Thursday, June 7

My Camera Phone Will Not Be Denied: Book Expo 2012


Well, it's June, kids, and once again, here I am, your faithful media personality, filing a report from Book Expo of America, NYC's annual galaxy-sized smut carnival clusterf*ck showcasing the best, the brightest, the most random, and the most embarrassing that the World O' Books has to offer. As you can see from the picture above, Satan himself was on hand promoting his new book, The Seven Hats of Devilishly Successful People, with a Foreword by his twin sister's anchor baby Ann Coulter. Everyone was selling something, so let's dive right in with SeeTimBlog's totally blinkered and blurry BEA coverage and try to discern something, anything.


Did you know that President Barack Obama is both a rank amateur and a great destroyer? Well, he is. Don't think about it for too long because you might tilt your head and wonder, "hmm, if he's such an amateur, shouldn't he be more of a sloppy destroyer?" But no! Because Obama is such a scary idiot oppressor, his amateurishness just naturally, clumsily brings about perfectly calibrated destruction. Get it? Don't think, just say yes!




Beaver Books Publishing is in the children's section, isn't that surprising? Oh look, it's Lemony Snicket!




A cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger was on hand to sign copies of Ruth Rendell's new book. (Or something, I don't know what's going on here.)



Had to get a pic of Satan's tail. It's a lot like Ann Coulter's, but thicker. (Ann's is skinny and gnarled, like her fingers.)



WaveCloud.com is apparently some new "Goodreads"-type site whose mission is to bring authors and readers together, or some such. Do we care? Only kind of! I just searched for my book (Tune in Tokyo, buy it!) on their site and turned up nothing. Nothing! BURN THAT SITE DOWN. Anyway, one of WaveCloud's gimmicky ways of getting notice at BEA was hiring folks to walk around with a big box of hot coffee on their back and a paper cup dispenser, so folks could give themselves a little pick me up. This, I think, falls in the "random" category of BEA happenings.


















A very effective line of questioning. The government trusts God, so what's your problem? Also, the government trusts banks, the blindness of justice, and the U.S. Postal Service. So why are you always bitching?



Okay, here we go. It's truth time, y'all, so put on your aluminum veracity visors. Circling back to President Barack Obama, did you know that he plans to go house to house and murder all the white babies who aren't union thugs if he gets re-elected? Then he will turn around and just stone cold walk away, like he's doing in the cover photo above. Don't be fooled twice, sheeple! Because did you know that he also plans to take away your last remaining freedums, like the freedum to eat deep-fried butter while soaking in a tub full of melted Country Crock, the freedum to stand your ground against Skittles, and the freedum to go bankrupt because you can't afford the hospital treatment for your chronic butt rot condition? And that he will make Fox and Friends' Gretchen Carlson illegal? Obama will do all this and more, and so if he is re-elected, it means the end of days, because who can start their morning without the spastic absurdity of Gretchen Carlson smirking her way through an interview with some like-minded shill or other? (On the plus side, if you want Gretchen to be illegal, vote for Obama early and often!)

So, this book Fool Me Twice will lay all this out in words that the great unwashed masses of our country's greatest insane asylums can understand. And the publisher's gimmick for generating buzz about the book at BEA was to hire some poor handsome young black man who from behind bears a striking resemblance to our president. (Look at him on the lower right corner of the photo above. They have very similar heads!) He had the perfect sheen of gray on his hair, it was quite amazing. Sadly, the illusion falls apart when he turns around and shows us his handsome face, which bears absolutely no resemblance to our president's handsome face. Still, he's got the gestures and expressions down.



I hope he's getting paid well for doing this, because it can't be sitting well with his poor mother. Also, here's another thing:


I didn't take the opportunity to briefly have the World's Largest Afro, because I won that prize in high school. And now it's time for the most important photo of this entire blog post.


That's right: it's Michael Bolton and his aquiline nose. The woman in front of me was simply losing her shit. Losing it. Completely. In her defense, he did look pretty handsome. So anyway, he's got a book coming out in November called My Life, My Music. I can't think of anything I'd like to read less, but hey, I'm not his target market. His target market is millions of women like the woman who was standing in front of me. Good on him. (My target market, by the way, is illiterates.)

So! That's all I have for the floor show, but because I'm not just an intrepid reporter but also an author, I happily twirled on down to the Press Lounge for the Amazon Publishing swaray with my friend Alyson, where there was much free booze and opportunities to pose once again in front of the magnificent Gotham cityscape.


