Your "It's a Goddamn Christmas Miracle" Quizo Update

Before we get to the meat of this week's missive, a quick request: is anyone today going to be very near the Utrecht art supply store on Broad Street? I need something from there and am not able to go into town to get it. If you can do this favor for me, I will grant you a great largesse this evening, bearing in mind that vis a vis the distressingly-specific item I require the usual true Grail/false Grail rules will apply. Please drop me a line if you are able to conveniently swing by the place.

Anyway, onwards.

The phrase in this week's title was actually spoken by me twice in the last four days. The first came on Christmas day, when for the first time in recorded memory everyone in my family got perfect gifts.

Now understand that buying gifts for my parents is alternately an exacting and excruciating process. Shopping for my mother is the former. While her tastes are so complex as to make the Minoan labyrinth look like the straightaway at Daytona, if you can hew close to certain high points - cozy British murder mysteries, Magnum PI, and the collected works of Sinbad - you're pretty much okay. Shopping for my father, on the other hand, is one of the greatest exercises in futility known to man. The house is littered with stacks of books, movies and various gadgetry that were gifts for Christmas, birthdays, Father's Days, etc, that lie unwatched, unread and unused. Not that he is rude about receiving such things, he just never seems to DO anything. Like, ever. It's quite amazing, really; my father is probably the best-read person I have ever known and I have NEVER SEEN HIM READ A BOOK. So getting gifts for Dad is quite tough as it's an amazing chore to get him something he will actually lay hands on more than once.

This year I decided to obviate both of these problems by getting something that they would BOTH use to great extent: a new television, a big flatscreen hi-def job. I had a very nice one picked out and bought up, and on Christmas I had a friend with a hatchback (so as to fit the box on the back deck) give me a ride over to the Death Star to pick it up. This was at maybe 10AM on Wednesday morning. You may recall that early on Wednesday there was a bit of bother with an ice storm, but by 10 it had gone away and everything was clear. I, however, on the way to the car, managed to find the only remaining patch of ice in all of Northeast Philadelphia, slip on it, and bang up my knee pretty badly. It didn't seize up completely until later in the day so I managed to get the TV home all right, but when my knee DID seize up later that night I was presented with a considerable problem.

Since I had long since decided to present the TV as a Santa-style come-downstairs-on-Christmas-morning-and-oh-my-god-there's-a-TV-there! sort of gift, I was left with the difficulty that once my parents had gone to sleep (at 2 in the bloody morning), I now had to not only hook up a brand new large LCD television and dispose of the old one in complete silence, but I had to do all these things on one leg. The fact that I managed to complete this Herculean task should not be understated. That part in and of itself was a minor goddamn Christmas miracle, but it did unfortunately mean that I was basically immobile on Christmas Day.

Come the blessed morn I woke up and, not wanting to ruin my Santa Claus moment, laid awake in bed for a solid two hours waiting for my parents to go downstairs so I could hear the great gasps of surprise and joy. After lying awake for two hours I heard them both go downstairs and, not hearing any gasps of any kind after about ten minutes, I hobbled my way down the stairs.

"What the FUCK?!" I said. I gesticulated wildly at the new television. "No reaction? Seriously? NOTHING? Brand new big-screen TV and it gets NO FUCKING REACTION?"

"Actually," my mother said, "it fits in with the room so well we both walked past it the first time without noticing."

"WITHOUT NOTICING?" I was still shouting, I feel perfectly reasonably.

"Without noticing, well, this is funny," my father said.

It was at this point that I stopped shouting and wildly flailing my arms about long enough to realize that in front of the Christmas tree was a complete set of brand-new golf clubs with one of the oversize decorative bows that we normally hang from the living room light fixtures stuck to it. As my father just got a new set of clubs, I just received a new golf bag from them for my birthday last month, and my mother does not play golf, these were clearly for me.

I wistfully handled the bow, looked at the TV, and said, "I should have thought of this."

"It's sure as hell not three coats," my father said.

