How Many Dead? So Sad. Hey, Buy My Album!

File this one under "unimpressed releases." We want you to meet Michael Weiskopf. If there is a poor man's Bob Dylan, Michael Weiskopf is that person's poor man. Oh the plight of musicians; they grind it out for years hoping to get their big break. Fortunately the internet has provided a myriad of opportunities to expose that desperation. It's hard to draw attention to your work. And when the going gets tough, the tough capitalize on mass murder in the form of a badly written press release to increase SEO, draw people searching for information on the crime and get them to check out your latest song that's loosely related to gun violence.

What? Isn't that what they do?

So Michael Weiskopf, whose website is here, wrote a song in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre called "Guns Don't Kill." From what we've gathered after spending literally dozens of seconds researching this guy is that he's based out of the Hamptons. His website is created by Hamptons Web Design, and he has radio appearances centered out east.

Today, he accidentally decided to promote his music with this headlined release: "Latest Shooting Underscores New Anti-NRA Rant." 

OK, first: calling your song a "rant" is probably not the best tactic. Secondly, the lead graf calls attention to the recent shooting in "Santa Monica."

On May 23, a young man in Isla Vista, Cal. went on a shooting and stabbing spree reportedly because he kept striking out with women. Whatever the matter, he senselessly took six lives and wounded a number of others before finally turning the gun on himself. He committed this crime near UC Santa Barbara and one of his targets was a sorority house off campus.

Santa Barbara. Not Santa Monica. Which is not that bad of a mistake unless you're writing this press release as your attempt to mark your solidarity and empathy for the victims. Oh wait.

Then there's this to consider. One year ago this week, there WAS a mass shooting in Santa Monica, where another six people were killed, (including the shooter) making it entirely plausible that this "gaffe" was in fact, no mistake, but a press release that was repurposed and sent out again in the wake of the Santa Barbara killings.

So you're capitalizing on TWO mass murders? And you don't even have the decency of a proofreader to make sure your opportunism isn't so transparent?

Oh self-promotion: I love you. Oh Hamptons: I love you more!

Pub Crawls Made Easier With Hamptons Hopper?

This summer the Hamptons will be graced with an alternative to Pink Tuna and the Hampton Jitney. Some whippersnapper entrepreneurs have come up with the Hamptons Hopper, a new venture designed to ferry drunk and self-important Abercrombie models to all the night spots from Montauk to Hampton Bays.

Using converted school buses (we can't wait to see the fashionistas try to look cool getting on the small bus), the Hamptons Hopper buses are painted green and boast air conditioning, lounge seating and plugins for iPhones.

In fact, the whole venture is very tech-savvy. Of course, like any business in the Hamptons, you can't just get on the friggin thing; you have to have a "membership," which starts at $20 and your membership card is basically showing the driver your iPhone.

In June, Hamptons Hopper plans to launch an iPhone App that allows you to track when and where the next small bus is heading your drunken way.

They're also hiring. On Board Ambassadors, for one, which is a dick title. You'd be more like a stewardess catering to 20-something booze floozies, but it's a living.

Planning to ride this new bus? Send us pictures and let us know if it's worth the membership. In the meantime, check out their website and Facebook page.

To be fair, I was sort of with this idea until I read: "You will have access to some complimentary refreshments.  Most importantly, you’ll meet a whole bunch of other intelligent and incredibly good-looking members at our stops and on our Hopper vehicles!"

What would a new Hamptons venture be without channeling its inner Derek Zoolander? Answer: one you didn't want to punch in the dick.

The Most Ridiculous Help Wanted Ads Pt. 2

We're chronicling some of the most corporate-inspired lines of BS to ever find its way into a job description or title. Last week we brought you the "Educator" position at Lululemon. This week's installment includes Nike's bizarre job title for its openings in Riverhead and Deer Park.

Nike Seasonal Athlete.

Athlete? Will Nike be sponsoring my long jump? Are they looking for someone to wear their shirts at the Winter Olympics?

You wish. No, the Athlete is what they call the people who stock the shelves and ring up customer purchases. Or as we used to call them: stock boys and cashiers.

Nike Athlete. A position that holds firmly to the optimistic notion that the young people we're targeting don't read past the headline.

