<-- hot
Dec 30, 2008
Dec 28, 2008
Fuck Nirvana
I bought this on cassette when it came out in 1985 and played it till it broke, which was in early 1986. For Xmas this year my brother bought me an iPod, and the first thing I did after setting up iTunes was search for things I used to own, didn't think they'd have, and didn't think I'd even care for anymore. I was wrong on both counts. LOVE was one of the most underrated albums of the 80's. When everyone was eating up hair metal or U2 (yes, I ate up U2, too) The Cult were doing straight up rock and roll, and this album is a monument to pre-grunge/pre-emo goodness. What is "emo" anyway? We used to call it "You're 20 so quit yer bitchin' and rock already."
Dec 25, 2008
Dec 19, 2008
Dear YouTubers:
A lot of you do, anyway. First of all, still pics of starving children you added some misspelled text and an Enya song to is not a video, it's a slide show. In case you missed the memo, slide shows have been the stereotype for boring people half to death since the 1950's.No matter what I search for on YouTube, most of the "videos" are mash-ups of footage the user didn't shoot and music the user didn't write. I guess that's to be expected, though, because we live in a pretender society. Instead of buying a guitar, we buy Guitar Hero. Instead of seeing original bands, we pay to see cover bands and do karaoke.
If your idea of a video is hijacked newsreels of bombings and a Rage Against The Machine soundtrack, stop wasting bandwidth and leave room for people who actually create something. With the extra free time, you can jerk off and pretend you're getting laid.
Eat It
The two of you who visited the previous incarnation of this site might remember my rant about the doctor whose response to my cholesterol numbers was to whip off a statin prescription. No conversation, no questions about diet or exercise, just five seconds of scribbling for big pharma thanks see ya.Fuck that. I got myself back to the gym and oatmeal 6 days a week, and guess what, "doctor" - I lowered my cholesterol by 30 points, and your statin sits unopened in my medicine cabinet. Eat it, whore.
*The opinions in this blog are not necessarily those of Quaker Oats.
Dec 18, 2008
Playboy's 55th Anniversary Issue
When I bought my house in 2004, I gave myself a Playboy subscription as housewarming gift. One way or another, my house was going to have naked women in it. This past year I almost didn't renew because, naked women or not, Playboy was starting to bore me [yeah yeah insert gay joke here aren't you clever shut up hack]. First of all, CGI "women" from video games are not hot and do not deserve a pictorial. Second, too many bottle blonds with enhancements (yawn). I can see that at the gym. Lastly, if Playboy needs to offer renewals at $15.97 a year, chances are most subscribers aren't in the market for a $14,000 bottle of scotch.I'm glad I didn't cancel, though, because the January 2009 issue is great. Christopher Hitchens weighs in on the Bush administration (and not in the way you might expect), Scott Turow provides the fiction, and there's a feature on Norman Mailer. The only thing that could improve that line-up would be a dispatch by the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson, as channeled by Jim Goad.
I know it's a cliche, but in my case it's true: I read Playboy for the hot naked tail. I am totally unapologetic about that, so if you're one of those "Playboy demeans women" people, handcuff yourself to a brass pole and blow me. This month's featured hot naked tail is Dasha Astafieva, who hails from the Kingdom of Hott, a.k.a. The Ukraine. I would crawl through nine miles of unwiped ass to assassinate a president-elect for this one. And yes, I did just manage to say "ass" three times in a four-syllable stretch.
Dec 17, 2008
CrumMyspace
Now that I've got this site pretty much tweaked to my liking, I'll be spending more time here and less time on Myspace. I did finally cave in and join Facebook at the urging of just about everyone I went to grad school with, and I have to say that the folks who built it are programming gods. Facebook makes Myspace look like so much shiny garbage, and I've given up on trying to make my MS page viewable to people over the age of fourteen. Besides, Facebook allows me to auto-import this blog through Feedburner, so I don't have to post anything twice.
To my comic buddies who have yet to build a real website: I highly recommend starting with Blogger or WordPress or some other blogging tool (this site is a Blogger template). The apps and widgets and gadgets are vastly superior, dead easy to configure, and if you have your own domain you can redirect the whole shebang there.
Get on it.
