I go entire months without ever updating this blog because nobody reads it, and nobody reads it because I never regularly update. It's a vicious cycle. It also doesn't help that the blog is unfunny and boring. I'm in the process of writing the fourth episode of the public access show right now, so I'll take a minute to finally post the second and third episodes here. This is part one of the second episode:
Check out the intro. Do you like how our mini-fridge and microwave are both right next to the front door? I finally got around to giving that stuff to Goodwill, but I'll be damned if that wasn't the classiest home decorating decision ever made.
If neither of these sketches work, at least the shot of me belting out Wanted Dead or Alive in my boxers will dispel the grossly wrong myth that I'm really skinny. I asked three people at work how much they think I weigh. Two of them said 160 and another said 165, which are just a tad underweight for a 6'5" man and only off by 50 and 45, respectively. Then again, maybe people will be too blinded by my staggering paleness to even see accurately. The real kicker is one hour in the sun gives me a perfect tan, yet I haven't gone outdoors since 1998. God likes to give gifts to people who don't use or appreciate them because he's kind of a dick.
And here we reach the third and final section of the show. The first bit with Mr. Happy on the phone getting kinda sucks. The writing is weak, and I lied before when I said that none of the episode is cringe-worthy, because this part definitely fits the bill. I didn't think it would be painfully obvious at the time I was filming, but I was wrong, because it's really blatant that I'm reading from a script in my lap. I thought it wouldn't be a problem since my eyes go all over the place, but they fixate on my crotch long enough and often enough that the reading is unmistakable.
The bit where I bring out the chart to document my laziness (And the measurement is accurate. Just look at how often I update this blog) is fun although it runs longer than I'd like. My real regret here is how stupid I look for making the joke about Cincinnati sports teams. The Reds are still one of the worst teams in baseball, but this was clearly a bad time to make this joke since as I write this the Bengals are 7-2 with a two-game division lead, and the University of Cincinnati Bearcats football team is more than likely on its way to a BCS bowl. At least I didn't fuck up the continuity with the insert shots.
I wanted to finish strong so I ended with the Boardwalk Hotel sketch. I didn't realize that my head is clearly visible in the bottom right corner of the first shot of the hat, but I'm not sweating it. I always thought this was the second or third best Ron Mexico sketch I made, so I opted to bust it out here. This is the third time I've done this sketch, so anything I'd have to say about it I've already said two years ago. I guess I'll just end by saying that my girlfriend throws a pretty damn accurate hat. The credits show her missing the first four or five times, but the thing was so fucking light and floaty that it's a miracle we got that shot so fast.
In this second part we start off with a sketch about porn titles. I don't know why I have such a lifelong fascination that borders on fixation on porn titles, but as god as my witness, this is the last fucking time I'll create a piece of comedy centered around the subject. Maybe I enjoy the subject so much because porn titles are easy to come up with, and rolling off a dozen of them is a great way to feel clever without actually being so. Either way, this bit has some good ideas, but it runs too long and doesn't take off as much as it should.
I like the steak sauce cartoon that follows. As a slave in the food service industry, steak sauce is a subject that's very close to my heart. Steaks that aren't treated properly make me sad. Why somebody would pay well over $20 for a quality ribeye only to order it well done and drown it in steak sauce makes no sense to me. It's like paying $5 million to have sex with Jessica Alba and putting a paper bag over her head while you do it.
I also like the bit because it's the first time that I felt like I literally built a set using MS Paint. I took a rooftop view of the Chicago river, I put a window in front of it, and I put the projector screen that the consultant uses in front of that. I know this is basic shit to you fancy boys with your Harvard degrees and McCafe coffee, but I'm proud that I taught myself how to do something. Fuck you.
I'll go ahead and throw this up since I haven't updated this thing in months. This is part one of my new public access show that will be premiering in the Northern Kentucky area Tuesday of next week:
I've been talking about putting together a public access show for literally a year now, and I finally got around to it a few weeks ago. After months and months of dicking around and doing next to nothing in the way of creative output, I bought a bitchin' Sony Handicam for $350, wrote up a 15-page sketch comedy script that was about 30% old Ron Mexico and Crapstick Doodle material, and 70% new stuff, and got to it.
What you may notice first and foremost is that I am the only person who appears onscreen, and my voice is the only one you hear. This isn't a deliberate creative choice or done purely out of arrogance so much as it's the inevitable result of not having any friends. Maybe only having myself onscreen will work and be enough to sustain six episodes a year or however many I end up making. Hey, it worked for Andy Milonakis. Okay, well, it didn't exactly work for him because he fucking sucks and his show wasn't funny, but it did get him a job, and that's certainly something.
Comedically I think the show has some moments, although it's clearly rough around the edges. The writing could use a certain degree of polish, and let's face it: anything that stars me is going to leave a lot to be desired in the acting department. However, one area where I'm quite pleased is with the technical stuff. Although I thought most of my Ron Mexico sketches were funny, whenever I rewatch them there's always some serious technical issue or acting gaffe that makes me cringe. Sometimes I fucked up with editing and left a blatant continuity error, maybe I included a line that an actor flubbed, sometimes I forgot to shoot some footage that I needed and I had to use clever editing to finish the job (Fuck if you think I was going to wait a day for the equipment rental desk to open back up and do an hour and a half of extra work to get the footage the next day) and every video has at least one instance of the sound being so fucked up that you can barely hear what the actor says.
I didn't sense any of that in this video. The greenscreen effect when I play Mr. Happy is a little wonky but other than that, I'm pleased with how this one comes together from a technical standpoint. I attribute it to my new camera, which offers little to no shooting options. In that sense it's completely retard-proof. With the PD-150 cameras I used in college you could adjust shutter speed, white balance, gain, aperture, stereo and mono sound, and about a million other audio and video options that gave visually creative students a full range of opportunities to bring their wonderful stories to life, and it also gave untalented idiots like me every opportunity possible to fuck up and create totally unwatchable dogshit. With my dumbass-approved camera, all you do is point and shoot and the camera will make it look pretty okay for you.
I don't really have any interesting stories about the actual making of the show since I shot it completely alone and editing was a ridiculously simple process. I did three takes of each line, threw it into the computer, picked the best take, and that was about it. The only problem I had while shooting was when I cooked a pizza while knocking out a couple lines and the oven timer going off ruined one of my takes. I guess it would also classify as a problem that I intended for the show to only be 15 minutes long and ended up with 22 and a half, but that's mostly because I didn't account for all the time that transitions and credit sequences would add.
Whoopee, that's it! Stay tuned for part 2. Or just go to www.youtube.com/crapstickdoodle if you want to be all fancy about it.
This is the titular character from the totally kickass Xbox Live Arcade game Splosion Man. You use the analog stick to move, and you press any button on the controller to explode. That's all you have to worry about with the controls. The coolest thing about the main character (besides the fact that he fucking explodes every 5 seconds) is the random-assed noises he makes. It's all gibberish, but when you hear it over and over enough times, the brain starts to rearrange the noise into real words.
My girlfriend overheard the noises once, and she asked me if Splosion Man was saying, "Lunch pussy." I started listening closely and I began to hear it. I wondered if anyone else thought Splosion Man says lunch pussy. I thought about going to the message boards on GameFAQs to ask around, but it's well-established that even hinting at the existence of human genitalia is automatic grounds for death.
So I did the logical thing: I did a Google search for "Splosion Man Lunch Pussy" to see if it drew any matches. I learned a valuable lesson: Do not run a Google search for Splosion Man Lunch Pussy. You will not like what you find. I've seen things I cannot unsee.
There are a lot of ways to lose or ruin a cell phone. You can leave it in a cab, you can carry it in your pocket and accidentally spill beer all over it, you can lose it at a party, you can get it stolen, you can drop it on the sidewalk and watch it shatter, you can eat a whole bunch of greasy fried chicken while tailgating outside a football game, talk on the phone, have it slip out of your greasy, disgusting fingers, and watch as it falls into the portable deep fryer, or whatever else you can think of.
There's a whole bunch of shit that can happen to phones. However, there is one method of ruining a phone that is so pathetic and so fucking bizarre that you'd never expect to personally know someone who did it even if you lived 500 years. Despite the extremely rare and insane circumstances, I know multiple people who have lost phones this way multiple times.
Full disclosure: I was in a fraternity in college. Fraternities are extremely secretive, so you may not know what I'm about to tell you. It's rare indeed that someone would ever reveal the kind of guarded information I'm about to tell you: Frat guys drink a shitload. Pause for a second while you process that revelation.
People would get mind-numbingly hammered on Jagermeister and beer and pass out on couches and floors on a more or less nightly basis. One time a particularly creative low-functioning alcoholic sat on the toilet while blackout drunk and passed out with his pants down mid-shit, but that's a story for another time. Anyways, people passing out drunk, pissing their pants, and ruining their phones by getting said piss all over them was a disturbingly common occurrence.
People who were temporarily phone-less due to showering their devices in gold would usually ask to borrow other peoples' phones. This always annoyed me because the people they called when they borrowed my phone would inevitably call back on my phone hours later, forcing me to act as secretary. When someone asked to use my phone after his third accident, I put my foot down. Causing $430 of property damage due to pissing yourself at the age of 22 is cool, but $645 is where I draw the line, dammit! Sometimes you have to set firm, harsh boundaries for the people you love.
I was thinking about all of this because last night my girlfriend told me how one of her coworkers lost a cell phone by leaving it in a cab. I brought up the urination incidents from my college days, and then I proudly proclaimed that I've never done it myself. Then I had a sudden realization: This is the kind of company I've kept. Thanks to my peers, my standards for socially acceptable behavior have been driven so low that I think not pissing all over expensive electronic devices is a laudable achievement. Holy shit.
