February 12, 2010 | lists

Cynics might regard the hype surrounding Valentine’s Day as being the invention of the makers of chocolates, the sellers of flowers, and the pourers of drinks to lonely depressed people fighting off the suffocating gloom with high-octane booze. There may be some truth in such a cynical outlook and we did toy with the idea of launching our own line of Shark Guys’ Valentine’s Day cards (sample caption: “Born Alone. Die Alone. Happy Valentine’s Day.”), but we have decided instead to provide this “How to” for the heart.

These tips are for those alone this Valentine’s Day who would like to have someone with whom they can share their views that the day is utter bosh next year, as well as those who already have somebody and are convinced they can do better.

Here then are The Shark Guys’ First Date Tips!

Before the date:

1. For your online dating profile, use a self-portrait taken with a camera phone, which demonstrates that you dance nimbly on the cutting edge of technology and confers self-confidence that others can only achieve surrounded by friends with digital cameras in a social setting. Make sure the setting is dark — any physical imperfections should be kept hidden until you meet because by then running away would be awkward for your date.

2. Select a venue that does not have a listed telephone number and a place that could not possibly be found without being deeply familiar with the area. Should your date actually find the place, this demonstrates both how in-the-know you are socially, as well as his/her level of resourcefulness and how committed the person is to making things work.

3. Alternatively, when choosing a place to meet, say you know this great place with healthy food and a clean bathroom and will email the details. Google the nearest interstate truck stop diner and forward the information.

4. Arrange to meet at a coffee shop, drink 11 cups of the strongest coffee you can before the date, and once there, order water, say you never drink coffee, and deny that you are in any way more animated or energetic than normal.

5. Suggest something competitive like bowling or a tennis match. This not only gets the circulation going and fires up all the right hormones, but it gives you the opportunity to show your incredibly competitive nature and instill respect in your date via a humiliating defeat.

6. Prepare a list of topics of conversation. Avoid banal topics such as hobbies, pets, and favorite movies and instead go for the stuff that can really spice up a conversation like your views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During the date:

1. Rave about how Maury Povich and the science of DNA testing are not to be trusted.

2. Excuse yourself from the table, go to the bathroom, climb out a window and re-enter through the front door, introducing yourself again as if meeting your date for the first time. (Must find rare restaurant that offers escape via bathroom window beforehand.)

3. Ask your date to pull your finger and when he/she does, tell them you are incapable of forging an emotional bond with another human being.

4. A confident man will order for his date. This gives the woman an instant, post-date talking point with her friends.

5. Women enjoy being asked lots of questions. Some possibilities include:  “Are you bondable?”, “Have you kept your hepatitis vaccines up to date?” and “Do you support or reject Roe V Wade?”

6. Arrange for the waiter to continually refresh your water. This will ensure numerous trips to the bathroom and surreptitious updates to your friends via text.

7. Put your cellphone on the table. This acknowledges how much you value human social interaction. Answer it every time it rings, but never in the presence of your date, which would be rude. Excuse yourself from the table and talk for as long as you like.

8. Ask if she has any cute friends as this is good to know if things go sour. If she objects, backtrack and say that you’re asking on behalf of your cousin, who coincidentally has the same mobile phone number as you.

9. Complain about everything. Having a critical eye and pointing out slow service or how this particular dish of chicken tikka masala is worse than all that have come before it in your life shows that you are a discerning person who refuses to settle for second best.

10. If dining, time a long bathroom break for around the time you expect the bill to arrive. (One way to help this along is to get the attention of a waiter, make the international hand signal for wanting the bill, and point a thumb in the direction of your table). If  the bill is not paid by the time you return, look disgusted as you pull bills out of your wallet and throw them on the table.

After the date:

1. Send a text within the half-hour, unambiguously asking how things went, ideally using a 1-10 scalar model. This makes a response straightforward.

2. Post a Facebook status update (provided you’re already Facebook friends) announcing the date’s incogitable success and how you’re mulling over a second meet-up.

3. Ignore people who say you have to wait a reasonable amount of time before contacting someone after a first date, lest you set off down the road to a restraining order. Email the next day and let your date know that you had a pleasant time, and that this relationship feels like it has much more potential than your previous two marriages and countless casual flings.

