I am not above suffering public humiliation for charity. And while I may not dance on bars (see pics of last year’s Celeb Bartending Bash), I will sing. Badly. Very badly. Like ear-bleedingly-bad.

And so I promised on my fundraising page for this year’s AIDS Walk that I would cover Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ if I raised a thousand bucks. Fortunately (or unfortunately if you value your hearing), I’m up to 3200 bucks. So here it is. Without further ado or warning… (But don’t say I DIDN’T warn you…)

WANT TO THANK ME?
SPONSOR ME IN THE AIDS WALK BEFORE SATURDAY!
SPONSOR ME IN THE AIDS WALK BEFORE SATURDAY!
SPONSOR ME IN THE AIDS WALK BEFORE SATURDAY!
SPONSOR ME IN THE AIDS WALK BEFORE SATURDAY!
SPONSOR ME IN THE AIDS WALK BEFORE SATURDAY!
(Yes, for a $1000 donation I will destroy all existing copies of this recording.)

PS: Clearly, the bits were I squeek like a boy in the midst of puberty are on purpose. The truly tragic music video is still coming…

PPS: HUGE thank you to Damien of On Point Productions for making me sound less terrible than I am… Not THAT much less terrible. But less terrible all the same.

OK, people, let’s consider this a virtually delivered pep-talk.  I’m all about tradition.  Tradition is great; some of the very best events in the Southern Tier are based on tradition: The Spiedie Fest; JulyFest; the Chris Thater Memorial (which, I should add, I will be huffing and puffing my way through this coming Sunday… and if you take a picture I swear to God I’ll rip the negatives or flash chip or whatever it is right out of you damn camera and then stomp on it until it’s dead dead dead.  And then I’ll give you the stink-eye.)  Anyway, tradition is good.  And we have a lot of it.  And we take pride in it.

BUT

The world doesn’t run on tradition alone.  Part of my mission at BingPop has been too highlight the hot; the new; the trendy.  And to point out that some pretty traditional charities/organizations/venues in town are testing the waters with some brand new attention-grabbing adventures.  So without further ado… I present to you… (And I didn’t even need a rhyming dictionary for that brilliant little wordplay…)

REALLY COOL CRAP THAT PEOPLE ARE DOING TO GET YOU TO NOTICE THEM, BINGHAMTON!

COW CHIP BINGO
CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NORWICH
OK, to be fair, this tradition isn’t that new.  It’s 12 years old.  But it’s cool as crap.  Pardon the pun.  Get it?  Cool as crap?  Cause it’s cow chips?  (God, I’m good.)

You can probably figure out what this is all about.  The cows are fed.  Very well fed.  And then released onto a giant board filled with numbers and, well, grass.  Which is the perfect place for cows to, well, “go”.  To the bathroom.  And once the cow has, well, “gone”, the resulting “mass” is examined to determine exactly which numbered box it landed on.  Contestants purchase the numbered boxes in advance for a chance to win cash money prizes.

Cash for poop.  Now THIS is sport.

Well, come on, it’s more interesting than soccer.  Or paint drying.  (Equivalent.)

Now I’m perfectly willing to concede I might only find this event “fascinatin’” ‘cause I’m a “city boy”.  Like cow tipping and the idea that cows give milk—cows give milk, can ya believe it?!—it’s one of those things that you don’t learn about when you buy all your chicken from street-corner pushcarts or in styrofoam fast food containers.  PS, now that I’ve realized meat comes from nature and isn’t grown in a lab, it DOES seem odd that it can come in kid-friendly shapes.  Way to go, Perdue!

Now here’s what I think could make this event a BIT more interesting: urban cow chip Bingo.  COURT STREET is roped off from River Read Books to L’aveggio Roastera, spectators can watch from the sidewalk—maybe the sidewalk seating at Sake Tumi—and egg the cows on like contestants on the Price is Right…  Or better yet: Bird Crap Bingo!  In Bingo!  Just release a fleet of pigeons downtown and the numbered squares could just be peoples heads.  The possibilities are limitless.

OK, let’s move on…

WARP SPEED WEDNESDAYS
THE ROBERSON CENTER

If you’re a Star Wars fan, go away.  Any halfway intelligent human being clearly realizes that Star Trek is superior to Star Wars.  Like that time that Geordi from Star Trek: The Next Generation got trapped on a ship full of stupid people that only kidnapped him because they were too damn stupid to fix their own stupid ship—that’s what I feel like when I’m trapped in a room full of people who like Star Wars better than Star Trek.  And if you’re offended: Hab SoSlI’ Quch!

