Musings For A Darkened Room

For those of you who have been reading for a while you may know that I’m a pretty avid listener of the Los Angeles based radio station 106.7 KROQ and the Kevin and Bean show which airs weekday mornings.  You may also recall my attempt back in March to get some air time with the Kevin & Bean show with my Criss Angel is a douche bag stunt on Zotfish.

Last week the Kevin & Bean show hosted their Annual Miss Double D-cember pageant.  Miss Double D-cember is a contest which allows women to show off their “talents” in an effort to win the title of Miss Double D-cember and the perks that come along with it, such as attending KROQ events, etc.  Morning show listeners vote for the top contestants and after the voting is over there is a pageant held to determine the winner of the contest.

The 2009 Miss Double D-cember pageant took place last Friday at the Sidebar in Fullerton California and a winner was crowned live on the Kevin & Bean show.  This years winner and owner to the title Miss Double D-cember 2009 is a 25 year old bartender from Chino Hills named Cassandra.

PlasticSurgery.com was on hand at the event and did an outstanding recap of the event.  You can read all about it and see exclusive pics in their article; Breast Augmentation Patients Participate in KROQ Double D Pageant.

I recently finished archiving a number of journal posts from my old LiveJournal account here on Musings For A Darkened Room.  Before I began seriously blogging I updated friends and family using the free services of LiveJournal.  At the time my blogging efforts were nothing more than journaling my daily life.  I would typically post about the ins and outs of my daily routine and only on the slight occasion did I post anything outside of that.  HOWEVER, I came across a few of those occasional posts which I wanted to share with some of my newer readers.  Most of them still hold some social value, or I just really enjoyed writing.

Understand obviously that many of these posts were written 3-4 years ago and my writing skills were not nearly at the level they are now, though I’m not saying they are exactly up to par just yet.  Hopefully these entries will pique your interest and bring back some life into these old forgotten posts. Enjoy!

Write It Just Like That, But Not Really - A post about school censorship and how we are striking down creativity and self exploration at a critical time in adolescent lives.  How can teens discover who they are if they aren’t allowed to be themselves?  Especially in this case where a student is told to write an assignment in a certain style and then gets severely punished for doing just that.

For My Fellow Pagan Bloggers - Have You Found Jesus? - A funny story that I shared from a Yahoo! Group that I belonged to at the time.  It tells of a woman who had been preached to by multiple people about religion in a single day and how she calmly, but comically responded to the last person.

God’s Politics - My response to a change made to the Kevin & Bean morning show which airs weekday mornings on Los Angeles based radio station 106.7 KROQ.  The changes which stemmed from a strongly right wing political environment were in my opinion unwarranted and ultimately show how the Christian values of politics and society have struck fear into corporations and the media.

The Story of Father Time - A funny anecdote about an experience I had with an elderly gentleman in a Carl’s Jr. restaurant who was convinced that only his Timex had the correct time.

Christianity, Striking Fear Into the Naive and Gullible For Centuries… - I repost a ridiculous list of warning signs that a church by the name of St. Mary’s Catholic Church provided parents with as an aid in determining if their teen was turning goth.  Sadly a large portion of the things listed are pretty normal behavior for a teenager.  A couple of my favorites are, “Insists on spending time with friends while unaccompanied by an adult.” and “Watches cable television or any other corrupted media sources.”

Wedding Invitations & Save the Date Cards - The last and only truly personal post in the group.  This post showed scans of both the Save the Date Card and Wedding Invitations that Misty and I hand made for our wedding using scrapbooking materials.  It was perhaps the most tedious task of my life, but it made our wedding related mailers one of a kind.

I have added a significant number of older posts dating all the way back to August of 2003.  Most of them again are just personal journals that I kept, many of which were related to my early days of dating Misty up until the point in which we were married.  I doubt there is anything of real interest outside of what I provided above unless you want to get a glimpse into my life a few years back.

I moved nearly everything that was hosted on LiveJournal over, however the account still exists and there are still a number of posts with either surveys and tests or just posts that I felt were too general and irrelevant to bring over to Musings.  If you’re interested you can still read the rest at A Day In the Dark

So as I promised the other day, today is the day I planned to wrap up the ZotFish and Criss Angel posts. Sadly since then there have been no further developments; so I thought I would take this opportunity to simply recap the events from day one.

Last Friday Mashable did a review of ZotFish, a website that provides a means for the general public to ask celebrities, politicians, and athletes questions. The idea behind the site is that people post questions and people on the site vote for the questions. The more votes a question gets the better chance the question has of being answered by the person being asked. I was curious to see if any celebrities had in fact answered and what celebrities were featured. As I browsed through ZotFish I discovered that the magician Criss Angel was one of the available celebrities to ask a question. I decided to test out the site with a humorous question for the emo-gician based off of a running joke on the Kevin and Bean show heard weekday mornings on the Los Angeles based radio station 106.7 KROQ.

