No marketing opportunity should go to waste! So, I hired a polling firm and did the field work to determine what ads would see a lot of traffic there. Here are my recommendations about what to advertise to readers of sex offender databases.

(I had about four more sentences here but couldn’t remember what I wrote before my computer froze. For some reason, the damn thing is full of viruses.) Kindergartenfinder.com This one makes a lot of sense to me. These guys are mostly aged 40 and older, a lot of them probably have kids and need to know where to drop them off for soccer practice. Thailand tourism Thailand is beautiful at this time of year. But be careful: sometimes what you think is Thailand, is just Vietnam in drag. Lawyers Ah, another thing no American should be without! Whenever I bust out my semi-annual lawsuit, I need one of these. Apparently people who use the sex offender registry also need them. Perfectly reasonable. Seminary school This one is the only one that doesn’t make sense. Why would Catholics be looking at this site? The Catholic clergy has nothing in common with sex offenders!

Maybe it’s some Irish guy with too many kids, looking for a nice new adoptive parent to take some of them. (I did notice that many of the gentlemen in the database just loooove children.) ]]> This past weekend, I attempted to get back in touch with a high school classmate of mine. I noticed that next to his mugshot on the sex offender database, there were no ads. Nothing, anywhere on the page. I was more outraged by this omission than by the crime he “allegedly” committed.

No marketing opportunity should go to waste! So, I hired a polling firm and did the field work to determine what ads would see a lot of traffic there. Here are my recommendations about what to advertise to readers of sex offender databases.

White vans The always-in-style shaggin’ wagon is inexplicably popular with this demographic. The white paint job symbolizes innocence; the tinted windows, its loss.

Candy Not sure why they like candy so much. Seems like more of a kid-thing. But, the research has spoken–they really want candy for some reason.
Sunglasses I guess these cool cats just gotta look hip!
Free credit reports Really, who doesn’t want a free credit report? I can’t count the number of times I’ve compulsively clicked on one of these ads! (I had about four more sentences here but couldn’t remember what I wrote before my computer froze. For some reason, the damn thing is full of viruses.)
Kindergartenfinder.com This one makes a lot of sense to me. These guys are mostly aged 40 and older, a lot of them probably have kids and need to know where to drop them off for soccer practice.
Thailand tourism Thailand is beautiful at this time of year. But be careful: sometimes what you think is Thailand, is just Vietnam in drag.
Lawyers Ah, another thing no American should be without! Whenever I bust out my semi-annual lawsuit, I need one of these. Apparently people who use the sex offender registry also need them. Perfectly reasonable.
Seminary school This one is the only one that doesn’t make sense. Why would Catholics be looking at this site? The Catholic clergy has nothing in common with sex offenders! Maybe it’s some Irish guy with too many kids, looking for a nice new adoptive parent to take some of them. (I did notice that many of the gentlemen in the database just loooove children.)

“Bah!”, said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle?”, said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do”, said Scrooge. “‘Merry Christmas’! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then”, returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge stopped writing and looked up at his nephew with a stare as cold as the air in the bleak counting house. “Christmas,” said the old miser, “is nothing but a reminder of the inevitable passage of time, an anniversary upon which the fates decide to heap another tragedy upon my life.”

The nephew took a seat as the old man continued, his voice barely concealing a cruel cynical laugh of contempt. “How should I celebrate Christmas, then? Shall I spend the evening alone with my books, as I did as a child? While every other student of the boarding school was fattening himself upon roasts and candied fruits, I was in solitude save for Ali Babba taking sanctuary from your grandfather, a man who held me a grudge for killing my mother in childbirth. My first Christmases were full of pain and disappointment, watching your mother open lavish gifts while I received nothing but my father’s bitter wisdom. ‘The gift of life should be enough for you, Ebenezer,’ he would say. ‘Heaven knows we paid enough for it and have yet to profit from the exchange.’ No, no Christmas of my youth should serve as template for celebration.”

A tear was at the corner of the nephew’s eye, eyes so like his mother’s. She too would cry come Christmas and would secretly offer to share whatever she received with the young Ebenezer to try and keep his spirits up. But he always refused. It was the name slot on the tags he wanted, not the gifts inside. Inside, the nephew felt a burning surge of empathy for the old man; he knew what it was like to be blamed for the death of one’s mother.

“I suppose I had one happy Christmas, at old Fezziwig’s fabric store as an apprentice. He threw the most lavish of parties, especially considering he spent so little on it. I danced then, you know, and was known as being quite agile on my feet. And I met her, Belle, a beautiful young woman in appearance and soul. We danced, we laughed, we loved.”