To my comic buddies who have yet to build a real website: I highly recommend starting with Blogger or WordPress or some other blogging tool (this site is a Blogger template). The apps and widgets and gadgets are vastly superior, dead easy to configure, and if you have your own domain you can redirect the whole shebang there.
Get on it.
Dec 15, 2008
The Ultimate Comedy Writing Secret Revealed!
Though I've only been doing comedy for just under four years now, I occasionally get asked by one of the younger guys at a show or via email what I do to come up with material. And I've seen the question posed on comic forums more times than I can recall. While comedy is a relatively recent venture for me, I've been writing one thing or another for 20 years (and been published), and I've been teaching writing for more than half that time. So for those of you still looking, here it is - the ultimate, eyes-only, super-duper secret to writing jokes:
Don't.
You read that right. Don't write jokes. Please don't misunderstand me - when you get on the comedy stage you better have jokes. But when you sit down to write (you do sit down to write, don't you?), the last thing you should worry about is whether what you write will be funny right then and there. Just write. Even when you do not feel inspired or have the foggiest idea what to write about, just write. Pick a topic at random - politics or pancakes - it doesn't matter, and fill a page with any and every thought that comes to you. Maybe you had some shitty pancakes at Denny's yesterday. Write about that. Maybe that will trigger a memory of those awful Sunday family breakfasts at Denny's when you were a kid, you know, the ones after church, and how the food always seemed unusually shiny and the waitresses kind of hot because you were 12 but you just came from church where maybe they made you feel guilty about fantasizing about Denny's waitresses and bam - you're onto something. Or maybe not. Who cares? Just write it, file it, and move on.
Most writers of any genre will tell you that most of what they put on paper ends up in the trash eventually. But if they didn't do it every day, they'd never get that small percentage of stuff that works. For every killer 10 minutes you hear a comic do, there's another 20 in a landfill somewhere. Ditto for novelists, poets, journalists, and screenwriters. It's not about inspiration or being some kind of genius. If you're waiting for funny to leap out at you from the label on a peanut butter jar at the store, don't be surprised if you emcee for five years. And if you're watching TV with a notebook in your hand, quit that shit. I'm not saying don't do TV jokes, I'm just saying that anything that jumps at you from the tube is also jumping at every other comic in the country who's flipping through channels in a hotel room somewhere. Turn it off, draw the blinds, shut off the phone for half an hour every day and push that pen.
As for books on writing, most are bullshit. You could fill an entire Borders with all the books ever written that promised to show you the secrets to writing success, which begs the question... if even one of them was the real deal, how did all the others get published? They got published for the same reason shitty romance novels get published - there's a market for them, and that market is the untold thousands of wanna-be writers who are convinced that there's some magical secret laid out in a book (if only they could find it!). There is only one book on writing that I would recommend without much reservation. It's by Stephen King, and it's called On Writing. It doesn't matter that King is not a professional comedian (though he is funny) or a writer of high-falutin' "literary" fiction. On Writing is the most bullshit-free writing book out there. And it's available as a mass market paperback, so it's cheaper than most to boot.
"But Ron Shock and Louie Anderson say they never wrote anything down!" Yeah, but Ron Shock is a natural story-teller, and Louie Anderson is an elephant. And even so, they constitute, what, maybe .03% of the comics who ever made a living at it? Ellen DeGeneres wrote every day, and even on days she didn't put new words on the page, she went through her act and found ones to cross out. George Carlin had a filing system that rivaled the IRS. Most of us have to write, revise, re-write, edit, AND do the shit on stage half a dozen times before tossing it and moving on. It's writing, not rocket science.
One last thing that I used to tell my writing students when starting something new from scratch: If your pen isn't moving, you're thinking too hard.
You're welcome.
Don't.
You read that right. Don't write jokes. Please don't misunderstand me - when you get on the comedy stage you better have jokes. But when you sit down to write (you do sit down to write, don't you?), the last thing you should worry about is whether what you write will be funny right then and there. Just write. Even when you do not feel inspired or have the foggiest idea what to write about, just write. Pick a topic at random - politics or pancakes - it doesn't matter, and fill a page with any and every thought that comes to you. Maybe you had some shitty pancakes at Denny's yesterday. Write about that. Maybe that will trigger a memory of those awful Sunday family breakfasts at Denny's when you were a kid, you know, the ones after church, and how the food always seemed unusually shiny and the waitresses kind of hot because you were 12 but you just came from church where maybe they made you feel guilty about fantasizing about Denny's waitresses and bam - you're onto something. Or maybe not. Who cares? Just write it, file it, and move on.
