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 group, and we think references to ham are funny in general.

This show is going to be awesome. Come see it. Also, my brother’s team fwand is performing at 10:30pm. That’s right, the name of that team is “fwand.” Now THAT’s a ridiculous name. Am I right? Ladies, back me up on this. But fwand is funny, so watch ‘em! Their comedy is also about 100,000% better than their ridiculous myspace page.

Separate anecdote: I did stand-up Wednesday night at School Night. When I finished, another comedian there very nicely took me aside and told me that after every single joke I told, I grinned and made a clicking noise with my mouth. I had no idea. But once he pointed it out, I could remember doing it. It’s an odd nervous habit. The audience had laughed decently at my stuff, so I figure they thought I was doing it on purpose; that I was trying to establish myself as “The Clicking Guy.”

It wasn’t as bad as when someone took me aside and told me I had been doing an Emo Phillips joke as part of my set.

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 do, then I’ve done it.

Though I’m keeping seventy cents.

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 recommend the site to you.

Unfortunately, there’s also one on blogging less. Worse, it makes a lot of sense! I cancelled cable two years ago, so I don’t watch much TV — but I channel surf the Internet like a junkie lab rat hitting a metal bar to get more cocaine. Wasted time all over the place.

As your friend who is concerned with your time use, I must now recommend that you all stop reading my blog!

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 you tried Google Earth’s Santa Tracker? You get to see Santa’s workshop. That’s fun.
• This guy is making extensive reviews of each of the first ten issues of Love and Rockets!
• Something I only just stumbled on: Woody Allen has credited a lot of what he learned about comedy writing to Neil Simon’s brother.
• Best album I bought this year: Rabbit Fur Coat by Jenny Lewis
• Best comic I discovered this year: Fables
• Best movie I’ve seen this week: The Last Picture Show
• This guy:

…

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 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 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 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 HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

That’s all my time! Thank you, everyone! You guys have been great! Let’s bring Justin back to the stage!

Post Script – The second best movie title I’ve ever heard of is Adam Sandler’s first movie Babes, Ahoy! I think it was renamed, but not in my brain. The best movie title is the never-made sequel to Dude, Where’s My Car? which was going to be Seriously Dude, Where’s My Car? Kevin agrees with me.

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 the importance of height: In seventh grade I took wood shop, as we were all required to. On day one the teacher (Mr. Allsworth?) had three points and he wrote them on the board. Number ONE was to always wear your goggles no matter what. Number THREE was to never touch any machines that you hadn’t been shown how to use. But for number TWO, he wrote “5 foot 4 inches” on the board. “This is my height,” he said. “I hate hate hate being this short. If any of you grow up to be scientists and have an experiment in increasing someone’s height, I am telling you now I would be a willing volunteer for that experiment. I don’t care how dangerous it is.” And I don’t remember him broaching that subject again.

Sketch and Awe TONIGHT — 8pm at UCBT.

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 out of these sketches. Mine centers on the finer points of Yo Momma jokes, which is a dialogue the country needs to be comfortable with.

Details summarized here.

Random and unrelated picture of Gerald Ford here:

Gerald Ford is not referenced in the show.