Announcing TacomaHotOrNot.com

Local blogger and hopeful theater operator Erik Hanberg has announced a new project this week called TacomaHotOrNot.com. The new website will allow Tacomans to post pictures of themselves online and let other Tacomans rate their attractiveness. By the end of next year, he hopes that Tacoma has crowned a Hottest Woman and a Hottest Man.

In describing the website, Hanberg says that he’s going to feature something unusual for this kind of website: Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). “This November, the citizens of Pierce County voted to keep RCV. It was like the County ran a marketing survey for me—if that’s what voters want, that’s what voters will get.”

We had been curious about what his secret project was since the last City Council meeting, when a vote was passed 8-1 to award Hanberg $157,000. He confirmed that, indeed, the City of Tacoma had funded the startup.

“There’s nothing unseemly about the City wanting to rank the hotness of local citizens,” Hanberg said. “And I should be clear that this is entirely and absolutely unrelated to any secretive plan to keep the Russell Company in Tacoma.”

Russell? What does TacomaHotOrNot have to do with keeping Russell?

We sent a spy into the City building earlier this week posing as an “intern for a day,” who swiped us some confidential memos. What came back was startling.

TacomaHotOrNot is the first step in an elaborate plan to—quite literally—wed Frank Russell to Tacoma. Once the relative hotness of an individual has been established online, they will be recruited to identify, seduce, and marry an employee of the Russell Company. They will then be offered a 10 year property tax abatement on any home in Tacoma they desire. Marry into the Director level or above and the rewards grow exponentially. The specifics of this particular tier of the program were not available at this time as city staffers are waiting for the next biennial budget to release details.

City Manager Eric Anderson admitted the plan was in motion and was one of the first initiatives of Project Mirror Room, a project working jointly with Project Destiny. “Do you realize it’s going to be 2008 in just a few days?” he said. “The clock is ticking. If we can get Russell employees tied down to our fair city by marrying them off to Tacoma’s hottest citizens, we need to start today.”

Can non-hot Tacoma citizens help as well?

“Absolutely,” Anderson said. “Those who don’t rank highly on the site will be given driver’s licenses with Bellevue addresses and sent to bars up north on Friday and Saturday nights. The Russell employees who live in Seattle and Bellevue will start to find the dating scene suddenly leaves a lot to be desired … ”

Disclaimer: We may occasionally stretch the truth or make things up on Fridays… but only when there’s a disclaimer. Everything else is absolutely true … Trust us.

Previously on Exit133