Doug visits Twitter
Years back we were on the road and passed signs for the Jelly Belly factory that advertised tours and Bingo demanded we go. I knew it would suck - anyone but Bingo would know it's gonna suck - and it sucked amazingly. Slow-moving guided tour of sad immigrants in white smocks and hair nets doing line work on conveyor belts. I haven't liked Jelly Belly since. Every color tastes like waiting to die.
That was in my head when Brian Hennigan - my uncut Scotsman sneaky manager-like person - told me we'd been invited to tour the Twitter home offices when I was playing in San Francisco. We'd taken one other tour in SF a few trips before to the old block-long armory that is home to my favorite porn site Kink.com. That wasn't as depressing as Jelly Belly but it still ruins the illusion when you see the looks on the actresses faces when they're walking the hallways. That's not Dominatrix, that's just hate.
Twitter sounded like the most tedious of them all but Brian said that I had to - probably because he wanted to and without me, there's no invite. Leechy, manipulating cock-bag he is.
Turns out, Twitter Headquarters fucking rocks to the point that it's almost Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory of the tech world. After what seemed like very unnecessary security to get in, you think you've walked in on the company Christmas party on what is actually just any given Wednesday mid-morning.
Just past the reception area is a monster - cafeteria isn't the right word - more of a Vegas-size buffet with seating for about 60,000 people all of whom are being entertained by a live DJ up on a stage at the front. Unless you choose to eat outside on the giant roof patio - at least the size of a football field with a manicured lawn and herb garden.
I wasn't going to eat until I saw at one station a giant silver bowl of nothing but perfectly cooked bacon where I let my manners go and grabbed a handful like a wilting bouquet of brown flowers. They say they go through 28 pounds of bacon a day.
Bacon make you thirsty? Don't worry, they have coolers full of beer around every corner, right near the arcade rooms that are around every corner.
And that's not just for visitors, that's for everyone working. Not that they were. Nobody seemed to be working at all. This room you saw two guys playing ping-pong. The next is foosball.
I guess I don't really know what I expected people to be doing. Just from being on Twitter, I assumed the only staff they need were some Star Chamber dark-glasses types that secretly decide who gets to be verified and than a handful more to ignore the "flagged as spam" reports. I don't know how many people are actually employed there, an approximate shit-ton, but they all seemed happy as fuck.
Every CEO on Undercover Boss should be forced to go to Twitter to take notes on how to give people livelihoods without it ruining their lives. Every workplace should be that fucking great.
It almost seemed set up. If I had been someone important, I would think the whole thing was some kind of Kim Jong-un ruse to make foreign dignitaries like myself believe that all the North Korean people live in luxury. But that shit's for real.
At least for now. I bet if I were to visit Myspace offices now, they might just be wearing hair-nets at a conveyor belts.
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There still isn't a name for the podcast. "Blottobiography" sounded a little too Chelsea Handler though I might use it for a book if I ever get off my ass. At one point we'd decided on "Wasted Time" at the end of recording outside the Jupiter Hotel in Portland. I wasn't quite sold on it until we started recording drops - "Hey this Doug Stanhope's Wasted Time" -when a homlessy-atristy Portlandia type who'd been hanging around as an audience of one chimed in with a slow, gravelly "Waaaasted!" that was pure gold.
We had him do a bunch of 'em. Then I Googled it to find out, of course, someone already has that podcast title. But we're still gonna find a way to drop that guy's "Waaaasted!" anytime we can.
We record as and when we find somethign interesting on tour. Chaille is editing them and getting 'em out as quick as he can. As for all of your questions about where to get it and why don't I put it here or there - I have no fucking idea how any of that shit works. I get a link, I tweet it and put it up here. Other than that, I just talk into a mic.
So far there is no theme or structure and I'd like to keep it that way. I wouldn't mind if it just came across like a strange conversation you heard on a shortwave radio or someone bootlegged drunken ramblings caught on the infamous"Shut Up Little Man!" tapes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep taping shit and it'll become something eventually.
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If you haven't heard, Bisbee AZ has been making some news of late by trying to legalize civil unions within the city limits much to the ass-chafing of a lot of church folk as well as the state. Radley Balko wrote up a great peice for the Huffington Post here. We've been having a lot of fun with it and I dont think it's anywhere near over. Stay tuned.
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Celebrity Death Pool is going strong and you still have time to put a team together for the remainder of 2013. I'm sucking dick in 8th place but I have a lot of strong picks that nobody else has so I feel confident.
Right now you can grab a Stanhope's Celebrity Death Pool t-shirt and get Deadbeat Hero DVD free with it. How's that for a fucking deal?
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Get ready for a Mountain Time Zone Tour in June - from El Paso up through Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Utah and back to AZ. We did it last year just to for the drive - some of the best places to be in the US in the summer. This time we figured we'd do it again with gigs.
