BREAKING NERD NEWS!

Jon Favreau's Iron Man.



The lead role of Tony Stark...



Iron Man's alter-ego, will be played by...



Throw a mustache on him. Roll film. This movie's going to rock.

Yes Don Hall, there is a Short-Haired Chick Friday

Party, my place, tonight, 8pm 5720 N. Wayne (Ridge & Wayne)



WARNING THE FOLLOWING BLOG CONTAINS PICTURES OF DOUG STANHOPE



I say that because I've met Doug Stanhope and I don't really like him, buuuuut after Howards interview with a much more mature Doug I do kind of like him. In 1999 Schadenfreude played The Chicago Comedy Festival in yet another stab at recognition.



Doug Stanhope came on and did a set wearing a bunch of our props and proceeded to tell no jokes, spill a beer on the audience and talk about who he'd like to fuck. Utter contempt for the audience (which he addressed on Howard). Later on during a "schmooze session" at a hotel bar Doug got drunk, put on a lampshade (yes, he literally did), pulled his dick out (yes) and proceeded to make a real immature jackass out of himself. The agents couldn't get enough of it. We realized we had yet to figure out the game of making it in comedy. We've since given up and have been met with unprecedented success comparative to those days.



SO WHO'S THE GIRL WITH DOUG!??



Her name is Bingo (Amy Bingaman) and she's the reason I now like Doug. The meathead that Doug personifies would not date a girl with a shaved head with extreme artistic tendencies who's spent time in a mental institution. The guy Doug personifies, Mr. Man Show (which he hated every minute of, I found out), should be dating a ditzy supermodel, but he's not. In fact the guy Doug personifies wouldn't even be seen near someone like Amy, who paints herself blue during psychotic episodes.



There's a fine line between insanity and pure genius. It's not just a phrase, it's true. Amy described some of the things she'd do when she had an episode, she would buy a bunch of silverware and plant it in the garden, hundreds of yards of forks an spoons sticking up. After one episode where she got fingered by an old hippy who was she and Doug's 'shroom dealer (they had some damn good stories) she freaked out and stapled hundreds of gloves to the walls of their apartment. Such odd behavior, but such an interesting place for your mind to go. I like it. It may be insanity, but it seems to edge that line of artistry. And it's not like she exhibits the art. It's just for her and how she deals with what's going on.



When Howard asked if Doug kicked the hippy's ass, Doug said no because they guy had really good 'shrooms. Artie then asked if Amy was planning anything special for her 200th episode, like Family Ties.


Bingo and...is that Steve Scholz?


She's so cute in that Wicker Park way.

And she's got a great voice as can be heard on her myspace page.

And then, like a champ, Bingo rode the Sybian.



The Sybian is this chair with a vibrating nub that Howard has girls sit on while Baba Booey runs the controls, turning up the vibration as the come to climax. Ah, Howard.



If you haven't bought Sirius or pirated an episode from bittorrent, or simply went to his VERY DETAILED daily blog, Howard Stern is easily 100 times better than he's ever been before, and it's not because he can curse and he does nothing that much wilder than he did on WCKG, it's just that he has a freedom now, no longer constrained by commercials that break up his show every twenty minutes, because Stern's show is all about flow. That's the big secret that all true intelligent Stern fans share, we all know what's great about his show, everyone else surmises, and surmises wrong.



It's not about sex, it's about Howard starting talking about a story in the paper, then Gary interrupting to talk about baseball, then Artie backing Gary up on, then Howard saying he hates baseball because of his Dad, then Artie and Gary talking about their Dad's and baseball, then someone calling in to make fun of Artie's Dad who was a veg after a roofing accident, then Howard's dad calling in and Howard sharing a moment, then a guy calling in, touched at the conversation crying because he lost touch with his Dad and all of them calling him a pussy. The Sybian ride was unplanned and occurred after two hours of uninterrupted airtime.





Jeff The Drunk says:

"That's Right Bitch!"

I Got A Tattoo

Tat

I decided to mark my time in Chicago with a Tattoo on my right shoulder. It was a great day all around, my beloved ex, Carla, and I were having a little last lunch in Bucktown. For years Carla, who's got ink herself, has asked me to get a tattoo. So we had lunch and then she came and watched some hispanic dude grind needles into my arm for an hour. They had this big poster of Japanese symbols, for anybody who wants to get a Japanese symbol on their arm in 1998. My favorite was that they had the Japanese symbol for "cheese." Part of me wanted to get that, just so I could have everyone assume it meant "peace" or "tranquility," but really it means...Cheese.

Yes, it hurts, but it's a pain you can get over. It's more inconvenient than anything. I've never seen Carla happier, she just loved watching me get a tattoo, but that's Carla. I'll miss her...and everyone.



What's the tattoo of, you ask? Why the picture of Justin and Mayor Daley, of course.

You'll have to come to my party to find out what it's really of. Tomorrow night, 8pm, 5720 N. Wayne Ave. BYOB, buzz Witt/Gluck

Classic Schad
As I type this I'm backing up some old, sensitive Schadenfreude VHS to DV. I'm watching the second show we ever did from Cafe' Ashie in 1998. It's so bad, but with little funny moments. Right now John Bolger, Gillian Vigman, Sandy, Kate, and myself are sitting around a fake table playing pretentious theatre directors, Ike Barinholtz plays a waiter who tries to namedrop ineffectively, saying that River Phoenix (dead) is thinking about playing the lead in his new script, and that it's about Larry Flynt. Justin and Tommy are the loudest and supportive laughers. Justin would be onstage with us in four weeks.

It should be nostalgic, but it's actually just weird.

The Coolest Project Ever

While I'm rolling in shitty old VHS of Sandy's earliest gay/nerdy performances I'm writing out the notes from last Thursdays meeting. I don't want to say what it is right now, but we're working on what might be the coolest Schadenfreude project yet. It's a musical. That's it, that's all I'm going to say. It may not happen, I don't want to jinx it, but if it happens it will be the best thing we've done, next to the book we're writing. Did you know we're writing a book? Yes, again, don't want to talk much about it until the trigger is pulled, we've got a lot of work to do, but it might be the coolest thing we've ever done...next to Alderman our screenplay that now sits in Los Angeles. I'm going to go keep it company.

You know I never wrapped up the screenplay on the blog here. I'm so proud of it, it's so good and so full of jokes and there are some great cameo's from our little universe. I can't wait to see an audience of our fans when Todd Voorhies makes his cameo. We've had a lot of discussion about who we'd like to play who. I'll just say I just saw Little Miss Sunshine and Alan Arkin IS Ed Bus.

