Any thoughts about it so far? Who are you going to see? Who do you think we should see? Almost every act has been announced by now, so I won’t list them all. It’s all on the web site. Here are some helpful links:

Main web site:
http://www.bumbershoot.org

Printable PDF artist lineup, schedules, and map, which includes the new venue that is replacing “the pit” (aka the Exhibition Hall)
http://bumbershoot.org/info/pdf/

Online lineup and scheduling tool:
http://sched.bumbershoot.org/

Miscellaneous info:
http://bumbershoot.org/info/about-bumbershoot/

Info about the free 40-years-of-Bumbershoot poster show (thru Sept. 7):
http://bumbershoot.org/40/umbrella-for-the-arts-40-years-of-bumbershoot-artwork/

Downloadable icons, wallpaper, and cellphone stuff:
http://bumbershoot.org/bumberfan/downloads.htm

Platinum/Gold Pass info:
http://bumbershoot.org/tickets/platinum-gold/

Buy tickets and ticket info:
http://bumbershoot.org/tickets/

That’s all for now…

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In the book, our beta-male hero Charlie Asher all of a sudden finds himself to be, well, Death. Or at least a “merchant of death”. Hey it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it. There’s a wild cast of characters and the story takes you on a  ride. I can’t really do the book justice, so I’ll post this mini-review from Publisher’s Weekly:

“Cult-hero Moore (The Stupidest Angel) tackles death—make that Death—in his latest wonderful, whacked-out yarn. For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. Though security cameras catch nothing, Charlie swears he saw an impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit standing beside Rachel as she died. When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something’s up. Along comes Minty Fresh—the man in green—to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. While Charlie’s employees, Lily the Goth girl and Ray the ex-cop, mind the shop, and two enormous hellhounds babysit, Charlie attends to his dangerous soul-collecting duties, building toward a showdown with Death in a Gold Rush–era ship buried beneath San Francisco’s financial district. If it sounds over the top, that’s because it is—but Moore’s enthusiasm and skill make it convincing, and his affection for the cast of weirdos gives the book an unexpected poignancy. “

So yeah, what’s not to like? The book is Christopher Moore’s “A Dirty Job”. It was a very enjoyable read and now I need to pick up another book by Moore. If anyone has any suggestions let me know…

Other “have you read this book” posts

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Well, to start off, I’m full and happy after a lunch at Curry Corner. It’s a great Indian Food lunch buffet here in the Natomas area. All you can eat and all gooooood.

Last night we saw an advance screening of a new movie, City Island (web site, more info, even more info). It’s a very funny comedy with heart. We were laughing out loud and so was everyone else in the theater. Great writing, brisk pace, and funny! Go see it!

And let’s be sure to add some April birthday wishes for my sister Steph, my ex-sister-in-law Connie, and our friend Jared (the big 30).

And talking about Jared, he just started up a food-related blog over at JaredEatsWorld. Go visit and tell him stevenology sent you!

Last Friday night we went to see the Sacramento Rivercats baseball game. It was fun, always is, but they lost. They choked at the end. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

OK, faithful readers, what do you think of all THAT?

There are lots interviews with his friends, usually with him present to wisecrack and look back fondly. The book presents Groucho in his later years and he knows he is old and doesn’t have a lot of time. He gets a little down here and there, as would be expected. So he looks back on his long, celebrated life, and tells us all about it. There are also guest interviewers, who have great discussions with Groucho. These include Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Burns, and many more.

It was a little sad in that Groucho was near the end of his life. But his mind was sharp and he was clever and smart. In short, I liked the book and it just reinforced what I already knew, that Groucho was one of the funniest people ever.

Have you read it? Do you have an opinion?

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You know you are living in 2010 when…

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 12 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don’t have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 15 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile.  : )

12.. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually looked back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list

AND NOW YOU ARE LAUGHING at yourself!

What do you think? You can always leave me a comment…

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Sherlock Holmes – Robert Downey Jr is just so charismatic. I love him. The rest of the cast was good but he is the star. This version of the venerable tale is a big budget effort and it shows. But there is still attention to the Holmes character. It’s fast-paced and very entertaining.

Up In The Air – The smartest movie of the three for sure. It’s from the director of the wonderful Juno, and like that film has great dialog and sharp, interesting characters. George Clooney is the lead and does a very good job, but both of the main female characters are very good too. It’s very funny at times and moving at other times. This one is for the brain and the heart.

Youth In Revolt – It’s an indie-feeling teen comedy but a little raunchier and more “out there”. The characters are wild stereotypes and the situations are hilariously outrageous but the main thing is that I was laughing out loud over and over during this film. It’s really funny unless you are easily offended. Even then, you will probably laugh a lot.

In short, I would recommend all three movies. If you’ve seen any of them or even if not, let me know what you think!

