Mr. Tee

A few years ago, I was looking for something I could do to add on to the monumental fortune I've made in advertising. Preferably something not involving monster egos, all-night work sessions, talking to account planners and unimaginably bad pizza.

So my friend and art director extraordinaire Kurt Brushwyler and I kicked around escape plans for a while, and came up with a business idea we could both get behind: t-shirts.

Alright, so it wasn't the most original idea. But we were going to do it in a way that managed to combine two things we loved - t-shirts and Vegas.

I forget the name of it, but for a while there was a little newsletter/brochure you could pick up at any restaurant, usually near the restrooms by the sponsored post card rack and outdated copies of the L.A. Weekly. It listed all kinds of bizarre classes that not only reinforced every stereotype about L.A., but also that no legitimate institution of learning would ever offer.

One of them was How To Get Into The T-Shirt Industry. Coincidence? I think not.

So one night after a long day freelancing at Chiat (is there any other kind?), Kurt and I hopped in his Prius and drove over to the world-famous, two-star Marina Del Rey Marriott for a three-hour class taught by guys who'd hit it big making t-shirts and selling them to Paris Hilton for $95 a piece at Kitson.

It was actually an interesting and educational evening. Needless to say the part about having to go to Vegas at least once a year to hawk our wares at the Magic Fashion Convention was quite appealing.

Our master plan was to get those cart/kiosk things you see in the main promenade of The Forum Shops at Caesar's and sell the t-shirts off of them. It was going to be our test run. If they did well, we'd approach each of the casinos and holding companies about making exclusive t-shirts for their gift shops, with funny lines tailored specifically for each hotel.

I wrote about a couple hundred Vegas/hotel lines, and Kurt started working on designs for them. It was ours, and it was fun.

Right up until I called The Forum Shops to find out about the carts. Come to find out - and if I'd thought about it for a second I would've realized it - that Caesar's owned all the carts in their mall. They didn't rent them to outside vendors.

But since we both come from advertising, and are used to rejection, adversity, broken dreams and plans going awry on a daily basis, we knew exactly how to handle the situation.

We gave up.

Every once in awhile, when Kurt returns a phone call (my hair was black when I called him) or when I see him, we kick around rebooting the idea. But then we move on to more important things, like which sushi place to go to for lunch.

We still own the URL and still have the lines. Plus there are a whole slew of casinos that weren't there the first time around we could approach. So I'm not ruling anything out - we might come back to the idea at some point.

All I know for sure is if we do, there'll definitely be a lot of research involved.

Guilty pleasures Part 10: San Andreas

There are three things I noticed immediately while watching the latest disaster film, Into The Storm. No, 2012. Nope, The Day After Tomorrow. Mmm, maybe Twister. Or Volcano. Was it The Core? Ah, I remember: San Andreas.

First, it's almost unearthly how similar Dwayne Johnson and I are built. It's like looking in a mirror. It's boggling how two completely different, unrelated people with, and I'm going to take a wild guess here, completely different workout regimens can look so much alike.

Second, when the big one does finally hit, as we all know it will, I'd like to be somewhere near Dwayne Johnson. That guy knows exactly what to do in that situation. It's uncanny. Who would've thought his years in the wrestling ring would prepare him for unlimited acts of heroism during times of shifting tectonic plates?

And third, I'm so unprepared for the giant quake that's coming it's not even funny. Well, except the part how I'll be driving along and suddenly the car will get swallowed up by a giant hole in the road that just appears out of nowhere. That'll be good for a laugh.

I went into San Andreas expecting nothing more than a fun time, a stupid script I've heard in every other disaster film of the past decade (apparently "Ruuunnnnn!" is a popular line of dialog), impossible scenarios and great special effects. And I wasn't disappointed.

In movies like this, it really doesn't matter who the actors are - the special effects are the star. And in San Andreas, they're spectacular. Buildings crumble. Bridges fall. Glass shatters from skyscrapers onto the street below, where pedestrians are running for their lives. Cue the tsunami.

The movie delivers on everything you'd expect it to.

Here's one special effect I wasn't expecting: I don't know how Paul Giamatti managed it, but he actually pulled off chewing the scenery while it was falling all around him.

I said it doesn't matter who the actors are. Let me backpedal a bit and say Alexandra Daddario is irreplaceable as Dwayne Johnson's daughter. In fact there ought to be a law that she plays the daughter in every film from now on. Or the sister. She just needs to be in every movie, okay?

Anyway I won't tell you how it ends, but when it happens for real, let's just say it'd be a good idea to have my construction company up and running.

Mindless fun, great eye candy and a loud, entertaining two hours if you let it be.

I give it an 8.5 on the Richter scale.

Unbuckled

I was in a hurry to get somewhere yesterday. Pick up the kids, get dinner, go to the post office, work (stops and laughs at the thought of rushing to work, regains composure), whatever. I had to be wherever I had to be fast.

So I flew out of the house, got in my Lexus ES (the E stands for extra, the S stands for soul-less) 350, pressed the button, hit the self-accelerator and took off down the block.

What I didn't do was buckle my seat belt. And it took me awhile to realize it.

There are only three ways into my neighborhood. It's not gated, but you have to know the way in and out. As I was barreling up the block, and then around the corner, I felt an extremely pleasant sensation.

I was unconstricted, free, able to effortlessly lean over and reach down to pick up the loose change in the passenger footwell. And that's when it hit me: no seat belt.

Now, I have tried very hard to never be one of those a.) people b.) bloggers c.) parents who say when I was younger.

When I was younger, we didn't wear seat belts. We flew around the corners and around the car, and if we were sitting on bench seats we slid and sqooshed the people next to us.

It was, how you say, fun.

Yeah yeah, much safer. Blah, blah, lives saved.

For at least a couple blocks before I got to the perimeter of my neighborhood, and had to turn onto a busy main thoroughfare, I got to recapture that freedom.

In case my kids are reading this, you are never allowed to ride in a car without your seat belt for any amount of time. When we were younger we didn't know the dangers as well as we do today. I apologize if I've mislead you by making it sound fun. It's not.

(Yes it is.)