I don’t know what they’re going to say about me in Antithesis, but here is a local magazine article from this month’s Wine Country Metropolitan:

Antithesis Celebrity Magazine’s Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men—Dead Rooster Author William McCamment Takes Top Honors

LA CRESTA CALIFORNIA—If you had any doubt that women around the world are gravitating toward older men these days, just check out Antithesis Celebrity Magazine’s Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men. Rounding out the top ten this year are no less than six gentlemen with at least 40 candles on their next birthday cake. The top honor this year goes to 48 year-old blogger, William McCamment, who authors the increasingly popular Dead Rooster blog.

William, who is single and lives alone in Southern California, was accidentally discovered by Icelandic supermodel, Hjördís (who, in case you’re unfamiliar with this striking 23-year-old blonde, pronounces her name, hYOR-dis), when she literally ran into him as he was coming out of a Beverly Hills antique shop carrying two 16th century ceramic chickens.

“I didn’t see him until it was too late,” said Hjördís. “I bumped into him so hard that one of the chickens flew out of his arms and onto the street where it shattered into a million pieces. I felt so bad but there was nothing I could do. There was no way to replace it—it’s not like they sell 400-year-old ceramic chickens on every street corner!”

Profusely apologizing, she noticed that the guy she ran into was extremely good-looking. “I almost couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Here was this guy that just lost a very expensive chicken—because of me—and all I could do is blush and think about how incredibly handsome he was.”

After some awkward apologies and high-pitched, girlish crying over the loss of the chicken (mostly from William), the two got into Hjördís’ rare 2006 Aston Marin DBS and sped off for a quaint dinner at Malibu’s exclusive Mountebank restaurant. During the meal, Hjördís confessed she thought he was handsome and suggested he be included in the running for Antithesis Celebrity Magazine’s Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men.

William, shocked at the suggestion of a (then) 46-year-old Rare Book Dealer making the list and thinking nothing would ever come of it, agreed to let her submit his bio. Sixteen months later he sits atop AM’s Incredibly Hot Men list ahead of such hotties as # 2 Johnny Depp; #3 George Clooney; # 4 Matt Damon; and #5 Orlando Bloom.

“What’s interesting,” said Antithesis publisher, Katrina Random, “is that largely unknown fellas like William are beginning to crack the top ten, whereas better known heartthrobs like Brad Pitt barely make the list at all.” Pitt came in at number ninety-nine. It’s the first time in Antithesis’ history he didn’t make the top five.

END OF ARTICLE

DEAR DEAD ROOSTER READERS: The above article is, of course, fake. There is no Antithesis Celebrity Magazine; no list of the Top 100 Incredibly Hot Men; and most disappointing, especially for me, there’s no smitten Icelandic supermodel named Hjördís.

The idea for this prankish post was prompted by the recent alignment of three random strokes of fate:

The first was that my good friend, Joe, at Crotchety Old Man Yell at Cars wrote a post about how all these young, beautiful women keep flocking to Hugh Hefner’s bedroom even though he’s an old, desiccating Crypt Keeper–to which I responded in a comment, “It’s the fame. Before I became an international superstar blogger, I hardly ever had swarms of 19-year-old hotties drenching me with their love…” Haha! Uh…yeah…

The second was my recent discovery of an online photo manipulation tool called PhotoFunia that, when you upload your picture, it places it realistically into a photo with celebrities and/or interesting scenes (the photos in this post aside from the magazine cover were created with that tool—the magazine cover was done by me and Photoshop). Go play with it, you’ll love it. And, they have a full 74 photos to choose from!

The third and final stroke was that my monopoly on the search phrase “Incredibly Hot Men” has faded and I miss winning bar-bets with people that don’t believe it when I tell them my picture will come up if they type it into a search engine.

So, I tried to work a little SEO magic into this post hoping it brings it back up. We’ll see.

Thanks for playing along.

The temperature that day was about 8 degrees F (-13 C) with a wind-chill factor roughly equal to that of the dark side of Pluto (the former planet—not the dog). We are braving these elements because it’s Sunday in Green Bay Wisconsin, the Packers are playing the Colts, and one of Jeff’s employees coughed up some free tickets.

If you live in Wisconsin and are offered free Green Bay Packers tickets, you MUST accept them and go to the game or else you will forever be known to all other Wisconsinites as THE BIGGEST IDIOT IN THE WORLD.

Everyone in Wisconsin is a Green Bay Packers fan: EVERYONE. A few people have attempted to move there from other places such as Minnesota and tried to remain true to their hometown team, but that would make them STUPID VIQUEENS FANS and there is NO WAY they are going to get their furnace repaired now—they’ll just have to huddle together in naked, manly fashion with DA’ STUPID BEARS FANS.

