I'm With Stupid: I Shoulda Learned to Potato Them Drums

I'm With Stupid: I Shoulda Learned to Potato Them Drums
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I'm going to be a pest this week and get a song stuck in your head, but it's an OK song, so it won't be that bad. And you'll definitely remember the song. You'll probably even remember the video, which seemed cutting-edge in 1985 but is laughably outdated now.

The song is "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits, and the video, made with Atari-era CGI, is notable for featuring a man's frozen, decapitated head thawing out in a microwave oven. It was a big hit back when MTV still played music videos.

I've been thinking of that song a lot lately. Well, to be honest, I always think a lot about the title and how I can make it work for me, but it's come up more often than usual recently because of certain events that I've noticed in the news.

First there was the case of the guy who fell asleep at a Yankees game and was shown on ESPN while the ESPN announcers talked about him. He's suing Major League Baseball Advanced Media, ESPN New York, the New York Yankees and announcers Dan Shulman and John Kruk for $10 million in damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The best part is that the guy's lawsuit claims that Kruk and Shulman "unleashed avalanche of disparaging words" like "stupor, fatty, unintelligent, stupid." Kruk and Shulman said nothing remotely like that about the guy, so one is left to assume that it might just be possible that the guy already sees himself that way.

The guy was subject to some mockery on Twitter for his size and the fact that he fell asleep at a baseball game, but the only reason anyone knows anything about him is that he filed the lawsuit; otherwise no one would have cared for more than three seconds about him and the 15 stupid tweets that made fun of him.

But that guy's emotional distress is apparently worth $10 million, and the annoying thing is that the rest of us are a little envious of that guy because in our messed-up legal system, he actually has a chance of getting that money. And then he actually has a chance of getting easy, easy chicks for free.

Oh, and by the way, if you're not getting your chicks for free, it's called prostitution, and it's usually illegal. I'm just saying.

The other story that got me thinking of money for nothing involved a guy in Ohio who created a Kickstarter page jokingly seeking $10 to pay for his first attempt at making potato salad. For some reason, more than 5,000 people around the world have decided that they really need to give the guy money so he can make a potato salad. As of this writing, the guy had raised $43,057.

To his credit, and because he's apparently a much better person than I am, the man is considering throwing a huge, public potato-salad party for the people of Columbus. If it were me, I would have taken the money, made one potato salad and then never made potato salad again, because I don't really like potato salad. I consider it the lowest form of potato-based food product.

Anyway, the guy's dumb potato-salad thing got me thinking of ways that I could get people to give me money through Kickstarter, but then I realized I'd have to create an account, make a page and do some other stuff, which is something, meaning I wouldn't really be getting money for nothing.

I eventually will figure out a way to get my money for nothing, but in the meantime I think I've figured out a way to get money for doing something really easy, and I have Dire Straits to thank for it.

Some of the hardworking jobs about which Mark Knopfler sang, like moving refrigerators and color TVs, would be awful, but there's one job I think I actually could do. I think I could be a microwave installer.

Mind you, I won't move microwave ovens, which is an entirely different job, but if you have a microwave oven in place and you need it installed, I will gladly come and plug it in for you for $350 plus expenses.

I believe microwave installation is going to be a real growth industry, but it was never my dream. No, my dream was to play the guitar on the MTV -- or at least bang on the bongos like a chimpanzee -- but it's been decades since anybody did that.

Todd Hartley says McDonald's hash browns are the highest form of potatoes. To read more or leave a comment, please visit zerobudget.net.

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