The MySpace Between Their Ears
It’s been a while since I’ve railed on MySpace and the mockery is long overdue:
I’ll start with an unusual friend request I received a few days ago; It was from my mom. As if seeing my mom’s mug on MySpace wasn’t disturbing enough, she lists her marital status as “single.” Hey, I know I’m bad about returning phone calls but there are better ways for parents to inform their kid about a divorce. They seemed so happy at our birthday celebration last week (sniff). I’m curious how she even found my MySpace page and I’m a bit concerned that she found it through this blog. I’ve always known there was a possibility my parents read my blog but I have to operate under a shroud of denial for the sake of keeping it real. Otherwise, I’d have to start using terms like “frickin’” and “gosh darn” while I discuss gum drop forests. There really need to be parental controls for parents. I’d hate for my sweet, wholesome parents to think they failed at raising me- I take full responsibility for the foul-mouthed, bionic monster I’ve become. So please, Mom and Dad, just look away.
What I’m still trying to understand about MySpace is if it merely attracts idiots or if it’s actually a breeding ground for them. The first pieces of evidence I submit for consideration are the unsuccessful attempts at disguising one’s age. Most of the people I know on MySpace are comics and we all know that people in the entertainment industry don’t tell their real age (except me, I turned 26 last week). So they insert some random age and then halfway down the page they list the schools they attended and the majority of the time it’s obvious they’ve listed their actual graduation year. Here’s a tip: if you’re going to admit you graduated high school in 1995, you might as well admit that you’re 30.
Idiots are bad enough but idiots with no sense of humor are the worst and MySpace has more than its share, the worst offenders being single, white women, usually over 30. Some of you may remember that I made a Bea Arthur MySpace page as a goof for a friend. It’s totally outdated and some of the humor attempts no longer make sense but I’m too lazy to update it. I tend to forget about it for months at a time then I’ll check in and accept friend requests and read through the mail, of which there’s plenty. The blacks dig it, the gays worship it but the single white chicks are outraged. You wouldn’t believe the hate mail I get from some of them for tarnishing Bea’s delicate image. Actually, they don’t all send hate mail. Some of them write letters (one does so on a regular basis) that indicate they really think that’s Bea Arthur’s page. How can people be so easily offended and/or so utterly gullible????
I witnessed further evidence of white chicks’ lack of sense of humor from comments on my video page. It contains the horse joke that’s on my MySpace page and I forgot that it can be found through a video search. A bunch of females blasted me for it and sure enough, visits to their pages all turned up lots of pictures with them and their horsies. Funny or not, at least my bit wasn’t meant to be taken seriously whereas their knee jerk responses were. I think they all need to spend a little less time with barn animals and a little more time interacting with humans. And they need to lighten up.
My final piece of evidence (for now) about the idiocy of MySpace users is the video below. Please watch it and form your own opinion about the matter.
Now go read some of the comments left for it before continuing with this post (UPDATE: I noticed that MySpace adds new comments to the top so what you read may not be typical of the comments I read).
Done? Now, hopefully by the point he mentioned a Tomcat had to be decommissioned from Afghanistan you realized that this is a joke (courtesy of The Onion). If you didn’t realize it’s a joke, you need to hightail it out of here with my parents. If you realized it’s a joke and didn’t think it was funny you should just die. The woman’s deadpan line, “We can only hope that’s coming soon” is priceless. But as you can see from the comments there are plenty of people who thought this was real, which means not only were these kids incapable of picking up on any of the MANY signs this is a joke, but they couldn’t even be bothered to read through a couple of comments to get a heads up from the people who did realize it’s a joke before sending their own nasty opinions about the kid (many of which don’t sound like they’re joking). The comedy world survived Jerry Lewis, Gallagher and Carrot Top but I think MySpace is more than it can handle.
So why do I still have a MySpace page if I despise it so much? Because it’s the only way my idiot friends know how to get in touch with me. If you can’t beat ‘em, add ‘em to MySpace.
Oops!
Ok, I accidentally linked the MySpace page to my own site out of habit. My MySpace address is www.myspace.com/comedianjenee .