The Most Ridiculous Help Wanted Ads Pt. 1

Here at Hamptonyte we pride ourselves on our continued unemployment because it permits us the delicious advantage of reading the most amazing help wanted ads and job descriptions this side of Goebbels. We also realize our unemployment is the direct result of that "karma" Bruce Buschel an anonymous commenter left with us on our blog post about Southfork Kitchens going belly up. 

Did you know you can be a Sandwich Artist in East Hampton? Sign me up! Also, if you apply for that job try not to be shocked when they hand you an apron and tell you to make sandwiches for people who come up to the counter during lunch time. Or, as you might know them: a Deli worker.

But here's one classic example from Indeed posted by East Hampton yoga and clothing studio lululemon athletica (we don't know why they lower case their store name, but the Hamptonsdouche is so strong in this post that we felt compelled to follow suit.)

They're looking for an Educator.

An educator? They're holding classes there?

No.

Apparently that's what they call their cash register people. Note:

"Their main role is to effectively educate our guests on the fabrics, features, fit and function of our product, our culture and the communities we belong to. By educating guests we empower them to make decisions for themselves based on the facts that we offer them. By doing this, the guesswork is taken out of shopping for customers, and a ‘Wow! It’s You!’ guest experience is created, leaving customers with the knowledge to educate others on behalf of lululemon athletica."

Wow, it's you!
Wow, what horseshit!

Seriously, who writes this stuff? It goes on and on like this before they finally get down to brass tax and tell you that you'll need a High School Diploma and a good mop. Also, you'll need a "strong personal sense of style," which means you'll be judged by a panel of salad eating designer monkeys at the interview so make sure your ish is tight.

We don't want them all choking on their vitamin water now do we?

Yes. Yes we do.

Not just a failure in business, a failure in life

We're more than just curious about the mental processes of whoever posted this Craigslist ad looking for a "Millionaire Mentor," we're curious if anyone responded!

"I am a failure in my professional career and need to reinvent myself and get my head screwed on straight," the ad laments. It's so full of self-loathing and so unclear in specifics ("I have no direction or focus and need to be put on the right track") that it reads less like a Help Wanted ad and more like a search term for a good dominatrix.

Poor creature. We don't know a lot of millionaires, but we'd venture to guess that most would never want to work with someone who describes themselves in such terms as this ad.

Then again, times are tough for everyone.

Did Bruce Buschel's douche chills contribute to his shuttered restaurant?

We'd like to think so, and so do the good folks at Curbed Hamptons, who reported a few weeks ago that Buschel's Southfork Kitchens on the Bridgehampton Turnpike is up for sale for $3.8m.

Buschel, no stranger to this blog, is somehow a complete stranger to the idea that shitting on your target demographic often makes your target demographic suddenly hungry for McDonalds. Although, in fairness to Buschel, McDonalds is probably where Buschel figured his demographic eats anyway.

Buschel is a rare and interesing character in that, it's rare for people to want to see someone's dreams battered like Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, yet sooo many people wanted to see that with him (peep the comments in the link). It's rare for someone to see their dream fulfilled and then completely undermine it by publicly attacking his own patrons in all his New York Times-contributing what-the-fuckery. It's rare for a New York entrepreneur to be so vaginally thin-skinned as to respond to relatively obscure blogs that criticize said what-the-fuckery, and it's rare for a massive amount of people to take glee in someone else's demise. Yet that is what Buschel and all the douche chills he invokes, has done.

Look at it this way: his restaurant closing is the equivalent of people saying 'I would rather starve than eat at your place.' Ah Buschel. The douche is strong in this one.

So Southfork Kitchens has shuttered. And that's a good thing. And Buschel may walk away with $3.8 million. And that's a bad thing.

See. We don't even want you to have money!

Jerry Della Femina's Problems Would Make Jesus Christ Want To Murder Him

Jerry Della Femina's idea of poverty is so rage inducing we saw the Dalai Lama read this Business Insider article and then immediately turn around and punch an infant in the face.

Della Femina, the sleazy, slimy lying gold-toothed creep ad man was one of the few Madison Avenue execs who amassed his fortune and didn't manage to blow it on a coke habit in the 80s. He's been a permanent fixture in the Hamptons since forever and even opened up a successful restaurant with the money he made convincing people with money they don't have to buy shit they don't need.

