In the Spirit of Mitch Hedberg

This is actually the worst of Hedberg's three comedy albums. Recorded live, it had a lot of material that was being tested for Hedberg's upcoming HBO special. His other CDs, Strategic Grill Locations and Mitch Altogether are much more polished.


The last week or two have been pretty noteworthy. Instead of Jack Handy, it seems I was channeling the late master of paraprosdokians, Mitch Hedberg.

• Two things I never learned in college were how to properly take Adderall and the Greek alphabet.
  
  
• I thought someone parked a motorcycle in the little crosswalk between some handicapped parking spaces, but it turned out it was just a guy in a wheelchair. I felt bad and hoped he didn't see me staring, but then I realized he was a quadriplegic and couldn't turn his head. I still felt bad, but at least now I knew he couldn't see me staring.
  
  
• Sometimes I like to stick a blueberry or a raisin inside a raspberry and pretend like I'm eating some new kinda fruit. Then I usually ask why I paid so much for some crappy fruit that tastes like two fruits I already had. What the fuck was I thinking?
  
  
• I want to make a line of t-shirts exclusively for wolves. They'll all be black with pictures of my face straining and howling at a full moon.
  
  
• My friend's car broke down today and started leaking some kinda green liquid on the ground. It was the first time I got to say, "Augh! I'm stepping in tranny fluid!" and it wasn't weird. That's a lie. It was completely weird. Just not as weird as the other times I have to say that.
  

On Women

Men (and male impersonators), listen up. I am about to drop wisdom on you.

Granted, this is mediated by their individual personalities, but in almost all cases the more beautiful a woman is, the more she hates her feet.

And this is actually pretty understandable. Feet are, after all, pretty weird to look at. All boxy and trapezoidal. What are they doing down there? Fuckin' miracles all up in this bitch.

But see the logic in play: the more beautiful a girl is the fewer physical traits she has to complain about. At the very least, a woman cannot walk around actually saying that she thinks of herself as a Venusian goddess. All her friends would hate her for being such a shallow, conceded bitch.

However at the same time, I truly believe that until a woman achieves that level of bitchy hotness, psychologically she needs to be able to find something awful about her appearance to keep her in line, to keep her from being completely unlikeable, to have something to strive for and work towards. It's like an equilibrium of looks, keeping a mentally healthy level of body dysmorphia.

1) The more attractive the woman, the fewer unattractive physical traits.
2) Feet are weird.
.:/ A woman can always fall back on hating her feet.

Moreover, she's going to rely on this hatred for her pedis as she frightfully approaches the self-realization of critical hotness, that tipping point between giving up and becoming an egotistical whore and accepting small imperfections as natural and beautiful in their own way, allowing her to age gracefully and not turning into a slutty supernova.


Interestingly, it has recently been pointed out to me that shoes are absolutely adored by women for almost the opposite reason: shoes will always be designed to be cute.











Once a woman knows her shoe size, she'll pretty much never have to worry about not fitting into them perfectly.

A dress has to be taken in, let out, hemmed, pinned and all of this at the women of genes, weight, and even water retention, but shoes, shoes vary much less in design.

Even if a girl tries on a hundred dresses, once she has a dress she finds acceptable, even merely passable, there will be cute shoes available no matter what. Those shoes might be the saving grace of an entire outfit.

Men: never question your lady's shoes.

However, if you're still trying to find an in with a lady, I might recommend aiming a gentle put-down at her feet.

Try to work in an off-handed Daddy Issues comment at the same time. Works wonders.

On Salt

I went grocery shopping the other day, pretty much entirely for sandwich finxin's, whole wheat and white bread, tomatoes, cheeses, roasted beasts and the like.

There are really only three guys who work the deli counter at our local A&P: Old Italian Guy, who always gives me a few slices of everything to snack on as long as it's not very busy; Young Latino Guy, who actually speaks perfect English and can handle orders in both metric and Imperial measurements and is always happy and talkative; and of course 14 Year Old Pudgy White Boy Who Never Remembers An Order, Can't Seal A Deli Ziplock Bag For Shit and Has Cost Me Many Dollars In Cheese Going Moldy Too Fast Who Always Calls Me "Sir."

If you don't already hate this kid as much as I do, he's basically one more testicle descending away from being this wonderful fellow:



However, this last trip was a bit more fun for me.

It was relatively busy and everyone was working at once. Obviously, I got stuck with Chubs and so made my order one piece at a time and slowly. Twice each. I began with 3/4 lb. of roast beef.

