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?