family values, mistaken identity, and poop chutes
here thar be votin'
“Mr. Bidness, I'm truly sorry if I've awakened you, but I was unable to sleep myself... so I thought I might talk to you about a few pressing matters."
Barely conscious or no, oh man... I would've recognized that totally creepy... scratch that, totally creepily sexy voice anywhere. What the hell was he doing calling me at this godforsaken hour?
“Listen, Dennis..." I whispered hoarsely and hurriedly, desperately hoping to defuse this awkward situation ASAP before my beloved Cherille at my side might be awakened from her deep, hot, anal slumber. “...Don't get me wrong, Dennis, you're a great guy, you were such a great butler for those eight or nine days or so, we had some good times together. I'm sorry it just didn't work out, man. It's kind of ridiculous, y'know, I really couldn't even afford to have a butler anyway, to be honest... and we both knew it even before the first paycheck bounced, I think... I mean, I was living in a shitty 1-bedroom on the south side... the place didn't even have a garbage disposal and the neighbors would sing along with Creed or Evanescence or something all the time through the kitchen wall... I mean, you must have known that this gig was a sham, right?..."
“Mr. Bidness, I... um... no, there's no need to apologize..."
“...And, no, I really shouldn't have had that much to drink that night, y'know, I was in a really weird place with my divorce... and yeah, ok, I was feeling kind of uhhh experimental that last night, sure, but I'm not like that, y'know, I really shouldn't have led you on like that... it got so completely weird after that, that's why I had to, like, fire you as soon as you, uh, finished me off... I kinda, y'know, quite literally 'came to my senses,' you could say... look, uh, really sorry about the uhhhh lack of reciprocation..."
“Erm, that's all well and good, Mr. Bidness... now, if you'll please just let me get a word in edgewise..."
“...Anyway, look, like I said, I'm really sorry, I'm just honestly not gay, not even bi-curious, really... I was just drunk, I'm totally straight... I swear I don't ever fantasize about that night, not anymore... well, um, at least not more than like once every couple of months, man... “
“Mr. Bidness, please, please stop talking now. It is vitally important that we discuss your poll standing right now."
“...I'm sorry, but we haven't talked in two or three years now, I thought you understood... I mean, I definitely thought you understood well enough not to drunk dial me out of nowhere at fucking 3am asking me to pull out my 'standing pole,' for crissake, Dennis. I mean, of all the times... I'm staging my Internet-star comeback and there's a lady in the hizzay. So, like, have a good night, but man, would you please lose my number now? I don't do booty calls."
I urgently reached over to slam the phone back into its resting place. It was then that I heard an aggressively impatient, yet unquestionably professional throat-clearing on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Bidness, this isn't 'Dennis.' It's Rev. LaRock, your recently-hired LJ Idol campaign manager. I am calling about your standing in the polls."
...Whoops. “...Whoops. Um... sorry, Rev." Oh well. I was sure he'd just forget all about this conversation in the morning. I mean, I wasn't gay. I just said so, right? “Please, uh, go on."
“...Yesssssss... well, Mr. Bidness, as you may know, your performance last week was drastically improved. Your popular vote count nearly doubled, and you shot up from a 22nd-place intra-tribe performance in week two of the race to 4th place. Along with a totally arbitrary shuffling of your direct competition, disorienting voters just enough in your favor at a pivotal moment in your campaign, well... it seems that posting an entry far too long for any sane human being to read caused many more voters to just give up and vote for you regardless. So that's the good news."
“Yeah, I'd heard about all this. Seems like it's looking up. So what's the bad news?"
“The shuffling of the race has made impossible for my team and I to track or make sense of the other campaign results in order to plan the next phase of strategy for you..."
“I just knew you were going to be upset about that, Rev."
“Yes, well, I admit I was quite disturbed by this development. For a time I was having a dialogue with a few old friends who could have made clauderainsrm... 'disappear' for his deep transgressions against our campaign last week. But on talking it over at greater length with my team, we decided this wouldn't ultimately benefit your campaign... at least not until we'd had a chance to hack into his LiveJournal account to secretly take charge of affairs ourselves..."*
The Rev cleared his throat and continued. “It's like my daddy used to say to me: 'Really, Li'l Rev, what good does it do to eliminate a bureaucratic issue up on the mountaintop before you can directly replace that issue with, say, the oppressive governance of a shadowy puppet body posing as the real thing, pretending to act in everyone's best interests but really only acting on behalf of yours?'"