A smile crept up on the old man, slowly working facial muscles long atrophied to the years. A small hope crept up inside the nephew, before being crushed. “But, the higher the rise, the greater the fall. I poured my soul into my work for her, to earn her, taking the small inheritance I received and lending it out, investing, to build a solid foundation for our future. Christmas after Christmas she expected me to seal our contract, and Christmas after Christmas I was unready. Those were years of building disappointment and a growing gap between us. Should I celebrate those Christmases? A toast to what I had once and lost due to time? Shall I roast a goose to honor the hours of silence that emerged? Or decorate a tree with baubles of her increasingly distant stare? No, not those Christmases, for there I found misery in company where I had only known it in solitude, and was all the worse for it, for she gave me a heart only to let it break and decay.”

“Or what of the Christmas where she left me? Shattered our contract, right there in park. She didn’t even look at me until the words ‘I release you, Ebenezer,’ left her lips. She left me there, completely alone save for the coins in my pocket! The second she stopped being the complete and total center of my existence, the moment I had to share the space on altar to her with the financial needs of our lives, she refused to understand me, to love me, and it destroyed me. I walked out of that park past carolers and happy children playing in the snow, unable to relate to any of them. Some babe born in a pig sty millennia ago and they’re out singing in the snow! Bah! Humbug!”

“I lost myself in my work. Marley, my only real companion, you couldn’t call him a friend. But the cruel fates took him from me on your precious Christmas as well, seven years ago this day! Don’t you see, nephew? Christmas for others may be a time of reconciliation, of loved ones coming together. For me, it is a day of loved ones being cruelly separated. For me, this is a day of humiliation at the hands of my father, rejection at the hands of Belle, solitude at the hands of Marley. It is a day of tears being repressed and somber memories and thoughts discarded. How else could a man like I survive? To open myself up to the world, to Christmas, is to only invite pain. The only way to endure is to refuse to feel.”

“Perhaps when you are an older, wiser man, [...]]]> “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!”, cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!”, said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle?”, said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do”, said Scrooge. “‘Merry Christmas’! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then”, returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge stopped writing and looked up at his nephew with a stare as cold as the air in the bleak counting house. “Christmas,” said the old miser, “is nothing but a reminder of the inevitable passage of time, an anniversary upon which the fates decide to heap another tragedy upon my life.”

The nephew took a seat as the old man continued, his voice barely concealing a cruel cynical laugh of contempt. “How should I celebrate Christmas, then? Shall I spend the evening alone with my books, as I did as a child? While every other student of the boarding school was fattening himself upon roasts and candied fruits, I was in solitude save for Ali Babba taking sanctuary from your grandfather, a man who held me a grudge for killing my mother in childbirth. My first Christmases were full of pain and disappointment, watching your mother open lavish gifts while I received nothing but my father’s bitter wisdom. ‘The gift of life should be enough for you, Ebenezer,’ he would say. ‘Heaven knows we paid enough for it and have yet to profit from the exchange.’ No, no Christmas of my youth should serve as template for celebration.”

A tear was at the corner of the nephew’s eye, eyes so like his mother’s. She too would cry come Christmas and would secretly offer to share whatever she received with the young Ebenezer to try and keep his spirits up. But he always refused. It was the name slot on the tags he wanted, not the gifts inside. Inside, the nephew felt a burning surge of empathy for the old man; he knew what it was like to be blamed for the death of one’s mother.

“I suppose I had one happy Christmas, at old Fezziwig’s fabric store as an apprentice. He threw the most lavish of parties, especially considering he spent so little on it. I danced then, you know, and was known as being quite agile on my feet. And I met her, Belle, a beautiful young woman in appearance and soul. We danced, we laughed, we loved.”

A smile crept up on the old man, slowly working facial muscles long atrophied to the years. A small hope crept up inside the nephew, before being crushed. “But, the higher the rise, the greater the fall. I poured my soul into my work for her, to earn her, taking the small inheritance I received and lending it out, investing, to build a solid foundation for our future. Christmas after Christmas she expected me to seal our contract, and Christmas after Christmas I was unready. Those were years of building disappointment and a growing gap between us. Should I celebrate those Christmases? A toast to what I had once and lost due to time? Shall I roast a goose to honor the hours of silence that emerged? Or decorate a tree with baubles of her increasingly distant stare? No, not those Christmases, for there I found misery in company where I had only known it in solitude, and was all the worse for it, for she gave me a heart only to let it break and decay.”

