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Mean-spirited joke

Sorry there’s no new posts, dear reader. I’ve been pretty busy with the year-end giganto-issue of the magazine, and haven’t had time for much of anything else.

Except for our office Christmas party. This year, I joined the writing squad for our annual “Carnac”-inspired joke-fest, where our boss comes out in a turban and cape and does the “answer first, then question” routine. I only mention this because my favorite joke failed to get a single laugh, but managed to make the entire room of 80 people gasp.

Here’s the setup: one of our ad salesgirls quit earlier this year and moved to Florida. She was pretty incompetent, and never sold much. So, since our jokes revolve around current-ish events and departed employees, I came up with the following:

Answer: “Terry Schiavo”

Question: “Who did [ad salesgirl] replace as the laziest person in Florida?”

One of my fellow joke-writers almost choked when I came up with that one. Trying to be ‘sensitive,’ the committee changed it to, “Who is the only person in Florida with less brain activity than [ad salesgirl]?”

As I said, not a single laugh. I chalk it up to game theory; if one person started laughing, I bet others would’ve loosened up. But I wasn’t gonna be the one to start it.

Anyway, the party went well, even if our favorite office drunk failed to get blown up this year and break a table, like he did two years ago.

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Don’t make me get all Tookie

How do I feel about the execution of Tookie Williams? I have some misgivings about the right of the state to kill convicted criminals, but I also have misgivings about letting people live after they commit heinous acts.

Evidently, California was asked to provide clemency for Williams because, after being convicted of multiple murders, he’s seen the light. Of course, he still contends that he’s not guilty of the murders, so California is ACTUALLY being asked to provide clemency for someone who’s changed his life after crimes he didn’t commit.

As I told the official VM fiancee this morning, “If he was convicted of murders-during-the-course-of-a-single-robbery, I might have more leeway, because of the Tarantinoesque capacity for things going horribly wrong, but murders from different robberies in the span of a few weeks makes him much more reprehensible, in my eyes.”

Then there are Williams’ victims. This page contains links to photos of them. These are pretty graphic, so consider yourself warned. I took a look at four people who had their lives taken from them, and then asked myself if Tookie deserved “a second chance.”

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Can’t jump, etc.

Nice article on Slate about the idiocy in comparing every white basketball player to Larry Bird. Here’s a taste:

Want proof that getting compared to Bird is a one-way ticket to the Caucasian basketball graveyard? A list of players who’ve been identified as Bird-like reads like the roster of a CBA team sponsored by the KKK. There are the Dukies: Danny Ferry, Mike Dunleavy Jr., and Christian Laettner (according to Charles Barkley, “the only thing Christian Laettner has in common with Larry Bird is they both pee standing up”). There are the guys whose main qualification was playing college ball in the Midwest: Troy Murphy and Wally Szczerbiak (“a Larry Bird game, a Tom Cruise smile,” one scribe said). There’s the inexplicable: Australian Andrew Gaze. And the monstrously, hilariously inexplicable: center Eric Montross, whom Celtics exec M.L. Carr said was cut from the same cloth as the Birdman.

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Little Gil in Slumberland

I get nice presents for my friends, but I have to admit that I save the best ones for myself. Last year, it was the seriotypes of women’s portraits by Lorenzo Mattotti. This time around, I got myself this hardbound collection of Little Nemo color comic strips printed at their original 16″ x 21″ Sunday paper size. It’s a thing of beauty.

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Iran

My (occasionally long-winded) buddy The Brooding Persian has a good post about the latest rant from Iran’s president:

What we’ve got now—and I mean the Iranian nation, our neighbours and the broader global community—with this witches brew of nativist authoritarianism, Shi’ia theology, Mr. Huntington’s creative profundities and a bit of second hand Carl Schmitt from-god-knows-where, coupled with belligerent adventurism of foreign powers–is what a nice lady once described long ago as the “devil’s cauldron.”

He also posts about some good news.

I haven’t seen TBP in a few years. We had tentative plans to get together this summer, but that was contingent on Iran and Israel qualifying for the World Cup. (I figure that’s about the only circumstance under which I’d visit Germany.) Unfortunately, the Israelis didn’t keep up their part of the bargain.

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Seasonal Anxiety

Big snow on Thursday night and Friday morning meant I was working at home yesterday. I took care of a lot of my magazine stuff (getting advertisers’ profile-pages approved for the year-end issue) in my home office while about 8 inches of snow piled up outside. At one point, I noticed that my neighbor across the street was clearing his driveway out pretty quickly with his snowblower. The snow was thick, but powdery, so the snowblower had an easy time of it.

A few minutes later, I noticed that he was clearing my driveway with it. I smiled, then ducked under my window, hoping to avoid a scene. My car was in the garage (no windows), so it was possible that he thought I was at the office. Either way, I just didn’t want to step outside and thank him.

This isn’t to say I wasn’t thankful. It’s just that I find it pretty uncomfortable to thank someone for doing unpaid labor in the cold, then walk back inside my warm house to drink hot toddies and think lofty thoughts. I would’ve felt obliged to get a shovel out and clean my walkway or something, just to show him that I, too, was man enough to work out in the cold. Even though I really wanted to be inside, where it’s warm.

He went on to do the driveway of another neighbor after finishing mine.

I also got my wood-burning stove working yesterday. It was the first time I tried it in about two years, since the “why is there a tremendous volume of smoke pouring out of the stove?” episode. Worked like a charm. Even better news was that I remembered the enormous cache of wood in my shed. The wood was left there by the previous occupant, so it dates from early 2003 or thereabouts. Since it’s so old, the wood catches fire really easily.

I still had my neurotic “let’s look inside and make sure it’s going” compulsion for the first hour or so. It’s the first fireplace/stove I’ve ever had, so — as with every other thing in the world — I’m afraid that there’s something I’m supposed to be doing that I just don’t know about, but is glaringly obvious to everyone else. (That fear has actually played a huge part in my life, but it hasn’t stopped me from achieving my long-time dream of having a successful career as a literary author. The fact that I can’t write has stopped me from achieving that dream.)

Anyway, there was no need to check up on the stove. My library’s nice and toasty, and if I really crank that bitch up, I might be able to cut down on the heating bills this winter.

I’m glad that my only dramas are self-inflicted.

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No, seriously

Harold Pinter used the occasion of his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech to attack Bush & Blair over Iraq. Perfectly within his rights.

Karl Ritter, the AP writer covering the event, wrote, “The Nobel committee has not shied from rewarding writers who make a stand against authority, notably in rewarding the literature prize to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970.”

No, seriously.