Your Free Trip to SxSW Starts Now!

If you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you’re not at South By Southwest and you didn’t get to see Quentin Tarantino sitting alone, writing in his journal at the Omni Hotel bar*, let me see if I can’t give you a feel for what it’s like.

In the exhibition hall, a few booths down from my employer’s booth, there is a booth for company called Yam Trader. Their sign attempts to convince you that “everybody’s jumping on the yamwagon!” In order to entice you to hop on said yamwagon, they’ve spent two entire days erecting and painting a 20-foot-tall styrofoam yam.

It’s hollow and has two doors, so you can enter the yamhut, where presumably they either talk your ear off about whatever Yam Trader is or hit you over the head with a blunt object and forcibly bundle you off to the yamwagon. Who has two thumbs and is not about to find out? This gal! JUST TRY TO FORCE ME INTO YOUR YAM GULAG**, FIENDS.

Perhaps I am overreacting, but the fact remains that this is an event for which a company thought spending thousands of dollars to build a giant foam yam was a smart marketing idea. It’s not even an attractive giant foam yam.

Also, a slice of pizza costs seven dollars.

There you go! Now you know what it’s like to be here.

*I presume he was writing angsty poetry. 

**Don’t even THINK about using “Yam Gulag” as the name of your new Scandinavian doom metal/folk band, because I am already on that shit like white on rice.

ETA: I am actually really happy to be here, despite what this post may sound like. Also, I welcome our yam overlords.

EETA: No yamimosity here!