Warning this post may be dangerous to your appetite

I've tried to get rich quick on several occasions, and I'm not talking lottery. You've proabably heard about the million dollar homepage (dot com). This college student who got the idea to sell a million pixels at a buck a pop made a million in four months. This is the kind of get rich quick scheme I'm talking about. I can't hide my petty bitterness for the college student, even though I acknowledge that it's based on envy.

Five years ago, I had a plan to make some money. I've always been attracted to enterprises that make all of their money during a certain season. You know like a Christmas tree peddler. They work like fiends for a couple months and then sit around the rest of the year. So that was why I was so gung ho for my calendar idea. People only buy calendars for a couple months of the year, so if you could sell enough, sitting pretty for the rest of the year seems viable. I think I've mentioned it before, but I created the Outhouse Calendar, wherein each month featured a gory shot of some overflowing shithole in an outhouse. I spent many weekends visiting hundreds of outhouses in search of the most gruesome scat scenes.

This was one of my favorites (replete with bloody tampon!). It has made some people gag.





Wait for it....









(pic removed, too gross)

I'm lousy at marketing, and so I only sold one. To my father. But I had a website and everything. I thought it would be a great gag gift, and then I could find different themes for future years, like "scabs" or "diapers".

Went through a spate of selling clothes on Ebay which was lucrative, but a lot more work than you can imagine. (Ladies, don't throw out your old flip-flops, weird people will pay like $50 for used ones - especially if it includes a picture of your foot in them.)

I also seem to remember a summer of painting terracotta pots and selling them at crafts fairs. (I shudder at the man-hour to revenue ratio.)

I would go on (and maybe make some kind of point) but you've probably already clicked away by now, horrified by the photo. I'll take it down tomorrow, wouldn't want that stinking up the page all week.