The pressing question I decided to ask was, “Why are you such a douche bag?”. Following my post of the question I decided to take the idea and run with it. I generated a small buzz here in the office and was able to get quite a few colleagues to vote for my question. I then took it to the next level and contacted members of the Kevin and Bean show in hopes of getting some on air buzz on Monday.

I continued my personal promotion of the question support, and by 2:45PM PST my question reached the top position with 12 votes outranking the likes of Barrack Obama and Hilary Clinton. The question sat at number 1 for nearly an hour and a half before it was sadly removed from ZotFish. In a funny twist they also removed Criss Angel from their celebrity database.

When I got home I discovered that Michael Baldwin of Zotfish personally responded to my attempt with an e-mail. You can read the e-mail in ZotFish’s Response to my Criss Angel question, but basically he just explained that he appreciated my efforts but obviously it had to be removed due to the harassing nature of the question. Following the question takedown and his response I contacted the Kevin and Bean show so that they were aware that the question would not be there come Monday and I also wrote a response to Michael thanking him for the e-mail and letting him know the backstory on my efforts.

On Saturday I got responses for both Michael and Bean from the Kevin and Bean show regarding my attempts. Michael responded with, “Was amusing” and Bean simply followed up with a “very funny. good effort though!!”.

Though my attempt at getting radio hype for my efforts failed I definitely learned a lot from this. First I learned that with the right subject matter you can start a decent buzz fairly quickly, but I also learned that if you are going to do something like this you need to take it slow so that you aren’t caught in the act early on. I was in no way trying to do this maliciously or as a way to thwart the serious efforts of ZotFish, I simply wanted to experiment with the site a little and hopefully build some hype around something that Kevin and Bean show fans would quickly relate and respond to.

That said, I again want to commend ZotFish and Michael Baldwin for their quick takedown and response to the question. If they want their site to be a successful one they will need a quick response time like this, especially as they grow in popularity. As the site gets bigger I am sure questions like this will become an everyday occurrence, and the more bogus questions users and celebrities see, the less serious they will take the site.

If you’re interested in reading about these events as they unfolded including images of the questions ranking and the takedown of Criss Angels page follow the links below. They are in the order in which they were posted.

Criss Angel is a Douche Bag
ZotFish.com Deleted My Question
ZotFish’s Response To My Criss Angel Question
My Response To Michael Baldwin of ZotFish
Nearing My Final Wrap Up Of The ZotFish Fiasco

Today I spent the day with my family at the San Diego Zoo, but I was thrilled to see earlier this morning that I got a follow up response from ZotFish. Also, last night I received an e-mail from Bean from the Kevin and Bean show.

Michael from ZotFish responded with, “Was amusing!. Bean from the Kevin and Bean show responded to my e-mails with, “very funny. good effort though!!”

I’m going to keep my blogging open for this through probably Tuesday at the latest just in case anyone else from the Kevin and Bean show replies. This has been a fun venture…hopefully I’ll get another opportunity to do something like this again in the future. Don’t worry ZotFish, I’ll leave you out of it next time! ;P

I was thrilled to find out when I got home that ZotFish had actually taken the time to respond to my Criss Angel question attempt personally. While I am bummed that things didn’t go as planned, I applaud ZotFish for their quick response to something like this. I really was hoping that perhaps I could have gotten some KROQ involvement before it got to this point, but I never knew for certain that they would get involved to begin with. I am going to send out an e-mail to the Kevin and Bean show and let them know about the question being taken down, but I do plan to direct them to my blog just in case they are still interested in how things went. Oh, and if you’re wondering what ZotFish had to say about the question, here is the response I got:

Hi Mike,

Congratulations on getting your question up to the #1 spot!

I appreciate the enthusiasm — ideally everyone would get that many of their friends to register and vote on their questions. Of course, we’ll have to remove it due to its harassing content, since we are launching a serious site.

We welcome all questions of yours that aren’t offensive, however.

Cheers
Michael
ZotFish

Again, there are no hard feelings with ZotFish and I wish nothing but the best for the site. I think it is a great concept and if they can get it to work and if they can get some responses from the celebrities I think it will be an incredible site. Again my purpose for this was simply to cause some buzz and hopefully have the opportunity to potentially get KROQ and some of their listeners involved in something that would be overall quite amusing. Obviously Criss Angel would have never answered, but the buzz alone would have been worth every ounce of effort.