# 01 Jun 2004, 04:27PM: Life, Drugs, And:
On Wednesday I performed stand-up comedy for a SAGE Scholars graduation ceremony/fundraiser. I did okay. They loved the immigrant jokes, not so much the satirical opening (clichéd quotes and axioms). I'd say that no one reads Yeats anymore, except lots of people in the blogosphere have the same poem on our minds: The Second Coming. Maybe we grope for meaning and find this bit of Yeats, as after the 2001 terrorist attacks we found Try to Praise the Mutilated World.
On Thursday I went to Cobb's and viewed Nick Leonard, Joe Klocek, and Brian Regan. As per usual (how quickly I forget!), the openers were funnier than the headliner. Mr. Regan has a gift for caricature, and he resembles Alton Brown, but I only laughed maybe 20 times in the hour he performed. That's 40 straight-faced minutes. Well, one man's meat.
Cobb's brands its Cosmopolitan (a mixed alcoholic drink) as "The Cobbsmopolitan". Next: Cobb salad, corn on the Cobb, a male swan as the mascot.
On Friday I met Leonard's old friends from the Clark campaign over dinner at Pomelo, which had more vegetarian entreés in my recollection than on the menu. The week had left me a bit jaundiced, but they handled my bitterness with good grace. I drank sake.
On Saturday Leonard and I left for Bakersfield to visit the Richardson/Whitney clan. Leonard's grandfather seems stable, which is good. I got to see A Day Without a Mexican, which sprawled but had several nice touches.
"Boomers," the Bakersfield minigolf/arcade, has a Disney-branded Dance Dance Revolution machine. Among other tunes, it plays "M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E" and "Macho Duck," a "Macho Man" derivative starring Donald Duck. Creepy.
Leonard and I came back to San Francisco, visiting some friends in Mountain View (evidently not a total wasteland) along the way. I checked on Betty, my one surviving goldfish. She seems fine. I wish she would poop in my presence so I could verify that her whole digestive system is working, but you take what you can get.
Today I am listening to KSCU and answering customer email. The Religious Policeman has posted several new items. I should get more tea. This week I will actually write that article I've been postponing for months. Life is okay.
# 03 Jun 2004, 05:06PM: Poor Akshay!:
From 9 million to 265 to 2. The winning word: autochthonous. Second place: Akshay Buddiga, who fainted but recovered to spell "alopecoid" perfectly. I hope he is all right.
# 04 Jun 2004, 08:33AM: I Was Also Right About Carbs:
Bruce Sterling said, I have plants at the party. Who are there secretly and sort of organized with one another. And they aren't really made clear to the party members that they are there at all. They are covertly there. They are covertly organized. They have secret handshakes and recognition symbols.
What is their job? Their job is to monitor the party and see if enthusiasm is moving into an area of untoward radicalism. So they don't do anything blatant. What they do is stage small but effective party spoiling scenes.
I remember, when I was very young, I thought a similar scheme could stop the stock market from crashing or boiling over. A cadre would buy when everyone else was selling, and sell when everyone else was buying. People told me that such a scheme was unnecessary, since markets self-correct and investors act like that anyway. Now I believe that the pool of investors does not contain enough contrarians, and that probably buyers-in to my childhood fantasy would do well by doing good.
# 04 Jun 2004, 09:38AM: "Scum-Sucking Bottom Feeders":
The writer of a letter to the editor used this epithet, which doesn't quite work, in my view.
Jon Stewart has had the hilarious David Cross and the "Talking Points Memorized" Thomas Friedman on The Daily Show this week. Cross (who plays Tobias Funke on Arrested Development (Fox renewed it for another season! Yay!)) persuaded me to buy his CDs. Friedman whipped out his "more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria" message, leading Stewart to write down a recipe for "Thomas Friedman's Democracy Brownies". As Belle Waring said, "More federal than Syria? Frickin’ awesome!"
Is Syria's government really that monolithic? I mean, when I think "Syria", I don't think federalism or lack thereof is really the main problem. But what do I know, I majored in political science.
Speaking of Crooked Timber: these eminently contrarian, geeky people skewer all sorts of conventional wisdoms!
