Simon Fraser (IV)

I just saw one bot on Twitter following another bot on Twitter.

Life is good.

This morning I received the best unsolicited commercial email I’ve ever received. The first great thing about was that it was addressed to me. These people found me and sent this email to me specifically.

I’m checking to see if you have any upcoming travel plans for which you were considering chartering a private jet.

Okay, can I just say, I love you. I love you because you assumed I was already wealthy enough to afford a private jet. Thanks buddy. Furthermore, I love you because you didn’t push your shit on me, you inquired to see if I even needed your shit.

At Talon we have a transient fleet of 19 aircraft and are equipped to meet any itinerary. We have recently added five Hawker 4000s to our certificate and are the only US operator that has this aircraft available for charter.

I don’t know what a transient fleet is but it kind of sounds like your pilots are homeless. And that’s great that you’re helping the homeless by letting them fly your airplanes. I hope anything in the cockpit that is made of aluminum is bolted down, otherwise they may take it and try to sell it at a scrapyard.

And these Hawker 4000s sound really impressive. Not that I know much of anything about the various makes and models of aircraft. But they have a number in the thousands attached to their name and that makes anything sound impressive. For instance, the Deathtrap 4000 sounds far more impressive than the mere Deathtrap.

I am here to assist you in determining the most ideal program for your personal or corporate travel needs; be it to charter our aircraft on a trip-by-trip basis, arrange a custom Block Time Agreement or explore aircraft ownership and management.

Aircraft ownership? But I’m not even a Scientologist.

If you have a flight in mind or are curious about a price, please contact me with your trip details including dates, destination and the number of passengers and I will provide you with the best available option.

Oh I am very curious about a price.

As for a flight in mind, my gal and I want to take our dog on a holiday to Paris because, well, in our opinion, every dog should be taken on a holiday to Paris at least once in their short but joyful lives. So that’s 2 passengers plus 1 canine. I’m guessing this will cost several thousand dollars to charter. I may need to find a few more passengers to offset the cost.

Anyone wanna go from Toronto to Paris and back on a private jet? Message me. Dogs welcome.

To anyone who ever wonders what’s the point of the Internet …

Pete Hill is a friend of mine on Facebook, and real life too. On December 6th, Pete posted a link in his Facebook status to a video on YouTube called “We Got That B-Roll”. It had already received 5000 views at the time I watched it (one week after it had been posted).

I enjoyed the video and thought it would be a great to screen for a live audience at Pirate Video Cabaret on December 17th in Toronto. So I tracked down the director in L.A. and emailed him for his approval. He confirmed with the creative team that I could screen it and sent me a high-quality version with end credits added. And bam, I had 2 more minutes of hilarious video content to deliver to the audience on the 17th.

I predicted it would hit 100,000 views by today. I just checked, it’s at 125,219. I love being mildly accurate about something.

There’s 2 lessons here :

1. The Internet eliminates geographical barriers and provides a clearer picture of a population by its trends.

2. Your friends are the people that you listen to.

Please mind the subtext.

1. I will not attend your event because you have given me no indication of what your event actually is. You have used a title for your event that contains no keywords. It is so cool that it no longer has any meaning. Furthermore, you have advertised ten to fifteen acts in your event. However, I recognized none of them; though 3 of them are certainly of Irish heritage. You have provided absolutely no points of reference for me to generate any expectations whatsoever. You should be congratulated for so deftly positioning your event within the ever-so-subtle realm of… Obscurity! (Exclamation mark added for increased irony.)
2. I will not attend your event because of your text. Let me clarify. Every piece of text in your marketing is uppercase. All the text in your email or Facebook message, it’s all uppercase. I am really glad you did this. If it had been title case or even sentence case (you know, grammatically correct and all that), I would not have even noticed you existed. However, you used the wrong font and I just can’t support this Helvetica bullshit you’re pitching me.
3. I will not attend your event because I received your email promoting your upcoming event. However, here’s the thing : I’ve already unsubscribed from your mailing list many times… You don’t know this because, upon deeper inspection, I noticed that you’ve got a faulty unsubscribe function on your spamvertising-ridden website. If I were you, I would think this “error” grants me some kind of plausible deniability should anyone ever have the spare time to royally kick me in my slack ass. If you actually contributed to culture as much as you leech off of it, I would still not attend your events, for there would yet be more talent within a diarrhea-stained foot stool that is missing 1 leg.
4. I will not attend your event because you used the word “awesome” in the marketing of your event. 9/11 was awesome. Five minutes of an hour-long George Carlin routine is awesome. Those are two extremes of awesome that I have witnessed. Unless you’ve literally reinvented a wheel and it’s functional, your event simply does not track on that scale.
5. I will not attend your event because I do not live in Buffalo and your Whitesnake cover band (so cleverly called Coverdale) offers me no incentive to visit Buffalo.
6. I will not attend your event because your event takes place in a sports bar. Sports bars are not known for their taste in cultural programming. Actually, that’s not true. They’re very well known for their taste in cultural programming. Thank you for choosing a venue that says so much about your event.
7. I will not attend your event because I do not pay to watch a rehearsal… Oh, that wasn’t a rehearsal last time?… Oh… Really?… Hmph.
8. I will not attend your event because you chose to have the William Tell Overture auto-play when your web page loaded without providing me the ability to mute Rossini’s popular but obnoxious composition. I believe this needs no further explanation.
9. I will not attend your event because you have indicated nothing original about your event. Nobody could point a finger at your event and say, “There. See? Like that.” Except me, just now, but I am merely demonstrating. Given the choice of attending your event or the equally sans originale event the next night or the identically carente de originalidad event the night after that, I have opted to write these words. While they might leave the reader with a bitter aftertaste, they do not even approach the magnitude of stale dyspepsia that you have chosen to generate in an unwitting and undeserving audience.
10. I will not attend your event because… it’s me, okay? I’m the asshole. Right? I’m full of shit. I gotta open my big fat mouth and spew this acid at you. I’m a dragon. I’m an fuckin’ acid-spewing dragon. With my attitude and my opinions. It’s me. This is me: “Blah blah blah. I’m a fuckin’ dick with my big fuckin’ mouth.” You’re right! You’re absolutely right! I’M A FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE!… Y’know what?… Just keep sending me invites. Just piss me off even more, send me all your goddam’ invites… Fuck. Me.

I found myself watching a YouTube video that I didn’t really want to watch and I clicked away from it. But because I’d watched the first few seconds of it, the recommendations that then appeared on my YouTube home page contained content similar to the video that I didn’t want to continue watching.

While this bit of automated programming functions if I’m enjoying the content, it did not today.

Watch out!