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If I’m never on a reality TV show, it won’t be for a lack of trying.
At the urging of my friend and former boss Bil Boyd, I have applied to appear on the ABC show Wipeout. Yes, I have applied for the chance to look like a complete moron on national television. Don’t act like you’re surprised.
Obviously, I have no idea if I’ll ever hear back from the production company. As I understand it, most of the people who wind up on shows like this were discovered at on-site casting calls in California shopping malls. Or they slept with a producer.
As for me, I have no recollection of sleeping with a producer and I simply filled out an online application that posed some moderately probing questions, such as:
- What are your worst qualities?
- If you could be anyone living or dead, real or fiction, who would you be and why?
- If you were granted one wish (however impossible), what would it be and why?
In case you’re wondering, I said I can be a jerk; that I’d like to be Marty McFly so I can travel through time; and that I’d like to play a football game for the Steelers. On the moon. Why the Steelers? Because I’ve been a fan all my life. Why the moon? Because if we lose, at least I can say I’ve been to space.
As clever or just plain stupid as that might sound, who knows if anyone at the production company will read my application? Either way, I’ll keep you posted.
Back when I was wrapping up my first year of writing this blog, I promised you, faithful reader, that I wouldn’t stop entering wacky, senseless, and ridiculous events. Of course, I was careful to note that I wouldn’t be able to maintain my previous pace of entering at least one contest each month.
Even with that footnote as an excuse, I never intended to go four weeks without writing a post—let alone four months. Call it a hiatus, a sabbatical, a spiritual retreat, or plain laziness. No matter what, I’m back, and my next event is another marathon.
Even though I haven’t blogged since June, I haven’t stopped running. In fact, since the Tobacco Road Marathon in March, RunKeeper says I’ve run 568.6 miles, or about 20 miles each week. I’ve used most of that time to somewhat successfully concentrate on not falling face first on the trails at Umstead State Park. During the rest of the time, however, I’ve thought much about my next steps for this blog. Its future has mirrored the highs and lows that go along with long distance running. It’s gone as high as starting my own national egg toss championship and as low as pulling the plug on this whole project.
But for every time I think of one reason to stop blogging, I’m reminded of a dozen reasons to keep at it. Actually, today I was given 10,000 reasons to keep at it. That’s because the Japan Tourism Agency has proposed a campaign to give away 10,000 free roundtrip tickets to Japan, so long as the ticketholders publicize their trip on blogs and social media sites.
So, anybody know of something ridiculous I could enter in Japan?
Maybe a game show?
