Mea Culpa (That's Latin for "My Bad")

by Crazy Ivan

So I wrote a blog yesterday that I thought was a clear parody and a pretty darned funny one at that.  Judging by the reaction that I got from it, a lot of people agree with me.  A lot of people also don't and that's why I'm writing this retraction of sorts today.

The article was titled "Getting Snubbed".  We saw the (nearly) final cut of the commercial the other day and my lovely visage didn't appear in it.  This kind of thing happens from time to time and it would be really egotistical to get bent out of shape about it, but I think pretty much everyone feels let down by stuff like that.

Anyway, I decided to write this blog as sort of a caricature of that feeling.  I wrote a brief little history of all the times I felt like that before and did a whole long whiney bit.  I thought it was clear that it was meant as parody... I even put a picture of an empty room and complained that I wasn't in the photo.  That being said, a lot of people took it way more literally than I meant it.

So I read back over it imagining I was somebody that didn't get the joke.  When I do that, it's actually pretty bad.  Bad enough that I should have noticed before I published it and rewritten it a bit.

See, the problem is that I refer to a bunch of our maniacs as having "gotten snubbed".  In fact, I use the word "snub" or "snubbed" about 14 times in the article including the title.  When I think about somebody "getting snubbed" I think about somebody who was booked to be on a talk show and then got bumped because the first guest ran long.

But that's not what everyone thinks of.

When I Google the word "snub", I get two similar but not identical definitions.  The first comes from Wikipedia and it says "Rebuff, ignore or spurn disdainfully" which is really harsh.  The lighter definition shows up second and it reads, "To dismiss, turn down or frustrate the expectations of".

Now, when I read that first definition, I feel awful for ever letting my fingers type out the word snub in association with all the awesome kids that helped us out with the commercial.  Nobody got rebuffed.  Nobody got ignored.  And by no means did anyone get spurned disdainfully.

In fact, as far as I know, everybody who made the shoot got a few seconds or a second and that's a pretty potent second.  You've got to figure that if 10 million people see you for a second, that counts the same as one person seeing you for like four and a half months!  Pretty cool stuff and I'm sure that everybody is going to be mad stoked when they see their smiling faces on TV, even if it is a brief moment.  I mean, it's not like we're only playing this thing once.

When I said that I felt like some people got "snubbed", I was using it in the far lighter terms of the second definition: "frustrate the expectations of".  I know that I was hoping that the best trick I hit would make the final cut (and it didn't) and I'm sure everyone was hoping the same thing.  So when I singled out particular people and said they got "snubbed", all I really meant was that I was personally hoping to see more of them in the commercial.

Take Jaksib for example.  This dude throws down one of the sickest tricks in the entire commercial.  Now, he's facing away from the camera so I can imagine when he sees that his expectations might be a bit frustrated but he's certainly not gonna feel ignored or "spurned disdainfully".

The same is true of Mantis and Junkie as well.  They're both have way more time in a national TV commercial than (I'm willing to bet) any other kid in their school.  I'd have loved to see Mantis' 4 Myachi juggle make the final cut, but he I definitely wouldn't say his 4 Myachi juggle got "rebuffed".

The truth is that there's only 90 seconds (or 2 minutes... now I can't remember) so some really good stuff just had to be left out.  Pinky had an awesome shred and I'm sure it wasn't used because there wasn't enough time in the ad, not because she was being "dismissed".

Anyway, after some of the e-mail I got in response to the article, I feel I should apologize to anyone who read it and thought I was saying that anybody who came to the filming got slighted in any way.  All I meant is that I'd have loved to see more of their shots make the final cut.  But honestly, if they got everything in there that I wanted, the commercial would be sixteen minutes long.  In the end, the decision wasn't mine and it wasn't Myachis at all.  We left all the decisions about the commercial in the hands of people who make commercials for a living.

So if you made it to the filming and in the end you feel like maybe it should have had a little more "you" in it, don't sweat it.  No need to get bent out of shape about it.  And whatever you do, don't write a sarcastic blog about it!