The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

…and damned if I’m going to give up the crown.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, perhaps you should see the Breast Scarf and Butt Skirt postings first. At last check, I still had the number one Google entries for the phrases “breast scarves” and “butt skirt”. Yet another dubious acheivement to add to the list.)

The boob shirt

And now — thanks to John “lemonodor” Wiseman for sending it to me (he even called me the “expert in this domain”) — I present the boob shirt:

They certainly look like a family, don’t they? Is this mother-daughter bonding, just gone terribly, terribly wrong? And the bald guy on the left — Dad, perhaps — is that sly grin one of paterfamiliar pride? And most importantly, considering that this involves both Disney and copyright issues, has Cory Doctorow been informed?

(Don’t worry about that last one — I emailed him already.)

I’ll have to buy this month’s Playboy, and yes, I’ll be reading it for an article…

Adam Keys reports in his blog, Bit Banger, that the breast scarf photos have finally appeared in Playboy. If you recall from an earlier blog posting, I was contacted by a Playboy photo editor, who asked if they could buy the rights to the photos. I told them that the photos were not mine, and pointed them to my friend Karin, who had forwarded them to me in an email. I guess that they managed to follow the email trail back to the rights-holders of the photos.

Never in my wildest dreams of adolescence did I conceive that someday, even Hugh Hefner’s empire would be influenced by me. I think I’ll use my best Mr. Burns voice and say “Excellent. It’s all falling into place.”

While outdone by the ladies above, the Japanese have their own naughty t-shirts

My friend, former OpenCola coworker, Blogger coder and Google employee Steve Jenson sent me this link to some naughty women’s t-shirts from the Land of the Rising Tentacle. I’d have posted it sooner, but real life weirdness got in the way.

When I wrote the New Girl story, I got a couple of joke emails and comments saying “So she’s available, right?”

But nobody ever made the joke: “So you’re available, right?”

Make an honest, charming and handsome accordion player’s day, willya?

Once again, that Accordion City institution, Kick Ass Karaoke, takes place tonight. It’s at the usual place — the infamous Bovine Sex Club — and the fun starts at 9:00 p.m.

I’ll be there, of course.

Want to know what the fuss is all about? Here’s a previous blog entry with photos.

While I don’t want this to become the “All New Girl, All The Time” weblog, I should let you know that the darkly funny web site, Capital of Nasty, is now running the New Girl story. Thanks, Leandro!

I remember attending Clay Shirky’s talk about LiveJournal at last year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic; I’d just ducked in there to avoid John “Captain Crunch” Draper, who’d been hounding me throughout the entire conference to help him do some “energy transfer work” in my room. Eager to avoid a tear-filled session where I’d have to play-act the “bad touch” incident at a therapist’s with anatomically-correct dolls, I thought I’d go see what insights Clay had come up with in his months of LiveJournal research.

(A friend later said: “If you’d been in the hacker community as long as I have, you’d have known that Crunch was a creepy gay old man,” to which I replied “If you’d been in the having-a-life community as long as I have, you’d be able to figure it out pretty quickly.” Nerd.)

At some point, Clay was talking about the kind of stuff that people typically wrote in their LiveJournals and I quipped to someone beside me: “LJ people. Yeesh.”

If the New Girl Situation is some kind of karmic payback for the LiveJournal dis, I would like to ask the cosmos: “I think my account’s all settled, don’t you?”

If you’ve been reading the comments from the New Girl story, you’ve probably seen comments from Mean One, someone who’d been burned by New Girl far worse than I was. She’s created a LiveJournal just to tell her own New Girl story.

I didn’t know there was a blog that chronicled LiveJournal drama, but such a beast exists: LJdrama.org. Naturally, the New Girl drama did not escape their notice.

…UFies, being those who read the geek-culture comic strip User Friendly. The New Girl story is their Link of the Day, so I thought I’d say hi to them with these Dust Puppy-related photos from LinuxWorld Expo NYC 2000:

In my browser, I keep a folder called “For the Blog” where I stuff all kinds of interesting bookmarks. It’s been getting quite full over the past month, and especially over the past ten days where the entries have been “All New Girl, all the time”. Along with some New Girl-related stuff, here are those aforementioned interesting things…

Breakin’ 2 — finally on DVD!

