Where Sam doesn't play anymore ...Rick's Cafe Americain

It is preposterous that I could actually win this, but on the one-in-a-billion chance that this becomes a meme and gets viral like the Hank, the Angry, Drunken Dwarf thing, I’ll put it out there anyway:

Vote for me as “Best Male Comic” in the ECNY (Emerging Comics of New York) Awards. While you are there, throw in a couple of votes for my R Bar friends:

Brian Finkelstein for Best Director
Carter Edwards for Best Technician
R Bar for Best Venue
Monkeydick for Best Improv

Eventually I will have to throw my two cents in about this game, but for now the day job and the night comedy is keeping me busy. Also, I’ve been blogging more at Stay Free! Daily. Tonight’s all-Brooklyn schedule:

8PM: I will be hosting Dubious Prospect, my weekly open mic at Ripple, a very cool Prospect Heights bar around the corner from my apartment. It is a one-drink minimum for comics to perform and it is starting to get some traction. No cover or minimum to attend as audience, but, seriously, I know that you want a drink.
[Ripple, 769 Washington Ave., between Sterling Pl. and St. John’s Pl., Prospect Heights]

10PM: I will be in Brian Finkelstein’s show at R Bar. This continues to be my favorite room in the city. I will probably be here until 2AM playing video bowling and darts. No cover or minimum here either, but, once again, you probably can’t help yourself.
[R Bar, corner of Graham Ave. and Meeker Ave., Williamsburg]

Because the gigs clock on the front page remains bollixed, I’m just going to start posting info about shows as they come up. The clock is right when you click through to the full calendar, so feel free to do so for more information.

(UPDATE: I am told that some people still get the wrong time on the main calendar page. *sigh* I’m not sure what I can do. Just trust what I write in the main blog. I don’t know why I worry; this site isn’t pulling any audience in anyway.)

For instance, tonight at 8:30 I am going to be in Comedy Social at Sin Sin Lounge on the corner of 2d Ave. and 5th St. Later, I will be in the 10:30 Morrison Motel show at the Village Lantern on Bleecker St. (@ Thompson). I know that I am going on early at the Social and late at the Lantern, if that is any kind of a guide for you.

I am duty bound to tell you that there is a better show to be seen and it is for a better cause. Tommy Amado - the host of the excellent Friday night Brooklyn Buffoonery show at the Village 247 in Cobble Hill - has put together a benefit for Kevin Knox, a Boston comic who has come down with cancer. He has a great lineup including Christian Finnegan, Bill Burr, DC Benny, Eddie Ifft and Geno Bisconte.

The benefit is at Boston Comedy Club, 82 West 3rd Street between Thompson & Sullivan. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Call (917) 856-8700 to buy tickets or (212) 477-1000 to reserve them. (I admit that I’m not sure why there are separate numbers for purchase and reservation.)

The collected Jewish superheroes retell the Passover story. I had no idea there were so many of ‘em.

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

I waited so long to respond to Dawn Summers’ challenge that she has resorted to trying to coax Ferrari out of retirement. That means it is time to respond to get with the meme.

I have to “name five things that people with whom I generally associate think are really cool, but that leave me cold”. I was having trouble coming up with five things, and I was thinking about recasting the meme, but damn it if Karol didn’t beat me to the punch. So I’m back to just answering the question. In no particular order:

Citizen Kane: I can’t tell you how many people have told me what an amazing movie this is. How it was ahead of its time and in many ways ahead of ours. But it is boring. Boring boring boring.  I would fall asleep watching this movie even if I knew I would be tazered every time my eyelids drooped.

Knowing a lot about new music: This is very similar to one of Dawn’s selections, but I don’t mean “new music.” I mean the obligation to keep up with it. I am getting older. I know this and acknowledge it. When something new bubbles up to my consciousness and it meets my tastes (which would probably take in a lot of the stuff I don’t know about), I embrace it. I just don’t have the energy to keep up. Cooler people will keep me informed about what I need to know. Along these lines, Modest Mouse wasn’t bad, but for a few months they were more ubiquitous than Starbucks and I’m not sure that they deserved it. I feel bad for the people so in the know that they were force fed Modest Mouse for a year before giving in and preaching the gospel.

Buffy: I watched episodes here and there. I enjoyed them. But if you listen to the people who really like this show, you’d think that Joss Whedon invented writing.

