Bloody Mary: An American Werewolf in London

bloody mary podcast

Happy New Year! Start your year off right with an episode of Bloody Mary, an all-lady horror podcast hosted by Kristin Lytie!

I met Kristin at this year’s Altercation Comedy Festival in Austin. We talk seniority in comedy, the neverending story, who’s an anxious attachment person, and how to tell if you are becoming a werewolf.

I’ve seen this movie a jillion times, most recently at Braindead Studios, which used to be the Cinefamily. That ended when the manager got popped for sexually harrassing, well, everybody.

I figured out after the fact that the title, An American in Werewolf, is based on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is annoying. But I love this movie and I love talking about it, check it out on Apple podcasts here!

Alt Resume

I am close to taking my Summer Sabbatical, which is not really what it is, but it makes my Mom feel better when I say “I’m Taking A Sabbatical” instead of “I’m quitting my job and hanging out all Summer”.  I thought it was time to get my list of “OTHER” skills together and post them on the Internet.

If you feel like you read a slightly different but kind of the same list as this one, it’s because my site was hacked and my service restored from last week’s restore point and I lost it.  It’s because SOMEONE was very jealous of my 70 hits a day.  Eat it, haters!

1. Pit Toilets: I’m very good at using pit toilets in Asia.  You just have to pretend you’re camping, which you kind of are.

2. Sleeping on Airplanes: Also work related.  I can sleep bolt upright on a red eye to Turkey and emerge as fresh and ready as if I had slept in a garbage- filled car.

3.  Tap Dancing.  I’m not the world’s best tap dancer (SAVION GLOVER, because we can really only have one famous tap dancer at a time), but it’s the skill that took the most time and expense to learn, and which has the lowest street value.  I’m considering trying to make people pay me NOT to do it.

4.  Bemani.  It’s no longer fashionable but I can totally do it- I get more points for style than accuracy on Dance, Dance, Revolution, but Karaoke Revolution is my bitch.

5. For that matter, I can lead in six count swing, and I can lead about five things in Lindy hop- I’m a good Lindy follow- I like a lot of dances.

6.  I can make dance parties happen.  I can make people do it.  At karaoke, at coffeeshops- most of the time.

7.  Karaoke.  I’m good at it.  I don’t have the most amazing American Idol style voice, but I know my range and I will perform the SHIT out of a song.  I like to work a crowd.  When I do it in Hong Kong they are upset with the dancing and eye contact.

8.  Comedy.  I do it for money and for free.  Mostly for free.  Don’t ask me to tell you a joke, I’ll make you laugh, m-f.  Just you wait.

9.  I can draw- I haven’t for around five-seven years, but I probably still can, right?  I’m sure I can.  I have an art degree.  I can blind contour the shit out of something.

10.  According to the Munsell test of Color Acuity, I am a Superior Color Discriminator.  I will discriminate the shit out of your color.  I need a lab coat and a light box with a true North setting.  But I will do it.

11.  I can make patterns and sew.  Again, I usually don’t.   But I can make seriously obscure and fucked up Halloween costumes!

12.  Goth Makeup and Fantasy Make up!  I have an airbrush and I’m  not scared to use it, including airbrushing a fake tattoo on you!

13.  I’m really good at telling long, involved, interconnected stories to people on acid.  I can be on acid or not, it doesn’t matter.

14.  I can tell a fake art history lecture at the drop of a hat, especially if the hat is from a particularly evocative period

15.  I’m really good at making one kind of vegan chocolate chip cookies.  Just one kind.

16.   I’m really good at maintaining a blog for 8 years that only my mother consistently reads!

17.  If I had just bought my first guitar, I would be a crazy natural guitar playing genius- however, I have had my own guitar for a decade, and play it occasionally.  I’m mediocre, but proud!

18.  I’m really good at steering an oversized Costco shopping cart with my elbows while eating free BBQ nuts.

19.  I’m a good trivia team member- I don’t know that much about television or sports, but I’m very good at arbitration to try to determine the likeliest answer.  Also, I like to win but I don’t care if I do.

20.  I’m really good at running a White Elephant party.  I will whip the crowd into a frenzy over Scratch tickets and a rubber garden gnome.  Blood will flow!

21.  Despite all the above, I’m really good at not going to Burning Man!  I haven’t gone every year it’s happened!  Consecutively!

With this kind of skill set, I’m gonna destroy this job market!

Damned Dog

Sleevedog-Strawberries

This is the single most popular photo in my Flickr stream, the dying website that I have enjoyed for many years.  And why not? It is a sleeveface of my French Bulldog, Hazel, and her favorite Damned record. She is pretending that she is a pig.  Thank you for your time.

Bridgetown Festival Postmortem

Photo of Jon Glaser by Liezl Estipona

Well, we’re all winners, because we all got to tell jokes and hang out at the 5th annual Bridgetown Comedy Festival, which was widely regarded as The Best Yet, but here are some of my random thoughts on the event:

Party Excellence:

My Shortest Attendance Of A Party, Ever: The promotional shindig for the Riot, LA’s alternative comedy festival- I got there at 1, I gave Pete Holmes a hug and watched Lachlan Patterson pretend to play the harp, the cops busted it at 1:10 and we were bringing our noise disturbance to the street.

Superlatives:

Person Who Is The Best Partner For An Extended Interpretive Dance: Jono Zalay

Best Sex Talk: Jon Glaser

Most Multi-Talented: Mary Mack

Most Amazing Dancer Besides Me: Guy Branum.  Way to play to the stereotype, baby.

Least Surprising Winner of a Trivia Contest Who Is Nonetheless Very Fun To Play With: TV Geek Paul Goebel.