4. Sending flowers after a first date is cliched. Send lottery tickets instead.

February 5, 2010 | Sports, lists

The Greatest Show on Earth – this weekend at least, and provided the neighbors remember to shut their curtains – is the Super Bowl. While the World Cup draws a much larger global audience, it can’t measure up to the NFL’s manifestation of greed, garishness, and hyperbole (and that’s just the halftime show).

One of the main reasons sports exist, besides giving gamblers something to bet on other than whom among them will die of coronary disease first, is to please people who have a thirst for a never-ending source of statistics and trivia that will probably never be useful even on Celebrity Jeopardy: High School Dropout Edition.

Did you know that more toilets are flushed during the Super Bowl’s half-time show than at any other time of year? And in a related “fact”, that the phrase, “Holy Christ Bob, what have you been eating? Light a candle next time for chrissake!” is said more on Super Sunday than at any other time of year? (Editor’s Note: Snopes says despite popular belief, people do not sit in agony with bodily functions threatening to rupture something internally during Super Bowl games, and there is no truth to the rumor that city sewage systems have been crippled by half-time loaf-pinching.)

We can’t fault broadcasters with more airtime to fill than a direct flight to Singapore for regaling us with facts such as how teams playing in domed stadiums and those going by the name “Buffalo Bills” have never won a Super Bowl. We wish though that broadcasters would spice up Super Bowl coverage by focusing on the game’s darker side, the seamy past of a game as rich in its vices as the meals of its offensive linemen (an accurate term) are in calories.

Here we attempt to redress this disparity with our Top 10 Super Bowl Disgraces,  and no, Bills fans, we’re not going after you again – these do not involve on-field play.

10. A Not-So-Winning Streak

It was 2004 and an embattled American football-watching public was on the line to the guardians of public decency after being forced to gaze at the unholy specter of Janet Jackson’s nipple. Just before the second half began, Briton Mark Roberts, the World’s Most Prolific Streaker (he has a broad range and is considered the Meryl Streep of nudity in front of sprinting naked at public sporting events), ran onto the field dressed in a referee’s outfit, took that off and did a dance. Yes, the unsightly photo to the right is a still from this performance. But, like a three-game winning streak for the Toronto Raptors, this streak had to come to an end sooner than later — members of the New England Patriots and Carolina Panthers as well as police and security tackled him and he was taken into custody. And if there was ever any question as to how seriously Americans take their football, the incident resulted in the Brit being banned from the US.

9. Enough to drive a man to drink and drive

Drinking and driving is of course disgraceful, but it’s easier to get laughs from looking at attempts to curb the activity during Super Bowl weekend.

This creative effort from the Roseville, California police department is typical of efforts to speak in the language of the drunken Ripped and Ready to Ride football fan. Presumably the prospect of losing one’s license or ending up a vegetable after a wreck does not penetrate to the heart of the football, but ones things are laid out in game terms the message comes across:

* HUDDLE with your teammates before the game and designate a sober driver.

* RUN to the phone and call a taxi cab or a sober friend for a ride home, or

* PASS on going out, and enjoy the game at home.

A more accurate rundown of Super Sunday:

*HUDDLE outside as you smoke weed.

*RUN to the bathroom to throw up

*PASS out.

8. A Super Bowl Ring of A Different Sort

Trivia time: The NFL pays $5,000 for each of up to 150 Super Bowl rings, which then go on to become the most oft-cited pieces of jewelery in sports-related crime reports.

Here we are talking about a Super Bowl ring that involved thieves, not the guys at the ticket or beer stands, but a consortium of pickpockets and other scoundrels who formed a Super Bowl crime ring for the big game in northern California in 1985. About 20 to 30 pickpockets plied their trade at the San Francisco airport, and three were arrested for stealing luggage. Police later found $800,000 in property at their hotel, as well as weapons and jewelry. It would be one of the few times in history when a big news story would link crime and the Super Bowl and a team executive would not have to arrange bail payment for a player.

7. Marion Barry, DC Mayor / Stanley Wilson’s nose candy binge, Super Bowl XXIII.

As blizzards buried Washington in 20 inches of snow in late January 1987, Barry, no stranger to the white stuff himself if you catch our drift, relaxed in Pasadena on a Super Bowl vacation. As public works officials fumbled, the mayor partied, eventually collapsing after smoking cocaine “laced with something”, according to a friend. Stanley Wilson, in keeping with the team ethos the Cincinnati Bengals have developed over the years, was found face down in the Peruvian marching powder and missed the big game.

