Subliminal Monkey Balls

“GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!”

The above caustic incantation is how I perceive most advertising. Whether it’s an infectious baby on a web cam or a bearded fool clamoring bloated portrayals of junk or a magazine ad formatted to look like an article or a magazine article written in a covertly advertising manner or a pop-up ad, which I don’t even look at, but if I did I would make a note never to patronize that company for interrupting my on-line Old Maid tournament, or a television crawl about a doorknob millionaire matchmaker show featuring a dopey looking Cher-oid beast making faces at me and ruining the moment when I was about to weep because Will Hunting had just reached an epiphany as he hugged his therapist, Mork from Ork, or a guilt-trip, zippy radio bit about donating my car to help kids I don’t even know (how the hell am I supposed to get to the bar?) or the deluge of other dickering disruptions that are hurled at me each day, “GIVE US YOUR MONEY!” is all I hear. It makes me want to dip my head into a boiling pot of goulash and keep it there for like an hour, but then the goulash will become over-reduced, so I don’t. You shouldn’t boil goulash. I do like that one dude on those Miller High Life commercials. “Y’all must be crazy!” Ahhhh, it never gets old. It doesn’t mean I’ll drink the product. It doesn’t mean I won’t, either. Advertising, although seemingly a necessary festering abscess in our beloved capitalistic economy, is the festering abscess of society, and I loathe anybody associated with it, especially those who sell out to it – no matter how fetching the term “Frosty Favorites” is.

So why the hell are there Google Ads on this page? That is a fair question. The easy answer would be that it is Sid’s fault because he has no scruples. Or manners, for that matter. But, that is not the correct answer. We here at Google Pop have taken a lot of good natured ribbing over the years for having sold out by placing Google Ads on our quaint little blog. And rightly so, although the sticky bombs tossed at my station wagon were a little excessive – they destroyed my custom Never Ending Story paint job. We only did it to become Internet millionaires, and why wouldn’t we? It is a noble cause. And we are well on our way. So far, we’ve amassed a prodigious $5.45 (and that’s after only 16 months). On cyberpaper, that is. We have yet to be paid, and we won’t be paid for quite some time.

The Google pimp does not fork over the dough to its bitches until the dirty whore of a web site has generated at least $4,938,338.82 worth of user clicks. The good news is that when we finally get the check, we’ll be a millionaire. The bad news is, by that time, we will be dead. A dead millionaire, but dead nonetheless. But a millionaire, nonetheless, too. It’s a yin yang kind of thing. Unless you like being dead, then it’s a yin yin thing. Or a yang yang. I can never remember which is the good one. Personally, I like yang. I’m a yang guy from way back. I am so imbued with yang, people think I won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1957 (I actually won it in 1983 for discovering the tri-sexual duality of tau neutrinos). I also walk funny.

Part of the soul selling deal with the Google is that we are not allowed to coerce our visitors into clicking the ads, which makes sense since their flashy designs should be enough to attract ravenous online shoppers. Or at least dumb people with some cash to throw away. Nor are we allowed to click the ads ourselves. Why would we? We don’t need any of that crap. Nobody does. So, don’t click on the ads. We don’t need the Google police sending us on the lam again, and you don’t need the crap they promote, either. Take your money, and do something useful with it, like buy a monster truck from GM.

So, if it’s going to take forever to get paid by Google, and the ads suck, why do we display them on our site? Another fair question. One might think it’s because of Sid’s lack of scruples. Good guess, once again. But, wrong, once again. The truth is they can be entertaining and a source of inspiration.

Google has some kind of outlandish database sorcery that sifts through the words in our blog and tries to match them to key words in their table of skulking vendors and then serve up their ad in the designated areas on our site. The assumption is what we’re writing about is of interest to whomever is reading it, and the readers also may be interested in purchasing something related to that topic. We all know that nobody who happens to be reading this blog is even remotely interested in what we are saying. Thus, Google’s underhanded, know-it-all scheme is foiled, which is just plain funny. We sure fooled them. The lack of clicks generated so far is proof of that (it certainly has nothing to do with the amount of traffic to this place).

These ads also help us guide the content of the blog, as we attempt to generate silly and useless ads by writing about silly and useless subjects. Do you think Sid WANTED to write about cow pissing? Do you think I WANTED to write about scratching my crotch? No. What kind of dunderheads would write about that? He was trying to elicit a bovine diaper ad, and I was going for a Sarah Palin ad – both of which we feel are hilarious. Let’s face it, it’s not easy for either one of us to come up with ideas to write about, and we’ll take all the help we can get.

