Swine Flu Is So Last Week

Once again, the media have been complicit in advancing a fear-campaign over a flu outbreak that will probably fizzle out by the time I finish this sentence. Even NPR stooped to near FOX NEWS levels yesterday, transitioning from Obama's statement that there's no need for panic to the W.H.O.'s Level 4 Pandemic Alert in practically the same breath. I'm not even bothering to write jokes about it (unless untold thousands die, of course).

What's more disturbing to me is how many of my fellow Americans continue to drink the mainstream media's kool-aid. Disturbing but not surprising, though, because apparently a lot of them believe not only everything they hear on the news but also everything they hear on The Colbert Report.

No shit.

Now I know why right-wing freaks go on shooting sprees, driven by their fear of Obama taking their guns away - they have no sense of irony. Hey, what better way to stand up for your constitutional rights than by shooting a couple cops and getting killed in the process? That'll learn'em.

My New Favorite Toy

I recently got a new notebook computer from my employer and, of course, it has Windows Vista. The moment I opened Word, I hated it. Not only is it more bloated than Dom Deluise with all kinds of useless gadgetry but the most basic and useful of its tools (like the Print button) are tucked away in the many layers of its inscrutable menu system.

I have XP on the home machine and do most of my typing in Notepad and occasionally in Open Office Writer. Or at least I did until I came across a link on Joe Rogan's blog to a program called Dark Room. This bare bones text program features nothing but a full black screen and a couple of small, very discreet scroll buttons. Hit ESC and you'll get the pull-downs with the bare minimum of essential features. Otherwise, it's just you and your words, completely free of distraction. I've had it for one day, and I'm hooked.

And the timing couldn't be better, as I'm about to undertake the task of revising/re-writing my act from beginning to end. I'm not necessarily tossing years of jokes in the trash, but I am prioritizing the material I care most about and trimming a lot of fat. I've been featuring long enough that if the crowd isn't buying what I'm selling I can pull the dick jokes out and finish my time without catching a shot glass in the head. I like my dick jokes well enough and think they're original, as dick jokes go, but I've got bigger ideas to fry, and a lot of that material I put to paper when I started doing comedy has been sitting on my desktop for too long.

But finals are next week, and the kiddies will make their exodus to the Chicago burbs, and then it will just be me and my brain and Dark Room for four months, punctuated by good times with friends and good books and some shows I'm looking forward to. Which reminds me:

Saturday, June 13
Charleston, IL @ The Elks
PAT GODWIN
MATT HOLT
yours truly
.

Viva El Mysterio!

The Whiskey Daredevils turned in a stellar - nay, God-like - performance Saturday night at Bad Motherfucker Fest, our tribute to the recently departed Graham Lewis. If you've never seen these guys, put it on the list of things to do before succumbing to swine flu.

Thanks to everyone who came out and to Jake Pope of the Porn Again Christians for helping pull it all together, cranking out a great set, and putting me on the bill. Really, Jake, if I had known you were going to pay me, I would have at least tried to hit the 20-minute mark!

Susan Boyle's Makeover

If you look real close, you can see camel toe.

Bad Motherfucker Fest

This Saturday, April 25, I'm hosting the Graham Lewis tribute show, aka Graham Jam, aka Bad Motherfucker Fest, at The Top of the Roc here in Charleston, IL. That's his wallet in the pic. That's his pic in the pic. And that metal box contains Graham himself. Headlining the show is The Whiskey Daredevils (formerly The Cowslingers) long-time friends of Graham and Kit Lewis and the best no-bullshit rock band to grace Chuck Vegas in quite a while. This is not a private party, so come on out. Five thin dollars. Supporting TWD are Charleston's own Porn Again Christians and Mugwump Specific.

Danville, IL

The 140+ crowd at Sarge's Tap was great, especially considering the fact there were 5 comics on the bill. No matter how funny a line-up is, there's a time-limit on what an audience is willing to endure, but they endured. Rick Omundson did a great job of keeping the show rolling, and even with an intermission for the smokers, the energy in the room didn't suffer. My own set went over very well, better than I deserved in fact. I was a stuttering retard for at least half of it, and while I got the jokes out more or less intact, I'm willing to bet most of the video won't be usable as promo.

