Phil: Steve, I see you have a new profile picture on your Facebook page. Wry grin, furrowed brow, cool shades. You look like a character from one of your books. That is, if you wrote books about assassins who drive minivans with a frappé in the cup holder.
Steve: I haven’t written that book yet, but it sounds like something I’d do. A minivan could be perfect cover for an assassin. No one, not even the police, gives my minivan a second look. The photo was taken by our own Bruce Greenberg during the recent ArtHop Birthday Bash (which explains the sunglasses and sweaty hair), and edited by our own Kelly Brewer to erase other people from the background, etc. To me, digital photography and its manipulation are like voodoo. I don’t understand it, but I fear it.
Phil: The things you can do with photos! It’s amazing. A “friend” recently sent me several incriminating photos of me and barnyard creatures. And this guy doesn’t know anything about Photoshop. He probably doesn’t even have a camera. He just forwarded one of my photo albums from Facebook thinking I’d be shocked or something. Actually, I was. The lighting made me look all fat and pasty.
Steve: You’re such an animal lover.
Phil: Well, at the end of the evening they’re the kind of guests you don’t mind having for dinner. But the photographer really had no sense of composition. Or focus, even. Choose your photog well.
Steve: Don’t choose me. At a recent event, I was handed a credit-card-sized digital camera and asked to shoot a photo of the camera’s owner while he gave a brief reading. No instructions. Just “Here, shoot my picture.” I fired away during his remarks. He returned to his seat. I handed him the camera. He checked the little screen. Nothing. Not one photo. I still don’t know what I did wrong.
Phil: You probably ended up texting an offer for a free sample of erectile dysfunction products to a 9-year-old in Banswatta. Two people utterly confounded by your mastery of gadgets in one fell swoop. That’s impressive.
Steve: All modern technology baffles me. Whenever you see a video or a photo or something other than words in the Corner Booth, you know that someone (usually Kelly) helped me put it there. I’m not playing to the whole “Dad as technological doofus” stereotype. I truly am a doofus.
Phil: Speaking of pasting “media” into web columns, and doofuses, check this out! If you click the following audio link you’ll hear the two dolts who write that insipid Cutting Board feature for anewscafe.com. I guess they did a radio spot on KLXR in an effort to subvert radio listeners into reading the brain pablum they retch forth in their so-called “column.” You’d think Mike Quinn would be more protective of his listeners, but I think he actually produced the ad. Here, listen…
(If Kelly would help us insert the audio file, that is. Sorry, Kelly, but you’re surrounded by doofuses. Like Rick Moranis in Spaceballs. Only you’re taller.)
Steve: Phil, I believe you’re the one who referred to that spot as the “longest 59 seconds in radio history,” and I wouldn’t disagree. Mike kept encouraging us to sound livelier, but lively is not my natural tenor. You sure got all lively, though. You sound like a cross between a chuckling clown and a calliope.
Phil: I think I’d have a future as part of a comedy team, if I weren’t held back by my “partner.” Just because you get up at three in the afternoon and orange juice isn’t like sunshine without vodka, it doesn’t make you Dean Martin. Or even Dan Rowan. I really had to do the heavy lifting.
Steve: It’s true you wrote the whole ad, but it was your idea to do the spot in the first place. I don’t want to be on the radio, oh, ever. With my subtle Southern accent, I sound like Goober of Mayberry. Better that I just sit quietly, wearing my sunglasses and projecting a menacing, assassin-like image. But no, I let you lure me (again) into making a fool of myself.
Phil: Yeah, like I had candy and a minivan.
Steve: I’m still waiting for the candy.
Phil: I’m still waiting for a punchline.
