Todd Stadler's blog

i am a fame whore

So they're going to put me on the TV. Specifically, the MTV.

For those of you keeping count (hi, Mom!), this will sort of be the second time I've been on MTV.

The first, far less interesting and yet more surprising time was when MTV's The Year in Rock for 1995 had a section on the Internet gaining popularity.

As introduced by Kurt Loder saying something about how there isn't only porn on the Internet, a screen shot from The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project scrolled by, with my name clearly visible.

At the time, I was first made aware of such micro-fame by a sharp-eyed dormmate who just happened to be watching the program.

This time, I've been much more involved in the whole process, and I've even been given notice of my appearance before it happens, but you'll still have to be a good observer to ensure you won't miss me, I bet.

It all started when I got an e-mail from somebody claiming to be working for MTV.

Or rather, someone working for a company doing production work for MTV, which was why, he explained, he didn't have an e-mail address ending in "@mtv.com". I was, of course, slightly dubious.

I was made all the more doubtful when I found out that his company's name is Plum Productions. The reasons for my doubt will be made clear if one visits www.plumproductions.com, but I don't recommend you do that, at least not on company time (ahem).

It later turned out that there are at least two Plum Productions in the world, the one at the aforementioned URL being a porn company, and the other a seemingly respectable producer of TV shows and commercials.

This latter one has its Web site at www.plumprod.com, which unfortunately doesn't completely avoid looking like a porn site URL itself.

Anyhow, the man who contacted me, Terry Anderson (no, not that Terry Anderson) eventually called me up and explained the dilly-yo.

He was working on a new show, to be called MTV's Big Urban Myth, which would explore all sorts of urban legends.

And he wanted to talk to me about Twinkies. Because, you know, I am the world's preeminent expert on that moist, golden snack cake.

Of course, when I say things like that, I have to wonder how I got to be in this position.

Eight years ago, I found myself goofing off with a friend at college, when I should have been studying for finals. Being geeky slackers, we put our results up on the then-nascent Internet because ... well, I'm not sure anyone really has a good reason for putting something on the Internet.

But in the intervening eight years, our names, or at least the Web page we made, have been mentioned in a whole lot of places.

Meanwhile, almost nobody (including myself, it would seem) cares about the electrical engineering degree I was supposed to have been studying for in the first place.

Is it any coincidence I quit my job at Intel to be a Web designer? There's a lesson in here for the kids, but it's probably a very bad one.

Anyhow, Terry Anderson wanted to know what I knew about the shelf life of a Twinkie.

I get e-mails about this all the time, so you'd think that I might have looked into it at some point. But you'd also probably assume that I might have bothered to update the Web page that made me famous in the past several years.

Either way, you'd be wrong, having massively underestimated my inertia.

Besides, it's really hard to do a shelf-life test that, as many people theorize, could take ten years or more.

I'll plug a Twinkie into a wall outlet and take a photo for yuks and all, but I don't have such an abiding interest in the minutiae of the Twinkie to sit around for ten years, you know?

Still, I had a guess about a Twinkie's shelf life, which was that it wasn't very long.

I based this on my attempt once to collect all the different colors of Hostess Sno-Balls (no, they don't pay me to do this stuff, I just have issues).

You may not be bored enough to have noticed, but Sno-Balls change colors with the seasons, turning green around St. Patrick's Day, orange around Halloween, and so on.

I had maybe five or six colors before I noticed that the pink Sno-Balls were also blue and fuzzy. I think there was a hole in the package.

Either way, not a good sign for a supposedly infinite shelf life. I mean, they do have an expiration date, right?

I told all this (and more!) to Terry, and he somehow mistook my incessant rambling for knowledge of some kind and decided to put me on his show.

Seeing as the film crew for the show was lazy, they declined to come visit me in sunny Portland, Oregon, so they asked if I could travel up to Seattle for an interview.

Being lazy but not beyond a little quid pro quo, I asked if they would put me up in a hotel. After all, if there's one thing I know about, it's corporate largesse.