“Yep, I know exactly what your daddy meant, Rev. I held exactly the same position once. Didn't file those divorce papers until I'd finally managed to set aside enough for a deposit on a Real Doll."
“Well, Mr. Bidness, I suppose we both digress. As I was saying, the results last week were quite hard to make sense of as part of any larger trend that would help us establish a strategy for victory. The capable and dangerous gypsy_moon went from an even lower-ranking performance than you in your tribe the previous week to a well-deserved landslide victory. rm is no longer a direct threat to you at the moment, but foolonthehill has a similarly sized friend base and achieved quite similar results in the polling...
“...And, Mr. Bidness, you also had some stiff competition from people-- I won't mention any names here-- having the lack of shame, the nerve to write about their first girlfriends and stuff. It's quite hard to compete with this cynical, calculated, sickeningly-cute approach in a race so intensely fueled by estrogen as this one. Perhaps if you were able to post a video of you as a two-year-old child, saying 'Mommy, I done doodied!' to the camera while awkwardly holding a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and a squirmy yet very patient golden-retriever puppy, we might be better equipped to compete."
“Oh, Rev... I do know my mom has video of me beating a golden retriever puppy with a copy of War and Peace. I was about ten years old at the time, though. Would that work?"
“Perhaps, Mr. Bidness, perhaps. A lot can be done in post-production these days... cheap DIY CGI has really changed the whole game. Don't trust a tenth of what you see, Mr. Bidness. The most popular cute-kitten videos on Youtube actually started out as balding men in their mid-30s doing poorly-timed a capella covers of Snow's 'Informer' from their work cubicles.
“...But speaking of outright deception and animal abuse, Mr. Bidness, we've employed a few telemarketing firms in North Carolina to conduct some 'objective political surveys' by phone. This has been a highly effective strategy for many of our past clients, one that's won many hotly contested elections like yours.
“...We're now in the process of getting phone numbers for active LJ Idol participants and voters. Once we have a sufficient number of Idol participants to dial, we'll be calling around with our 'surveys' asking voters if they would, say, still consider voting for the likes of gypsy_moon if they learned that she enjoyed hunting down baby bunnies from her solid-gold-plated personal hovercraft with custom-made, long-throw hydrochloric-acid spray guns."
“Um, gee, Rev... I figure you know your business as well as anybody, but I'd be careful when you go making up stories about a woman hunting down helpless animals from the safety of absurdly expensive aerial transport. It could backfire... you just might find the media calling her 'America's Sweetheart' the following week."
“Mr. Bidness, I assure you that we know exactly what we're doing. And naturally, we're taking a multifaceted approach to ensuring eventual victory for you. Since we don't know whether the polling in the new tribes reflects any kind of a trend at this point, and we aren't sure what kind of entries will play well with the maximum number of voters, we've decided to try a new approach with idol_hans.
“...In his latest entry, our automated-writing-synthesis software H.A.N.S. was given all of last week's entries from all 26 of your racemates in Tribe One. It then wrote a brief entry which strategically combines key elements and phrases from everyone else in your tribe. No matter which competitors your audience voted for last week, they have no choice but to love H.A.N.S.'s entry this week, because, well... it's all of those entries they voted for and then some."
“Right, well, I saw H.A.N.S.'s latest entry, Rev, and with all due respect, it looked like a lot of gibberish to me. Granted, I couldn't stop reading it, maybe because I recognized a lot of the shit it stole or something... but I really couldn't make much sense of it either. Irresistible, but why? Somewhere between Joyce and one of your more entertaining spam subject lines. And what's with that MP3 that went along with the entry? That was... really something."
“Ah yessss... the MP3 reading." Though quiet, the Rev's chuckle was one of the most forwardly evil-sounding things I'd heard from him so far. “Some of your LJ Idol competitors like to add custom MP3 readings of their Idol entries, you may have noticed. Well, in the guise of accessibility, we too have had H.A.N.S. do his own reading of the casserole-entry he penned. But there's a little extra... technology and research that went into that recording... y'know, some things that haven't exactly been publicly published."
“All I know, Rev, is that after I finished listening, my scalp itched horribly, and I desperately wanted to vote... for myself. I kept going back to the poll page like a moth to a flame, trying to click on my own name again and again, even after the poll closed. It was fuggin' horrible, Rev. What the hell are you up to over there, anyway?"
