Today on Mike: What Is The Mike Haddad Show?
Aired: Wednesday 20 July 2005
I've been dreading writing this. The piece that has the sole purpose of explaining what The Mike Haddad Show is. However, after receiving an email from someone who thought that the show was more than it is and was asking for references to have his reality TV shows produced, I decided that it was time to do this and that I'd better make it good while I'm at it. Reality TV, by the way, happens to suck but I wished him good luck with his endeavors anyways.
The problem with describing what The Mike Haddad Show is comes from the fact that it's developed a lot from what it originally was meant to be: A stupid little blog. I guess in some ways it still is a stupid little blog, but to me and a few others it is something more than that. I hope that it might end up meaning something for you too.
For me, it has become much more than just my personal (or not so personal) blog. When I started the blog way back in March 2003 I was only 16. I wasn't sure what I planned on doing with the blog, but I had oodles of experience with HTML. Good HTML too if I do say so myself, as opposed to the shoddy coding that you see on a lot of the sites. So I dove in head first and decided that I would just figure it out as I went along. It shows. Looking back on the older entries I find them less than satisfactory. I wouldn't ever take them down though. They are as much a part of my growing up as puberty, and the first time(s) I got laid. I look back on them just like I look back on memories I have throughout elementary and high school. And I shake my head at them all the same.
I did the angsty teen thing really well. It doesn't surprise me that no one read my poor little Blogger hosted blog. I wouldn't have read it either. It was hardly ever funny. For the most part it was just a rehash of what had happened to me in school that day, a detailed post about who was dumb and why I was better than them, or what stupid things we did on the weekend when we thought we were cool.
I like to think that by the time I was done studying English in England over the summer of 2003 and had come back from my cruise I had learned something about how to be funny in writing. Unfortunately this would be proven false. Although the writing I did while I was there got large amounts praise from my teacher, by the time grade 12 had started I had gone back to whining about pointless things, which is not the same as being funny. It is different, and lame, and differently lame. In retrospect it was caused by a combination of things: high school was bothering me; my relationship had seriously started degrading at the end of July even if I ignored it; I was getting tired of having to do the straight half of life.
University came and gave me a chance to do things the way I wanted to do them and a second chance at being funny and having a good blog. This chance was to be wasted. I was still jaded from drama over the summer and too annoyed by University to actually do a good job. It wasn't even drama of the gay variety. It was plain old short angsty teen drama. Mono kicked in, and I found myself struggling to stay awake so blogging was only used as an outlet when I needed to get something done so I could stay sane. Eventually I started to recovered, and was given my third chance. Enter The Mike Haddad Show.
The original idea for The Mike Haddad Show came about in May 2004 while a group of us were at Queen's University for the EMC program. A bunch of us were sitting downstairs in the common room while I flirted with this really hot guy and we watched TV. That was when The Brendan Leonard Show came on. Soon the conversation changed to how I should have my own show much like The Brendan Leonard Show, only with less suck. Not much happened until 7 July 2004 when four of us decided to try and film the purchase of items with only coins. It didn't work out too well, but it was still funny for us. That experience would leave the idea of the show buried in the back of my mind until it could flourish.
I think flourish is a good word to describe what happened. The show turned into a project for me to keep myself occupied with. Natasha jumped on and helped me plan the photo shoots, and I'm sure she will continue to do so. Eugene is harassing me to get guest bloggers. Mel is in love with the photo gallery. The other Mel is helping setting up the other half of the project. Heat constantly comments. I'm sure some of the other characters drop by to visit sometimes too. You dropped by too, if you're reading this. So you should say ‘Hi' once and a while. I know you're there. Which is cool because I haven't even had to talk about boobs yet, and that is a good thing because I don't think I'd look good with boobs.
Mike Haddad at 9:28:13 PM
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Today on Mike: What Makes The Mike Haddad Show Special?
Aired: Saturday 13 August 2005
I was attacked by my thoughts on the taxi ride home last night. As it turned out, a subway delay caused me to miss my train home by about 30 seconds resulting in me taking a taxi so I could get home on time and not be shot by the parental units. That gave me enough time to think, with actual music to think along to. I was thinking mainly about how I have been a huge slacker, to the frigginmasendeshita. It's like to the max, only with more emphasis on being a friggin.
The big focus in my mind was the question "What makes the show unique?" In the end I was satisfied remembering a lyric rapped by Eve in her pop hit 'Let Me Blow Ya Mind' featuring the ever so crazy Gwen Stefani: "I do what they can't do, I just do me." Given a few seconds to giggle at the sexual allusions of that, I proceeded to think about what "doing me" meant. What do I have that makes me unique from the other bloggers out there? You can't just say everyone's special, because as brilliantly stated in Mr. Incredible, that's just a way of saying no one really is. So I started trying to think about what category the show would fit into.
More often than not, a blog is either personal or political. That didn't help me very much. My blog, though occasionally political if someone does something really stupid, is not anywhere near political enough to be considered a political blog. So that left personal as the most obvious choice for the show, leaving me with the unpleasant challenge of becoming more interesting than some of the better established personal bloggers out there, and their perspective bags of tricks (not the kind you pull; at least not yet anyways).
Dooce has both her daughter, and the fact that her body will NEVER EVER allow her to go to the bathroom in peace. The fact that she lost her job because of her blog gave her a nice little push into the spotlight. The blog at Thick Slab is both Church & Wellesley based, angry and occasionally R-rated. Xiaxue is a mediocre looking Singaporean chick that has no problem making fun of herself, no problem making fun of others, and a knack for doing both extremely well. I think the fact that she gets paid just to blog, and is given free passes to events also helps her case.
I think I have two things left working for me, and my anger is no longer one of them. That trait started faded, and is not usually beaten into submission by the fear of offending my close friends who provoke the beast that can be my anger. So anger is out. I have the fact that I'm a homo and I have nut allergies. I find the nut allergies thing rather amusing since I've had more run-ins with nuts in the past two weeks than I had suffered through over the last 10 years. Both times, the nuts happened to be hidden in a piece of food given to me by my father. So I guess that it has finally come to the point where I'm spending far too much to the point where I'm now a huge liability. Maybe I can run around screaming "My father is trying to kill me, read my blog for details!" for the publicity. Right.
Mike Haddad at 6:56:50 PM
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