Right now Ike is playing an angry Grandpa that John had to take with him to a party in order to get the car. Ike is asking a party full of teens if they'd like to see him shit in a cardboard box.

The Textbook Definition of Cowardice

A Textbook Definition of Cowardice
By Keith Olbermann

Monday 25 September 2006

Finally, a special comment on Bill Clinton's interview. The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong.

It is not essential that a past president, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.

It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as "crazed."

Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit.

Nonetheless. The headline is this:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. "That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."

The Bush Administration did not try.

Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest "pass" for incompetence and malfeasance in American history!

President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs - some of them, 17 years old - before Pearl Harbor.

President Hoover was correctly blamed for - if not the Great Depression itself - then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash.

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War - though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this president.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been president on September 11th, 2001 -- or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive.

But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed, until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.

Except for this.

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts - that he was president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton's.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

Consider the timing: the very weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is - not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it.

The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.

It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired - but a propagandist, promoted:

Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.

And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for "e-mailing" you the question.

Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen.

He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden.

He was brave.

Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.

The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon.

Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to 9/11." Of that company's crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush's new and improved history.

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it - who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews - have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The Dog."

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton's judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri - the future attorney general - echoed Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been "distracted" by the Lewinsky witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?

Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?

Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was, "All Monica All The Time"?

Who distracted whom?

This is, of course, where - as is inevitable - Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are.

The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.

But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it's all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.

The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President.

Thus, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it, we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus, instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us "safe" ever since - a statement that might range anywhere from zero, to 100 percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous president to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be a textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair - writing as George Orwell - gave us in the book "1984."

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power...

"Power is not a means; it is an end.

"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power… is power."

Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union address from 1862.

"We must disenthrall ourselves."

Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln's sentence.

He might well have.

"We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."

And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date, to save our country.

The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us - then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

PARTY! MY PLACE! THIS FRIDAY!

Yo yo! For those of you who don't know, I'm moving to L.A. Good idea? Bad idea? Only time will tell, but no outcomes matter to party our asses off one last time this Friday. Show up around 8, that should give us plenty of time.

8pm
5720 N. Wayne Ave. (West of Broadway on Ridge, 1st street on your right after Hollywood (that's right, Hollywood)
Buzz Witt/Gluck
BYOB

MY FAVORITE SKETCH!!!!!

Boy, lots of Kids In The Hall over at youtube. There was a time Sophmore year at Miami Of Ohio when I was O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D with The Kids in The Hall, and, of course, sketch comedy in general. I was early into my sketchwriting career, I had cable for the first time in my life with my rommate, Jason Bechtel, who, by the way left a nice message and this picture of Schadenfreude on his indie rock website, I-See-Sound



Here's Jason, good to see you buddy.



Anyway, so I had HBO and Kids In The Hall for the first time. I used to run home from my improv show with the Tower Players to catch the new episodes of their last season on HBO, I taped it religiously and watched those episodes over and over and over, asking everyone who walked through the door if they wanted to watch some Kids In The Hall.

This has always been my favorite Kids In The Hall sketch.



They were just great. And boy did they know how to get in and get out of a bit. Premise, escalate, hit the road.

Now if I could just find a youtube video of the "Shirling" sketch in which a bunch of men chain themselves to each other around a barrel on which sits a spitting cobra and they spin and try not to get hit. "NEW SNAKE!"

"You got that little smirk on your face, you think you're so clever."

YES!

I don't watch FOX news, one has to have cable to do that, but thank you youtube. Did anyone hear about this? Bill Clinton, say what you will about him, a very smart man smacked the shit out of that muppet Chris Wallace for hauling out, once again, the theory that 9/11 was Bill's fault...because 9/11 has to be somebody's fault, and the only other option is Bush, and he's so stellar in so many other ways... Personally I blame Bin Laden, but this is where Fox and I part opinionwise.



Goddamn Bill's good in this argument.

The amazing thing is, there's such arrogance from these talk radio conservatives is that they are incredibly shallow thinkers backed up by the momentary politically expedient opinion, one that is never their own. This is why they literally have no policy. Bill Clinton was President of the United States during the time you're talking about Chris, you're going to lose the argument. All you have is the information that fills that vacuum created by your vehemently incurious existence supplied by talk radio conservatives. The propaganda (not your opion, you don't have one) says he's didn't do all the things he did to stop Bin Laden, but he did, and you're so arrogant that you think the talking points are going to weigh out in an argument against the actual guy? You guys are dumber than I thought, oh wait, Iraq, forgot about the hubris war. This is why Bush can only speak to hand-picked audiences and Fox can only agree with themselves in that little Fox Morning bubble. The only time they'll allow a non-talk-radio-conservative on is when he's of the stature of Mr. Clinton. That won't be happening anytime soon.

Because the facts are detrimental to their insistence that they're correct. They'll try and keep it out of the picture.

By the way, Cheney and the muppet that interviewed Clinton are very good at defending themselves by throwing out lies very confidently (because you're not going to do the research) in opposition to good arguments against them.

Chris says in the above argument, very confidently, that they take the administration to task, if only you watched Fox Sunday. If only you watched Fox Sunday. Clinton doesn't buy it, and he has good reason not to.

Here's Muppet's record on taking Cheney to task.

and Condoleeza.

and any of them on Richard Clarke

Nothing? Questions about Bin Laden have been reserved for the administration from six years ago. Journalism. What're you gonna do?

What I'm Listening To Right Now

I could go on about my love of music from 60's and 70's exploitation soundtracks. Exploitation, not Blacksploitation, which falls under the previous category. When I discovered the world's greatest music stream Exploitika.com five years ago I was so invigorated by this world of thousands of albums and artists I'd never heard of. The amount of music in the odd subgenre was massive. The first two albums I bought in the genre, Beat at Cinecitta and Cinemaphonic Soul Punch are the best albums I've bought since Pyromania. Incredible. You want a good party/chill album? Soul Punch, baby.

Which brings me to my big big tip of the hat to a man with as good a taste in music as I do.



Endless Mike.

One the above link you'll see a couple posts down Mike has listed off all his links to out-of-print, uber-rare exploitation/lounge/library links. I've found that Library music's where it's at. "Library", as in British libraries of stock music recorded for tv shows and movies by some of the best studio musicians at the time, not as in the sort of music heard in libraries.

Right now I'm listening to Ear Catching Melodies. Check it out.

Kidnapped!

Check it out, Tim Hutton (who was in a film I co-co-co-co-co-produced) is in what looks like a cool new show. Support Tim! (we still need distribution).

