how the last time i laughed this hard on tv was during "arrested development" when tobias was a mole and george michael was flying in tinytown

from this week's episode of "the office", written by ricky gervais and stephen merchant:

michael; "you show me a white man you trust and i'll show you a black man i trust even more. pam, you tell me a white person you trust."

pam: "my dad".

michael: "danny glover."

jim: "jonas salk".

michael: "who?"

jim: "justin timberlake".

michael: "oh, please, colin powell. next".

karin: "so i got one. jesus christ."

michael: "apollo creed"

hilarious.

how something can be so terrible that it makes it all the way around to unbelieveably brilliant

it happens. especially with acting and directing.

and this clip from god knows what is the star piece of evidence to that theory. and please, watch it all the way through. i submit that iit turns the corner from nauseating to excellent when the woman wearing the arm sling joins the karate fight. or when the bad guy licks his knife.

again, it's so horrible in every measure that it's hall of fame brilliant.

enjoy it with everything you've got.

how i would love to coach, and i would absolutely hate to coach

there was a sign up sheet at the jcc for a basketball coach for a grammar school aged team. i seriously thought about volunteering for it, and then i quickly snapped out of it.

i mean, i would love to coach. i think i have a lot to share when it comes to basketball, and i know i'm a pretty good teacher. and i have a nice way about me. but to deal with parents? no frigging way.

check out this horrifying story about the insanity that parents have gone to - and this is just miles away from here.

yeah, no thanks.

how i was too angry to post this then, but i'm much better now, thank you

after the giants-titans debacle on sunday, i grumpily walked over to the bar to settle my tab. while waiting for the bartender, i watched these two guys, who by all accounts were very good friends, settle their own.

it was, in a word, strange.

i'm gonna try and recount it.

okay, here goes it:

- "hey man, i think you owe $25 and i owe $22, because when you take into account the extra beer..."

- "yes, but you're not taking tax into consideration."

- "i think i am. that's why the split should be 25 to 22."

- "are you sure? with tip, i think it's more $24 for me, and $23 for you. check it out."

the guy takes the bill and analyzes it.

- "i'm not sure. maybe we can borrow a calculator."

a calculator! for a dollar! it's so ridiculous, i'm using exclamation points!

imagine if they hated each other. or if their team blew a 21 point lead in the fourth quarter.

shit. i'm in a bad mood again.

how none of these are related

in honor of my crossing the street in the mission yesterday with a pair of transvestites, and also in honor of me watching a homeless man in the upper haight urinate on the sidewalk in front of a pair of german tourists, i give you, completely unrelated, jim mora's "playoffs?" rant from five years ago. for no reason, other than it always makes me laugh. just like street-crossing transvestites and sidewalk-urinating bums.

how after they mailed one in, i mailed this in

feel free to do the same.

New York Football Giants
Giants Stadium
East Rutherford, NJ 07073
Phone: (201) 935-811

Dear Messrs. Tisch, Mara and Accorsi.

I am a lifelong Giants fan, as is my father, and as was his father. My nephew will be a lifelong Giants fan. When I have a son, he will also be a Giants fan. There has never been a game where we've missed a play and not sweated and bled with them. Our Giants. Your team.

And, although I understand that the game of football has many different tangibles, with games hinging on a lucky bounce of an oblong ball, I not only speak for my family but also for most Giants fans where I say that the game against the Titans was the most embarrassing and infuriating I've watched.

I understand that the team has experienced more than their fair share of injuries. And I get that the healthy players have to do double-duty because of it. And I'm fully aware that we play the most difficult schedule in football.

None of that is an excuse for the complete lack of effort and fire that I, my family and every Giants fan, watched in the second half against the Titans, a clearly inferior team. A team we had beaten and demoralized. A team we graciously let back into the game.

Being a Giants apologist, I can point to those factors and excuse those thirty minutes as a fluke. But that second half reminded me of the Jacksonville game. And the Seattle game. And the first three quarters of the Philadelphia game. You get the point. They all showed a complete lack of effort, which seems to be the personality this team has taken.

And, the worst part of it all is that I have no hope that it's something we can overcome. It is a virus that has taken over in the very fiber of the team that I love.

Your fans are not professional football players. We cannot do the things that they do. But we can expect that they do the things we can. Like playing the whole game. Finishing tackles. Finishing plays even. Caring. The small stuff that helps win games.

It's Plaxico Burress giving up on a play - yet again. How many times? It's Mathias Kiwanuka giving up on a sack. It's the offense playing without any urgency. It's placcid playcalling.

it's Jeremy Shockey looking like the only player on the field who actually cares.

And all that is inexcusable.

This is the first time I've contacted the team. I always had the assurances that your fathers would have taken the necessary steps to remedy this embarrassment. I hope you follow in their footsteps.

Thank you for your time.

A disgruntled Giants fan.

how when you give back to your peeps, they give back to you

i wrote a poem on yelp.com for a bar that i frequent called the 540 club.

it wasn't much of a poem. still, it is funny.

in fact, here it is:

$2 PBR.
i repeat, $2 PBR.
i don't care if a hungry alligator is tending the bar.
$2 PBR.

still, one of the bartenders drew it up and the owners made it into an ad. it's running in the san francisco bay guardian.

book piece.

how i dig gregg allman's friends

i saw "gregg allman and friends" last night at the grand in san francisco. the band's name confused me. i mean, there's the allman brothers band, but since duane allman died, it's really been just gregg allman and friends. so...i'm confused.

so i went there expecting dickey betts and warren haynes and butch and derek trucks, among others. but i got gregg allman and friends - different friends.

one of them was named jerry jemmott, who is an amazingly accomplished bassist and who, as gregg allman said, "would take days to list everyone he's played with". i also liked the fact that he's from staten island, new york. sweet.

