Speaking of lewd, who started this practice of emblazoning words on women’s butts? I’m talking about sweatpants. When I first noticed this, the words were always the names of colleges, but last week I walked behind a woman whose sashaying ass had the word Pink written across it.
This gave me an idea. A matching top and bottom. The top says Tits, the bottom says Ass. A postmodern classic.
As of 8:18 this morning, I’ve received 62 submissions for my business naming contest. With due respect to the submitters, some of whom wrote from far off exotic lands like Holland and Seattle, the winning entry is not among them.
On the positive side, my mother was delighted to find herself mentioned in the contest rules. “It was so cool,” she wrote. “You rock!” (So far as I know, this was the first time my mother referred to anything as rocking.)
An odd side-effect of trying to name something, particularly when one is already dangerously obsessive, is that the brain locks in and everything becomes naming fodder. For example, in the last minute I reflexively considered the following names (this is for my business, mind you):
Actually, Cool Mother has its merits.
Okay, I checked: Cool Mother is taken.
This is becoming a problem.
A contest! Be a winner! Free money!
I will pay $250 to the person who successfully renames my business.
That’s $250 in American (not Canadian) currency, enough to buy a nice dinner for your entire debate team.
I am changing the name of business and launching a new website in support of it. The website will include a blog about making websites, written by me.
My business, in case you don’t know, involves making websites. The current name is Bluearcher Media, and please don’t tell me not to change it.
Warning: I already have a new name in mind. It’s your job to beat it. If no one beats it, no one wins, and that will be sad.
Email your entries to me, Michael Barrish. Submit as many names as you like. Anyone can enter, including my mother. Entries must be received by 12:00 p.m., June 30. The winning name will be the name I use when I launch the new site in mid-July.
The new name will likely be:
Ideally it will also be:
Some facts about my business:
Finally, to give you a sense of what I’m looking for, here are some business names I like:
I get to pick the name I like best, based on whatever I decide matters.
I set my bagel on fire.
What happened was, I put it in the broiler to toast it and promptly forgot it was there. Sometime later, while sitting at my desk, I smelled smoke and ran immediately to the broiler. When I opened it, the bagel was on fire. I tried blowing on it, but it didn’t go out.
It’s interesting to see a bagel on fire, I suppose because one doesn’t often see this. The flames were pretty.
I tried blowing on it again, and this time the fire went out.
After waiting a few minutes for the bagel to cool, I moved it to the cutting board, where I tried scraping away the burnt part. This proved more difficult than expected, plus little bits of burnt “dust” were getting everywhere, so I turned the bagel on its side and in one motion sliced away the entire burnt layer.
The layer was at least a quarter inch thick and made me think of calcified lava. Foolishly I nibbled on a corner. It tasted like dirt.
Earth is not what it seems but an incredibly elaborate and nasty ruse. The main character—we’ll call her Martha—discovers that she’s not really a human but a creature equivalent to a Greek or Roman god. As a kind of practical joke perpetuated by her fellow gods and goddesses (they’ll all very jealous of her for some reason), she’s been born as a human on Earth, which isn’t really a planet (planets don’t actually exist) but something akin to a Hollywood set. The only parts of Earth that exist are the parts she visits, and these only exist while she visits them. Also, all the other “living creatures” on “Earth” are really her fellow god and goddesses in the guise of “humans” (humans don’t exist either) and other supposedly living things. Basically they’re all secretly laughing at her, even the “babies,” even the “cockroaches.”
Her one god ally, we’ll call him George, writes the story we’re now reading. At the end of the story he explains that her name isn’t necessarily Martha and that in truth he doesn’t know her real name or even if she’s a she. All he knows, because of some unfortunate limitation of his god powers, is that if she’s now reading the story we’re reading, she’s the one everyone is laughing at. His advice to her (and this is how the story ends) is to beat the shit out of everything and everyone, from cockroaches to babies to the President of the United States. This is the only way they’ll learn, he writes.
A man signs a shovel and so he digs.
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