Senator Durbin, I'll miss you the most...

Who the fuck are my Senators in California? They'll be no Dick Durbin. Check this out.

from Alternet

But the real show-stopper came when Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Il) stepped up to the microphone to engage Reid is a dialog that must have had Republican teeth gnashing all the way to the White House. Here it is, straight from the Congressional Record:

Mr. Durbin: Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. Reid: I will be happy to yield for a question.

Mr. Durbin: Can the Senator refresh my memory? Was Mr. Bremmer the recipient of a gold medal or something from the President? Didn't he receive some high decoration or medal for his performance in Iraq?

Mr. Reid: The answer is, yes, he received that. I assume one would expect that from somebody who had a throne while he was over there.

Mr. Durbin: Isn't it also true that George Tenet, who was responsible for the intelligence that was so bad that led us into the war in Iraq, got a medal from the President the same day?

Mr. Reid: That is true.

Mr. Durbin: Did Michael Brown with FEMA receive a gold medal from the White House before he was dismissed?

Mr. Reid: I don't think he did. Even though he was doing a heck of a job, I don't think he obtained a medal from the White House.

Mr. Durbin: Apparently, these gold medals were being awarded for incompetence. They missed Mr. Brown, but they did give one to Mr. Bremmer. Will the Senator yield for another question?

Mr. Reid: I will be happy to.

Mr. Durbin: I am trying to recall the exact number -- it was in the billions of dollars -- that we gave to the President for the reconstruction of Iraq; is that not true?

Mr. Reid: It started out at $18 billion. But as the Senator from Illinois will remember, part of that money, stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, was used by some of the contractors who were sent over there to play football games -- some of these same people.

Mr. Durbin: It is also true, is it not, that the Democratic policy conference has been holding hearings -- in fact, I think it is the only agency on the Hill holding hearings -- on this waste and abuse, this profiteering and corruption at the expense of American taxpayers and even, equally important -- more importantly -- at the expense of our troops?

Mr. Reid: I say to my friend, this war is approaching 3 1/2 years, and there has not been a single congressional oversight hearing on the conduct of the war. This war has now cost us, the American taxpayers, about $325 billion. There has not been a single congressional oversight hearing on the war.

Mr. Durbin: I ask the Senator from Nevada if he might comment on this as well: Are we not in a situation where the President has told us that he wants to "stay the course'' in Iraq, and Vice President Cheney, when asked a week ago, said he wouldn't change a thing in the way they have done this war in Iraq? Is it very clear that unless there is a change in leadership in this town soon, we are going to continue down this disastrous course, exposing our soldiers to danger every single day, their families to the anxiety of separation, and the taxpayers of this country to billions and billions of dollars more being spent that don't make us any safer?

Mr. Reid: I say to my friend, I spent the weekend reading a book. I did other things. I spent a lot of time on an airplane. The book is called "Fiasco,'' written by a man named Thomas Ricks who has spent his life covering the military. He has written books on the military. I don't know his political persuasion. This book is on the best seller's list of the New York Times.

In this book, he talks in such detail about what has happened as a result of the incompetence of this administration to our valiant fighting men and women over there. I recommend the book to anyone. It is a searing indictment of this administration.
Reid then thrust the final dagger on his own saying, "The war in Iraq has been a diversion from the real war on terror. But this administration and this do-nothing Congress are content to stay the course, even as it makes America less safe and Iraq less stable. We need a new direction. This Congress has failed."

My ears are happy, Olbermann's speaking.

Wickerman Club

As you know I was stunted the best I'd ever been stunted last Friday night. Part of the stunt was convincing me that we were doing and entirely different show than what ultimately happened (video on the way). And the Oscar goes to Stephen Schmidt for our brief conversation before teaching:

"People just want to see monologues, they want to see you playing the characters your known for. Let's just give 'em what they want."

Okay. And best supporting actors go to Justin for not letting me cut the Office Prick monologue that I would never give, Kate for convinvcing me that it'll go great when i met her at the bank and complained that I didn't have the monologues down, and Stephe again, for making sure he had all my music cues down for moments that I'd never put on stage.

And the Ace award goes to my ego for buying it for a second. So Adam had to write two new monologues and re-memorize two old ones for characters that in retropect nobody could give a fuck about. So here is monologue #1. Brent Wickerman, you don't remember Brent Wickerman? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Brent's one of the Managers of the Phudi Mart (our next screenplay) and this'll let you know a little bit about him. This may very well be the opening monologue in the movie before we know where they are and who Brent is.

Silence!!! Gentlemen, welcome to Wickerman Club.

You're not your job. You're not $5.25 an hour. You're not your black pants, brown apron, and a yellow shirt, which need to be tucked in by the way."

When I look at you guys in this warehouse I see a generation of displaced youth who needs a cool forty-year-old to look up to. You're here to find something in yourself long lost, the companionship of men, real men. That's why you're here...or you got a flyer on your windshield, actually show of hands on that, a little marketing survey....

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake! You are not your case of Miller Lite I buy for you at 20% markup. You're a generation with no leaders, who looks up to a man who rents his own house, two blocks from your school. The type who knows if my Corona sign in my front window is on, then the party is on.

You are guys are looking for purpose, to be men, to be led by a real man. A man who owns a Fiero and an Iroc-Z. A man with an asian-themed bedroom a framed print of Alyssa Milano in a hockey jersey. A man who wears very very small italian underwear.

As a generation without leaders you look up to a man who worked on Wall Street for almost a year during the greed-is-good eighties, and man who posed for Playgirl and wouldn't take "no" for an answer when it came to their "stringent" chaps policy.

There's a secret in this secret society and the secret is me.

First Rule of Wickerman Club is you do not talk about Wickerman Club. That's not a gay thing, we're not going to be touching each other The only thing we'll be touching is each other's souls, and maybe a butthole or two, it's an initiation I haven't quite worked out.

Second Rule of Wickerman Club is you do not talk about The Cars, if Ric Ocasek isn't singing then they are NOT The Cars.

Third Rule is we have to beat the fuck out of each other to make this work. I didn't invent that part, all I know is it's not gay, not in an obvious way. Let me grease up here.

(Wickerman takes off his shirt and Stephe sprays Pam on his chest)

Fourth Rule is let's just have fun, you know? Where in the Wickerman Club manifesto does it say "thou shalt not have a little fun?"

Fifth Rule is I got this great new tape, have you guys heard this tape? This is a really great tape, she's called Pink, and I don't listen to a lot of new music but this is just great.