“Mr. Bidness, suffice it to say my team and I are in the business of winning races, at any cost and no questions asked. I would simply advise that in the future, you ignore the goings-on over at idol_hans. From time to time he'll be posting experimental materials that may, or may not, be eventually used in your own unfolding campaign. But I worry that you may be adversely affected by some of the experimental techniques we are using before we have a chance to really understand their effects on voters... on consumers. A smart 'religious leader' never drinks the Kool-Aid from the big bowl out front, if you follow. Now, tell me, Mr. Bidness, when you listened to H.A.N.S.'s MP3 reading, did it itch all over your scalp, or just in the front? That part's critically important. My team needs to know."
“All over, Rev. Horribly. For hours."
“Hrm. Well, sounds like we'll need to do a little more tweaking of the binaural beat rate and masking frequency to ensure maximum subject absorption if you're ever gonna win this thing."
“Great. Can I go back to sleep now, Rev? This entry's already over 2000 words long, for crissake, and there are some nightmares about an oppressive secret-police state awaiting me at the moment."
“Yes. We'll talk more soon, Mr. Bidness. For now, enjoy the company of your lady friend. Enjoy it well. It was very expensive company."
I hung up the phone and contentedly turned back over to spoon anew with my beloved Cherille. I gently cupped her ass. Yes, truly, I'd recognize the shape of that amazing ass anywhere.
Couldn't resist giving it a pat. Funny... she didn't budge or murmur or anything.
Gave it a squeeze. Kinda heavy... cold. A little rubbery... even for Cherille, with those ass implants of hers.
...Yeah, well, the blessing and curse with these Real Dolls is that they really do live up to the name... to the point where a groggy dude can't be blamed for being fooled when his beloved hot anal cheerleader ditches in the middle of the night and drops 120 pounds of latex in her stead. That's one major Real Doll issue, and then there's the the whole “tearing where it really counts" problem. But I've heard that can be solved with the very careful application of common silicone caulk.
* Please note: This asterisk'd paragraph, and its surrounding paragraphs, were written strictly for entertainment purposes / totally limp shock value and are not, in any way, shape or form, to be taken fo'serious by anyone anywhere ever. This campaign does not endorse nor shall it ever sponsor acts of LJ-related murder, terrorism, or illegal obstruction of LJ Idol justice. May democracy, or something vaguely resembling it, prevail. I am srs_bidness, and I endorse this message.
“Mr. Bidness, I'm truly sorry if I've awakened you, but I was unable to sleep myself... so I thought I might talk to you about a few pressing matters."
Barely conscious or no, oh man... I would've recognized that totally creepy... scratch that, totally creepily sexy voice anywhere. What the hell was he doing calling me at this godforsaken hour?
“Listen, Dennis..." I whispered hoarsely and hurriedly, desperately hoping to defuse this awkward situation ASAP before my beloved Cherille at my side might be awakened from her deep, hot, anal slumber. “...Don't get me wrong, Dennis, you're a great guy, you were such a great butler for those eight or nine days or so, we had some good times together. I'm sorry it just didn't work out, man. It's kind of ridiculous, y'know, I really couldn't even afford to have a butler anyway, to be honest... and we both knew it even before the first paycheck bounced, I think... I mean, I was living in a shitty 1-bedroom on the south side... the place didn't even have a garbage disposal and the neighbors would sing along with Creed or Evanescence or something all the time through the kitchen wall... I mean, you must have known that this gig was a sham, right?..."
“Mr. Bidness, I... um... no, there's no need to apologize..."
“...And, no, I really shouldn't have had that much to drink that night, y'know, I was in a really weird place with my divorce... and yeah, ok, I was feeling kind of uhhh experimental that last night, sure, but I'm not like that, y'know, I really shouldn't have led you on like that... it got so completely weird after that, that's why I had to, like, fire you as soon as you, uh, finished me off... I kinda, y'know, quite literally 'came to my senses,' you could say... look, uh, really sorry about the uhhhh lack of reciprocation..."
“Erm, that's all well and good, Mr. Bidness... now, if you'll please just let me get a word in edgewise..."
“...Anyway, look, like I said, I'm really sorry, I'm just honestly not gay, not even bi-curious, really... I was just drunk, I'm totally straight... I swear I don't ever fantasize about that night, not anymore... well, um, at least not more than like once every couple of months, man... “
“Mr. Bidness, please, please stop talking now. It is vitally important that we discuss your poll standing right now."