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“Ghost Town”, “He’s Just Not That Into You”, “Rachel Getting Married”, “Revolutionary Road”, and “New In Town”.

Meanwhile, within a few days of that I won a free copy of “Bruno” and Petra bought “Free Willy”. Yes, really.

Leave me a comment below. Tell me what you think.

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We didn’t get pictures of every music act we watched at the festival, but you can read about it here (part one) and here (part two) if you want the play-by-play. It’s a gripping read, and one you might not soon forget. Or I could be wrong. In any event the pictures from the trip (three pages worth) are here on the photo page. Click on the first small photo to see the larger image and then you can either click through them or watch the slide show. Have fun and leave me a comment afterwards!!

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Leave me a comment below. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting!

Below is a quote from comedian Wanda Sykes from her new talk show. I found it really funny but sad too.

“I went to sleep, and when I woke up people were mad at Obama. And I thought, ‘Did I miss something? Did Obama start an illegal war? Did he fly over a flood zone and just wave? Did he torture detainees in a secret prison? Did he start illegally tapping phones? Did he alienate the world and squander a surplus?  Because if he did any of that, we need to impeach that jackass.’ …

I can’t believe people are blaming Obama for the mess Bush left. I mean, Bush just pees all over everything and leaves it soaking wet, and people are looking at Obama like he just zipped up HIS fly. That’s Bush pee!”

Haha! You go girl!!

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Leave me a comment below. Hurry, before your shoes get all wet!

This book compiles eighteen or so short pieces, many of which published in various places but gathered together for the first time. From “Tandoori Ransom” to “Sam You Made The Pants Too Fragrant” to “On A Bad Day You Can See Forever” to “Above The Law, Below The Box Springs” to, well, maybe you get the idea. His stories are off-beat and unusual and not (as you might expect) full of easy jokes. Oh, but they are funny. Clever and funny, which is even better. 

Here’s what Booklist had to say:

It’s been 25 years since Woody Allen’s last humor collection, and for lovers of the New Yorker “casual” (a blend of goofy personal essay and literary parody), that’s far too long. Most of these pieces appeared originally in the New Yorker , but there are a handful of originals as well, all of which will please those determined souls who like their humor distinctly old school (“On a Bad Day You Can See Forever,” a rant about the horrors of rehabbing a condo, begins with the narrator reading Dante and wondering why there is no circle in hell for contractors). The topsy-turvy literary allusions pour from Allen’s pen like bullets from a Gatling gun (an appropriately obscure simile), exposing the intellectual pretensions of a ragtag assortment of Allenesque everymen–endearingly unkempt nebbishes who, despite knowing their Dostoevsky, can’t quite deal with the absurdities of daily life. Take Flanders Mealworm, the unfairly unheralded author of The Hockfleisch Chronicles, who, desperate for cash, agrees to write a novelization of a Three Stooges movie: “Calmly and for no apparent reason, the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle.” If Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe weren’t exactly what Yeats had in mind when he used the phrase “mere anarchy” in “The Second Coming,” they should have been. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

And consider this by Amazon reviewer Brad Shorr:

The two funniest books I ever read were “Without Feathers” and “Getting Even”, so my expectations were impossibly high for “Mere Anarchy.” But almost to my surprise, Woody Allen’s new book at least equals and maybe surpasses them both.

Allen’s writing skills are off the charts, whatever the genre. At times, his sentence structure is so intricate and precise, his vocabulary so eccentrically obscure, that his setups become funnier than his punchlines:

“I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum…”

This particular vignette, “This Nib for Hire”, is particularly hilarious: the story of Flanders Mealworm, a pretentious, out of work novelist writing a novelization of a Three Stooges short.

In the later chapters, Allen drops the highly stylized prose and reverts to earlier form, where he simply piles absurdities on his paragraphs like pastrami on rye. This too is sidesplitting:

“How could I not have known that there are little things the size of ‘Planck length’ in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket? …”

Allen is funny on every level:

Funny premises–”Frederich Nietzsche’s Diet Book”, Savile Row suits impregnated with fragrances, a lighting double kidnapped by Indian terrorists while on location.

Funny, perfectly drawn metaphors and similes–”I have also reviewed by own financial obligations, which have puffed up recently like a hammered thumb.” Or, “With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.”

Funny character names–Hal Roachpaste, Reg Millipede, Agememnon Wurst and E. Coli Biggs, to name a very, very few.

Funny words–Myrmidon, crepescular, succubus, screed, vigorish, on and on.

And of course, funny jokes, everywhere–”She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing Misha’s teeth sideways rather than up and down.” “As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness …”

Allen is the absolute master of fusing the sublime with the absurd. The result is a book that makes you think as well as laugh. That’s a combination you don’t often see these days!

So, you get it. It’s funny, witty, clever, and you should buy it along with all his other books. Trust me. Anyway, if you have (or haven’t) read the book, leave me a comment!

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