(Wickerman presses play and does a dance to "I'm Comin' Up")

The Sixth Rule, did I mention that we're going to be beating each other up? Cool. Because that's definitely a deal-breaker for some people, maybe even me.

The Seventh Rule is you DO NOT talk about Wickerman Club, except on the internet.

Now I need you to hit...him, as hard as you can.

(Tony Smalek, store manager, walks in)

Smalek: I don't want to interrupt Brent, we need to open a new aisle, we got a ton of customers.

Aw man, we were just claiming our lost masculinity through the homo-erotic ritual of wrestling and combat.

Smalek: Sounds gay.

It's not gay.

Let's Go To Prison

Check out the poster for Bob Oedenkerk's upcoming movie written by Thomas Lennon and featuring the late Jim Zulevic.

I Got Roasted!

Boy oh boy, did I get fucked with. First of all, the ultimate fucking with, fucking with my stagefright and inability to memorize.

Schadenfreude convinced me that Friday night's show was a regular show for the most part. The "wraparound" would be a roast, that there would be three sketches that were roast sketches, three guest spots, and four other sketches.

Little of this was true.

But I still wrote three new monologues and tried to memorize them in 24 hours. We were going to "send off" some of my "memorable" "characters." Scruffy McMuffin, Brent Wickerman, Redneck Randy.

but no.

I came out as Scruffy McMuffin to give my first of four monologues that I hadn't memorized very well. Right as I got into the monoglogue (and nobody was laughing, I like to imagine they were instructed not to...but I don't think it was that well organized) and began humping a microphone stand in a giant McMuffin costume Kate came out and stopped me.

"Adam, stop...PLEASE stop. We're not doing a show. We're really doing the roast of Adam Witt."

Very sneaky.

I was so relieved. Each of the monologues was very long, and moments before the show I was hastily scribbling cue cards for each of the monologues, which I will be putting up all week with pictures.

In addition to writing and memorizing my monologues, I had to go to the Village Discount Outlet and buy costuming for a fake Sam Kinison, Rita Rudner, and John Pinnette. I wonder if part of the joke the group planned was to load me up with things to do in addition to memorize three monologues. I spent two hours in the thrift store and only two of the props got used for a total single minute of viewable time. $26 for one minute of Sam Kinison/Rita Rudner references.

I'm sure there's a "priceless" joke in there somewhere, and I'm sure it's super funny.

And then there came a relentless torrent of friends giving me shit all set up by the Schad crew. Don Hall, a man on my short-list of favorite people, gave me a healthy dose of Don-inspired vitriol, and I believe made a great Dick York joke.

Andy Eninger, who I've known for fifteen years (wow), brought one of my early Chicago sketches onstage and did an analysis of my comic structure and lack of female roles.

Justin set up a game in which he marched people in front of me and asked me if I knew their names, which is a GREAT BIT, because I do forget a lot of people's names. But they went easy on me. The brought our intern from 99-00, Sara Tolbert, onstage. I don't think I've ever forgotten her name.

Kara Buller and Megan Powell came up playing fake ex-girlfriends, talking about how bad I was as a boyfriend. I gotta tell ya, I'd love to add those two to my list of ex-girlfriends. Looking good. Kara came up to me before the show (as I was memorizing lines I'd never speak) and I must admit, I forgot her name.

In between every act, Justin would come up and call me a fucking fag. He started the whole thing by saying he'd been listening to the Artie Lange Roast and all they did was call him a fucking fag every minute, Justin then called me that a fag at least 20 times.

Joel Friend, Josh Kaufmann, Robert Buscemi, and Tony Sam, who really killed. And to top it all off Mike & Dwayne did their best song ever called "Sketch Show." Which is my new theme for life.

The roast was great, it was pretty emotional. It's really really super weird crazy insane unthinkable crazy that I just had my last regular Schadenfreude show, that I'm moving, that everyone was saying good luck to me in L.A. Why are they saying this? Is this really what I'm doing? It's like it's out of my hands and some unseen force has pushed me in this direction and I am helpless to stop the tide of random life events.

I'll have the video up tomorrow, it's a lot of footage to crunch, it was like a 90 minute roast.

Thanks to everyone who came and roasted me and gave me so many memories over the last ten years to think about as the whole roast was transpiring.

God I hope I don't fuck this up.

UPDATE!!

Oh my sweet CHRIST! I just went to the screening room to see the funniest video I've ever seen!. You must go now, it turns out Tim Schadenfreude (for whom the group is named) recorded a goodbye greeting when I first announced I was moving to L.A. in 1999. I just laughed really really hard.

"Let me ask you something? Do I look okay?"

You can't land on a fraction man!

he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say do you know that if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you. I'm a little man, and he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas.

America's Next Top Short-Haired Chick

I was in the subway the other day and saw an ad for Americas Next Top Model 7.



And I noticed two things. Two things just popped out at me.



And it's not the girl to the bottom right who looks like Arcee from Transformer's: The Movie. You can hardley tell she's a space car in her robot mode.

While I couldn't find any more pictures of them, I did find pictures of the last top model, or rather one of the runner-ups with short hair.



Mollie Sue



Check out her myspace page for her myspace page.



I don't really have time to comment on any of this as I'm prepping some bits for my roast.



Instead I'll substitute in a script from The cartoon M.A.S.K. from 1983



Mayhem: Hurry up.
Dagger: Yes, sir. I've never done such an easy job like this.
Sly Rax: Nothing like a good earthquake to scare people away.
Mayhem: Good Job. Let's get going.



Mayhem: M.A.S.K.! (Turns around)
Matt: This is it V.E.N.O.M.!



Woman: Help ! Somebody help !
Mayhem:Viper, fire!
Mayhem: How convenient…let 's get out of here.
Matt:Bruce, Brad, Alex, Gloria help that woman. We'll take care of VENOM.



Sly Rax: Stiletto fire!
Buddy:Penetrator on!
Hondo:Ugh!
Dagger:Torch on!
Dusty: Backlash fire!
Gloria: Aura on!
Woman: Nooo! Ahhhh!



Bruce: Lifter on!
Dusty:Backlash fire!
Vanessa: Eeayah!
Dusty: Better give up…now.
Vanessa Fat chance!!



Dusty: Woah!!
Dagger:Get in, quick!
Dusty: Hey! Stop!
Mayhem:This should slow him down.
Dusty: Oh Nooo…
Dusty: Hey! Wait a minute!
Dusty:Don't evaporate me!



