Atomic Nerds

Right off, y’all are flat amazing. I want to deeply thank every one of you who donated. By hitting the $2000 mark, that’s four times my original goal, which based on last year’s efforts I thought was fairly ambitious. I am utterly blown away by this.

But there’s still 55 hours left in this to go. This party don’t stop until the cops come.

So if y’all are going to insist on blowing my mind every step of the way, then all right, motherbitches, it’s nightmare-hard mode time. If at 23:59 Central time on September 30, my fundraising total is higher than Jay’s, I will take my freshly waxed self over at Blogorado and Jay is gonna get a lap dance whether he likes it or not, and video goes up. Think of it as a victory teabagging after a come from behind win. I haven’t discussed this with him, so it could get interesting.

Donate here. You’ve got…fifty five hours and thirty minutes to kick the total up by another $2,890 as of current standings. Ambitious? Oh hell yeah. Let’s do this.

Ambulance Driver has the standings.
$295 $155$55 $45 $30 Nothing between here and finding out what it sounds like to wax a Stingray.

Thank you all, very much. …I think. More when I have time to breathe.

You know what to do.

Ok, Jay has over 3 grand in his kitty, so barring a miracle I’ll cede first place to him. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want to raise as much as I possibly can, because after watching my dad go through treatment, I’m convinced it’s a shitty enough experience that there are very few people I’d wish such a fate on.

So here’s the new deal. You want to hear the screams of agony and/or profanity? Get the bar over $2000 and I’ll call that close enough to first and it’s on. That’ll be a full order of magnitude more than we raised last year, with a little extra. Hitting the 10x mark as an improvement? Yeah, I’ll take it.

Donate now.

As best I can figure the standings right now, JayG has us pretty well monkeystomped for who has raised the most by roughly $1500, give or take a bit. Daunting, but surmountable with effort. Further, it’s still a damned tight horse race between myself and Evyl Robot- some days we’re swinging back and forth with just $5 separating us. I blame this on their dirty cheating leveraging of resources to offer their own prize packs for donors.

So with the task in mind of unseating Jay like a toddler not strapped in on a tilt-a-whirl, I’ve come up with my own notion for stuff to raffle off, naturally of much more questionable worth.

Let me preface this with two pieces of information. First, I have never heard the current earworm du jour “Call Me Maybe”. I’ve heard about 30 seconds of it being read by confused NPR staff before I said something along the lines of “this is stupidest pile of recycled felch-wash I’ve heard this month” and leaving the room. Second, the lyrical transcription I’ll describe momentarily was undertaken after a healthy dose of cough syrup.

So here’s the raffle. Anybody who donates $10 or more to the Prostate Cancer Foundation can forward their receipt to nerdsatomic at gmail dot com with the subject line “Raffle.” At the end of the month, I will record two mp3s, one of me singing “Call Me Maybe,” and the other of me singing Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” but with updated lyrics for the gun enthusiast community. “Shoot this way,” if you will. Like I said, there was cough syrup involved. Don’t judge me.

Two lucky, for a given value of the term, people will win, one mp3 each. And there’s no “please don’t spread it around” clause here either. Share it freely, or if the winner says so I’ll post it in the sidebar for the entire year for the world to cringe at.

A measly ten bucks gets you a chance on this. You’ve heard me on Vicious Circle in the past probably, so you know this’ll be comedy gold. If you’ve donated $10 or more already, yes I’ll happily accept those receipts as well, but each receipt you forward is another crack at the prize, so I’d donate some more just for good measure.

And lest we lose sight of what this is all really about, please, if you’re a male over 40, make an appointment with your doc and get yourself checked. Cancer sucks worse than my singing, I don’t want any of you winding up with the worst possible prize in this raffle.

…Which I will hopefully have time later to expand upon.

Reading the discussion at Popehat about comment moderation approaches, and the way upvoting and downvoting comments seems to be more about popularity of opinion or agree/disagree than about the quality of civility of the comment, I find myself musing on the distinction between “unpopular opinion” and “asshole comment”. Especially because of the frequency with which I see the acronym “PC” for “politically correct”.

Although I’ve encountered cases which I genuinely regarded as “political correctness gone wild”- mostly cases in which someone tried to completely do away with an unpleasant reality by altering language until it was sufficiently sugarcoated- in the last five years or so I’ve vastly more often run into cases in which someone was claiming that their own abominable behavior or belligerent/dismissive/openly hateful assertion was getting negative social reaction because it was “un-PC”.

….Yes, I will expand upon this, which I should have time to do soon. Perhaps. I hope.

The Bold Personal Challenge section of Kilted to Kick Cancer has apparently commenced. Ambulance Driver and JayG are at it again as they’re currently the top two fundraisers, just as last year. Jay has promised to shave his ‘stache if he wins, as he puts it “Who else puts their mustache on the line???”

Well, Kelly is stepping up. He’s promised to shave half of his ‘stache for Blogorado if he wins so we can all have a nice chance to take lots of pictures and so forth. Good on him stepping up.

But let’s be realistic. Millions of men shave every day. Applying a razor to the face is not a daunting challenge, even if you look a little silly afterwards.

So as it turns out, our gracious hostess Farmgirl’s best friend is a cosmetologist. And a good sport. So here’s where I see their bets, and raise. If I win and raise the most funds, I will wax my junk at blogorado, and record the audio stream of the process and post that up for you all to enjoy for the year. If you’re a regular around here, you’ve probably seen me get creative with the invective before, so take your favorite example from that and imagine what it would sound like with some motivation and inspiration.