Eventually the full-on present-opening commenced. I ended up with the clubs - which are, amusingly, decked out in white, black and orange - and a GPS for my car. My mother got the camera she's been dying for from my father. She gave him a plane ticket to go Spring Training again this year. They both got an astonishingly awesome TV from me.

Once we had coffee and breakfast, I looked at them and said, "is it just me or did everyone get absolutely perfect gifts this year?" This has never happened before, not even close.

We all agreed that everyone had.

"That," I said, "is a goddamn Christmas miracle."

My second utterance of that phrase in the last few days came last night around 7PM when I finally accepted the fact that the Eagles were going to make the playoffs in what has to be the most incredibly unlikely way possible. I had read on some football website that going into Sunday the Birds had something like a 5% chance of making the playoffs. They might have beaten the Cowboys, sure. And the Bears or the Vikings MIGHT have lost, just slightly maybe, and there was a very poorly-packed snowball's chance in hell that the Buccaneers would blow it as two touchdown favorites against the Raiders, but there was basically ABSOULTEY NO WAY IN THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE that all three of these things would happen.

By kickoff at 4:15 not only had both the Bears and Vikings lost, but the Bucs somehow DID blow it to the Raiders, and as the game was starting I sent around a text to my friends urging them to contribute to a fund that would allow us to send Al Davis a quart of fresh human blood as thanks for opening a playoff window for the Eagles. (Come on, you know he's a vampire. Or that he at least bathes in the stuff.)

The Eagles had a window. The stars had all aligned, save one. They just had to beat the Cowboys and incredibly, unbelievably, the Eagles would make the playoffs. It was going to be rough, though. The Cowboys are no pushovers. They're still a fantastically-talented football team, and the Eagles policy of "never cover the tight end" would only make someone as good as Jason Witten even more dangerous. And, hey, Tony Romo can't dick it up in December forever, can he?

About 90 minutes later, after Pacman's second mistake in 90 seconds had given the Eagles a total of ten free points, I sat there open-mouthed, staring at my television in disbelief. Eventually I found words and said aloud to my otherwise empty living room, "you've gotta be fucking KIDDING me."

As halftime struck I called my father, in Florida with my mother to visit his aunt.

"The Cowboys have basically quit," he said. "The game is pretty much over. But don't discount Andy Reid's ability to fuck this up."

"Even he would have to try pretty hard to blow this one," I said.

"This is the Eagles," he said. "Never forget that." So I went to watch the second half, waiting for the Eagles to blow their lead and return to normalcy.

When Merrill said, "there's a timeout on the field! The score is, and we are not drunk, 34-3 Eagles!" I realized that this was actually going to happen and I was possessed by a strange euphoria.

After the game ended I just sat there, not quite comprehending the ridiculous sequence of events that had led to this point. I looked over at the tree, all lit up, thought about a happy family with perfect gifts, two weeks off from work, and the Eagles in the playoffs on a new big screen TV, and just smiled and again spoke to the empty room:

"It's a goddamn Christmas miracle."

If all those things happening at once aren't that, folks, I don't know what is.

JLK

Your Out of Control Quizo Update

WARNING: LENGTH! Though this is still a pretty good story, I think. Definitely worth reading, but at 1800 words I’ll understand if you aren’t up for it, so:

TLDR version: This week’s clue is “Jaws!” Comic conventions are fun! 80’s music is nice! Hipsters should all be killed!

JLK

The full version follows:

As I said at one point this weekend: there is my scene, there is not my scene, and then there is the anti-matter equivalent of my scene, which, should it ever intersect with my scene, would cause the total annihilation of everything in the vicinity.

I spent most of this past weekend at Wizard World Philadelphia, a situation which can comfortably be labeled “my scene.”

Now, if you’ve never been, understand that generally speaking there are four things you can do at a decent comic convention:

1) Meet professionals/talk to professionals/express your undying quasi-sexual love for professionals.

