not falling down

I’ve failed repeatedly to remember today’s (and therefore yesterday’s) date; I need to try harder, because someday my kids are going to have to memorize one of them for history class. October 26, 2004. The Knesset, amid epithets and protests, voted to withdraw Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip.

Neat things!

• JEDI COPS! I’d join this if I had any writing resources left. Maybe you should join, and tell me how it goes. The diceless RPG system they use, called the Karmic Cycle, sounds suspiciously like the luck-based system Ben came up with for Cosmos, last year.
• Stephen has started a pending lawsuit. Oh, I meant “advice column.”
• It’s unfortunate that the comic is apparently updated about as often as Xorph, but Pihakwa is so pretty I want to buy it, all of it, or somehow mark it with my scent. The gallery is sweet, too.

Found via Clickolinko: a simple regular expression search-and-replace is applied to Harry Potter.

Let’s talk about Cody Powell. Cody Powell is a living, breathing colonoscopy. After my perfectly civil post the other day, describing in mild and accurate terms the reasons why our former schools hate each other, “Mister” Powell spent three solid days responding the only way he knows how: public urination. I am disappointed, but unsurprised.

As is usually the case in matters between myself and Mister “Powell,” I’m left to take the high road… alone. I’ve said my piece about “Trinity” “University,” and there’s no need for me to elaborate on it. Will I say, for instance, that there are no Trinity class reunions after the tenth, since by then every member is inevitably dead of syphilis? Will I say that the pregnancy rate at Trinity is low only because its male students so often confuse vaginas with ear canals? Will I point out that Centre graduates tend to end up as Vice-Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, whereas Trinity graduates go to Jupiter, to get more stupider? No. No, I will not.

“Mister” “Powell,” the “ball” is in your “court.” We can shake hands and agree to disagree like human beings, or we can take the well-trampled route of your former classmates and do it in the dirt. Regardless of your choice, naturally, the lithe, golden god-avatars of Centre will spend Saturday trodding nobly on the collective face of the Trinity Troglodytes. And when I receive your bowl of pudding, Fancy Boy, I will do with it what men have done for centuries with such devices: I will install it in my water closet, and into it, privately, I will pee.

THE RED SOX WIN THE PENNANT

THE RED SOX WIN THE PENNANT

THE RED SOX WIN THE PENNANT

THE RED SOX WIN THE PENNANT

I am glad Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post book critic, stepped up and made the case that Catcher In The Rye sucks. I don’t know if Jonathan Yardley knows his stuff or not, but I hate Catcher In The Rye, and I’m glad to be seconded.

In January, Dave Barry will go on hiatus for the first time in thirty years. It’s uncertain when or if he’ll be back.

I’ve been meaning for a while now to write about Dave Barry and Izzle^2 Pfaff, among other things. Skot Kurruk, who writes the latter blog, is somebody who was obviously–like me–raised on Dave Barry’s humor; he appeals to me even more because he plays to my fetishes by using theatre terminology and cuss words. His posts read a lot like columns, and include a connect-for-bonus final punchline. He even has the same cumulative effect as Dave Barry: one entry will make you smile, but by the fifth or sixth you’ll be snorting in your cube, desperately trying to conceal your laughter by shoving a hand up each nostril. Okay, that’s just me.

So read Izzle^2 Pfaff, is my first point here. I have others.

I started reading Dave Barry columns not long after my introduction to joke books, in probably the fifth grade. Yes, I’m the kid who read joke books, and recited everything in them to my friends and family, usually multiple times. It is surprising that I survived middle school.

I thought that these books were hilarious, and the obvious parallel that I drew between them and Dave Barry was the Platonic punchline, the kind of thing that usually gets followed up by a musical sting (“ba dum dum CHHHH” is a sting, not a rimshot; if you call that a rimshot, you don’t know what a rimshot is). I deduced, subconsciously, that this was the root and source of all humor. Anything can be made funny with a punchline, I thought! If I make punchlines, I will be funny!

It is for this reason that I was literally retarded in the humor department for a long, long time. I was not a funny person, and I honestly didn’t understand why. I am only now overcoming this: I still don’t consider myself funny, but I am getting funnier.

My slog toward freedom from punchlines has been long and difficult, but along the way I was fortunate enough to discover webcomics. People talk a lot about how webcomics are revitalizing and expanding sequential art, but not so much about the boundaries they push in humor. Think about it: there is nobody on earth who is doing what Chris Onstad is doing with Achewood, a humor and pathos with no individually funny elements, built entirely with rhythm. Granted, everybody at Dumbrella is doing some of the same things, but nobody else has Onstad’s easy mastery of the method. Chris Onstad is the John McCrea of comics.

Before I read Achewood, though, I was reading Penny Arcade, by a couple of guys who are–let’s say the Ramones of comics. They have double-handedly inspired about 70% of all the comics on the Interweb right now. Like the Ramones, they took a short form, stripped it raw and made it different; like the Ramones, they made a lot of boys believe that anybody could have a smash hit with just a few ingredients and a lot of heart. (This is not true, which is why most webcomics feature two sarcastic guys and die after a month.) They are not entirely punchline-free, but a single Penny Arcade strip is often jammed with more lunacy than lesser comics can fit into their fourth panels all week.

And before even Penny Arcade, I was reading Checkerboard Nightmare, the first thing I’d seen that managed to satirize the entire concept of punchlines. I’m going to mix allegories here and call Kris Straub the Jon Stewart of webcomics: the only guy who’s capable of calling out, duelling and deflating anyone in the medium, including himself. The kind of writer who’s so sharp that he gets attacked for not being an impartial journalist–then has to remind his attackers that he never made any promises to be either.

The non-webcomic thing that had the biggest impact on the way I perceive humor was Project Improv and its spinoff, my own improv troupe, Street Legal. I’ve pretty much parted ways with PI (for that matter, they’ve pretty much parted ways with themselves), but I owe Ken Troklus and Rebecca Grossman a lot for pointing out to me that punchlines are not funny–connections are.

Dave Barry (remember? I was talking about Dave Barry?) has stated in print that he is a big Achewood fan. It’s almost bathetically symbolic to me, now, that he is taking an indefinite break from column-writing, and that Achewood is moving from the Chris Onstad’s local copy shop to a real publisher. I still read Dave Barry’s columns every week in the Washington Post, and it’s taken Achewood and over a decade to make me realize that punchlines are the smallest part of what he does.

Boston Overturned

Curt Schilling Dipped in Bronze

Game 7 Cancelled; Bodies of Sox Found Riddled by Tommy Guns

Just think about it: for one night, David Ortiz gets to have sex with anybody in Boston. Anything in Boston. If you are in Boston, he could have sex with you, or with your mom. He could have sex with your dad while forcing you to have sex with your mom. He could have sex with your cat. He could have sex with your cat’s mom.

I’m glad I don’t live in Boston.

I once ran competitively, while wearing shorts that were made to fit a girl. More recently, I engaged in the pastime of twirling a disc back and forth over mud, and falling down. I’m not much of a sporting man, it’s true; I don’t play games with life, and it doesn’t play games with me. But those of you who know me–really know me–or who have been reading this journal for the past few days, know that there’s one major-league sport that can really set my blood a-racin’.

That sport is football.

Every year, my alma mater and a certain podunk nobody school in Texas throw down the pigskin over one hundred yards of bloodstained turf. Now, it’s true that Trinity has the better record, but that’s only because its student body is composed of vicious, quasi-sapient goat-mutants.

Perhaps the biggest shock of my life came about a year ago, when I learned that renowned fancy boy Cody Powell was an alumnus of that same mockery of higher education. I did a little checking, in fact, and confirmed that he is the only pure-blooded human ever to graduate Trinity! No mean feat, I must say, and of course I’d never drop a bad word about my good friend C-Po. I do have to point out that he had sex with girls at his school, though. Think about that for a second.

Regardless, my daily exchange with the Picklemeister has been a little strained lately, a little tense, a little shrill and twitchy on one end. The perennial Centre-Trinity footbattle is just around the corner; on October 23, Mister Powell and myself are going to see just which side is really worth its mustard.

If my team wins, I’m going to fax him a copy of my balls.