Most writers of any genre will tell you that most of what they put on paper ends up in the trash eventually. But if they didn't do it every day, they'd never get that small percentage of stuff that works. For every killer 10 minutes you hear a comic do, there's another 20 in a landfill somewhere. Ditto for novelists, poets, journalists, and screenwriters. It's not about inspiration or being some kind of genius. If you're waiting for funny to leap out at you from the label on a peanut butter jar at the store, don't be surprised if you emcee for five years. And if you're watching TV with a notebook in your hand, quit that shit. I'm not saying don't do TV jokes, I'm just saying that anything that jumps at you from the tube is also jumping at every other comic in the country who's flipping through channels in a hotel room somewhere. Turn it off, draw the blinds, shut off the phone for half an hour every day and push that pen.
As for books on writing, most are bullshit. You could fill an entire Borders with all the books ever written that promised to show you the secrets to writing success, which begs the question... if even one of them was the real deal, how did all the others get published? They got published for the same reason shitty romance novels get published - there's a market for them, and that market is the untold thousands of wanna-be writers who are convinced that there's some magical secret laid out in a book (if only they could find it!). There is only one book on writing that I would recommend without much reservation. It's by Stephen King, and it's called On Writing. It doesn't matter that King is not a professional comedian (though he is funny) or a writer of high-falutin' "literary" fiction. On Writing is the most bullshit-free writing book out there. And it's available as a mass market paperback, so it's cheaper than most to boot.
"But Ron Shock and Louie Anderson say they never wrote anything down!" Yeah, but Ron Shock is a natural story-teller, and Louie Anderson is an elephant. And even so, they constitute, what, maybe .03% of the comics who ever made a living at it? Ellen DeGeneres wrote every day, and even on days she didn't put new words on the page, she went through her act and found ones to cross out. George Carlin had a filing system that rivaled the IRS. Most of us have to write, revise, re-write, edit, AND do the shit on stage half a dozen times before tossing it and moving on. It's writing, not rocket science.
One last thing that I used to tell my writing students when starting something new from scratch: If your pen isn't moving, you're thinking too hard.
You're welcome.
Hey Keanu...
...can you play a wooden, humorless anti-hero in an over-hyped train wreck of a remake for 8 million dollars?Cool. Thanks.
Dec 10, 2008
Bendovabitch
If you get the leading "Big News" page at The Huffington Post, you have fucked up. If you're a Democrat with aspirations to the presidency (and have the hair-helmet to prove it) and you get the leading "Big News" page at The Huffington Post, you have monumentally fucked up and are beyond the aid of any attorney, spin-doctor, or stylist.Christophe could not save you.
It's over, B-Rod. You might want to consider a crew-cut, or at least something that will offer the folks down in Marion less grip.
Dec 9, 2008
Dec 8, 2008
Yes, I'm on it. That makes one Facebook, one Myspace, one Youtube, and this site. I am now, officially, a fourteen-year-old fat girl.
Back
I took some time off from updating/revamping this page (and the myspace) for two reasons. First, my good friend Graham Lewis died in October. He was 46. He was also a fat bastard with a heart enlarged by a factor of three and a daily regimen of high blood pressure meds, asthma meds, and Viagra. Throw in some sleep apnea, some chain-smoking, some Jim Beam, and no exercise for 25 years, and there's no need to look at the autopsy report.
Second, I have no comedy career to speak of at the moment. I had a busy October up until the death, opening for Larry Reeb, Nick Gaza, and the Assholes of Comedy show in Peoria. But since then I haven't even stepped onstage at an open mike, and I have nothing on the book for the rest of 2008. That will change in '09, so drop by from time to time to check out clips and dates as I add them. Or join the mailing list below.
Second, I have no comedy career to speak of at the moment. I had a busy October up until the death, opening for Larry Reeb, Nick Gaza, and the Assholes of Comedy show in Peoria. But since then I haven't even stepped onstage at an open mike, and I have nothing on the book for the rest of 2008. That will change in '09, so drop by from time to time to check out clips and dates as I add them. Or join the mailing list below.
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