3MR's Instant Scandal Cache-In Kit

Washington, DC -- So you were vacationing in Aruba or Antarctica and missed the whole presidential sex scandal? Maybe you thought you'd entered a time machine and landed in 1992, living the whole Gennifer Flowers scene all over again. Now all your friends have the latest jokes and Photoshopped Monica pictures, and you have nothing.

It's not too late to build your own scandalous shrine online, where anything you write could be picked up by a cyber-sleuth gossip reporter faster than you can say "fornigate." Follow these seven easy steps, and you'll be in the loop.

1. You need a domain name, but all of the obvious ones are taken (fornigate.com, lindatripp.com, kenstarrresign.com). Choose a minor figure like Lewinsky's lawyer or Clinton's secretary, or get a little more creative: bubbagate.com, slickwilliegate.com, trippedbytripp.com or kathleenwilley=anitahill.com are up for grabs.

2. Get some jokes. Either swipe some, or use puns on the following words: chief of staff, gag order, wag the dog, Deep Throat. If all else fails, try Dr. Seuss, a limerick, or a Hillary haiku.

3. Sell T-shirts, mugs or condoms with your snappy "___gate" expression.

4. After the hits start piling up, sell banner ads to smarmy credit card hawkers, 900 lines, and miracle diet programs.

5. Link to established news sources to give your site instant cred-by-association.

6. Get a gimmick. Anagrams, doctored photos, and fake milk ads have been done. That leaves a Magic 'Gate Ball, a fake Oval Office sexcam, or a random Clinton Denial Generator.

7. Call Matt Drudge and whisper into the phone: "I heard that Time magazine was going to run a story about Clinton sleeping with me, but they killed it for lack of evidence." Voila! You'll have more press coverage than you could ever imagine...

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DeathRace 2000(tm)

[each week we'll highlight the lowlights at one of three failing online ventures: Snap!, HotWired and Slate]

SF Weekly Takes a Bite Outta Snap!

In last week's SF Weekly Dog Bites column:

"...The free-lancers who write the reviews that comprise the bulk of Snap!ís content earn $600 each for writing a required 175 Web site reviews a week. Which, for those of you caught without a calculator, works out to $3.43 cents a review.

"Oh well. Luckily, Snap! content producer Suzanne Herel sent a memo last Tuesday to her contract-work minions instructing them that they'd have something to spend their paychecks on -- new software. As of this week, all free-lancers will be expected to own their own copies of Filemaker Pro.

"'Iím sorry, but we can neither provide this software nor reimburse you for the cost,' Herel told the memo recipients, after chirpily assuring them that if they shop around they should be able to find a copy for $99 or thereabouts. Which would be, oh, 23 reviews or so."

What's next? Freelancer bake sales to help get Snap! out of debt? The wonderfully snide SF Weekly was even kind enough to include a link to our DeathRace 2000 site online. Our servers await inundation.

[To follow the Race online, go to http://www.mediawhore.com/deathrace]

"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.

Max Schlickting - Editor-in-Chief
Barbara Yalpsid - Online Editor
Lefty Periwinkle - First Amendment Expert

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