Fan letter to Alec Baldwin

Dear Alec Baldwin,

I have not seen many of your movies, and those that I have seen I'm pretty sure I have mostly hated or at least didn't like (except for the salesmen movie where you were mean to Jack Lemmon), but I saw your TV show the other night and thought it was funny. Are they going to cancel it? I hope not.

What is Tina Fey like in real life? Are those glasses fake, like Lisa Loeb, or real, like Daria from MTV? Can you ask her if she will be my girlfriend, or at least have sex with me? (If she asks, I am very very attractive, and also charming and intelligent). I would write her directly, but that sort of thing never works with celebrities, in case you were ever thinking about trying it.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Your pal,

Joe Mathlete

P.S.-- You probably shouldn't have yelled at your daughter, but then again, kids can be dicks sometimes so she probably deserved it.

P.P.S.-- Your hair makes me uncomfortable.

Arrested Development

Like hopefully every single one of you who ever watched it, I am an enormous fan of the late, lamented Arrested Development. Much has been written about the show's brilliance and the criminality of its cancellation(s), so I'll just say that it was a neat show that I wish they were still making.

Thanks to the wonderful technological advancement that is the DVD (which stands for Digital Viewable Dvd), I've watched the show over and over again since its untimely demise, sometimes with a good friend of mine whose enthusiasm for television (especially television on Digital Viewable Dvds) dwarfs mine exponentially. This friend (let's call him "Chester") is a man of strong opinions, opinions which often run somewhat counter to mine. Over time, Chester and I have engaged in a number of arguments over the show: which season was the best, which cast member was the most talented, would they really have been able to keep the momentum going through a fourth season and beyond, would Jason Bateman ever find work again, etc.

One such argument revolved around the actress Alia Shawkat, who played Maeby Funke (main character Michael Bluth's jaded and machiavellian niece). Essentially, we both found her attractive, but I thought she looked too young and too close to the age of the character she was portraying until season three. Chester disagreed, saying that she was hot from the get-go. Either way, we both felt a little bit weird that we were attracted to someone who was supposed to be in high school, and on top of that highly discouraged that we found it so weird that we were attracted to someone who was supposed to be in high school, those days seeming not all that long behind us. It was our first encounter with feeling like dirty old men, and the true sadness came from the fact that we knew it would not be the last.

Then, several months ago, Chester and I had the idea to look Alia Shawkat up on IMDB and see if that would make us feel better (Linda Cardellini, who played Lindsay Weir on Freaks and Geeks, was like 25 or something when that show came out).

It was a very bad idea. Turns out she was, at that time, 17 and a half.

Which meant she was around 13 when Arrested Development started filming.

Which meant that both Chester and myself were thought sex criminals.

Moral: IMDB is terrible.

I tried, I really tried

I had promised yesterday to do "a deconstruction of the modern American female circa 2007 via the lyrics to a wildly popular hit sung by a half-dozen identical retarded cheerleaders." That song, which I had only heard in passing in brief 30-second increments, turned out to be Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend."

I tried. I really did. I listened to the song all the way through and googled the lyrics and read the lyrics and honestly, I really really did try, but all I ended up with was a couple paragraph's worth of really vile profanity, some of it terribly misogynistic, some of it not even spelled correctly.

I have a hard enough time making myself think about Marmaduke every day without having to analyze the equivalent of combining "Nanny Nanny Boo Boo" (the children's song, definitely NOT the Le Tigre song) with one of those MTV shows where they follow around absurdly privileged and horribly mean teenage girls for a weekend.

If you are a straight guy who has never been to a Gay Pride Parade before, I will tell you this much:

It is a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE place to try to pick up girls.

I don't want to talk about it, other than to say I have never had the sentiment "what on earth is wrong with you" so strongly conveyed to me via blank stares.

Also, on a semi-related note: Erasure is a severely underrated band.

Another comic strip thing: "The Meaning of Lila"

So every day (okay, maybe three to five out of every seven days, depending on how busy/lazy I am) I go to a comic strip syndicate website to grab that day's installment of Marmaduke so that I might explain it to the internet. It's a stupid job, but somebody's got to do it. I've been asked many times to do something similar to another comic strip, only once doing any such thing (a short-lived experiment that I don't think most people realized was my way of saying "I really don't care about comic strips, or blogs about comic strips"). However, due to accidentally clicking the wrong link on that comic strip syndicate website a few too many times, I think I'm ready to give it another go, at least this once.

The Meaning of Lila is linked directly under Marmaduke on said comic strip syndicate's website, and sometimes when I'm in a hurry I make the mistake of reading a comic strip singlehandedly trying to set the feminist movement back fifty years. Fortunately it's not very funny so I don't think we're going to have to go cloning Betty Friedan just yet, but all the same I have to wonder how a cartoon about a ditzy secretary who embodies every negative female stereotype imaginable has survived for the past year without a hint of comedy. Especially since said cartoon is written by "John Forgetta" (a guy) and "L.A. Rose" (almost certainly also a guy).

Anyway, here's a trial run (and probably the only instance ever) of my new project, "The Meaning of The Meaning of Lila," in which I apply the lessons we learn about the main character, an "everywoman" named Lila, to every woman in general.

(CLICK FOR MAKE BIG)

Women are terrible with money.


Women love owning clothes.


Women love bake sales.


Women can be motivated to do things they'd rather not do by the presence of handsome shirtless men.


Women are terrible with money.

With any doubt, this comic strip will be cancelled before I accidentally click on it again. Cross your fingers, kids.