I don’t really do this. Over the years you may have noticed that I am not the most outgoing person on Earth and talking to strangers, even strangers whose work I admire, does not exactly float my boat. In point of fact it rather sinks my boat. When it comes to social interaction, I am the Orca and talking to strangers is Jaws. The boat is clearly of insufficient size. Besides which it’s really somewhat impossible to have a meaningful conversation with someone in a loud, hot, hangar-sized room with 15,000 other people milling about, so actual face time isn’t really a consideration for me. I spend maybe 5-10% of my time at these things doing this. It does, however, lead into #2, which is...

2) Get sketches/autographs.

This is the big one for me. I just started the sketchbook two years ago and I tend to get sketches from guys who spend inordinate amounts of time on them so there isn’t a whole lot in there - I’ll bring it tonight if you want a look-see - but I have a collection of autographed books going back a LONG ways.

Upon reflection I’m really not sure why I do this, let alone spend so much of my time at conventions (roughly 75% of it) pursuing them. My pursuit of sketches and autographs is the direct cause of the one major downside of comic conventions: the intense, severe pain going to them creates. I am not making this up. As we are aware a back injury from the ancient mists of forgotten time (i.e. high school) has turned my lower back and left leg into largely-useless slush.

The problem comes from the fact that in a strictly technical sense I don’t buy “comic books” any more. The flimsy little things that cost 3 bucks (THREE DOLLARS!) and can be rolled up and used to lightly whack people in the head? Yeah, I get maybe 10 of those a year. What I do buy TONS of, however, are what we in the business call “trades,” i.e. trade paperbacks, which are permanently-bound collections of several comic books that are far sturdier and can go on a bookshelf. I have lots of these. LOTS.

Most people bring individual comics to conventions to get autographed. I bring trades. Lots of them. Basically the obsessive-compulsive part of my brain - which is almost all of it - has decided that IF a writer or artist is going to be at Wizard World I MUST bring EVERY SINGLE TRADE OF THEIRS THAT I OWN to get autographed. And, in recent years, due to some kind of strange economic quirk, more and more trades are being published in hardcover and I am an absolute whore for a hardcover book.

They are quite heavy.

Lugging around a bag full of hardcover books for 8 hours will do a number on a normal back, let alone the jellyfish that is the spine of yours truly. So, every day when I come back from the convention floor I pop a giant handful of painkillers, which tends to make me a little unbalanced mental-wise, and continue to slowly turn more and more into House every day.

Still, I do have a giant collection of autographed trades, and a book full of pretty sketches. What do you have? A family who loves you? HA! Fucking loser.

3) Socialize with other fans.

I have a handful of friends, maybe a half-dozen, who I only see at Wizard World Philadelphia anymore. Guys I knew in college, guys I worked with at old jobs years ago, stuff like that. And the best part is that not only do we KNOW we’ll see each other we don’t even PLAN it. Every year we just randomly run into one another at the convention center. EVERY GODDAMN YEAR. It’s pretty funny. This is basically how I spend the remainder of my time.

I do also occasionally break out of my introverted shell and talk to other fans, usually when I’m standing in line waiting for something and the pain in my legs and feet and back is crossing the wires in my brain. At one point on Saturday I was waiting in line to have Ethan Van Sciver autograph my copy of the Sinestro Corps War - which came out FREAKING AWESOME, I’ll bring that tonight too - and I hear this girl behind me going through her sketchbook with a guy I later learned was her (much) older brother.

All I hear from behind me is this little girl saying, “here’s Lee Weeks... Walt Simonson... Neal Adams... John Romita Senior... Jim Lee... John Romita Junior... Art Adams... Frank Miller... Matt Wagner...”

I turned around and said to the brother, “oh my god HOW OLD IS THIS GIRL?”

She looked up at me and said, angrily, “I’m ten!”

If you’re not a comics person understand that sitting there hearing this litany of artists who contributed to the sketchbook of a ten-year-old girl is roughly the equivalent of on the first day of your senior year of high school meeting this kid in your class who talked about how he spent the summer time-travelling back and forth between different eras in Hollywood having wild sex with Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren and Jane Fonda and Grace Kelly and Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe and, yeah, that scene with Sean Young in No Way Out, she got the idea after we did it fourteen times in the back seat of my car.

