Heart on a Stick
Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
All in All, Getting Shot Outside a Strip Club? Right After Your Bachelor Party, Just Before Your Wedding? A Pretty Good Way to Go.
posted 12/01/2006
There are good kinds of insomnia. I’m a fan of the one where you’re so fulltobursting with ideas and excitement over those ideas that sleep slips to the bottom of the to-do list. You crash for four straight days afterwards, but those missed nights aren’t really missed.That’s not the one I’ve got, right now. This one’s the purgatorial waiting room where there’s nothing but Cosmo and Car and Driver and that ilk, so you wind up staring at Highlights for Children for three hours and wondering if the doctor’s even in the building and for fuck’s sake I can’t find the fifth thing that’s wrong with this goddamn picture. This is the one where sleep’s all you care about, so everything else is behind this dreamy haze of secondhand smoke. Nothing feels important, or real, or right. Prose gets goopy. My wonkometer is totally frakked. Hasn’t been this bad since I strangled that hobo outside of Spokane.
Don’t know whether it’s this perpetually re-gifted Indian Summer, or general life shit, or what. I haven’t been to a show for half a month – and while Bowery Presents and Live Nation are busy forcing concert prices upupup (Andrew Bird’s a $20 ticket, now?), self-righteous pricing boycotts don’t make for good excuses. I missed, like, two $6 Cake Shop shows I should’ve been at. Gah.
Yes, I’ve tried that. And that, too.
The worst thing you can possibly do, when you have insomnia, is turn on the television. Because TV’s job is to make you never stop watching. And TV’s pretty good at its job. So, of course, I have been watching too much late-night television.
And what wisdom have I gleaned? From six straight hours of Eyes on the Prize, I learned that African-Americans seem to like to walk a lot. I learned that, as a performer, Craig Ferguson is nine thousand times more engaging than Conan O’Brien; that the Tonight Show still has about as many chuckles per episode as any given five minutes from The Sorrow and the Pity; and that I apparently have seen far fewer episodes of Seinfeld and South Park than I’d thought I had.
Did you know Carson Daly has a talk show? And did you know it sucks? Yeah, you probably did.
I don’t have cable, thank goodness, so my options are limited. Otherwise I might have flipped right past the brilliant epic genius that is Play2Win.
Play2Win (or P2W, as it’s known to its fans (who are known to each other as “Play2Winners!”)) is a syndicated late-night call-in game show that doesn’t feature many games, or many calls. It airs in New York weeknights at 2am on Channel 11, pretty much the time/channel juncture of lowered expectations.
What happens on P2W? Nothing. Nothing happens.
The show features two female hosts – Amber and Tara, upbeat, girl next door types – who take turns presiding over ultra-simple word games. There’s “The Shuzzle” (a word jumble) and the “Fair & Square” (a borders-only hidden word box), both easy enough to solve within seconds. This one was featured the other night:
It was onscreen for FIFTEEN MINUTES. Fifteen minutes is a huge amount of television time. Jim Belushi could find three hundred and fifty ways to make you hate him in fifteen minutes.
But Play 2 Win just sorta sits there.
Nature would abhor this show, but I find it fascinating.
(Keep in mind I have not been sleeping well.)
They must figure the longer they keep puzzles up there, the more apt you are to call/text/log in (there are fees involved, of course, and some sort of call-back process before you’re put on-air). So if you’re not there to gawk, the show is passive-aggressively beating you the fuck down. But it’s also beating its cast up.
It’s up to the hosts to create some sort of urgency out of dead air; it’s a blast, watching them fail. These poor women are up there like ants under a magnifying glass on a cloudless summer afternoon. Explaining and re-explaining the rules we understood the first 300 times, asking the same questions again and again. Asking the same questions so often they first become rhetorical, then existential.
“Can you figure it out?” “Can you do it?” “What are we looking for?”
Of the two, Tara’s clearly in her element. She doesn’t have anything insightful or enlightening to add to the process – self-awareness in this situation could only lead to despair – but that doesn’t mean she’ll ever stop talking. She just goes on and on, displaying the patience and energy of a billion special-needs kindergarten teachers.