Matt: Are you all right, Dusty?
Dusty:Well sort of…V.E.N.O.M. got away.
Matt: Don't worry. At least we got what they were after. Did you figure out what it was?
Alex:It 's a computer component used to divert earthquakes from populated areas to the desert or ocean floor.
Matt: Then obviously V.E.N.O.M. has the means to create earthquakes. That's obviously what the plutonium was for… some kind of earthquake device.

MY LAST SCHADENFREUDE SHOW!!

...for a while. This Friday will mark somewhere between the end of an era and nothing particular at all. Will I still be writing and making movies for Schadenfreude.net? Yup. Will I still be writing as much as a I can for Rent Parties and checking in weekly to work with the gang on the big projects? Yeah. Will I be in those shows or writing them from Chicago? No. If I haven't announced previously in dramatic style, I am moving to Los Angeles on October 1st. I almost moved there instead of Chicago ten years ago, but I figured if I was going to do the comedy scene in Chicago I might as well do it while I was young and all my friends were in Chicago. I've thought about moving to L.A. ever since I got here.

In the meantime many of my friends moved from here to L.A. and many of the friends I made since I got here have moved there as well. When we visited L.A. last November to put on a show at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre I felt the Los Angeles had stopped being this mysterious, difficult, strange mountain. Now it was simply that new neightborhood that many of my friends live in, just off the Plaid Line, it was Chicago in L.A. last November. I quit my job not knowing what I would do next. The only thing that would keep me here would be a job in my industry, film, and there are 120,000 % less industry jobs here than there are in L.A.

So come see the show this Friday at the Gallery Cabaret, we'll be roasting me, and roasting roasts.

2020 N. Oakley
One block East of Western, one block North of Armitage.
Doors 7pm, Show 8pm, Party 9pm

Tomorrow, Short-Haired Chicks and how the decision to move to L.A. made itself. You ever had a decision make itself? It gives you a weird What the bleep perspective on a world I truly believe exists only in our minds.

"What one thing would you do if you knew you could not fail?"
-Brian Tracy

Keith Olberman, once again, is genius

We have not forgotten Mr. President, you have, may this country forgive you.

Happy 9/11

It was five years ago that Iraq attacked us.

I'm watching MSNBC's rebroadcast of the morning of 9/11. I picture Paul Wolfowitz jacking off to it.

I remember it well as I was in America's tallest building watching it live on CNN. On my floor of the Sears Towers they had tv's lining the hallways that played CNN 24/7. A group gathered around the tv and we all watched the second plane hit, then calmly gathered our things and left.

You were all there, shocked isn't the word.

"All right. You've covered your ass, now."
-George W. Bush to CIA briefer who presented the Aug. 6, 2001, memo: "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US."

It's so sad that an anniversary of such of horrific event should bring such mixed feelings.

I watched on the same CNN monitors over the next year as Iraq overnight became our Ivan Drago, powerful, looming, ready to strike within days. Something that must be stopped...a month before the 2002 mid-term elections. It is somewhat forgotten now (I'm assuming that's the real goal of "staying the course") but the drumbeat of war with Iraq was incredible. I watched everyday for the the next year hour after hour after hour of political speeches designed to get us into this war, it was infuriating because it was every day. Day after day after day of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Powell and Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz and George Tenet making speech after speech day after day about how Iraq will kill us if we don't do something. We couldn't confirm that they destroyed their WMD's and then Iraq sent that information, and then that wasn't enough. Then it was that Iraq won't let inspectors in, and then they did and the war crew had to make a new round of speeches on why being given everything they asked for from Iraq wasn't enough. Then they were going to get U.N. approval and then they didn't and had to give a speech.

Speech after speech after speech, day after day after day. They wore me out like a child asking for candy.

The administration that hasn't met a tragedy it can't turn into an advantage for them has really spit in those victims faces with their selfish political right-wing-talk-radio actions afterwards. With every action after 9/11 I find it more and more difficult to believe that there were anything but happy that day.

I just turned to FOX who's calling their broadcast "9/11, The Day America Changed." You know, just in case you were wondering why everything's been so fucked up and why gas is so expensive. Dick Cheney is, once again, making a speech. Turns out this war is going to have to be long, like the Cold one that provided defense contractors with billions of government dollars, you know, just in case you were wondering why we're still in Iraq. Long war.



See if you found this as interesting as I did.

9/11 in a Movie-Made World
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

...For most Americans, even those like me who were living in Manhattan, 9/11 arrived on the television screen. This is why what leapt?to mind - and instantaneously filled our papers and TV reporting - was previous screen life, the movies.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the news was peppered with comments about, thoughts about, and references to films. Reporters, as Caryn James wrote in the New York Times that first day, "compared the events to Hollywood action movies"; as did op-ed writers ("The scenes exceeded the worst of Hollywood's disaster movies"); columnists ("On TV, two national landmarks… look like the aftermath in the film Independence Day"); and eyewitnesses ("It was like one of them Godzilla movies"; "And then I saw an explosion straight out of The Towering Inferno"). Meanwhile, in an irony of the moment, Hollywood scrambled to excise from upcoming big- and small-screen life anything that might bring to mind thoughts of 9/11, including, in the case of Fox, promotion for the premiere episode of 24, in which "a terrorist blows up an airplane." (Talk about missing the point!)

In our guts, we had always known it was coming. Like any errant offspring, Little Boy and Fat Man, those two atomic packages with which we had paid them back for Pearl Harbor, were destined to return home someday. No wonder the single, omnipresent historical reference in the media in the wake of the attacks was Pearl Harbor or, as screaming headlines had it, INFAMY, or A NEW DAY OF INFAMY. We had just experienced "the Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century," or, as R. James Woolsey, former CIA director (and neocon), said in the Washington Post that first day, "It is clear now, as it was on December 7, 1941, that the United States is at war.… The question is: with whom?"

The Day After

No wonder that what came instantly to mind was a nuclear event. No wonder, according to a New York Times piece, Tom Brokaw, then chairing NBC's nonstop news coverage, "may have captured it best when he looked at videotape of people on a street, everything and everyone so covered with ash… [and said] it looked 'like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan.'" No wonder the Tennessean and the Topeka Capital-Journal both used the headline "The Day After," lifted from a famous 1983 TV movie about nuclear Armageddon.

No wonder the area where the two towers fell was quickly dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for the spot where an atomic explosion had occurred. On September 12, for example, the Los Angeles Times published a full-page series of illustrations of the attacks on the towers headlined: "Ground Zero." By week's end, it had become the only name for "the collapse site," as in a September 18 New York Times headline, "Many Come to Bear Witness at Ground Zero."