“Or what of the Christmas where she left me? Shattered our contract, right there in park. She didn’t even look at me until the words ‘I release you, Ebenezer,’ left her lips. She left me there, completely alone save for the coins in my pocket! The second she stopped being the complete and total center of my existence, the moment I had to share the space on altar to her with the financial needs of our lives, she refused to understand me, to love me, and it destroyed me. I walked out of that park past carolers and happy children playing in the snow, unable to relate to any of them. Some babe born in a pig sty millennia ago and they’re out singing in the snow! Bah! Humbug!”

“I lost myself in my work. Marley, my only real companion, you couldn’t call him a friend. But the cruel fates took him from me on your precious Christmas as well, seven years ago this day! Don’t you see, nephew? Christmas for others may be a time of reconciliation, of loved ones coming together. For me, it is a day of loved ones being cruelly separated. For me, this is a day of humiliation at the hands of my father, rejection at the hands of Belle, solitude at the hands of Marley. It is a day of tears being repressed and somber memories and thoughts discarded. How else could a man like I survive? To open myself up to the world, to Christmas, is to only invite pain. The only way to endure is to refuse to feel.”

“Perhaps when you are an older, wiser man, when funerals outnumber birthdays, you’ll understand. Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Given my previous record with the holiday, the most I can hope for is that Christmas will return the favor of forced indifference! Good day, sir.”

There was a beat where nobody dared move. Then, the old man shouted, “I said, good day!”

The nephew turned to leave as Ebenezer returned to his books. The former exchanged forced pleasantries with Mr. Cratchit as he put his hat and coat back on. As he turned to leave, he stared back at his uncle one last time. “Merry Christmas, uncle.”

As the door squeaked closed, Mr. Cratchit could have sworn he faintly hear the old man whisper, “Merry Christmas,” in return, but was not sure of it and knew better than to ask.

That was the last time his nephew tried to invite the old man to Christmas dinner. The fates decided to honor Scrooge’s request and give him the Christmas gift of an uninterrupted sleep. Slowly, the years of pain corroded the man from the inside out and he died, years later than he should have. His nephew and Cratchit were the only ones at the wake. The nephew was particularly cold and distant, even for a burial: it was the first invitation to a funeral he had ever received.

in the lunar lander

singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

He was right;

it was near absolute zero.

But then, what are space suits for?

One not-so-dark and not-terribly-stormy-either night, three stunningly attractive and inconceivably brilliant men convened at a home on Juliet street in Oakland. One was a visionary, a man with ideas, plans, and an affinity for German dance metal. One was a technological expert with a voice so deep he can get elephants to spontaneously defecate, known to most of the Internet as Burpen. One was an incredibly negative sod who also happened to have a few good ideas, also the most skilled player of grabass in the world, certified in the crucible of official competition. Over heaps of parmesan cheese these three gods among men formulated the plans for what the internet has not yet realized is its most glorious destination.

These three übermensch there hatched the plans for the website that would proceed to make the internet jealous. It was to be a site featuring only original content. All of the material on Clunkline was to be produced by the authors of the site. These three dashing and impossibly virile men determined it made sense to include only original material because it was the only way to guarantee the site would be better than any other. There would be the main site, featuring nothing but the most side-splitting articles, and the authors’ corners, for more avant-garde work to be appreciated by people who understand art.

With these goals in mind, Tanzmetall and Burpen convened to create a server to broadcast our good work to the internet.

Jesus, so named because He was spreading the good word, was in Good Friday condition when Tanzmetall and Burpen, whose sperm sells on the black market for millions, started to work on it. The endeavor of resurrecting Christ was not one for any simple-minded fool. Burpen, however, is capable of setting Marilyn vos Savant’s hair ablaze purely by firing thought-waves at her, from any point on Earth or low-Earth orbit. Jesus went from having no idea He had a hard drive to rising to the heavens totally resurrected in no time thanks to Burpen’s expertise. After many sleepless nights, the site was assembled and The Word was finally available to anyone who had access to port 1000.

Or at least, so we thought: The problem with Jesus was it was very difficult to get Him to interface with the internet. In order to accomplish the task, Tanzmetall with MacGyver-like guile bravely employed over 100 feet of cable and some bacon-tape. Thanks to his heroic efforts, Clunkline now had a tube. And it was a tube to behold. We send pictures of it to people on Craigslist all the time.

In those early days of yore, Clunkline began to flourish with content that is now considered classic. Videos like Fuck it’s an Owl, images like Tanzmetall’s fake ads for real products, the beginning of the esteemed Ronnicles, and How to Maik Postah. We also talked a whole hell of a lot about why we hated Hillary Clinton. Lesser beings would have spent the rest of their writing careers trying to live up to these incredible works, but we at Clunkline are supreme beings, and we continued only to produce the finest material.