6. Koo-Koo-Ka-Choo Mr. Robinson

Having happened in  less than 24 hours, this has to be one of the quickest falls from grace in NFL history. On the day prior to the 1999 Super Bowl in Miami, Atlanta Falcons free safety Eugene Robinson spent the morning accepting the Bart Starr Award for “high moral character” from a Christian group called Athletes in Action. The appropriateness of the name of the award wouldn’t become apparent until later that same evening when Robinson was arrested by an undercover officer for offering her $40 for sex.

5. Embezzling Down Pats

In 1997, Sheriff’s officials arrested a Spring Valley man accused of embezzling more than $100,000 from the New England Patriots football team, and of selling fraudulent Super Bowl tickets in Massachusetts. Of course, the Patriots and their current head coach are no strangers to cheating, having used spy cameras to monitor opponents. As mentioned here previously, a better name for them would be the New England Patriot Acts.

4. Things get weird at half-time

Of Bruce Springsteen’s 2009 Super Bowl half-time performance, Seattle PI wrote: “The best part of the show was when Springsteen did a good old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll power slide across the stage and landed, crotch first, on an NBC camera. After the ill-fated Springsteen slide, The Boss got right up and was all smiles.”

In 2007, Prince also reminded the football-loving public of man’s ability to fornicate during the half-time show when an image of him playing his guitar was projected onto a a large sheet and some were left wondering if he was just happy to see everybody.

3. Tail-Gate Terror?

Tailgate parties are the best way to support your team that involves getting your face-painted, getting drunk, and hopefully throwing up on the car of a VIP. In 2008, a 36-year-old restaurant owner, was upset with authorities for denying him a liquor license. To right this injustice he did what all people looking for a quick and satisfactory conclusion to their beefs do: he began writing insane letters to different newspapers. In these, he promised a “revolution” (presumably the aim of the revolution was to ensure that anyone who wants a Bacardi Breezer can have one, regardless of age), and carnage, which he said would be “swift and bloody”.He brought a semi-automatic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition to a parking lot near University of Phoenix Stadium where tailgate activities were taking place, but did not go through with his promised act of violence and ended up turning himself in.

2. Raider Riots 2003.

The interesting thing about sports-related riots is that they can occur even after a victory, such as the riots in Montreal that happen any time the Canadiens hockey team does anything even remotely successful, like catch the bus on time. A combination of heavy “victory drinking”, and the exuberance of triumph being channeled in the most destructive manner possible means that a win for the home team could mean a hometown businessman filling out insurance forms the following morning for destroyed property. Even then though, people tend to go about turning over police cars and setting random fires with the kind of joie de vivre and good spirits attached to victory.

Things get meaner when the hometown loses, as they Oakland Raiders did in the 2003 Super Bowl. Oakland fans burned 12 cars, did a bunch of other damage; a McDonald’s restaurant was also among the collateral damage, which goes to show that every descent into anarchy has its bright spots.  It took 400 cops to quell the melee. Said one rioter: “If they would’ve won, we wouldn’t be doing this.”

1. Superbowl brawl, and subsequent murder: the Ray Lewis case.

The NFL is often dubbed the National Felon League and that seems unfair until you consider the fact that when Ray Lewis was arrested for murder, he was the second player in the league to face that charge in two months. Lewis was at a Super Bowl party in 2000 with two friends when a fight broke out with another group — two members of that group were stabbed to death. He beat the murder charge, but the public’s association between his name and murderous brawling did not endear him to Disney. Despite being the Super Bowl MVP, Lewis did not get the sponsorships to go with it and missed his moment with Mickey and the “I’m going to Disneyland [to elbow my way past the autograph hounds, sign a major promotional contract and swim in money!]” .

February 1, 2010 | lists

In case you missed the Google alert, the newspaper industry has been snatched out of its boat by a crocodile we’ll call the internet and is now in the midst of its death roll at the bottom of the swamp. Publishers, the slow-to-move idiot who suggested, “This seems like a perfectly safe place to drop anchor and rub animal guts against the side of the boat”, are now reacting to the disaster their torpid business practices and shortsighted greed brought upon the industry with desperate, futile countermeasures.

Publishers tend to look past their own culpability when it comes to fewer newspapers and more Jehovah’s Witness flyers ending up in mail slots when they centralized production at the expense of killing any interest a reader in a specific locale might have had in picking a paper up.

