Ephemeris of Miscellany

Happy birthday to Welcome Back, Kotter's Gabe Kaplan, born on this day in 1945. In 2003 I went back to teach at my old high school. What resulted was the worst two years of my life and the cancelation of the short-lived spinoff, Welcome Back, Kreider. ... Chris Rock- "There's math, and then everything else it debatable." From Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, 2013 ... The Guardian- ‘Chris Rock did the brave, smart, toughest thing’: comics on that Oscars slap Haha! Great line, and after someone threw a glass at him. "If I’d known I was going to the zoo I’d have bought my bananas.” Comedian Shaparak Khorsandi: When you come at a comic, you come at a professional who has been booed off and slapped off and dealt with worse than you. Before I did standup, I was in the audience when someone threw a pint at Dave Fulton’s head. It smashed behind him and he just said: “If I’d known I was going to the zoo I’d have bought my bananas.” I thought: “If I can have this career, ...

Mitch Hedberg died on this day in 2005. His jokes ring through my head over and over, not unlike religious texts. Man, twenty years... if he would have written one joke a week since then, that's a thousand jokes we missed. It's like Martin Scorsese said about Stanley Kubrick though - we have no option but to be satisfied with what we were given. To pick just one: "I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny." OK, two more. "I had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality." "I got some tartar control toothpaste. I still got tartar, but that shit's under control." (I love that this BuzzFeed list leaves out the rest of that joke....

One of my least favorite facts. On this day in 1985 The Singing Nun (Jeanne-Paule Marie "Jeannine" Deckers) committed suicide due to financial hardship. ... There was a 12% solar eclipse this morning at sunrise, so I climbed up on my roof to see it. Reminded me of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test. Video: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18p1hsurGL/ ... A Smattering of Thoughts on the Oscar Debacle -If you are on Will Smith's side, whose side are you on? Will Smith is not on Will Smith's side. He apologized. I'm bewildered how people would opt for Angry Will versus Apologetic Will. -Women don't need men to defend them with physical violence, from jokes. -Will Smith is part of a tiny minority who even knew about his wife's condition. My theory is that 99.99% of the people criticizing Chris Rock for "making fun of her condition", didn't even know she had the condition, yet they are inflexibly convinced Chris Rock must have known. It's not like ...

This guy climbing a huge palm tree unaided makes my palms sweat. https://fb.watch/jxqsEPBPiU/?mibextid=6aamW6 ... The rotten thing about discovering that the average age of my recent male ancestors is only 61, is that it deprives me of a midlife crisis. I have to settle for a three quarter life crisis! ... Nick Thune says all of his rooms are set to room temperature, except the corners which are set to 90 degrees. He says that only 12% of his audience likes that joke, but he measures his jokes according to milk fat percentage, and 12% is astronomical.  My type of humor. ... When someone says something you agree with, you can say, "You know what they say, opinions are like assholes and yours is the best." ... If some person thinks Will Smith was justified to violently attack Chris Rock because he was offended by something he said, and that person also thinks that they have the right to not be attacked if they say something that someone finds offensive... that person is the def...

The ancient meets the modern at Petroglyph National Monument. March 27, 2018 ... Reflections on the Oscars, 2022 Oscar Day used to be a holy day for me and I know right when it stopped. One year they were behind time like normal, and they basically fast-forwarded the In Memoriam segment, my favorite segment. Clips of all these actors, actresses, and directors that I felt like I almost knew and loved just flew right on by. You could barely read their names before the next one appeared. They might as well have played the Benny Hill theme song over it.  Thinking back on the rest of the telecast, I wondered if it was critical to hear John Travolta's minute of half-witted jibes about sound, followed by Julia Roberts' minute of half-witted jibes about sound mixing. The jokes that the Oscar writers put in, they aren't even supposed to be funny, are they? Their intent seems to be filler vs entertainment, often ironically pointing out that nobody even cares about the category. ...