There was a call for campus bodies today — they were recording a recruiting video, I think, so they just wanted a swarm of college-like people to mill around on the mall. I dutifully showed up to do my part to serve the UMM community, like a good boy, and they started splitting up the mob. You walk here, you walk there, you two throw a football around, etc. Reasonably enough, they started organizing the young photogenic types first, setting them in motion. I was predictably the last one…and the organizers walked away, leaving me aimless, so I just moved out of the frame and hid behind a tree.
At least now I know my job. I’m the creepy old guy lurking in the shrubbery while the co-eds and jocks frolic in a bucolic collegiate scene. You can still sign up for the university, because you all know I’m mostly harmless, just kind of unsightly. The worst I might do is show you a spider.
I assume that’s Morris the Cat in the schools logo?
I hope they’re filming some in the classrooms and labs with professors in the scene. Kind of sad if the only “image” they project is “young photogenic types” who are actively throwing footballs, walking around chatting, nodding, smiling. Oh boy.
Please! Not the comfy spider!
Hey, you chose to take the creepy-guy-behind-a-tree position.
I remember being an extra in a “Firefly” fanfic, “Browncoats: Redemption.” I sat at a table in a fancy-ish-looking restaurant setting, in a suit I hadn’t worn for many years, holding a gross-looking fake drink and pretending to laugh at a particular time in each take. I don’t remember seeing myself in the final version. But buy it anyway if you see it, the proceeds may still go to the same charities listed on the T-shirt we all got.
What, you’d trust a spider that’s NOT comfy?
What’s the phenomenon called again? Parallellism? Simultaneity? There was news today about the (resurrected by Modi) Indian tigers sculpture with fangs that traditionally didn’t show aggressive fangs.
Actually, they probably thought you had just stopped to watch while on your way to do something that mattered.
You say “I’m the creepy old guy…” but maybe that’s not it, and really it’s “I’m the creepy masked guy…”
They don’t want their ads to admit they ever heard of medical protection.
Why were you not perched upon the campus flagpole wearing your fur coat and pork pie hat? School spirit and twenty-three skidoo, and all that.
They should have showed you in goggles and a white lab coat, holding up a glass vial of some sort of colored liquid and nodding along with other goggled, white-coated colleagues–you know, sciency stuff!
I think you missed a chance, PZ.
You have plenty of cosplay experience.
In my college days, whenever I saw a camera crew on campus, I always tried to be the weird guy in the background smoking a cigarette.
Now that I think about it, that’s a pretty good description of my college days in general.
Don’t be upset. It sounds as if they are focusing on getting the ‘beautiful people’ interested. So superficial. Sounds like a true ‘victory of style over substance’. As our book points out “beauty is in the mind of the beholder”.
Your role in future recruiting videos should be the X-File “cancer man” but without a cigarette. Just radiate menace.