Instead of addressing fundamental flaws in the way they do business, the oxygen-deprived brain trust, compounds them. For example, Newsday, with the 11th-highest US circulation, recently restricted access to its online content to paid subscribers.

After three months, execs were asked how many people had signed up. When the reporter who posed the question heard the response, he asked for it to be repeated because he couldn’t’ believe his ears. It was ‘35’, which is even fewer people than the most unpopular Facebook user has on his friend list, and would mean a pretty poor turnout at a funeral, which in a way this is. It should serve as an example to any other newspaper that reckons it can turn “this internet thing” around by opting for a solution that would only work with a time machine and topless celebrities or a huge amount of luck.

But we have a soft spot for newspapers — until a shut-in is able to turn his rent-subsidized apartment into a firetrap by stockpiling items of interest collected from the internet, we will not fully accept the web’s takeover of written content. Here then is our gift to newspaper publishers worldwide, who were left wondering what else can be done after Newsday’s failure to get people to pay for online content — 25 Ways To Save The Newspaper Industry!

1. Promote heavy Sunday editions as non-fatal weapons for battles among inner-city youth.

2. Convince sports fans of the benefits of reading about games the day after they’ve been played and analyzed in minute detail online and on TV.

3. Dump all remaining full-time staff members in favor of those willing to work below the poverty level and interns, who are willing to work for free in exchange for valuable on-the-job training to prepare them for a career in an industry that will be completely dead in five years.

4. To eliminate delivery costs, have publications delivered to fulfill community service obligations (DUI recidivists with revoked licenses would be issued a wagon, the On the Wagon program).

5. Offer readers the opportunity to have columnists read them their work in person over breakfast.

6. Fire overpaid columnists and give their jobs to writers of letters to the editor who are just as well informed if not more so.

7. Get social media friendly by limiting stories to 140 words each, and offer to customize coverage to focus on developments in the lives of subscribers’ Facebook friends.

8. Make up names for central figures and places in crime stories to avoid costly lawsuits due to sloppy reporting. For example: Police arrested a suspect, let’s call him Melvin, for murdering his boss, let’s call him Chuck, at a downtown fast food franchise, let’s call it purveyor of knock-off Mexican food that gives this reporter diarrhea.

9. Abandon paper publishing entirely and have reporters read their copy online prefaced by 2-3 minutes of video advertising and/or pornography. Don’t like it? Rely on local unsubstantiated gossip for your daily news.

10. Get friendly with the arts and crafts people at rehabilitation centers and offer to source hats made out of newspapers for them.

11. Insist on press releases with quotes from notables already included. This cuts down on the time it takes to spell check and think up a headline pun.

12. When in doubt, pun.

13. New slogan for industry wide ad campaign: “Newspapers: they can also be used for wiping your ass while in captivity.”

14. Remember, Naked News need not have a monopoly on naked news.

15. Install razor sharp pincers in newspaper vending machines to pluck off the pinky finger of anybody who goes for more than one copy at a time.

16. Encourage staff members to take part-time work as PR writers so they get to see the start of the news cycle of most every story in newspapers these days.

17. Push reporters’ cars into nearest lake, thus saving the awkward “We can’t pay your gas expenses” talk.

18. To curb labor costs, have readers write their own reviews of restaurants, bars, tourist attractions. Wait, this is called Yelp.

19. Negotiate exclusive publishing rights with professional athletes for their blog content. After a big game, the athletes can share with readers what they thought of the game without busybody sports reporting intermediaries.

20. Film low-cost documentaries about behind-the-scenes news room goings-on with lots of journalism-specific product placement advertising—Gentleman Jack, Lucky Strikes, Starbucks.

21. Restore newspapers’ credibility by reversing trend toward advertorial writing — advertising rewritten to appear as a news item — by rewriting news stories in ad speak. “Swine flu, it’s not just for unhygienic farm hands any more.

22. Charge people a dollar a letter in the crossword puzzle.

23. Introduce a $50 prize to anyone who can spot the exact location of a “word of the day” in the print edition. For added fun, find a creative way to insert the special word into obituaries and announcements of foreclosures.

24. Make the job of paperboy more lucrative by giving the person something more valuable than newspapers to deliver, like firewood or drugs.

25. Encourage young people into the profession by arranging screenings of “All The President’s Men” and “The Insider”, while balancing this with the realities of the current state of the profession by throwing them down a flight of stairs afterward.