Yes, it’s soon to be April 15th, which means it is tax time once again. I still have to finish filling out some forms, but at least I finished paying my 2008 No Car Tax last weekend. Or I guess technically, two weekends ago, since last weekend I was briefly in RI to perform at the Catch a New Rising Star in Lincoln. With only a 5-minute slot though, it wasn’t much show. I figure those who like my rapping can catch my weekly podcast or my guest appearance this Saturday at the Red Room, while those who like my comedy can come to one of the monthly comedy open mics here, or catch a performance by my improv troupe.

Anyway, I know I probably sound like a commercial, but perhaps that’s because I recently reviewed a book about the infomercial industry. I must say, writing for the USA Today is interesting. Because they have so much to cover, they tend to like their articles very concise, and so I often find that my articles end up edited down quite a bit. Still, I’ve been told to write what I think the book merits, so I’d rather overwrite than be too brief and force editors to make up whole paragraphs.  Regardless, writing reviews is something I’ve always wanted to do, and now I’m doing it, so yay for that.

Apparently there’s recently been a large kerfluffle over at Amazon, where a number of GLBT-related books had their sales ranks removed. This was originally theorized to be an attack on homosexuality, but more recently Amazon has called it a “glitch” and some online troll forces have claimed responsibility, noting that they did it for the “Lulz”.  I was going to “comment” on this, but after the previous “sentence”, I got too entertained by putting “certain” words in quotes. I guess I’m easily “amused”.

Hello, new year! I greet you with open arms*! I enjoyed last year quite a bit, so I’d like to sign up for more of the same. That’s why we’ll start off the new year right with a column about infinite food, millions of wasted dollars, and clean plates.

I know, you’re thinking, “Surely you won’t manage a whole post without talking about board games?” Well, you’re right.**  Some of you know that I recently got yet another shipment of board games. Among them was Android: an epic adventure game with a much bigger rulebook than any other game I own. This is also the first boardgame for which I’ve seen a truly compelling trailer, which is linked in my review, which you should go read.

Man, that’s enough whiches to start a coven.

*To hug you. Also with open mouth, to eat your tasty food.

**And quit calling me Shirley.

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.

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.

I summarized last night’s debate in rap form. So if you want to know what Palin and Biden said, but can’t be bothered to sit through two hours of blather to find out, why not listen to my rapping executive summary? It can be found here.

Also, if you’d like to read an article about a lecture you just missed on Japanese culture and Art, look no further.

I don’t know if you saw this story, but a huge study showed that it’s not just women who make less money than men, but men who believe in gender equality make less money than men who don’t. I wrote a column about this because I was very surprised.

I can’t help but be curious as to what other belief sets are associated with higher earnings. Do racists earn more money? Does a belief in Scientology suggest you’ll have a higher income? (If your name is L. Ron Hubbard, yes!) What about people who enjoy Velveeta? With infinite correlated data points, there are probably a whole lot of really fascinating statistics just waiting to be discovered.

I stayed up waaaaaaaaaaay too late (still now) to write a song that summarizes last night’s presidential debate. The text is here.

So, my column last Friday was about current health scares relating to contaminated food. One of these was the big powdered milk scandal in China. And then I realized that the other day, I was wearing a “Got Milk?” shirt. And a very very wrong idea occurred to me, which is something along the lines of a “Got Powdered Milk?” shirt with a little stick figure baby with X’s for eyes lying at the bottom.

Nope, much as I may dislike some politicians, I’ll never be able to run for office.

…are writing and eating. Often at once. This is why I’m thrilled to have finally gotten into doing restaurant reviews. A few weeks ago I reviewed an Italian restaurant, and yesterday they ran my article on the local greasy spoon.  Writing down the price range for Jack’s in comparison to most other places I reviewed was just plain entertaining.

Speaking of my life as a gourmet, tonight I had a seafood casserole with lobster, crab, scallops, shrimp, garlic, cilantro, white wine, and parmesan. It was, frankly, pretty damn tasty. And the best part is, I didn’t have to go to a restaurant to get it.

The problem with unreasonable people (aside from the fact that they are sufficiently unreasonable that such is the main adjective you use to describe them) is that you can’t complain to them that they are being unreasonable, or they will simply get stubbornly huffy and continue being unreasonable while calling you an unreasonable complainer. This is as true in real life as it is in politics.