Mr. Popularity

Day after day, week after week, month after month, I find myself wondering why this blog isn't more popular. It's gotten to the point where my life's being consumed by the thought. Well, consumed to the extent that my life hasn't been consumed by chasing skirts and suffering through Facebook status updates from my former high school friends ("Cindy is driving the kids to school, then she has to go grocery shopping. Ugggghhhh I am sooooo tired"). I hope Cindy isn't updating her status while she's driving her kids to school, as that just seems inherently unsafe. Knowing Cindy, her kids are going to have enough trouble making it through life without being disfigured in a car accident Cindy causes when she's trying to finish the "Which Cocktail Are You?" Facebook quiz while behind the wheel.

Here are four reasons I came up with that may explain why the blog isn't more popular:

1. The blog doesn't have any marketing or advertising.

This isn't exactly true - I did make four t-shirts for the blog. I even wore one of those t-shirts when I was out last weekend. Of course, I was wearing the t-shirt underneath a Snuggie on a Snuggie Pub Crawl, but since Snuggies are open in the back you could totally see our logo and URL. Since there were several hundred other idiots out there in Snuggies, I expect the page hits to start rolling in any day now.

Author's note regarding Snuggie Pub Crawls - when girls are all wearing the same baggy, one-size-fits-all robe, they tend to start looking alike. This can lead to talking to a girl at the end of the night thinking she is a girl from earlier in the night you have already spoken with. You may bring up things from the earlier conversation that the new girl doesn't remember, because you weren't talking to her before. You may even call her by the prior girl's name, and the current girl may then get pissed at you and send you home. So beware.

2. The blog's content sucks.

I've specifically been asked to discontinue writing about getting humped by dogs. Who knows how many other offensive topics the readers have suffered in silence?

3. The Wood Dog doesn't post.

A point closely related to point #2 above - at this point the third installment in the Legion of Doom series is as overdue and eagerly awaited as Duke Nukem Forever, the OICW (the U.S. military's replacement for the M-16), or the Guns n' Roses album Chinese Democracy. It seems at this point that the Man of Wood is not a man of his word. However, technically all he said he was going to do was "blog more", and he's blogging more than, say, a termite, so it might be that in his mind he's fulfilling his resolution. Either that or he refuses to be shamed into posting. He may be a liar, but he's also a man of integrity. Glad to have him on board.

4. We never post any Top Ten lists.

Aha! I think we may be on to something with this final point. People love Top Ten lists! Dave Letterman's used them for years and he's still on the air, and I'm pretty sure they're something of a known marketing tool as well - I remember seeing lists like Top Ten Reasons to Give a Togo's Gift Certificate with totally inane reasons like "Take a friend to lunch" making the Top Ten. That stroke of genius could only be the product of a Madison Avenue ad wizard, designed specifically to appeal to today's ADD-afflicted society.

I received my first lapdance at a bar in my hometown. I was probably 21 or 22 years old, and was playing pool near the bar while female oil wrestling was going on where the dance floor normally is. My Mom's boyfriend was there, and he paid one of the wrestling girls $5 to go into the other room and give me a lapdance. As I recall she was fairly attractive, and would have been considered very attractive in my town, though baby had slightly more back than I would have preferred at the time. She then sat me down on a barstool and proceeded to give me the lapdance. The song she performed to was Loser by Beck, and she quietly sung the words as she performed as I sat there pondering the meaning of irony.

With that as context, I present to you:

TOP TEN SONGS YOU'LL HEAR AT A STRIP CLUB

I performed all my own research for this piece, which consisted of a few field trips and a careful examination of my iPod playlist, but no internet searches for anything like "Strip Club Songs". Note that at a real strip club, all of these songs will have been trimmed down to three minutes or less:

10. Girls, Girls, Girls by Motley Crue



Several times during the night, the cheesy DJ with the tuxedo and the ponytail will put on this song, then get on the microphone and tell all the girls to go to the stage for the line-up or "cattle call". This of course gives everyone in the audience a chance to evaluate all the talent, after which they'll all be hoarding their money to purchase a lap or table dance from one of the three cute girls out of the fifty girls working that night. The video for this song actually features a girl on a stripper pole, but Youtube doesn't allow me to embed that video.

9. Hot For Teacher by Van Halen

There's always at least one stripper playing to the teacher fetish we all have, and this song will be a staple at strip clubs until some genius releases a song called "Hot for Catholic Schoolgirl". Then again, I think there are a couple of Britney Spears songs that work just fine for that. Note: the first 45 seconds or so of the video are pretty disturbing, but a bikini-clad woman does eventually end up dancing on a stage.

8. Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard



This song first became popular while I was attending high school, and so did the girl who you'll likely see onstage dancing to this song. The song aged pretty well, but unfortunately the girl did not. Both the band and the stripper are still performing live, but both are woefully past their primes. A shame.

7. Here I Go Again by Whitesnake



The chick in the video is of course Tawny Kitaen, who was the stuff of teenage wet dreams back in her day. Now she's the stuff of the police blotter, having beaten her husband with a stiletto heel in 2002 (he was 6'6" professional baseball player Chuck Finley, so that's pretty impressive) and been caught with a quantity of cocaine in 2006. Do yourself a favor and don't Google Ms. Kitaen, as she pretty much looks like a 47-year old disaster these days. Rather, focus on the 35-year old disaster who's up on stage performing to the song.

6. You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC



You'd think I spent a whole lot of time in strip clubs in the 80's, but I promise you I'd never set foot in one until much later and I've heard all these songs at those establishments recently. Maybe that says something about the caliber of establishment I've been going to, but I just love going to strip clubs and seeing strippers perform who were unattainable in high school but who are now stripping well past their prime and are all-too attainble, assuming you can supply a little bit of meth or even a six-pack of Budweiser tall boys. Score one for those of us who were chess club dorks - the day is mine! And with that, we conclude the old school/hair band/white trash portion of our program.

5. Whichever Britney Spears Song is Currently Popular by Britney Spears

I went ahead and chose Britney's Circus to post but you can bet that if there's a Britney song getting airplay that you'll hear it at a strip club. That may be because her songs have something of a sultry dance groove to them, or it may be that all strippers look up to Britney. As a 27-year old batshit-crazy single mother of two, she's pretty much their queen.

4. Low by Flo Rida



Ah, yes. Getting low. Are we talking about crawling around and seductively dancing near the floor? Are we talking about self-esteem? They're not mutually exclusive, not by a long shot. Update: apparently the increased traffic caused by my linking to this video prompted Youtube to pull it down, so all you get now is still pictures. Bite me.

3. I Wanna Love You by Akon feat. Snoop Dogg

Careful, this one gets all subliminal on our asses. You see, the song is about a dude who goes to a strip club and the stripper who catches his eye. The dude decides he has to have the stripper and throws a bunch of money at her in the champagne room ("...spendin' a couple dubs, throwin' 'bout 30 stacks in the back make it rain like that 'cause I'm far from a scrub"). That translates to $30,000, which may seem like an excessive amount but remember that Pacman Jones made it rain with more than twice as much money. Afterwards, the two leave together in a limo but instead of just a sexual encounter, it looks like this could be true love ("...the type I want to marry, wantin' to just give you everything and that's scary"). So the moral or the story is to go to a strip club and spend an assload of cash on a stripper and then to marry her. It's like a hip-hop remake of Pretty Woman.

2. Me and You by Cassie



Let's see... a video that consists entirely of a reasonably attractive girl dancing alone on a stage? I guess she could be practicing for a ballet recital, or maybe she's just getting in some extra work in hopes of someday appearing on Dancing With the Stars. More likely, this is the cute girl who starts off working at the strip club as a cocktail waitress and would never dream of stripping, at least not until she finds out that the strippers are making 10 times what she's making. Then she'll start stripping, and she'll take the first $4,000 she earns and buy a fake pair of boobies to really increase her earning potential. Also gotta love when she kisses the mirror at the 1:00 mark - now we know where A-Rod is stealing his moves from!

1. I'm In Love With a Stripper by T-Pain feat. Mike Jones



Look, I realize this choice is obvious. It's like putting together a party playlist and using Let's Get It Started by Black Eyed Peas as your first song. But just because your #1 is obvious that doesn't mean it's not #1. I'm starting to think that writing a song that'll be overplayed in a strip club is a rite of passage for hip-hop artists, kind of like how many artists write songs about how tough it is to be famous after they become famous (for example, Have You Seen Me Lately by Counting Crows, Harder to Breathe by Maroon 5, and Don't Let Me Get Me by Pink). I guess it would be pretty cool to see a buxom, tattooed young woman strip to one of your songs, and there's no better way to make sure that happens than to call your song I'm in Love With a Stripper. Well played, T-Pain, but it could have turned out differently. Just ask Two Live Crew:

Must Love Dogs

I went on another date with "Melanie" the other night. Had a pretty good time, really. At the end of the date, Melanie and I found ourselves back at her place. Now, Melanie has a small dog. This is far better than if she had a cat or multiple cats, but the dog is clearly very important to Melanie. For example, there are several pictures of said dog on Melanie's online dating profile.