another one of gregg allman's friends - although he only played harmonica for one song - was taylor hicks. i dig him. i think winning "american idol" was bad for him, mainly he's gonna be pigeonholed into something he's not. he's a legitimately talented dude who is much bigger than the label. and he did a helluva job on the harmonica - and he knew better not to sing when on stage with gregg allman. he wasn't gonna win that one.

they played a bunch of blues songs, a bunch of obscure gregg allman songs, dylan's "just like a woman", the grateful dead's "turn on your love light" and a bunch of allman brothers classics - like "melissa", "midnight rider", "whipping post" and the encore, "statesboro blues" - but reworked with a heavy dose of the blues. i mean, heavier than the blues-influenced southern rock they pioneered. great great stuff.

my point? check them out if they come to your town. really great stuff.

how i know i'm late on this

but "chad vader: day shift manager" is the funniest intentional humor i've seen on the web.

just really brilliant stuff.

here's episode 1, episode 2, episode 3 and episode 4.

i'm officially jealous.

of course, david cross covering bank of america covering u2 is pretty damn funny too.

how some things are just too sick to believe

and by sick, i'm referring to 5'9" nate robinson blocking a shot from 7'5" yao ming.

amazing.

how the nets are taking it to the knicks in all areas

it's bad enough that the best basketball team in the city plays in east rutherford. but now, they're taking even the unintentional comedy crown away from the clown princes of hoop.

yep, it appears that the nets are seeing the reign of isiah thomas and raising them with an all-seniors dance squad. like over-60 dance squad.

i gotta admit. that's funnier and much more painful than the marbury-francis backcourt.

touche, nets.

how i'm not sure how much this will help, but it'll at least be some sort of a voice

if you want to stand up to the latest in a long line of horrible decisions and moral ineptitude by the fox network and o.j. simpson, sign this petition started up by the goldman family, condemning not only the o.j. simpson interview but all the parties that will profit from it.

it's all disgusting, and everybody should be ashamed of themselves.

not that fox or o.j. had any shame left over.

this goes for you too, reganbooks/harpercollins.

how there's nothing as funny

as the bulletproof drive-thru window at the only 24-hour jack in the box in san francisco at two in the morning, with a line full of drunkards who aren't driving thru.

really, you have to experience it to believe it.

it's comedy at its finest.

how i spent my afternoon

finally, one of the world's finest parallel parkers has met his match.

use the four arrows on your keyboard, and the space bar for brake.

how i love november just for this

in the past twenty four hours, i've watched:
butler beat indiana
north carolina barely get by winthrop
oral roberts beat kansas

no other sport has the threat of an upset any greater than college basketball.

god, i love this.

how i hope for everyone's sake that ricky gervais or sasha baron cohen had something to do with this

there are certain checkpoints in your life where you need to evalute everything and say to yourself, "is this really what life is about? am i happy where my life is heading?"

and, it's at this checkpoint where, if you answer it wrongly, you get stuck singing something like this.

i threw up in my mouth. then i laughed the vomit out of my mouth.

it's the worst video i have ever seen, and the best video i have ever seen.

it works even better if you read the lyrics as you listen.

really, i can't see how anyone at bank of america thought this was a good idea. and i can't see how bono is not gonna strangle everyone over there and at mbma over this. i would, if i were him.

thank you, comedy gods.

how i didn't miss this show this time around

in the music section of my comcast on demand service is a channel called concert.tv where you can find selected concerts from artists.

i know. duh.

anyways, there's a concert from a year ago at the fillmore by a great band called my morning jacket. they are incredible live, especially when they begin to rock out. and this show completely captures that electricity.

for some reason, i missed that show. i don't know what i had going on that day, but it must have been important. but now i haven't, i've attended it, even though it's a year later. it's like i hopped into a delorean, ramped up the flux capacitor and attended a show i should have been at in the first place.

if you got it, check them out.

how the world has been taken beneath my feet

i've physically trained myself to automatically change the channel whenever i hear any of the fifteen thousand "this is our country" ads that come on during an nfl game. i'll usually find something worth watching in the meantime and set my remote so that channel is "last". i need to do that, so i don't throw my sofa through the nearest window. which i'm sure is not the response chevy was looking for.

anyways, while i'm watching the giants-bears game tonight, my alternate non "this is our country" channel was spike tv, which was showing a rocky marathon. i turned the channel during the second chevy ad during the fourth quarter, and it's the scene in "rocky III' when rocky's got nothing on the beach, where apollo tells him that he's lost it, and then adrian convinces him that it's okay to be afraid of clubber lang, that he's gotta do it for himself. and that turns the tide for rocky, as the best music score ever chimes in, and we're treated to a montage of rocky picking up his training. and although it looks superhuman, it's great stuff.

my point is that the scene culminates with rocky finally beating apollo in a foot race down the beach, and then they begin celebrating in the pacific ocean. they hug, and the tides' splashing around them, and it's in overcranked slo-mo, and the music hits a crescendo, and...well, i gotta say it, that i never realized how off the charts that scene is in the flamingly gay scale. in fact, it's the freddie mercury mustache of unintentionally gay scenes - almost topping when maverick and iceman hugged after fending back the migs in "top gun".

i've must have seen those rocky movies a million times each, and i never noticed how "fabulous" that scene was.

san francisco, san francisco.

how i just have six more months to go

although this trailer for "spiderman 3" doesn't grab me, i think it's safe to assume that with sam riami back to direct and alvin sargent writing the screenplay, that it should be just as amazingly fantastic and human as the first two were.

at least, that's how my spidey sense is tingling me.

how you best be filling out those TPS reports - or else

inspired by the heartwarming "shining", i give you the trailer for the horror classic, "office space".