Every day in October I will be rocking an A To Z Blog Challenge about my terribly terrific tattoos. Every day a new letter. Today is October 25 and the letter of the day is U.
U is for Uniporn. The story of the Dolphin and the Unicorn.
One day I was sitting in my office and I thought to myself “You know what would be cool, a picture of a unicorn humping a dolphin.” So I sent off an email to my Rocks Off designer extraordinaire, Glenn Hidalgo, that said “Glenn, I need a picture of a unicorn humping a dolphin in front of a rainbow, and it has to look all care bears style.” A couple of weeks later the line art came. A week after that this fully realized beauty:
I was stunned. It was perfect. But of course I had no use for it. I just printed it up and hung it on my refrigerator and home. Every day it would make me smile. It wasn’t til about 8 months later that it dawned one me – WHAT A GREAT IDEA FOR A TATTOO! So I went and got it done, naturally.
A week later my friend Phil emailed me and said “Hey I just started a new band called Children of the Unicorn. Its me and the always awesome Dave Hill! Let me know if you have any gigs for us.” I emailed the pic of the tattoo back to him and that ended up being the band’s album cover, and Phil asked me to join the band. So I did. He already had the full lineup – so I just played cowbell and tambourine, and generally added a heavy dose of awesomeness to our shows.
The tattoo was getting great reactions. So naturally I had to turn the image into a t-shirt. So we did. On pink shirts for boys, and on blue shirts for the girls. It quickly became our best selling shirt. YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BUY ONE BY CLICKING HERE.
And then came the song. My buddy David Blend hit me up and said “If I write a song about why a Unicorn would want to hump a Dolphin, could you find someone to record it?” I said sure, but asked what made him think of it. And he revealed his bigger plan for it to be an ad for a tattoo shop I own in Tucson, Arizona. The Magic Fun Store. Corn Mo recorded the song. B.A. Miale made the video. And the rest is viral marketing history.
It didn’t stop there. The English are big fans of Uniporn. Last year the Uniporn made a surprise appearance on the Graham Norton show. Which apparently is a talk show where the guests get drunk. Sounds like fun! This particular episode featured Mark Wahlberg, Minnie Driver, and some British dude talking about tattoos. Mahky Mahk talks about getting his removed – because he’s a faygo. Then Graham shows them some pictures of “questionable” tattoos and gets their reactions. Skip ahead to the 3:00 mark to get to the good part.
A couple of months ago, I got contacted by the producers of RudeTube, a British television program that collects and shows funny videos from the internet. For people who don’t know how to use the internet, I presume. They loved the Song and video and sent a crew to my house to interview me and B.A. who made the video. That went a little something like this:
But my all time favorite piece about the tattoo came from a hot chick. Well, she was hot. Not anymore. A few years ago I was watching the Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff and a relatively unknown comedienne named Whitney Cummings tore the house down with jokes like “Pamela Anderson’s here. Pam you’ve slept with Bret Michaels, Tommy Lee and Kid Rock. Why don’t you save yourself some time and drink a vat of Magic Johnson’s blood.” Pure class. I was immediately smitten. The next morning I looked her up online and went to her website. I started reading her blog, clicked to the the next page, and there was my arm, staring back at me. She was less than complimentary. But at least she was funny. I wish she was still funny. Oh well. Princess complex, indeed.
http://whitneycummings.tumblr.com/post/830425335/i-love-tattoos-obsessed-id-get-one-if-i-wasnt
Oh, and then there’s this asshole. No, I don’t know him.
Duuuuuude.