...apples and oranges are both fruits, both about the same size, cost about the same and have similar nutritional value. They're about the most eminently comparable things I can think of....
I will accept "chalk and cheese" as a valid metaphor.... Readers of a literary bent might have a go with "lightning and a lightning bug", but I've never really got it to work....
In taxation news: I walked through a corridor at work. Two coworkers occupied it, leaning against the walls while conversing and forming a narrow meniscus for passers-by. As I negotiated my way, one joked that I would have to "pay the toll". Most of the time, someone telling me that is a boyfriend asking me to kiss him, so I blushed bright red.
Well, a brighter shade of brown.
Filed under:
Comedy Taxes
# 04 Jun 2004, 02:44PM: How Could I Have Missed This?:
Josh Kornbluth interviews Richard Yancey (Love And Taxes monologuist and Confessions ex-tax-collector, respectively).
I guess the answer is that I missed it because I only bothered to register at the Washington Post two weeks ago.
Filed under:
Comedy Taxes
# 04 Jun 2004, 09:06PM: Annals of Compassion and Genius:
I was unduly cold and harsh to a customer today. I thought something like "why can't these people follow directions? why do they do any old thing and then whine that they didn't get the thing they wanted?" and snapped and wrote a snappish, condescending reply to someone who, as it turns out, was right, right, right, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
My boss found out and wrote me a gentle rebuke.
I thought I was going to have a performance evaluation today. I couldn't really concentrate on my work this afternoon, as the meeting got postponed, from 1 to 1:10 to 2:30 or "whenever the room goes free" to Monday morning. So now it will happen while my uncharacteristic and wholly without-basis outburst is fresh in everyone's mind.
Aren't I clever.
# 08 Jun 2004, 04:50PM: I Am A Nut:
I'm now basically stage-managing Heather Gold's show, "I Look Like An Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie". It'll run Sundays, June 6th through July 18th. Playgoers indeed receive fresh cookies at the end of each performance. You see, she bakes onstage, and the cooking is a metaphor. And every night is different, because she talks with different special guests as they stir and chop and so on. A neat concept, implemented well.
And there's music! And lighting changes! That's me.
# 09 Jun 2004, 03:50PM: Here Baby, There Mama, Everywhere Daddy Daddy:
Leonard and I gave each other buzz-cut haircuts on Sunday. I have never worn my hair this short before. I wonder whether my scalp will darken.
# 09 Jun 2004, 03:52PM: "You're as manly as the manliest tree on the Isle of Man.":
One of the best Five-Minute Enterprises yet: Hatchery.
# 14 Jun 2004, 10:03PM: Post-Weekend Update:
My performance evaluation went fine. Evidently I am doing a very good job but we still have ideas for goals and improvements.
My haircut makes me look like Anjali from Alison Bechdel's strip.
On Wednesday evening a guy harrassed me on the street in my neighborhood. I responded calmly and prudently but he unnerved me; this hasn't happened to me before in my neighborhood. Among his blithering I heard him ask whether I was Iraqi. Real reassuring.
I left work early on Friday to talk about tax history with a Berkeley professor and then to see Mike Daisey. Both rewarding. Then I basically spent the whole weekend working on Heather's show. No major mistakes on my part - huzzah! I'd forgotten how tedious and nerve-wracking shows can be. No offense, Heather.
# 16 Jun 2004, 10:07AM: Listening To:
Outside the Inbox, songs based on spam subject lines.
# 17 Jun 2004, 10:08AM GMT+5:30: Also We Were Eating Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto On Arugula:
This morning on BART, the person next to me was reading the same issue of Smithsonian as I was.
# 17 Jun 2004, 05:02PM: Just Two Months Early For Independence Day:
Two, two, two articles in today's Salon feature India or Indian-Americans. Philip Robertson, Salon's constantly-in-danger Iraq correspondent, profiles Sudip Bose, who is basically the Army's Dr. Bashir. (If only we had Sisko and Kira running this station, instead of Section 31.) And Charles Taylor (not the dictator) (I think) adores some epic cheese Hindi flick, noting in passing that Shahrukh Khan (whom you may recall from every Hindi movie since 1998) "sometimes seems the offspring of John Stamos and Jerry Lewis."
