WIL WHEATON dot NET

50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong

Your Saturday Moment of Zen.

  • WWdN in Exile

I don't like to work on the weekends if I can help it, but I'm doing Big Bang Theory all next week, and this keynote isn't going to write itself while I'm off being Evil Wil Wheaton, so here I am.

When I write something, especially something this important, I spend most of my time letting ideas incubate and grow (which to an outside observer looks an awful lot like I'm goofing off) broken up by intense periods of writing a few hundred words at a time, staying as many steps ahead of the "this sucks" demon as I can. I also have to take breaks fairly regularly to keep my mind from going all HAL-9000 on me, and a silly post like this one is perfect for accomplishing that particular goal at this very moment.

So … check out this nifty image:

This came from one of those spam blogs that just keyword scrapes the tubes for everything it can find on a topic and then automatically generates posts that sound like a possessed child when read aloud. 

I'm guessing that Parsons' phot car was some kind of magic device that traveled around the Midwest in the early 20th century, selling snake oil and little photo cards. This particular picture was snapped right before the subject bought eighteen ounces of liquid heroin tonic ("GUARANTEED TO CALM EVEN THE MOST NERVOUS OF WOMEN OR YOUR MONEY BACK!")  for the princely sum of five cents. It looks like it was taken in Danville, Illinois, which is about 200 miles away from Wheaton, Illinois, and I suspect that the 'bot what powers this particular blog put "Wheaton" (as in me) and "Parsons" (as in Jim Parsons) together when the Big Bang news hit the wires, and somehow it landed on this picture. Or maybe it wasn't anything like this, and the whole thing is a coded message I left in the future for my current self to find, which makes me want to ask Future Me why I couldn't have just sent myself a nice letter that was easy to understand … unless …. OMG FUTURE ME IS IN ROBOT PRISON IN DANVILLE AND ONLY BE FREED IF ME AND JIM PARSONS DRESS UP LIKE DANDY BOYS FROM THE 1900s AND MOUNT A RESCUE!

Okay, Future Me. I hear you, and I'm coming to save you … just as soon as I race over to Jim's house, pick him up, convince him to come with me, and then build a time machine, you idiot. Way to send the message to the wrong version of us in the past, stupid. JEEZE!

Um. Right. So…

The page where I found this image had a bunch of stuff related to my name, so it tripped my google alert yesterday. When I looked at the site, I was quite amused to see this picture, which was titled “Evil Wil Wheaton Bible”. Because, really, who doesn't want an evil bible named after them and represented by a picture that isn't apparently evil or biblical? I was equally amused to see several anti-spam software advertisements surrounding the scraped content.

Okay, I think I've amused myself just enough to recover the mana I needed to cast Keep Writing Keynote, so I'm going to get back to it before They're All Going To Laugh At You has its next turn.

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20 February, 2010 Wil

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this post brought to you by wil’s lizard brain → ← Evil Wil Wheaton returns to The Big Bang Theory

59 thoughts on “Your Saturday Moment of Zen.”

  1. Alex Pope says:
    22 February, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    Yup that is an odd abbreviation alright. The only one that I thought made any sense was the abbreviation for Carter-Wallace Inc. which started in the mid-late 1800s (they use the abr. as a stock symbol but it could just be the abr. for “Carter” who founded the company).
    Given that it’s a pharmaceutical company it would work well with Wil’s assumption that it was a “snake oil/tonic” type deal.
    But I couldn’t find any other connections.
    Here’s the Carter Wallace entry I found: http://www.answers.com/topic/carter-wallace-inc
    Cheers.

  2. Anonymous says:
    22 February, 2010 at 3:16 pm

    The Parsons Photo Car may have been a railroad car used as a traveling photography studio. Like this one:
    http://photoswest.org/cgi-bin/imager?11003330+Z-3330
    Still a fine image that strikes a bit too close to home… Definitely too much medicinal alcohol.

  3. thomascouey.com says:
    22 February, 2010 at 9:53 pm

    Is that an old stereogram image? Neat.

  4. Glen Raphael says:
    23 February, 2010 at 2:00 pm

    If normal Wil Wheaton gets stuck writing a PAX speech, slip into Evil Wil Wheaton mode and see what he has to say to the same crowd! I’m planning to attend PAX East and I’d love to hear from E.W.W.. Maybe you could start out Evil, have somebody whack you with a clue-by-four, reboot, and disavow the previous sentiments. Or just run with it and see what happens. Sure, you may have *said* “don’t be evil” at a previous PAX, but rules are for other people. The little people. You have a vast audience hanging on your every word; are you really going to use that power to do/say something *nice*? Abuse that authority!

    Like Evil Shatner’s Saturday Night Live “get a life!” sketch, only for reals.

    Oh, and speaking of evil/self-regarding: if you need another temporary diversion just go to the Masters of Song Fu competition and check out a few takes on a “song that doesn’t rhyme”. Especially mine, titled oh-so-creatively “Song That Doesn’t Rhyme”.

    http://www.asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/22/song-fu-6-round-2-voting/

  5. Cdar2 says:
    23 February, 2010 at 4:28 pm

    Steven Moffat, who was the writer of the episode Blink, has taken over as Head Writer and executive producer of the ‘New Who’ franchise. So, let’s hope there are many more episodes like Blink in the coming season. It was definitely one of my faves. He also wrote the screenplay for the British show Jekyll, for those that haven’t seen it. Go Now!!!
    There are only 6 episodes in total, and it’s definitely one of my favourite shows that I’ve ever seen!

  6. Wil says:
    23 February, 2010 at 6:05 pm

    He also wrote The Girl In The Fireplace, which is one of my favorite New Whos.

  7. Sublett.wordpress.com says:
    23 February, 2010 at 7:00 pm

    Apparently someone collecting old photographs has another by “Parsons’ Photo Car” of someone named Arthur Bruce of Vermilion, IL:
    http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~rampage/INDEXTWO1.txt
    I’m just sayin’….

  8. Sherry Crocker says:
    3 March, 2010 at 11:04 am

    Normally I’m signed in as Isisgate1. However, there was a malfunction in the automated corallary update subroutines meaning I’ve forgotten my sign in infor for typepad. [ginormous sigh]
    Anyway… I’ve just caught up on I don’t know how many posts. Yeah for Big Bang appearnce zwei!
    Yeah for PAX!
    but my real reason for posting: I thought that Commmandment #5 states:
    When your favorite song comes on over the loudspeaker, especially in a grocery store on senior discount day, you MUST sing and dance in the aisles.
    Or is that one of the articles of confederation for the day you become Supreme High Commander of Everything? gosh I hate being this befuddled.

  9. Slippy Lane says:
    5 March, 2010 at 6:11 am

    Much as I hate to do this…
    Everyone knows that coded messages from the future can only consist of the number “3”
    🙂

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