For those of you have been asking me to somehow relaunch the old The-N.com game Slasher!, which as I’ve said I have neither the authority nor technology to do, here’s some good advice from a couple of former The N users, Autumnforte and Lillian Noe:
Seth Madej
Cat Killing
I wish this video from education broker Skillshare didn’t play like a bad commercial for an investment-management firm, because its message about the value of curiosity deserves to be heard.
Categories: Video | Tags: intelligenceClick here to comment
The 14th Winner of #SethBuyMeLunch
I forgot to mention last week that the latest winner of #SethBuyMeLunch is photographer Liezl Estipona, AKA @liezl. I ran the entire contest on 1/17 before realizing that it wasn’t actually Monday but in fact the FALSE MONDAY created by Martin Luther King Jr. Day. #SethBuyMeLunch’s legitimacy has been compromised, but I’ve been unemployed so long that I should be happy knowing what month it is (which I don’t).
Liezl and I will be lunching tomorrow, but if you’re in LA you can win a free lunch with me today,1 which actually is probably Monday, simply by tweeting #SethBuyMeLunch before the end of the day.
----- I mean you can win today. We won’t eat today. [↩]
Categories: #SethBuyMeLunchClick here to comment
A Bunch of Good Songs About Being a Good Person
Update, 2/19/2012: I’ve added a streaming MP3 of the one previously unlistenable song in this list, “Caroline” by Kirsty MacColl.
Maybe it’s just been my spending a couple of years unemployed, but I’ve noticed a subtle, glacial shift in the assholism of our culture. It feels like sometime not too long ago we crossed an invisible line on this side of which it’s ever so slightly more probable that people will act like assholes than not.
We choose to just be a tiny bit lazier and not return that email. We decide to spend just a little bit more time on our own stuff instead of doing that thing we promised to do for someone else. We quickly jump on Twitter to badmouth other people instead of spending just one moment to stop and think about whether or not we should, let alone an additional moment to judge ourselves. And we all seem to have finally agreed that it’s probably okay to screw someone else over a little bit if it’s not personal, just business.
Categories: Writing | Tags: art, ethics, musicClick here to comment
The Weights That Were Sunk in the Water
ScoutMob’s half-off coupon for Skylight Books gave me the chance to go to a bookstore and shop for an actual new book, a treat as rare to me lately as Fabergé egg fondling. I chose In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, one of the first fiction collections from IDW, a comics publisher that manages to put out some good stuff despite most of their cash flowing in from adaptations of Transformers, GI Joe, and for fuck’s sake CSI.1
In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes collects 20 detective stories contemporaneous to Arthur Conan Doyle’s work2 but mostly forgotten now. The back-cover blurb claims the tales “match or beat” some of Conan Doyle’s, which if you’re comparing them to, oh, The Valley of Fear isn’t saying much. But browsing the comics aisle and coming across actual Victorian mysteries with titles like “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks,” “The Assyrian Rejuvenator,” and “The Case of the Laker, Absconded” is pretty much opening your Domino’s box and finding a pane frattau from Otto. Even better, the collection is edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, the Sherlockian academic whose The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes I rub against my privates when I’m feeling amorous.
I’ll report back as I work my way through the stories, which I’ll begin right after I finish Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls. (I’m on page 158.)
Oh and endless admiration to anyone who can source the title of this post.
----- That good stuff includes The Bloom County Library, an anthology of Berekely Breathed’s classic ’80s newspaper strip and one of my earliest comedic influences. I’m up to volume three. [↩]
- Or in the case of the first three stories, predating it. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “The Danseuse” appeared in 1862, right at the midpoint between the debuts of Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Holmes. [↩]
Categories: Writing | Tags: booksClick here to comment
Quiz: Bruce Springsteen Lyric or The Clash Lyric?
Here’s a particularly didactic quiz I created years ago in the heyday of Facebook’s Quizzes application.
Categories: Writing | Tags: music, quizzesClick here to comment
Special Relativity Week 5: A Tale of Self Pity
Today marks the end of the fifth week of fundraising for my radio series Special Relativity, and the time has come for honesty. Things aren’t looking good. The project’s received only three donations in the last two weeks. It’s now so off track that I’ll need to raise over $140 a day for the next seven weeks to meet the campaign’s $8000 goal.
