Gettin' snarky with the journalists, part 2
Written at:
23:57 25 Jan, 2005 permalink
The second in a series of e-mails I sent to journalists writing hard-hitting news about the Twinkie's forthcoming 75th anniversary.
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 10:42:33 EST
From: Xxxxxxx@aol.com
To: Todd Stadler
Subject: I'm writing a USA Weekend article about Twinkies
I'm writing a USA Weekend article about Twinkies. Would you tell me a little about the TWINKIES project? When/why/how was it started? What is it? What's the point? Anything else you wish to say. Please give me your full name, title, where you're based, phone number, e-mail address.
Thanks,
Xxxx Xxxxxxx
Phone (xxx) xxx-xxxx
E-mail Xxxxxxx@aol.com
And my response:
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 18:01:42 -0800
From: Todd Stadler
To: Xxxxxxx@aol.com
Subject: Re: I'm writing a USA Weekend article about Twinkies
I'm writing a USA Weekend article about Twinkies.
Great!
Would you tell me a little about the TWINKIES project?
I'm not sure what to say about the project that isn't on the Web site
itself, so ...
When/why/how was it started?
May 1995 (almost a milestone of its own!). As almost all things created
by college students, it was a desperate attempt to stave off sleep and/or
the need to study, likely both. We were probably inspired by an unsourced
internet forward later found to have pulled from a 1989 Spy Magazine
article somewhat similar in structure to our tests, but I don't really
remember anymore. Either way, we were all goofed up on copious amounts of
caffeine, and unwilling to read our books. This would have been
unremarkable for college students had we not also decided to post our
results on the relatively nascent Web. Because, you know, once you're on
the internet, you're credible. And funny — because in 1995, the only
other stuff on the Web was scientific research. So you didn't have to try
hard to be lauded as hilarious. I remember before the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project
became famous, the most popular humor site on the Web was a scan of
knock-knock jokes from a 1974 issue of Highlights for Children.
What is it?
Um ... A Web site? No, make that — an old, mostly funny Web site? Or
how about: the world's foremost authority in the nascent field of Twinkie
science? (I really just want to have a quote from me featuring the word
"nascent", so I'm using it as much as possible.)
I was also going to say that the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project is a boon to lazy
features journalists, but I didn't want you to get offended. That's why I
didn't say it. Still, you'd be surprised how often we get mentioned in
papers that never bothered to contact us. Some poor guy, working under
deadline, has to write an article in the Living or Today section or
whatever, his friend forwards him our URL, and twenty minutes later he's
got his article. If he attributes any quotes to us, they're just taken
from the site copy. Then we find out about it because somebody reads it
and tells us about it. Also, whenever there is a story about Twinkies, we
(which means I — Gouge, my erstwhile co-scientist either doesn't get all
the e-mail or chooses to ignore it) are the go-to guys for quotes. Not
that I mind — I relish the cheap 'n' easy fame, to be sure — but it's
odd to me how often respectable publications or programs get ahold of us.
But, honestly, don't let my quasi-cynical rambling turn you off. I really
do want to be featured in your article.
What's the point?
You know, many a philosophy professor has been granted tenure because he's
written copious amounts of verbiage answering this question. So I'm
likely not going to cover it all. Ha.
To a surprising number of our readers who bother to e-mail us, the point
is that we apparently "have too much free time". As if it were we who
just wasted thirty minutes in the computer lab surfing humor sites and
writing in to the authors in the futile hopes of getting our e-mail posted
on the letters page. Hmph.
To an equally surprising number of science teachers, the point is to teach
the scientific method in a fun and humorous way that engages kids at a
visceral level something something something. That we still get letters
attesting to this use blows me away. Okay, yes, we did use our knowledge
of the elementary-school-level scientific method to structure our tests.
Maybe because it harkened back to those halcyon days when you could stick
some celery in red water and call it science, or maybe because we hadn't
done any real research since said days, and we didn't know any better.
But I'd like to say for the record that we didn't set out to teach anybody
anything in a fun or humorous way. Because I am a firm believer that
teaching should never involve cutting the cord off of an underused
applience and plugging it directly into the wall. Still, to the degree that we've helped the children (who I believe are the future), that's great. Even if I know deep down that the only reason the teachers use us as examples is because
they're bored bored bored.
But, honestly, the point was originally "to entertain ourselves because we
are bored". When posted to the internet as such things eventually must
be, this became "to entertain nerds with computers because they are
bored". Later, when the internet was no longer the exclusive domain of
nerds, this became "to entertain losers who are still bored in spite of
there being more productive and informative sites out there".
I suppose now, the point is "to keep Todd on the periphery of fame for
years to come at no expense to him, much to his own amusement".
Anything else you wish to say.
