Facebook Doppelganger Week: An Interesting Social Experiment in Vanity

Interesting week it was on Facebook. The first ever Doppelganger week where people replace their profile pics with pictures of celebrities that they look like, or rather, wish they looked like.

Doppelganger week showcased a level of mass delusional behavior that would make Snookie say, “Aw, shit no bitch!”

It was really interesting, and useful in a way, to see what my facebook friends (and even a few of my actual friends) see when they gaze into the looking glass. Some were insightful, some clever, some hideous, and some I simply cannot go without acknowledging here. (names are altered to shelter these sensitive souls)

Sorry, Rosalita, you don’t look like Kim Kardashian. Keep dreaming though! John, you don’t look anything like a young William Shatner or James T. Kirk, but thanks for ruining Star Trek for me! Pocahontas? WTF?

There were a few pics that I did find well done, however. One was my friend Matt, who seamlessly superimposed his head on the body of an astronaut and claimed it was his doppelganger “World Famous Astronaut Curtis Hansel” (who I’m 88% sure doesn’t exist). And, also, I guess I should say that one person who did compare themselves to a ridiculously hot person and got it right was my friend, Allie. Yes, you do have long blond hair, you’re thin, are tall for a girl, have big boobs, and are generally pretty hot, so yeah, I guess you do look kind of like Jessica Simpson.

Stand-Up Show recap

So last night my friend Eli and I went and performed a little stand-up at a bar near where we live called Shea's. It was quite possibly the most confusing emotional experience of my life. Allow me to explain.

When you do stand-up (or at least I do) the adrenaline really kicks in. For about 2 hours afterwards you are really wired, and depending on if you killed or got killed you are either really high or very low.

So last night I performed and I did a really great job, I thought. But the rest of the night before then had been such a massive disappointment that it ruined the night for me. I killed and I felt like crap afterwards.

First off the MC was a dick to me the whole night for no reason. I showed up an hour before the thing started and even though I was the first comic there the MC seemed to arbitrarily pick the order of who went (even though he clearly wanted to get some people up in the first hour) and I ended up going 2nd to last over two hours after the show started.

But that wouldn't have been so bad, if virtually everyone before me didn't completely suck.

Of the 14 or so acts before me there were basically two types of bad: People who thought they were funny and people who didn't know what being funny was.

The audience was alright. Not great but it was a very big room and you have to expect that a room that size not everyone is going to pay attention to you. There were probably about 50 people actively listening at the start of it.

But nearly every guy who went up there complained about the crappy, disinterested crowd (and interestingly, not about how they were completely unfunny comics).

My buddy Eli (one of the better acts) who had no idea what he was doing had this attitude like "Please bare with me, I have no idea what I'm doing" and he had good energy so even if you didn't think he was being very funny he was at least endearing.

Most everyone else was somewhere in the spectrum of Awkward-Annoying-Boring.

Out of everyone I could have maybe seen 2 or 3 of them being funnier to the point where you thought they were pretty good if they had a better venue.

Sex jokes were the soup du jour and no matter how many one comic told, the next one would make twice as many like none had been told all night.

The MC (other than being a jerk) was terrible. He did about 5 minutes of borderline funny material when he first got up there (what an MC is supposed to do). Then standard procedure is the MC gets up between each act tells a joke and then the next guy goes.

But not this MC.

He got up there and went for 5 minutes of his own after almost every guy. Even long after he had run out of material he went up there and just talked and insulted the audience for a few minutes.

But the worst guy of the night was without question the guy who went on right before me.

Imagine the most boring, awkward, loser ever. And then sit and watch him talk for 15 minutes at 11PM in a dark room after you've had 5 beers. Asleep yet? The guy got up there and basically told completely unamusing stories to his girlfriend about the Twilight movies and food. At least his girlfriend was laughing, no one else was.

So then I went up there, performed to the 10 people that were still there at that point, and did a pretty good job, a great job if you consider what was up there before me. But because everyone else had sucked so bad leading up to then I didn't even get to enjoy it. Bummer of a night.

A video of the act may be coming soon.

Who Sent You!?

Ah, hello there. If you clicked on here from the Primer link, then this post is going to be a bit of a let down.


Been really busy lately, but an actual post is in the works so come back in a few days.

Until then, if you haven't seen my new Primer article the link is below (and even if you have, why don't you just click the link anyway, its not like you have anything important to do if you're here).

Link Up Here.

Stuff-About Article

Ay yi yi, It has been a while. Don't get too excited, not much else is coming in this post.

Just putting up a link to a little thing I wrote recently for my friend's alarmingly successful dooky little site.