I miss Wisconsin a lot—especially fun times like we had that day—but I don’t miss the freezing temperatures. I also like the fact that, here in California, when I go to a football game and order a beer, it doesn’t come out of the cup in one solid block.

Recently, I went to Universal Studios in Hollywood California with my brother’s family. My brother was out of town on business, so our group consisted of me, my sister-in-law, her 70-year-old mother and my 3-year-old nephew. There were also two teenage girls—my niece and her friend—but as soon as we passed through the gates, they magically disappeared.

Anyway, my sister-in-law, Evelyn, who had been to Universal a few years earlier, kept telling me I was really going to freak out on the Mummy Ride. “Wait ‘til you see the bugs,” she kept telling me. “You are gonna’ freak!”

She repeated this enough times that I finally had to say, “Stop with the bugs!” and insist that we go on the stupid Mummy Ride so we can get on with our lives!

However, there was a problem. See, the last time Evelyn was at Universal Studios they didn’t have a Mummy Ride. What she was remembering was a portion of the Studio Tour dressed-up Egyptian Style to promote the newly released movie, The Mummy.

In the Egyptian part of the tour, the tram—which, by the way, tops-out at a blazing three-miles-per-hour—goes into a tunnel where, eventually, scarab beetles, obviously created by a film projector, crawl all over the walls. Hardly something I would “freak out” about.

But, Evelyn kept seeing these Revenge of the Mummy: The Ride signs throughout the park, which, as it turns out, is not the snail-like tram she remembered, but a high-speed indoor rollercoaster designed to leave you twitching for the rest of your life from permanent nerve damage.

So, we finally get to the entrance to The Mummy Ride and the attendant points to my 3-year-old nephew and says to Evelyn, “You can’t take him on this ride…”

“Why not?” asks Evelyn.

“He’s too small.”

An argument breaks out (remember, she thinks this is the slow-paced tram ride) and other ride attendants gather to help out their comrade. In the mean time, Evelyn pauses long enough to say to me and her mother, “You two go ahead and go on the ride…I don’t want you to miss it…”

Now, here’s the situation: unbeknownst to me, I am about to board a skull-thrashing, spine-twisting, bowel-releasing high-speed rollercoaster with, as a riding companion, a soft-spoken, flower-sniffing, easy-chair-nap-enjoying, 70-year-old grandmother.

As the line wound-down into the building, there were all kinds of creepy Egyptian scenes including a great big scarier-than-reality-mummy-dude with extremely poor dental hygiene spouting several violent statements along-the-lines of, “I am going to rip off your face and use it to wax my car!”—or, something like that—I don’t remember his exact words.

I began to wonder why Evelyn was so adamant about taking a three-year-old on such an obviously too-spooky-for-children ride. What was she thinking? I was glad they wouldn’t let him on.

Finally, we get to the point where they load you into the car and they put me and Grandma in the very front. A padded neck-brace ratchets down over each of our bodies to hold us down and I’m thinking, OK, this CAN’T be a good sign…

It begins to dawn on me that this is going to be a rollercoaster type ride, but it’s too late now, so I just keep quiet. My only hope is that it is not too extreme for Grandma.

She looks at me and smiles.

BANG! The thing instantly goes from 0 to 500 miles-per-hour and Grandma’s face melts into a rictus skull of terror. She grabs hold of my shirt and begins tearing it off me as she screams a type of squealing horror that you just can’t duplicate outside of a torture prison.

“I’M SO SCARED” She screams.

I am shitting my pants.

The ride blasts into high g-force turns, shoots through twisting holes, flies out over hills, drops into zero-gravity darkness, then finally, just before impacting a hard-rock wall, slams to a halt.

We’re just sitting there. We begin to relax.

But, wait!—the fun isn’t over yet! Through a tiny hole in the wall, a series of scarab beetles begin spilling out by the thousands. Not the stupid, projector-style bugs I would later see on the tram ride; these are clickety-clackety realistic looking bugs that…

OH MY GOD! IT’S THE BUGS!

Evelyn warned me about these things! What in the HELL are they going to do to me? I am seriously worried now because she didn’t even mention the psycho rollercoaster part of the ride, so this must really…

BANG! We instantly shoot full-blast through the whole ride again, but this time, we do it all BACKWARDS! You’ve got to be kidding me! All the screaming, all the shirt-ripping—it all happens again and with extra intensity because we are facing-away and have no clue where we’re going—only that we are racing through the tunnels at breakneck speed.

Finally the ride ends and as we exit Evelyn is waiting outside—still unaware that it was a high-speed rollercoaster that she had just sent her 70-year-old mother to ride. She asks, “How’d you like it, mom?”

Grandma, without a hint of what she’d just been through, simply said, “I didn’t like it too much.”

Me? I looked like I had just lost a fight with a Grizzly bear and was forced to buy a new Revenge of the Mummy T-shirt.