No wonder the events seemed so strangely familiar. We had been living with the possible return of our most powerful weaponry via TV and the movies, novels and our own dream-life, in the past, the future, and even - thanks to a John F. Kennedy TV appearance on October 22, 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis to tell us that our world might end tomorrow - in something like the almost-present.

So many streams of popular culture had fed into this. So many "previews" had been offered. Everywhere in those decades, you could see yourself or your compatriots or the enemy "Hiroshimated" (as Variety termed it back in 1947). Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't kissing Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies as an atomic explosion went off somewhere in the Florida Keys or a playground filled with American kids wasn't being atomically blistered in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, even when it wasn't literally nuclear, that apocalyptic sense of destruction lingered as the train, bus, blimp, explosively armed, headed for us in our unknowing innocence; as the towering inferno, airport, city, White House was blasted away, as we were offered Pompeii-scapes of futuristic destruction in what would, post-9/11, come to be known as "the homeland."

Sometimes it came from outer space armed with strange city-blasting rays; other times irradiated monsters rose from the depths to stomp our cities (in the 1998 remake of Godzilla, New York City, no less). After Star Wars' Darth Vader used his Death Star to pulverize a whole planet in 1977, planets were regularly nuclearized in Saturday-morning TV cartoons. In our imaginations, post-1945, we were always at planetary Ground Zero.

Dystopian Serendipity

Increasingly, from Hamburg to Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, others were also watching our spectaculars, our catastrophes, our previews; and so, as Hollywood historian Neal Gabler would write in the New York Times only days after 9/11, they were ready to deliver what we had long dreamed of with the kind of timing - insuring, for instance, that the second plane arrived "at a decent interval" after the first so that the cameras could be in place - and in a visual language American viewers would understand.

But here's the catch: What came, when it came, on September 11, 2001, wasn't what we thought came. There was no Ground Zero, because there was nothing faintly atomic about the attacks. It wasn't the apocalypse at all. Except in its success, it hardly differed from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the one that almost toppled one tower with a rented Ryder van and a homemade bomb.

OK, the truck of 1993 had sprouted wings and gained all the power in those almost full, transcontinental jet fuel tanks, but otherwise what "changed everything," as the phrase would soon go, was a bit of dystopian serendipity for Al Qaeda: Nineteen men of much conviction and middling skills, armed with exceedingly low-tech weaponry and two hijacked jets, managed to create an apocalyptic look that, in another context, would have made the special-effects masters of Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic proud. And from that - and the Bush administration's reaction to it - everything else would follow.

The tiny band of fanatics who planned September 11 essentially lucked out. If the testimony, under CIA interrogation techniques, of Al Qaeda's master planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is to be believed, what happened stunned even him. ("According to the [CIA] summary, he said he 'had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was.'") Those two mighty towers came crumbling down in that vast, roiling, near-mushroom cloud of white smoke before the cameras in the fashion of the ultimate Hollywood action film (imagery multiplied in its traumatizing power by thousands of replays over a record-setting more than ninety straight hours of TV coverage). And that imagery fit perfectly the secret expectations of Americans - just as it fit the needs of both Al Qaeda and the Bush administration.

That's undoubtedly why other parts of the story of that moment faded from sight. On the fifth anniversary of September 11, there will, for instance, be no memorial documentaries focusing on American Flight 77, which plowed into the Pentagon. That destructive but non-apocalyptic-looking attack didn't satisfy the same built-in expectations. Though the term "ground zero Washington" initially floated through the media ether, it never stuck.

Similarly, the unsolved anthrax murders-by-mail of almost the same moment, which caused a collective shudder of horror, are now forgotten. (According to a LexisNexis search, between October 4 and December 4, 2001, 260 stories appeared in the New York Times and 246 in the Washington Post with "anthrax" in the headline. That's the news equivalent of a high-pitched scream of horror.) Those envelopes, spilling highly refined anthrax powder and containing letters dated "9/11/01" with lines like "Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah Is Great," represented the only use of a weapon of mass destruction in this period; yet they were slowly eradicated from our collective (and media) memory once it became clearer that the perpetrators were probably homegrown killers, possibly out of the very cold war U.S. weapons labs that produced so much WMD in the first place. It's a guarantee that the media will not be filled with memory pieces to the anthrax victims this October.

The 36-Hour War

Indulge me, then, for a moment on an otherwise grim subject. I've always been a fan of what-if history and, when younger, of science fiction. Recently, I decided to take my own modest time machine back to September 11, 2001; or, to be more exact, the IRT subway on several overheated July afternoons to one of the cultural glories of my city, the New York Public Library, a building that - in the realm where sci-fi and what-if history meld - suffered its own monstrous "damage," its own 9/11, only months after the A-bombing of Hiroshima.

In November 1945, Life magazine published "The 36-Hour War," an overheated what-if tale in which an unnamed enemy in "equatorial Africa" launched a surprise atomic missile attack on the United States, resulting in 10 million deaths. A dramatic illustration accompanying the piece showed the library's two pockmarked stone lions still standing, guarding a ground-zero scene of almost total destruction, while heavily shielded technicians tested "the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity."

I passed those same majestic lions, still standing (as was the library) in 2006, entered the microfiche room and began reading the New York Times as well as several other newspapers starting with the September 12, 2001, issues. Immediately I was plunged back into a hellish apocalypse. Vivid Times words and phrases from that first day: "gates of hell," "the unthinkable," "nightmare world of Hieronymus Bosch," "hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke, and leaping victims," "clamorous inferno," "an ashen shell of itself, all but a Pompeii." But one of the most common words over those days in the Times and elsewhere was "vulnerable" (or as a Times piece put it, "nowhere was safe"). The front page of the Chicago Tribune caught this mood in a headline, "Feeling of Invincibility Suddenly Shattered," and a lead sentence, "On Tuesday, America the invincible became America the vulnerable." We had faced "the kamikazes of the 21st century" - a Pearl Harborish phrase that would gain traction - and we had lost.

A thought came to mind as I slowly rolled those grainy microfiches; as I passed the photo of a man, in midair, falling headfirst from a WTC tower; as I read this observation from a Pearl Harbor survivor interviewed by the Tribune: "Things will never be the same again in this country"; as I reeled section by section, day by day toward our distinctly changed present; as I read all those words that boiled up like a linguistic storm around the photos of those hideous white clouds; as I considered all the op-eds and columns filled with all those instant opinions that poured into the pages of our papers before there was even time to think; as I noticed, buried in their pages, a raft of words and phrases - "preempt," "a new Department of Pre-emption [at the Pentagon]," "homeland defenses," "homeland security agency" - already lurking in our world, readying themselves to be noticed.

