2010 July | Kelsey Timmerman

Adventures in Spam: Dead Dad = Win

By Kelsey

It’s been awhile since I’ve done an “Adventures in Spam” piece. Here’s my last one. Anyhow, I received the following email below and thought I would take a break from writing for a few minutes to respond.

My Dear,

It is my pleasure to contact you for a business venture which I intend to establish in your country. Though I have not met with you before but I believe one has to risk confidence to succeed sometimes in life. There is this huge amount of Seven million Five Hundred Thousands U.S dollars ($7.500.000.00) which my late Father kept with a Fiduciary Fund Holder in Abidjan before his death.

Now, I have decided to invest this money in your country or anywhere safe enough outside Africa for security and political reasons. I want you to assist me claim and retrieve this fund from the Fiduciary Fund Holders and transfer it into your personal account in your country for investment purposes on these areas:

1). Telecommunication
2). the transport industry
3). Five star hotel

If you can be of any assistance to me I will be pleased to offer to you 20% of the total fund. I await your soonest response.

Respectfully yours,

Ms. Julien Kowan

MY RESPONSE

Bummer! Sorry to hear about your Dad.

That said…

The timing of your email is great! I lost my job and have to scavenge for food for my family. If I have to eat one more raccoon, I’ll barf. My daughter has taken a liking to blended earth worms.

My favorite thing about Abidjan is that it’s like the first country (note: It’s actually a city) that pops up on an alphabetic list of countries. How’s the weather there?

Let me know what I should do next.

Show me the money! No more raccoons for me!!!!

Kelsey

Mad World

$10 for Tuesday: Samaritan’s Purse

By Kelsey

It’s not always easy giving. First it takes time.

Today I was flying back from 12 days in NYC and really didn’t have any idea of who I was going to give $10 to this Tuesday. I got home. I was tired. I was much more interested in playing with Harper and Oreo than staring at my computer. There was a chance that my $10 for Tuesday wouldn’t get posted until Wednesday.

And sometimes it takes a kick in the pants. Today that kick came from Michele Shaw:

Hi Kelsey! In the spirit of your Tuesday project, I have contributed for a month to Samaritan’s Purse. They do one of my favorite projects-Operation Christmas Child, and are already gearing up to help children around the world come December.

Giving is like anything else, you need a little support sometimes. So this Tuesday, along with Michele, I’m giving $10 to Samaritan’s Purse.

One thing I really like about their site is that you can choose what project you want to support.

Thanks Michele!

Anyone have any good ideas where to shoot my $10 next week?

Giving Back, ten4tues

Stuck on Train

By Kelsey

I’m stuck on a train in Connecticut. You can follow my tale of survival on twitter at #stuckontrain . There’s no AC, but there’s plenty of gaseous kids.

This Writer’s Life

American Flag on NY Stock Exchange Replaced by Credit Card Ad

By Kelsey

Wall Street brought to you by America. America brought to you by Wall Street.

An $8 whiskey near Wall Street. Where is Windell when you need him? Glad I brought my credit card.

(60 minutes later) Wait, wasn’t there just a flag here? Wall Street brought to you by debt. Debt brought to you by Wall Street?

Mad World

A Popular post written by a boob for boobs…did I mention boobs yet?

By Kelsey

If I were paid per page view, I would wake up in the morning and write a headline like the one above.

This is what our world is coming to. Journalist Michael Ayers (@michaeldayers) shared a story with me this morning in the New York Times – In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger.

The piece is about how online journalists are on deadline around the clock and judged by the amount of page views their pieces get. Here’s a passage:

…they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.

Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages. Some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles.

To me this story is less about recent-grads being overworked than what a focus on page views and writing for search engines means for media as a whole.

I’m somewhat okay with Gawker having a big board in their office that tracks the most viewed posts and who wrote them; the world turns to them for gossip. But the fact that the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and other papers are doing so is really sick. No wonder we don’t hear about people suffering from the financial crisis around the world or the political situation in Kyrgyzstan.

Performance is no longer based on depth and importance, but popular appeal.

In a few years from now maybe I could be the world’s most viewed journalist. Each morning I’ll hit my keyboard first thing and see what’s trending on Twitter and Google and write a post combining as many of the topics as possible.

It would go something like this.

Trending on TWITTER as of 2:54 PM:

1)Cissa Guimares is a Brazilian actress not afraid to show her boobs.
2)Bruna Surfistinha is a former prostitute who blogged about her tricks that likes to show her boobs.
3)Lindsey Lohan used to be an actress now she just shows parts of her boobs and is in prison.
4)Teflon Don is an album by Rick Ross, apparently about bitches:

She came to party like it’s 1999
If she died on my d!@k
She would live through my rhymes

Trending on Google as of 2:54 PM:

1)Defarra Gaymon (actual news) was shot by an undercover cop in NJ.
2)Shirley Sherrod (more actual news!) resigned from USDA after admitting to limiting assistance given to a white farmer because of his race. (editd: oops! The media screwed this one up. She’s back and has received an apology from the President. Imagine that, the media screwed up reporting something.)
3)Colt McCoy is a football player who just got married and a song about his rival Tim Tebow was sung at his wedding.
4)The Switch is a movie in which an actress famous for her boobs gets pregnant with a turkey baster.
5)The Donner Party wasn’t much of a party, unless you like eating humans.

