Well put, Natalie Dee – Smartie Pants of the Day

nataliedee.com
(click for full-size comic)

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Up next: On Richness (waiting for the Better Title fairy)

Disgruntled student?

Here’s something interesting that WordPress’s (trademarked, I’m sure) awesomeness gives me everytime I log in:

These are terms people used to find your blog:
Search
fraggle rock
MFA for teaching art useless
contest won skill math question phone I
bob barker’s beauties sexual encounters

So… what does this tell us about Naked Finances readers? They like TV from the 80s. They don’t understand that search engines usually disregard terms like “I” and “for”. They seem to be more drawn to the sexy “naked” part of the domain name (barker’s beauties sexual encounters?) than the admittedly less sexy “finances” part.

Also… they don’t seem to have a lot of respect for the degree necessary for teaching art school at the university level. I hope the clever WordPress engine directed them to this post: Who’s Your Rich Daddy?

and more importantly, this post: Teaching the Artists How to Art

But… I know what you really came here for:

Enjoy.

Gettin’ er done since 1981!

Absolutely nothing of importance…just wanted to celebrate the naked finances blov hitting 1981 views!

(robyn (author and founder) was born in 1981, so considers this fairly random number an important one.)

and so, in honour of 1981,

from nataliedee.com

The Price is Right, Final Frontier.

(Or “I’m smelly, tired, sick of clapping and screaming, and Bob Barker looks like a wax mannequin of himself”)

Pt. III of III (See Pt. I here and Pt. II here)

We met handfuls of interesting people in line. My most memorable line encounter was with an elderly couple that had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. If I could have given them the new car, trailer camper, et al, I would have.

And then there was Earl. Earl has one of those inherently tough-but-adorable faces. He got in line at 11:30pm, and spent the following 12 hours campaigning and charming the pants off of everyone in his line vicinity, including TPIR talent scouts.

Yes, talent scouts. I had mistakenly assumed that contestants were chosen randomly, giving me a 1 in 200 or so (0.5%) chance of fulfilling my childhood dream of playing Plinko (or at very least the stupid golf game). Sadly, for my mostly shy demeanor, we were expected to perform, in groups of 10, after staying awake for over 24 hours and sitting in the rain for over 10 hours, for two dry-faced CBS Polo-Shirt Wearers with clipboards. We were asked, in drill sergeant fashion: Name, Occupation, Hometown?

Jen & Steve did a cute honeymooning-Canadians performance, Elliot was a cuddly, witty engineer from Silicon Valley, and I….froze. “Uh, I’m a photographer. From Canada. But I actually live in California. And I’m a student. Of finance.” Frig. I think I even smelled as boring as I sounded. When I saw the tell-tale flicker of “Boring, next.” Pass over Clipboard #2’s otherwise emotionless face, I realized I blew it. No Plinko.

 

Why did Mom have to raise such an honest And trustworthy daughter? Why can’t I be a better liar? I could have adopted bubbly southern Delta Smelta-Phi daughter’s shtick, jumped around, cheered and punched the air a few times, and I probably would have been picked. Maybe we should have laced our 4am coffees with something stronger than half & half.

 

In order to honour the blogger’s (note: I prefer bloviator’s but it hasn’t caught on just yet) code of brevity and succinct, witty posting, I will point-form the remainder of my TPIR observations:

 

• Making crowds of 500 order themselves into numerically organized lines is a really good way to waste an inordinate amount of time.

• Having a single person handwrite all studio audience (and possible studio audience) members name tags is another great time-waster.

• After 12 hours in line, in the rain, it doesn’t matter how funny your t-shirt is, you do not make an attractive audience member (by sight or smell).

• Because of the tired and smelly factor of those who make it into the first few rows of the audience, CBS hires a group of nice-smelling, make-up-wearing actors to fill the only row that is consistently visible on camera throughout the show.

• Having someone yell at you to clap and cheer, louder & louder, for 45minutes of taping, regardless of how ruggedly good-looking he is, is not an effective motivator after about 5 minutes.

• Especially if the guy yells “Oh YEAH!” in a porn-y voice every time a new item comes up for bidding. Side note: your impression of Oh YEAH! will be the most memorable thing you take away from the longest/most exhausting 24 hours of sitting/shuffling/waiting of your life.

• TPIR set looks much smaller in real life than on TV – miniature, even.

• And finally, Bob Barker has to wear a lot of make-up to still appear TV-presentable at 83.

 

 

If Bob has a little place in your heart, despite the sexual assault allegations and chauvinistic fan kissing, tune in on May 16^th, 8pm.

