Friday, January 25, 2008
More Steve - Excerpt
Just got through reading Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin - hence the earlier post - which if you have a sense of humor I would recommend, no demand, you read as soon as possible.
At any rate, on with the excerpt....
Mixed reviews continued. At the end of my closing-night show at the Troubadour, I stood onstage and took out five bananas. I peeled them, pit one on my head, one in each pocket, and squeezed one in each hand. Then I read the last line of my latest bad review: "Sharing the bill with Poco this week is comedian Steve Martin...his twenty-five minute routine failed to establish any comic identity that would make the audience remember him or the material." Then I walked off the stage.
Labels: Comedy, Excerpt
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Life ala Steve Martin
Be courteous, kind, and forgiving.
Be gentle and peaceful each day.
Be warm and human and grateful,
And have a good thing to say.
Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike,
Be witty and happy and wise.
Be honest and love all your neighbors,
Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.
Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus.
Be dull and boring and omnipresent.
Criticize things you don't know about.
Be oblong and have your knees removed.
Be sure to stop at stop signs,
And drive fifty-five miles an hour.
Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth.
And when you get home get a master's degree in geology.
Be tasteless, rude, and offensive.
Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional.
Put a live chicken in your underwear.
Go into a closet and suck eggs.
Labels: Comedy, Excerpt, Lyrics
Monday, September 10, 2007
Excerpt
"Perhaps the greatest relief of all, though, was that I still thought of myself as a good man. I'd assumed what had happened at the edge of the nature preserve would change me, affect my character or personality, that I'd be ravaged by guilt, irreversibly damaged by the horror of my crime. But nothing changed. I was still who I'd always been. Pederson's death was just like the money; it was there whenever I thought about it, but then when I didn't, it was gone. It made no difference to my life in a day-to-day sense unless I called it up myself. The key was not to call it up." - From A Simple Plan by Scott Smith
I'm a huge fan of the film version of A Simple Plan, and I'm rapidly turning into a fan of the book as well. This passage got me thinking about murder, a person's capability of committing it, etc. For those of you who haven't seen the movie or read the book, the first murder in both is largely an accident that gets out of control.
At any rate, living in a world where the concept of murder is pretty loosely defined - thou shall not kill except in war, the death penalty, the movies, etc. - it makes you question your values. I suppose I'm like a lot of people - I'd only kill another human being under specific circumstances: mess with my child or my wife, try and kill me, break-in to my house, etc. Other than within those parameters, I don't think I could kill for revenge. I've always thought the best revenge was to simply let people live their own lives, karma has a way of taking care of the rest. There hasn't been a war in my lifetime that I felt strongly enough about to do something over - Afghanistan coming the closest, but even then I knew we'd fuck it up, which we did.
I don't think I could be a hit man, though I have achieved hit man status on Grand Theft Auto, I don't think I could be an executioner, a soldier, or the person who orders them to kill. I have driven under the influence more times than I care to admit, which has the potential to kill. I don't currently own a gun, though I do plan on getting at least a shotgun - not so much for human burglars but those of the Ursine variety, I have the same policy for bears as I do for humans in that respect.
Anyway there's no point or moral or whatever to this entry, that quote just got me thinking is all. If anything, I'm just puzzled over the definitions of death; murder, execution, war...it's all killing. Is it all murder?
Thou shall not kill...unless you have a good reason.
Labels: Excerpt, Movies, Random
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Excerpt
"I drive fast, but I am extremely careful. In twenty years of driving - I am thirty-three, the same age as Jesus when he died - I have never had an accident with another car. True, I have rolled three cars on three different occasions, but those were Acts of God, as we lawyers say. And besides, I was drunk. Surely no man would blame me personally for what a foreign substance does to my body. I tell you, I have ulcers. Can you understand that? In any event, I do not blame myself." - From The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta
Labels: Excerpt
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Quote
"Everyone knows frogs can't skateboard, but it's kind of sad that they believe everything they see on TV." - Squids will be Squids
Labels: Cephalopods, Excerpt
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Excerpt
"A big problem was that the canning, freezing and dehydrating kinda killed the taste. They also kill the smell and the color. So a billion-dollar industry sprang up to make processed food not taste like cardboard. Mostly they do that by injecting chemicals. A simple example is methyl anthranilate, which is used as a metal corrosion inhibitor in jet engine lubricants and also to make grape Kool-Aid taste like grape. Amyl acetate (also used as a paint and lacquer solvent) tastes like banana. But the formulas are usually much, much more complicated than that. To simulate an old-fashioned strawberry milkshake, the "artificial strawberry flavor" in a Burger King shake contains forty-six chemicals. None of which is strawberry." - Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock
Labels: Excerpt, Food
Friday, November 18, 2005
Excerpt - The Truth (with jokes)
"It's a cliche to say that the Bush administration's use of language is Orwellian. After all, the "Healthy Forest Initiative" won't make forests healthy. Much to the contrary. It will make them gone. And the pro-air pollution Clear Skies Initiative is designed to clear the skies of birds. And then there's the slogan of Bush's newly created Ministry of Truth: "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength." All of those things can be justly described as Orwellian. I mean, who's he kidding?
But Newspeak isn't the only thing Orwellian about this presidency. In Orwell's dystopian classic 1984, the totalitarian state of Oceania is kept in a state of permanent war by Big Brother, who is the oldest of four sons of a former president. Big Brother's younger brother Younger Brother is really named Jeb, and is much smarter than Big Brother. Eerie, right? Anyway. Back to the permanent war. It doesn't matter who the enemy is or whether the enemy is actually threatening Oceania; the important thing is to keep the population thinking that it is under attach from an external threat. And just like in 1984, where the enemy is switched from Eurasia to Eastasia, Bush switched our enemy from al Qaeda to Iraq. Bush's War on Terror is a war against whomever Bush wants to be at war with." - Al Franken The Truth (with jokes)
Labels: Excerpt, Politics
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Excerpt - Relevance
"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness." - Carl Sagan from The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Labels: Excerpt, Science
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Excerpt
"There are times, however - and this is one of them - when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring rain on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison scum right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation." - Hunter S. Thompson Generation of Swine
Labels: Excerpt
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