Todd Stadler's blog

Gettin' snarky with the journalists, part 3

I don't know which is more pitiful: that I continue to be contacted by journalists wanting to write stories about Twinkies (especially the Twinkie's 75th anniversary), or that I continue to rely on my correspondence with them to fill up my otherwise terribly sparse blog. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Date: May 16, 2005 10:02am
From: xxxxxxxxx@newspress.com
To: Todd Stadler
Subject: Story for Santa Barbara News-Press

Hello,

I am working on a story about the 75th anniversary of Twinkies. I saw your Twinkie PROJECT Web site and thought it was hilarious! Would you be available to talk to me by phone briefly about your experience?

I'll let you call me, but I'll be more straightforward with you than I have been with most other journalists: while I'm always excited about the possibility of milking this thing even further, I'm a really lousy interview. I tend to respond to questions as if they aren't really exciting, because, well, usually they aren't. I may have made some people laugh with what I wrote over a decade ago (!), but I rarely get those kind of chuckles when I'm talking to people.

This is likely because when I'm writing, I'm able to edit and re-edit my wit down to a razor-sharp edge that slices through the tedium of people's lives, causing the blood/laughs to flow freely, and eviscerating, the, um, fun. See, that metaphor, which is funny because it's crude, took me some time to think about. And sure, it was worth it. But when I'm talking, I'm stuck with my first draft, and people realize me for the boring fraud I am. Oh sure, I've tried editing my conversation while I'm talking, but people get really tired of my saying the same thing over and over, changing a word here and there, and the impact is lost. Of course, that's a lie, but the point is it's the kind of clever lie I can never come up with when responding to a request to describe "what the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project is all about" when it's my opinion that the Web site explains that much better than I ever could.

I'm also a terrible interview because I can never decide if I want to suck up to the media — in the hopes of making it my friend and having it tell everybody how great and funny I am — or if I want to sarcastically dismiss the whole lot of journalists who write about snack foods and those who play with them as if they were news. The latter path, of course, allows me to earn near-infinite street cred with all my fellow Web Celebrities, who might otherwise decry me for "selling out" and forever refuse to invite me to any more of their Web Celebrity parties. But seeing as I'm making up the whole Web Celebrity thing anyhow, the suck-up path has lots to recommend it, such as yet another possibility of seeing a banal quote that only somewhat resembles anything I said being attributed to me in an article that is largely indistinguishable from all the other articles written about me. Aha! I fooled you, because I was talking about the suck-up path, but I managed to be snarky in doing so, thus traveling down the sarcastic-dismissal path. This is what it's like to be a conflicted member of Gen X, or so I've read.

Anyhow, irony and self-reference aside, it's my opinion that this e-mail is likely the most interesting thing you'll get from me, but I'll probably be much nicer on the phone and more likely to say something that resembles what you're looking for. I'm just like that. It's the magic of personal interaction, so easily ignored in an e-mail.

The not-so-secret secret is that what I really do these days is not work on the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project, but rather write rabid screeds to journalists who contact me for information on said project, not so much because I bear any antipathy towards said journalists or even journalism in general, but because it's an excuse to write, and I don't have much else going on in my life to fill up what I suppose I'd call my blog. Which is to say that I just have too much free time, something that people have been telling me ever since I got famous for putting something on a Web site that allows them to waste their copious free time.

You may be interested, if you haven't looked already, in reading my other correspondence with journalists about the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project on cockahoop.com. Not all of them get snide, late-night tirades — some of my e-mails actually contain information!

Oh, and you can call me at 971-XXX-XXXX, preferably at hours that are almost certainly not when you want to call me, which is some time after 5:30pm. Before that, and I'll be more reticent than usual, because my co-workers find it odd when they overhear me talking about Twinkies so much. I've heard them whispering about my "Twinkies problem", and I think they're planning an intervention.

To summarize: this e-mail almost certainly shouldn't have been this long or this snarky, and you really should ignore everything except the phone number. Thanks.