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the very worst jobs
Tuesday, June 15 1999
In my workplace, the very worst jobs I get are "microsites" for commercial promotions. They're usually designed around a batch of non-standard HTML pages with odd-shaped images and plenty of language such as
Have you ever been hypnotized at a party?
Well, this is your chance to be hypnotized
by all the lights that will be flashing when
you and a friend are flown to Los Angeles to
watch the Premier of "Stir of Echoes" with all
of your favorite Hollywood Stars!!!
Yes, that's a direct quote from a page I put together, the three exclamation marks and everything. The whole thing is totally sic. Putting these pages together is absolute grunt work, since there's practically nothing to automate and you pretty much have to follow the web designers' directions verbatim. Frequently the matter is made far worse by a technologically-incompetent marketing hack who evidently thinks all of web development is "magic" and thus equally doable.
On a happier note, in the evening Kim and I watched Buffalo 66, an art film with plenty of big-name cameos. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed the film enormously. It was a sort of probing exploration of a fairly typical individual from working-class America. Our hero, a single-minded, humourless dysfunctional guy, was raised by uncaring parents (they have "one picture" of him around somewhere) into a cold cruel world where pretty girls ignore his attentions and football teams are sensations until that crucial moment. One such crucial moment managed to, in that typically Byzantine manner of life, put our hero behind bars for five years. Like everything else in our hero's life, this crucial moment has left him in a rut. His entire life is nothing but a series of ruts. To break out of just one of them is a story worthy of a movie. That's where the beautiful large-breasted blond heroine steps in. Her day takes a dramatic turn as he, freshly released from prison, randomly kidnaps her and takes her on a visit to Mom and Dad. But, in a strange twist of typical movie fashion, her personality turns out to be perfectly suited to dealing with his. She finds excitement in his crudely straightforward manner and soon falls in love. From there the movie follows typical Hollywood formulæ, but in its own quirky art-film kind of way.
Where the movie excelled was in its character development of the chief male protagonist. From the homophobic get-go, he was shown to be a deeply flawed individual. But with every flashback we see how his tragic childhood shattered his humanity. He ended up with the traits of many broken people I've known: my brother, Josh Furr, and even some of myself, particularly my loner tendencies. Said Kim at one point, "He's almost as bad as you!"
"Guaranteed to increase the size of a man's specific anatomy." - from an advertisement on Rock 105.3.
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