Jewcy Enters the Terrible Twos

It seems like only a year ago that I was sitting here, in this same room, at this same desk (rotated 90 degrees from how it is now), photoshopping funny pictures of a cartoon turtle holding a balloon in celebration of our first birthday. Of course it was longer than that. It was a year and a day.

I wanted to update you (and I mean you, specifically, VALUED USER WITH uid != 0) { print ‘USERNAME ‘ . $user->name; } else { print ‘IP ADDRESS ‘.$_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]; } ?>) about the fun changes that occurred in the second year of our magazine’s existence:

• Jewcy got visited by the set of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. They bought us a ping pong table and a foosball table and used our office for a 2-minute scene in the episode "The Self-Made." None of us have seen it yet. Jewcy made me sleep in the office overnight so someone would be around to watch the crew move out all their equipment at 5:30 the next morning. Weiss came to visit me at 11:00 that night with his girlfriend. Vincent D’Onofrio noticed that we had been staring at him for upwards of 20 minutes and finally, between takes, stopped and said, "How’s it going, folks?" We collectively blinked and each gave our version of "Hi."
• Super-intern Michelle Threadgould left us for greener pastures after a chronologically impossible sixteen years of employment with the company. She was succeeded by mega-interns Ma’ayan Rosenzweig and Jessica Miller, whose individual hours each slightly surpasses the combined length of all FDR’s terms as President. My summer was made simultaneously more and less difficult by Raphael Eidus’s internship as coder extraordinaire. Now, international woman of technology, Faustine Pollet, is filling that role while I reminisce in writing about "the good old days."
• We bid adieu to office manager Maya Wainhaus, but welcomed Todd Sloves in her stead. He does everything she did except for writing a Tetris blog.
• Tara Rice celebrated her landmark five-hundredth hour of enduring Canadian jokes from Todd over lunch. As payback, she mandated that we all eat salad for lunch four days a week.
• We said goodbye to Joey Kurtzman and Helen Jupiter, costing us a valuable Western Frontier outpost and leaving the Oregon Territory at risk for "Injun Attacks" and long, crying jags about how much we miss them so, so much.
• Weiss left Jewcy. Then came back.
• Izzy left Jewcy, but didn’t come back. Her spiritual successor, Lilit Marcus, started with us a few weeks ago, however, and filled the empty void in Simpsons references caused by Izzy’s departure.
• Lilit went on a week-long vacation exactly two weeks after starting here. Chapter review questions: 1) If she keeps up that pattern, how many vacation days will Lilit have used by the 71st week? 2) How many vacation days does Lilit get per year?
• Tahl got married. To a woman. One beautiful memory from the evening: "Ms. Laub caressed her husband’s shaved head while he wrapped his still-scarred arms around her as they swayed to their own beat."
• Izzy got married too, and while the New York Times didn’t do a write-up, MAD Magazine did.
• A French guy (unrelated to Faustine!) wandered into our office and asked if he could buy a t-shirt. "We don’t really sell them from here," Todd said, but Michael Tive, Jewcy’s General Manager, wouldn’t let a business opportunity pass us by. "You give me cash, I’ll get you a t-shirt," he said. "…With nail polish." And he did.
• Michael Tive admitted that at least part of his famed wheelin’ and dealin’ came from the wild days he spent at SONY Corporation, where all employees are required to both wheel and deal on a semi-weekly basis as part of company policy.
• Michael Weiss banned commenter "Rob" for being too right-wing for even our resident conservative.

And that’s basically all the important things that happened in the past year. I got to buy a few computers for the company, but if I’d wanted to bore you with things nobody understands I’d have mentioned part-time staff writer Jake Rake and his job description.

Maybe somebody else should write these things.

‘Til next year, Craig