(Are you at the dramatic part of the music yet? If not, please wait for it to get back to that part before reading this. You can masturbate to our glory while you wait.)

And so we did, for a month or so, and it was good. But, what we didn’t know was it was about to get even more orgasmically fantastic because Lo! On the horizon rode nom de pomme on a horse so brilliantly white that your mom had to avert her eyes when she was fucking it! And he brought with him the level of prolificacy that only rabbits used to know. With the arrival of nom de pomme, Clunkline became a veritable dynamo of diarrhea. A diarrheanamo, if you will.

But tragedy had not yet ceased its siege on His Holiness. Every few days Clunkline’s glorious tube would clog itself as it shed an old IP address and tried to flush it like last night’s kielbasa and sauerkraut. We had more downtime than a General Motors factory worker. Something had to be done. After months of fervent procrastination, Jesus was transplanted from His home in Pittsburgh to the domain of Grabass_Champion in faraway exotic tropical Greensburg.

From this new home Jesus much more steadily broadcast the Word of Clunkline. And it was good. Except that Grabass_Champion needed to use a proxy to get to the site which bothered him just enough that he didn’t write as much. But everyone else picked up that slack anyway.

The time following that was rather uneventful. We launched a merchandise effort, through CafePress.com because we were way too lazy to print our own shirts, but we knew that the world NEEDED T-shirts with pictures of the Titanic colliding with the Hindenburg on them. We also naïvely believed that people wearing “Clunkline.com” would get other people interested. Pssh. They were already interested! So far we’ve sold literally tens of shirts to pretty much ourselves and some midwesterners.

We were kind enough to allow lesser internetfolk to advertise on our site, and we returned the kindness of being paid for adspace by mercilessly insulting the folks that bought the ads.

We wrote a lot of funny things. We frequently met in undisclosed locations and ate inordinate amounts of pizza [...]]]>

Since Clunkline has just entered its new glorious auspicious second phase of righteous harmony, known to non-party-members as Clunkline 2.0, we as the Clunkline staff feel it’s necessary at this juncture to issue a review of the past two years of Clunkline history.

One not-so-dark and not-terribly-stormy-either night, three stunningly attractive and inconceivably brilliant men convened at a home on Juliet street in Oakland. One was a visionary, a man with ideas, plans, and an affinity for German dance metal. One was a technological expert with a voice so deep he can get elephants to spontaneously defecate, known to most of the Internet as Burpen. One was an incredibly negative sod who also happened to have a few good ideas, also the most skilled player of grabass in the world, certified in the crucible of official competition. Over heaps of parmesan cheese these three gods among men formulated the plans for what the internet has not yet realized is its most glorious destination.

These three übermensch there hatched the plans for the website that would proceed to make the internet jealous. It was to be a site featuring only original content. All of the material on Clunkline was to be produced by the authors of the site. These three dashing and impossibly virile men determined it made sense to include only original material because it was the only way to guarantee the site would be better than any other. There would be the main site, featuring nothing but the most side-splitting articles, and the authors’ corners, for more avant-garde work to be appreciated by people who understand art.

With these goals in mind, Tanzmetall and Burpen convened to create a server to broadcast our good work to the internet.

Jesus, so named because He was spreading the good word, was in Good Friday condition when Tanzmetall and Burpen, whose sperm sells on the black market for millions, started to work on it. The endeavor of resurrecting Christ was not one for any simple-minded fool. Burpen, however, is capable of setting Marilyn vos Savant’s hair ablaze purely by firing thought-waves at her, from any point on Earth or low-Earth orbit. Jesus went from having no idea He had a hard drive to rising to the heavens totally resurrected in no time thanks to Burpen’s expertise. After many sleepless nights, the site was assembled and The Word was finally available to anyone who had access to port 1000.

Tanzmetall used bacon-tape to hold the tube to the wall where he routed it around his door.

Or at least, so we thought: The problem with Jesus was it was very difficult to get Him to interface with the internet. In order to accomplish the task, Tanzmetall with MacGyver-like guile bravely employed over 100 feet of cable and some bacon-tape. Thanks to his heroic efforts, Clunkline now had a tube. And it was a tube to behold. We send pictures of it to people on Craigslist all the time.