Derek Jeter: He is an excellent hitter and a very smart baserunner. He has put up all-star numbers his whole career and is likely to continue to do so. Unfortunately, he is treated like the second coming of Honus Wagner. What that meant was that the real second coming of Honus Wagner had to move over to play 3d base while St. Derek of Ann Arbor Kalamazoo stayed at shortstop. Even though, by every defensive metric (however crude they are), Jeter fields like his glove is made of anti-matter. It isn’t that he boots the ball, he just has the range of a lamppost on grounders. (He can chase down a popup, but I never said he wasn’t an excellent athlete.) With A-Rod - a legitimate Gold Glove shortstop - on his right, Jeter was able to cheat up the middle enough to start actually fielding grounders to his left and had his best statistical season in the field last year. He is a great player, but the reason he has more rings than Liberace isn’t his “heart”; it is because he has spent his whole career in the middle of a lineup of equally great players.

Party Poker Blogs: This is the one that is likely to get the most hate thrown my way, so I want to be clear: this isn’t a slam on Iggy as a person or as the blogfather and I’ve made this section extra-long (uber, if you will) in his honor. Iggy has done more for the poker blogging community - hell, to create that community - than anyone. He has co-written a book to make playing poker more profitable. He has set up blogger tournaments online and - amazingly - in Las Vegas. He linked to me when I started my silly poker writing and sent some a lot of traffic here (which I squandered). Everyone who has met him in person attests to the fact that he is a great guy. None of that makes his uber-posts readable.

Even if you want to link to something in an uber, you can’t. Why would you? If you see something interesting in item 31, do you want to send your own reader to skim the first 30 items? You can’t even scroll through that much material. It would be almost forgivable if it were original content. Instead it is a series of extended quotes from other sources with minimal commentary and a lot of bonus code pimpage. Also - and I hate to say this - Confederacy of Dunces is one of my favorite books; Iggy has been spelling Ignatius wrong for years. Every time I see that ‘o,’ a part of me dies. I can only hope that Pauly will protect me from the hordes, even though I suspect he disagrees with me.

I’m not looking to bring down the wrath of the community, so for anyone out there: If you want to sign up on Party Poker or Full Tilt Poker, use bonus code IGGY.

And here’s a bonus sixth: Originalism/Strict Constructionism. They aren’t the same but they share a lot of the same flawed logic. They are more malleable than their champions let on and frankly, even the founders wouldn’t have wanted a Constitution interpreted solely by either of these infantile metrics. They were smart enough to know that they couldn’t predict the future and chose a limited document so that it would be flexible not fixed. I added this bonus sixth thing just to note that I have conservative friends and I respect them. Even though they are almost always wrong.

On whose doorsteps shall I light this flaming bag of crap? I choose asphnxma because I don’t know why Dawn didn’t; Pauly, because he actually has opinions about everything, can probably knock this off in 10 minutes and I don’t link to his non-poker blog enough; and Alceste because he doesn’t know me and might as well hate me, he doesn’t post enough and I like reading his comments over at Karol’s site (and I want to see if he even notices).

For some reason that I can’t figure out, the clock on my gigs page shows all events as an hour earlier than I set them. I’m going to keep this post on top for a while, updating it when necessary, but will still post the occassional item below. The correct times are:

April 27 @8:30pm at Sin Sin
April 28 @10:00pm at R Bar
May 3 @10:00pm at Alligator Lounge
May 16 @8:00pm at Comic Strip Live
May 23 @9:00pm at Ripple (Prospect Heights)
May 26 @9:00pm at Telephone Bar
May 30 @9:00pm at Village Lantern
June 20 @9:00pm at Freddy’s Backroom (Prospect Heights)

Further details here, but trust the times in this post. Please plan accordingly and include one of the shows in your plans. 

I had to cancel tonight’s show at the Village 247 in Cobble Hill. Brother of Ugarte and I are going to watch the Golden Gloves finals tonight at MSG. I’ll probably do the 247 show next Friday but until Tommy confirms my spot I don’t want to presume.

I know it has been a long time since I’ve written anything. (Well, written anything here. I’ve been writing the occassional entry over at Stay Free! Daily.) This is particularly disappointing becuase I performed reasonably well in the WPBT and have cashed at the last two AM tournaments I played in, including a win. Suffice it to say that poker is going well, comedy is going even better, Cornell hockey had a hell of a run, baseball season has started and I am in a very happy place. All of that joy may make me sound like a dick, but trust me: I was a dick when I was miserable.

Keep your eyes on the schedule because I keep adding stuff. Man, this is fun.

The first project that I worked on with Zinester got an unexpected boost today. The Washington Post linked to Bush is Not a Chimp in an article about the furor over a group of Belgian trainers that used the Bush/chimp comparison montage in a presentation.

I’m not much for trying to fool people. Most April Fool’s jokes just aren’t that funny (though there are exceptions). A better approach is parody, and my friends Francis, Jim with Francis’ friend Debby (and Studious Girls ad model Alexandra) have written a very funny one.

For fans of Boing Boing (a directory of wonderful things), FJ&A present Boring Boring (a directory of dull things).