AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to actor-director Paul Bartel, whose Eating Raoul remains the most true-to-life cinematic portrayal of a baby-boomer generation grown hostile to the essential life-forces and obsessed with individual lifestyle “perfection.”

THANKS TO THE WEB, annoying marketing cliches and concepts can emerge, rise, and burn out at up to ten times their previous rate.

Today’s case in point: All those “My __” sites.

How it works:

(1) Take any portal site, news site, sports-stat site, MP3-download site, online-retail site, or burlap-sack-fetish site.

(2) Fix it up to add even a tiny bit of user customization. Maybe let a user pick the background colors, or set it up to show soybean-futures prices but not flaxseed-futures prices.

(3) Congratulations! No longer have you a mere “Notarysojac.com”. You can now proudly offer “My Notarysojac.com”!

Always ones to believe in taking dumb ideas and running them further into the ground, we hereby pre-announce plans to (one of these quarters, eventually, as soon as we finish reading CGI-BIN Scripting for Dummies) revamp this site so you can create “My MISCmedia.”

• Choose your satirical target. Don’t get riled up by today’s pre-chosen topic? Then pick another, from a handy list that might include:
  • Half-million-dollar condos that need structural repairs after just one winter.
  • Why Dallas doesn’t deserve to host championship ice hockey.
  • This weather we’re having lately.
  • Those Kids Today.
  • Talk show hosts who have their own magazines with themselves on the cover.
  • That “Whazzup?” beer commercial.
• Choose your sarcastic comments and adjectives. Instead of the same-old same-old, pepper up your reading with your selection of:
  • “What’s up with that?”
  • “Can you believe the nerve of these guys?”
  • “Doesn’t anybody remember how much this sucked the last time it was revived?”
  • “Just call me another old white guy who doesn’t get it.”
  • “The feel-good hit of the year.”
  • “Bravo! Encore! More, more, more! Don’t stop yet!”
• Choose your semi-obscure topical references. Compare your chosen topic to your chosen point of universal comparison:
  • The deciding Game Six of the 1979 NBA finals.
  • The lost original ending to The Magnificent Ambersons.
  • Police Academy III: Back In Training.
  • The life and works of Emily Dickinson.
  • The final episode of Roseanne.
  • Dryer lint.
• Choose your trite and predictable political line. For every phenomenon, there’s a quick-N-easy way to classify it into a prepackaged ideological schematic, such as:
  • “That’s so pretentiously anti-PC, it’s PC.”
  • “If we can implode the Kingdome, why can’t we stop this?”
  • “As a phenomenon, it makes less of a statement than it does a rhetorical question.”
  • “Another example of the dominant culture’s systematic peripheralization of The Other in the realm of signifying discourse.”
  • “In a planned economy we’d have just the same thing, only it would be to the proletariat’s benefit.”
  • “Mumia wouldn’t approve.”
• Choose your simple explanation. For every phenomenon, there’s a quck-N-easy way to classify it as part of an all-purpose universal enemy, such as:
  • The Patriarchy.
  • The IMF/World Bank.
  • Bill Gates.
  • The UN’s Black Helicopters.
  • People who eat meat and watch television.
  • The fashion industry.
• Choose your more perfect world, in which such aboninable phenomena would never occur:
  • The Late Sixties.
  • The pre-recorded-history worldwide matriarchy.
  • The True Socialism that’s never been practiced anywhere yet.
  • Regency England.
  • The good old days of the Depression.
  • The future Libertarian paradise, after governments have been dissolved and business runs everything.
• Choose your would-be snappy closer.
  • “Make it so.”
  • “If not here, where? If not now, when?”
  • “Whatsoever ye do, do so quickly.”
  • “I say it’s spinach.”
  • “Those who forget [insert today’s topic here] are doomed to repeat it.”
  • “Joe Bob says check it out.”

MONDAY:The next Great Anti-Microsoft Hope: Is it open-source software Or is it Napster? Neither?

ELSEWHERE:

• They’re ready to save post-cocktail culture from the crude, the rude, and the cell-phoned: They’re the Etiquette Grrls!…