Though I wouldn’t want to date a Tara, or sit next to one on any form of mass transit, I do admire her verbal wherewithal.
Me, I’d be crying “Uncle” within seconds. “Dude?” I’d say. “Dude? C’mon, man. Dude. Seriously? Duuuuuude. SHOOTING. STAR. It’s fucking SHOOTING STAR. What’s the MATTER WITH ALL OF YOU?! I knew this guy who was a one-eyed dyslexic. Who was raised by WOLVES. In MADAGASCAR. He DIED in 1981 without ever learning ENGLISH. And five seconds after that shit went up on screen, he was banging on the inside of his coffin screaming, ‘Shooting Star! Shooting Star!’ Okay, whatever, next word.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
But not her. She’s all, “This is a short word, so you probably don’t need to WRITE IT DOWN TO FIGURE IT OUT. But MAYBE YOU DO. SOMETIMES the SHORTER WORDS are HARDER TO FIGURE OUT. Get CLOSER TO THE TV if it helps.” So bully for Tara.
Like everything inane, Play2Win has made the rounds on Best Week Ever (watch here... one blessing is that P2W isn’t as assholicly obnoxious and professionally unfunny as the mocktards at VH-1); it has, naturally, a Wikipedia page and a Yahoo! fan group. Fans even found Tara’s myspace page, which then went private (The caché is here. Is the “e” in “potatoe” ironic? Can you figure it out? What are we looking for?) There’s a good summary of show info here, and a too-brief late-night cry of desperation here.
Brevity does this show no justice, though. There’s just SO MUCH NOTHING, and all in one place! In the future, when time sprawl has overrun every available moment, you’ll want to tell your grandkids about this.
Because this much nothing simply must be preserved, I give you the following:
Print it up. Read it out loud. Share it with friends. Kidnap your bosses’ children and make them read it out loud.
And Tara, baby, this one goes out to you:
*
Has Anyone Seen My Sunglasses? Anyone? Dept.:
The Who’s been a joke for a good long time. Now, they’re just a punchline. Please, enjoy this endless series of awful Caruso one-liners from CSI, Miami-Style:
YEAHHHHHHHHHH! (via)
*
Matt and Kim have put together the perfect video.
If you’re enamored with their infectious happyhappy raggedpunkyfuntimepop and their ongoing displays of personal affection, “Yea Yeah” (what, no exclamation point?) perfectly captures that spirit.
And if you gag on their shrill, off-key, cutesy remedial nonsense, you can turn the volume off and watch people throw shit at them.
Win-win!
YES? YOU THERE IN THE BACK? (6)
1. DVC left...
12/01/2006 12:01 pm
That CSI: Miami YouTube was one of the funniest things I've seen in ages.
2. CygEffect left...
12/02/2006 4:27 pm
Hey, I run that Play2Win description page (the first P2W 'fan' page as
opposed to the 5 or so hate pages/forums currently online.) I have to say
that this was a really funny read; funny because it's true for the most
part. I also liked how you had the photo of the "Pluto" Shuzzle which I
remember staring at in disbeleif over how easy it was for a few seconds
when it aired. I mean, at least choose Jupiter or Neptune or Zubeneschamali
if you want to fuck with people. Heres a funny quote from the Yahoo Group:
"you know the production crew is having a bad day when we see the Shuzzle:
'RM T'" lol
3. Max Power left...
12/02/2006 10:19 pm
Fuck. Best banner ever, man. I'M IN YR BASE KILLING YR DUDES!!!!
4. yeti left...
12/04/2006 9:57 am :: http://noyetidance.blogspot.com
That CSI vid just made my Monday morning awesome.
5. Jason PSNYC left...
12/05/2006 5:13 pm :: http://www.productshopnyc.com
As a fellow insominiac, I have watch 'play2win' more times than I care to
admit. It's either that or QVC. Either way, that show is insane in its
concept. Who calls in? The show must have some alternative subliminal shit
going on....
6. The Good Doctor left...
01/24/2007 1:43 am
Oh thank GOD SOMEBODY says something about this show
it's so god damn stupid and i'm pissed that they moved the consecutive
south park episodes to make room for it lol