For some reason, brother Thalo thinks 88 is the magic number. Hell, we can do better than that. Let’s go for 100, maybe even 125. Heck, give me Jerry Lewis and a couple kids with iPods permanently stuck to their heads and we might make 150.

The current inducement I’m offering for anyone signing up this week is, ABSOLUTELY FREE, one FREE personalized haiku or one FREE limerick. Your choice. This offer will not last so sign up today for your FREE bit of insulting poetry. And for a few of you out there we will throw in an even bigger prize if you will leave. Just kidding. Anything for a joke.

A question has come up on whether someone can "renew their vows" and sign up again. Well, that would sort of be inflating our membership which, frankly, would be perfect considering OS X. But I’ll leave the final call on this to thalo.

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Minus one plus one is a wash. But if you want to have yourself cloned........

Yeah, cloned would be the way. I guess one would just register under a different email address or something. I've thought about doing the same in the past just to have a little fun. But I dropped that idea because I think I'd be spotted in a millisecond.

Hmmm...this membership drive is getting off to a slow start. I guess it's time to up the inducements. Okay...

For a strictly limited time only, all new thalo.net members will receive, absolutely FREE, one virtual lap dance. There *is*, however, a bit of a problem in this regard. None of the hired help around here is female. Whether some of us are gay or not is not on the record, so that's not gonna be of any help. So if you're a guy and you're expecting your lap dance we might have to have thalo throw on a wig. Heck, I'll even give it a go. It's all for a good cause. We're helping Stevie's DigiKids.

Summer Fun. End it Already.
by Mark Leyner

quote:

I think one of the reasons I love the telethon so much is that, deep down, I don’t really like summer. I like the "regulation" year—the working year. I like unrelenting overdrive, the sense of embattlement, the crushing, migraine-inducing deadlines, the serried, cacophonous streets, life in extremis with its rigor and intensity. It’s hard-core. Summer is soft. It’s lax. Summer is an elephantiasis of the weekend.

I’m not a hard-hearted person, and I can certainly appreciate many things vicariously. But by Labor Day, I’ve had it. And seasons like the summer can not be appeased. They understand only one thing: force. This is Jerry Lewis’s indispensable function in our culture. Without him, summer would never end.

As irreproachably laudable as the telethon’s purpose is—raising money to cure muscular dystrophy—we all know there’s something coarse and grotesque about the proceedings. We cringe, we peek through our fingers, but we can’t turn it off. Jerry Vale, Steve and Edie, the bugged-out Marty Allen, Señor Wences, tuxedoed dervishes on unicycles juggling candlepins and spinning plates to "The Flight of the Bumblebee," trained bears, children in leg braces, and the latest cash tally announced with drum rolls and fanfares of trombones.

Nice piece of writing there, I think. A bit of rat-race denial included, for sure, but still a nice piece of writing.

quote:

Each and every year, Jerry Lewis reenacts his murder/suicide pact with the summer. Disheveled, mopping flop sweat from his jowls, barely coherent, the shaman of madcap morbidity chokes up as he sings "When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high" and you know he’s taking the summer down with him. It’s all over. The meshugene martyr self-immolates to expiate our excesses. For months, we’ve reveled in a sea of gin and tonic, anarchic, acrobatic coupling, and sun-blocked sloth. Jerry dies for our sins.

Remember, you can give the gift of thalo.net to a loved one as well.

88 is the magic number. I'm seriously considering making it so people can't sign up after that. So two more slots. Who will it be?

Wow, the reader board hasn't moved an inch. Man, you'd think we were charging an arm and a leg for memberships, but it's FREE. I feel like one of those PBS guys. "Uhhh, please call now and pledge whatever you can. Anything will do. We've got t-shirts and books and a lot of other great premiums you won't find anywhere else. So call now. Lots of lines are open here. This is some great programming that you just won't get anywhere else. We need your support. Hello? I don't hear any phones ringing? I said, goddamnit, we need your support. I gave up a perfectly good Saturday night to try and chisel a little money out of you cheap freeloading bastards. Hey, Mr. Lexus out there sitting in you leather sofa drinking a Heineken. You can afford a fuckin' twenty dollars for a mug. You probably spend that much each day on your girly espressos. Fuck this. Fuck this completely. If they want to watch Doctor-fuckin'-Who for free then let them. I'm oughta here. Oh, and kids? Too bad your cheap bastard parents won't give the money so that Barney can have his life-saving operation. Goodbye."

Now serving number 87. Number 87. Well, brother thalo, I think we've already scraped up all the people in the universe who are motivated to join because, 1) They either hate you so much, and you are so hated by others, that they want to show their chops to their friends by daring to face the Mighty Thalo or, 2) They hate you so much they wish to withhold any sort of oxygen from this site.

But I refuse to believe that, 3) People have become so neurotic, anal, and repressed that they won’t dare feed their muses. That I will never believe. It may be that computer discussions draw more of the "geeks", more of those who are more comfortable talking about circuits than jerk-its. (Ah, come on. Give me that one.) But in all people, including the Lap-Dance-phobic me (and like I said, there’s one clear path to ending that), there are the muses that need to be fed and awakened. Even if it is by writing "My Ode to the Circuit Board" then that is enough. We’re not asking anyone to be Lawrence Fucking Olivier and to recite Hamlet. All we’re asking is that you speak your own mind, I guess, no matter how polluted, enlightened, unenlightened, sicko, healtho, or whatever.