Now he's sold his house because, well, because his poor unborn great grandchildren may not be able to sit by a pool lined with the skin of Mexican day laborers while doing lines off a blonde co-ed's back. Or as we used to call it: The American Dream.

That's right, a man who lives in America in 2012, with full knowledge of how high the unemployment rate is, who no doubt had to lay off some of his own workers at his various business ventures, who flies his helicopter over thousands of foreclosed homes, has the balls to complain that he's selling because he refuses to pay more taxes under the Obama administration.

Taxes? Really? Taxes? You do realize, Della Femina, that your tax bill is probably quadruple the monthly mortgage of the average home just west of where you live, right?

Instead of feeling fortunate that he even has the money to PAY those taxes, he's selling low just to avoid them. His ginormous, disgustingly lavish, and grossly unnecessary oceanfront house went for $25 million. He wanted $40 million. But he's settling for 25. A fact that makes us just...so sad.

“I want the proceeds of this sale to go to my kids and my grandkids,” he told The Post's Jennifer Gould Keil and Selim Algar. “I don’t want my money going to Obama, and that’s what’s going to happen in the New Year. That’s why I sold right now, that’s why I wanted to get this done.”
“I’m basically the loser in Obama’s class warfare,” he added.

Wow. That really gets us...right around...the chest/heart region or thereabouts. Another loser in Obama's class warfare, according the article, is Discovery Networks CEO David Zaslav, who inherited Della Femina's meager 8 bedroom, 6.5 bathroom, heated pool-even-though-there's-a-literal-ocean-500-feet-away, mansion that sits on 1.7 acres.

On a side note, we'd like to know how an advertising/marketing guru can be this culturally tone-deaf. On a sider note, we'd like to know how Della Femina's brain didn't say to him: 'please don't call the NY Post and...say anything like what you're about to say.' On an even sider note, we'd like Della Femina to eat a bag of dicks.

Oh Yeah, We're On The Facebook Now

 Just a short post to let all six of you know that you can grab our headlines and comment on our blog posts from Facebook. Our Facebook page launched yesterday, and we'll populate it with short, relevant and informative information as we come across it. The launch was rather unceremonious, and took 24 hours to upload our profile picture, but otherwise a rousing success.

So like us on Facebook, and then all we need is 24 more likers and we can start getting analytics from FB, which will show us just how many people have no idea we exist.

Should be fun.

Occupy the Hamptons Doesn't Occupy Common Sense

That grim looking fella to the left of this photo is right. We are the 99%. Especially us here at Hamptonyte Blog. We have all the requisite 99% problems: unemployment, disenfranchisement, disgust with corruption, irritation at the continued illusion we call the American Dream. Hell, we practically started this blog along similar sentiments.

We can't be so cynical as to criticize a small group of protesters holding up signs in a community that is veritably empty during the winter months, and sure to have them lined against a wall and executed arrested during the summer. Despite the usual Hamptons media eye-rolling these protests often create, we're pretty much on their side. We sort of admire the fact that reminders of the greed and corruption that plague our Republic will not be escaped when these creeps from Wall St. head out here on Memorial Day. For that we thank this small band of flies buzzing into the luxury ointment.

But we can't get on board their recent decision to occupy HarborFrost. It just doesn't make any sense. Simply pulling into the 7-11 parking lot, where a lot of the HarborFrost attendees parked, it was visibly evident by the lack of BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis, that many of us jumping into the frigid water were in the 99% and are most likely attending to take our minds off the struggle we endure daily.

I recognize there will always be some degree of shouting at the choir, but the last thing anybody wants to see at a festival, is a group of sober-faced grouches standing there with signs, reminding us how fucked we are change needs to take place in our capitalist system.

The occupy movement needs just a tad bit of PR in this spot. They already have policed themselves when it comes to individual members' behavior. Here's another instance where they should do so. Nothing makes the average person, liberal or otherwise, more turned off to a movement than when the movement doesn't know where or when to land its blows. The perception many walked away with during HarborFrost is that a bunch of sign-wielding, friendless shut-ins, with nothing better to do on a Saturday, attempted to hijack a fun event by drawing attention to themselves. The operative word "themselves." Not the movement. Or the message. Such is the importance of PR in this circumstance. The protest had absolutely no relevance to the festival, except for the fact that hundreds would be gathered in one spot. From a PR perspective, this screams the protestors want attention, more than they want to inform the public of an injustice. Now, if the festival was paid for and sponsored by Goldman Sachs or Lehman Bros., and the soup being served was made from the ground up bones of unemployed Americans who went into default on their mortgages, that would be a different story.