Yesterday I was thinking about the whole thing, and I realized how easy it might be to misunderstand why I’ve undertaken this uphill boulder roll. I can imagine someone looking at me and thinking, “This guy’s a writer who can’t get someone to pay for his work, so he figures he’ll take the easy road and just beg people for cash.” One could, very understandably, interpret what I’m doing with the same disdain one directs toward an obviously able-bodied guy panhandling on the subway.
So I want to clarify here that asking people for money — especially asking my friends for money — is not something I want to be doing. It’s not easy. I don’t enjoy it. It’s difficult and humiliating. Imagine turning to folks who you respect and care about and who are successful and saying to them, “I haven’t been successful lately. Can you give me a handout, just out of faith that I’ll do something good with it?” It hurts.
Categories: Special Relativity | Tags: TV, WritingClick here to comment
Project Mouth Slime: I’m Gonna Spit in a Cup and Bake It
Sorry about the delay in my returning to Project Mouth Slime, but sometimes more important things in life get in the way. In this case, “more important things” are “anything.” But past is prologue! Onward! When last we left off, Sophie and I had discovered that mouth slime appeared when using Listerine Total Care Zero, an alcohol-free nighttime rinse, but not when using Rite Aid Tooth Care, which contains alcohol. I opted to try a night of swishing with Listerine Total Care, a brand-name mouthwash with alcohol, to eliminate the possibility of brand peculiarities. I paired the rinse with regular fluoride toothpaste; Sophie rinsed after brushing with whitening toothpaste. Neither of us awoke slime-mouthed. So mouth slime appears to be linked to nonalcoholic mouthwash.
Categories: Writing | Tags: Project Mouth Slime, science, The SimpsonsClick here to comment
#SethBuyMeLunch Lunch No. 13
I met writer-producer-director-actor-comedian-queef-joke-enthusiast Ann Marie Lindbloom for lunch at Simple Things Restaurant, a sandwich and pie place on West 3rd, where she ate half a turkey-and-avocado sandwich and took the rest home. I promptly insisted she reimburse me for the uneaten portion, because page 53 #SethBuyMeLunch contract clearly states that the complimentary lunch includes only food eaten during the course of the meal. She kicked me in the eyes and ran off. Luckily I still had time to enjoy my reuben,1 which was of high quality, if a little overpriced, with thick, tender corned beef.
If you were to say the phrase “thick, tender corned beef” to Ann Marie, she’d make a joke about it of questionable taste. Which is, of course, the reason you should have lunch with her. She’s quick witted and walking around with a shoulder bag full of ideas for animated comedy series, all of which are of questionable taste, which is why you, being a development executive, should ask her to pitch them to you. She’s one of those types who can talk to a room full of people for four minutes and have them all convinced that they must work with her. For all of the above reasons I wish her nothing but ill.
Ann Marie (AKA @AnnMarieTV) is certainly the most under-followed person I know of on Twitter. Follow this link to rectify that, but know that here be potty mouth. Truth is though that Ann Marie admitted to being secretly mortified every time she types a joke about lower body parts or anything that one wouldn’t bring up in polite conversation with Charles Kuralt, and she hates mean jokes. Endearing qualities both, which is why I didn’t tell her that she kind of freaked me out because she looks like my old high school girlfriend.
You can win lunch with me simply by tweeting #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday, including today. Details here.
----- My second choice, because Simple Things was out of their famous fried chicken sandwich. [↩]
Categories: #SethBuyMeLunch | Tags: comedy, food, Los Angeles, TVClick here to comment
For Gawdsake Listen to This Great Radio Comedy
If you’re a supporter of my series Special Relativity, then you either enjoy radio comedy or are something of a sucker. I’ll assume it’s the former and thus you’ll like the best example of radio comedy I’ve heard in a long time: the first episode of Mike Henry’s new podcast, The Songs We Sing. It features blues legend Lester “Polecat” Brown and is positively — dare I say? — Frebergian.
You can listen to it right here in the player below. Then go subscribe to new episodes via Tumblr or iTunes. And if you like it, Mike would probably appreciate you telling him so.
Categories: Special Relativity | Tags: comedy, radioClick here to comment
