Will Hines Dot Net

Enjoy it, people!

My improv team 1985 has a special one-time Saturday show tomorrow at 9pm at the UCBT. It is called “Ham for the Holidays.”

A couple of points:

• The name ’1985′: Just because the team is named 1985, that does not mean we focus our material on the year 1985. It’s a completely improvised show — we just picked that name because you have to have a name when you’re an improv group, and that was the first one that no one hated.
• The name ‘Ham for the Holidays’: This show will more than likely have nothing to do with ham. You just have to pick a show name when you’re an improv [...]

I like justifying all of my bad habits as being the descendents of habits that at one point preserved the existence of the human race. For example, I like eating peanut butter sandwiches at 1 in the morning. I like to imagine that at some point, millions of years ago, a meteor crashed into northern europe in the middle of the night, killing all of the cavemen, except for the two fat shit cavemen who were in the burrow eating a hunk of fatty mastadon. Those two fat shits were my grandparents times a million and they saved the planet and that is why I am eating this block of peanut butter while I watch my NetFlix of Undercover Brother.

So I had Google Ads on my site for nine days. In that time, four people clicked on the ads, earning me a total of seventy cents. Two of those clicks were on ads that were in the left-hand margin of the site for just 24 hours. All in all, that’s not worth it. Believe me, it’s tough to give up what could amount to thirty-six dollars and forty cents over the course of a year, but I bit the bullet and took the ads down.

This is not a comment on the usefulness of Google Ads (which are easy and free to set up), but on the low traffic of my blog. If “un-selling out” is something one can [...]

I love 43folders.com, a blog that explores ways to improve how productive you are. It’s where I discovered the book Getting Things Done, which I enjoy. I recently discovered that 43folders has a fun wiki. Fun as far as wikis go.

What’s so fun about it? Well, although the sections are primarily designed to discuss the potentially dry and boring topic of “personal productivity,” they’re also titled playfully. Samples: Working while standing, Keep your pen, Just buy two, Act Randomly and Out the door.

I mean, it’s not HILARIOUS fun. It’s “my, what an endearing and eccentric professor” kind of fun. But I like a lot of the tips I found there, and I [...]

Eliza and I headed over to Joe McGinty’s Keyboard Karaoke in Williamsburg last night. Piano accompaniment makes all hipsters sound chill and loungey. I heartily recommend. The song choices are a good mixup of common and obtuse. I strained to sing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” but forgot how the middle part went. Eliza started with the somber Joni Mitchell’s “River” and then upshifted into barn-burner with “Living on a Prayer.”

Reading Group Discussion Topics:

• Was John Hughes as big as I remember? And if so, what happened?
• If you were in charge of making the world better, and you could forever get rid of CARS or GUNS, which would you pick? I’m getting increasingly freaked about cars and how dangerous they are.
• Have [...]

1. Monogrammed slices of American cheese
2. Flesh-scented soap
3. Cockroach slippers
4. Hal Linden
5. Monogrammed Hal Linden
6. Winterized Hal Linden
7. Organic, free-range Hal Linden
8. Gift certificates redeemable at outlet stores that sell clones of Hal Linden
9. Indoor/outdoor Hal Linden
10. Hal Linden expansion set
11. Family-sized Hal Linden
12. Barney Miller
13. Candles

It suddenly occurred to me that “Chips, Ahoy!” is a very awkward name of a consumer product of any kind. There’s punctuation, which makes it more of a sentence than a name, and it sounds about 150 years out of date.

Other products named by the same guy who named Chips, Ahoy!

• How now, Pudding?
• Forsooth, Now That’s Yogurt!
• Why, Methinks I Taste Cheese-Filled Pizza Crust!
• Soy Milk, Ho!
• Good Morrow, Corn Dog!
• Whether Tis Nobler To Suffer The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune Or To Just Help Ourselves To These Graham Crackers.

(big breath) HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA [...]

World’s Tallest Man Saves Dolphin. An awesome title for something so cool that I can’t believe it happened, but IT DID! It’s like an 8 year old was running the news. Can we please have a superhero team of all the Guinness Book winners? Fattest Man, Beard of Bees guy, and the Finger Math Kid? I love they got the TALLEST man. I’m sure someone much less tall would have been tall enough, but once they knew they needed a guy at least 7 feet high — they just looked at each other and said “Let’s go for it. Get THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH.”

A separate, less dramatic tangent about [...]

I need to buy a hand pump that I can use to inflate a basketball. Since I work in midtown, that means I might just walk one block north and buy it at the humongous Fifth Avenue NBA store. That’s sort of like going to the Wonka Factory to buy gum.

I need the pump for a sketch show happening tomorrow night at the UCBT at 8pm. It is called “Sketch & Awe.” It features sketches by myself, Joseph Wengert, Chris Kula, Shannon O’Neill, and Gavin Speiller. The cast is Charlie Sanders, Eric Scott, Bridie Harrington, Sarah Burns and Nate Shelkey. It’s a silly but responsible group of people. We wrote the shit [...]