The Worst-Case Scenario

Sharp-eyed frequenters of the Jingosphere (I just can't get enough of my shiny new word!) will have noticed that just to the southeast of these pulsating paragraphs appears a new feature of our little axis mundi in the form of a commercial message for Rosie O'Donnell's charity "r" store. (Readers who stumble across this post two weeks hence will not see it, for the ad buy was for a fortnight, which makes sense because after that time there will be no need to whore holiday e-commerce and we'll all be heartily sick of the whole goddamned Christmas thing anyway, like I'm not already but that's just me. Is it?)

I've been chatting with a friend about this whole Blogad thing, and we're both pretty convinced that the folks who place these ads don't actually read the blogs they buy ads for, as evidenced by the fact that my friend (Matt, at The Tattered Coat -- sure, I can drop a name with the best of 'em) has been on hiatus for a month and a half and is still getting ad buys. His top post, dated November 1 of this year, is pretty clear about his intentions, but the bucks keep pouring in, in the form of these gigantic PayPal deposits that need a full-time accountant just to keep track of. And a wheelbarrow, of course, to cart the cash around.

So it occurred to me to try a little experiment to see if Rosie O'Donnell's people actually read a blog on which they spend such staggering amounts to advertise. I've settled on this for a plan: I'm going to say something really hideously libelous about Rosie and see if they pull the ad. That should flush my prey from the bushes, right? Nobody will continue to advertise on a publication that openly ridicules the subject of the ad, right? And what can happen? What, as they used to ask on "The Prairie Home Companion," is the Worst-Case Scenario?

Well, Rosie's people could read my assertion that I'm the guy who, by dint of a whiny and abrasively passive-aggressive personality and a dreadfully mechanical and unempathic sexual technique, drove her -- reluctantly, shamefully -- into the arms of women and deprived forever my fellow men of plausible fantasies of sweet, sweet O'Donnell Conquest; the horrified ad-buyers could rush to the phone to inform Ms. O'Donnell of my perfidious public confession, whereupon being so informed, Rosie could assemble a coterie of motorcycle enthusiasts in tasteless yet strangely uniform barbarian denim and leather ensembles, who in their ravening multitudes ride to my home, waylay me and beat me into a jellied pulp. My battered and broken body no longer effective as the sole breadwinner for a family of four, I resort, unshaven and unbathed, to composing Nigerian 419 emails at a rate of 40 cents per deceased Minister of Finance; when I'm exposed by the FBI for interstate fraud (my pedantic insistence on the correct employment of upper- and lower-case letters establishes a distinctive "hand" that gives me away), I slip away into exile, leading to years on the lam in various Third World hellholes and an endless succession of hairstyle and beard configurations that change radically every time I'm featured on "America's Most Wanted." On finally being positively identified on the strength of a distinctive tattoo (Gill Sans, right buttock, reads "This Is Not a Tattoo"), I am surrounded by Philippine police in a seedy Manila godown. I manage to escape by the skin of my teeth owing to a fiendishly clever expedient: Played by Kevin Spacey, I masquerade as a limping sniveler named Roger "Verbal" Kint, only to be identified by movie's end as the nonexistent criminal mastermind Keyser Soze. However, all is not resolved; by dint of a monumental coincidence that would draw a raised eyebrow and an exasperated "Oh, really now!" from Charles Dickens himself, I am recognized in my new guise as a Malagassy émigré busboy at Hedonism II in Jamaica by Rosie herself as she courts a secret paramour -- this one an extremely unconvincing Honduran cross-dresser named Harvey Maria. Thus thrown together, like Hepburn and Tracy, we finally reconcile, in our now older and wiser realization that:

No matter what Fate throws your way
You must not e'er despair
With a cunning lingual rhythm, boy,
You're gonna get her there.

So... Rosie? Ball's in your court, darlin'.