Even for naturally funny comics and actors, it’s a daunting enough task that the bit usually lasts for under thirty seconds. Comedian and former Simpsons writer Dana Gould, however, is no usual guest:

[Mildly NSFW]

For more Dana Gould, I guess his web site would be a logical place to start. He did a great episode of WTF with Marc Maron, although he did it long enough ago that it’s no longer available for free.¹ I also find him to be well worth following on Twitter, where he is @DanaJGould.

I clicked through some of the other Larry King Game clips on the KPCS YouTube channel. None of them approached Dana Gould level, but a few I can recommend for a quick giggle are comedian Paul F. Tompkins, musical parodist Weird Al Yankovic, poker champion Annie Duke, and comedian Greg Proops. To watch all four as a playlist (2:18), click here.

To be completely honest, I haven’t yet watched a full episode of The Kevin Pollak Chat Show. But I definitely plan to, because among the show’s extensive archives are chats with some people of whom I am a big fan. Apart from the full Dana Gould interview and the four mentioned in the preceding paragraph, I am psyched for the ones with Christopher Guest, Garfunkel & Oates, and Bryan Cranston.

In the web-based audiovisual realm, Scott and his writing partner BJ Porter have brought the CDR brand to the comedy video site Funny or Die. Among their video contributions to FoD is the wildly popular “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis” series, in which Galifianakis interviews celebrities in a manner that is hard to describe exactly. I guess you could say he is simultaneously sheepish and insulting. Best just to watch.

The whole catalog of “Between Two Ferns” videos is here. Others that cracked me up extra hard include the one with Natalie Portman and the one with Jon Hamm.

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hey, Dr. Karl Hufbauer – you and your C+ dismissal of my Freshman Billy Budd paper can kiss my baby tuckoo!

What can I say? I try to keep C&B more on the Dubliners/Portrait of the Artist end of things than going all Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake up in here. It’s gratifying to have the internet recognize the lyrical Irish genius of my prose. For a few moments there I was wondering what I’d do if the word was that I wrote like Dr. Suess, or (worse yet) Dan Brown or somebody. Phew! Get thee behind me, self-doubt.

Take it away, my internet-designated forebear in prose:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Peter Gammons (Flickr/Trev Stair)

Sagely baseball writer Peter Gammons, asked by MLB Network analyst and former big-league pitcher Mitch Williams whether he will now vote for Mark McGwire’s induction into the Hall of Fame:

I think it’s going to be hard now to vote for Mark. I reserve the right to change my mind. I voted for him this time because, you know, he never was suspended… but once you’ve admitted [to using steriods], I believe that… I mean, you guys know how hard it is to be a Major League player. The Hall of Fame is an honor, not a statistical right. I really do look at it that way, and for [you] and all the people we know that did not use any performance-enhancing drugs, I find it hard to vote for him.

What’s going to be fascinating to me–and I hope it doesn’t impact–but I think there are going to be some people that just because writers say, “My eyes tell me he must have done steroids,” that there are going to be one to five people that were innocent that don’t make the Hall of Fame because of the people that did cheat. And that really breaks my heart, knowing how hard all of you worked to get where you are.

Hendrik Hertzberg:

We can finally drop the “thousand.” Last year may have been two thousand nine, but this year, mercifully, is twenty ten. And next year will be twenty eleven. And so on until—well, until the year 3000.

Sing it, Rick. I for one am in favor of anything that signifies departure from the last decade.

Everybody got that? “Twenty ten.” Woohoo! Our long extra-syllable nightmare is over!