It is not easy to feed the egos of Hollywood celebrities. It is not even easy to merely feed their intestines.
This seems to be the conclusion one reaches from the story of Jon-Barrett Ingels, waiter to the stars. Well, now former waiter to the stars.
You see, Ingels was merely an extra in the vast set that is Beverly Hills. He would be still or sparkling, depending on his audience. And occasionally, he would turn his Twitter account into a diary of how hard it was to make his daily bread.
According to the delightful Los Angeles Times blog Brand X, Ingels worked at the Barney Greengrass establishment in Beverly Hills. I am not entirely familiar with it. However, a minuscule drift toward Citysearch reveals to me that within its exquisite walls, one can espy not only the Olsen twins, but also Pamela Anderson.
So it would not have fazed Ingels at all to greet Jane Adams, she of the HBO penis-inspired series "Hung" and formerly the terribly neurotic skinny thing who consorted with Niles on "Frasier." According to Ingels, Adams ordered a soup and a lemonade, and for this sustenance received an entirely reasonable check for $13.44.
Adams allegedly explained that she left her wallet in her car. Ingels said she could go out and get it, but he claims that she never returned that day.
Now, given that a large swath of Hollywood waiters are aspiring writers, actors, and gigolos, one should be unsurprised that Ingels subsequently blogged about this episode at HowToSucceedAsAFailure, which appears to be his magnum opus. Or perhaps magnum hopeless.
When a representative materialized the next day to pay for Adams' food, Ingels felt empowered to tweet at his Twitter account, PapaBarrett: "Tues: Jane Adams, star of HBO series "Hung," skipped out on a $13.44 check. Her agent called and payed the following day. NO TIP!!!"
Oh, Papa. Oh, Momma. Could he not hear the train coming even then? Well, no. When other celebrities were brought to his table, Barrett continued to tweet with an eagle's eye and a teenage boy's brain.
Ali Larter, the famous, um, person from "Heroes," was "not wearing a bra". BJ Novak, the louche and wayward intern from "The Office", was, perish the concept, "hungover."
As for Tori Spelling, she of the rather classic "Beverly Hills, 90210" and no obvious plastic surgery, well, Ingels described her as having "become hot." In the very same tweet, he offered indiscreetly that she eats "salami eggs and onions."
This was all within a few days in July. A month later, Ingels claims that Adams wandered into the restaurant, rather upset, and gave him his $3 tip. Ingels offered her platitudes of the "Aw, you didn't have to" sort. But Adams, he says, exclaimed, "Well, I read about it on Twitter!"
You know that the power of microblogging is such that this does not have a happy ending. Yes, Ingels was put out to green grass.
Of Adams, he muttered to Brand X, "All she could think about was herself and her pride and her ego."
I am not sure whether this was before he tweeted on August 15, "For the record, I think Jane Adams (Hung) is a great actress!!" and "Jane Adams (Hung), if you're listening, I am producing a Web series and would love you in it!!!"
So now PapaBarrett is unemployed but still tweeting. On September 10, he bemoaned that though the NFL has a Twitter policy, Barneys New York (visited by many a Greengrass patron) does not.
Jon-Barrett Ingels currently has 457 followers. He lists his occupation as "Unemployed, thanks to Twitter."
Welcome to the Year of Fear. They say 2009 will be difficult, dangerous, maybe even disastrous. But, here at Technically Incorrect, we believe it will be the year that the seemingly impossible will be the most likely to happen.
So here are 6 things that we feel sure will occur in 2009. Notice the vital importance of advertising in each of these surefire occurrences.
1. FACEBOOK WILL BE SOLD TO A NETWORK TV STATION. Oh, guffaw away if you must. But some time this year the folks at Facebook will sit down and realize that they haven't sold much advertising. Again. They will look around, from beanbag to beanbag, at the faces in the room and realize that TV stations are still somehow selling ad space. Best bet to pick up this bottle-fed (no teat showing, as per Facebook rules) baby will be NBC. I mean, if you can sell the Olympics on the basis of NOT showing it live, then you really are the magicians of ad sales.
2. HULU WILL START ITS OWN PORN SITE. I think I read somewhere that hotels make most of their money from porn channels. You know, sad, lonely men hanging around in hotel rooms with nothing better to do than hang around. Hulu will get in on this market. Naturally, the biggest difficulty will be selling advertising around this channel. However, NBC is a major player in Hulu. See Prediction No.1 for details of the network's phenomenal advertising sales skills.
(Credit:
CC Mosieur J)
3. GOOGLE WILL BUY TWITTER. Because Google is so committed to privacy, deeply, deeply committed, it will buy Twitter. No, not so that you can merely follow someone around, very privately. No, it's so that you can very privately keep up with other people's Google searches in real time. Mark my words, this is the next growth area. People watching people searching. Very privately. And just think of the advertising opportunities. Ads beamed to you in real time reflecting your real up-to-the-minute moods and feelings. And the moods and feelings of everyone you're following. Cool, huh?
4. YOUTUBE WILL LAUNCH ITS OWN CABLE CHANNEL. You know, it's not always easy to find the videos you really want to see on YouTube. If you look at what people are watching most, it often seems to be soccer matches from Poland or Turkey. So YouTube will launch a cable channel, probably in partnership with hitherto advertising-free HBO, that will feature the finest new uploads: the plaintive Britney fans, the strange college sportscasters, the scorned theatrical wives. It will be like America's Funniest Videos but will last for 24 hours each day. Advertisers will, naturally, flock to this surefire hit.
5. ADVERTISING AGENCIES WILL LAY OFF ALL CREATIVE STAFF AND PRODUCE ADS BY ALGORITHM. You thought this had already happened? Well, almost. Mathematicians have proved that there are only so many new ideas in the world and we've pretty much seen them all. In today's difficult business environment, mathematicians are far better placed to work out precisely what will sell than the hairy, unwashed potheads who went to art school but can't paint a lick. Google has proved itself to be the world's most efficient advertising agency and its greatest problem will lie in keeping its mathematicians out of the clutches of the folks who brought you Tony the Tiger and the Five Dollar Foot Long song.
6. THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER WILL LAUNCH ON THE SAME DAY AS WINDOWS 7. This is perhaps the surest of all our predictions. The two greatest steps forward for mankind will not only be launched on the same day, but will do it in a joint promotion. The Collider's computers will all be running Windows 7, while Windows 7 will be available with a new, free dance video from the Collider scientists. It will be the greatest success in scientific and advertising history.
This is Technically Incorrect, yes, Incorrect, thanking all those who realize that entertainment is far more important than news and wishing you an extraordinary New Year. This post was generated using the Deleterious Substances Algorithm, kindly loaned to me by a chap from Google I met in a local sushi restaurant.
- prev
- 1
- next
