Wow! I can honestly say I wasn't expecting this.
(wave to crowd and allow audience applause and standing ovation to die down.)
Fortunately for me I write my Time: Man of the Year acceptance speech a couple weeks in advance of the awards every year "just in case". (I can tell you that there are some ex-girlfriends and coworkers who had mocked me for doing this over the years... who's laughing now huh?)
Let me begin by saying that I did not set out in 2006 to achieve this honor. No, I set out in 2006 to start a modest little blog. I thought this little blog was going to be revolutionary in every aspect and that people would be beating down my door begging to read it. I told all my friends and mentioned it in as many online forums that I could think of. Pretty soon I found myself serving an audience of up to 12 people a week! Since I was posting erratically and without any sort of coherent theme I'm sure you can guess that things got a little dicey there for a while.
Luckily in the blogosphere there are no deadlines and no real urgent need to build an audience. My blog puttered along for a little while before I forgot about it completely and left it sitting on the side of the information superhighway like an abandoned gas station in the middle of the desert.
There's a few people I'd like to thank for helping me win this honor.
I should probably start by giving a shout out to the numerous distribution channels that carried my body of work. There's too many of you to list by name without hurting the ones I forgot…so I’ll just have to say: you know who you are.
(give a knowing wink and point to the guys at You Tube and MySpace. Wait for applause.)
To the two Asian guys whose video of them lip-synching to the Backstreet boys song circled the net several time: Thank you. You taught us that there is a reality rung lower than reality TV that we have yet to mine. You are truly an inspiration to us all.
To LonelyGirl. I have to admit that I never watched any of your videos and I don't really see what the big-deal is if you were real or not, your story has shown us that there are strange depths of the internet we have yet to dig into to see if there is a way to make money there. For that, I thank you.
To the guy who posted a You Tube video of his cat sleeping with the Justin Timberlake song Sexxy Back playing in the background: I have never been one for contemporary or Avant garde art, but by the end of this video I found myself contemplating the complexities of my own life in the context of a sleeping cat. Thank you for making that available for the word to see.
To the spammers who figured out that I can still read and understand the words "vi8gra," "vtaagra," "vi@gr@,"and "v!8gr@." You guys must be burning the midnight oil coming up with these! All of your hard work paid off this year when you reached the milestone of 9 out of every 10 e-mails are spam.
Gr8t job!
I'd like to thank my mom for still believing in forwarding me e-mails she gets that have pictures of people's pets doing cute things. Mom, I've asked you a hundred times to stop sending those to me, but you insist on sending them anyway ensuring that they will never go extinct.
I'd also like to thank my dad who inspires me every day with the question "If it's a log on the web why don’t they just call it a 'web log'?" Why not indeed. Are we so lazy as an Internet community that we must lower our common expectations of language?
Truer words were never spoken Dad. Last time I checked the word “Blog†didn’t even show up in a spell-check! Expect to see an entry about this on my Web Log.
And of course as any one who has used the Internet for more than ten minutes will know I'd be remiss if I didn't thank the good Flying Spaghetti monster above. FSM has always been there for me when I needed to talk about religion in mocking and sarcastic terms.
Thanks you all for this honor.
(At this point in the speech back away from the podium drop to the floor and do triumphant one-armed pushups in honor of the late Jack Palance. Or just run the clip of him doing it from YouTube.)
-Zak Rockstar, Time's Man Of The Year 2006
