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: