Longtime readers of JeffCarl.com (me) are no doubt aware that I promised a much overdue overhaul of my website after I last updated it in 2008. That did not happen.
So the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, aside from the horrible toll it has taken on lives and economies around the globe, provided me with the impetus to take a website built on 22-year-old handwritten HTML and Perl code, read by quite literally nobody except search engine crawlers and people looking for other people named Jeffrey Carl, and give it the update that was so sorely unneeded. Well, you’re welcome, people.
I realized that the aforementioned 20+ year old HTML code was terribly outdated and not exactly Responsive Web Design (I don’t care what you say, <BLINK> is coming back). And it turns out that my 15-year-old copy of Adobe Dreamweaver hasn’t been compatible with my computer for about 13 years. So I joined the herd and installed WordPress, which like Linux is free if your time has no value. (It doesn’t!)
So after spending four hours over the weekend wrangling my old server into shape and installing WordPress (true fact: I still can’t get Postfix to work despite more than 2,000,000 web hits on the Internet about how to fix it!) here we go. And instead of doing something sensible like converting all my old content to WP first, I decided to just turn a completely blank WP site live in production on the Internet and you get to watch me slowly add the content back to it! FOR FREE. Again, you’re welcome, people.
So watch (really, don’t!) over the next several weeks or months (depending on how pandemic recovery goes) as all the great stuff from JeffCarl.com (none) gets updated, upgraded and recycled for the 2020s. And I’ll even write exciting new stuff on my Internets home site for the first time in nearly two decades! Or I won’t! Either way, you don’t have to care.
Check back soon for more updates! Or don’t! And if you have half as much fun reading this site as I have writing it, then I’ve had twice as much fun as you.
The long-lost last cassette tape of RTM Episode 1 surrounded by contemporary crap that I found in my storage unit such as 1.44 MB floppy disks and headphones the size of hockey pucks. Not pictured: lots of flannel and Duck Boots.
Being cooped up during a pandemic can make you do crazy things. Things like sort through your old storage unit boxes to find the last extant analog copy of an embarrassing old radio show you did 25 years ago, and then digitizing it and uploading to the Internet. Because, reasons. Also because the Internet.
Radio Theatre For the Masses was… a… thing. That happened. It was aired on the University of Richmond’s college radio station WDCE, but in retrospect I can’t remember if someone at WDCE actually asked us to do it or if we just did it and put it on the radio because we could. Possibly just because the on-air booth was never locked and the DJs were frequently absent on smoke breaks. That latter scenario would not surprise me in any way.
I don’t even remember what year we did this. 1994, maybe? 1995? Many of the UR Theatre folks at the time were involved so I can only assume that some form of intimidation or blackmail was employed. I could tell that Robert Zehner was involved when I listened to it again because he had a Macintosh Quadra AV that was the only personal computer that could do actual digital sound editing. I was absurdly jealous because I had a black and white Mac Classic II that had virtual coughing fits trying to run the “Flying Toasters” screensaver from After Dark.
I think it was part of the plan Paul Caputo and I had to somehow get rich and famous by saturating the marginal media outlets of Richmond, Virginia with comedy and somehow assuming that talent bookers for Saturday Night Live were searching the hinterlands like minor league baseball scouts. They were not.
I… I don’t remember why we did this. If you’re reading this, I can only assume that you were sent a link or you have been terribly rickrolled by someone. If you listen to it and recognize your voice, I’m sorry to have involved you. If you listen to this and were not involved, then 1.) I’m sorry you had to listen to it and 2.) I’m still sorry in general. I do still think that “Bryn MacMuffin” and exploding cats were funny, though.
Click below to listen or scroll down for more information about the guilty parties responsible:
Radio Theatre For the Masses, Episode #1, 1994-1995 or whenever?
This started out as a Central Bucks West high school student project, although I can’t remember for which class. My friends and I had done a video project for our AP English class, a retelling of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult updated to modern West Virginia. I still don’t remember why that was something that I actually got class credit for in an actual functioning secondary school. It was predictably awful but it merely whetted our appetite to be bad in a more original and ambitious way.
Neil Binkley, Luke Irwin and I started the project in the fall of 1990 and haphazardly recruited assorted friends as actors and extras. Armed with a box of props largely scavenged from Neil’s farmhouse and a budget that encompassed buying 8mm videotape and frequent trips to the Montgomeryville PA Taco Bell, we set out to create an original horror/comedy film.
A heavily armed, tobacco-spitting posse prepares to hunt down the mysterious killer
The title and the titular villain came from a wonderfully atmospheric song on Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy album. The plot, insofar as it can be said to have one, came from my lingering fascination with Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The railroad track was a stretch of the SEPTA line between New Britain and Doylestown.
Our actors were chosen based on who was available for filming after school on the particular days we needed someone to get killed, redshirt-style, on camera. Sets were the houses of whichever parents were most willing at the time to tolerate us. The presence of a shower scene was both a conscious homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and a shamefully gratuitous abuse of our friend Libby’s willingness to stand in a shower wearing a bikini and be filmed getting killed. Our special effects were high on ingenuity value and essentially nonexistent on production value (pumpkins do not make effective head stand-ins and Heinz’s ketchup is not convincing blood). I got a hat that says “Ernie’s Liquor Barn” from a thrift shop (I still have it) and today I’m amazed that we were able to legally purchase chewing tobacco as 17-year-olds back then.
The “fearsome symbolism” in question
I think that Luke, Neil and I had collectively gone by the name “Hippy Industries” before this, but the name “Fearsome Symbolism Productions” came out of Man In the Long Black Coat, based on our inserting phallic imagery wherever possible on the theory that it would incite the feminist repudiation of Freudian theory espoused by one of our teachers. (It seemed to make sense at the time.) FSP would go on to be our collective nom du film for the next few years, and I still have a registered business license in that name in case I ever figure out what to do with it. I imagine that a line of FSP merchandise on Etsy is probably the next big project for me.
A pinup-ogling yokel is about to be surprised by the Man In the Long Black Coat
Our schedule left us time to basically shoot at each location once, and we learned painfully in retrospect how important proper lighting is (We had none, proper or otherwise, so some already washed out scenes were largely rendered invisible.) The “Richard Cranium” who shows up often in the credits was how clever 17-year-olds try to sneak the words “dick head” into the credits of a school project and I’m not sure how that didn’t get edited out when this eventually made its way onto local access cable TV.
It was shot and edited on Neil’s 8mm video camera, so back in that analog world every generation of edits lost some quality. (Not that there was a lot of quality to begin with.) Later this version was transferred to 3/4″ tape for broadcast and a few additional edits, and recorded on VHS. From there I eventually transferred it to interlaced Standard Definition digital video, so alas it won’t be being re-released in a 4K director’s cut UltraHD BluRay anytime soon. YouTube won’t let me show it because of all the copyrighted music we used, so excuse the MP4 video file hosted on my server if it’s slow to load.
All things considered, our first bona fide Fearsome Symbolism Productions effort was a lot of fun, even with all the cringe-worthy elements in retrospect. And if you have half as much fun watching it as we had making it, then we’ve had twice as much fun as you.
Click the image below (or the link below it) to watch:
Fearsome Symbolism Productions Presents was our second FSP show and represents an escalation of cringe worthiness that has not aged gracefully on nearly every front. It starts with the violent armed takeover of the local community access TV station studio by white domestic terrorists to a soundtrack of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” and I think that’s probably the high point of the whole thing.
FSP Presents was our first show done specifically for broadcast on local access cable rather than for school. As a courtesy to our millennial viewers I should explain that local access television was how crazy people distributed videos before YouTube, except that it could only be seen by insomniacs and chemically impaired people tuned to a specific unpopular TV channel late at night.
Posing as a male stripper was about as funny a thing as we could think of to make our friend Scott do
FSP Presents ended up as a grab bag of topical comedy sketches, TV parodies and three musical numbers thrown in for good measure. Oh, and we even ripped off the David Letterman “Top 10 list” format, too. The quality of content was not measurably improved from The Man In the Long Black Coat, but at least it was all the hell over the place. Yay?
Luke Irwin had moved mostly behind the camera, and Brian Kehs and Doug Klumpp stepped in. Neil Binkley and I carried the bulk of the on-camera embarrassment, although this time around we reached further afield for cast members and included actual grown-ups. We expanded our locations from half a dozen to “wherever in the Doylestown PA area there was not someone in the background messing up the shot,” including an actual Chinese restaurant and a comic book store.
The band “Chromatic Aberration and the Hippies” was a group of friends who were willing to record in front of Neil’s barn in exchange for, I believe, snacks. And yes, the version of “Proud Mary” that runs over the end credits does in fact hold the record out of the more than 1,500 recorded versions of that song as “pitchiest.”
Doug Klumpp and Neil Binkley editing at the Suburban studios
Having Suburban Cable’s 3/4″ video cameras to shoot with and their community access studio for editing meant that the technical quality of the product at least was significantly improved over Long Black Coat. We had to stretch out our ending credits to cover the aforementioned “Proud Mary” rendition so we availed ourselves of the text editor to keep churning out credits to fill up the time. That, for example, is why you find a food & beverage credit for Sung Ik Song, a kindly old Korean grocer in Germantown who only sold malt liquor and thought we were Temple students so he never checked our IDs.
To be fair to ourselves, at the time it was still funny to be suburban white kids obsessed with Public Enemy and wanting to co-opt rap culture and have a whole segment pay off with a joke about an angry Chinese director named Spike Li. I swear that back then it really was actually mostly kind of okay! Or at least it seemed like a good idea at the time. And I got to strap fireworks to the back of a cardboard cutout cat and set it off, which is sort of a life highlight, so there’s that.
Citizen Payne was FSP’s ultimate creation in both a chronological and qualitative sense, as well as in a “oh God I can’t believe we did that on camera please don’t let this get on to Twitter” sense. It was also, hands down, the most fun I have ever had being not very funny with my friends.
Summer 1992 was, for most of my friends and I, our first summer “home” after freshman year of college, and most of us knew that it was likely to be our last time together as a group before we gradually went our separate ways for good. With that added poignancy and urgency to spend our remaining time together in a meaningful way, we then proceeded to dick around and waste most of the summer.
It’s like picture in picture except not
Because the FSP crew were film nerds, we all had greater or lesser fascinations with Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. As a result, we planned to use the summer to make our own epic – and storyboarded an absurdly ambitious plot that touched on Kane, Superman, Saturday Night Fever, Charlie’s Angels and everything in between. Had we actually finished it all, it would have easily run an hour long.
Neil and Winnie Binkley
Neil Binkley’s house became the locus of our scattered filming efforts that took place whenever we could coordinate our schedules (in and around our summer jobs), but progress was never adequate to meet our ambitious storyline. By late July it had become clear we would never finish it in time before the end of summer. I went home one night determined to salvage the project and holed up in my parents’ basement with a six-pack of Mountain Dew and my trusty Sears typewriter.
Neil Binkley and Brian Kehs
N.B. to our younger readers: a typewriter was like a computer running a very, very old version of Google Docs that had no screen, only one font, required applying viscous fluids to delete words once typed, and couldn’t copy, paste, add images, markup text, change layout, use emojis, save versions, reply, forward or retweet. It basically represented the midpoint in human communications capabilities between cave paintings and WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
Libby Beard at the Montgomeryville Taco Bell. A lot of my photos from that summer take place there for some reason.
N.N.B. to our younger readers: DOS was ostensibly an operating system for computers in the sense that it would let you play very blocky pirated versions of SimCity if you entered the proper commands. Sears was like Amazon if Amazon sent you a 400-page book three times a year to order from; also you could drive there and be bored while your mom shopped for clothes. WordPerfect was neither a word, nor perfect; discuss.
At any rate, I emerged with a revised script where we would basically make the show an extended promo for the real Citizen Payne, showing off the bits of the original story we had filmed and adding some new “behind the scenes” features, combined with a few clips from older FSP productions, in order to flesh out our requisite 30 minute slot. We even went so far as to make a trailer for Citizen Payne that ran on Suburban cable that summer – a teaser for a show which was itself a teaser for a longer, nonexistent show. Such meta. So wow.
Click the image or the link below to view the trailer for Citizen Payne:
Filming the “Bikini Warriors” segment of Citizen Payne
Just as before, our cast was made up of our friends who would work for tacos, and our prop budget was severely impacted by the overhead costs of malt liquor acquisition. The looking-at-it-30-years-later cringe factor has reached apocalyptic levels, especially due to our taking full (figurative) advantage of our attractive female friends who were willing to run around in bikinis on camera.
Some of the skits are pretty broad parody of common tropes popular in TV or movies at the time. Other parts of it make almost no sense if you aren’t familiar with Citizen Kane or the parodied source material, but pop culture solipsism is a time-honored tradition for teenagers. Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a big influence of mine at the time and a lot of the self-referential humor is cribbed from there.
Tom Brunt of Suburban Cable who graciously let us use his cool gear
We once again had the run of the Suburban Cable community access video equipment for filming and editing. The closing credits sequence took a disproportionately long time but it was assembled from clips of all the FSP films (including the “lost” Tristan and Iseult) and plenty of outtakes so it functions as a three-minute FSP “greatest hits” themed to the Beastie Boys. The version I put online is a digital transfer from a VHS copy that was recorded direct from the 3/4″ tape deck, so today you’re able to view it in something approximating the interlaced 30 fps Standard Definition glory that it once appeared in to residents of Southeast Pennsylvania (and later Richmond Virginia).
All in all, Citizen Payne was a wonderful experience and a great way to ride off into the sunset for Fearsome Symbolism Productions. By finally making it available online, I hope to introduce a whole new generation of people from all over the world to not care about it or watch it, and probably live happier, more fulfilling lives as a result.
Click the image or link below to watch Citizen Payne:
The Richmond State + BLAB TV: a deep, rich vein of pure comedy gold.
In the summer of 1996, Paul Caputo and I decided to use our runaway lack of success at The Richmond State to conquer the next rung up the ladder of comedy fame: local access television.
As a courtesy to our millennial viewers I should explain that local access television was how crazy people distributed videos before YouTube, except that it could only be seen by insomniacs and chemically impaired people tuned to a specific unpopular TV channel late at night.
We rounded up our friends Branden Waugh and Julie Amos to co-star, and somehow ended up with a collection of hyper-topical comedy skits that have aged very poorly and a musical number that somehow came out even worse. I am still pretty proud of the opening credits song, however. We assigned Branden to be the salesperson who would enlist local sponsors and I don’t remember how that all turned out except that it somehow involved “Myrna’s Bits ‘n’ Boots” and we only lasted one episode.
If someone at YouTube reviewed this video for objectionable content it will have doubled the BLAB TV lifetime viewing audience.
Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.
Unlike other sports blogs, only BTBNL has the courage to a.) take on hot topics like the controversial call that gave the Seahawks a victory over the Packers Monday night, and b.) do it after everyone else has stopped caring and moved on to other topics. That’s the kind of quality journalism that explains why we have gotten fewer hits in the site’s entire history than pictures of Pokemons drawn as sexy Anime girls or Overly Attached Girlfriend got in the last 10 minutes.
Touchdown! Or maybe not.
It’s important to send a message not to bow to peer pressure, like everyone else in the country thinking you were wrong about it being a touchdown.