Her brother informed me that she knew who all those guys were, that even at her age she was a big fan, and that I shouldn’t feel too bad about it since little kids will always have better sketchbooks than grownups.

You think going to a comic convention is sad? Well, if you think that you’re a gigantic douchebag, but try going to a comic convention and envying a ten-year-old girl.

4) Attend panels.

I don’t do this at all; in the past I didn’t go because the 60-90 minutes I spent in the big conference room listening to people ask the STUPIDEST FUCKING QUESTIONS you’ve EVER HEARD was time I could have spent getting sketches and autographs, and the actual information content of the panels could be gotten on the internet the second I got home. Now that I am in possession of the super-phone I can actually get the same information off the tubes 2 minutes after the panel ends while I’m waiting in line for sketches or autographs. Panels at comic conventions are not an efficient use of your time. Do not go to them.

That’s pretty much everything important; there are activities I haven’t mentioned but if you indulge in those... oy.

There are, of course, things to do outside the convention. I have almost never done such things, but this year I broke the mold and, for the first time, went to an official “after-party.” This is where the scene-difficulty begins. When I was first invited to this “party” I was told it would be at a bar in Olde City.

Strike One.

As it got closer to it I was told that, in addition to being hosted by friends of mine, an independent comic company who I shall not name but whose books are across-the-board absolute trash would be co-hosting, and that they would be bringing their “booth girls.” If you don’t know, “booth girls” are a step up from prostitutes the way that Penthouse is a step up from Hustler.

Strike Two.

When I arrived I found a club roughly twice the size of the main bar at the DH with precisely two functioning light bulbs full of barely-legal children drinking Red Bull and vodka - or, as I call it, THE DUMBEST THING IN THE FUCKING WORLD YOU CAN DRINK - listlessly swaying to bad techno music spun by a prematurely-balding 20-something deejay wearing a Japanese baseball jersey and sporting oversize thick-framed hipster glasses that I realized, after inspecting closely, were not prescription. I ordered myself a ginger ale and the bartender gave me a dirty look.

Ooh, just missed the edge of the plate with that slider, Ball One.

I only stayed after the encounter with the bartender because I caught Alex Maleev walking around, looking about as happy to be there as I was, and we headed outside where I smoked and we talked about the upcoming European championship. Alex is a great guy. He hooks me up every year with a painting because I wear a Chelsea kit to the con.

After Alex headed back in I finished my smoke and started back inside. When I opened the door I heard that the current song was Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” only with a really, really, REALLY bad techno beat tossed under it. As I stood there the DJ scratched the hell out of the track - why I cannot fathom - and it transitioned into the Outfield’s “Your Love,” again with a bad beat under it.

Understand that I am a person who LIKES techno music. I do not, however, like BAD techno music, and I really don’t like the combination of bad techno with classic 80s anthems.

Strike Fucking Three.

I can’t imagine I would have enjoyed a night like this even when I was as young as these people. This is so not my scene it isn’t even funny. I headed from there to the other after-party at the actual comic shop, which was much more my scene - i.e. a smaller-ish bunch of people hanging out, talking instead of shouting, mellowly drinking a beer or two - and had a hell of a great time there until an incredibly-drunk Mike Oeming decided to take everyone to Sugar Mom’s for shots and I decided that was my cue to go home.

It’s true - watching people drink in a comic shop IS more fun than watching them drink in a club.

I think it’s time to wrap this one up, and as a reward for reading this whole thing, one of the questions tonight will be, “what is AT&T’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange?”

See you tonight, with my cool stuff in tow.

JLK

Your Comfortable Shoes Quizo Update

This past weekend saw Wizard World Philadelphia - aka a comic book convention, aka "Nerdi Gras" (as one friend of mine calls such things) - and to I'm quite sure no one's surprise I attended.

