Will Hines Dot Net

Salinger was a truly brilliant author. If Catcher In The Rye is too cliche for you mofos, then read Nine Stories and be the cool Salinger kid on the block. At least read A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

OR enjoy this sketch that Rob Lathan and I did in 2004 or 2003 or something for our one-time-only Spank “Rob and Will Fix America.” – J.D. Salinger Changes His Voice Mail

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This thing was the hit of the pre-YouTube Internet! Well, not really.
My Salinger voice sounds more than vaguely Indian.

First of all, it’s nobody’s fault but my own that Tabitha and I went to Bermuda at the worst possible time of year. Jet Blue had a one day sale on airline tickets in November and I thought to myself “Hey Will, you never take vacations — you need to just kinda make that happen.” That I still listen to my frontal lobe is evidence of my eventual destruction. Here’s things I honestly did not know about Bermuda until we landed at the airport:

• It is not the Bahamas.
• It is not that far south! It’s even with like North Carolina. NORTH Carolina!
• It’s super-British! Everyone drives on the left and there’s pictures of the Queen like nobody’s business.
• Meals are hilariously expensive. I sounded like all my friends do when they come to New York. “Seven dollars for an egg and cheese sandwich?” I said out loud in the exact timber of my grandfather’s voice. “That’s outrageous.”
• There are about 4 months where it’s too cold to go in the water, and January is one of them, and going to Bermuda when you can’t go to the beach is like going to Disneyworld for the maps.

HOWEVER Bermuda really is cartoonishly beautiful. The water is bright blue, and the roads are quaint and made of real things like stones and bricks as opposed to whatever plastic cylon material the rest of the world uses. You ride ferries everywhere like that’s normal. Everyone is really polite and says hello all the time like they’re getting paid for it. The accent is extremely particular — some vowels sound British, some southern and a few Jamaican. Very fun.

So we hoofed around beautiful street and read about the island’s history. We ate lobster and fish and hiked around an old British dockyard and saw some remarkably laid back people blow glass and aggressively sell us rum cakes. We saw the cultural commission presentation of Gombay dancers. On a walking tour of the oldest town a cat followed us around, which we took as a good omen. Then a man mowing the lawn of the oldest house in the Western Hemisphere or something stopped to tell us that we had come there at the worst possible time and that we were dumb, but he said it in a friendly way.

Our hotel was beautiful, and right on the (cold) water, and with wi-fi. We saw a small drawbridge and drank a deathly amount of coffee and tea. We had paid very little for our flights and hotel so even though it was a burger and beer cost $25 minimum, we ended all right.

Still, we were both so excited to land in NYC you’d think we’d been trapped in the Arctic!

Cagematch in 3 hours. Come see!

Two videos for you folks today. Macbook Pro Unboxing, the debut offering from The Brig, a Beta Team I have the privilege of coaching. (Sample coaching: “That’s funny. Do that one. See you next week!”).

And then this from Bobby Chicago – Corporate Sponsored Senate. My favorite part is Brandon’s extensive monologue in the middle.

Over the past 2 years, filesize limits for uploading videos has really jumped up! Here’s the settings From Final Cut, I pick “MPEG-4″ for file type to export. Used to do the default QuickTime Movie with H.264 but MPEG-4 gives smaller file sizes that still look great (Nate Dern figured this out while he interned for ucbcomedy.com). All my stuff is widescreen, hence the custom height and width.

Here’s video settings.

For College Humor, which still restricts file sizes to 80mb, I’ll set the data rate to 1500 kbs. Or sometimes make the dimensions 400×225.

Here’s audio settings.

YouTube is the best experience. Upload quickly and is immediately available as a low-res file. Then in a just a few minutes the higher-res version is ready. Impressive and good-looking.

Any comments? Suggestions? Random nouns?

Lanny reads from Get Psyched! Step 5: Enjoy. In this excerpt, Lanny severely overestimates the lifestyle of his readership.

You guys know Lanny’s 7 steps, right? One of the best parts of writing this book was coming up for a chapter to defend each of these steps.
1. Get Psyched
2. Have Fun
3. Pump It Up
4. Go For It
5. Enjoy
6. Drink Plenty of Fluids
7. Get Psyched

Bad First Dates with Gavin Speiller! This series is hilarious. And I dare you to not be charmed by Gavin Speiller! Before anyone in this improv world knew who Gavin was, my brother once had an indie group called “I Love Gavin Speiller” because my brother is smart.

So what is this book about anyway? Hey, why don’t you hear a short excerpt? Here’s Lanny reading from Step 7: Get Psyched.

Look at that: it’s a real book!

Answer any or all:

• I want a better profile pic for my twitter. What should I do?
• In the book version of Let The Right One In, the vampire Eli describes once meeting an older vampire and asking why there weren’t more of them? The older vampire answers, and then points at Eli’s chest and coyly suggests something I do not understand. Explain that.
• Is it harder and harder to feel like one knows the current music scene, or is it just something all aging hipsters like myself feel?
• Is it okay if I describe myself as an aging hipster?
• I have eight unspoken for ISBNs and I’m going to use them to publish books by me and my friends. No question here, but if you have suggestions for books I’d like to hear.
• Could it be that the reason the dBs never got any bigger was the lead vocals were never really that powerful, despite the great song writing and arranging?
• You know that very sweet video some teenager made which is just footage of a girl sheepishly walking around a 7-11? And you know how lots of people crapped their pants over it? Am I a dick for thinking that that video is good MOSTLY because it had the good sense to put a good song underneath the footage and that we SHOULD be complimenting the music?
• Anyone know a simpler way to record a podcast than how I’m doing it? I do this: shotgun mikes into a mixer through RCA cables into the “line in” input of a Mac Book Pro into Garage Band. Export as .aiff, edit with Final Cut Pro, export as .aif and use iTunes to change to an mp3. Phew!
• How does Ricky J do anything that he does? Especially the History of Cup and Balls?
• Will we all live to see America be as wonderful as it could be? Or at least to experience hoverboards? How about food pills? Food pills! Food pills!
• Will someone ever dig up a piece of paper that resolves once and for all: who Shakespeare was addressing his sonnets to, what happened to Amelia Earheart, or what Kurt Cobain’s next album would have sounded like?
• What is the scariest short story I could read?
• Will I ever successfully do a Scottish accent on stage? What if I do not wish to put any work or concentration into this task?
• Will I ever live in another city?
• I know I’d prefer invisibility to flying, but how about phasing vs. turning to steel? Emotionally they are similar.
• Will I see Marvel Comics make an original roster of superheros that eclipses the Kirby pantheon? Not that I have anything against the Kirby pantheon, but forty years is a long time to base a company on re-runs.
• Farting, body odor or nose hairs? Which is worse and why?
• That’s it!

Big Dog! I got to see this and it’s great! Funny and ambitious and smart. Hooray Eric and Charlie!

I kid the Pitchfork top 100 of 2009! I give Pitchfork top 100 of 2009 a hard time with all its meandering electronic crap blankets! But it introduced me to the hilarious/awesome song “Rockin’ That Shit” so we’re even! We’re even Pitchfork top 100 of 2009! EVEN!