YOU KNEW this was going to happen one day, right?
NEW YORK (AP) — Old school: The body is a temple.
The Next Big Thing, according to 31-year-old Joe Tamargo: The body is a billboard.
Tamargo, who runs a Web site LivingAdSpace.com, has started a new enterprise, selling advertisers the opportunity to permanently tattoo their messages on his body.
After posting his offer on eBay, the responses began to trickle in.
Two advertisers earned spots on his right arm — and put a little more than $1,000 in his pocket. A California pharmaceutical company last week posted an ad for pilldaddy.com for $500. On Thursday, Tamargo earned $510 to have "Save Martha! It’s a good thing. SaveMartha.com" permanently etched farther down the same arm.
"They say there’s nothing better in advertising than word of mouth," said Tamargo, who lives on Long Island. "I figured, this might be better."
Maybe he has something there, since tattooing has come a long way.
There was a guy who had a map of the United States tattooed all over his body. His private parts contained Arizona. They even wrote a song about him that had the lyric: "By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be rising…"
And then there was the guy who had a prenuptial agreement tattooted on his private parts. It didn’t stand up in court.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.