Jesus Christ, Bodum 8-cup French Press with free coffee scoop. Show some self-respect. You are the best. It’s why I bought you.

I’m not sure if we are going to perform again. Sketch is a lot of work, and it’s hard to gauge how motivated everyone is. But I hope we continue on because it was a good learning experience and the DC area has a grand total of two sketch comedy groups, including us. We’re half the community! We can do a performance where the whole show is one guy taking a shit in a bucket and still call ourselves “one of the best sketch comedy groups in the DC area”.

Hmm. Maybe we should create a “Shit in a Bucket” show. We could promote it like mad, filling the theater with urban hipsters who saw our large fliers filled with ironic quotes like “I’ve never seen shit in a bucket done this well before!” and “You gotta be shitting me!” We could make a movie trailer hinting the show will be an elaborate narrative taking place over three time periods: the Renaissance, the 80s, and the far future. The promotion will be so whimsical and jokey that when the show starts, I think people will be pretty surprised the entire show is one guy taking a shit in a bucket for five minutes, lights out.

It would literally be the worst show everyone in the audience has ever seen,or will ever see. They will be able to tell their friends about this show for years. That has to be worth a $5 ticket, right?

Maybe that’s what’s on the To Do list of an ant queen: “Breed. Eat honey. Sharpen mandibles. Breed some more.”

Regardless, it gets over the top sometimes. All of these headlines are from The Washington Post’s web site today.

Haynesworth learns who is boss
It’s hard to insert a smackdown into a headline, but this editor pulled it off. To be fair, it’s an opinion column about a prima donna Redskins player, but still, Haynesworth is a 350 lb. Man. He’s such a man that my word processor automatically capitalized “man” when I wrote it. You shouldn’t gloat at someone with an arm the size of your torso unless you want the next headline to be “Sports columnist learns who is boss after Haynesworth sits on him”.

Iran starts feeling heat
Ooh…sounds like Iran is about to get some comeuppance! It also sounds like wishful thinking—Iran has been hit with sanctions, embargoes, and toothless U.N. resolutions ever since the Western-backed Shaw was overthrown in [1978]. Maybe the editor was lazy and was just recycling a headline from 1986.

Then there’s the “Weather Gang” section of the Post.

PM Update: Some payback for all the heat

Seriously? Have we declared a War on Weather now?
WEATHER FORECASTER (draws gun): “I’ve had it up to here with you, heat! [BLAM BLAM BLAM] Oh yeah! Who’s sweating now, [description of heat]?”

Even the chat promos are getting into the game.

Carolyn Hax Live: Advice columnist tackles your problems
Go Carolyn! Grab our problems by the ankle, drive them to the ground, and then punch them in the face until they promise never to bother us again.

Where are our problems going that they need to be tackled? Are they running towards the endzone to spike another painful thought into our egos? I don’t need my problems to be tackled. I’d be perfectly content leading them to a plate of cookies under a box propped up with a stick. Trapping my problems and never having to look at them seems like a perfectly acceptable solution.

My main concern is that if emotion met rationality in a cage match, emotion would whack rationality with a folding chair every time. It’s inherently stronger than rational thought, which evolved much later than our emotional centers.

That’s why it’s easier to manipulate people when they are emotional. (see: Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann) and why news organizations should be careful when they use emotionally-laden words. They make articles more interesting and can help us care about things we might not care about otherwise. But they can also obscure truth and prompt us to form opinions based on emotion rather than the more laborious path of reason and logic.

On another note, I love Miike Snow’s song “The Rabbit”. The video is mesmerizingly strange.

That is all.

This post has been brought to you by Siemens USA. “Siemens: Yeah, we know what our name sounds like.”

This post has also been brought to you by Old Tyme Photo-Graphy. “We’ll process your daguerreotypes lickety-split! And by lickety-split, we mean one month.”

This post has also been brought to you by House of Ice-Cream. “Help! Somebody grab a bucket! Our house is made of ice cream!”

Announcement #2: If I had a time machine, I would travel back to 1826, right before French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was going to take the first photograph ever, and somehow, whether through persuasion, bribery, or force, convince him to take a photo of his dick. Here are my reasons:

1. It would be extremely funny.

2. History books would be forced to talk about it. The first photo ever is a watershed moment in history. You can’t skip over the subject of the photo. And the subject would be Niépce’s wee-wee.

3. It would shut up people who argue that society is more decadent than it used to be. “Counterpoint: first photo, dick photo. And he really wanted to photograph his dick because he had to keep the shutter open for eight hours, and he wasn’t even sure the technique would work.”

4. If an alien visited our planet and asked us to point to one moment in human history that would encapsulate everything he needs to know about males on our planet, we would now have that moment.

Announcement #3: I do have a time machine, I did travel back to 1826, and I did convince Niépce to photograph his dick. I bribed him with a six-pack of Coke Zero and a 30-day supply of Viagra (technically, 29 days. One of the pills was used in the photo.)

What I did not anticipate is that propriety would triumph over truth. History books of the day were too embarrassed to print the true details, so they said that the photo was “accidentally destroyed.” Really? Like used for a coaster or thrown out by the house servant while she was tiding up? IT’S THE FIRST PHOTO IN MOTHERFUCKING HISTORY. That’s BS. We can all read between the lines: phrases like “accidentally destroyed” and “perished in a mysterious fire” is history code for “something to do with dicks.” Not all these cases involve time travel, but 100% of them involve photos of men’s penises. I guarantee it. I know the truth, and now you know too.

I’ve only uploaded a few so far, but this is one of my favorites from the trip. It’s of my Mom eating a mystery flavor Jelly Belly.

After we got back, we had a huge week-long Iranian family reunion. At one point, there were 14 people staying my my Mom’s house. She was frazzled and kept calling me Uncle Farzan, but she was also happier than I’ve seen her in a long time.

I haven’t had the time or motivation to write recently, but that’ll change soon. I’m doing well with using the Internet less. I read three books so far this month and watched a few movies: No Country for Old Men (best movie I’ve seen in over a year) and Inception (intellectually engaging and worth seeing, although I’m not passionately in love with it as some people are.) I haven’t read regularly in a long time, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I picked up a few books.

Self-portrait (6-01-10)

Milk drop (6-05-10)

Higgins (6-11-10)

The Sweep Master (6-24-10)

Moonscape (6-25-10)

Hayden (6-26-10)

Butterfly (6-30-10)