Now, let’s go over to the boards and check the tally… What? Eighty fuckin’ seven still? Okay, I wasn’t going to do this, but bring out the dancing shadow iPod people. And bring me another bucket, masseur. I’ll embarrass myself and this site in any way I have to in order to help Stevie’s DigiKids, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come without pain.

Still 86. Hey, there's a poetry to that number too, as in "let's 86 visual superabundance."

For a while I thought traffic was way up, then I figured out it was all YOU, bwahahaha.

For a while I thought traffic was way up, then I figured out it was all YOU, bwahahaha.

Is there a difference, brother thalo? No. I believe there is not, because although Brother Brad speaks for himself, and has the right only to speak for himself, when one such as me does speak, I think I also sometimes speak for others. I am very sure that when others start speaking up, start crowding up the board with their souls and reflections, that I will be content to sit back and soak it all in.

So, JHC, if you want to shut Brother Brad up there could be no better inducement than to sign up, sign on, and talk away. Please do it because I can’t keep up a pace like this for long. Man, did my head hurt last night, but I’m very glad that it did. Some shit just has to come out, like the puss that has to come out before the wound can close and heal. Yeah, some of you smart-guys out there figure it is all the product of coke, Coke (caffeine), or some other stimulant, but I can assure that that I don’t even have a sugar buzz working for me. I’m in the grips of a mind-altering agent but it ain’t something you can pickup on a street corner or even a Macworld keynote speech.

Well, after yet another heartfelt plea to save Stevie’s DigiKids, let’s check the board again. And after two days of singin’ and dancin’ my brains out we now have a grand total of…what? There must be something wrong with this board, [Heh, you in the control booth. Get someone down here and see if that thing is stuck.]

Hmmm….maybe if we dangled a shrink-wrapped OS X Tiger box over a pool of acid and threatened to cut the cord if we didn’t receive some new memberships, and pronto.

quote:

puss that has to come out

paging Dr. Freud...

Oh man. There's no "lmfao" that covers what's happening on this end. Did I really write that? Geez.

quote:

And after two days of singin’ and dancin’ my brains out we now have a grand total of…what?

The flaw is that you're singin' and dancin' your little heart out to people who are already here. Go prospecting at other websites.

Y'know, we're known much more than our actual registration would indicate. Maybe some are afraid that if they register, the Apple/NeXT squad will pull up in front of their doors and scowl at them.

And some of those early registrants who no longer particpate may have gone over to the Dark Side, or took part just to contribute to a diversity of opinion (which is good) and then departed, or registered just to tell us to go fuck ourselves. I tell people that there's more of a mix of opinions here than they think, but they also think we do nothing but whine about OS X, which they think is a done deal and not worth the time to debate anymore.

Markle

The truth is, Markle, I don't know what this place would be like if there were, say, a hundred posters posting at one time. I reckon I would enjoy many of the interchanges, but that I would eventually sort of crawl into a nice, warm corner of thalo.net and continue doing my own, as you say, blogging. With quantity doesn't necessarily come quality, and although I think everyone has an interesting story to tell if they would just tell it, too often the standard fair is someone trying too hard to be unique or to look James Deanish by simply being hostile. Again, according to the thalo.net philosophy, even these (especially these, I'm sure brother thalo would say) can offer the chance for a lot of interesting stuff and more than a few truths. But the problem is that it takes real skill to bring that out of people. That takes time too. And with hundreds of posters this place would likely look just like any other place.

I've sort of taken on brother thalo's philosophy of "If you build it, they will come." But if I were try to read his mind (and this certainly would represent how I think), I would interpret that as "If you build it, those who should come will come."

Posted in wrong place. Still 86? Come on, people. I want to here those phones ringing.

quote:

The flaw is that you're singin' and dancin' your little heart out to people who are already here. Go prospecting at other websites.

Yeah, except brother brad knows, being a mod... that the traffic of UNREGISTERED users far outweighs that of the membership. He's trying to bring in the lurkers.

Check out the action figures for the Crazy 88. Now THOSE are toys I'd play with. With removable arms and head, and blood-fountain action with a special disappearing red ink (included).

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How many unregistered lurkers would you say we get on an average day?

today it's 83 discreet unregistered visitors so far, visiting forum pages. That's about average. I don't have reporting for how many hit the home and turn tail and run, though. To register in the reports, they have to enter a forum.

By contrast, the registered membership accounts for roughly 30 discreet visitors a day. As you know, lately only a handful of the brothership posts regularly.

Page views on Mar. 15 was well over 3000.
Feb 23 we had one of our all time biggest days with almost 6000. Must have been a crawl.

I believe our total forum page views to date are only 260,000, but that's very respectable for our size, considering we do zero promotion. And we've been steadily getting more and more popular with time.

I think a publicity stunt at Macworld Boston would get us some more attention, if that's what we really want. I could leave bumper stickers or free gifts out for people to take. Or we could water-balloon the MFI booth.

Or we could water-balloon the MFI booth.

Oh, geez. Do you really wanna go through the long and laborious process of fighting off charges of "terrorism" and other trumped-up PC charges? Yeah, I suppose you do, and to tell you the truth, it wouldn't do my heart any harm either, but I suppose a Silly Putty assault would probably be better. There would not be damage to anything but their pride (water can sort of ruin computers), it *is* sort of fun and silly by nature, and thus it would be hard for them to spin themselves into martyrs and us into evil co-conspirators filled with a personal hate for Steve Jobs, blah blah blah. Hey, they'd still try, but they *should* look silly trying to do so. But given the general attitudes of the more left-of-center Mac crowd, I'm not so sure.