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Atlanta – Day 4 – I smoke rocks Joe…

A trip that went overall went well ended on a sour note.  Here is the recap;

Wednesday June 16th afternoon – find out I will be headlining the Sunday night show at The Punchline (fu*king great)

Thursday June 17th morning – see that Joe Rogan has been booked to perform Sunday night. Oh well, feature for Joe Rogan ain’t bad (not too fu*king bad)

Friday June 18th evening – find out that I will be doing guest spots on Joe Rogan’s shows (a second one added because of his popularity) (oh fu*k)

Sunday June 20th – 28 minutes before showtime – Bumped off of the show because Joe Rogan (who by the way has fingers the size of Joe Torre – look it up, no wonder this guy was a world class fighter) has a two man show (fu*k Fear Factor and MMA)

Sunday June 20th 17 minutes into showtime – asked to get out of my seat at the bar so customers can sit (fu*k me)

Sunday June 20th 40 minutes into showtime – I walked outside and saw a member of The Punchline staff looking at one of my cards that I hand out (really nice, not just a business card) after shows.  I asked him where he got it and he said it was just sitting there.  So my last moment at the club was seeing one of my cards from Saturday night discarded like it was a free ticket to HA! Comedy Club (NYC reference).

Of course the Joe Rogan shows were sold out and the average age was 27 as opposed to the shows I worked this weekend which were 2/3 and 3/4 full and the average age was 47.  But them’s the breaks.  Other than that good time in Atlanta. See ya next year.

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Friday Gripes #1 – Break The Glass Floor: We…

Inspired by a discussion I had last night with another comic I have decided to dedicate each Friday to an over-the-top diatribe on things that annoy me.  Other days will continue to be random thoughts when I think of them randomly.

I wanted to watch Pardon The Interruption yesterday evening on ESPN and instead was treated to Women’s softball.  Per a discussion last night at my show at River Bar, which went well (and by “well” I mean it was the comedic equivalent of dying alone on a hospital bed with no family and no friends, writhing in pain) I believe it is time for ESPN to just develop ESPNW – a sports network dedicated to women’s sports so that I am not rudely surprised when I turn on the television looking for sports and instead find women’s sports (and it would probably knock off at least 23 cents on my cable bill).  To make an analogy I have made several times before – turning on ESPN when looking for sports and finding women’s sports is like finding an episode of Real Sex on HBO and instead of it being a segment on nymphomaniac, attractive female strippers, it is about a nudist colony for chubby people over the age of 70.  Disturbing and disappointing.

Now I am all for women and women’s equality.  I was raised in a household led by a strong woman (if she were black she would have been a “strong, black woman,” but I don’t think the phrase “strong, white woman” is a actual acceptable phrase outside of police descriptions.  I enjoy the company of women, both in relationships and naked on the Internet.  But equality can only go so far.  It is time to get women’s sports off of my television.  Now sports like gymnastics (the closest a young girl can ever come to experiencing the life of an abused altar boy) and figure skating make sense being televised because there is a different capacity than men in those sports.  They offer unique skills and outfits, except for the case of Johnny Weir.  But any other sport – golf, basketball, softball/baseball, soccer, tennis, running, speed walking, push ups, jumping jacks, etc. are just better done by men.

This is not a shot against Title IX – I think parents of girls should have just as much chance as parents of boys to not have to pay for their kids’ college education if they can play sports, but at some point it is time to say – welcome to the real world.  The same way I think it is important for strangers not to pretend to be impressed by every toddler they run into, just because that toddler’s parents are going “Can you say hello to the man?” and the kid mumbles something, so to is it important to not pretend that women’s professional sports have some intrinsic value.  In both cases you are merely deluding the other party.  It would be like if there were a television station dedicated to The Godfather films (even 3), but every 6 days they flood the station with The Last Don – CBS’ terrible original movie (also based on a Mario Puzo novel) starring Danny Aiello.

My Mom once said to me, when I was complaining about the WNBA, “If you had a daughter, wouldn’t you want them to be able to watch other women playing basketball really well?”  And I thought about it and realized I was not Chinese and could not offer her to sterile, white Americans for cheap so I said “yes.” But I’d really prefer them to want to watch the NBA because it is 1000 times better and I would not have to cringe for 2 hours watching a bunch of women my height executing the fundamentals of the game at 1/3 the natural speed.

The truth is all televised sports are just vehicles for advertisers and corporate America to reach consumers, and I am not saying women’s pro sports should not exist.  That is what YouTube is for – like those underground MMA fighters.  They can still compete, but I just don’t want it interrupting real sports and real sports news.

Next Friday – RIP messages on Facebook & Twitter

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The Return Of The Cave Man

Whenever people talk with fear about radical Islam in the Middle East they speak about how it is a fringe element of the faith that wants to bring modern society back to the 9th century.  We fear this because it comes with repression of women, suicide bombs, etc.  But the more I look at American pop culture it seems we are hell bent on doing the same, but with our own American style.

The fastest growing sport in America is Mixed Martial Arts. I know defenders of this sport will call  the guys great athletes, but that doesn’t cover up the fact that it is basically just brawling for the enjoyment of a mob.    It reminds me of the scene in Gladiator when Derek Jacobi’s character is discussing how Rome is the mob and Caesar will be applauded by the mob for giving them bloody games.  Well, I guess we’ve come full circle.  Watching highlights of these MMA events convinces me that we are less than a century away form Gladiators coming back.

Twenty years ago, prescient film pioneer Jean Claude-Van Damme did a movie called Lionheart about underground fighting clubs for big money.  20 years later the clubs are out in the open and cleaning up on pay-per-view.   Are we 20 years from the number of movies that showcase races or fights to the death (usually involving prisoners) becoming reality?

Frenemy, ginormous and staycation are now in the dictionary, so this is not just a testosterone fueled movement.  Idiots of all classes, races and genders seem to growing exponentially and continue to win.  The movie Idiocracy, by Mike Judge, shows, through two accidental time travelers over the next 500 years, society getting dumber and dumber to the point that a porn star is elected US President, popular shows on television simply involve people getting hit in the nuts and people can barely speak properly.  Judge may have overshot with 500 years.

Twitter has shown us the way to communicate with each other in short bursts.  So in 50 years perhaps we will simply communicate with emoticons or high-tech equivalents of grunts, believing technology automatically means better, but not realizing social skills have eroded to the point that we are more at ease instant messaging each other than actually communicating in person.

Last year I thought there was hope when The Dark Knight elevated a traditionally mindless genre, the action/comic movie to something artistic and elegant.  But this year’s #1 movie is Transformers 2 which appeals to the basic attraction to visual and aural stimuli with base humor and nothing else.   So after a year that gave us Obama and The Dark Knight (my two favorite things from 2008) it appears that tales of the idiot’s demise were greatly exaggerated.  Time to go tweet.