Kirsten Wiig is one of the funniest actors who has ever been on Saturday Night Live. This video is a good example of how much she can do with absolutely nothing. She’s a master at under-delivering jokes, which is pretty much an unheard of comedy style on SNL. Can you imagine how unfunny this would be if Cheri O’ Teri had delivered it?

Today, the inevitable article about the Diablo Cody backlash and the motivations behind it. Okay, I know yesterday I claimed to be seething with jealousy, but that was just a joke. It would be like being jealous of Josh Groban … sure, seems like he makes good money, but it comes with the price of having to be Josh Groban. I have no interest in being Diablo Cody, let’s get that straight. I don’t want to be known because I’m a former stripper, I want to be known because I’m the greatest living stripper in the world.

Garfield is a never-ending fountain of funny. The site Garfield Minus Garfield removes Garfield from “Garfield.” Brilliant.

Speaking of Matt, he got his first post on Popular Science (dot com) today. Check it out and show some respect for the mighty octopus.

The top story on Salon today discusses that giant and highly visible contingent of Democrats who will switch to McCain if Hilary gets the nomination because they don’t want to see a woman in the White House. I’m being facetious about the “giant and highly visible” part. Salon has a grand old history of running articles like this, most particularly by my arch nemesis, Rebecca Traister. The theme of these articles is: “I know a person who has a particular viewpoint! Without doing any actual research, I’m going to write an article about how this person is representative of a greater trend in society!”

Here’s how it works. My friend Matt works in web production. He recently bought a Honda Element. If I were a Salon writer, I would take this information and use it to write an article about how people who work in new media prefer cars that give them a sense of adventure, because they’re trapped behind a computer all day. Note that I absolutely wouldn’t write that people who work in new media simply prefer the Honda Element … that’s something that an astute reader could potentially find some statistics on and prove that I’m full of shit. What I would do is assume the false trend, and then move beyond this assumption to explain why this trend (which, remember, I’ve just fabricated out of thin air), is so. Anyone who disagrees, then, will disagree with the reasoning behind the trend and not with the facts of the trend itself, i.e. “I think people who work in new media buy Honda Elements because they want a sense of power, not because they want a sense of adventure!” And boom! I have just created a new fact that can forever be taken for granted: people who work in new media prefer big cars. Way to go, me!

I won $100 in an Oscar pool last night. It was a nice surprise. I thought I was a goner after the early awards … I only ended up getting 14 out of 24 correct. I’m convinced it was Marion Cotillard’s surprise best actress win that pushed me over the edge. I voted for Diablo Cody with gritted teeth, and she came through for me. I wonder if she felt bad accepting an award for a screenplay that she didn’t write?*

*I have no proof of this, just a sneaky little hunch and a seething case of jealousy.

Today’s top story on HuffPo:

First of all, HuffPo has got a real hard-on for anti-Hilary news. Now, I’ll be honest with you, I’m an Obama supporter. I’m tired of everyone in this country hating each other, and I think it’s more likely that everyone will continue to hate each other if Hilary is elected than if Obama is elected. But I still have to call it like I see it, and the way I see it is that the media are really being dicks to Hilary for no real reason. Just look at that circled portion up there. What right does the Huffington Post have to say that “Media Reports Doom Campaign”? They try to pass it off as though they are an unbiased observer. What it should really say is, “We Doom Campaign”.

I just got back from New York. I met with a bunch of people about Awkward Press and we had our first reading. The reading went gangbusters. I read a new story called “The New Words.” It was nice to hear an audience responding to my writing, because I rarely get feedback from large groups of people. It is a solitary life, the life of a writer. On the positive side, it makes me a deeply serious and fascinating person.

It was strange being back in New York. The weather was awful. According to my friends, New York had been going through a heatwave all winter. I was there for the one week that the weather sucked. This is an example of a message from God. It was great to see all of my friends, though. I don’t have a lot of friends in L.A. I also don’t drink as much here.

One day, Sarah and I were eating bagels at a bakery near our hotel. The hotel wasn’t really a hotel, it was an apartment building that rents out apartments as hotel rooms for $120/night. It’s the most fabulous deal in New York, but I have been sworn to secrecy by Sarah, who does not want outsiders coming in and taking this fabulous secret place away from her, like they did with Brooklyn.

While we were eating our bagels, a group of four 12-13 year old girls entered the bagelry. They rushed in the door en masse and staked a place at the table next to us. Each girl had long, blond hair, and they were dressed like they were coming home from an expensive private school. It was only 11:00 in the morning, though, so I don’t think they were coming home. They didn’t seem the type to skip school, but I don’t think we were in the midst of any major holidays. There was something in the way they rushed into the restaurant and immediately went about their business that made me feel they were under a time constraint, but I can’t imagine a school letting a bunch of 12 year old girls roam about the city at lunch. The entire experience was a study in contradictions.