Among them all, the word that surfaced fastest on the heels of that "new Day of Infamy," and to deadliest effect, was "war." Senator John McCain, among many others, labeled the attacks "an act of war" on the spot, just as Republican Senator Richard Shelby insisted that "this is total war," just as the Washington Post's columnist Charles Krauthammer started his first editorial that first day, "This is not crime. This is war." And they quickly found themselves in a milling crowd of potential war-makers, Democrats as well as Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, even if the enemy remained as yet obscure.

On the night of September 11 the President himself, addressing the nation, already spoke of winning "the war against terrorism." By day two, he used the phrase "acts of war"; by day three, "the first war of the twenty-first century" (while the Times reported "a drumbeat for war" on television); by week's end, "the long war"; and the following week, in an address to a joint session of Congress, while announcing the creation of a Cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, he wielded "war" twelve times. ("Our war on terror?begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.")

What If?

So here was my what-if thought. What if the two hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United 175, had plunged into those north and south towers at 8:46 and 9:03, killing all aboard, causing extensive damage and significant death tolls, but neither tower had come down? What if, as a Tribune columnist called it, photogenic "scenes of apocalypse" had not been produced? What if, despite two gaping holes and the smoke and flames pouring out of the towers, the imagery had been closer to that of 1993? What if there had been no giant cloud of destruction capable of bringing to mind the look of "the day after," no images of crumbling towers worthy of Independence Day?

We would surely have had blazing headlines, but would they have commonly had "war" or "infamy" in them, as if we had been attacked by another state? Would the last superpower have gone from "invincible" to "vulnerable" in a split second? Would our newspapers instantly have been writing "before" and "after" editorials, or insisting that this moment was the ultimate "test" of George W. Bush's until-then languishing presidency? Would we instantaneously have been considering taking what CIA Director George Tenet would soon call "the shackles" off our intelligence agencies and the military? Would we have been reconsidering, as Florida's Democratic Senator Bob Graham suggested that first day, rescinding the Congressional ban on the assassination of foreign officials and heads of state? Would a Washington Post journalist have been trying within hours to name the kind of "war" we were in? (He provisionally labeled it "the Gray War.") Would New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on the third day have had us deep into "World War III"? Would the Times have been headlining and quoting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on its front page on September 14, insisting that "it's not simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism." (The Times editorial writers certainly noticed that ominous "s" on "states" and wrote the next day: "but we trust [Wolfowitz] does not have in mind invading Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan as well as Afghanistan.")

Would state-to-state "war" and "acts of terror" have been so quickly conjoined in the media as a "war on terror" and would that phrase have made it, in just over a week, into a major presidential address? Could the Los Angeles Daily News have produced the following four-day series of screaming headlines, beating even the President to the punch: Terror/Horror!/"This Is War"/War on Terror?

If it all hadn't seemed so familiar, wouldn't we have noticed what was actually new in the attacks of September 11? Wouldn't more people have been as puzzled as, according to Ron Suskind in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, was one reporter who asked White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, "You don't declare war against an individual, surely"? Wouldn't Congress have balked at passing, three days later, an almost totally open-ended resolution granting the President the right to use force not against one nation (Afghanistan) but against "nations," plural and unnamed?

And how well would the Bush administration's fear-inspired nuclear agenda have worked, if those buildings hadn't come down? Would Saddam's supposed nuclear program and WMD stores have had the same impact? Would the endless linking of the Iraqi dictator, Al Qaeda, and 9/11 have penetrated so deeply that, in 2006, half of all Americans, according to a Harris Poll, still believed Saddam had WMD when the U.S. invasion began, and 85% of American troops stationed in Iraq, according to a Zogby poll, believed the US mission there was mainly "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks"?

Without that apocalyptic 9/11 imagery, would those fantasy Iraqi mushroom clouds pictured by administration officials rising over American cities or those fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles capable of sp?aying our East Coast with chemical or biological weapons, or Saddam's supposed search for African yellowcake (or even, today, the Iranian "bomb" that won't exist for perhaps another decade, if at all) have so dominated American consciousness?

Would Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri be sitting in jail cells or be on trial by now? Would so many things have happened differently?

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

What if the attacks on September 11, 2001, had not been seen as a new Pearl Harbor? Only three months earlier, after all, Disney's Pearl Harbor (the "sanitized" version, as Times columnist Frank Rich labeled it), a blockbuster made with extensive Pentagon help, had performed disappointingly at the multiplexes. As an event, it seemed irrelevant to American audiences until 9/11, when that ancient history - and the ancient retribution that went with it - wiped from the American brain the actual history of recent decades, including our massive covert anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, out of which Osama bin Laden emerged.

Here's the greatest irony: From that time of triumph in 1945, Americans had always secretly suspected that they were not "invincible" but exceedingly vulnerable, something both pop culture and the deepest fears of the cold war era only reinforced. Confirmation of that fact arrived with such immediacy on September 11 largely because it was already a gut truth. The ambulance chasers of the Bush administration, who spotted such opportunity in the attacks, were perhaps the last Americans who hadn't absorbed this reality. As that New Day of Infamy scenario played out, the horrific but actual scale of the damage inflicted in New York and Washington (and to the U.S. economy) would essentially recede. The attack had been relatively small, limited in its means and massive only in its daring and luck - abetted by the fact that the Bush administration was looking for nothing like such an attack, despite that CIA briefing given to Bush on a lazy August day in Crawford ("Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US") and so many other clues.

Only the week before 9/11 the Bush administration had been in the doldrums with a "detached," floundering President criticized by worried members of his own party for vacationing far too long at his Texas ranch while the nation drifted. Moreover, there was only one group before September 11 with a "new Pearl Harbor" scenario on the brain. Major administration figures, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, had wanted for years to radically increase the power of the President and the Pentagon, to roll back the power of Congress (especially any Congressional restraints on the presidency left over from the Vietnam/Watergate era) and to complete the overthrow of Saddam Hussein ("regime change"), aborted by the first Bush administration in 1991.

We know as well that some of those plans were on the table in the 1990s and that those who held them and promoted them, at the Project for the New American Century in particular, actually wrote in a proposal titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" that "the process of transformation [of the Pentagon], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

We also know that within hours of the 9/11 attacks, many of the same people were at work on the war of their dreams. Within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was urging his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq. (Notes by an aide transcribe his wishes this way: "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.")

