They’re an army in the night, like Norman Mailer. Once again, that’s Riki “Garfunkel” Lindhome and Kate “Oates” Micucci, along with special appearances by Sarah Silverman, Tig Notaro and probably some others that I missed. G&O’s new album All Over Your Face is for sale on Amazon, iTunes, and probably lots of other places. Their website, as listed in my blogroll, is garfunkelandoates.com.

G&O make what they call “couch videos” of new songs they write and post them on YouTube. My listing the following video of “Pregnant Women are Smug” at #3 in my 2010 Top Ten is a little bit of a cheat, because their original YouTube video of the song appeared in April of 2009. But in 2010 they made their first national TV appearances — three, in fact, on The Tonight Show — and this is my favorite of them.

Garfunkel & Oates have made several appearances on my buddy Scott Aukerman’s podcast Comedy Death-Ray Radio (see also #8 in this year’s Top Ten). My favorite G&O on CDR episode so far was the one with them and Weird Al Yankovic.

Last night I got to see G&O’s live show at the UCB Theater here in L.A., where they have a regular gig the first Friday of each month. In addition to an hour of Riki and Kate being as beguiling and hilarious as I’d expected, plus a funny stand-up interlude by special guest Moshe Kasher, my $10 ticket also got me a red lunch bag with the punny label “Garfunkel and Oates Presents.” The schwag within included two packets of Swedish Fish, one of Sour Patch Kids, a mini-box of Wonka Nerds, a fun-size Butterfinger, and G&O-branded stuff including two decals (one pictured above), a kazoo (to accompany the girls on the second verse of “Fuck You”), a lighter, and a retractable ballpoint pen.² That is unbeatable value for your comedy-show dollar, baby.

Garfunkel & Oates’s all-inclusive website is garfunkelandoates.com. For their complete video canon, check out their hilarious YouTube channel (my all-time favorite: “This Party Took a Turn for the Douche”), and their Facebook page is here. They recently finished but have not yet released their first album, All Over Your Face; in the meantime, MP3′s of some of their songs are available on iTunes.

One of these is Nick Kroll. Many know him as a cast member of the TV series The League on FX, although I’m still not yet one of them.¹ I don’t know what the correct comedy-speak term is for Kroll’s overall schtick, but I’ll take my best shot by describing him as (mainly) a bag-of-characters comic. His douchebag extraordinaire creation Bobby Bottleservice appears in several Funny or Die videos, including as part of the faux crime-fighting duo the Ed Hardy Boys. In this video, Kroll takes part in the Comedy Fights Malaria effort of Malaria No More by bringing Bobby Bottleservice to West Africa. The result is just wrong enough to be funny.

Of Nick Kroll’s other characters I personally get the biggest kick out of El Chupacabra, although by definition that one is best suited for radio. Fabrice Fabrice almost made the list this year, but I already had one Funny or Die interview video. Maybe next year, Fabrice.

This little Facebook meme has found its way to me. OK, what am I supposed to do?

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I’ll do it, and I’ll send it to the friends who tagged me in theirs, but no way am I going to require 25 of my Facebook friends to write lists too. My friends have more important things to do… well, most of them, anyway.

25 Random Things About Me

1. I am a compulsive copy editor and a remorseless grammar nazi (in case you hadn’t noticed).
2. I am geeky enough to use HTML markup when posting things on community web sites. In case you still hadn’t noticed.
3. I’m seriously considering getting a bicycle to use for getting around town, in order to both save money on gas and get more exercise. The only drawback I foresee is the increased chance of severe injury due to LA’s shortage of bike lanes and surplus of reckless drivers.
4. I’m discouraged at having already written this much and only being on #4.
5. Guiltiest dietary pleasure: ice cream.
6. I just decided that if I’m going to write this much, I’m damn well going to make it a blog post — come to think of it, then it’ll automatically become a Facebook note anyway. Screw it, I am now composing this on WordPress.
7. I first used a computer in about 1981 when my elementary school obtained three or four machines and stationed them in the library. They taught us to program a little bit of BASIC, which never really came in handy. Within a couple of years I was writing school essays on my family’s IBM PC and telling people how totally choice WordStar for DOS was.



