In the past 24 hours, a clip entitled “Worst Wedding DJ EVER!” has crossed my transom multiple times, usually accompanied by an exhortation like “Too Funny!” or “OMG.” In the clip, some guy in an ill-fitting suit is inspired to use some… unconventional percussion while he’s leading a conga line through its motions from the stage. As with many funny videos that just happen to surface on YouTube, I had one important question: Was the thing real, or was it just stealth marketing for some TV show coming to a high-numbered cable channel this summer? I put my head together with Awl Internet Expert Miles Klee and we tried to figure things out.

Miles Klee: While I did spend a summer as a caterer of tasteless New Jersey weddings and could easily imagine this epic Phil Collins “cross-fade,” it seems clear to me that we switch from diagetic music to non-. You can see that our stardust emcee is clapping to a different beat, and the boob solo, while it should be heavily reverbed, doesn’t match up either.

Maura Johnston: I am guessing that he was playing, ahem, “bongos” along to “Conga” and the Phil was edited in later. But don’t you think the setup itself is kind of odd? Specifically, what DJ company would allow an employee to wear jorts in such a public way at a wedding??

Miles: Oh man, you’ve really only been to classy weddings, haven’t you. The ones where the worst thing that goes wrong is like two drunk ladies doing the Dirty Dancing routine at the end of the night while their husbands methodically consume all the untouched cake slices on Table 16? As far as I’m concerned this guy slapped a Kinko’s poster (featuring an oddly militant John Mccain ’08 star) on a podium and sold himself as a professional, then told his wife/girlfriend/familiar to stop by at the Veterans’ Hall to pick him up around 11pm because the reception would probably be over by then. Only, surprise, he got offered an extra $50 to keep the music going till midnight and she just had to wait around until such time as a) the party dies, or b) she can be used as a prop.

Maura: Oh God, that makes so much sense! And yet… and yet. Part of me still wonders if it isn’t some sort of viral video ad for, say, an upcoming Comedy Central project, or a Party Down spinoff about hapless DJs.

Miles: Yes, I was instantly struck by parallels with the infamous wedding singer scene from Old School, right down to the goatee, at which point I felt I was tackling a chicken-or-the-egg problem.

Because part of what makes that Old school scene great is the knowledge that spectacularly bad wedding singers/bands/DJs do exist-I might go so far as to say comprise a tyrannical majority?-and that probably one in particular was the inspiration for that timeless rendition of “Total Eclipse Of The Heart.” But I think this inkling has more to do with the video’s fairly ingenious editing, which, wow, I had forgotten what slo-mo is for.

Maura: I’d totally forgotten about that scene! did you know that the Glee version of Total Eclipse is No. 16 on the Hot 100 this week?

Sometimes I wonder if any videos like this can be real at all. Although obviously some of them are! Like the “Kid Sings ‘Paparazzi’” clip from earlier this week, which in 48 hours went from 19,000 views to something like 8 million, on the local news after American Idol last night, the kid’s getting advice from Gaga on Ellen, etc. I guess there were just a bunch of odd details that didn’t add up — like, why would someone have chosen that moment to tape that part of the wedding? Maybe it was a videographer who was being paid to shoot the whole thing, but in this economy would someone really jeopardize his job for lulz?

Miles: My experience with Glee begins and ends with me cringingly buying one of the CDs for my little sister this past Christmas, and I will never speak of it again. But as to the video’s origin, my theory is: There was no professional involved. Instead the only relative who owned a camera was tasked with recording whatever they could. This person then got drunk and forgot to record anything, remembered toward the end of the festivities that they were supposed to, grabbed the nearest geeky-looking wiseass of a nephew and ordered him to get some footage.

At least that’s how they do it in my family.

What’s new in Haiti? Glad you asked!
• Nonprofits like the Red Cross, CARE and Catholic Relief Services dispense donations slowly; each of those organizations has only spent between 8% and 25% of the money donated to Haiti, choosing instead to retain it for future spending. This is tricky because people get antsy when you don’t give their money to Haiti but all the organizations swear they’re just trying to do it right, so don’t immediately flip out.
• Don’t even try and leave Haiti, because even Jamaica will put you in detention and then ship you right back.
• Brazil just became the first country to donate to the Haiti reconstruction fund run by the World Bank. Yup, the first! So far, the only!
• Some Haitians are concerned that the president has used the state of emergency to stay in power, with the help of the parliament, for too long; demonstrations are ongoing.
• On June 1, “Joint Task Force Haiti,” the U.S. military operation there, will “stand down.” Actually they mostly are pretty stood down already; there are only 850 servicemembers in Haiti; at one point, there were 22,000. Shortly thereafter, “New Horizons” begins, with about 500 soldiers working on engineering and infrastructure.

The publishing giant/dinosaur/juggernaut Conde Nast is “considering” a move to the totally not built Freedom Tower downtown and the naming rights are tricky! We were thinking COOKIE: NEVER FORGET but there’s also other good choices, such as SI TOWN and GRAYDON GARDENS.

Is there too much information on menus at fast-food chains and casual-dining restaurants, which are thanks to various government additions evermore laden with calorie counts and sodium counts and fat gram numbers and math and even more math? Maybe, given that the information presented might not always provide the full picture, thus lulling one into a false state of security about, say, a 545-calorie entree that is loaded with enough salt to preserve a full side of pork. Or maybe not, since: “People who order Burger King’s Triple Whopper with Cheese (1,250 calories) or Taco Bell’s Volcano Nachos (1,000 calories) probably understand that it is not health food”! Somehow this story did not find someone contrarian enough to argue that the Triple-Whopper-scarfing masses read the calorie counts as rewards points for consuming fattening food, and are actually gorging themselves in hope of being as well-known as famed glutton Guy Fieri, but perhaps the reporter was on a deadline.

The late all-reality-TV network Fox Reality Channel used to have a family-themed variant on Cheaters called Sex Decoy: Love Stings. In the show, a mother and her daughters, all of whom worked for the Arizonan PI firm Mate Check Private Investigations, would try and trap men who were thought to be cheats into flirting, or maybe some light making out. (The uncomfortable “mother pimping out her own flesh and blood” overtones aside, I have to say that watching the squirming men can be sort of fun. But I like Cheaters, too.) In Japan, a similar service is performed by people known as “wakaresase-ya” (splitter-uppers), only there’s one crucial difference, which is in part brought on by the country’s adversity to the idea of a no-fault divorce: These people are not afraid to really go there when it comes to shaking a client free of someone undesirable.

The function of the wakaresase-ya is the direct opposite of a dating agency: with great ingenuity, and the right fee, they will prise apart human relationships. Do you have a troublesome ex-boyfriend who won’t leave you alone? A beloved son who is getting engaged to an unsuitable girl? A dead-loss employee who refuses to take the hint and retire? All of these difficult situations can be resolved by the splitter-uppers.

The broken-hearted ex will be visited by the girl’s “new boyfriend”, a muscular gangster-type who explains why he would be wise to nurse his broken heart alone. The undesirable daughter-in-law-to-be will be lured into a drunken one-night stand with a handsome and mysterious man who appears from nowhere — photographs of their tryst will find their way to her fiancé. The stubborn employee will find himself confronted with evidence of gambling debts, or nights in massage parlours — and resign to avoid embarrassment. In each case, the dirty work — of threatening, seducing and investigating — has been done by a splitter-upper.

The wakaresase-ya profiled here has some 150 employees of all ages and walks of life, including porn actors (who take the entrapment all the way to the bedroom, another thing that their U.S. counterparts would not do on camera) and homemakers. Surely there is at least an aspiring screenwriter or two on staff as well, because man would this make for quite the HBO drama in which each episode is a self-contained story arc, no?

[Via]

Thanks to Joe Clark, here is a recent secret speech by Bob Miller (secret = it took place in Canada), who jumped ship on the innovative, profit-sharing imprint HarperStudio just as it was beginning and surprised everyone by going off to head Workman Publishing, fine publishers of Brain Quest Write & Erase Set: Alphabet and The Big Breakfast Diet. This resulted in HarperCollins shuttering the imprint.

You can look at the short existence of HarperStudio as a success or a failure; Bob regards it as a failure, clearly, despite three Times bestsellers out of 16 books published, and a low cost spent on all of these books (and also no money wasted on advertising because advertising doesn’t sell books, which, obviously). So one would imagine they spent outright between $3 and $5 million on books.

[Disclosure: I don’t know him but I am not a fan of Bob Miller these days in light of his sudden departure; HarperStudio bought books from friends of mine and from me as well (all books that will still be published, as of now).]

Miller also claims that “small advances” (that’s $100K and lower, and if you’re a fiction writer, you’re currently thinking “I’d kill someone for a $40K advance!) made the house unattractive to “track record” authors.

This misses the point; a house like that is supposed to make writers, and can afford to gamble on books, not just buy the cache of authors outright as is done in the wrecked publishing star system. Bob totally misunderstands what he was doing, and how and why he was doing it, it sounds like? “It was hard to convince authors,” he says in this speech, about the advance limit. “The authors we were able to get were authors who did not need the money to write the book over time and were doing something over time that did not require as big an investment.” (He points to their MARK TWAIN BOOK as an example. Mark Twain didn’t need the advance because HE IS STILL DEAD.)

But for the living ones? “The level of author that might have been interested” in profit-sharing was already making too much money elsewhere, is what Bob weirdly concludes from the experience. Then maybe you shouldn’t have spent all your time sniffing around after “the sure thing” rockstar author? It sure is a weird view of running an imprint when everyone you want to publish is already too rich and well-known to work with you.

Sure, you will learn how to cook testicles from this article about Achewood creator Chris Onstad, but you will also learn so much more than that. WARNING: Contains testicles.

The preliminary ratings suggested this, but the official numbers are out now, and Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live brought in 12.1 million viewers. The 4.6 rating La Betty pulled in the 18 to 49 set puts that episode of ‘SNL’ ahead of ‘House’ and ‘Lost’ and ‘Survivor’ and almost on par with ‘Glee.’ Now many people in the TV industry will try to mimic this success and fail shamefully!

A Minute-By-Minute Look At The Life Of A City, Los Angeles and New York editions.

The charming short film “Pixels,” in which various classic arcade game characters destroy New York City, has been picked up by Adam Sandler’s company for a full-length version-a “’Ghostbusters’-style action comedy”! I am withholding judgment, barely. Cast Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver and we’ll talk! Cast Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider and enjoy your giant expensive CGI bomb. The original video, if you haven’t seen it, is pretty great though. Enjoy it while you can.