Monday, June 30, 2008

Who's Going to Kill Me?

Now I know the odds are that no one is going to kill me. The odds are much better that I’ll die in an accident or kill myself either by suicide or slowly by smoking, eating or breathing too much. But forget the odds. For some reason, worries tend toward murder and how to avoid it.

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My New Improv Comedy Class

Hey, kids!

I'm thinking of starting a school for people who want to act funny or be funny when they're acting ;).

The class is called:

Comedy is So Easy!

We'll only meet once for ten minutes. I'll be teaching the first two rules of comedy, which are all I have so far.

1. Using anything that's not deodorant as deodorant is funny.
2. Acting like you're in slow motion is funny.

If you sign up now, I'll include an extra minute or so on the double, triple and, for advanced comedians, the quadruple take.

It's only $625.

Please pass this link on to your friends if they'd like to be funny. And have a funny day, homo. (I think I just came up with rule 3!)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The Daily Show Isn't That Funny Anymore


During the writer's strike, I stopped watching both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Recently, I started watching both again.

I was glad to see that Colbert was still at the top of his game. His charm giving center and focus to his charmingly assholish character.

However, the Daily Show has lost most of its steam. I don't think that Stewart or his team realize that the two things that made the show are now lacking. Those two things are: 1. Fantastic correspondents, and 2. A consistent world view.

The great correspondents have mostly moved on, except Samantha Bee maybe. We're getting the Ellen Cleghornes or the Seth Meyers replacing Tina Fey version of correspondents, with exceptions including Bee, a rare Dimitri Martin or PC guy appearance.

And the point of view of the show has dried up. That point of view was generally, Look at this bullshit, look what it's hiding. Stewart's venom at the artifice of politics is his best stuff (more and more I see his humor as a Robin Williams-light like pastiche of all the comedy that has come before him). Nowadays, he seems as stifled by the news media's fetish for chewing on whatever cud you get served up. Stewart is silent on impeachment and fair-to-middlin' on the various investigations which are now unveiling the armor in this administration that he helped crack. But even worse, he hasn't been very funny doing it. The bits are too sketchy and the punchlines too tepid.

This isn't to say that he has to make fun of Bush. It just means that when he's making fun of the left he has to be funnier than Rush Limbaugh. I know Conservative framers love to make it seem like we can't handle Obama being criticized. It's worse than that actually. I can't stand to be embarrassed by gags like the "Hummer Copter," which if Don Imus did would have him off the air again.

So last night, Stewart tells us it's OK to laugh at Obama. He told a couple of flat jokes about the pseudo Presidential seal Obama's team has been putting on the Senator's podium. He spent two minutes explaining the symbols without one decent joke. When the audience seemed pained. Stewart explained that we are allowed to laugh at Obama.

Yeah, it's OK to laugh at Obama. Stewart has spoken. But what he really means is, Please laugh at me. Unfortunately Stewart's character hasn't been the charmingly assholish one.

But the good news is that if the Daily Show is on, I can put the TV on mute and wait a little bit for Colbert to be an asshole on purpose.

Shaq Disses Kobe Rapstyle

The Never Afraid Society meeting had been canceled twice in row when they met for the last time. Before they could move on from old business to new business, Philip, the Historian of the club, stopped the meeting to report that he smelled gas.

Leila, the Sergeant-at-Arms, insisted that what Philip smelled was actually the smell of heart disease, which is the nation’s greatest killer. All of their hearts were rotting, from cholesterol or use or heartbreak, and Leila was sure that was the stench that was seeping into their nostrils.

Derrick, the President, was uncomfortable around conflict; even Venn diagrams and sentences containing semicolons put him ill at ease. He’d seen the disagreements between Philip and Leila over minute details, such as the minutes, erupt into knockdown, drag-out snippy stare fests. And the thought of a moment in distress spurred his brain, which raised his gavel and adjourned the meeting.

Philip shouted, “What about my principled rejection of arbitrary decisions by those in authority?”

“I’m sorry,” Derrick said. “You’ll just have to suck on your principled rejections today.”

“Here, here,” Leila said, seconding the emotion. She then begged all nine members to wear both sweaters and turtlenecks to the next meeting to contain the stench of their decaying hearts.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

The boy with a dorsal fin was rarely invited to parties, and never to pool parties. He wasn’t an outcast the way the girl with the blow hole on her forehead had become because besides his dorsal fin was so often out of view, contained by a hood or a cape or other flattering accessories. He didn’t have sonar, as many supposed he did. His skin was flax-colored, crusty where his bones hinged. He would often leave flakes of himself, which was helpful when he was wondering in the forest or exploring new continents, as he did later in his life. In his teens, he wanted his dorsal fin removed. He called a family meeting. It turned, the way his family meetings often did, into a human triangle with his mother on top of him and his brothers and sister shouting orders, reminding them all of the proper manner in which to brush their teeth. “Hit the gums!” she’d yell, again and again. “Give them hell.” The boy with the fin supported the weight of his heaviest and clumsiest brother at the bottom of the human triangle. His heaviest and clumsiest brother grappled with the dorsal fin, loosing his balance and regaining it over and over. But he never fell and the triangle remained until their mother was done explaining how brushing one’s teeth should never be done in circles, but in squares or rectangles or parallelograms, perhaps triangles. And that’s when he realized that he’d keep his fin forever, even if meant he’d be buried face down.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Meanest Man Contest---MP3 Internet Downloads

As you get older you realize that being mean isn't a choice; it's an inevitability in this shitty, shitty world.

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The Dublin Valley YMCA was famous for its indoor pool. J. Scott Jefferson, the town’s only luminary, had built the cavernous building into the side of a rolling hill near the beach at the turn of the 20th century as a greenhouse for his collection of non-native vines and dandelions. A grid of windows occupied the north side of the building. Black frames containing white glare at most hours of the day. In late afternoon, the field of brush, green and soft shades of brown most times of the year, could be seen through the panes. J. Scott had told his friends, when he had them in the later more philanthropic period of his life, that he had framed more than a dozen natural Van Goghs, if Van Gogh had lived in California and never discovered absinthe. During the summer, at all hours of the day, the children of Dublin Valley filled the pool with the little, soft bodies, flailing arms, sloppy splashing and, let’s be honest, sweat and pee. As the sun would set, the building became dark in minutes. The windows lost any color any sense of transparency at all if a lifeguard or another staff member did not turn on the long rows of fluorescent lights that had been installed above. At night the wall of windows was perfectly and absolutely black, just the way J. Scott and his vines and dandelions liked it.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Can music kill you?

A music video channel show that channels a little bit of Jackass and a lot of Mythbusters. The guy with a mustache looks like an evil Jim Croce.

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Monday, June 16, 2008

Failing 1.23 Million Kids—The Crisis in Our Public Schools

Despite every good intention, America’s schools are on the verge of (or in the midst of) colossal failure. Our current educational system was created in the late 19th century, expanded to serve immense numbers of students in the 20th century and finds itself paralyzed by a war between conservative and progressive philosophies in the 21st century.

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Bill Moyers on the Importance of a Free Press to Democracy

Thursday, June 05, 2008

That's Not Change We Can Believe In

How The Vagina Actually Works