BTBNL set up an exclusive live chat session to answer questions from its literally hundreds of avid readers who do not technically exist. BTBNL Grand Poobah Paul Caputo decided that the best person to give a reasoned, unbiased response to all these reader questions was the site’s lone Seattle blogger resident/sportsfan, me. Which should tell you all you need to know about Paul Caputo’s editorial judgement.
BTBNL Blogger Jeff from Seattle: Hi everyone! Looking forward to answering your questions about the exciting Seahawks win from last night. Here we go!
BTBNL Reader Neil from Chalfont, PA: What should the NFL do after such a terrible call ruined the game by giving the Seahawks an undeserved win on an purported Hail Mary touchdown from Russell Wilson to Golden Tate that was really an interception by M.D. Jennings?
Jeff: Assface says what?
Neil: What???!?
Jeff: Exactly. Next question?
Look, they are working as hard as they can, so BACK OFF. Okay?
BTBNL Reader Amy from Baltimore, MD: Should Golden Tate be fined for his egregious pass interference that wasn’t called on the final play of the game?
Jeff: Only if by “egregious pass interference” you mean “unbelievable awesomeness.”
Amy: No, I don’t mean that at all.
Jeff: I’m pretty sure you do. And he shouldn’t be fined for it, he should be awarded this nation’s highest honor, the Congressional Not Being Arrested For Stealing Donuts Medal. Next question?
BTBNL Reader Branden from Atlanta, GA: We all saw the replays, and the facts are very clear about what happened. Let’s be fair and put our team affiliations aside here to discuss the issue rationally like adults. Can’t we just logically agree to the obvious statement that this call was incorrect and the Seahawks didn’t really deserve to win?
Jeff: What color is the sky on your planet? Is it green? That seems lovely.
In the spirit of compromise, I will agree that you blow goats during your free time when you are not actively assisting Al-Qaeda and/or selling crystal meth at preschools.
BTBNL Reader Greer from Mobile, AL: Shouldn’t we all be boycotting NFL games with these terrible scab replacement referees?
Do these ladies deserve the best in referees? We think they do. And we are ready to volunteer any time necessary.
Jeff: I think these replacement referees are just fine.
Greer: But it was revealed recently that some of these referees actually got fired for not being good enough for the Lingerie Football League. Not that this is any kind of linkbait to get people to read this article due to a question on the LFL.
Jeff: First, I am going to say “shame on you,” and link to the Lingerie Football League website as an apology. Second, I am not going to dignify your slurs on the Lingerie Football League. That would be almost as bad as casting aspersions on the Canadian Football League cheerleaders of the British Columbia Lions. Third, I have forgotten what the original point was.
The CFL British Columbia Felions being cheerful. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.
Also, we have a picture of the CFL British Columbia Lions “BC Felions” here, which is somehow related to something in this post about the Seahawks/Packers game. It has nothing to do with driving hits and trying to make this website profitable. Just saying.
That’s all the time we have for tonight – join us again next week when we answer nobody’s actual questions about the Philadelphia Phillies or the Washington Nationals!
Bloggers To Be Named Later was Paul Caputo’s fabulous sports-blogging empire of the mid-2010s. My role in the enterprise was to promise to write humor articles and then not do that, or at least not remotely on time. Ultimately, after a flirtation with viral Internets fame, the site basically turned into an excuse for Paul to get free baseball tickets, which is actually about the only good reason to run a blog of any sort. After the BTBNL site wound down, I realized that I hadn’t kept local copies of most of the stories I had written, so I ended up scouring through The Internet Archive to find as many as I could in order to prevent a tragic loss to the world’s cultural canon of blog posts complaining about the Seattle Mariners. You’re welcome.
Most athletes are actually pretty smart people, despite the fact that many of them had college majors in non-subjects like “sports medicine” or “communications.” But there are a few tell-tale signs that your favorite athlete may not be a brain surgeon in their spare time:
They went to school at a fake-sounding diploma mill like “Mount Saint Ringo College,” “East North Chattahoochee Tech,” or “Miami University.”