Now for considerable percentages of those who go these events are an exercise in counter-social behavior ranging from quiet-yet-dignified protest against the oppressive regime of the Cool Kids (wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt) to out-and-out incitement of open rebellious warfare against our evil mainstream overlords (wearing a homemade Spider-Man costume). The latter, especially, can get very unfortunate as the vast majority of people wearing such outfits are, shall we say, shaped a lot more like yours truly than Spider-Man necessarily. Note that I would make an official exception for the folks dressed like stormtroopers, Darth Vader and the like, as since attending my first convention years ago I have learned that those folks are members of a group called the 501st Legion who a) make all that shit by hand - handmade movie-quality stormtrooper armor deserves no small amount of credit in the first place - and b) do tons of charity appearances for children's hospitals, museums, and the like. You want to snicker at the guy in the Thor outfit that's one thing, but never laugh at the stormtroopers.

The defining feature of events like this, however, is the fact that it means I essentially spend an entire weekend standing and walking around, which was a serious consideration even before I turned my lower spine and left leg into useless mush. As I said after my first convention years ago: the most important thing is to WEAR THE RIGHT SHOES.

Due to various ridiculous circumstances, this year of course I did not do that, and spent the rest of the weekend (and well into this morning) paying the price. A word of advice: when given a choice between doing something you KNOW is both stupid and will cause you considerable pain in the long run or getting to a three-day event ten minutes later than you planned on getting there, take the extra ten minutes and find your fucking sneakers.

My inability to walk led to the unlikely event of me watching the movie Rising Sun on television on Saturday night - primarily because going out would have meant that someone would have not only had to drive me wherever we were going but would have had to assist me, linebacker-with-a-sprained-ankle-style, from my front door to their car and no one seemed to be up for that. Rising Sun, aside from managing to be at once both quietly understated and hilariously overwrought, also has the distinction of being one of only two movies I can think of in which Sean Connery says the word "fuck," which is just really, really weird (the other being The Rock). For that alone it deserves commemoration.

Finally, my dad and I celebrated Father's Day by watching Oakmont Country Club win the US Open. As a golfer you don't really "win" the US Open so much as you just lose better than everyone else and pray the course does not literally swallow you whole and slowly digest you for a thousand years ( c.f. Boba Fett and the Sarlacc, Phil Mickelson and Winged Foot).

JLK

Your Screaming Agony Quizo Update

As you may or may not have heard, today was the first day of the new "campus-wide non-smoking policy" here at the hospital. Well, technically, the first day of the policy was yesterday, but as I'm not one of the poor bastards who has to come in on the weekends ( i.e. "nurses") it started for me today. I gave the matter a lot of thought and came to the conclusion that I'd rather be miserable for a week while I stop smoking altogether - well, more miserable than usual - than me miserable every day for the rest of my life.

And so, on my first day enjoying the new policy I'm sitting here, the woman who also sits in this room who NEVER FUCKING SHUTS UP I MEAN CHRIST ALMIGHTY DO YOU REALLY THINK I WANT TO LISTEN TO YOUR PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS ALL GODDAMNED DAY FOR GOD'S SAKE JUST STOP TALKING FOR FIVE FUCKING SECONDS will be here any moment, I have forgotten the headphones for my iPod (which is the only thing that makes being in this room all day with that cursed woman bearable), and I have to sit through three hours of training later today for software that a) I never, ever use, and b) I already know how to use. Instead of cigarettes to deal with all of this, I have a bag of Tootsie Roll pops and the knowledge that I'm pretty sure I could successfully murder someone if I have to. This is not as comforting as you might think.

Now some of you may be wondering what the big deal about this is. If you are it's likely you've never smoked in your life (good for you!) and have thus never tried to quit smoking (go fuck yourself!). Let me try and explain what quitting smoking is like.