Third Person To Get Engaged At or Near Bridgetown, That I Know Of: David Cope

Most Amazing, Most Giving, Most Funny, Most Worshipped: Maria Bamford

Dummy Most Likely To Have Her Badge And ID Stolen By Drunk Sluts At An Afterparty: Me

Best Combination Of Funny and Good Hugs: Tim Harmston

Hottest Person With A Fiftieth Birthday: Dwight Slade

Most Incredible Sensual Bird Mime: Kurt Braunholer

Funniest Person I Can’t Believe I Hadn’t Heard Of:  Dave Hill.  Smart, surreal, and very rock-and-roll- seriously, he’s amazing.

Most Talked About In Reverent Tones Of Adoration: James Adomian

Best Impression Of An Effeminate Southern Coin Collector: David Crowe

Show Which Had No Indication Of Being Well-Attended And Great: Hawthorne Lounge Portlandia Show, where we did comedy to the sounds of Guitar Wolf being played next door

Person Who Most Worried Me That He Would Fall Off The Large Thing He Had Climbed Onto, And Mar My Show With His Death: Patrick Keane

The Best Erotic Fiction About Star Trek And Mythology (lifetime award): Mike Drucker

Best Place To Meet Other Comics on a Delta Flight: The SLC-PDX leg from the Mormon-infested west coast hub.  I met one comic I knew and three I didn’t, but whom I identified from their bitching about being asked to host shows.

The Most Disturbing Portrait of Dora The Explorer: Aparna Nancherla

Most Amazing After-Party DJ: April Richardson

Most Likely To Be Mistaken For Each Other: Whitmer Thomas and Christian Ricketts

Least Twinlike Brothers: The Walsh Brothers (FLIPPING HILARIOUS)

Most Adorable: Alex Gavlick

Most Excited Fans: Tim Heidecker

Most People Showing Up For His Show Who Were Sad That He Was Stuck In Yakima, WA: Joe Frice

Most Hilariously Upside-Down Show: The Closing Show at the Bagdad, where Doug Benson, Todd Barry, and Matt Braunger opened so that they could run to other shows

Simply Wonderful: Rory Scovel

Most Discussed Panel: The Humor Code, where scientific mind Myq Kaplan and Superstitious Wunderkind Pete Holmes discussed theories about what makes things funny, and Mary Mack was kept down by the Man who would not supply her with a microphone.  Because The Man is afraid of The Truth!

Person Who I Stalked At The Coffeeshop The Most: Jake Barker

People I Most Wanted To See And Did Not Manage To See (aka The Bridgetown Curse): Janeane Garofalo and Claire Titelman.
Almost Too Fun To Hang Out With:  Janine Brito

Strangest Internet Distinction: Bridgetown Comedy Festival has the odd distinction of becoming Twitter spam: bots are tweeting  “BRIDGETOWN COMEDY FESTIVAL BLOG: THE WRAP-UP” today.

Hardest-Working Behind-The-Scenes (TIE): Volunteer Coordinator Charlene Conley, Logistics Manager Rylee Newton, Hospitality Manager Helen Vank, Transportation Coordinator Amanda Pants, and Organizer and COO Andy Wood.  Thanks everybody!

Learning Cockney Slang: Don’t Be A Berkeley Hunt

Kevin Keegan, not a vegan


In Cockney rhyming slang, “I’m going to the Fatboy Slim” means “I’m going to the gym.”  This is interesting, because as far as I can tell, Norman Cook’s fitness regimen is cocaine, which in cockney is “charlie.”

To call someone a “Berk” is short for “Berkely Hunt”, which rhymes with something that is the reason why the Mighty Boosh can never be shown in prime time in England, because the inoffensive-sounding “berk” is slang for something very dirty, something that rhymes with “hunt”, and starts with a “c”.

In cockney, to say something is Kevin Keegan, after the legendary footballer and coach, means that something is vegan. My tiny friend Emiko from Foodfightgrocery.com let me know this triv, that if you are at a party and pointing at various foods, asking “Zat Kevin?”, you are asking if it’s free of animal products, not made of an unlucky friend.

I took a picture of this sign at Nike, which makes me laugh but doesn’t make anyone else laugh, because it implies that the hallway is vegan. I think it’s Eddie. (eddie money=funny.)

byronbowie

  Postscript: Like most of us, I was watching the Julien Temple short film, Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, on the treadmill last night (sidebar: Bowie was 37 when this film was made, and in my opinion at the height of his personal awesomeness.  Goals, people.)  Anyway, in this film, when Bowie is portraying the most challenging role of his career, a scheming poster-hanger named Vic, he says “I’m a berk!”, which means that Bowie tricked MTV into letting him say “cunt” repeatedly on their network in 1984, which is just another reason he’s my hero.

A Deranged Millionaire

Hodgman%20backstage

I knew that Long Beach was hosting this year’s illustrious TED talks,  but I was surprised to see Deranged Millionaire John Hodgman walking up my street.

I gave him the traditional surprised, over-excited nerd HI, which he shrank from, and I later tweeted him that I didn’t mean to yell HI at him.

You might wonder: How does a Deranged Millionaire dress to blend in seamlessly with the TED populace and pass undetected?

Why, he wears a navy arctic fleece half-zip pullover. 

It’s obviously a joke on the fact that people in SoCal will bundle up like Serbian prisoners when the temperature drops below 60 degrees.

Portlandia!

So, I was in the third episode of Portlandia this season, and I’ll also be in the season finale.  Pretty much everyone in Portland gets a turn to be on the show. While they’re shooting, people just line up at Powell’s Books downtown and wait to get picked up by the Craft Services bus. My first episode is available at Amazon.com here, because this world is modern.  The most fun thing was asking Carrie about the time she called in to promote herself on the OPB show about comedy I was on, and how I gave her crap for it.