8. I am not a grammar martinet with regard to casual conversation. The standard for spoken English is necessarily much broader than the one for written English. How dull and colorless would conversation be without the wild cards of things like dialect and slang?
9. I inadvertently stayed up working on something until 2:30 A.M. last night, and it’s altogether possible that I’ll fall asleep before I finish this.


She’s worth every penny

10. Pretty soon I’ll need to go pick up my dog Bella from her bi-monthly cardiac ultrasound re-check appointment at the vet. I’ll feel lucky if we get out of there for less than $350.
11. I can’t believe I already need to do laundry again.
12. Every so often I hear the Italian woman in the building next door having sex. Usually it’s when I need to concentrate on something else, but can’t, because she apparently likes her nookie with a generous supply of fresh air via her open window. C’est la vie, she’s clearly faking it most of the time anyway.
13. In my opinion The Office has fallen off a little bit lately, especially compared to 30 Rock, which still consistently cracks my shit up.
WARNING: items 14, 15 and 16 contain a high level of geekery. Viewer discretion is advised.
14. I’d love to be able to uninstall iTunes (and the irritating Apple Software Update app piggybacked onto it, which pesters me daily to install something called Bonjour for Windows) and use Songbird for everything. The problem is my iPod, which I like to use for listening to podcasts. With Songbird’s graduation from Beta into its full 1.0 release, its functions for podcast reading, metadata editing, and iPod device support went from “useless or nonexistent” to “kind of a pain in the ass, but it works.” It just ain’t there yet.
15. Which reminds me, I have a couple of web-related crusades of principle going, so I think I’ll give them each a number on Ye Olde List here. First in line: the iTunes Store. Think we’re supposed to stop hating them because they’re finally selling songs without DRM now? Think again. The new “DRM-free” media files they’re selling still have the customer’s registered e-mail address embedded in them, making any future copies thereof potentially traceable to that customer. Also, if you want DRM-free versions of music you already bought from the iTunes Store, they’ll give them to you… for 30 cents per song. That’s right, they want to charge you again for music you already paid them for. Say it with me: the iTunes Store sucks. Buy your MP3 music downloads from Amazon, where they’ve always come without DRM and at the higher-quality 256-kbps bitrate that iTunes just now started providing.



16. Next, a Colbertian wag of my finger at Internet Explorer. I would say “people who use Internet Explorer,” but Google Analytics tells me that would implicate 40% of the visitors to this blog over the last month, and I dearly love each and every visitor I get. Even the ones who use a shitty browser. Never mind that IE is the bane of any web designer’s existence (unless you’re a web designer, in which case I don’t need to tell you). There is simply no humane reason for anyone to deny him or herself the improved ease of use, configurability, speed, and stability of the superior alternatives: either my favorite, Firefox, or any of Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Flock, and the Mac-only Camino, among others will do (but for God’s sake, not AOL Desktop). Seriously, do yourself a favor.
17. Now that I’ve heard Terry Gross interview Darren Aronofsky on Fresh Air, I really want to see The Wrestler.
18. All due credit to the Cardinals for peaking at the right time, but I’m rooting for the Steelers.
19. Every move Rod Blagojevich makes still leaves me saying, “Can you fucking believe this guy?” Wow. Not even a decade in, and he’s already making a credible run at Douchebag of the Century.
20. I believe that my biggest liability as a blogger is my constitutional inability to write something brief. However, in this instance it was not I who decided the list had to be 25 items long.
21. It is downright nippy in my apartment right now, but after last month’s bill I don’t want to keep cranking up the thermostat.
22. I haven’t used most of the Amazon gift certificate my brother gave me for my birthday yet. Possible items include Season 2 of The Shield on DVD (God, I already miss that show). Earlier today I also thought of two more glaring holes to fill in my music library, namely, Sam Cooke and Junior Walker & the All-Stars.
23. I’m having trouble restraining myself from putting up little cop-out entries for these few remaining list items… whoops — see, that one got by me.
24. Our refrigerator in this apartment is at least 25 years old. When it first cycles on it makes a sound like a garbage disposal that a piece of silverware fell into, which lasts for about ten seconds before trailing off. I barely notice it anymore, but it tends to startle guests.
25. I’m far from perfect, but one thing I’m very good about is always putting the toilet seat down.

