The Sound of Young America (www.maximumfun.org) - A great archive of a show that teeters on NPR-ish-ness but is saved by the high quality of it's guests, particularly it's focus on comedians like Louis CK, Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford and others, along with the likes of Dave Foley, Chuck Klosterman, Miranda July, Bob Odenkirk and Michael Cera... hours of blissfull work-killing fun!

The Psychic Soviet, by Ian Svenovius - A crisply written deflowering of the romantic notion of the artist, the gayness of Lord of the Rings and any idea you ever had about the history of rock and roll. Ian (former leader of the Make-Up and the Nation of Ulysses) makes these arguments sound completely rational and compelling, and thankfully direct.

The Filmic Ouevre of ZAZ - Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker. These are the guys who wrote, or directed, or in some way created a whole slew of comedies, like Airplane!, Top Secret!, Naked Gun, and BASEketball. In fairness they've been responsible for some real shit, it's easy to remember how awful their almost vaudevillian style of parody can be when done with a heavy hand (the later Scary Movies for instance).

But remember that in their best movies they're not trying to make you chuckle quietly to yourself because you "got" their pop culture reference. Their goal is to have you laughing until your stomach hurts. They pack the jokes so densely and carefully that you really do need to watch their films 2 or 3 times to make sure you don't miss a joke. Their style is so easy to understand and to mimic that they have suffered somewhat for their imitators, which is a shame since their best work is truly great.

Everyone remembers the line "Joey, do you like gladiator movies?". And that's because it is a hysterical line. But then you remember that it was spoken by "Captain Oveur", which leads to this:

Roger Murdock: Flight 2-0-9'er, you are cleared for take-off.
Captain Oveur : Roger!
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice: L.A. departure frequency, 123 point 9'er.
Captain Oveur: Roger!
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Victor Basta: Request vector, over.
Captain Oveur: What?
Tower voice: Flight 2-0-9'er cleared for vector 324.
Roger Murdock: We have clearance, Clarence.
Captain Oveur: Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?
Tower voice: Tower's radio clearance, over!
Captain Oveur: That's Clarence Oveur. Over.
Tower voice: Over.
Captain Oveur: Roger.
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice : Roger, over!
Roger Murdock: What?
Captain Oveur: Huh?
Victor Basta: Who?

Rose House

Many of you know Fort Grunt's tireless dedication to the Environment. However you may not be aware of our biggest project to date, Rose House. Rose House is a small cottage we've been building on a 10 acre plot of land in Chatham county. Nothing fancy, we're building it with the intention of living off the grid, with an extremely low environmental footprint. We should have enough solar panels to power a few laptops and wireless routers, and maybe a Nintendo Wii. (Have you seen those things!) While most of the building material is recycled wood from an old mill that was torn down in the '70's, we are insulating it with a mixture of straw and fecal matter. It's a pretty basic 2 to 1 ratio, mixed up in big vats and then caulked into the spaces in the walls. I know what you're thinking, when Lou brought it up I was concerned about the smell as well. However he reminded me that since we are both Macrobiotic raw food freegans, and mostly subsist on a diet of rose petals and sunshine, our fece (hey, what is the group singular of feces anyway?) actually smells good. Like roses. (hence the name)

Construction has been a bear, but we're nearly completed. Pictures to follow. Just thought you'd all like to hear about what we're doing for Mother.

This is a great time to be an appreciator/consumer of humor. Someone somewhere told me that 90% of everything is crap. This has always seemed fairly obvious, kind of axiomatic that - if nothing else - I will only really appreciate 10% of a medium's product. I think that's true even with humor now, but the 10% rule doesn't really matter, because there's a ton of humor being put out right now, so there's a good amount which is excellent; that 10% is pretty damn good.

I know it's kind of awkward to refer to it as humor, but the reality underlying this awkwardness is what makes it such a great time for humor. There's so many types; good standup comedy, writing, tv and movies... Judd Apatow and his cadre have been making some of the best humor around in the form of TV shows and movies (40 Year Old Virgin, Undeclared, Knocked Up...), Chris Onstad and Nicholas Gurewitch have been doing some amazing web comics. For the written word blogs/websites have had a pretty good run, although (not surprisingly) the humor blogs are almost uniformly not as funny as blogs trying to communicate something and using humor doing it. Cockeyed.com, x-entertainment.com, seanbaby.com are all pretty solid examples of this kind of internet humor. In a more traditional printed book you can read the work of Simon Rich and Paul Feig, or the phenomenal Zombie infested world of Max Brooks.