# 18 Jun 2004, 04:56PM: Copy, Paste, Delete, Copy, Paste, Delete-No-Wait...:
I can only stand this incredibly tedious task because I am listening to Do You Measure Up and the like. Also, I'm drinking my second cup of coffee of the day. I ordinarily drink coffee maybe once a month, while out with friends. Coffee, wine, and beer all taste awful. Another reason to go teetotal.
# 18 Jun 2004, 06:14PM: Men In Black And Blue:
Often, if I compliment a woman on her couture, she responds either with a compliment on my clothes or with a description of the item's provenance and bargain-basement price (e.g., "I got it while I was in [country], they use such great colors and textures there, and it only cost [amount]"). Both men and women sometimes respond to compliments with self-deprecation, but until yesterday I'd only seen women immediately, reflexively tell me how much they paid and where.
Yesterday, while waiting for a light to change, I admired a stranger's pleated/ruffled short-sleeved button-down shirt. It reminded me of Adam Parrish. I told him it was snazzy.
"Oh, thanks! Thriftmart, in the Mission, maybe six bucks."
We walked across Fourth Street, the crowd separating us, as I burst into guffaws.
# 22 Jun 2004, 04:30PM: Grumpy:
They should call it "allGoode Organic PuriTea with Peppermint, Red Clover, and Not Nearly Enough Licorice."
I've been sending some letters to soldiers via Books For Soldiers. Sample post: "My unit is deployed again. We have been on the road for the past three years and there are not many countries we havent been to over here. I hope that I can get some support for us. We are a group of 78 Marines. WE have access to DVD players, CD players, and a microwave. Dont have a lot of books or movies though."
I hope they enjoy my meanderings about public transit and my fish. Just bought some stamps, which didn't cheer me up as much as usual. Bah!
# 23 Jun 2004, 11:46AM: When I Get Depressed I Read Beliefnet:
Christianity (sort of) in Left Behind and Harry Potter.
Finally, they both have a theology. It's not, as one might expect, that Left Behind is Christian and Harry Potter pagan, but rather that Left Behind is Protestant and Harry Potter is Catholic. One of the chief theological arguments between Catholics and Protestants has been over whether salvation is earned through faith or by good works. In Left Behind, the only thing that matters is faith in Jesus. Steele explains that church leaders had led so many people astray because they merely "expected them to lead a good life, to do the best they could, to think of others, to be kind, to live in peace. It sounded so good, and yet it was so wrong. How far from the mark!"
While everything is pre-ordained in Left Behind, Dumbledore explicitly tells Harry that even though he carries some of the essence of Voldemort in him, he has the power to do good because he has the power of choice.
In that sense, despite their similarities, at their hearts the two series are different in a fundamental but not obvious way. Left Behind is fatalistic; Harry Potter sees outcomes determined by individual actions. Both provide a roadmap for how to live a good life, but in one case the key is morality, and in the other it is faith.
# 23 Jun 2004, 08:44PM: America's Moving Adventure:
Leonard just moved slightly further from my apartment. It will now be slightly harder to visit him for dinner four nights a week.
# 28 Jun 2004, 08:09PM: Retroactive Continuity:
Last night's show featured Carol Queen and Betty Dodson. Wow! I could pretend I named my fish after Betty Dodson.
# 29 Jun 2004, 07:15PM: I Could Tell You Stories, Wait, They'd Be Boring:
This weekend Heather et al. take a break from the show, which will help my mental health significantly. Unfortunately, I cannot use that long weekend to prepare for my comedy performance tomorrow, because it's tomorrow. Between now and 8ish pm tomorrow, I have to come up with and polish four minutes of material for a contest of sorts at the SF Comedy Club. Come if you'd like.
# 30 Jun 2004, 01:03PM: "The government should pay for goods and services in wishes and fairy dust.":
We should try not to spend much more than we earn, as people, as businesses, as governments. Note to Leonard: mentions agriculture subsidies!
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