A friend — Wendy H., the afore-lauded braint of Laura’s brant — sent this to Laura yesterday in a desperate attempt to get Laura to brant. (Please note that Wendy H. addressed her email to Laura, The Branter, as opposed to Laura, The Person. This means that Laura has succeeded in convincing her readers (both of them) of her dual personae!) And so, while Laura is usually 100% responsible for the content on her website and especially on her brant, her need for something funny to throw at her starved fans — and her agreement that this news item is really funny — this one time she is allowing herself to be “pitched” and “used” to “advance another person’s agenda” by posting something suggested to her by someone else. (Another note: this gets dangerously close to how P.R. people and journalists work which makes Laura very very nervous, but rest assured that this will never happen again.)

Scruples and brantilistic ethics aside, here’s the pre-written item, completely written by Wendy H.:

“So, perhaps Laura could brant about this, the amusing part being that they arrested a naked man ‘on suspicion of indecent exposure’… like they couldn’t tell for sure.”

“A man was arrested on suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon after police found him outdoors — naked — and he told them he had a tool in his rectum, authorities said.”
(From Boston.com: “Naked Man Arrested for Concealed Weapon”; November 4, 2006.)

For those of you (besides Laura) who are counting the days before “Piece of Work” is published, there are only ten more days between now, September 15, and the official publication date of September 25. Laura thinks she’s done the math right (25 minus 15 = 10), but just in case she hasn’t she’s showing her work (maybe if she hadn’t gotten an 11 on her math final in her junior year of high school she would have more faith in her ability to do math, if you can even call simple addition, or subtraction, math). If she’s made a mistake in her calculation, please bring the error to her attention by leaving a comment here on her brant (just make sure you sign it “Smarty-Pants”).

Not to get bogged down in more figures and numbers (this is the most math Laura has done in years), but in the 15 days since her first brant entries Laura got pretty busy. She meant to keep her brant current with interesting and entertaining entries to satisfy her rabid readers (although from what she can tell about them so far, she’s not sure satisfying her readers is possible because they are SO incredibly rabid), but she was kind of swamped (inundated, actually) with enthusiastic responses to her website. Yes, okay, so a lot of the praise was for the site designer’s (Jefferson Rabb’s) actual design of the site (”cool”, “hip”, and “modern” are three words Laura got really sick of hearing this week), but she, too, received her share of comments regarding the content. While most people (allegedly) enjoyed the faux-narcissistic voice of the third-person narrator (also known as “Laura The Branter”), one or two people (buzz-killers) doubted the fact that Laura is really as insecure as she makes herself out to be. In other words, they wonder if her self-deprecation is an act. This struck Laura as incredibly funny (in fact, she would have started laughing hysterically if she wasn’t already crying hysterically because of how wounded she felt having her credibility called into question like that). All Laura can say is that these doubters (buzz-killers) must not know her very well. In fact, Laura wants to reassure everyone that she is even more insecure in real life than she makes herself out to be on her website!

(OK, well obviously that’s a lie, but you know what she means.)

Laura also wants to call attention to the fact that her theories about celebrity narcissism (featured in “Piece of Work”) are actually based in sound scientific research. To prove that she does her homework before shooting her mouth off (even though, technically, she shot her mouth off long before this bit of supporting research was released), she’d like you to read this September 13th article from the Los Angeles Times — “Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans.” (Again, she’s providing the link even though she doesn’t know how to get the link to light up and do it’s linking-thing.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/cl-et-narcissism12sep12,1,5835330.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-entnews&ctrack=1&cset=true