Meet My Meat, Then Smoke It

By Robert Wilonsky Tue., Aug. 29 2006 at 1:59 PM

Categories: Stuff and Nonsense

These days, people are becoming increasingly paranoid about what unseemly things may appear about them on the ol' Interweb, especially in light of the fact that potential employers are Googling everyone on the planet.

But everybody's got a MySpace page. And anybody who's graduated from college in the past three years is on the Facebook. And I guess there are still a couple of people on Friendster. Those seem innocuous enough. If you don't want something stupid on your profile page, you don't put it there.

But if your name pops up on the social networking site Smokin A Phattie, I'm not sure too many people are going to stick around long enough to find out it's about cookin' grills and barbecues instead of, well, toking a bit of Ye Olde Cheeba. The Frisco-based site launched last week, and some of its newest users call themselves "Get'R Done," "PhatBastard" and "Just Smoke It." A classy bunch, verily! I called Edward Garcia, the site's founder, to make sure those were real folks signed up to the site, not just clever marketing ploys created by a savvy PR group, and he says they are.

Garcia tells Unfair Park they're only getting about 200 unique hits a day on the site right now, but I suspect their hits will go up once I tell you this: The first 800 folks to sign up will be in the running to win thousands of dollars' worth of barbecue paraphernalia. My meat consumption stops at poultry, and you can bet even I signed up. The site has all the bells and whistles (or should that be smoke and gaseous emissions?) of MySpace. Smokin' A Phattie users can post recipes, blogs and organize grillin' events. I guess that's how we know it's really a barbecue site. If it was for potheads, users would just be able to send each other virtual postcards that say, "Woooaaaah." --Andrea Grimes

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