After a few photos, Alyson and I decided it was probably time to conjure some hell beasts to get the party started.



Alyson's hell beasts were better than mine because she used both hands. Anyway, they arrived, went straight to the bar, drank all the booze, and stole all the women, the end.

Friday, June 1

Holy Sh*tsnacks! Tune in Tokyo Hits #2 on the Wall Street Journal's E-book Nonfiction List!





Well this was unexpected! It appears that last week's download-a-palooza over at Amazon in light of the Kindle Daily Deal designation for Tune in Tokyo has somehow led to its being listed on an actual non-Amazon list, hooray! Sure, next week the book will probably have dropped to # a million, but so what/who cares, amiright? This is a day to celebrate the little guy (me) sitting pretty seven slots above the big guy (Bill O'Reilly) who works for Satan's own network (FOX News, duh). Does this mean that Jesus really loves me and thinks Bill is just terrible?

Maybe it does. But just for this week, probably.

Wednesday, May 30

Bet You Can't Top These Wedding Cake Toppers



It is a truth universally acknowledged, that wedding cake toppers are the most important part of a wedding reception, and the key signifier of a healthy, robust, and ageless marriage. If these figurines are not pleasing to the eye, it spells certain doom for the happy couple, for how could they recover from such an unseemly failure of presentation? Did you ever see the toppers on Kim Kardashian's cake? So tacky and, therefore, incredibly prophetic. And every wedding cake that Elizabeth Taylor ever had featured a plastic bride and groom flipping each other the bird. Remind me how things ended up for our Liz in the marriage department.

In short, these tiny simulacra have an important job to do, and the ones that our friend Rachel Roth, who is making our wedding cake, got from Etsy bode well for Jimmy and I, because they bear remarkable likenesses to our real selves. Jimmy's (left) is a dead ringer, for in real life, his head is perfectly round, and scientists use it to calibrate their instruments. I've always wished my head was rounder, and this figurine allows me to finally realize that dream, sort of. But it's most important for them to capture our essences, and I think these do. Is it sad that our essences can be captured in figurines that are no larger than five inches? Maybe. But in their defense, my essence can probably be captured in an item much smaller, so I'm feeling pretty flattered by the extra inches. Our cat Stella is pretty happy with her essence, though as always she wishes it was skinnier.



In conclusion, Jimmy and I have been together for 15 years. We met in North Carolina, our home state, and are now finally able to get married because we live in NYC (we actually married on February 13, and are celebrating on June 9) and Ye Olde Breeders of New Yorke have finally stopped being idiots about 21st century reality and are now graciously allowing us to do what we've been doing for a decade and a half, but now with health insurance benefits and such. Don't worry, though, North Carolina will get around to enshrining basic decency in its constitution next century, once it's done enshrining brazen idiocy. To paraphrase the late great Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward us gaywads, eventually.

Wednesday, May 23

Hell's Freezing Over Dept: Tune in Tokyo Makes the Kindle Top 10 List!


Folks, this great nation is just going to hell, is it not? I mean, look at this Kindle Top 10 List: The Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy Bundle at #9 and then some depraved piece of idiocy like my book Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries charting even higher, at #8? Good Lord, save us from ourselves!

This is just insane. TiT was the Kindle Daily Deal yesterday, which is why it went Top 10--even making it as high as #5, according to Publishers Weekly--but today it is back at its regular price and as of a few minutes ago it's still at #10! At first I thought there must be some mistake, but Amazon robots don't make mistakes. They are all-knowing, like Stephen Hawking or Suzanne Somers. So it must be really happening. Also, here's something to look at:






I just had to place that there for posterity, because at one point yesterday I was #8 on the Kindle list!!

Just so you know, this will not change me in the slightest. I am the same boy who eats his chicken deep-fried and dipped in Nutella that you've known for however long you've known me.

Tuesday, May 22

Whose Classy-Person Vehicle Is Parked Outside Our Apartment?


















Tim: Is it Beyonce's?

Jimmy: No, hers is pink and bedazzled. I think it's Tracy Morgan's.

Tim: That means Tina Fey's probably in it.

Jimmy: Nah, they don't hang out outside work.

Tim: Who do you think is in the VIP lounge?

Jimmy: You mean the VIP Crawl Space? Probably Paula Abdul and a bunch of fish tanks.

Tim: And Nutella. I bet they've got a big barrel of Nutella up in there.

Jimmy: Not for long if I know Paula.