This is what happens when you've got a few friends in tow for a show. Instead of hanging out at the hotel getting your head straight or maybe taking a nap, you head to the tavern down the street at 5pm for their tasty $1.50 bloody mary's, and by show-time your performance ability is not exactly at 100%. You have a great time, and the very forgiving crowd likes you anyway (luckily, they are way more fucked up than you are), but when strangers shake your hand and offer compliments afterwards, you feel like you've just picked their pockets.

The folks I met at the show were all very cool, even the guy who couldn't resist telling me his favorite street jokes (which I forgot almost immediately). But the highlight of the night was the waitress at the truck stop diner where we ate a heart-stopping breakfast around 2am. "Oh, here, I forgot your fuckin' jelly." She didn't miss a beat.

Who Needs Aliens?

Once again, I picked the wrong day and time to "pop in" to the grocery store. Tuesday at 2pm is, apparently, Thoughtless Asshole Hour at County Market (which, by the way, is about as "county" as NASA). There were several open check-out lanes, but all of them had lines, and only one had a cashier actually scanning items. The others were at a stand-still because their cashiers were busy waiting on price checks, running to fetch cigarettes from the taxable sin vault, or paging someone over 21 to come approve someone's bottle of Shiraz. Stupidly, I chose the lane that seemed to be operating normally. I know better than to do this - not only from years of shopping for food but from years of merging into the only moving lane of highway traffic just to find myself at a dead stop, watching an ADD five year old in the car ahead of me conduct an improv puppet show with an Elmo doll and a box of Kleenex.

Children can be forgiven for failing to notice when nearby adults wish them dead, but people old enough to buy their own food have no excuse. Ahead of me is a sweet little old lady with two items: 1) a produce bag containing 3 small potatoes and 2) a loaf of Wonder Bread. Ahead of her is a woman of about 40 (kids in tow, of course) with a cartload of cookies, chocolate flavored cereal, and jugs of neon-red sugar water. And coupons. But she doesn't have a tidy file of coupons stacked and ready to scan. She simply hands the cashier the entire circular she grabbed on the way in the store, forcing the cashier to flip through the pages, find the corresponding coupons, rip them out one by one, and scan them.

While this is going on, the little old lady makes small talk with her about her kids. I pretend to be interested in the magazine rack (sorry Cosmo, but my erogenous zones are not a secret) while quietly hoping she and her future Type II Diabetic kids die in a mini-van fire in a chain-store parking lot. Finally, it's the little old lady's turn, and I'm home free. But wait, those potatoes rang up at 59 cents a pound, and the sign clearly said 49 cents.

She has half a pound of potatoes.

Are you FUCKING kidding me? my inner voice says. I mean, don't get me wrong, you're obviously mentally acute and pretty spry for your age, but do you really have time for this shit? Is that time worth less to you than a nickel?

The potatoes issue gets sorted out. Of course, the sweet little old lady didn't read the monitor right. Here comes the bread. Beep. "That was marked a dollar, I think." This time she volunteers to check herself and discovers - after what seems like 84 minutes - that she picked up the wrong loaf. It wasn't Wonder Bread on sale, it was Equally Shitty But Similar-Looking Brand Bread. Little old lady produces a dollar bill then proceeds to dole out the remaining 37 cents in as many coins as possible.

When I finally check out, I notice that every line I avoided is already gone and all the other lanes are empty. By the time I walk to the door, I've forgotten where I parked, what the weather is like, and even what day and time it is. It's like the missing time you hear about in alien-abductee stories. I don't know exactly where I've been, but I'm pretty sure I've been violated.

God is Fabulous!

Yeah, it's real. Finally the uber-Christian culture warriors have succeeded in creating an ad campaign that may be impossible to parody (though I hope SNL or Patrick Boivin give it a shot). What's hilarious is the storm metaphor. Historically, storms have been invoked to represent the wrath of God, who's favorite method of punishing folks for behaving like Christians and not burning gay people at the stake is to set loose a tsunami every so often. According to this ad, though, storms are the vehicle of choice for the unrestrained armies of gayness poised to smite all good God-fearin' breeders in their wake. Call it global flaming.