Enjoy! Or don't, whatever. Just click the link.

link-up here

An Epic Beginning

I love to write. It is what I am pretty sure I want to do with the rest of my life (that is, if I could only do one thing). Yet every time I try to sit down and start to write on this ugly little thing I call a blog I find myself with nothing to say, nothing to write, and entirely uninterested in trying to think of anything. In the time that is has taken me to write just this small paragraph I have already twice looked at my news feed on facebook and turned my chair around to check the Yankee game. (Twice now)

Now, to some people, a grand opening to a blog wouldn't really matter. Particular in the case of my blog since this is actually close to the tenth posting. But as I stated in what I believe was my previous post, this would not be just some simple blog. This was to be a great story. A classic tale of life told through the eyes of myself that millions would be able to relate to, yet, never fully realize. (Which of course all would have been just a cog in the magic of the machine).

I just absent-mindedly checked my email and opened a link to ESPN, but I haven't looked at it yet.

As you can imagine, just any opening would not do. Weeks went by and I still had nothing to write for this wretched little monster, and the saddest part was: I really didn't care that much. It was a mild source of frustration and guilt but it stayed mainly in the back of my mind always losing out to short term pleasures and distractions.

I have had a lot of distractions over the past few weeks. A vacation trip with rarely seen friends. An ongoing apartment search. A sibling's wedding. The usual work frustration, with added pains of talk of promotion and raises.

But a time came early on today when I found myself short on excuses and oddly higher on motivation than normal. The vacation had come and gone. The wedding plans were all squared. The work frustration still existed but had subsided. And the most daunting of rain clouds over my life, my desperate search to find an apartment and find someone to take the one I was vacating seemed to be settled.

It was a funny little coincidence involving the departure of one of my current roommates coinciding with the reaching out of a former roommate prospect within 24 hours that left me feeling relaxed in a way I haven't felt in weeks. It finally felt like I had accomplished something and could just sit and take it easy.

And that is when I got the idea to write this first post of my blog.

Nothing epic, nothing grand. Just honest and anti-climactic.

I've always loved a good sarcastic anti-climax.

Of course, none of the ease of my morning would even last to dinner. My frustration with my work could soon be coming to a head. And of course complications involving my former roommate prospect has left me more or less where I started both in psyhical and mental state.

So it may be another few weeks before I really get into the juice that fuels my life. Something that I have long been wanting to shout from the mountain tops is my loathing for the Ignorant Liberal's champion: Bill Maher. But not yet.

No, for now, this will sustain me. I'll be content with this as my great entrance into the bloggosphere as I sit here in the dark of my soon-to-be former bedroom, picking dead skin off my sunburns, listening to nostalgic movie themes.


Clip O' the Post

Drag Me to Hell? No Thank you.

So in my last post I implored my ZERO readers out there to go out and check out Sam Raimi's new movie, "Drag Me To Hell".



Well, I just saw it.

I guess it is better than your average PG-13 horror flick and is worth renting or watching if you ever see it on HBO but that is about all I can recommend.

The opening was pretty strong but after the first act the rest of the movie is pretty blase more or less with the exception of a few strong moments.

The real bummer was the ending. Others have complained about it already all over the web. They say it is predictable and not how they wanted it to end. Well, I'm not really complaining about that exactly. I just thought it was boring and a little lazy.

**Spoiler Alert**
Now if you want to see this movie and don't want to know the end I suggest you stop reading here. But I was thinking about what would have made a better ending and I came up with this:

Christine actually does stuff the envelope with the button in it in Ganush's mouth. We assume that she is successful in passing off the curse. Then on the final scene on the train platform Clay pulls out his papers and Christine sees the envelope. She freaks out as she does in the film (saying things like , "no, it's not possible" etc.) and she falls on the train platform. Clay drops his papers and the envelope falls on the ground. Clay reaches for her but it is too late, Christine gets struck by the train and killed. Just as it ends, a gust of wind flips over the envelope and the coin falls out, revealing that it was in fact just a coin in the envelope and not the button.

I told this ending to my friends who also saw it and they liked it better as well.

I like it better because, for one, Ganush gets sent to hell and it is good to see the bitch go down. and two, it has a nice "twisted fate" to it. Christine escapes hell by the demon but is killed anyway because she is so haunted by the experience.

It reminds me of the ending of Vertigo. Great ending that movie has. I remember the first time I saw Vertigo I was told going in that the girl falls from the Bell Tower. And I was watching it and thinking, "well it is almost over, I guess it isn't going to....OH Shit!" And then the movie ends. Hitchcock, he got you right as you were at the door. Great stuff.