Well, all the winter holidays are here, so what better way to celebrate than reading my column about your holiday horoscope? I’ve been having a grand time, attended a Solstice party tonight, performed at a holiday revue (did I mention I enjoy revue-ing?), and am looking forward to playing lots of board games over the next week, followed by hosting a number of old friends, the usual New Years parties, copious amounts of tasty food, and so forth.

For once, I may enter the new year hoping that it mirrors the old one for me, because I’ve really enjoyed 2008. But I get ahead of myself. We’re still in the tail end of this year, so I hope you all enjoy the holiday season, whatever holiday you celebrate. Including empty set. Which sounds like a weird holiday where people give each other matching gift-wrapped boxes containing nothing. Or maybe that’s Buddhist Christmas. Although that’d probably be one with everything, not nothing. I guess they’re linked, but Buddhist philosophy may not be the ideal topic for a humorous blog. I just mention it now and zen.

Also, there’s a new News in Rap posted.

My column from yesterday was about cliches. Yes, there should be an accent, but I’m too lazy to find it. For professional correspondence — and this is a trade secret — I tend to use Google to find a page with an accented e, and then just copy and paste that at the bottom of my document, to use whenever I need it with more pasting. But it’s 2am and right now, I’m not feeling professional.

The latest episode of my non-professional freestyled reporting is now available at www.NewsInRap.com. Tomorrow night (well, okay, technically tonight) I’m performing with the Royal Berkshire Improv Troupe at the local theatre, which is also not technically professional. And although I’m not a professional board gamer, I probably spend as much time gaming as one. My latest addiction is Dominion, which we acquired barely a few weeks ago. We’ve already played two dozen games,

Today I ate a pizza at a restaurant called “Hold the Anchovies”, and roughly 10 minutes after I ordered, while sitting at my table, it suddenly hit me: I can’t believe I didn’t order anchovies.

Me!

If you read my column today, you’ll find out that I’m the featured reader tomorrow at Papyri Books. After that, I’ll be performing at the Red Room and probably freestyle rapping in a manner not entirely dissimilar from the News In Rap podcast that I just posted. It would seem to the untrained eye that I have a penchant for self-promotin’ and linkin’, but that’s only because it’s true.

Hey, they can’t all be good.

Last weekend I attended my fourth wedding* in as many months. I continue to be surprised how different each wedding is that I attend, although this most recent one was perhaps more different yet, what with it being an orthodox wedding. Still, there was a bride, a groom, and other people I knew, so it was a wedding. And there were even animatronic parakeets on each table, which were bizarre but charming.

In other news, my most recent book review** ran in the USA Today yesterday, about a book on neurological marketing techniques. It was a fascinating read about how corporations will approach advertising in the years to come, and it takes subliminal advertising to whole other levels. It’s sort of awesome and scary, or at least, would be scary if so many other things weren’t much more scary.

*That is, fourth wedding of other people. I try only to get married every other month. Prospective wives, feel free to send gifts!

**Not, of course, a review of my book, for which I am still trying to find a publisher.

Apparently the RSS feed on this page has stopped working. I’m not sure why, but I guess if you’re reading this, it’s either finally fixed itself, or you don’t need the RSS feed anyway. I will continue poking around and trying to fix it so you can get Reliable Seth Stuff.

Speaking of which, like clockwork, here’s my column from yesterday. I’m still a little sad about that, but I think I made the right choice. Also, now that the presidential debates are over, I’m converting my freestyle rap podcast to a more general news format. I’ll be trying to post one episode a week at www.NewsInRap.com, so go listen to last night’s episode and hear me rap about the news as I read it so you don’t have to.

Or seven, possibly. That’s why you should go read this article about the seven powers we really want to see on Heroes. If you dig it, Digg it. If not, well, then maybe you’ll prefer my most recent column, which was about tissues.

Last week, I performed my stand-up act for the first monthly Comedy Open Mic at a new local restaurant. I used a lot of the same material I used four years ago at a conference in Ohio, but for some reason, it didn’t go over nearly as well. I’d have thought a crowd of humor writers would be a tougher crowd then a bunch of local folks attending a comedy night, but I was wrong.  Oddly, the local folks seemed to really dig the improv we did post-stand-up, which (to my mind) wasn’t a patch on my carefully crafted routine. Oh well; that’s why I do improv stuff.

Well, that’s it. I’ve now summarized in rap the last of the 2008 presidential debates. Like last time, I sat down at my computer with the transcript of the debate, put the beat on repeat, and rapped. For almost a half an hour. You can hear this epic freestyle that covers all the important points of the debate right on my podcast page.

I guess I’ll need a new plan for next week’s podcast…

So, for a long time — since I graduated from college — I’ve been working on this book. I’ve even mentioned it on the bottom of my Books page. And I finally finished it. But I haven’t managed to find a publisher yet. That’s why I decided to put it online. I’m posting one chapter a week at www.GodToVerse.com

Oh, and I should probably tell you what it is. I translated the entire Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, line by line, into verse. (Given that I spent roughly five years or so doing that, it should perhaps be no surprise that I consider summarizing a presidential debate in rhyme a relatively lighter project.) Anyway, go take a look, check back every week for a new chapter (or subscribe to the RSS feed), and if you like it, tell a friend.

Especially if that friend owns a large publishing company.

I believe it was some famous guy whose name eludes me (Thomas Jefferson? Mark Twain? Karl Marx?) who said, “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” I think I’ve never appreciated that as much as I do now, having just recorded my summary of the second presidential debate. See, for my previous two debate raps, I’ve spent hours (in the first debate, way too many hours) reading the debates and writing up rhymed summaries for myself to rap later.

This time, I wanted to take less time. So after watching a brief clip of the debate to hear the candidate’s voices (conclusion: I don’t care), I brought up the debate transcript, turned on a looped backbeat, and began freestyling. I had gotten maybe a quarter of the way down the page when I realized: “Crap, I’m already ten minutes into this!”

Since the whole thing was freestyled and recorded real-time with no pre-writing, you actually get to hear my realization on the podcast. Anyway, the whole thing clocks in at nearly 23 minutes, which is a lot longer than the previous debate raps, a little longer than I’d like, but still not nearly as long as watching the debate itself. More importantly, it took me much less time to do, so I’m likely to freestyle a summary for the final debate next week (unless I get a lot of people emailing to say “the first two were much better, please pre-write the last one!”)

Anyway, enough written blather. Time for rhyming verbal blather!

http://risingpun.podomatic.com/

…fry, fry again.

I’ve always had an unhealthy love of fried food. I am perhaps best known for my signature dish, the fried burrito, which I learned from an old highschool friend of mine. But in general, I’ve always believed that frying anything makes it tastier. My column this past weekend examines why that might be the case. But now that we have a deep fryer, it’s tricky to only use it occasionally. Especially since every time we use it, we end up with delicious food. Most recently, we made vegetable tempura* and fried calamari, which was unsurprisingly delicious.**

Anyway, I remember always arguing with people that frying any food would make it better. When I was young, people would offer ice cream as a counter-example. But having gone out for dinner recently where fried ice cream was on the menu, I must say to those people: Time to find a new counter-example.

* An amusing meal because it lets you eat plates of deep fried food while thinking to yourself “This is probably healthy.”

** Or in the case of the calamari, squidelicious.