Jeff Wysaski
Local marketing intern, Dan Cheaver beat out numerous competitors this past Wednesday to become the first person to post a comment to celebrity actor Zach Braff’s January, 14 MySpace blog entry.
The feat was accomplished at 7:13 p.m., a mere one minute after Zach posted his latest update, titled “Check Out This Awesome Band I Just Discovered.” Immediately following the victory, an elated Dan was quoted to say, “Whoo! Yeah! Suck it two through infinity!” After a victory lap around his office cubicle, Dan added, “I rock!”
So just what was the winning comment? A short, but sweet declaration of “Flirst!” “Would I have liked to have spelled ‘first’ correctly? Sure, but I’ll take a misspelled victory over a 2nd-place comment any day,” Dan remarked in an interview conducted by fellow intern, Patty.
The fact that the winning comment is featured on a celebrity blog is all the more impressive. Avid blog reader Rand Molchester puts things in perspective – “this isn’t your rinky-dink best friend’s journal that receives five hits a month. Dan was competing with Zach Braff’s 343,000 MySpace friends for that top spot.”
Zach Braff is best known as the lovable goofball, J.D., on the hit show Scrubs, but is also world-renowned for his voice work, having leant his kid-like enthusiasm to such hit characters as Disney’s Chicken Little and the adorable puppy in the Cottonelle toilet paper commercials. Indeed, he has a very strong fan base, and Dan knew he had stumbled upon a rare opportunity when he visited the page “on a whim” to see if Zach had posted any thoughts about “doing another Very Merry Christmas with the Muppets.”
By luck, Dan noticed that the page had just been updated. The recentness of the new blog post immediately sent his adrenaline into overdrive as he clicked the link. A pure professional, Dan ignored the content of the posting and immediately scrolled to the bottom of the page. To his amazement, a blank comment section lay before him. Dan recalls that “everything went into, like, slow motion. When I was typing, I wasn’t even thinking. My body just took over.”
Dan’s experience is consistent with that of other seasoned blog commenters. Experts explain that when blogging superstars are confronted with a high-stress reply, they frequently enter something called “the zone,” a heightened state of awareness that delivers lightning-fast reflexes and maximum words per minute (WPM).
Dan attributes his success to an unusually slow day at the office. After visiting such daily time wasters as Facebook, Digg, Fark and director Kevin Smith’s blog, Dan adeptly surfed over to MySpace. “I was originally going to just post a bulletin about how bored I was. Then, I saw that my buddy Moocher had added Garden State to his list of favorite movies.” A few mouse clicks later and the rest was history.
At last count, Braff’s blog post had resulted in 72 comments. While many commenters were congratulatory of Dan’s success – with notes such as “good stuff” and “even better than the Shins’ last effort” – others were noticeably miffed. In fact, the sore losers of the bunch were so upset, they gathered en masse to rebuke Dan’s efforts, repeatedly calling him “gay.”
Not content to rest on his laurels, Dan is hoping to bankroll his newfound success into a lucrative TV career. He has already expressed interest in hosting an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels was unavailable when reached for comment.