And I didn't even mention Hot Fuzz. But that's because I'm not trying to make a catalog of everything which is funny (see attached.) Instead I'm trying to make a point about how much good stuff there is.

Getting back to the "there's a ton of humor being put out right now" trope, here's something to think about. 10 years ago when Happy Gilmore came out there was no question it was the funniest movie of the year. The exploitation of sudden over-the-top violence, "stupid humor", and a plot which was essentially meaningless and only existed as a framework to rest the jokes on was a revelation in a world of Hot Shots Part Deux and Dumb and Dumber. Now there are car insurance commercials that use the same type of violence=humor to great effect. There are actual people who have invented beer fridges which launch a beer into your hand - the final realization of the stupid humor dreams of the 90's. Thanks to the proliferation of this humor in commercials and reality there is much less necessity for it in movie comedies. This has opened the door for the sweet yet raunchy comedies of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, as well as the smart stupid humor of Wet Hot American Summer and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle

TV is no different, there are an awful lot of "How I Met Your Mother"'s and shows with Charlie Sheen in it. But in the past 5 or so years we've also had the British and American versions of the Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, the Ali G Show, Flight of the Conchords, Lucky Louie, and the Sarah Silverman Program. Try making a list like that out of comedies of the 90s and you won't be able to do it. Seinfeld, the Simpsons... then what?

So yeah. It's a great time to like humor/comedy. And I could be wrong about why there's such an abundance of good humor right now. The other theory I've mulled about in my head is that Carlos Mencia (the wet dream of morning dj's everywhere) in and of himself is so bad as to necessitate being balanced out by the whole wad of good comedy.

BONUS: Top Ten YouTube Searches

Simon Pegg, Impossible Supermodel?

I saw the new, fucking amazing movie Hot Fuzz this weekend. Car chases, fast editing, explosions, fast editing, decapitations, and a horse all combined into a fast pitch baseball hit into the batting cage black netting of my heart by Simon Pegg, the star and co-writer of the movie.

Here's the thing. Heather (my wife) loves to act. like in real life theater. and I love my wife. And thus should love to go see her act. But I don't. I can't. Because movies like Hot Fuzz raise my expectation level so high in terms of acting quality, clarity of speech (seriously! even in a fucking British movie where I miss half the dialogue I still get more of it than in a local version of Macbeth) that I find theater really hard to watch.

Like a fashion photographer who's been exposed to too many impossibly beautiful supermodels and finds his wife to be an unfuckable hag, I find myself unable to fuck the unfuckable hag that is theater. I feel bad for theater. Theater didn't do anything wrong, it just stayed the same while all the other girls at the prom developed.

I'm going to New York this summer and will see several plays which theoretically should be really good, what with NYC being the center of the theater world in the U.S.. I'm not holding out much hope though.

Conservapedia (www.conservapedia.com) - From their about page: "Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Now it's time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet Conservapedia began in November 2006, as the class project for a World History class of 58 advanced home schooled and college-bound students meeting in New Jersey. Conservapedia has since grown enormously, including contributors nationwide. Conservapedia already has over one-half the number of entries as the Oxford Dictionary of World History. Conservapedia is rapidly becoming one of the largest and most reliable online educational resources of its kind."Worth reading at least for it's entry on kangaroos: "Kangaroos have large ears on top of their small heads, a long snout, and short arms with clawed fingers. Their legs are strong and powerful, designed by God for leaping." Fucking awesome

MIT's Open Courseware website -
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/all-courses.htm - an excellent web resource, the Open Courseware site archives many of the classes taught at MIT. Because classes can vary so much, some of these open courses are more fully realized on the web than others. For instance many of the Lit classes offer the full syllabus, links to electronic versions of the reading material, full reading lists, and outlines of the thematic (or other) connections, as well as audio and video recordings, often full lectures.
This site has helped me push myself when I've found myself getting complacent with either what I'm reading or how deeply I'm looking into what I'm reading. For instance parts of Oblomov are taught within the context of a course on "Imperial and Revoluationary Russia", which offers suggestions for reading some Russian histories (for the context they offer) or a collection of Russian fairy tales to see how the serfs viewed the wealthy elite.

I think best in terms of groupings and analogy. Here is a grouping
for this category:

Rilke
City of Glass
Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy
Struwwelpeter
W.G. Sebald
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Richard Sala's work
Anything else by Tim Burton
Edward Gorey
Kafka
Kafka (the film)
Some of Paul Klee's works
Everything by Joseph Cornell
Amelie/City of Lost Children/Delicatessen