the understanding of their popularity out of my reach.

For example:


Wacky Rubber Bands


















These are a cultural phenomenon. They cost anywhere between $1.00 a package to $1,250 on ebay.

What are Wacky Bandz (or the more popular Sillybandz), exactly?
They are just regular rubber bands in the shapes of animals...seriously.

In typical fashion they are FLYING OFF THE SHELVES! We have had kids and
teenagers come into my work who literally have been dragged out of the store screaming and crying because their parents didn't buy them a rubber band in the shape of a Plesiosaur.
But the more I scratch my head as to why these animal-shaped pieces of rubber were so popular, the more I realize my generation had dozens of trends that were just as stupid.

Here are some of them:

Stupid Trends From My Generation:

1. Slap Bracelets

















Slap bracelets were huge when I was in elementary school. It's basically a piece of flexible tin wrapped in fabric but that didn't stop every kid from wearing them when I was in elementary. It also didn't stop children from removing the fabric and weaponizing the bracelets like a prison shiv. Not to mention the whole idea was to take that piece of tin and slap it as hard as you can on your wrist.

2. Pogs



















The idea behind Pogs (other than being circular pieces of cardboard with pictures on them) was that you would stack up your Pogs upside down against an equal amount of your opponent's Pogs, and then use a heavy "slammer" to knock over as many Pogs as possible. Any Pogs that turned over face up now belonged to you. These bad boys were banned from my school because it was "gambling." They even created a student-run Big Brother organization to rat out the children who were playing with Pogs. They were called, and I'm not joking here, "Red Shirts" because they would wear red t-shirts. We got around the Pog Prohibition by staging fights on the other end of the school yard so that while the adults and newly appointed "Pog Gestapo" were busy breaking up the quarrel, we would play pogs. That's right, I was the Al Capone of Pog bootlegging.

3. Pokemon















I never really got into this one, but my little brother Glen did. He had all the cards and Nintendo Gameboy games, and watched the T.V. show after school. You have to hand it to Japanese marketers though: the idea was brilliant. Have all facets of industry devised around a system whose slogan is "Gotta catch'em all!" Like adult neuroses, it creates a basis that one's self-esteem is reliant on how many fictional monsters it can collect. Either way, it was really stupid.

P.S. - To anyone who read this section and said, "But Neil, those are Yu-Gi0-Oh cards in that picture; not Pokemon!" You should be ashamed of yourself.

4. Reebok Pumps & Air Jordans















Remember Michale Jordan (at least before he grew a Hitler mustache)? Remember shoes that you pumped up so they would cut off circulation to your feet? Well, they were all the rage in the '90s. I remember getting a pair of Reebok Pumps when I was a kid in the actual belief that they would make me jump higher...yes, I was a sucker for marketing when I was seven.

5. Boy Bands




















Remember when the only music coming out was manufactured bands filled with sexually ambiguous boys who looked like sexually ambiguous girls with auto-tuned vocals to songs they didn't write? You do? Then stick an ice pick into your eye.

6. TY Beanie Babies



















One day my newly married step-brother will have to explain to his wife why he has a storage closet stuffed to the rafters with TY Beanie Babies. My step-mom, step-sister, and step-brother collected these like they were rarities akin to the Shroud of Turin or the Mona Lisa.

People at school would claim that in several years their Beanie Baby would be worth "tons of money." Not sure if the Beanie Babies have become as popular as the lost Charlie Chaplin film but I'm not holding my breath.

As you can see, no matter how stupid some current trends are, we have to admit that ours were just as stupid.

Maybe worse...