Being the nice guy I am, I went ahead and walked Melanie's dog around the block when we got back. The dog marked a few bushes but refused to poop anywhere so the walk felt like kind of a waste, like a porn film without the money shot. Anyhow, I get back with the dog and Melanie is grateful. We agree that I'm going to stay over.

Melanie's dog sleeps in her bed. I now know that this is true even when she has a human overnight guest. I've dated girls with dogs and/or cats before, and in those cases the girl would kick the dog or cat out of the bed if I was there. Granted, the animals usually made it back into the bed in the morning, but at least we had some alone time unfettered by a third mammal. In Melanie's case, I wasn't going to make a big stink about it at this time - Melanie and I are barely dating, so I'm at the bottom of the totem pole and the dog is sitting right there at the top. I get this. If things ever got serious I'd think, hope and demand that I'd eventually become more important than the dog, but we're not there yet.

So Melanie and I end up doing a little making out. Nothing crazy, just some good old-fashioned mostly-clothed fun. As I'm going about my business, I feel something on my backside. I come to the horrible realization that what I felt was a dog's nose. It seems the doggie was doing a little sniffing around and got a little too close. Now, there are some people who might be turned on by this. I am not one of those people. In fact, I found this to be quite a turn-off. However, I decided to try and play through it. I didn't think farting to scare the dog and have him back off was a very good idea, so I just sort of bumped the dog's nose with my butt in hopes he'd get the hint and get lost. This seemed to work as I didn't notice him doing any more sniffing around, so I hit one into the gap and made my way toward third base. This move receives a rather audible and favorable reaction from Melanie, and who doesn't love being a crowd-pleaser? This are just going along swimmingly.

Except that the dog was also apparently intrigued by what was going on, so he decided to hump my leg. I imagine there might be bigger turn-offs than that, but I can't really think of any right now. Wait a minute... maybe I can (NSFW). But still, having a dog hump your leg while making the sexy time is probably the worst thing that's happened to me in the context of the bedroom. Melanie's having a good time, and seems unaware that her dog is doing what it's doing, so I'm reluctant to stop what I'm doing. I decide to take one for the team and just suffer this indignancy in silence. In fact, I'm pretty sure the dog finished, meaning two of the three mammals present had a great time. But the third mammal, Me, did not. It was just a little too weird. I think between this and the cell phone incident, this chick is officially undateable. Which means we go back to the old drawing board.

Uninvestigative Reporting

Inside a typical restaurant, a group of girls is out to dinner. The spinach salads and cheesecake slices have been eaten, and the mojitos and chardonnays sit half-finished on the table. The girls who are present have gossiped ad naseum about any girls who are absent, and all that remains is to pay the check. After painstaking itemization and multiple recalculations over several agonizing minutes, each girl's share of the check has more or less been determined. Then it happens, as it invariably must - each girl pays for her share of the check on her own respective credit card. All across America, this scene repeats itself over and over again, like the mythical Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill. Why doesn't one of the girls pick up the check and be paid by the other girls? It's not possible, because girls don't carry more than a few dollars in cash. But why not? We tried to find out.

I'm Oscar de La Jolla. That story, and Andy Rooney, tonight on It's OKTO Blog.

I'd like to admit up front that this is a very poorly-researched story. I came up with three possible answers to why chicks never carry any cash, but I didn't really ask any girls why they don't carry cash. I actually was chatting up a cute chick Saturday night and she offered a fourth explanation, but I don't really remember what she said because I was busy looking at her boobs. But I did get her number so maybe I'll be able to coax that information out of her again at a later date. Coax her? I just met her! Oh!

A buddy of mine who was out with me the night I met this chick texted me the next day to see how things had gone. This dude has a pretty sweet interrogation method, as the first text to arrive read "Did you throw a f*ck into that chick?". When I indicated that I had not, the next text to arrive was "I thought you were going to make her into your c*ck ornament." Eloquence at its finest. I'm pretty sure this dude was Cyrano de Bergerac in his former life.