All in all, it was a very tiring, but very fun 24+ hour adventure. Here’s the proof:

Before:
After:

See…still happy, and relatively unscathed.

 

Oh yeah, to tie this back to finances (the purported reason for this site) – gambling and game showing are freakishly similar pursuits. In a word or two: Don’t bother. The chance of a decent return on invest is damn near nil. Unless of course your name is Earl, you manage to charm the pants of the clipboard guys, and as as “thank-you for making our audience go bonkers”, one of the CBS guys rigs the great wheel to land on $1.00 and 5¢ consecutively during your turn. These two spins net Earl $1500 (before taxes, of course) and a standing ovation from the audience (despite their net loss on the day) for a cool 18 hours of work.

Feeling lucky? Go sign up for your company’s 401(k), or open a Roth IRA account. More details in the next post – it’s already half-typed.

And remember, help control the pet population; have your pets spayed or neutered.

 

A BRAND NEW Kitsch-en Dinette Set!

Pt. II of III

Canadian friend Jen & her new husband Steve were honeymooning in San Francisco, and had planned a stop in Los Angeles to conclude their trip with a taping of The Price Is Right (TPIR from hereon in, because that’s what all the cool kids call it). They had two extra tickets, if my husband and I were interested – (Based on my last post, you can correctly surmise that I was). As for Mr. Nakedcrusaderrobyn, with a crazy deadline looming at work… Not so much. I called my friend Elliot, who seemed to have a similar penchant for cheesy game shows, we made some t-shirts, packed some snacks, and drove down to Los Angeles on the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend.

 

The taping was Monday afternoon at 1pm, and Jen & Steve were eager to get in line for tickets (you may recall that we already had tickets, but the first set of tickets didn’t seem to guarantee anything except entrance on to the highly secured (okay, just a fence and a bored-looking security guard) CBS Studio grounds), but after driving 6 1/2 hours, Elliot and I… not so much. (last Boratism, I promise).

 

We arrived at Elliot’s sister’s place (conveniently less than 1 mile from CBS) around 11pm, and Jen & Steve were out near the airport (about an hour drive, round trip). Since they were hoping to get in line around 1am, (they had heard this was the magic number in order to maybe, almost, probably, hopefully guarantee a coveted spot on Contestants Row), and some sort of Thanksgiving weekend parade had backed traffic up all over Elliot’s sister’s neighbourhood, there was not much point in trying to snag a few hours of sleep (which had been our original plan, sleeping bags and pillow in tow). But no biggie, right? We were gonna see Bob-freakin-Barker in t-minus-14 hours

 

We dropped the honeymooners off at 1:30am in front of the CBS studio gates, took the car back to Elliot’s sister’s place (although, in retrospect, if I had known how helpful a rain free shelter on wheels might have been for the following 18+hours, I would have forked out the $10 for parking), and joined them in line around 2am.

 

There were about 15 people in line at 1:30, but the crowd had ballooned to about 40 by 2am. Fortunately, Jen & Steve had secured our spots in line by renting $5 lawn chairs for us from the genius bagel shop entrepreneur across the street from the studio, so we didn’t get too many dirty looks when we joined them. (Thank-you again J&S. Those chairs were the best things, of anything.)

 

Having never stood in line over night for anything, not even tickets to the NKOTB concert I wanted to attend in grade 4 (“But MOM! What could possibly happen to a group of 9-year-olds on the streets of Toronto in the middle of the night?”), I had no idea how to handle the culture and etiquette of Line Standing.

 

Seasoned Line Standers do not stand – they sit – on folded lawn chairs which they stow in their cars, parked nearby. They have blankets. Umbrellas. Snacks. Thermoses of hot beverages. They Know What They Are Doing. We, clearly, did not.

 

There are two main types of Seasoned Line Standers Sitters:

Those who are chatty, hyper, and extremely happy to be standing on a mostly deserted, rainy Los Angeles street at 4am,

And:

Those who aren’t.

The latter category of Line Sitters seem to consider themselves martyr-like for enduring the hardships of night, rain, sleep deprivation, etc., and, naturally, transform themselves into blanket and tarp covered statues.

We are sandwiched between these two personality extremes. Grumpy Statue Camp doesn’t emerge from their blue covers until the line starts to move at 6:00am. Hyper Chatty Camp consists of a mother-daughter team from, cute-drawly-accents withstanding, one of the Southern states. Daughter is on break from her delta-belta-pi university, and they are vacationing in Los Angeles with the hopes (and seemingly sole purpose) of appearing on TPIR. They didn’t know they needed tickets, so by about 9am, and much cheer leading and shrieking, we didn’t see them again.

TPIR – The Final Frontier (aka Pt. III) – will be posted Thursday.