The Web site didn't always used to be at www.twinkiesproject.com. It used
to be at www.owlnet.rice.edu/~gouge/twinkies.html (now that's a URL!),
being a part of Chris Gouge's former student Web space. But if you go to
that URL now, you get forwarded to twinkiesproject.com, because the former
Rice webmaster (Prentiss Riddle) is a cool, cool guy. Anyhow,
when Chris graduated a year after me, it looked like the site was going to
be shut down. We had tons of offers to "mirror" the site elsewhere, but
we didn't like the idea of losing control over what we'd made. Then
Hostess, in a curiously wise move otherwise unheard of among large
corporations, decided to adopt us without exercising any editorial
control. They bought the domain twinkiesproject.com, set it up, and gave
us passwords. In theory, I could still edit it today, but I'm pretty lazy
these days.
Interestingly, we first got a hold of Hostess because of a raving lunatic.
In those days of the nascent (!) Web, lunatics roamed freely, as opposed
to now when they're mostly confined to blogs. Anyhow, some guy claimed to
have trademarked the word "Winkies" for some animated character he'd made.
He'd typed the word "winkies" into a search engine and on the results page
saw a link to our site along with a text excerpt that had his precious
would-be trademarked term in bold all over the place! Unfortunately, he
wasn't clever enough to notice the "T" in front of all the instances of
"winkies". So he threatened to sue us. At that time, Rice University had
the outstanding legal policy of "if even the looniest of dingbats says
you're threatening his copyright, we'll take down your page until our
highly paid legal team has thoroughly wasted their time," so the page got
taken down. Which got us coverage in the Houston Chronicle, and through
them, on the AP wire (and, ultimately, in a Dave Barry book, of course).
Because in those days, breaking copyright on the Web was a new thing.
Everyone wanted to know if perhaps the internet should be made illegal or
burned or something. Anyhow, through this whole legal morass, Rice's
legal team got a hold of Hostess' legal team and billed a lot of hours.
Out of those meetings came the agreement that our Web site would be
"blessed" as legal by Hostess, provided that we put a disclaimer about
copyrights they held on the site. We were happy to not be the first
internet copyright defendants put to death, so we complied. In hindsight,
this was remarkably cool of Hostess. I mean, here we are playing up the
"Twinkies are the stuff of mad science" angle, and they co-opted us rather
than tried to crush us, which was, and remains, Disney's favorite tactic.
Very forward-thinking, very postmodern (I guess — I never studied such
things). Anyhow, that's how Hostess came to save the site when we were
about to lose it when Chris graduated.
At some point later, Hostess tried to further co-opt our apparent e-fame
by cajoling us to "host" twinkies.com. They told us they'd give us a
year's supply of Twinkies if we only sent in photos of ourselves (to be
Photoshopped onto pixellated white lab coats, no doubt) and agreed to
shill for them. Visions of hundreds (possibly thousands — who gets to
define a "year's supply"?) of Twinkies arriving at my door made me giddy.
Then we found that since they were sticking to their line that Twinkies
only last a month or so, they would really only send us coupons every
month, good for whatever they deemed to be thirty days' worth of Twinkies.
This greatly disappointed us — we wanted hundreds of Twinkies, now! So,
being lazy college students, we never bothered to send in our photos.
Some years later, they officially removed their link from twinkies.com to
twinkiesproject.com, since they were trying to get rated by some arbiter
of child-safety, and our site had all sorts of depictions of people
settings things on fire, dropping things off buildings, which to some
people is a bad influence to kids, never mind the amazing science
education it offers! Ahem. So while we still have an official
relationship with Hostess, it's been years since we talked. I miss those
days when I got e-mail from their clipping service. Oh well.
And while they went on to declare bankruptcy, we've (er ... I've)
continued to milk it for all it's worth. Articles in purt-near every
major newspaper in America, plus several foreign ones. Radio interviews.
TV interviews (well, only one, but it was on MTV, and they paid for my
travel up to Seattle and hotel, which was pretty much the best gig I've
gotten out of this, even if the entire interview was filmed in the crew's
small hotel room and we kept having to pause whenever the maid's vacuuming
got too loud; it was on a show called Big Urban Myth; I only watched
one and a half episodes). We were also featured in a manual for a modem (a US Sportster, if I remember), along the lines of "so you're
connected to the Internet, now what's out there?" All in all, a
ridiculous amount of attention has resulted from a little goofing off.
It's the quintessential American success story.
My mom used to act embarrassed that she'd spent all that money sending me
to a fine university only for me to get famous for procrastinating. Maybe
she thought the folks at church would lampoon her son's lackadaisical
ways. But now she's proud to be the mother of "the Twinkies guy". And
given that four years ago, I quit my hardware engineering job at Intel and
became a webmaster (for a small publisher making gardening and
horticulture books), I'd have to say that the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project contributed
more to my current career than my official college major, which was
computer engineering. I can only imagine what Rice University has gotten
out of it in terms of free publicity. The bums.
So I'm equal parts jaded of the silly stories that get done on us,
realizing how they are at least mildly indicative of the sorry state of
today's entertainment-cum-"news", and excited to ride the wave of
unmerited attention like so many other people who mostly live in
California. But you can focus on the excited part in your article. Or
you can write me out entirely because I've sort of sullied your
profession. Either way, I get to write long, rambling e-mails to
journalists of apparent renown, so I've had my fun.