Since this topic is lingering, I’ll mention another email Bea just received:
Subject: Hi Beatrice
Message: Hi how are you iam S***** v*** I think you rock on the show because you are a Taurus like me Iam from Colorado and 16 you aree my favorite character.
goodbye S**** V***
I checked out her page, thinking this had to be a prankster. Within three seconds I was sure I was right because it was the classic mockery of a teenage girl’s site: sparkly things bouncing all over the background, Mariah Carey theme song, enormous pictures of parents, school friends and Kelly Clarkson. Just the type of site I can only view for 20 seconds before before my poor laptop starts having a conniption fit. Her inclusion of Green Day as a favorite band showed she has great taste, but it also seemed like it was a deliberate joke toward me.
Then I noticed her comments date back several days so this was obviously done before I published Bea’s site. Since a teenage girl’s site is inherently comical, I really wasn’t sure if it was legit. I accepted her friend invite and was about to leave a comment on her site when I realized that if this really is a teenager girl, she is way too naiive and probably shouldn’t have Bea’s picture with the little blurbs on her page. I deleted her from Bea’s list then went to see if that also deleted Bea from her list but her profile’s private, visible only to friends. So now I’m convinced this really is a teenage girl who apparently thinks she found the real Bea Arthur on MySpace and that Bea hangs with a lot of rappers. Now I kinda wish I’d kept her on my list so I can follow her for a while. I have a strong suspicion she’s going to be knocked up within a year by a guy who tells her, “We don’t need condoms. You can’t get pregnant until the 50th time. You can trust me. I’m a senator.”
The Real MySpace Page
So I had a little fun with the MySpace page. Sadly I’ve come to realize my niche in comedy is in fake profiles. Not a whole lot of money to be made there. While I did it strictly for amusement, I encountered a few situations that are appropriate fodder for this blog.
As I discovered the first time I tried MySpace (Just “1 Friends” On MySpace), pretty much anybody will accept a stranger as a friend so the tally means nothing. Actually, when you’re Bea Arthur, you only have to add a few friends and then the invites start pouring in. There were a few interesting email exchanges I thought I’d share.
Invitee: Who are you and how do you know me? I don’t add people i don’t know
(Clearly, this is a discriminating MySpace user).
Bea: I’m Bea Arthur from tv’s “Golden Girls.”
Invitee: Right. I’m sure Bea Arthur has a myspace account and adds random black men to her friends list. Seriously, how do you know me? And If you don’t know me, why do you want to be my friend? I only accept the top applicants.
He only accepts the “top applicants?” The guy’s page features two full screen pictures of a girl’s butt in a g-string. Bea Arthur’s ass may not look as great, but she’s certainly worthy of a lousy MySpace add. Fortunately for Bea, he must have temporarily relaxed his “applicant” standards and didn’t even wait for a reply before adding Bea as a friend.
The next email in Bea’s inbox was from a girl who wrote:
Girl: I see youre promoting my man on your top 8….I always love to see people helpin him out…. ;-) thx
Bea’s not the type to admit that the only qualification for making her top 8 list is to have a picture that gives the impression you’ve killed a person at some point. Well, actually, with Roc-Rok, it’s kinda hard to tell but she qualified via her other assets.
Then the girl sent another email and this was the exchange:
Girl: So who are you really?
Bea: I’m Bea Arthur from tv’s “Golden Girls.”
Girl: Does someone do your page for you….cuz I see you know a lot of the same people I do and theyre all from out this way…
I think we actually hooked one here. I guess she doesn’t realize the similar friends are a result of Bea poaching a few rappers’ friends lists.
Bea: I know most of them from the clubs. Even at my age, I still like to shake it.
No response this time so maybe she caught on.
Here’s the final exchange:
Random person Bea didn’t invite: Whats up momma….I was just wonderin who dis really is…???
Bea: I’m Bea Arthur from tv’s “Golden Girls.”
Random person: It seems like youre someone else and I see you know my boy **** how do you know so many rappers?
He thinks it seems like it’s someone else but he doesn’t want to go out on a limb and risk offending what could be the real Bea Arthur by calling her a fraud.
Bea: The question is, how do so many rappers know Bea Arthur? Some would say I’m an American icon.
I guess that answered his question because he didn’t respond.
While being Bea was much more fun, I do have a real site that I finally got involved with. Right now most of the people on my list are actual friends with a couple of obvious jokes thrown in. It’s interesting to go through comics’ pages and realize we all know the same people, which makes it even weirder when I keep seeing the same person’s picture on various pages and I don’t know him or her. It makes me feel out of the loop. The drawback to having all comics on my friends page is that it’s counterproductive to my purpose of drawing in more traffic. Comics are too wrapped up in their own hilarious endeavors to support each other’s. I guess I’ll either have to leave some great comments on their pages and hope to draw in some of their fans or I’ll have to get started on a June Cleaver page. There’s something about old white ladies belonging to groups like, “Bitch buy me some Kool-Aid!” that really draws people in.