I'm often reminded of a great line in Oliver Stone's Jim Morrison biopic The Doors. The entire movie script is pretty much Jim Morrison wandering around being profound and prophetic, and waxing philosophical over every little thing. But there is one instance...one little line, when Morrison has just recorded one of his uber-intellectual, drippy, philosophical poems. He stands up from his session and says: "C'mon let's get some tacos."

Note to Occupy the Hamptons: Sometimes even Jim Morrison knew when to give it a rest!

What if the South kept "concierges" in chains?

There would have likely been no Civil War! Instead of a slave trade, how nice does a concierge trade sound?

We stumbled on this advertisement for a company that specializes in consolidating the numerous ways Hamptonites can remain spoiled, weeping, drinking balls of incompetence. This particular brand of servitude goes by many different names. Concierge service. Luxury concierge. Personal concierge.

"Whether you need a rental home, reservations at the best Hamptons restaurant or a babysitting, pet-walking, dry cleaning-picking-up assistant, we've got you...We tailor our services to suit your every need, and we strive to ensure there is no limit to what we can do for you. At Open Minded Concierge, our relationship with our members is always treated with the utmost respect and extreme confidentiality."

Yassuh, we aims to please, and we please to aim, suh. Our prediction: By 2025, the American population will consist of two groups...the wealthy, and their "concierges." If we've said it once, we've said it a hundred times, the failure of the South was in its poor marketing efforts. No worries. It will rise again. And that fact pretty much blows.

Hamptons Restauranteur Gets Ugly With Commenters

Our favorite, clueless, and harmfully unhinged restaurant owner Bruce Buschel is currently engaged in a cyber-smackdown with commenters on his New York Times blog "You're the Boss: the art of running a small business."

Buschel is a recovered writer, editor, filmmaker, and whatever else draws him attention. We're still waiting for him to release his own fragrance: Eu de Poorly Run Restaurant. He owns "Southfork Kitchen," a fish-house located on what is locally referred to as the Bridgehampton Turnpike: a double-yellow stretch of highway that bypasses all the cops and the need for safe driving. His restaurant doesn't need a menu-change: it needs an overpass!

Anyway, since he opened his fish-house, (local fish only, so we hope you like Ling and Porgies) he's had the unique luxury of blogging about it in the NYT (he even had the gall to review his own restaurant!) He's an absolutely perfect specimen for the Hamptons. Except...his blog posts are kind of obnoxious. And his ideas on how to run a restaurant are kind of um...idiotic. His commenters think so, and this week Bruce decided he'd had enough, and got cunty with em'.

Exhibit A:
Dear Wasting time,
I see how you earned your name. We had 60 people coming for dinner and six staffers protesting. You would have called the guests? People get hurt on the ski slopes. You would close them down?

Exhibit B:

Our first general manager left after four months of work, one month after we opened to the public. The current manager has been with us from the git-go. Thanks for paying attention. No, really, thanks.

And:

If people put their passion and time and money into a project, who determines if it’s a hobby or a business? I have an idea that might please you: Stop reading.

Ooh, burn. So we're trying to decipher Buschel's tack here. Either he has no concept that bitching out commenters on his blog is sort of a bad PR strategy for his restaurant, OR...he's trying to channel the success of McSorley's Ale House on 7th street, which is famous not only for its microbrew of the same name, but for its notoriously cranky bar staff. Either way, he has learned one effective strategy for running a Hamptons restaurant in January/February. Close down.

Badvertising: Make the Evening News Tonight!

This posting in Craigslist is as simple as it gets. If you answer this ad: you will die. This isn't about a bad boss. This is about a bad serial killer.

Words to watch out for in any advertisement: "seeking young attractive," "open minded," and "send a photo." When you hear any of these phrases, know that you are just an e-mail click away from rubbing the lotion on its skin.

Badvertising: The Job Search

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