I was working on a question for this weekend’s show — about some ancient fish that scientists now believe was the first to copulate — and an idea for a joke came floating into my head. I wrote, “Prior to this, scientists believed that sexual intercourse began in 1964, around the time of the release of the first Rolling Stones album.”
When we did the show, Roy Blount, Jr. laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, the poem!” and I realized of course that I had flat out stolen that joke from Philip Larkin, whose great poem “Annus Miribilis” begins:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
My apologies to the late Mr. Larkin for the blatant, if — really — unintentional theft. Later on, complimenting Roy for the catch, I tried to defend changing the band to the Rolling Stones, saying, “Who ever got laid because of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand?’”
Roy’s reply: “John Lennon did, I’ll bet. And maybe Paul.”
Tomorrow night, Saturday 2/28, I’ll be hosting a special benefit performance of the House Theater of Chicago’s latest show, “The Rose and the Rime. “ It’s a fairy tale/parable/adventure story, with music and snow, a terrifying trip across a rope bridge, and a number of exceptionally talented and attractive actors who, at one point, take off most of their clothes.
It’s fun for the whole family — in fact, I’m taking the whole family — and at this special performance, I’ll be hosting a discussion/reception beginning at 7 PM with the the creators of the show… fun, drink, and Art, for only $50.
I’ve been asked for some clarification on this issue, so here’s the lowdown, on how you can, and can’t, fine me online:
In addition to the information you’ll find on the official Wait Wait site, I blog here sporadically, and you can always post comments (which I have to approve before they appear, but I generally approve everything that isn’t spam) and you can email me directly through the contacts page. I am not as good as I should be in writing back, but I will try. And I encourage anyone who’d like to talk to me about speaking engagements, etc. to use the professional contacts found there.
I am on Facebook, but have found out that if I accept all the friend requests I get from fans and listeners I get overwhelmed by information and have trouble keeping in touch with what I’ll call my meat-space friends. So tend not to approve most friend requests, sorry. However, I do maintain a Facebook fan page, and encourage you to sign up there… I stop by and occasionally post things there, and read things left on the wall.
And, like everybody else these days, I’m on Twitter, and you’re welcome to follow and reply to me there.
Thanks for your interest… I’m always amazed that so many people care what I have to say about anything.
Just to make something clear about Disneyworld, mentioned below: we really had a wonderful time. It’s almost impossible not to, just as it’s almost impossible to, say, get on a plane heading to Denver and not end up in Denver. Disney World is a meticulously engineered machine for creating fun, and barring some catastrophe, if you get into it, you will have fun. Now, there are many, many people who would not ever wish to enter such a machine, who find the whole idea of such a machine horrendous, but my view is: why not? At the very least, you can marvel at the stupendous amount of skill — Imagineering! — that goes into its making. The Expedition: Everest ride, to take but one example, is in its own way as pure an expression of human ingenuity, imagination, technology and craftsmanship as say, the Uffizi Museum in Florence, and the Uffizi has much longer lines.
Not that you would know I was away, from my increasingly sporadic blogging these days, but I spent the last five days with my wife and three kids in that remarkable, happiest place on Earth, Walt Disney World, or, as they prefer, the Walt Disney World Resorts. We did it up right: stayed at the Contemporary Hotel, got the five day park hopper passes, ate at character buffets (sorry about that spill, Pooh… send me the dry-cleaning bill.) I have nothing useful to add to the barrels of ink and pixels that have been expended praising or condemning Disney… except, man, they really don’t want you to run on the property. If you leave the appointed Pedestrian Zones, you are taking your life into your hands, and I have expected to be run down and captured by one of those Rovers from “The Prisoner.” As it was, I ended up tripping over a pipe or something that was sticking up through the concrete on a traffic island — I can’t blame Disney for the lapse, since, like I said, I wasn’t supposed to be there — and managed to bang myself up pretty good. My wife called down to ask for a first aid kit, and when she was told they didn’t have one she took the woman at the front desk to task, saying this was irresponsible on Disney’s part, not to have first aid supplies handy*. At the end of the call, during which my wife (out of concern for me and my bleeding knees) was critical indeed, the woman at the front desk rung off by saying, as she is required to do, “Have a magical day.”