Message to the National Organization for Marriage: if you're going to spend millions on televised ad campaigns designed to rally the masses against evil, there are better targets.

Yeah, Someone Does Gotta Go

Not that I expect better from FOX, but turning economic collapse into "reality television" is a new low. And some of my friends wonder how I make it through the day without a cable subscription. Those of you who are at least 40 might remember that the whole selling point of cable, in the beginning, was that in exchange for a modest subscription fee, you could watch programming free of commercials.

That worked out. Now all TV is digital, there's more advertising than ever (often woven right into the programming, including the news), and if you want the commercial-free stuff, well, that's extra. Pay for the privilege of having my brain assaulted? Thanks, but I'll pass. The shows I would watch are usually available on DVD in pretty short order, and I don't feel left out because I didn't see the latest episode of LOST at the exact moment everyone else did.

Anyway.

If you're tired of watching the half-baked, spinned-out, bullshit version of what's going on with the economy, read this. Or this. Or maybe take a look at this. Or this. And when you're thoroughly convinced that all is lost and everything is hopeless, there's some good news - maybe, just like television, none of it is real.

North Carolina Wins NCAA Tournament!

[yawn]

"I'm Apathetic as Hell, and..."

When I'm not on stage telling strangers about my penis, I'm in front of a classroom of university freshmen telling them about writing and literature. Whenever I assign a new reading, I take a survey of my 70 or so students to see how many of them have read the poem/story/play, and the results are always the same:

ZERO.

I can understand that their high school English teachers weren't putting Russell Edson or Tobias Wolff on their reading lists (because they probably haven't read these writers themselves), but Hemingway? Really? Not only have the vast majority of the 19-year-olds I've met in the past several years never read a short story by Hemingway - they've never even heard of him. Ditto Franz Kafka, John Keats, Arthur Miller, Sophocles, Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, T.S. Eliot, Richard Wright, and Flannery O'Connor.

The results are so consistent, year after year, that they do in fact cease to amaze me. What hasn't yet ceased to amaze me is their equally dismal knowledge of film. I expect them not to have seen Jim Jarmusch's latest. I expect them to have never heard of Fellini. But believe it or not, in this week's survey of my current crop, I learned that more than 90% of them have never seen a Monty Python film. One (out of nearly 70) had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here's a partial list of the movies none of them have ever seen:

Network
Blade Runner
Barton Fink
Do The Right Thing
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Raging Bull
The Godfather
Harold and Maude
Trainspotting
The Usual Suspects
Being John Malkovich
Full Metal Jacket
The Big Lebowski
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Heathers

Some of these are less surprising than others. I'm not exactly shocked that none of them have seen Network, but given the ubiquity of the Howard Beale monologue (it's all over YouTube and featured in who knows how many documentaries), I am a bit surprised that not one of them has any inkling of it. One student has seen, and absolutely loves, A Clockwork Orange, but has never seen any other Kubrick film. The one who has seen 2001 has also seen Full Metal Jacket but had no idea that they were both directed by the same dude.

And that's what gets me. It's not so much the shallowness of their reading and viewing (fuck, they're 19) as it is the lack of basic intellectual curiosity that leads one to find out - almost without effort - that The Departed and Goodfellas were both directed by the same guy. One student had seen Mulholland Drive (Naomi Watts lesbian scene = hot). When I asked what other David Lynch films he liked, he answered, "Who's that?"

My students are people who do not remember a time when any piece of information was not available at their fingertips via the internet. But they don't bother, and that scares me. I get papers with every instance of the word their spelled there, despite the fact that I tell them on day one that spell-check doesn't give a shit if they have the wrong word so long as it's spelled correctly, and that dictionary.com is fucking free. Only one student this year bothered to type "Franz Kafka" - or any other author - into a search engine, and every semester at least one of them will ask whether they are required to know the authors of the works I assign. Why wouldn't you bother to know that? How difficult is it to note that Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis or that Jonathan Nolan's Memento Mori is indeed the story the movie Memento is based on, and yes, the director Christopher Nolan is his brother? How is it possible that an entire generation, who can learn any fact or factoid without leaving their dorm rooms, has no desire to do so? Really, I'm perplexed as hell.

To be continued...