I was pleasantly surprised that they actually offered to pay for my hotel room, in a nice hotel conveniently located in sunny downtown Seattle, no less!

So girlfriend Julia and I trained up to Seattle and had ourselves a gay old time on the town, eating at restaurants nice enough so as to blow any savings we made from cheap train tickets and a free hotel room.

Which, in one sense, is the end of the story.

I somehow got to be famous and I got something free for it. I win!

But, of course, there's also this whole TV aspect to it.

As I'd mentioned before, I was never 100% sure what was going on with this situation.

The guy claimed to be working for MTV, but at the time, mtv.com failed to say anything at all about the show, instead opting to tell me about every other crummy non-music-related show on MTV.

Google wasn't any more help. Nobody had heard of the show.

And my attempts at actually getting ahold of someone official at MTV who could confirm that Terry Anderson wasn't some psycho trying to stalk me were futile, as I was thwarted at every turn by people who I'm sure are used to fending off rabid Carson Daly fans.

Combined with the distinct impression I was getting in the time before the Seattle trip that this operation wasn't the most organized thing on planet Earth, the lack of information made me wonder what I was getting involved in.

Was I somehow being made the object of a prank for some other, unnamed reality show? Was John Ashcroft finally to exact his revenge on me for sending him all those unimportant e-mails?

I didn't know, but since I was reasonably sure that I was going to get a free hotel room out of the deal, I wasn't too concerned.

Still, it's surprising how jury-rigged the whole affair was.

I got a phone call while I was at the Portland train station waiting to leave for Seattle. It was Terry, wanting to know if I could bring any props. I told him I could try to buy a Snapple bottle at the snack bar in the station, but other than that, everything else was at my house.

When I got to Seattle, the film crew called me and asked what I had prepared. I told them Terry had told me they'd be interviewing me, so I didn't have anything prepared. It's not like I tour major cities, setting Twinkies on fire at school assemblies.

And then there was the filming location, which was in the film crew's hotel room in the same hotel Julia and I were staying at.

Crammed into one small room were five film crew members and their equipment, a bed, Julia, and me. And I got most of the room, so as to give the appearance of, say, not being filmed in a cramped hotel room.

Of course, there's only so much you can do to a hotel room, so they spread the contents of a box of Twinkies around the "set", and managed to place the box in the foreground using a lighting stand, an umbrella, and a few clamps.

Did I use the word "jury-rigged" yet?

At several points, we had to stop the interview because the maids were vacuuming outside the door, and the noise was too loud.

I told the film crew that I was going to tell all my friends how much of a sham Hollywood is, and they all nodded their heads. I guess you don't have many illusions when you work on this stuff all the time.

And so it went. They interviewed me for thirty minutes, but I'm reasonably sure I'll be on for about one-two-hundredth of that time.

I say that because I actually watched what I think was the first episode of MTV's Big Urban Myth on Tuesday night, and most of the so-called experts got between five and ten seconds of air time.

The rest of the time was spent talking about sex.

Anyhow, I'm reasonably convinced that my five seconds will be the dumbest five seconds of the whole interview, and I'll end up looking like an idiot for all the 18-34 year olds in the country.

Not that I know, of course, as the production company didn't send me a tape beforehand. I'll be watching it for the first time with all the other Avril fans out there.

But hey, I can't pretend I'm all that sad about it. Free hotel room, fleeting fame, and, I assume, all sorts of wonderful offers that will come pouring in once the show airs.

In the meantime, set up your VCRs to record MTV at 10:30pm on Tuesday, February 25, 2003.

The official Big Urban Myth page also says the episode will air Wednesday, February 26 at 2:30pm, Sunday, March 2 at 6:30pm, and Sunday, March 2 at midnight.

According to the site again, I'll be accompanied by "Bush busters, Superbowl flushers, microwave disasters, hooker hysteria, and Keith's bloody babble." Whee!

And with that, I think my fifteen minutes are now completely used up.