So that’s it. If you want to rake in the page views to protect your job, pay off school loans, or feed the kids you should write this:

Chicks show boobs at Donner Party

At the late night Donner Party following Colt McCoy’s wedding, Cissa Guimares, Bruna Surfistinha, and Lindsey Lohan showed their boobs while dancing to Rick Ross’s new album Teflon Don. Defarra Gaymon and Shirley Sherrod were not in attendance, but they’ll only be trending for the next day or two so they weren’t invited. Word on the street is that Sherrod, in fact, has boobs, but partygoers would rather be eaten than look at them or waterboarded with a turkey baster.

At this rate in a few years we’ll all be bigger asses than…well…than Bruna Surfistinha’s…

Mad World

In the Huffington Post!

By Kelsey

Andrew (my partner on the Nothing Personal project) have a piece in the Huffington Post today - Finance Reform: How Short Memories are Created.

The timing of this piece is more than ironic. Tomorrow we’re hopping flights from Indiana to NYC. Goodbye Main Street! Hello Wall Street!

Our goal in NYC is to treat investment bankers and quants with the empathy that we treated the people we met around the world who had been hit by the crisis. It should be fun.

Uncategorized

$10 for Tuesday: Homeless are Homeless

By Kelsey

It’s sort of funny when a big butter Jesus burns down – in fact, I drove by the site last week and it’s even funnier in person – but there’s nothing funny at all about a homeless shelter burning down.

No one wants to live in a homeless shelter.

I remember the scenes in Pursuit of Happyness where Will Smith and son are waiting in line for a bed at a homeless shelter in San Francisco. The father, Will, was looking down at the ground to avoid eye contact while simultaneously scanning out the side of his eye for anyone that might recognize him.

Making the decision to move into a shelter must be quite humbling.

But then to have the last place you would turn burn would really seem like life is kicking you while you’re down.

That’s why this Tuesday my $10 is going to the Muncie Mission homeless shelter, which recently had a fire. I gave to them earlier this year, but they need all of the help they can get right now. If you want to help, go here.

Giving Back, ten4tues

Two guys walk into a butcher’s

By Kelsey

Brown & Co. Butcher. Kettering Road, Northampton

From Flickr's Creative Commons by Northhampton Museum

Many of you know that I’ve embarked on my latest project – Nothing Personal – with Andrew Newton. We’ve covered 10s of thousands of miles around the globe, crossed oceans and mountains, suffered nights on trains, planes, and buses, recorded days of interviews, and met some amazing people. Andrew arrived to Muncie last week and when we haven’t been getting him tested for malaria (that’s another story), we’ve been working on the Nothing Personal book proposal.

So far our project has been a success. Much more of a success than our recent trip to the local butcher here in Muncie.

Meat is manly, especially bloody meat surrounded by the sharp cleavers and knives that cut the bloody meat. That’s why there are few places more manly than a butcher’s.

We approach the counter of dead animal. I wait for Andrew to say something. Andrew waits for me to say something. Each of us hopes the other knows something about meat.

“Can I help you?” The woman behind the counter asks.

We look at each other and the realization sets in that neither one of us knows jack about meat.

“Yes, what steaks would you recommend for two adult males and one adult female?” Andrew says.

She stares at us. Perhaps it was Andrew’s accent and the way he puts a long “A” on adult. Perhaps it was the way we were nervously sweating as we watched our respective manhoods slip away.

“Well…ladies tend to like the New York strip and men the T-bone,” she says.

We both turn to the T-bone. It has more meat on it than an entire cow in Ethiopia. It’s huge. Taking it all in requires turning your head from side-to-side.

The head butcher steps up when he sees us floundering.

“Whatchyou fellas need?” He says with an East-coast accent and a bit of gravel in his throat. It’s a manly voice.

We turn to the New York strips, the ones the woman butcher told us the ladies liked. “Boy, those are kinda thick.”

“No problem,” the butcher says, “I can cut ‘em in half for you.”

“Oh, I can cut them in half when we get home,” I say.

“I doubt that,” the butcher says without the slightest bit of sarcasm. He grabs a hunk of meat and a sword-like knife.

Bam. Bam. Bam. Three ladies’ steaks cut in half.

We sheepishly approach the counter and pay for our pansy steaks. But as soon as we exit the world doesn’t know what transpired within.

We are just men leaving the butcher’s, carrying meat, and it doesn’t get much more manly than that.

This Writer’s Life