Y’all know I don’t bluff. Donate now.

So the HMFIC on this shindig has posted updated standings on the fund raising drive. There’s a three-way tie for third right now, and by some freak accident (read: Our Readers Are Fucking Awesome!) for second place in the eligible-for-prizes field, and from that same freak accident (of y’all being awesome, I mentioned that right?) I’m one of them.

This is a) very good news. It means I’ve already met the fund raising goal I set at the start of the month, b) good news for KTKC overall, and c) actually a little embarrassing. Why, you ask, would that be embarrassing? Because with $500 raised so far, my effort hasn’t even managed to equal the cash value of any of the prize packages I’m apparently now in contention for before you factor in the value of whatever firearm is in the mix. If you want to look at easy numbers, take a look at pack C- $350 in gift certificates, a $100 knife, a $140 weapon light… that’s $90 more schwag than I’ve raised so far, and that completely ignores the whole new pistol in the mix.

I don’t want to be a freeloader on this, and I very much want to swing as big a hammer as scientifically possible at male specific cancer, so the only answer is to raise more funds. I’ve updated my goal to be more in line with what the very generous sponsors have put up for all this. Let’s not stiff them here, folks.

I may not have my own prize packs to offer to contributors like some of the other folks are doing, but I am still for sale on this. You look up “shameless” in the dictionary and there’s a picture of me mooning Eric Holder’s mother. Hell, if I thought it’d bring in some money to The Prostate Cancer Foundation (hint hint donate at this link) I’d sign up to hang out with Johnny Knoxville for “Jackass 12″ or whatever they’re up to these days. There was some talk of “Cave Johnson pr0n,” but aside from being vaguely frightened, I have no idea what that would entail. I’m already running a subliminal campaign, and I’m telling you that every ghost-kid and cleaver-doc we put the hate on was totally some guy’s cancerous growth.

Every single one of you who has donated, you have my sincere thanks. The rest of you, c’mon! Get on the stick here! Five or ten bucks isn’t gonna break the bank! Donate now! Got something you want to see me rip on, or see LabRat explain? Break out the visa and let’s make it happen! Look, I’m going to offer the roller girls the chance to make me do the off-skates workouts I’ve been running them through if they donate, you guys can’t do much worse to me than the gleeful hop-to they’re going to muster, so let’s get donating!

Honestly I’m kinda surprised this one took this long to crop up. From commenter George:

What’s the going rate for the Humungous picture from Blogarado 2?

I have to admit I’m a bit conflicted. As this was done for a private gathering of trusted friends, I’ve a strong impulse to keep the scope of exposure limited to that group. On the other hand, I genuinely believe in what we’re working towards with this fundraiser, and if people are crazy enough to want to see me in a banana hammock that showing my ass will help raise some awareness and funds for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, I’m fairly torn. If nothing else, the notion of that getup being used for good feels kind of like saving a drowning child with an inflatable sex toy. Sure, the kid is better off, but… um…. well maybe if it wasn’t so slippery and she’d been able to get a grip on it sooner…

Yeah.

So here’s the deal. Lord Humungus is on the table, but it’s going to be pretty steep. Additionally, this isn’t going to be a “Hit X and THE WHOLE WORLD SHALL JUST WALK AWAY” kind of set up. Forward a copy of your receipt for $75 or more to nerdsatomic at gmail dot com, and I will send you a tasteless selection of Lord Humungus photographs from Blogorado. For donations of $100 or more, I will additionally include video demonstrating that it is very difficult to aim a large .44 magnum with one hand with a colander bungee-corded to your face. I’d request that if anybody is crazy enough to pony up at these levels, to please not spread them hither and yon (besides, that kills the incentive for anyone else to donate at these “you’re kidding me” levels), but obviously that’s not something I’ll have control of. Basically if you’re philanthropic enough to kick in that kind of scratch, I think “don’t be a dick” is one that’d be pretty easy.

So. Any takers?

Manipulator of muscles ChristinaLMT has jumped first on the request bandwagon.

How about a pic of you in a kilt with TANK THE ADORABLE? And you have to SMILE in the picture.

And putting her money where her mouth is up front already kicked in a nice pile of cabbage. Hmm, let’s see. A generous donation for something I was already planning on running? I think we can make this one happen for what’s already on the table.

Not to worry, Ms. LMT will be getting the un-altered version privately. Thank you for the contribution, Christina.

Now as for the rest of you, I like what I’m seeing. We’ve gone from just $25 on Monday to within spitting distance of 50% of the goal. Thank you all, now let’s keep it up. You can use this link to donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And I’m still taking requests. There’s not a lot off the table here either, so use your imaginations.

Don’t worry, we’re not transitioning into upkilt.com or anything. No, I just wanted to point a few things out.

1. My portable magic elf box has a sound file of LabRat in one of the later Vicious Circle recordings proclaiming “Oh for fuck’s sake” which plays whenever it receives an email. This is because…

2. I hate getting email.

3. The Prostate Cancer Foundation helpfully sends me an email any time someone makes a donation, even just a onefive dollar donation. (Corrected Via Perl’s…uh…thoughtful experiment. )

So if I ever wrote something that pissed you right off, here’s your chance to annoy me right back.