“...I'm sorry, but we haven't talked in two or three years now, I thought you understood... I mean, I definitely thought you understood well enough not to drunk dial me out of nowhere at fucking 3am asking me to pull out my 'standing pole,' for crissake, Dennis. I mean, of all the times... I'm staging my Internet-star comeback and there's a lady in the hizzay. So, like, have a good night, but man, would you please lose my number now? I don't do booty calls."
I urgently reached over to slam the phone back into its resting place. It was then that I heard an aggressively impatient, yet unquestionably professional throat-clearing on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Bidness, this isn't 'Dennis.' It's Rev. LaRock, your recently-hired LJ Idol campaign manager. I am calling about your standing in the polls."
...Whoops. “...Whoops. Um... sorry, Rev." Oh well. I was sure he'd just forget all about this conversation in the morning. I mean, I wasn't gay. I just said so, right? “Please, uh, go on."
“...Yesssssss... well, Mr. Bidness, as you may know, your performance last week was drastically improved. Your popular vote count nearly doubled, and you shot up from a 22nd-place intra-tribe performance in week two of the race to 4th place. Along with a totally arbitrary shuffling of your direct competition, disorienting voters just enough in your favor at a pivotal moment in your campaign, well... it seems that posting an entry far too long for any sane human being to read caused many more voters to just give up and vote for you regardless. So that's the good news."
“Yeah, I'd heard about all this. Seems like it's looking up. So what's the bad news?"
“The shuffling of the race has made impossible for my team and I to track or make sense of the other campaign results in order to plan the next phase of strategy for you..."
“I just knew you were going to be upset about that, Rev."
“Yes, well, I admit I was quite disturbed by this development. For a time I was having a dialogue with a few old friends who could have made clauderainsrm... 'disappear' for his deep transgressions against our campaign last week. But on talking it over at greater length with my team, we decided this wouldn't ultimately benefit your campaign... at least not until we'd had a chance to hack into his LiveJournal account to secretly take charge of affairs ourselves..."*
The Rev cleared his throat and continued. “It's like my daddy used to say to me: 'Really, Li'l Rev, what good does it do to eliminate a bureaucratic issue up on the mountaintop before you can directly replace that issue with, say, the oppressive governance of a shadowy puppet body posing as the real thing, pretending to act in everyone's best interests but really only acting on behalf of yours?'"
“Yep, I know exactly what your daddy meant, Rev. I held exactly the same position once. Didn't file those divorce papers until I'd finally managed to set aside enough for a deposit on a Real Doll."
“Well, Mr. Bidness, I suppose we both digress. As I was saying, the results last week were quite hard to make sense of as part of any larger trend that would help us establish a strategy for victory. The capable and dangerous gypsy_moon went from an even lower-ranking performance than you in your tribe the previous week to a well-deserved landslide victory. rm is no longer a direct threat to you at the moment, but foolonthehill has a similarly sized friend base and achieved quite similar results in the polling...
“...And, Mr. Bidness, you also had some stiff competition from people-- I won't mention any names here-- having the lack of shame, the nerve to write about their first girlfriends and stuff. It's quite hard to compete with this cynical, calculated, sickeningly-cute approach in a race so intensely fueled by estrogen as this one. Perhaps if you were able to post a video of you as a two-year-old child, saying 'Mommy, I done doodied!' to the camera while awkwardly holding a copy of Where the Wild Things Are and a squirmy yet very patient golden-retriever puppy, we might be better equipped to compete."
“Oh, Rev... I do know my mom has video of me beating a golden retriever puppy with a copy of War and Peace. I was about ten years old at the time, though. Would that work?"
“Perhaps, Mr. Bidness, perhaps. A lot can be done in post-production these days... cheap DIY CGI has really changed the whole game. Don't trust a tenth of what you see, Mr. Bidness. The most popular cute-kitten videos on Youtube actually started out as balding men in their mid-30s doing poorly-timed a capella covers of Snow's 'Informer' from their work cubicles.
“...But speaking of outright deception and animal abuse, Mr. Bidness, we've employed a few telemarketing firms in North Carolina to conduct some 'objective political surveys' by phone. This has been a highly effective strategy for many of our past clients, one that's won many hotly contested elections like yours.
“...We're now in the process of getting phone numbers for active LJ Idol participants and voters. Once we have a sufficient number of Idol participants to dial, we'll be calling around with our 'surveys' asking voters if they would, say, still consider voting for the likes of gypsy_moon if they learned that she enjoyed hunting down baby bunnies from her solid-gold-plated personal hovercraft with custom-made, long-throw hydrochloric-acid spray guns."
“Um, gee, Rev... I figure you know your business as well as anybody, but I'd be careful when you go making up stories about a woman hunting down helpless animals from the safety of absurdly expensive aerial transport. It could backfire... you just might find the media calling her 'America's Sweetheart' the following week."
“Mr. Bidness, I assure you that we know exactly what we're doing. And naturally, we're taking a multifaceted approach to ensuring eventual victory for you. Since we don't know whether the polling in the new tribes reflects any kind of a trend at this point, and we aren't sure what kind of entries will play well with the maximum number of voters, we've decided to try a new approach with idol_hans.
“...In his latest entry, our automated-writing-synthesis software H.A.N.S. was given all of last week's entries from all 26 of your racemates in Tribe One. It then wrote a brief entry which strategically combines key elements and phrases from everyone else in your tribe. No matter which competitors your audience voted for last week, they have no choice but to love H.A.N.S.'s entry this week, because, well... it's all of those entries they voted for and then some."
“Right, well, I saw H.A.N.S.'s latest entry, Rev, and with all due respect, it looked like a lot of gibberish to me. Granted, I couldn't stop reading it, maybe because I recognized a lot of the shit it stole or something... but I really couldn't make much sense of it either. Irresistible, but why? Somewhere between Joyce and one of your more entertaining spam subject lines. And what's with that MP3 that went along with the entry? That was... really something."
“Ah yessss... the MP3 reading." Though quiet, the Rev's chuckle was one of the most forwardly evil-sounding things I'd heard from him so far. “Some of your LJ Idol competitors like to add custom MP3 readings of their Idol entries, you may have noticed. Well, in the guise of accessibility, we too have had H.A.N.S. do his own reading of the casserole-entry he penned. But there's a little extra... technology and research that went into that recording... y'know, some things that haven't exactly been publicly published."
“All I know, Rev, is that after I finished listening, my scalp itched horribly, and I desperately wanted to vote... for myself. I kept going back to the poll page like a moth to a flame, trying to click on my own name again and again, even after the poll closed. It was fuggin' horrible, Rev. What the hell are you up to over there, anyway?"
“Mr. Bidness, suffice it to say my team and I are in the business of winning races, at any cost and no questions asked. I would simply advise that in the future, you ignore the goings-on over at idol_hans. From time to time he'll be posting experimental materials that may, or may not, be eventually used in your own unfolding campaign. But I worry that you may be adversely affected by some of the experimental techniques we are using before we have a chance to really understand their effects on voters... on consumers. A smart 'religious leader' never drinks the Kool-Aid from the big bowl out front, if you follow. Now, tell me, Mr. Bidness, when you listened to H.A.N.S.'s MP3 reading, did it itch all over your scalp, or just in the front? That part's critically important. My team needs to know."
“All over, Rev. Horribly. For hours."
“Hrm. Well, sounds like we'll need to do a little more tweaking of the binaural beat rate and masking frequency to ensure maximum subject absorption if you're ever gonna win this thing."
“Great. Can I go back to sleep now, Rev? This entry's already over 2000 words long, for crissake, and there are some nightmares about an oppressive secret-police state awaiting me at the moment."
“Yes. We'll talk more soon, Mr. Bidness. For now, enjoy the company of your lady friend. Enjoy it well. It was very expensive company."
I hung up the phone and contentedly turned back over to spoon anew with my beloved Cherille. I gently cupped her ass. Yes, truly, I'd recognize the shape of that amazing ass anywhere.
Couldn't resist giving it a pat. Funny... she didn't budge or murmur or anything.
Gave it a squeeze. Kinda heavy... cold. A little rubbery... even for Cherille, with those ass implants of hers.
...Yeah, well, the blessing and curse with these Real Dolls is that they really do live up to the name... to the point where a groggy dude can't be blamed for being fooled when his beloved hot anal cheerleader ditches in the middle of the night and drops 120 pounds of latex in her stead. That's one major Real Doll issue, and then there's the the whole “tearing where it really counts" problem. But I've heard that can be solved with the very careful application of common silicone caulk.
* Please note: This asterisk'd paragraph, and its surrounding paragraphs, were written strictly for entertainment purposes / totally limp shock value and are not, in any way, shape or form, to be taken fo'serious by anyone anywhere ever. This campaign does not endorse nor shall it ever sponsor acts of LJ-related murder, terrorism, or illegal obstruction of LJ Idol justice. May democracy, or something vaguely resembling it, prevail. I am srs_bidness, and I endorse this message.