Bruno Mars loves Mary Jane: Zendaya from Spider-Man: Homecoming accidentally resembles vintage MJ in the "Versace on the Floor" video

This is the 11th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

WARNING: Spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming ahead.

I'm in another book: SMITH Magazine's It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure

I first heard about SMITH Magazine's six-word memoirs on Facebook and wrote a few of my own on SMITH's site. The new SMITH/Harper Perennial collection It All Changed in an Instant used one of them.

I share a page with T.O. I'm on page 198:


It was inspired by an ancient Tonight Show clip I once saw in which George Gobel asked Johnny Carson if he ever got the feeling that the world's a tuxedo and he's a pair of brown shoes. I wrote those little memoirs a while ago, before I started including my middle initial in everything I do to distinguish myself from other guys with the same name.

I wish the It All Changed in an Instant editors used one of the other memoirs I wrote (like "So broke, can't afford longer sentence" or "Nothing kills boners like yacht rock") instead of the one they chose. But still, I'm honored to be in the same book with the following people whose work I've enjoyed: Andy Borowitz, Andy Richter, Bob Odenkirk, Brian Baumgartner (Kevin!), David Wain, Duff Goldman of Ace of Cakes, Eugene Mirman (his heartwarming memoir is "I've fucked at least eight people"), Henry Rollins, Henry Winkler, Joe Queenan, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, Kathy Najimy, Leonard Nimoy, Linus Roache, Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, Rick Parker, Rob Riggle, Shepard Fairey, Tommy Chong and Sound of Young America host Jesse Thorn, who started out at the same radio station where I first deejayed.

Parker, whom I met at San Diego Comic-Con last year, and Fairey submitted a couple of my favorite memoirs, which they drew:




Daily Show alum Riggle's memoir "I love my big, big balls" would probably get him into a heated balls-measuring contest with a certain fellow TDS alum (I bet he'd respond with "But mine are bigger, Rob Riggle").

But my favorite memoir comes from Lalah Hathaway, a singer like her legendary father Donny Hathaway: "So I only get six words?"

Shows I Miss (Already): Better Off Ted

I know Better Off Ted's not officially cancelled yet, but the fact that ABC burnt off an episode on New Year's Day and is burning off two more eps on the same night--this Tuesday night, to be exact--indicates the hilarious but little-watched series is being taken out back and shot.

Ted, which is narrated by the title character (Jay Harrington), who's like a kinder, gentler, health-conscious Don Draper, is about the research and development department Ted runs at the morally dubious conglomerate Veridian Dynamics. His neurotic scientist underlings Phil (Jonathan Slavin) and Lem (Malcolm Barrett) toil over inventions like vegetables full of anti-depressants, "weaponized pumpkins," "Hushaboom technology" ("War just keeps getting better") and a motion-detection system that throws Ted and his team into panic mode when they discover that its sensors are unable to recognize black people (an eerie foretelling of HP's racist face-tracking software!).

It took me a while to warm up to showrunner Victor Fresco's latest corporate satire--his signature creation is another corporate satire, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, which also co-starred Slavin--but now I consider Ted one of the most consistently funny single-camera sitcoms currently on prime-time. I can always count on Ted to contain five or six strange and absurdist lines that crack me up (the sexual harassment-themed ep that ABC burnt off on New Year's, "The Great Repression," rattled off way more than five or six and was endlessly quotable, with great lines like a reference to a lengthy hug as a "Midwestern handshake"). Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock, The Venture Bros., How I Met Your Mother and even Modern Family--which I like despite its occasionally sappy concluding voiceovers--have the same batting average as Ted's.

I've never seen former Arrested Development ditz Portia de Rossi play an ice queen before. (Did she play one on Ally McBeal? I wouldn't know. I'm a guy. I wasn't into Ally McBeal.) She pulls off the ice-queen act incredibly well as Ted's boss Veronica, whose callousness towards lesser human beings like her little sister never fails to amuse ("When my little sister came along, I was very jealous. That feeling never went away, even when she was older and I put testosterone in her orange juice, so she became hairy and unlovable and got kicked off the gymnastics team for doping"). Mrs. DeGeneres is the scene-stealing MVP on this show, much like Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock and William Shatner on Boston Legal, although on some weeks, she's been edged out by Andrea Anders as Linda the eccentric product tester.

When Ted premiered last spring, I felt at first like Fresco was just rehashing material from Andy Richter. But then I got onboard when I realized that "Whoa, Veridian's a pretty evil corporation, and the show's not going to sugarcoat Veridian's evilness or make this workplace one big happy surrogate family" and that the main female love interest, who's often boringly written on these sitcoms, is kind of nutso--a nice change of pace from "idealized, humorless girl-next-door" or "shrill, stick-in-the-mud female foil." Anders is a riot as Linda, a misfit and audience surrogate who hates the corporate world and continually finds ways to rebel against it, whether it's secretly writing a children's book that she hopes will be her ticket out of Veridian or responding to the craziness of Veridian by being even crazier than the company itself. Linda is the source of many of the show's most absurdist lines, like her random nickname for Ted at the beginning of the aforementioned kids' book ep ("Bloopity-bloo"). She's like a Midwestern working class version of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, except more attractive (peep the Xena outfit) and not as scatterbrained. This enjoyably written character and the loony, "Hushaboom technology"-worshiping universe that surrounds her and the level-headed Ted are some of the many reasons why I already miss Better Off Ted. Thanks a lot, According to Jim-loving Nielsen family dipshits.

Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993-2009)

I remember first becoming a fan of Late Night with Conan O'Brien--despite its tired gags about docile Asian (or rather, gaysian) male hookers--back when Conan and Andy did a clever series of shows called "Time Travel Week," and during a reenactment of a Civil War battle on Civil War Night, they brought out ultra-frail Civil War veteran Carl "Oldy" Olsen (a character who was retired in 1998 after the actor who played him died). That's how old of a Conan viewer I am.

Everyone's chiming in with their favorite memories of Conan's Late Night run (the Masturbating Bear, Triumph at the Attack of the Clones line, the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever, the writers' strike shows), and sure, those are all amusing moments, but I'm more fond of the weirder, lesser-known bits that haven't been featured in any of the clip montages that Conan has shown during his final Late Night week, like "Time Travel Week" and the following:

- The Hunky Newcomer, an O.C.-ish intern who squints his eyes and pouts to the accompaniment of Simple Plan's "Welcome to My Life."

- Conan experiments with having an all-kid studio audience for an entire show. Whenever the testy six- to eight-year-olds express their boredom with guests Dave Foley and Myron Kandel from CNN, Conan either brings out the Boredom Monster to entertain the kids or gets the CNN financial expert to stand up and do the Chicken Dance.

- "Max on Max," a porno video of a naked Max Weinberg humping a naked Max Weinberg.

- A lengthy parody of Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same and its dream sequences, in which the pale Late Night host proceeds to blind viewers' eyes by unbuttoning his shirt and imitating Robert Plant.

- Conan and Andy can barely keep their composure while a robot shits into a toilet during one of their "Staring Contests."

- Conan realizes the stupidity of his campaign for a 10th anniversary rerelease of Dirty Dancing after he plays back Jennifer Grey and Jerry Orbach's unintentionally funny crying scene (which Conan later reenacted with Orbach when he guested on the show).

- The search for Grady from Sanford & Son.

- Andy's little sister Stacy, who's obsessed with Conan. (She was played by a pre-SNL Amy Poehler.)

- The audience's horrified responses to Mick Jagger and Uma Thurman's "If They Mated" baby. The kid has such a disgusting-looking face it makes the V lizard baby look adorable.

- Years before Conan found comedy gold in the immensely popular Walker Lever, Polly the NBC Peacock shows Conan a clip of a badly aging Chuck Norris as part of a jab at craggy old CBS. The elderly Norris impersonator's fighting moves are priceless.

- Wrist Hulk.

- After a sketch in which Superman flies home to find Lois Lane in bed with her lesbian lover and he starts to masturbate, the camera cuts back to the actor who's playing Superman. He's still rubbing his chest long after the sketch ended, and a mock-disgusted Conan runs over to stop him.

- Conan and Andy watch a clip of the new Ninja Turtles ripoff Embryonic Rockabilly Polka-Dotted Fighter Pilots.

- Conan shows a blooper montage of Mr. T cracking up during the taping of a classic remote in which they went on an apple-picking field trip. T's pig-snort laugh is so bizarre and hilarious that viewers ask Conan to air the blooper montage again.

- The day after a fire chases Late Night out of Studio 6A, Conan tapes an entire show outside the building, near the Rockefeller Center skating rink. Left without a clip to plug guest Samuel L. Jackson's The Long Kiss Goodnight, Conan has to rely instead on a flipbook of the scene they were going to show. Then when people walk onto the makeshift set without realizing Conan and Andy are taping, Conan says, "It doesn't get any crappier than this."

- Though a 2003 New York blackout forces 30 Rock to turn to reserve power, Conan and announcer Joel Godard attempt to do the show with only flashlights to light the studio. But after about 15 minutes, they give up, turn off their flashlights and cut to a rerun.

- A forgotten uncomfortable moment, and it's not exactly funny or a favorite moment, but it's interesting because it shows how closely tied Conan is to SNL, which gave him his big break as a TV writer: in 1998, he asked Chris Rock about his upcoming projects, and Rock joked, "I'll be in Lethal Weapon 4, starring Brynn Hartman." Then the audience booed. (Brynn Hartman was Phil Hartman's wife. She killed her husband and then herself a few months before Rock made the joke.) Conan tried to defuse the situation by saying, "It's okay. We knew them. We can joke about it."

- "Clutch Cargo" Bob Dole (voiced by Robert Smigel) longs for his previous life as a pirate: "Oh, how I miss Squawky."

Oh, how I miss Late Night with Conan O'Brien already.