(That’s Klingon for something terribly insulting.  I’d translate it here but I’ve got too much class.)

Anyway, the reason this is so important to establish is because the Roberson Museum folks have oh-so-wisely chosen Star Trek (over Star Wars) to show before planetarium shows during Warp Speed Wednesdays.  I’m going to assume that’s it not JUST because Hyperspace Wednesdays sounds dumb.

Here’s out it worked: every Wednseday during the month of August, Roberson projected a Star Trek episode on the ceiling of the planetarium.  Besides making you very, very sleepy (from the reclining seats) and slightly injuring your neck (I doubt this is permanent), it was a great hook to get total dweebs like me into the museum.  I gave it a go this past Wednseday, walking into the museum about 5 minutes after the start of the episode—which is a bit tragic, because I was totally looking forward to the warble of the original Star Trek Theme (which, if you’re curious, is best sung by uttering the words “wah, waaaaah, wah wah wah wah wah” over and over again).

The episode shown was “All Our Yesterdays”.  It goes a little bit like every other episode of Star Trek: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam to a clearly dangerous planet with wild, reckless abandon.  The three get separated, usually in a configuration that allows Spock and McCoy to do lots of knee-slappingly funny bickering.  Kirk almost has sex but doesn’t.  Some kind of time travel accident occurs that involves the screen flickering and somebody vanishing—(that was apparently the only special effect available to all of science fiction in the 60s).  And then an alien with a weird head is defeated.  Occasionally the alien with the weird head is also the one Kirk tries to have sex with.

The showing was populated mainly by moms or dads with their kids; I was actually pretty impressed to see how many 8-year-olds sat fascinated, wordless, watching 50-year-old television. That is, until a late-arrival family sat down in the row right in front of me.  The young boy with them, exuberant, immediately exclaimed, “It’s Star Trek!”

Apparently he knew that I missed the opening credits. 

It was pretty cute.  The first time.  The 5th time, it stopped being so cute.  Luckily, his parents silenced him after a bit.  So I didn’t have to move forward my hastily constructed emergency plan to silence him by shouting , “Three of the original cast members are dead, you hear me?! DEAD!”  See how exuberant you are after that, little punk.

Not long after Star Trek ended, the planetarium show began.  I hadn’t been to a planetarium show since I was, like, 5, so I didn’t really know what to expect.  Basically, what I got was a rundown of that night’s sky, narrated by the museum’s expert.  Although I wasn’t immediately inspired to become on astronomer, I did pick up on a few facts I hadn’t known before: 1) If you look the haze of the Milky Way with binoculars, you can actually make out more distant stars (cool).  2) The little dipper is fainter than the big dipper because it’s further away (not as cool, but something you can tell people at parties so they think you’re smart than they are).  3) Children will immediately fall silent and become fascinated by laser pointers and will not speak again until the laser disappears (useful, see above).

PS: Children will also become immediately fascinated by the ENORMOUS Nintendo Wii screen that’s part of the current Roberson Champions exhibit.  And the rest of us will find it to be a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon if we’re too cheap to buy our own Wii.  Which I am.  See you at the Roberson…

BTW, I e-mailed the Roberson’s new marketing director Jason Fuime at 4:45 PM on a Thursday afternoon because I wanted to find out more about Warp Speed Wednesdays.  Also because I’m a bit sadistic and like making good-spirited, hard-working folk work late.  (Thanks for doing this on short notice, Jason.)

* So why Star Trek? Why not, say, Star Wars? Battlestar Gallactica?
Star Trek is a household name.  No matter what age you are, you’ve likely seen some form or version of Star Trek in your life.  Our planetarium guys also have a great interest in Star Trek and helped develop the name Warp Speed Wednesdays.  They were certainly thrilled to showcase some of their favorite episodes during the promotion. 
 
* How’s the attendance been? And who’s coming? Big dorks like me or everybody?
Attendance has varied during the month we’ve offered the free shows, some days busier than others.  We’ve had some positive feedback for providing a show to weekday visitors, since Roberson does not have scheduled planetarium shows Wednesdays or Thursdays.  As far as who’s coming — all kinds of people including the Trekkies.  We saw a bunch of families with younger kids stop in for the show as part of their visit to the museum.

