Will Hines Dot Net

Bedbugs. No, I Don’t Have Them.

But I guess everyone in the city will soon have them? Or so it seems. They’re in the movie theaters, Times Square.

My super-brief wikipedia reading binge implies that there once was a big bed bug problem, but the use of DDT after World War II wiped them out. Then DDT was banned in 1972 (a reaction to the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, and the effect DDT was having on the environment including the thinning of egg shells). And so now they’re back.

Why did it take almost 30 years since banning DDT for them to come back? Could we just real quick use DDT for a year and get rid of them again and then lay off the DDT? [...]

Let The Idiots Run For President

I am hoping the Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin run for president in 2012. They won’t win, as extremists cannot win the presidency. But they’ll do well enough to pull votes from more reasonable seeming Republicans. They’ll also end up looking way crazier than they do now — remarkable to those of us who consider them crazy already. But even just slightly intense people — Howard Dean, Jerry Brown — look intensely crazy once the scrutiny of a presidential campaign begins. “But Sarah Palin ran and did pretty well?” you politely point out. No — she did well in terms of making herself a celebrity. But she looked crazy and was on the side that lost big time.

I am bringing [...]

First Stand-Up Set

In January 1997, I performed at an open mike set at Rebar, a now demolished bar which was at 16th street and 7th Avenue. I had been watching every Monday for a month or so and I was now going up. My jokes were numbered because I would try to make myself write 10. Ritch Duncan was a regular at those nights. So was soon-to-be Daily Show writer Chris Regan. Leo Allen and Andy Blitz were there now and then. Dan Cronin, who wrote for Conan’s Tonight Show. Anyway, I never talked to any of those people though Ritch and I became friends later. This was my set, which I read off of the paper word for word:

1-19-97

1. So [...]

You Hear What You Want To Hear And Other Nonsense

Just typing.

1) I remember during my sophomore year of college my history professor commented on my paper that I was “a good wordsmith.” I was a chemical engineering major at that time and had never been complimented on my writing in college. Lots of compliments, daily, on my computer programming skills, analytical ability, mathematical acumen. But this guy, the co-author of the young adult novel “My Brother Sam Is Dead” made an offhanded comment about my writing and I switched my major the next day to English zero acclaim.

2) I got a haircut but chickened out of cutting the top as short. This was in the barber pit at Astor Place. The Russian woman who did it finished and [...]

Well I Wish I Wrote More Heretu

One reason I don’t is the explosion of Twitter and Tumblr. So many of my friends blog now and they’re all pretty good at it AND they tend to write in very short focused bursts as those mediums dictate. Makes the rambliness and self-centeredness of THIS blog really obvious! Of course it was always obvious but that never stopped me before. But I guess the novelty of having a blog made it feel okay. Probably people with access to movie cameras in the 30s or something felt justified in filming whatever because just putting it on film made it special. That’s what it was like to have a blog say fives years ago.

I’m not STOPPING or anything. But addressing why [...]

I Just Changed Comedy With This Video

This Guy Keeps Saying He Was The Drummer In Letters to Cleo. I really do love Letters to Cleo.

Clumsy User Interface

So I’ll have a Microsoft Excel file. I’ll need to save it as a “comma separated value” file. That means instead of saving it as a regular Excel file with all of its built-in functions and formatting and multiple sheets and stuff — I just save a simple file of the values in the cells themselves separated by commas. It’s useful for web applications to have the data in a simple format.

So I open the file in Excel. I click “save as” and save it as a “CSV” file. No problem. Two things: when I “close” Excel always prompts me “you changed this file — do you want to save it?” But I did not change it, and I [...]

Various

Listening to Exile in Guyville. What is it about this CD that blew everyone, including me, away when it came out so hard that we all still love it. And yet everyone younger who discovers it seems so underwhelmed? I guess it needs all the weirdness of 1993 wrapped around it to make perfect sense. Related by separate: Kim Deal and Pixies singing Gigantic live in 1988.

My shyer cat now likes to crawl on me and sleep when I’m on my couch typing on my laptop. It’s been a six year long battle of constantly-being-nice to get to this point.

I am going to film a small part for the new Electric Company on Wednesday. Cool, right?

Tomorrow night I meet [...]

My Freaking Deli

This deli across the street from my house does NOT UNDERSTAND BREAKFAST. They only serve it from 7AM until 10AM! WHY? Are they trying to TEACH ME A LESSON? If I go in at 11:30 and I ask for a bagel and they say “we don’t have any bagels; no more today” and I TRY TO KEEP MY COMPOSURE and REMAIN CALM and instead ask for an egg and cheese sandwich on freaking BREAD if that’s all they’ll do and the woman behinds the counter MAKES A FACE and says “No, it’s too late. A dollar extra.” TO COOK AN EGG? ARE YOU A NEW YORK DELI OR ARE YOU A SHAM? I don’t get that all the construction [...]

A Whole Lotta Nothing

I want to watch Airplane!

I need a haircut.

I like reading Peanuts comics.

That the drug companies and Republican have convinced the American people that it’s the people’s “right” to have health prices subject to market forces is one of the best cons of the modern age! Your health to the highest bidder = rugged individualism? What a scam! I just read some Facebook status messages from friends of friends making fun of Obama for letting everyone order whatever health care they want and passing on the bill to everyone else? Is that even close to what’s happening? THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD RESTRICT THE PRICE OF BASIC HEALTH CARE — IT’S NOT COMMUNISM YOU FUCKING IDIOTS! STOP WATCHING TELEVISION IT HAS MADE YOU [...]