First, imagine you're standing barefoot in the desert. I'm not talking some candy-ass desert like the Mojave or the Gobi or shit like that. Serious desert. Super-desert. The Sahara. Victoria. Real badass desert. We're talking Tatooine here, except instead of two suns there's, like, five. Okay, so you're standing barefoot on the surface of Tatooine. You don't have any sunblock and you've been standing out in the desert for, let's say, seventeen days, so what little actual skin you have left looks like the original copy of the Declaration of Independence that somehow got basal cell carcinoma. While you're standing there, your mother-in-law is standing behind you reciting bad knock-knock jokes while repeatedly jabbing you in the kidneys with a #8 crochet hook. Small desert imps chase each other around your shoulders with mini desert imp flamethrowers which occasionally catch your hair and ears alight, and you are constantly fed undercooked Thai food which causes gastrointestinal convulsions that could power a small automobile. Finally, boll weevils slowly eat your fingers and a large desert crocodile sits in a lounge chair wearing a jaunty straw hat, sipping an appletini and reading Gravity's Rainbow, occasionally looking over at you, licking its lips and saying, "you know, I think I'll eat you tomorrow. Or, you know, perhaps not. Got to keep you on your toes, old boy."

The situation I describe there is, in fact, PREFERABLE to quitting smoking.

Yeah, I'm going to be a real peach for the next week.

On the plus side, the new season of Doctor Who started so, you know, yay.

JLK

Your Back To Earth Quizo Update

It's a good-news-bad-news kind of day.

The good news is that my back doesn't hurt anymore and hasn't for a couple days. The bad news is that this means I don't really have an excuse to consume dangerous quantities of painkillers any more and thus have to live on this lousy planet with everyone else. I couldn't even pull a Brett Favre and get hooked on them and claim that's why I throw so many interceptions. I do kinda miss the purple clouds, though.

The good news is that Chelsea won the Carling Cup yesterday, defeating Arsenal 2-1 and winning us our first silverware of the season. The bad news is that Chelsea and England captain John Terry got kicked in the face and was knocked out for a little while, but he seems to be okay.

The good news is that the Oscars were last night and Martin Scorcese finally came up big. The bad news is that I was supposed to go to an Oscar party down the shore last night and the FUCKING SNOW prevented me from doing so.

Remember that bit a couple weeks ago, from that one psychotic e-mail that went out because Dr. Chill complained that I hate everything, where I talk about how wonderful snow is? Yeah, that was a lie. I hate it. I HATE IT. I hate it more than anything. MORE THAN ANYTHING, do you hear me? It drives me insane. Then last night I'm trying to get ready for this thing - which was black tie, further pissing me off, because goddamn I look good in formal wear, as those of us who were here on Barrymore night are aware - trying to divine from the weather forecasts whether it's safe to drive to Somers Point. Or, more accurately, whether it's safe to drive BACK from Somers Point at 1AM.

All the websites and TV stations were being relatively noncommittal and I was about to take the plunge when the thing on weather.com changed from "light snow, with a possibility of sleet and a secondary possibility of some icing" to "DON'T DRIVE TONIGHT IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE ZOMG WEATHER DEEEEAAAAAAAAATH!!!!!!shift1"

So much for that idea.

Did anyone catch that one commercial during the show last night, where Diane Sawyer is doing an interview with Bob Woodruff? He's that reporter who got bombed in Iraq and needed massive brain surgery and whatnot. I certainly have nothing against him, but during the commercial they quote this one bit where Sawyer asks him incredulously - Diane Sawyer, curse her black soul, is always incredulous about something - says "so you have no fear of death anymore?"

At this point I said out loud to the TV, "you know what, if I took a fucking RPG to the dome and lived to tell about it I probably wouldn't be scared of a whole hell of a lot anymore either. I'd be like, skydiving? You got it. What? No. Parachutes are for pansies."

Then I peeked outside and saw that the entire world had been encased in snow and ice and STILL wished I'd gone to the Oscar party. Goddamn snow.

The good news, though, is that my recent back injury, while comparatively healed, gives me total immunity from shoveling, since that's how I did myself last time. The bad news...

Well, I guess there isn't any bad news on that one.

JLK

Your "Laugh and the World Laughs With You" Quizo Update

You may have noticed that last week at the bar I promised that there would be a recap up on the website sometime in the middle of last week. If you noticed that, you may have further noticed this did not happen.

If you did notice these things, please stop being so observant. You're making me look bad.

The reason the aforepromised recap did not happen was that while shoveling snow on Sunday I did something to my already-bad back that is most closely approximated as hiring a frustrated German to walk up behind you and repeatedly club you in the lower spine with the business end of a 20-pound sledgehammer. This laid me up for several days and, frankly, the stuff I needed to write the recap was in my bag downstairs. That's the kind of week I had. No recap because the Quizo material was downstairs.

Now, aside from the metaphysical lumbar clubbing, here's something else interesting from last week. Before my world became a haze of lower back pain and prescription painkillers, I had asked my father if he liked the little bit about our attempt to watch Battlestar Galactica in last week's e-mail. He assured me - this was Tuesday, I think - that he had. He said he found it quite funny. In fact, he thought that he deserved more credit for the fact that he had managed to become less annoying while other people were trying to watch television.

Then, later in the week, when I was barely living on this planet, he said to me, "hey, how come I'm the butt of all the jokes in the Quizo e-mail? That's not fair."

At this point, let me tell you a little story:

Many years ago, back in the ancient mists of forgotten time when I used to do standup comedy (i.e. 2003), I was performing one Saturday at Standup New York. A friend of mine had come up for the show. We'll call her... let's say... Chrissy. Now, I had a whole bit in my act about how her and another friend of mine hooked up at a party and how I thought this was a disaster and how they were both retards for doing such a thing. Once I found out she was actually coming to the show I briefly thought about doing another joke in its place but decided against it because a) it was a good bit, and b) screw her anyway if she didn't like it.

Standup New York is, as comedy clubs go, pretty crap, but by some trick of the light the only table in the club that I have a decent view of from the stage is the one where Chrissy is sitting with her friend Sean, and as I go into the joke and get to the end I can see clearly - CLEARLY - that she is laughing. After that I look elsewhere and continue with my act.

Unbeknownst to me, however, during this joke this conversation is happening at the table:

Chrissy: [laughing]

Sean: Hey, I think he's talking about you.

Chrissy: No he's not.

Me: [makes joke on stage that clearly identifies Chrissy as the person I'm talking about]

Sean: Uh, I'm pretty sure he is.

Chrissy: [stops laughing for the rest of the show]

After my act I was standing out on 82nd Street smoking and Chrissy came screaming out the front door.

"I can't believe you told that story about me!" she is screaming.

"Why can't you believe that?" I said. I had been stealing my friends' life stories for various things for years at that point. Surely it should not be a surprise.

"You made me look like a total bitch!" she shouts.

"No, that was the joke AFTER the one about you. You, I just make look a little silly."

"I can't blah blah blah yackity schmackity yell scream (shrieking harpy noises) joke about me!" I have, honestly, long since tuned out this part in my memory. This goes on for a solid 30 seconds before I, exasperated, finally shout:

"YOU LAUGHED!"

"No I didn't," she protests.

"Yes, you did. I could see you laughing. You laughed."

And then I uttered the phrase that would protect me from the abuse of friends (and now family) ever since:

"If you laugh at the joke, you don't get to complain about being the punchline."

By the way, Dad, you've been mentioned in precisely three e-mails over the last six months, and you didn't even have lines in one of them. So, you know, nyah.

For what it's worth, while I was laid up, the only thing more fun than watching Chelsea's 4-0 FA Cup win this Saturday was watching Phil Mickelson (who we all know I despise) return to the Phil of old and absolutely choke his guts out yesterday at the Nissan Open. We missed you, Phil. Keep up the good work.

JLK

Your "Life is Once Again Pain" Quizo Update

If anyone is keeping track of such things - and I severely doubt that anyone is - you may recall a Quizo update from about a year ago (February 27, to be precise) which occurred after I spent an entire weekend moving out of my old apartment and moving a bunch of furniture out of my old office. This, as you may recall, led to a significant amount of physical pain and the infamous "pain" speed round.

Well, folks, we're back there again. And, let me remind you, pain can take on many forms.

First we have the sort of pain caused by seeing something so strange, so odd, so unbelievably weird that you get that tickle in the back of your brain that you realize is your actual consciousness writhing in agony.

Saturday night, upon returning from the theatre, I found an instant message waiting for me on my computer. Now normally I am very good about putting up an away message so that people think I am not just ignoring them when I am unable to receive one of the many thousands of IMs I get on a daily basis. This one said:

"Is this John?"

I looked at that and realized that the only way someone could have actually GOTTEN my IM is if I gave it to them or they read it on the Quizo website, which is essentially the same thing as me giving it to them. OBVIOUSLY, yes, this is me. Who else could it be? Let's look at my IM for a second: "LSUKozemp." It's been that for almost ten years. There are only something like 25 people named Kozempel in THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES, and as far as I know I am the only one who went to LaSalle, and I am for damn sure the only one who a) is, in fact, me and b) tells people "my IM is LSUKozemp." At that point I am seriously starting to worry that someone is out there who not only managed to obtain (through whatever means) my IM but for some deranged reason thinks that SOMEONE OTHER THAN ME WOULD BE USING IT.

Put another way: did one of you IM me this weekend? If so, I was at the theatre. Sorry. Leave a name next time.

Speaking of theatre, this week is your last chance to see Medea, playing at the Second Stage at the Adrienne, tickets $20, box office 215-563-4330 or www.prosfromdovertheatre.com. And that's the last time we'll hear about that.

There was also emotional pain this weekend, though thankfully it was all sports-related and thus reasonably minor. Chelsea lost to Liverpool on Saturday morning, which - though painful - was made considerably easier by the fact that the 7:30AM starting time meant that there were reasonably few Scousers at the pub and those who were there were, frankly, surprisingly well-behaved.

Then, on Sunday afternoon while watching the conference championships, we had two little muddles. First, the Chicago Bears' embrace of a cold weather running offense means I was denied one of the greatest pleasures of the NFL, i.e. watching Rex Grossman - aka "Sexy Rexy," aka "Rextasy," aka "The Sex Cannon" - throw interception after interception and generally be the worst, most hideously overrated and undertalented quarterback the NFL has to offer. That displeased me greatly. There are few things more entertaining than watching Sexy Rexy completely self-destruct.

Then, of course, came the AFC Championship. After a first half in which it seemed that Bill Belichek and Tom Brady's Faustian bargain was going to come through big-time once again, Peyton and the Colts fought back to take the lead.

The situation, then, is that the Patriots have the ball on the 20, with 54 seconds left, down 4 points.

I said to my father at this point, "well, clearly, the Patriots are going to win."

Note well the fact that Tom Brady - who I am largely ambivalent towards but hate his fans with unbridled passion - has engineered an astonishing SIX game-winning drives in the postseason. Tom Brady, in that respect, is the Jack Bauer of the NFL. 4 down, minute to go, 80 yards - yeah, he's got them right where he wants them.

Then he threw an interception and... and... it suddenly became clear that something is dreadfully WRONG with the world. Hence more emotional pain.

And, on a final and physical pain note, yesterday morning I was awoken by an incredible, earth-shattering pain in my left leg which has since been determined to be a cramp. I maintain that if this is a cramp it is no ordinary cramp, but the Mayor of Cramp City in Cramp County in the United States of Crampia on Planet Cramp in the Cramp Galaxy. I mean, fucking OW. It still hurts. This is why I may still be walking with a cane tonight, because there is a good chance I will be unable to fully flex my left leg. But, hey, House teaches us that leg pain and cane usage is an excuse to be cruel and aloof and not give a damn about other people's feelings.

So, well, at least now I have an excuse. Thanks, House!

JLK

Your More Wedded Bliss Quizo Update

My wedding marathon is finally over, after hitting two in the span of 24 hours this weekend. Fun was had, but I am seriously getting too old to carouse this much.

I am stone dead tired, so let me just say that your obtuse clue this week is weddings. Hopefully I will remember that when I actually make up the quiz tomorrow.

Remember, we are starting at 7 o'clock this week to accomodate the Eagles on Monday Night Football.

I am going to pass out now, if it's all the same.

JLK