* Any plans to do this in the future… (We hope so.)
It’s too early to say if we’ll do a similar promotion in the future.  But we are hoping to make some upgrades to the planetarium in the near future, which may result in new shows and more fun offerings like this one.

THE DONNER SUMMER DANCE-OFF
FLASHBACKS

Radio DJs, generally speaking, are meet and greet whores.  I myself am no exception.  It’s not that we actually care about meeting the famous person in question (most of the time).  It’s just that we really like posting the photo on our Facebook and have admiring acquaintances say things like, “OH MY GOD, YOU MET ENGLEBERT HUMPERDINK?!”

I, for the record, have not met Englebert Humperdink.  But I have met KC form KC and the Sunshine Band.  Which is awesome.

And if a meet and greet whore tells you he doesn’t count the number of minutes he gets to spend with said celebrity, he’s a dirty rotten liar.

I got to spend 45 seconds with Rob Thomas.  And spend a good 45 minutes figuring out the optimal photo crop to make it look like there WEREN’T 15 people in this photo.

The reason I’m telling you this is because the Donna Summer meet and greet at next week’s Anderson Center is a hot ticket to get.  APPARANTLY her management is demanding that it NOT be a “cattle call meet and greet”.  Which is really nice for the people who can actually win and/or sleep their way in.  It means you might get to spend a full 46 seconds with her.  And maybe the only person cooler to meet and greet than KC from KC and the Sunshine Band is Donna Summer.  Or maybe Elvis.  But that’s just because he’s dead.

Now the reason I’m telling you this is because you have ONE LAST CHANCE to win your way in to the meet and greet.  Tonight.  At Flashbacks.  The Donna Summer Dance-Off.

The other thing you should know about radio DJs is we take a certain delight in making people do fabulously embarrassing things for prizes.  And if there’s anything more embarrassing than wearing bellbottoms and go go boots to a club in 2010, please let me know so I can make it a radio contest.

The action starts at 9.  And if you know what’s good for your sense of superiority, you’ll be there.  In normal clothes.  (If you want to meet Donna Summer though… AND sit in the front row, you’d better be in costume—preferably drunk out of your mind.  I’m still trying to decide if I’m feeling that desperate: stay tuned.)

The DJ running the contest is Q107’s own Heather Black.  She’s a nicer person than I am, so I don’t think she revels in other people’s embarrassment, but I asked her for a quick e-mail interview just to make sure…

* So the poster says to impress with your "groovy moves". What exactly must one do to impress? Are there PARTICULAR Groovy Moves that will be required?
None in particular. One person actually visited a local store and asked for a copy of "Saturday Night Fever" on DVD to do his research! Anything disco, flamboyant, fun, and groovy!

* Costuming: How all out to you expect people to go. Any tips on where to shop around town?
It’s up to the participant. Obviously, we will be basing part of the contest on how retro and fun the costume is, so I recommend bringing out your inner polyester party!

Lots of people have asked if I have ideas on where to shop. I say find a relative who just can’t get rid of anything (even from the 70s!) and raid their closet, or hit up your nearest thrift store. You can always find fun stuff browsing secondhand racks, and you can’t beat the price!

* Will you, in fact, be in costume for said event?
Let’s just say I plan to "dress to impress!"

Dog people hate me.

And it’s not because I hate dogs.  It’s just because I think of them as cuddly chickens.  That don’t taste as good.  But if they did, I might eat them.

OK, OK, it’s not true.  I had a dog growing up.  It had a name and everything.  And I never once ate it.

I just don’t sentimentalize animals in the same way that I sentimentalize, oh I don’t know, ACTUAL PEOPLE.  Except cats.  I’m pretty sure I’d choose a cat over some of my family members.  Plus they pee INSIDE the house.  Which I totally respect.  Because being able to relieve yourself without a chaperone is an important life skill.

I have dogs on the brain, I should tell you, because I’m MCing the Southern Tier AIDS Program’s “Doggone Fun on the Run” this Saturday at Otsiningo Park.  (Here’s hoping I’m not relieved of my hosting duties as a result of this blog entry.)

Despite my aversion to overly sentimentalizing animals, this event is, well, undeniably adorable.

In addition to a 2-mile dog walk and K-9 demonstration, the dogs will play “musical mats”—which is basically musical chairs without the chairs.  Because apparently dogs can’t sit on chairs.  (Which cats can, BTW.  Just another reason to love them more.  Sorry, dog people.)

And the most interesting (bizarre? creative? fun?) event of the day will be this: dogs painting abstract art.

Yes, I’ll type that again, slower this time so you can be sure you read it correctly:
DOGS. PAINTING. ABSTRACT. ART.

I. Love. This. Sh*t.  Because it’s the sort of stunt you’d dream up if you were either (A) drunk after a game of flip cup while playing with the fraternity dog at 3 AM or (B) a pretentious Manhattanite artist trying to figure out what to put on a canvas while high on crystal meth at 3 AM.

Mary Kaminsky is neither of the two, but don’t let anyone tell you that she isn’t as creative.

Mary, the Development Director of STAP, has recruited Jen O’Brian, director of the Magic Paintbrush Project, to help with the painting of the canvases by the canines.  If you’re not familiar with MPBP, they do great work with special needs families and art projects.

And this whole thing is doubly convenient for Jen because she sees the doggie painting experiment as a precursor to new and exciting projects at her own organization.

I ripped Jen away from experimental art for just a few minutes so she could answer a few questions about this Saturday’s event…

OK, so how did this whole doggy painting idea thing come about?
Mary Kaminsky sent me a note asking if it were possible to paint with dogs.  We have included dogs in our workshops with special needs families as often there are companion animals.  It is not uncommon for a special needs individual to have a helper or companion animal.  So we have been developing ways to include the animals in our workshops.  We started paint with companion/assist dogs about two years ago.  So when Mary asked if it were possible.. I said "Sure!"

Be honest: do we really think you’ll be able to tell the difference between these doggy paintings and abstract art painted by actual human beings?
I’m not one to compare abstract art to the pieces that are created in our workshop.  They are created out of an entirely different process.  I’m not sure it’s fair to compare.  Our workshop focuses on family engagement and the interactions and processes that lend a creative edge to helping special needs individuals achieve their goals with their families. Abstract Artists go through an entirely different creative process.  But in this case, the paint captures the moment and the movement of the companions.  And that is what is special about The Doggone Fun and the Doggie DaVinci Project.

I’m assuming this paint is… uh… non-toxic?
Of course! Actually we have our own line of paint,  Life Is Washable! Paint.  We have a proprietary line of paint which is blended in Pennsylvania.  It’s non toxic, washable and glittery too!  so there is NO question - it is entirely safe!

I know this event is a “practice session” for other projects you’re working on.  What’s the master plan?
We are developing new workshop activities that will support individuals with developmental disabilities.  We wanted to create a workshop activity that included companion animals.   As I said before we have painted with companion dogs before, but we needed to work on how different breeds and animals were able to navigate their sensory issues with the paint and workshop.   SO when Mary asked.. it was a great time to test our some of our new activities.
 
As far as the master plan for The Magic Paintbrush Project.  We have served over 10,000 individuals since starting three years ago in over 900 workshops.  We have just expanded with our first license, so we now serve  the Hudson Valley area along with a large portion of Central New York.  Our plan is to expand our service to other areas in the state and region.  We are the only known program of this type in the US.  We are very excited about our growth and potential.

Will each doggy paint its own masterpiece, or is this a group project?
Both!  We will be creating a banner for STAP and also providing an opportunity for each puppy to paint.  As in our regular workshops, it will be tailored to the needs of each family.  I am sure the results will be interesting.  For those not wanting to paint - we will have an activity which you can still participate in.

OK, so how much do you think we could sell these things for in a gallery if we just hung them up on First Friday and didn’t tell anybody they were made by dogs?
I’ll leave that question to the galleries…  they do a great job in showcasing our wonderful artist community.  We are really lucky to have such a vibrant event each month as First Friday!  I think the buyers of art would want to know who it was created by and how.. that’s part of the story! For many, memories of our puppies are priceless, so a painting made by your four legged family, maybe worth more to you.  The paint captures the laughter, the wags, the moment… I’m not sure you can put a price tag on that. And the opportunity to refine and work on our companion animal inclusion is a golden opportunity for The Magic Paintbrush Project.

Do people need to, uh, prepare their dogs for this Saturday in any way?
I have a feeling that the humans will need more encouragement that the dogs.  Come prepared with a happy and encouraging word.  We’ll have a bit of magic ready for the dogs.. and it will be fun.  Raising a dog is based on trust.  Trust me this will be worth it.