Kevin Smith loves me. He really does.

Or at least, he’s contractually obliged to love something about the Virgin Mobile Bleepin’ Awesome contest.   Which I won (or rather, my Smiley Intervention video did).  Thanks, in no small part, to my rabid MySpace fan army.  If you stick with this clip long enough, the Clerksman does a passable impression of my accent.

Blogtag. From the mouths of MySpace babes (as in children…)

It’s the new sensation that’s a rockin’ the…. shit, vlogosphere doesn’t rhyme with sensation. Nation, however, does. I speak, of course, of the blog tag. The “five things I didn’t know about you”. I was mildly amused to see the video blogging world all agog (rhymes with vlog) over the novelty of posting and tagging their peers. Someone even made a chart of who’s tagging who in this meme.

Olde English, new-fangled medium

I post (increasingly) infrequently on Aspecialthing, which is “the premier comedy community on the internet” and a message board for what could fairly be described as passionate (alt-) comedy snobs. A while back I got into a bit of a posting pissing match over the merits of YouTube as a medium for comedy. The ASTers were up in arms because Brookers, who could fairly be described as a gap-toothed web-lebrity, had landed a deal of some sort with Carson Daly, thus snatching the burritos out of the mouths of starving alt-comedians the length of the land. Or something like that.

Running into the Running Fool

As I slouch through middle age, I am embracing my role as grumpy old man. Because, really, what are my options? I don’t actually keep the balls that the kids kick over the fence, but I may, on occasion, let them sit for a day or two first. That seems fair. Anyway, I read about the Running Fool’s cross country tour de sports racer trip on the Zefrank Show Forum and have a vague memory of volunteering our spare room as a rest stop for the trip. Without ever explaining any of it to Mrs. Mark. Then, well, Sports Racer Cherish Hellfire actually called me on it. As things worked out, the Fool arrived in the Bay Area too late to make it out to Chez Mark, but did disrupt my previously scheduled Saturday evening of sitting at home being a grumpy old man to join the Sports Racers for kareoke. And it was fun.

You can see me and non-Sports Racer Mrs. Mark in Geek Entertainment TV’s Running Fool is the Human Baton episode. And once you’ve seen their professional interviewing technique, you can see my own encounter with the fool by clicking here (quicktime) or here (flash) or on  the photo below.

It is telling, of course, that I didn’t let Luke get a word in edgeways.

It must be about that Time

So, having been Time’s Person of the Year for a couple of days now, I can look back on the experience and say that it’s a bit like waking up in a Tijuana with a stranger’s name tattoo’d across my chest in six inch high letters. I don’t quite remember how I got here, I know it wasn’t planned, and I certainly didn’t expect to find Kevin Nalty in bed beside me.

Time magazine picked “you” as their Person of the Year. Presuming “you” are all about the online video, the social media, the Wiki and the WordPress, the MySpace and the crowd-sourced media. Presumably if “you” are Ted Kazinski, say, your statuette from Time isn’t just “lost in the mail”.

But the rest of us? Well, speaking for myself, I’m watching NFL running backs get “jacked up” on PrimeTime, whle balancing the warm, testicle-radiating glow of my MacBook Pro on my lap, so I can stay jacked in. So I guess I qualify.

That being the case, I figured it was about time I started gathering some of my own online ventures and explorations under one roof. Hence, this blog. While there’s something a little cheesy about the “first post manifesto”, my goal here is to touch on the disparate strands of online media that interest me. Because I’m nothing if not self absorbed. But at this point, I think I should really show, not tell…