We know that by the 12th, the President himself had collared his top counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, and some of his staff in a conference room next to the White House Situation Room and demanded linkages. ("'Look under every rock and do due diligence.' It was a very intimidating message which said, 'Iraq. Give me a memo about Iraq and 9/11.'") We know that by November, the top officials of the Administration were already deep into operational planning for an invasion of Iraq.

And they weren't alone. Within the Pearl Harbor/nuclear attack/war nexus that emerged almost instantly from the ruins of the World Trade Center, others were working feverishly. Only eight days after the attacks, for instance, the complex 342-page Patriot Act would be rushed over to Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft, passed through a cowed Senate in the dead of night on October 11, unread by at least some of our Representatives, and signed into law on October 26. As its instant appearance indicated, it was made up of a set of already existing right-wing hobbyhorses, quickly drafted provisions and expansions of law enforcement powers taken off an FBI "wish list" (previously rejected by Congress). All these were swept together by people who, like the President's men on Iraq, saw their main chance when those buildings went down. As such, it stands in for much of what happened "in response" to 9/11.

But what if we hadn't been waiting so long for our own thirty-six-hour war in the most victorious nation on the planet, its sole "hyperpower," its new Rome? What if those pre-existing frameworks hadn't been quite so well primed to emerge in no time at all? What if we (and our enemies as well) hadn't been at the movies all those years?

Movie-Made Planet

Among other things, we've been left with a misbegotten "billion dollar" memorial to the attacks of 9/11 (recently recalibrated to $500 million) planned for New York's Ground Zero and sporting the kinds of cost overruns otherwise associated with the occupation of Iraq. In its ambitions, what it will really memorialize is the Bush administration's oversized, crusading moment that followed the attacks. Too late now - and no one asked me anyway - but I know what my memorial would have been.

A few days after 9/11, my daughter and I took a trip downtown, as close to "Ground Zero" as you could get. With the air still rubbing our throats raw, we wandered block after block, peering down side streets to catch glimpses of the sheer enormity of the destruction. And indeed, in a way that no small screen could communicate, it did have the look of the apocalyptic, especially those giant shards of fallen building sticking up like - remember, I'm a typical movie-made American on an increasingly movie-made planet and had movies on the brain that week - the image of the wrecked Statue of Liberty that chillingly ends the first Planet of the Apes film, that cinematic memorial to humanity's nuclear folly. Left there as it was, that would have been a sobering monument for the ages, not just to the slaughter that was 9/11 but to what we had awaited for so long - and what, sadly, we still wait for; what, in the world that George Bush has produced, has become ever more, rather than less, likely. And imagine our reaction then.

Safer? Don't be ridiculous.

Wake and bake, it's Short-Haired Chick Friday.

Hey, look at me, on time, on the right day, posting at all. You're welcome, I promise to get better, or at least find my way back to Chicago from DeKalb.



Yes, I wrapped up the DuQuoine Hot-and-Muggy-and-Retarded-and-"Whatsis For?"-and-"Howzis Work?"-festival-for-people-who-love-the-lottory-booth-because-it's-the-only-free-thing-at-the-fair-fair. As one of the fair organizers stated "the longest 11 days of your life wasn't it?" Uh, yeah.


DUHHHHHHHHH...

I want to start a website, www.duhhhhhhhhhhhhh.com, and it's just a site full of celebrity pictures with DUHHHHHHHHHHHH! written under every one one of them. That's it. There's something so hilariously immature about letting out a big grade-school mock-stupid "Duhhhhhhhhh!", try it at work today. The next time someone says something obvious, let out a big, loud grade-school mock-stupid "DUHHHHHHHH"


DUHHHHHHHHH...

Mock-Stupid Duh was the name of my Competitive Eating Club in High School.



Jim McWilliams is now teaching High School at the High School I graduated from in Oxford, OH. He says it's great to finally have kids that are precisely his maturity level, he had previously taught 5th graders. On the first day of class his High Schoolers asked Jim if he wanted to start an afterschool Art Club. Jim said he wouldn't be interested in an Art Club but he would be interested in a Guinness Book of World Records Club. They begin planning to break the walking-backwards record next week. Hilarious.



Oh, the short-haired chick is Ashley Scott by the way, she was on this short-lived show called Birds of Prey, which is the Batman tv show you didn't know about.



Not really Batman, but Batgirl, Huntress, and Oracle, three characters from the Batman comic book who fight crime. Didn't see it, though i'd love to. I'm a huge live-action superhero movie fan and I am all-inclusive in my worship. If I can drag my VCR to my buddies house in 1995 to tape the Generation-X(based on the X-Men comic book, not the generation) because he got better reception, then I will probably be interested in Birds of Prey. Having Ashley Scott along for the ride certainly helps.



I love casting agents. "We need variation, we need to show that Huntress is different, she likes baseball instead of going to the mall. I've got it, short hair." The character has been officially developed, feel free to skip some meetings.



Ashley was also in the best movie of all time Into the Blue. But it's not really a movie so much as an excuse to presell Foreign rights with Jessica Alba's ass.



You know why I like that picture, because I now know precisely what her vagina looks like.



Ashley Scott, Jessica Alba, and Paul Walker. They don't look like they could figure out how soup works between the three of them.



It would be an entirely different movie if Ashley were still wearing her Sassafrass.





Uh, I'll take C.



My next-door neighbor in Carbondale was a Golden Corrall. I ate there a lot. I love buffets, I love anything that's good kitsch and also good, Jim McWilliams for example.



There's something hilariously sad about being in Carbondale at 10pm, sitting in a place that calls it's clientele cattle while reading The Thing meets The Man-Thing which I bought for 75 cents in town.



I tried to eat healthy, but I'm sure somewhere around the two-pound mark even salad becomes unhealthy.



Every kid at the fair was named Austin or Wyatt.



So I drove the six hours back to Chicago, finishing up my unabridged reading of David Geffen's biography and delving into The Teaching Company: Great Religions, excited to sleep in my own bed, a little beaten by the DuQuoine experiment, and I got a call. It was Adam, the other Adam, the guy who tells me where to go.

"Hey, I'm so sorry, this is so last minute, but can you be in Sandwich tomorrow morning for the Sandwich fair?"
"I don't even know what language you're speaking dude."
"Sandwich, Illinois."
"They named a town, Sandwich?"
"Yes, but that's not important right now.

And so begins another journey to another hotel room in another corner of that state that I previously thought bordered Kentucky somewhere just below 108th street and bordered Missouri somewhere just past Pulaski. As always, I'll keep you posted.


DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!