The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

(This article also appears in Tucows Farm.)

It’s a Contest!

The company for whom I work, Tucows, and Serious Magic, a company that develops video communication software, have joined up to launch a contest called “Cow Tipping”. Contest participants have to create a tutorial video on their favourite software, hardware or web service using Serious Magic’s Vlog It! software, and the best ones will earn great prizes and be featured on the Tucows download site.

What Can You Win?

The best tutorial video will be deemed the grand prize winner and will be featured on the Tucows.com site. Its creator will receive:

• Creative Labs Live! Cam Voice webcam
• Creative Labs Labs Zen Video Player
• Serious Magic’s Visual Communicator Studio software
• A Blogware account, paid up for one year

Two runner-up videos will also be featured on the Tucows.com site and their creators will each receive:

• Creative Labs Live! Cam Voice webcam
• Serious Magic’s Visual Communicator Pro software
• A Blogware account, paid up for one year

In total, 30 videos will be selected from the entries and showcased on the Tucows.com site. Those videos that didn’t make the grand prize or the runner-up positions will still earn their creators these prizes:

• Serious Magic’s Vlog It! software
• A Blogware account, paid up for one year
• Green screen
• Microphone

How to Enter

• Get your hands on Vlog It! You can either buy it or simply download the free trial. Remember, the videos must be made using Vlog It!
• Make a video no longer than 3 minutes. Once again, it has to be a tutorial video for some piece of software or hardware or an internet service.
• Submit your video before the deadline! The deadline is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on August 10, 2006.

Coming Up

I’ll post the full contest rules a little later on. In the meantime, if you’ve got an idea for a tutorial video, get to work!

…the blog’s going to look a little weird for the next couple of weeks as I retool it a bit. I’ll make sure it’s still readable.

(The links in this article are slightly racy, so be warned.)

In the comments for the entry titled Exciting New Doritos Flavour!, a commenter going by the name of “manfire” explains that these characters (in the right column of Japanese writing on the Doritos bag pictured to the right):

read as denki anma.

As “manfire” says and a little Googling confirms, “denki anma” translates roughly as “a crotch noogie done with the foot” and it seems to be popular in the strange world of porn from the Land of the Rising Tentacle.

Doing a search for the term “denki anma” is an act for the brave, as it will lead you to many disturbing sites with even more disturbing imagery. Here’s one of the tamer images I found; I find it oddly reminiscent of the customer service at the Bell Mobility store at the Eaton Centre:

I still have no idea what those Doritos taste like.

Jason Kottke recently linked to a poem by Joan Murray about the old white-guy-voting-Republican demographic, titled We Old Dudes:

We old dudes. We

White shoes. We

Golf ball. We

Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We

Palm Beach; We

Vote red. We

Soon dead.

…and I thought: Wait a minute. That sounds familiar. A little Googling for a half-remembered line of poetry from a high school English textbook got me the poem I wanted, Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool. It’s about pool-playing dropouts, often presumed to be black and from Chicago, like Brooks herself:

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

…and then I thought that maybe Asian dudes like myself might be feeling a little bit left out, so I decided to compose this poem just for us — We Real Smart:

We real smart. We

Science, not art. We

Not on TV. We

Hack Ruby. We

Eat rice. We

Polite and nice. We

No fool. We

Soon rule.

(While writing the poem, I discovered that the English language doesn’t have enough rhymes for “black Honda Civic“.)

The deadline for requests for squshy cows has passed. I’m afraid that due to demand, I can’t fulfill any more requests, but keep in mind that this won’t be the last time we have such an offer!

Thanks to everyone who participated — your cows will be in the mail soon!