"Regular or salt-free?" he asked. (Not an unreasonable question.)

"Regular," I said.

"…Salt-free is on sale, though." Really? Have I already begun the physical metamorphosis fated me by my Yiddish grandpaternity? Have I taken on the appearance of a wrinkled, old diabetic who splurges at every opportunity to consume the same delicious sodium chloride which will one day raise my blood's pressure high enough to burst forth from its arterial prison and pool inside my brain cavity? Have I?

"No. Regular is fine," I assured Whitey.


As "The Beaver" sliced my beef (not a metaphor), something which he had to pause in to check if I had wanted a half-pound (wrong), I muttered under my breath:

"I LIKE salt."

This was apparently and I swear completely unintentionally hilarious, at least to the woman in line next to me. In her late twenties and shopping with someone who seemed to be her affable mother-in-law, she was young enough still remember how delicious bad food is but still old enough to appreciate the willfulness to relinquish adult responsibilities and malign annoying people in public.


Fuck that kid. I like me my salt.

On Bret Michaels

I opened up my BBC News feed yesterday morning to discover former Poison singer and reality show persona Bret Michaels has suffered a brain hemorrhage.

The linked article states that he has dizziness, blurred vision and is suffering from slurred speech.


So basically nothing has changed for Bret Michaels since 1988.

On Fruit

This is why we can't have nice things.



Seriously, guys? Seriously?

We didn't have enough fucked up fruits and plants and shit lining our grocery store shelves already, we had to go and genetically splice strawberries with pineapples?

It's a strawberry. It's already delicious. You don't need to forcibly crossbreed it with a pineapple, admittedly already another delicious fruit, if not one with a somewhat jaded past. (I can't seem to find it, but I still feel at some point I've covered the history of the pineapple. Quick refresher: pine cones were called pineapples because they hung in pine trees like fruit. Then someone discovered a fruit, called in a pine-y apple and the two were called the same thing until some other guy said, "This is retarded. Let's just call the one that's actually a fruit an apple. The other one can be a cone or some shit.")

ANYWAY.

The point is we really didn't need this. Yeah, it sounds delicious and yeah, I'd love to get my hands on one and am willing to pay an exorbitant fee for it, but, guys. Guys. Really? Did we really need to make a bizarro-strawberry that tastes like a pineapple? It doesn't even taste like a combination of the fruits, which is an absolutely delicious grouping of flavors! It's just a very tiny pineapple with less peeling involved. (Which actually sounds wonderful. Maybe it's a fruit of convenience. You know, like those dog purses. Just slice up a few of these and a few real strawberries and voila, pretty fruit salad.)

Still, I really didn't need to deal with this in my life right now. You'd think it wouldn't affect me, but this is just one more act of humanity playing God that I'll need to justify in my world view.


And I mean I already feel like enough of an asshole when I open my fridge and put tomatoes into the little drawer marked "VEGETABLES" instead of the one that says "FRUIT."

On Impossible Things

6 Things Which Are Impossible:

1. Altering the coefficients of any of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) within the confines of the three common physical dimensions, width, depth and breadth.
2. Boiling distilled water at temperatures lower than 212˚F at sea level.
3. Proving with any significance that we are, or at leas I myself am, not currently alive.
4. Accelerating any subluminal mass to speeds greater than the value of c in a perfect vacuum.
   
5. Lowering the temperature of anything anywhere ever to or less than -273.15˚C, or raising it above (1.416785(71) × 10³²)˚C.
   
6. Me ever enjoying a Sandra Bullock movie.
   

On Survivalism

My friend, Dan, has a very nice little second-story apartment one town over. I keep meaning to ask what he pays in rent, but at our age I feel like that's the equivalent of asking a woman over thirty for her exact height and weight.

Anyway, Dan lives right above his landlord, who actually has a pretty sizable property. In his backyard he happens to have a large, fenced-in run and a coop. The man keeps chickens. Like a dozen of them. (There used to be more but now they are down to about nine. No one's sure what happened, exactly.)

He also has a single, needs-to-be-shorn gray sheep.

Oh, and three little goats.
Yes, goats. Not necessarily pygmy goats, but pretty small little goat creatures.

Dude also taps the trees on his property for his own maple syrup. He's like some kind of crazy-awesome, low-level survivalist. Dude's like half set for the end of the world: wool, eggs, milk, meat, maple syrup; he's like his own warm and fuzzy IHOP.

When the revolution comes, he will be the first against the wall.

Assuming, of course, that the wall is made of delicious pancakes.