The girls sat down at the table and leaned in to each other conspiratorially. The shortest girl, who I decided was the leader, removed a folded square of notebook paper from her pocket. She unfolded the paper purposefully as the others looked on in anticipation. These girls knew what they were here to do. She began to read:

“Penis Pan.”
“The Penis Puff Girls.”
“The Penis of Penzance.”

And so on and so forth, all the way down both sides of the paper, one title per line. In each case, as a clever reader might have ascertained, they had taken the name of a popular film, television show, or other cultural touchstone, and replaced one word in that title with the word “penis.” For example, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants might become The Sisterhood of the Traveling Penis. This is not actually one of the titles they came up with; I use it only as an example. Most of the titles lacked this degree of sophistication (for example, “The Penisons” and “Two and 1/2 Penises”), but I didn’t hold it against them. Everyone has to start somewhere.

After it was all done and giggled through, the leader looked up from her paper. “That was dumb,” Sarah heard her say. The other girls, who had been chattering and laughing excitedly throughout the list, reluctantly agreed. They broke apart and went to the counter to order bagels as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

The most interesting thing about the experience to me is imagining what led up to the reading. The girls had clearly complied the list together. Whether it was composed in a moment of spontaneous creativity or had taken several weeks of hard work, I don’t know. But it was clear that the list meant something important to them. Substituting the word “penis” into titles was an activity they all enjoyed together.

I picture it like this: at some point in the recent past, there had been a spark of inspiration that led one of the girls to create the first “penis” title. The other girls followed suit. They began compiling their titles, digging deep into their imaginations to create at least enough titles to fill both sides of a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper. Maybe there had even been rejects along the way. And most fascinating: eventually, someone had to decide they were finished, and then someone else had to suggest, “let’s write them all down on one sheet of paper and read them out loud.” They had walked in with purpose. They didn’t sit down and say, “hey, we’re all assembled together, let’s read that penis list”; they knew before they walked in the door that they were going to read it. I can’t say they planned it out to the letter … it’s possible that the actual location had no significance. They may have all spontaneously decided “we must read the penis list, now!” and landed on the bagel place by coincidence. Or maybe this was something that occurred regularly. Perhaps they met at the bagel place once a week to refine the list.

I will never know what led to the creation of the penis list, or what happened to it after the meeting, but it is something that has touched my life forever. Now that is one beautiful mystery.

I’m starting something new. It’s called Awkward Press. I don’t really know what it’s going to be yet, but it will have something to do with words. This is the URL: www.awkwardpress.com. (FYI: Contemporary Press still exists, we’re just on hiatus while we clear up some monkey madness with our distributor.) We’re having a coming out party/reading in New York on Monday. I think it’s going to be pretty cool. If you’re in New York, please come!

Details:
Awkward Press Coming Out Party
Monday, February 11th
7-9 PM
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St. btw. Bowery & 2nd Ave.
Free

More details:
Join Awkward Press, a new publishing experiment from the creators of The Pumpkin Pie Show, A Very Merry Unauthorized Scientology Pageant, and Contemporary Press, for a night of reading, music, and future regrets. Featured readers include:

Clay MacLeod Chapman: creator of the Pumpkin Pie Show, a rigorous storytelling session backed by its own live soundtrack. He is the author of rest area, a collection of short stories, and miss corpus, a novel.

Jeffrey Dinsmore: cofounder of Contemporary Press and author of the novels Johnny Astronaut (as Rory Carmichael) and I, An Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey. Occasional rock star. What not can be found at www.jeffreydinsmore.com. You do not have to click this link because you are already here.

Kyle Jarrow: OBIE Award winning playwright and member of rock sensations The Fabulous Entourage and Sputnik Sweetheart, among many other talents. Kyle’s play Armless won the Overall Excellence Award at the New York International Fringe Festival. Upcoming projects include writing the music for Hostage Song which will premiere April 2008 at the Kraine Theater. More info at http://www.landoftrust.com.

Tony O’ Neill: author of Seizure Wet Dreams, Songs from the Shooting Gallery: Poems 1999-2006, and the underground classic Digging the Vein. He has two new works coming out in 2008—Down and Out on the Murder Mile (the sequel to Digging the Vein, available on Harper Perennial) and Hero of the Underground (the memoir of former NFL player Jason Peters, available on St. Peters Press). More info can be uncovered at www.tonyoneill.net.

Lou Perez (Luis Amate Perez): writer and performer whose short stories have appeared in Fiction and will be published in the forthcoming anthologies: Born in the 1980s (Route, 2008) and Rejected (Villard, 2009). You can check out his sketch comedy duo at gregandlou.com.

Rachel Shukert: Rachel Shukert is an author and playwright in New York City. Her first book, Have You No Shame? will be published by Random House/Villard in April 2008.

With a song or two by Jeffrey D. Probably two.

Courtesy of Matt: