An evening with John Oliver

We shed our proud-townie status for a couple hours last Friday and headed over to campus -- pardon me, "Grounds" -- to hear Daily Show correspondent and real-live British person John Oliver deliver a fine set of stand-up (happily, we were not the oldest people in the room; a fair number of other grownups attended too).

Now, writing about a comedy performance and trying to impart just how funny the guy was is probably an exercise in futility. Even if I had perfect recall or had surreptitiously taped the show, transcribing his bit about how he updated the Wikipedia entries for several political figures ("Sen. Richard Lugar could have been the greatest swimmer in Olympic history but for the fact that he's soluble in water") wouldn't come across quite as funny on the screen.

Nor could I do justice to his story about the moment that he realized he would be a comic, and not an athlete (it involved a 400-meter race, a cool breeze and a flap on the front of his shorts) . Because you still couldn't have seen the look on his face as he recounted the horrible tale, coming off like Harry Potter's hangdog older brother.

And I really don't know how to describe his partner-in-comedy Andy Zaltzman, with whom he hosts a podcast for The Times of London and did a show for BBC Radio called The Department.

What I can tell you, though, that if John Oliver comes to your town, you should go see him. Dude was really, really funny.

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All the old familiar places

It's been six months and a couple of days since I was last in Los Angeles. That's not that long, really, but in that time I've managed to forget just how freakin' big this place is. I'm on the plane, maybe a half-hour away from landing, and I look out the window. Hmm, I wonder if that's Big Bear down there.

Turns out it was -- and then I just kind of sat there for the rest of the flight and marveled at the unbroken spring of urban/suburban/industrial development that stretched from Lake Arrowhead all the way to the coast. Living in L.A., you sort of tend to stay in your bubble, and while you bitch about the traffic and know sort of implicitly that all those people live somewhere, it's easy to forget how the Southland stretches on and on and on.

So, yeah, it's nice to be back. And also a little odd.

Not in a bad way, though. More in this kind of way: Driving in from LAX, I take note of the old hotel on Lincoln that's been boutiqued and see that Playa Vista looks even more monolithic and out of place than when I last drove by. A couple new facades on the little shops near the office, a new shmancy blonde-wood door on the entrance to our suite.

As I leave, I remind myself that I'm driving to my hotel in Marina del Rey and not my old apartment. I've already sussed out a back way to avoid the traffic on Lincoln; it works. Pavilions still has the sandwich I like, so that's dinner. I sit and watch Super Tuesday returns in the state where I no longer vote; my primary is next week, and it looks like it'll still count, which is cool.

Nothing is all that different, but still it feels a degree or two off. Maybe it's a location thing -- I'm in a perfectly nice but nondescript hotel in Marina del Rey for the next six days, eating at places I haven't visited since I was fighting monsters. It's going to be great seeing my friends here again (already has been, with regard to my co-workers). And this will be my home again soon enough. Right now, though? Just passin' through.

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Surviving a cold, gray Sunday

Sometimes it's just about hangin' out.

Today's recipe:

• Re-runs of America's Next Top Model, Cycle 3


• NBA: Lakers v. Cavaliers


• Frosting the red velvet cupcakes I made yesterday


• Tasting the rum-raisin brownies I also made yesterday


• A Duraflame log (the 3-hour kind) in the fireplace


• laundry (OK, so something got accomplished after all)


• The Sunday Washington Post


• The Sunday New York Times


• Mocking my (possibly now formerly) beloved Joe Jackson for selling out the great "One More Time" for a Taco Bell commercial. Oh, Joe -- really? You break my heart.


• Later: leftovers of the beef and butternut squash stew Rick made the other day

Yeah. I could live this day over and over.

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Things to do

Not off to a blazing start in 2008, but any year that starts with kissing your awesome girlfriend at midnight, staying in bed till about 11, said girlfriend making delicious waffles and then watching football all day has potential, I think.

But since I still have a full year's worth of days (thanks, leap year!) to get stuff done, I figure a lazy opening can't hurt anything. And there is stuff I plan to do this year (I mean, how can one not be inspired by the likes of the image above? Seriously). Like:


More reading. Made significant progress on one of the great political novels of the 20th century, The Gay Place, over Christmas. On tap: Some Ross MacDonald (why this guy, one of the really great crime novelists, is not easier to find in bookstores baffles me), The Night Gardener (my first foray with George Pelecanos), Charlie Wilson's War (saw the movie, now want to read the full story).

Lisa and I have also talked about starting a two-person book club, where we each introduce the other to books we love. I'm thinking maybe The Drowning Pool (there's that man again), possibly some T.C. Boyle. Not sure yet.

Some travel. Nothing huge, probably, but it's nice to get away every now and then. Maybe somewhere in here, possibly here, very probably here for at least a couple days.

Another marathon. Been stuck on four for a couple years now, and it's time to climb back on that wagon. This one's on my birthday. Do I want to spend four or five hours running the day I turn 37? I dunno. But it's a thought.

And now, it's time to bookend this day by eating some chili cheese dogs and tater tots. Like I said: This year's got potential.

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Here’s looking at you

Instead of being a productive human being during the days between Christmas and New Year’s, I've been hanging out logging much pajama time, taking a break from non-fiction with Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia Project and catching up on the many episodes I've missed of Mad Men. I can’t even say the loafing has been all that creative, but boy has it been fun.



Mostly I've been so preoccupied lately that I've missed a lot of the presidential candidate debates (Can we call them that? Ten people on a stage raising their hands in response to a question is not a debate – it's a dumbed-down version of Miss America. I mean really. Post-9/11, when Pakistan is literally exploding, our image is crap in a huge part of the world and people in New Orleans are still living in freakin' trailers, not to mention having no health insurance and knowing their kids probably aren't learning what they need to know in school, don't we deserve something better that that?

Yes, I'm on my high horse, but sometimes it's just absolutely astonishing what we accept as normal in this country. But who am I to talk? I'm not teaching kids to read in Appalachia or something, and the money I give to UNICEF isn't exactly going to fix Darfur, so I should shut up, for heaven's sakes.). I don't know the specifics of Hillary Clinton's health care plan and I don't know what Barack Obama's response is to Joe Biden's idea that Iraq should be split into thirds.

I am an embarrassment of a former political reporter. For a long time I worried that I'd be climbing the walls if I weren't freezing half to death in Iowa and New Hampshire, or if I'd be worth anything if I couldn't get Mitt Romney's media guy to return my phone calls. Now I know. Admittedly, I miss watching the stump speeches and that cold fresh-air high that's oddly a little like altitude sickness mixed with excitement while watching the process. But I've ended up with something better than I could've hoped for – a life.

Not the one I thought I'd have, and not certainly one that needs some work (Chase, I swear some day that balance will be zero – just not yet.). But it's a step -- and something that other people have always seemed to be able to figure out far better than I. And hackneyed as I am, I'm grateful for every second – not least of which for Rick's giant leap of faith, which totally changed everything this year. And our friends rock.

Now I need to take a walk, catch another episode of Mad Men, and get back to everyone else's 2007 Top Ten lists.

Happy New Year.

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Flour power

We've been taking in the usual assortment of Christmas goodies the past couple weeks -- a shipment of candy from Lisa's mom in Milwaukee (including the mysterious substance known as fairy food) here, a loaf of bread from my sister-in-law there.

We also have a couple dozen of our own cookies still lying around. But we -- and by "we" I mean mostly Lisa -- have been keeping up our end of the supply chain up as well. I spent much of last weekend in awe of the sheer number of cookies that came out of our kitchen -- enough baked goods to make Mrs. Field go, "Damn, that's a lot of cookies."

After the jump, a rundown.

These numbers are approximate, but suffice to say that we completely covered the dining room table with plates and boxes of cookies and nuts. To wit:

7 dozen chocolate mint cookies

7 dozen pepperming sugar cookies

6 dozen oatmeal-white chocolate-cranberry

6 dozen oatmeal-pistachio-cranberry-apricot

5 (or maybe 6) dozen peanut butter Kiss cookies

4 pounds or so Union Square spiced nuts

And, oh yeah, 3 pounds or so of sugared pecans.

I really wish I'd taken a picture of the dining room table. Bad blogger. But to those of you who got them, hope you like them. I think they're pretty darn good.

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This is what snow looks like

The other day at Target, I bought a snow scraper/brush combo for my car. Good timing -- see above.

OK, so I'm stretching a little there. The snow that fell on my car this morning was gone by midafternoon, and the snow that fell on it tonight will be gone too -- hell, it's gonna be 60 by Saturday.

But damn if I wasn't happy to see the first snow of the season -- and my first personal snow since, oh, 1997.

Before today, it had been a little more than a decade since there had been a chance of snow falling in the place where I lived. I could see it on the mountains around Los Angeles some winters there, but it was three cross-country moves ago that I last had to have a scraper in my trunk.

So this morning I went out and took pictures of it snowing, and I caught a couple of flakes on my tongue and I generally behaved like a little kid. I'll probably re-acquire my distaste for snow over the next few months, but for now it's very exciting. Can't wait to fire my first snowball.

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This is what joy looks like

This is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Monday night in Washington, DC. The house lights are up, they're chugging through Born to Run, and tens of thousands of people -- including a couple of shirtless guys we saw jigging down on the floor -- are singing along at the tops of their lungs.

COOL.

We caught both the Sunday and Monday shows in DC -- and it was spectacular. These were my 19th and 20th shows, Rick's first and second. Yeah, yeah, I know. I don't even want to think about the things I could have done or the trips to Europe I could have taken if I hadn't spent the cash on Bruce Springsteen. But you know what? I really don't care.

Regardless of where you stand on the guy -- whether, like me, his rear end hung on the wall over your bed when you were in junior high, or you've thought the man-of-the-people thing has worn thin -- when you're there it's hard to deny that it's one hell of a show. The guy's 58 years old, and he was jumping up and down at the end of the 2-hour-and-20-minute set in a way that had me exhausted just looking at him. I've seen him from the back of football arenas and from the front row, mashed up against the stage, and it's safe to say I've never seen anyone play a room quite like him. Famously anti-war, he marked Veterans Day here in DC -- and last night he brought some wounded vets from Walter Reed to the show. Talk about altering the dynamic in a basketball arena.

The new album's not easy -- it's filled with familiar imagery of people struggling and disillusioned, trying to live decent, honorable lives in the face of bitter disappointment and not knowing which end is up. But it's also about making connections and finding meaning in each other -- nothing's ever perfect, but in the end we're all we've got. The songs are also catchy, filled with pop hooks, and taken as a whole, the thing rocks.

And live, you can't help but walk away feeling a little bit better connected to humanity. I took my parents to see Springsteen a few years back -- and bought them tickets to see him a couple of weeks ago in Chicago as a Christmas present -- and it sounds loony, but I seriously think it brought us closer. I may drive them up a wall, but now at least we can talk about Bruce Springsteen. (Incidentally, Mom, there's a rumor he's coming to Milwaukee in March -- so Happy Birthday.)

Do I sound like a sermonizing goofball? Yeah. Is the crowd at a Springsteen show whiter than any you'll see outside a standard-issue NHL game? Yes. Have I spent more time than I care to admit perusing the setlists online and trying to figure out what he's going to play in the rotating song spots (2, 7, 11, 12, 13, and the second song of the encore, by the way)? Definitely. Do I do these things furtively? Hell no. Embarrassed? Sure. Ashamed? Never.

Tramps like us...

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Things I'm liking right now

Bits and pieces of things and stuff that are good and cool:

This list of the most terrifyingly inspirational songs of the '80s. Of the "You're the Best" song from Karate Kid, the author has this to say: "It is completely acceptable to do any damn thing you want to this song. Whatever it is you’re about to do, Joe Esposito took seven weeks out of his life back in the '80s to write a little ditty about just how badass you are at it." Well, yeah.

Straight Cash, Homey -- a collection of unfortunate jersey choices by sports fans across this great nation.


The awesome birthday present I got from Lisa, which includes some of the greatest screwball comedy of all time.

Season three of Bones. I don't know if it'll end up in the pantheon of great shows, but the folks there seem to nail the balance of character development and crime procedural better than just about anyone at the moment.

Seasonal weather. Yeah, I freaked out a little when I heard the local radio folks drop the phrase "wind chill" this week, but the leaves are pretty, the air is crisp and I like wearing long-sleeve T-shirts. Plus, I got a new winter coat a couple weeks ago, so I'm set.

Friends preparing to have children.

Pie. But really, who doesn't like pie?

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Is it adult ADD, or am I just a spazz?

It's getting increasingly difficult to know. According to my not-in-any-way-extensive-Internet research, symptoms include:

• Distractibility
• Impulsive behavior
• The inability to remain focused on tasks or activities

So far, yes, yes, and yes.


Well, maybe not so much with the impulsive part -- unless you count stalking new bath and hair products during every trip to the CVS. Mostly it's just this creeping feeling that I really am beginning to understand what my grandmother meant when she used to go on (and on and on) ... OK, I forgot what I was going to say as I was writing this... oh yeah: when she'd talk about how quickly time goes by, and how it gets harder to keep up. Or, frankly, to recall what it is you were saying. Either way, lately it seems increasingly difficult to remember birthdays (I just couldn't be a bigger loser on that front -- sorry, friends and family), appointments, and to keep up with the laundry. And usually, all I really want to do is hang on the couch and watch Ace of Cakes.

Am I geezing? Has the fact that my hearing is fading after years of Bruce Springsteen shows started to creep in and distract from real life? Am I doomed to a future of never finishing another book, or being unable to tackle the towering pile of of New Yorkers mocking me from the corner? Do I just need a drink?

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