REASON #1: FEAR OF ROBBERY. Except in very rare cases (e.g. the Y-Scale, the female "professional football player" we met in San Luis Obispo, or some of my very unfortunate hookups), woman are the smaller, weaker sex. Therefore it would follow that women are concerned about having their purses stolen. Naturally, if there were any cash in the woman's purse, she would lose that in a robbery along with any gum, lipstick, Blackberry, sanitary product or cute lime-green iPod shuffle that might be in that purse. Now, many girls aren't that hip to finance, but I think most all of them know that their liability is limited to $50 in the event of unauthorized use of a credit card. So by not carrying cash, they're cutting their losses at $50. It's actually a pretty reasonable thing to do. Maybe guys should consider doing it, although it's much less impressive when you're "making it rain" by throwing your Visa, ATM, Safeway Club and Supercuts cards (tenth haircut is free!) onto the main stage at the local strip club. Not that Dr. Seuss the stripper didn't try and convince me that she'd be mightily impressed had I opened a line of credit on my card in the champagne room.

REASON #2: IMPULSE BUYING. As you may be aware, women tend to worry about their weight. Heck, I once worked in an office where a group of women got together and petitioned the boss to prohibit people from keeping candy dishes at their cubicles because these women were being unfairly tempted to eat the candy. Yes, instead of using willpower, let's make life just a little more miserable for those people stuck in cubicles by taking away their candy. Good thinking, way to suck it up for the team. By not carrying cash, women short-circuit their ability to buy a candy bar or a sugar soda during the day without having to petition the city to prohibit stores from carrying fattening products. True, women could still use their credit cards to buy a Twix, but with the credit card minimums imposed by most merchants this isn't very likely - just as women love to buy things on sale, they tend to hate to pay more for a product than they have to. Of course, they could always buy an US Weekly along with the candy bar to get above the credit card minimum, but at least it's an additional hurdle.

REASON #3: FREQUENT-FLIER MILES. If a person had the self-discipline and the financial ability to pay off their credit card each month, buying everything on the card seems like a pretty smart thing to do. You'll be building your credit score, your card may offer theft protection when the card is used to make certain purchases, and you can get credit cards with all kinds of reward programs like cash back, hotel points, or frequent-flier miles. So why not pay for everything on a credit card and take an annual trip to the Caribbean? Granted, you'll have to go in the middle of the hurricane and pirate seasons, but you won't be paying for that middle seat on the airplane, which is nice. Plus, you're maximizing your rewards while paying exactly the same amount you'd pay if you used cash. Carrying a balance and incurring interest charges (as a few women tend to do) might outweigh the benefits of the rewards program, but many women may be using their credit cards with the intent that they'll pay off their balances, even if it doesn't actually happen.

I don't know which of these answers is the right answer. I don't know if any of these answers is the right answer. Maybe the answer is that women each want their own receipt so they can expense the meal at work, or deduct it on their tax returns. Crap, I might have to actually ask a girl about this, unless someone wants to tell us the answer in the Comments.

And now, Andy Rooney.

Andy Rooney, as those of you who watch 60 Minutes know, has lost touch with reality. He's at best irrelevant, and at worst terrifying (especially in HD - woof!). But I love how whichever of the other goblin/correspondents who introduces Andy Rooney ("I'm Morley Safer... coming up next, Andy is wondering why they call the newspaper "USA Today" when it isn't published every day") always has this smirk on his or her face when Andy's segment ends, as if what Andy just finished saying was even remotely funny. Wait, I don't love the smirk, I hate it. Who do they think they're kidding? Screw those guys.

I'm Oscar de La Jolla. We'll be back next week with another edition of It's OKTO Blog. With any luck it will be the long-awaited third installment of the Legion of Doom series. I don't like our chances, but we can dare to dream.

Watching Watchmen

I saw this Watchmen movie recently. I guess the movie is based on a comic book. I wasn't aware of this fact until it was mentioned as the buzz around this movie grew. Some people like to call it a "graphic novel" instead of a comic book. You see, calling a comic book a graphic novel apparently grants adults the right to look at comic books without being ridiculed, comic books heretofore having been considered a child's domain. I guess its sort of the same in that boys don't play with "dolls", they play with "action figures". And adult males don't play with action figures, they play with "collectibles". But what everyone is really doing is playing with dolls.

From what I've heard, people who have read the comic book are sorta disappointed by the movie, so I suppose I'm glad I didn't read the comic. I really enjoyed the movie. The plot was interesting, some of the characters were interesting, and the music was really good. The opening scene and sequence through the opening credits was particularly good in my opinion. But I'm not here to review the movie. Not really, anyway. I just want to point out a couple of things.

First of all, Malin Ackerman, who plays Silk Spectre II, is way, way, way hotter as a blonde (as she is in real life) than as a brunette (as she is in the movie). This despite the fact that she spends much of the movie in a latex outfit. It's like it's not even the same person, much like what they did to Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich:
Secondly, a major character in Watchmen is a blue, godlike being called Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan is one of the Watchmen and he was created, as so many superheroes are, by being accidentally irradiated in a laboratory. If you're a female camper in the woods and you appear onscreen topless (most likely in the shower or in front of the bathroom mirror), or if you investigate a noise, you will be murdered by a masked killer, and there's a pretty good chance you'll be startled by a cat just before you're murdered. If you're a scientist onscreen and you go back into the lab to get something you forgot, or if a co-worker's sleeve gets caught on something and you try and help free them, you will be irradiated and will gain superhuman powers. It's just how these things work.

Dr. Manhattan is an interesting character for sure. Not only does he obviously work out, but his powers are so vast that he gradually loses his ability to relate to people or even to the world. Apparently part of his "losing touch" is that he forgets to have the common decency to cover up his junk. It appears this is intentional - when Dr. Manhattan is seen in earlier parts of the movie, when he's not wearing a suit, he tends to appear onscreen wearing only some sort of banana hammock. However, he eventually starts forgetting to conjure this critical item of clothing and so we end up getting a bunch of gratuitous shots of the blue torpedo. In several scenes, Dr. Manhattan appears as a 50-foot tall blue man. Now, recall that women had a hard time accommodating Dirk Diggler's reported 13" disco stick. If everything remains in proportion on Dr. Manhattan, only the most experienced and ambitious men and women among us would dare take on the good Doctor - think very experienced porn stars, NBA groupies, prison lifers, and longtime Castro residents (especially of the power bottom variety). Not that they would get the chance, though - Dr. Manhattan's increasing disinterest with the human race extends to sexuality. That's clear from the film, and even more clear from the theater's marquee:
I have to think it's better this way for all concerned.

Shaking Off the Cobwebs

Holy crap, there are more cobwebs around here than there are around my grandma's "naughty bits."  Actually, I might be wrong about that.  You see, she's been gone awhile now so there probably are cobwebs in that general vicinity.  Heck, the inside of her casket would probably look right at home inside some tomb being explored by Indiana Jones.  Whereas there aren't actual cobwebs on this website, it's just been a couple weeks since I posted anything. There is some good stuff in the pipeline; however, it doesn't translate as well as I'd hoped into the "written word" or "humor." Stay tuned, or GFY, at your own discretion.

Couple of bits of interest. First, I was speaking with an adult entertainer not too long ago. To clarify, this was a female adult entertainer. This charming albeit heavily tattooed woman took a liking to me, most likely due to the fact that I was at the adult establishment with someone who is a minor celebrity at that establishment, so I got some instant street cred. We agreed to meet for drinks at a Friday happy hour, then began a bizarre negotiation. Her opening negotiating position was essentially "You take me upstairs to the champagne room, and I'll buy you all your drinks at the happy hour." My opening negotiating position was essentially "No." I don't doubt that I could have made back a fair amount of what I would have ended up spending upstairs at the happy hour; those of you who know me know that I could put the booze away in my younger, more formative years. However, I did doubt that this chick would actually show up. She offered all sorts of safeguards, like promising she'd be there, and giving me her phone number, but the real kicker was when she offered to tell me her real name. Well, she didn't tell me her real name, but she told me a riddle, the answer to which was her real name. The riddle went thusly: "I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them __________ I am." Naturally, I guessed "Dr. Seuss?", and perhaps even more naturally I don't have a happy hour date coming up.

Unrelated second point: I was at the corner store earlier today and I bought a bottle of the little-known and highly underrated RC Cola, primarily because it was on special for $0.99 (that is the underrated part). The clerk rang up the sale for $0.99, and I handed over my dollar. And the dude didn't give me back any change. He didn't even offer to give me back any change, or even reach into the penny drawer. It's like it was understood that he got to keep the penny, like I was tipping him or something. WTF? If he does that 100 times a day, that's $52 he's pocketing at the end of the year! Is this like the automatic 18% that is added into a food or beverage bill in Miami? I don't get the option of getting my change back anymore? Granted, I probably would have just put the penny into the "give a penny, take a penny" tray but at least I'd have the option, and would have gotten a little exercise out of the deal. Though I guess it all ends up in the same place - the "give a penny" tray is the convenience store's tip jar (just as the March of Dimes plastic jar at the Safeway is the supermarket's tip jar).