In those early days of yore, Clunkline began to flourish with content that is now considered classic. Videos like Fuck it’s an Owl, images like Tanzmetall’s fake ads for real products, the beginning of the esteemed Ronnicles, and How to Maik Postah. We also talked a whole hell of a lot about why we hated Hillary Clinton. Lesser beings would have spent the rest of their writing careers trying to live up to these incredible works, but we at Clunkline are supreme beings, and we continued only to produce the finest material.

(Are you at the dramatic part of the music yet? If not, please wait for it to get back to that part before reading this. You can masturbate to our glory while you wait.)

And so we did, for a month or so, and it was good. But, what we didn’t know was it was about to get even more orgasmically fantastic because Lo! On the horizon rode nom de pomme on a horse so brilliantly white that your mom had to avert her eyes when she was fucking it! And he brought with him the level of prolificacy that only rabbits used to know. With the arrival of nom de pomme, Clunkline became a veritable dynamo of diarrhea. A diarrheanamo, if you will.

But tragedy had not yet ceased its siege on His Holiness. Every few days Clunkline’s glorious tube would clog itself as it shed an old IP address and tried to flush it like last night’s kielbasa and sauerkraut. We had more downtime than a General Motors factory worker. Something had to be done. After months of fervent procrastination, Jesus was transplanted from His home in Pittsburgh to the domain of Grabass_Champion in faraway exotic tropical Greensburg.

From this new home Jesus much more steadily broadcast the Word of Clunkline. And it was good. Except that Grabass_Champion needed to use a proxy to get to the site which bothered him just enough that he didn’t write as much. But everyone else picked up that slack anyway.

The time following that was rather uneventful. We launched a merchandise effort, through CafePress.com because we were way too lazy to print our own shirts, but we knew that the world NEEDED T-shirts with pictures of the Titanic colliding with the Hindenburg on them. We also naïvely believed that people wearing “Clunkline.com” would get other people interested. Pssh. They were already interested! So far we’ve sold literally tens of shirts to pretty much ourselves and some midwesterners.

We were kind enough to allow lesser internetfolk to advertise on our site, and we returned the kindness of being paid for adspace by mercilessly insulting the folks that bought the ads.

We wrote a lot of funny things. We frequently met in undisclosed locations and ate inordinate amounts of pizza while discussing the finer points of poop. You’re welcome.

It was a major milestone when we were graced by a visit from the Pope (he wanted to see Jesus) in which he blessed our servers. We repaid the favor by gifting him with a Fleshlight (we were done with it).

When the G20 came to Pittsburgh, the events tragically coincided with a failure of Clunkline’s servers. This triggered massive rioting, which really hampered the international conference. We’re sorry, world leaders.

Clunkline again achieved world fame when Michael Jackson read How to make TOST and died from an overdose of awesome. You’re welcome again: you wouldn’t have wanted to watch him get old.

Most recently we made news again as Barack Obama traveled with an entourage of irony to Oslo to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize for us to give us article material. It was going to be about how interesting it was that Obama was picking up a peace prize while escalating a war. Thanks for takin’ a hit for the team, B-rock! We never wrote the article, because it wasn’t about pooping, but we appreciate you doing us a solid, man. Shout out to mah President!

Despite this series of fantastic honors, Clunkline was not free from problems. Tragedy again struck when Grabass_Champion went on an expedition to the mysterious Orient in search of a cure for yellow fever. The frequently-ailing Jesus had no able caretakers living with Him, and it was only a matter of time before the three Moldovan cyclists that power Grabass_Champion’s home would starve and all of Clunkline would shut down until his return.

But when that plane arrived in New York, a new era of Clunkline was begun. And this glorious era was brought to you by one hangtthedj, whose graphic design prowess can take an old, crappy-looking site that only its writers read and turn it into a site that people actually take time to look at without suffering spontaneous bowel movements. And that’s where we sit now, comrades, on the brink of a new era. We may look back from time to time, as we have here, but forward is the direction things are ceaselessly progressing. Brace yourself, brothers. The future flies on detachable wings.

…Ehh, who are we kidding? In reality, Clunkline has far fewer views than this:

This cross structure could be built into the arrangement of a city’s streets. The protocol for multiple planes using more than one runway at once was a bit suspect, however.

This idea pitted the planes against a pitched surface, allowing for a space saving compact spiral. The pilots would have to land a plane at a roughly 17 degree horizontal angle, and passengers would be subjected to some 3.4 times the force of gravity due to angular acceleration.

These tarmac loops could be added to any runway to add linear deceleration distance by expanding the runway vertically.

The stack structure is considered del Mutel’s quintessential plan. A three-tiered vertical parking deck type structure consisting of runways from which various aircraft would take off and land simultaneously.