In fact: every “cast member” we encountered was, almost but not entirely without exception, quite nice. Sometimes really, really nice. Sometimes so very very nice that I imagined them being that nice all day, every day to hordes of sweaty loud (and large! very large!) people, and then going mad. Absolutely bonkers. I wonder: has anyone who reads blog this worked for Disney? There must be hundreds of thousands of employees. Do they reward you for being nice? Do they tell you that they have undercover agents posing as large tourists, and if they find you being nice, you will be taken to the Heavyside Layer? What? Because I couldn’t last there, being that nice, for a day.
*Later that day, at Epcot, we found a first aid station and the very nice (see!) woman there was happy to supply me with large size band aids and antibiotic ointments. Thanks, Uncle Walt!
I was working on an upcoming script today, and thought it would be funny if people were writing novels on Twitter… so I started coming up with Twitter versions of classic novels. For example, The Grapes of Wrath:
Times are hard. Sister breast feeding homeless guy. I am so outta here.
And then I said to myself, hey, why not go to my own site on Twitter, and ask other people to contribute their ideas. And Twitter, shall we say, responded. Results are here.
I am a devoted fan of Dan Savage, so was distressed to see his blog post taking me to task. It’s like being condemned by a dear friend…A dear friend who I admire for being willing to condemn everybody else, so I guess I should have seen this coming.
Dan was talking about a segment on this week’s show in which we quoted Andy Card talking about the “locker room” atmosphere of the Obama Oval Office, because Obama had been photographed sitting at his desk (the Resolute desk) without a suit jacket. Dan feels we knowingly or unknowingly were parroting a false Republican talking point; ie, that Bush and Reagan always wore suit jackets in the Oval Office, when photos (in his post) show clearly that they sometimes did not.
Well, you can listen to the show yourself, or read the transcript of the segment (I’ll post it after the gap) and decide for yourself if we were parroting anything. For my part, I’ll say this: if there has been any single theme to emerge over the last eight years, it’s the displacement, sometimes intentionally, of substance by symbolism. President Bush himself seemed obsessed with appearances; America always had to “show the world” and “send messages to our enemies” because we didn’t want to “send a signal” that would show we were weak, etc. Historians might decide, someday, that the entire rationale for the Iraq War boiled down to sending a message to the world… a trillion dollar Twitter post: “@muslimworld We will kick ur a$$ & take names!”
This tiny little brouhaha seems to me more of the same. That Andy Card would get all steamed up about the message Obama was sending by wearing shirtsleeves is, to me, hilarious, and it’s my fault if I didn’t make that clear enough in this week’s show. Perhaps I thought it was more self-evident than is the case. And I think that those who believe that brandishing pictures of W. without a suit jacket proves anything about anything important are making a similar error.
And, in regards to being a “card carrying member of the liberal media:” actually, these days it’s a little bar-code thingie on our keychains. They scan it at the checkout and we get 20% off our quinoa.
Transcript of the offending comment follows: (more…)
My colleagues and good friends Scott Simon and Ira Glass appeared with me at last Wednesday’s “Audible Feast” benefit for Chicago Public Radio. After dinner and cocktails, the audience was invited into the Rubloff Auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago to hear first Ira, then Scott, then me relate a story… the theme was “Driveway Moments,” a public radio term of art/marketing, referring to those bits of radio that are so compelling you end up sitting in your driveway (or garage, or parking lot) after you’ve arrived at your destination so you can hear the end…
Ira did a wonderful live, recreation of highlights from the superb “Giant Pool Of Money” episode of This American Life; Scott told a warm, sometimes chilling story about two young women he got to know in Sarajevo (and who inspired his excellent novel, Pretty Birds) and I… I did something else. After the gap, my contribution to the evening. Keep in mind it’s uncut and unedited and uncorrected, essentially a rough draft I improvised from on stage. Enjoy.
One of the more interesting of the many interesting people I met in the course of writing my book was Evan Stone, a very good looking, very funny, and very (yes, dammit) talented adult film star. He told me at the time I met him, on set in 2004, that he had big plans for the future, big plans indeed, that he couldn’t tell me about. Little did I know that they would involve performing during the Super Bowl! In Tuscon, at least. (The first link gives a warning before becoming NSFW. This one does not.)