They take retirement investment advice from Warren Sapp or handgun safety courses from Plaxico Burress
But lest you doubt its effectiveness, they have Actual Science backing up their claims, published by the independent “Society for Aqua-Metal Research.” All this can be yours for prices ranging from about $40 for a basic necklace to $230 for a pure titanium bracelet. (If you want a quick picture of what the profit margin on this is like, you can buy a non-Phiten titanium bracelet here for $35.) They also make – I am still not making this up – a line of lotions and hair care which feature “Aqua-Gold.” Because your hair needs gold … that removes ions … or something.
So what do we have here? The intersection of athletes with lots of money and not a lot of critical thinking skills. My friends, this sounds to me like what one of my business school professors called “an opportunity to make a f–k ton of money.” And frankly, it’s about time someone here at BTBNL figured out how we were going to get rich off this. I still think Paul Caputo’s business model for this site was that eventually Ryan Howard would adopt him and make him his heir.
That’s why today I am announcing availability of new sports-enhancing miracle trinkets made of a wonder metal: Redonkulin.
Redonkulin bracelets cause friendship!
These may – to the untrained eye – look like cheap German-branded “My Little Pony Friendship Bracelets.” But no – they are made of 13% pure Redonkulin – a rare pseudo-metallic compound forged in the depths of Mount Doom that provide greater energy, faster reflexes and Minty Fresh Breath. I will now take some made-up questions from the audience:
Q: Redonkulin sounds awesome! But how does it work?
A: It’s a well known True Fact that all body problems are caused by excess neutrons. Neutrons are invisible particles that hate America and are responsible for things like nuclear fission and poor SAT scores. But Redonkulin creates a bio-electric necker cube of anti-neutron repagination that literally beats up neutrons and takes their lunch money. In addition, it repels dangerous chemicals like dihydrogen monoxide, shields the wearer from most asteroids, and is washable on permanent press. Best of all, it works immediately through the power of the scientifically proven and impressive-sounding placebo effect.*
Q: Those frigging neutrons! I hate them!
A: I know, right?
Q: The neutron menace must be stopped, I can feel them getting all over me right now and causing fatigue, muscle cramps and itty bitty thigh pimples. How can I buy it?
The Amazing Twist-A-Thing! It is endless and just blew your mind.
A: Cool your jets, I’m not done. Best of all, if you act RIGHT NOW we will send you a free special gift:
The amazing Twist-A-Thing bracelet! Made from a secret compound of unobtanium, the animal they made the Ribwich out of, and petrochemical by-products, it contains highly scientific unstable molecules which sound like a real thing! Bend it in any shape – and it will snap right back to its original form. Put it around your wrist – WHO KNOWS WHAT CAN HAPPEN? Maybe something good for you or something.
Q: OMG.
A: Exactly. I think we can safely say with absolutely no exaggeration that this is the most awesomest thing ever in the history of anything that has ever been awesome.
Q: I must have it now. How oh how can I purchase this marvel of “science?”
A: You can buy it TODAY through this very website! Your very own sporty Redonkulin pony-friendship-themed necklace is available for only $174.99, or purchasable in three easy installments of $129.99 each. We will include FREE SHIPPING if you just mail us your credit card, and you will get it back eventually!
So don’t delay! Emulate your favorite naive or unscrupulous celebrity athlete endorser and buy your Redonkulin bracelet and amazing Twist-A-Thing today. All our products are scientifically proven to exist by research from the independent “Redonkulin Research Council**,” and we absolutely guarantee our products to not be radioactive as far as you know.
* May cause allergies in people sensitive to ponies or love. Do not use Redonkulin if you are currently taking Benzobrist.
** This institute is my dogs Spencer and Holly wearing adorable white lab coats. I asked them if Redonkulin is awesome while waving some Bacon Bits up and down and they nodded.