Since I ended up not doing this on Facebook, the tagging people thing doesn’t really apply. I’ll forward a link to this post to some friends and hope some of them leave comments here. Even if their comments are just to ask why I wasted their time with this frivolous crap. Don’t be shy, mock me!  I’ve teed it right up for you with this list, so bring it, bitchez!

The Illinois governor’s arrest has been a slow softball down the middle for the news media. No, scratch that – it’s been more like TWO softballs down the middle. The first was the revelation of his corruption itself; the second and more shocking was how much he sucked at being corrupt. The guy just has no gift for graft.

Yet even with this fat pitch lobbed at them, a few conservative commentators have merely fouled it off. My overextended baseball analogy is specifically directed at the two posts at National Review Online’s blogging-head collection, The Corner:

This Illinois Senate-seat news is outrageous and shameful. That said, it warms my heart. Finally, a political scandal you can talk to your children about. No room at the Mayflower. No Myspace page. No Gay-American announcement. Just good and evil and money and power corrupting.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez

Hmm… yeah. Because the real threat to the public about political scandals is that they’re almost always not suitable for children. Golly gee, maybe Blagojevich’s lawyers can get him a reduced sentence because he kept it clean.

I agree with Kathryn that there’s something almost wholesome or nostalgic about Blogo’s criminal misdeeds. He wasn’t found opening an umbrella in parts of his anatomy for money on the internet… He didn’t check interns for a hernia without permission or spy for the Norks. He’s just a crook. A good, old-fashioned, crook. I know I’m supposed to be outraged, and in a certain sense I am… But in another sense, this is just plain enjoyable. It’s like when you watch “Cops” and the idiot burglar tries to hide beside a tree in the dark, even though he’s wearing light-up sneakers. It’s like when Dan Rather dares the world to prove he’s a clueless ass-clown. It’s just good stuff… This is the sort of criminality we want the Feds to find, particularly in Chicago. Everyone gets what they deserve — at least so far — and all of the guilty parties are all the more deserving of punishment because they don’t quite understand what the big deal is. I love it.

— Jonah Goldberg

Oh for God’s sake, man, get a towel. …OK, here’s the thing: it’s important to recognize the difference between “a little schadenfreude” and “an avalanche of gloating.” One is a little too easy, but we’re all indulging in it a little and no one would begrudge you taking your turn. The latter, as we can see here, is such a disproportionate bludgeoning of an easy target that you end up looking like the bigger douchebag. Nice going.

Plus, you’ve left yourself wide open for your own helping of mockery. I have a few questions for you:

1. Are you saying you actually watch Cops? Eech… Whatever. I guess The Deadliest Catch felt a little too highbrow for you. Hey, you know what’s almost as pathetic as getting arrested on Cops?… Being a person who actually sets his TiVo for that shit.
2. Dan Rather. *sigh* That’s seriously the best you can come up with? A governor goes down in flames for trying to sell a Senate seat appointment, and you’re still beating that same old horse from 4 years ago?
3. “Particularly in Chicago,” huh? Heartwarming. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d like to know what the hell you’ve got against Chicago, but I’ll let them ask. I live in L.A., and I thought we were the big liberal Gomorrah you’d want to have raided by the Feds.