While the original Breakin’ movie was simply about breakin’ into breakin’ (the IMDB summary for the movie is “Girl is a waitress by day, a breakdancer by night”), Breakin’ 2 attempted to become a more “issues”-oriented movie by focusing its plot on the impending demolition of a community centre by the mandatory villain: the Evil Older White Guy Without a Shred of Funk Whatsoever. At the movie’s climax, the bulldozers — which take up the entire width of the street by driving in menacing formation — approach the community centre and only the scrappy crew of breakdancers can stop them. Along with a very young, very skinny Ice-T (listed in the credits of Breakin’ as “Rap Talker” and in Breakin’ 2 as “Rapper”), they put on a performance complete with hardcore poppin’ and lockin’ to stop the ‘dozers in their tracks. When the Evil White Guy orders the bulldozers to push through them, the drivers refuse, saying they’re not going to flatten a bunch of kids, especially talented ones! (Yeah, I know — in the post-Rachel Corrie age, it sounds even more contrived.)

Someone bring in Richard Dawkins — he’s a material witness!

At least one person out there believes that the true roots of terrorism are Darwinism and Materialism.

We’re in the big league now

At long last, Accordion City has finally got its own Craigslist. Let the job-seeking, event-announcing, stuff-selling and funny personal ads commence!

Right now, it doesn’t have many postings and doesn’t look like much. To see what it could become, check out the original (San Francisco Bay Area) as well as the New York one.

And finally, the New Girl update

I always save the interesting stuff for last.

Reliable sources indicate that New Girl last crashed on the couch of an old buddy from Cocaine Anonymous for three or four days and then got kicked out. (I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Cocaine Anonymous.) The word about her is going around town pretty quickly and I think the number of places where she can crash is dwindling rapidly. When this sort of thing happens, I’m told she relies on an unusual trick: checking herself into a psych ward at a local hospital, treating it as if it were a youth hostel that’s cleaner, if quirkier. I’m also told that she learned how to put on a convincing “unbalanced” act by using a paperback copy of Girl, Interrupted as a guide.

Memo to self: get introduced to women by friends with better “people radar” (admittedly, this one slipped under mine, which is usually pretty sharp). I was introduced to her by a former web guy for the Backstreet Boys, who later worked for the McDonalds web team. Simply put, the man makes a living bringing evil and misery into the world. You think he’d leave his work at the office, but nooooooooo…

The girl formerly known as my worst girlfriend ever (she’s now in second place — her performance was very good, but New Girl blew her away) offers her condolences. It’s kind of like being Batman and getting a phone call from The Penguin: “Hey dude, I just heard about the Joker thing, and I just called to say I’m sorry that it happened to you…”

The e-mail that got the ball rolling. Whistleblower has a LiveJournal set up just for New Girl-related stuff. The latest entry contains the full text of the email alerting me that everything I knew about New Girl was wrong.

Other people’s experiences with New Girl. Someone who’s had run-ins with her recently (complete with extremely unflattering photos — really, she looks better these days), and someone else who’s known her for much longer have very interesting stories to tell. After reading these, I think I’m going to sit in a tub of Lysol for a week.

And finally, a chance to get philosophical. A number of people have commented or emailed me, telling me that they hoped that my experience hasn’t turned me off dating completely. Not at all, and rather than explain why, I’ll leave it to AC/DC guitarist Angus Young, who sums my attitude up pretty nicely:

I’ve always found that it works to put your best foot forward and don’t be afraid. I suppose it’s a bit like swimming. You can’t just dip your little toe in the water. You’ve got to go all the way. I believe you’ve got nothing to fear, although a lot of people think that’s strange. If you hit a bum note, that was fate. Some of those bum notes might be a great accident. I think that if you’re too tight and restricted, then those sort of little spontaneous things just seem to give it that little bit of magic, they won’t happen. Every now and again, we all hit a bum note. The ideal situation is just to hit less of them! I think that it just takes a bit of confidence when you’re doing something. I’ve never been afraid.

As their song goes, I’ve got big balls.