My real honest-to-goodness MySpace page (well, it’s as real as I can bear to make it). Add me to your friends list. I’ll accept even if you aren’t one of the “top applicants.”
MySpace- Thank You For Being A Friend
As promised, I’ve thrown myself into the MySpace mix with guns blazing. I was really surprised how many of my close friends had MySpace pages and how many groups there are that cater to my very specific interests. I hope you’ll check out my page and let me know what you think. I guess I should mention that the MySpace picture is a little more current than the photo on this site so it may come as a surprise to some of the regular readers:
Just “1 Friends” On MySpace
A couple weeks ago, my friend Doug invited me to join MySpace.com. Normally I’d disregard such an invitation because I got my fill of instant messages from creepy strangers in the early days of AOL. But for some reason, Doug sent my invite to an old email address I’d all but forgotten about and I happened to check it and find Doug’s invite the same day Green Day was premiering their “Jesus of Suburbia” video only on MySpace. I figured it must be some sort of sign I was supposed to be a part of the MySpace community and joined.
I thought MySpace was a place to meet and interact with new people. I quickly learned it’s some sort of sick competition to see how many friends you can accumulate on the site. Either people send you an invitation or you send invites out to others and as they accept, they are added to your list of friends. Doug has over 2700 friends. I have one. And it’s out there for the whole world to see: “Jenée has 1 friends.” Yes, it says, “1 friends,” plural, as if the creators of MySpace never considered the possibility a person would only have “1 friend” so they didn’t adapt their HTML accordingly. Under the declaration is Doug’s stupid mug looking like he’s mocking me for accepting his pointless invite in the first place.
I expected my entire MySpace experience to last until the end of the Green Day video at which time I’d never return again, then I noticed Green Day had 42,000 “friends.” I decided as a goof to ask them to be on my friends list. The idea that a grown woman would bother to invite Green Day to be her friends seemed so incredibly geeky, I had to do it. So I sent them the invite and forgot about it.
A week later, I remembered the site and decided to check in again, excited about the prospect it might have the grammatically-correct “Jenée has 2 friends” with a picture of Green Day next to Doug’s. Nope. I still had just “1 friends.” In an even geekier move, I returned to Green Day’s MySpace page and saw that the lackey in charge of maintaining the site had indeed logged on since I sent my invite. What the hell? I checked out the “preferred friends” pictures on their front page. One features a guy bent over a car getting cuffed by a cop. Another picture shows a girl sticking out her tongue with the caption “Blow me you fucks.” They made page one of the friends cut and I couldn’t even make page 400? I considered the possibility the shmuck checked out my page and decided I wasn’t worthy. Maybe it was the fact I hadn’t added a photo or that I listed my age as 100, my sexual orientation as “unsure” and my marital status as “swinger” but since options like those aren’t readily available on most questionnaires, I had to take them.
I browsed some of Green Day’s “friends’” sites to see what they’ve got that I haven’t. Apparently I’m the only one who decided to add ONE famous person/band as a joke. I noticed everybody had scores, if not hundreds, of friends- some famous, some not famous. As far as I can tell, the object of the game seems to be to try and get as many hotties as possible, or at least eight for the preferred friends list. Who are they trying to fool? After browsing the photos and reading some of their comments, it was obvious to me that many of them probably don’t have 20 people who can tolerate them in their real lives yet they’re trying to create the illusion they’re friends with a bunch of Playboy Playmates. Are that many adults really so desperate to convince others they have lots and lots of friends? In Doug’s defense, he is a comic and he was on a tv show so I’m sure most of his “friends” are fans who sent invitations to him. For people in the entertainment industry, it can be another marketing tool, but for almost everybody else, it just seems weird to call someone a friend when their only awareness of your existence is a quick click to accept your invitation.
I decided to send out a few invites to random strangers, same profile intact, to see what would happen. They all accepted. I thought about the possibilities: I could acquire thousands of friends then shove it in Doug’s face, “HA! HA! SUCKER. I WIN!!” But in the end, I decided to delete all my new “friends” from my profile, which I’ll also do if Green Day ever accepts my invite. I’d rather the world know I have one real friend than 500 make-believe ones.