Please give me your full name, title, where you're based, phone number,
e-mail address.
Full name: Todd Stadler
Title: Twinkie scientist*
Based: Portland, Oregon
Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx
E-mail: xxxxxxx@aracnet.com
*This was the caption on my interview with MTV's Big Urban Myth, so I'd
hate to mess up the "branding" I've got going. If I ever get business
cards, this will be my title, so it's practically official or something.
Gettin' snarky with the journalists, part 1
Written at:
19:01 25 Jan, 2005 permalink
Apparently, the Twinkie's 75th anniversary is coming up soon, and as a result, several journalists have contacted me, in the hopes that a hard-hitting story will write itself, or perhaps that at least I'll write it. It's been odd again being the focus of attention, ten years after Chris Gouge and I made The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project.
For no apparent reason, I thought I'd share my correspondance with the journalists from respected institutions (they're the only ones I spend time writing convoluted responses to, because I am a fame whore). It's self-deprecating. It's conceited. And it probably reflects a belief that any story mentioning me probably won't pan out — they rarely do. So I have my fun writing back. The degree to which you have fun reading it is entirely your fault.
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:11:57 -0000
From: Xxxxx Xxxx
To: Todd Stadler
Subject: Enquiry
Are you guys still around and involved in the investigation of Twinkie duration?
Many thanks
Xxxxx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
My reply was as follows:
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:42:50 -0800
From: Todd Stadler
To: Xxxxx Xxxx
Subject: Re: Enquiry
Well, one of us is still around, in spite of (or because of? preservatives?) our erstwhile snack cake dealings. The other one hasn't shuffled off the mortal coil so much as he doesn't seem very interested in eking out every last drop of "fame" from passing journalists. Unlike me, of course.
Unfortunately, I can't say that I'm still "involved" in investigating
our snack cake friends, perhaps because there isn't much more to say about
them, but more probably because ten years later people are still
responding to what I've already done, so why do more?
Still, it's not every day I get an e-mail from someone at the BBC, so of
course I'll reply and if you have any questions, I'll answer them,
although the odds of my being more humorous than the Web site are slim.
It's not so much that the Web site is "all that" as that it was written
when I was a college student, deeply intent on not studying, and this
e-mail and any subsequent communications will occur while I'm working,
perhaps deeply intent on not getting much done, but ... hmm, I don't know
where I was going with that.
But whenever people interview me, I get the
impression that they think my every word will be as brilliant as they
perceive the site to be. They usually lose this impression quite quickly.
This sometimes leads to their rather sadly asking me questions that they
think are funny, regardless of how I answer, and rarely but most
pathetically to simply asking me to say a quote that they've prepared
because it will really tie the piece together. Gads, I'm not famous enough
to pry this kind of pathos. Still, I once did a video interview with MTV
in a hotel in Seattle in which the entire scene was shot in the rather
small hotel room of one (all?) of the crew members — the camera was on
one side of the bed, and I on the other, with a box of Twinkies duct-taped to some lighting rigging in between us. We had to keep pausing the
interview because the sound of vacuuming outside was getting too loud.
That's the sort of life experience that one treasures forever.
So maybe you don't want to ask me any questions now. Or maybe you see
through my thin self-deprecating veneer and you know that I actually crave
an interview with you, as it would give an otherwise normal life the
imprimatur of exciting media coverage.
Either way, I have some questions for you. First, aren't most Britons
unfamiliar with Twinkies? It seems like I get several e-mails a year from
folks in the UK asking what a Twinkie is and could I send them a box or
(for the sadly uninformed) could I, on the assumption that I work for
Hostess, arrange for Hostess products to be distributed in Britain
(a move which would be sure to firm up British respect for the United
States and her corpulent citizens)? I think, to most Great Britizens (I
just coined that term — can you circulate it over there?), a Twinkie is
some vaguely defined monstrosity that looks less like the golden sponge
cake it more or less is, and more like some kind of embodiment of
everything that's wrong with America. Sort of, and I mean no deep offense
here, like I think of a haggis (great chieftain o' the puddin' race!). Not
that I've ever had a haggis, but then I doubt most Britons have ever had a
Twinkie.
Secondly, a friend and I were having a discussion about units the other
day (you can see how much less exciting my life has become since my heady
days as America's premier Twinkie scientist), and we were talking about
what units are used in the UK. I was under the impression that it was all
metric at this point, but it seems not to be the case. Maybe it depends on
how old you are. I don't expect you to tell me what unit you use for light
brightness or whatever, but what about car speeds, distances between
towns, paper dimensions, temperature, and so on? I know about using
"stone" for people's weights, and I don't get it, so you don't have to
talk about that.
Thirdly, can you say hello to Ricky Gervais for me? I know how small and
intimate the BBC is, so you must see him somewhere around. Just let him
know how much we enjoyed The Office several years after it aired over
there. And if you could quote something from the show when you see him, so
much the better.
Thanks.
Written by: Prentiss Riddle
Written at: 19:03 27 Jan, 2005