Have you ever wondered why you feel like monkey balls after reading one of our posts? It’s because we’ve subliminally infused the idea of monkey balls throughout most of the writings using fiendishly placed letters and special polyfollic fonts. Unfortunately, our tactics may be beyond the intuition of the Google sorcery, and we have yet to have realized an ad for simian testicular enhancement surgery. But, we have not given up hope and will forge ahead with our quest. We hope you have as much fun with the Google Ads as we do.

Advertising is not informative nor is it there with your best interests in mind. Don’t believe anything it tells you. Its only purpose is to nab our cash. It is a pest. It is a violation of our right to be left alone and make asinine purchases of our own volition. It is also unavoidable. So, we might as well have some fun with it. And, monkey balls.

Ethics of Boiler Ragging

Each year my company requires its employees to participate in an on-line ethics awareness training program. They require this in case one of us commits an ethical sin, they can show the courts it was not the company’s fault since the employee was ethically trained. It protects them from getting sued because they’ve hired a bunch of email porn swapping derelicts, gift-accepting whores posing as managers and coked-up salespeople. And data pirate janitors.

I completed the ethics training this morning. It presented a combination of video and text instruction with pictures of appropriate looking individuals from all races, sexes, creeds and colors. But, surprisingly, no fat people. I guess the fat people in the company only work in the particular office I’m based out of. Multiple choice quiz questions followed each section to make sure the employee paid attention. I didn’t pay attention to most of the instruction. The excitement level caused me to doze a little. When the questions appeared, I chose the least fun or most imbecilic obvious answer, and that was enough to get by. Wait a minute, you mean I’m not supposed to make copies of my co-workers' medical records I happened to come across while breaking into the Human Resources office to find out what kind of raises others received and distribute them to everybody in the company? You got me on that one.

At one of the rare occasions I was paying attention, I heard the austere, yet comforting, but slightly impudently tainted voice of the narrator say that I “am the face of the company”. At that moment I happened to be doing some boiler ragging, which is a polite way I invented to say I was scratching my crotch. From the inside of my pants. My mom used to scold me at the dinner table when I talked about my crotch scratching exploits, so I began referring to it as boiler ragging, and she was none the wiser. She thinks boiler ragging has something to do with my job. In fact, she’s proud of my boiler ragging, and will ask me to tell strangers in the street about it. So I do. And they stay strangers.

So, I’m sitting slumped in my chair, with my hand inside my sweatpants tending the crotch itch, wearing the same crumb, sweat and stain ridden shirt I’ve worn all week, unshowered, and my hair, which I haven’t had cut in about a year and three months, is slumber-combed and in my face, and I hear this man tell me I am the face of the company (I work at home, by the way). Imagine the pride that demand instilled in me. Not to mention the trepidation. THIS is the face of the company? This slouchy, rag-donning, shaggy, smelly, boiler ragging mess is the face of our company? Is this why I haven’t gotten a raise in three years? Who is our marketing director, the Coen brothers?

Luckily, there is nothing in the ethics rules against boiler ragging, as long as it is done discreetly and not on top of other people’s desks. I wasn’t sure about this rule, having ignored most of the training, so I called the Ethics Compliance Office to make sure. The lady who answered the phone happened to be one of the strangers my mom and I met in the street once, so she was well versed in boiler ragging. I hope to see a section on proper office boiler ragging in next year’s training session.

Enough With the Pants

Again with the pants. Everyday it’s pants. I put on a pair of pants every day. Or shorts. But “shorts” is short for “short pants”. Still pants. Knickers are pants, too. I don’t care what anybody says. That goes for gouchos, too, and other bottom-half apparel that drapes two legs individually and secures around the buttocks and abdomen.

I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t I wear a skirt, or a kilt, or a fancy evening gown, or maybe a sari or a crotch bandolier? Those are good suggestions. I’ll take them into consideration.

Starting tomorrow I’m changing my ways. When I awake, I will wrap my lower half in a stream of Ace bandages and head out to take on the world. The next day, I’ll adorn myself with a wrap of sewn together discarded fruit peels. Hopefully, it will match my shoes. The following day? I’m not sure - maybe a lamp shade.