Analog Nation

Honestly, I was just sitting here minding my own business. I’d just finished dinner, had a bit of time before “Lost,” and was cleaning up some of the mess that accumulated over the last two weeks while I was locked in a theater. Out of nowhere, a friend of mine broadcast a challenge all throughout the Twitters:

Had I been enjoying a beverage at the time, there surely would have been a spit-take. Maybe it was his tone, all bravado and defiance. Well, as defiant as one can be in less than 140 characters. Maybe it was the fact that my Census form arrived in the mail today. Whatever the reason, his statement caught my attention and refused to let go — a call that could not be left unanswered.

Excuse me? Is that a gauntlet I see thrown upon the ground?

You have given me a subject that I can attack with bullet points.

You are correct to be frightened.

• The framers of the Constitution (which mandates the Census be taken every ten years) devised the Census as a way to keep Thomas Jefferson occupied and out of everyone’s hair. The ruse was never corrected after Jefferson’s death.

• The government conducts handwriting analysis on every Census form it receives. The psychological profile will be used against the American public in the event that the government needs to have everyone declared cognitively unstable.

• The Census is little more than a flimsy ploy — a pork barrel project guided by the Pulp & Paper Industry (Big Paper) as an excuse to sell the government paper by the truckload. Additional political action committee support is provided by the Ink & Toner Industry (Big Smudge), who also move a lot of product through federal contracts.

• The Census long ago ceased to be necessary, but has been continued by the United States Postal Service as a way to artificially drive up their volume numbers. Do you think it is a coincidence that the Postmaster General’s bonus comes up for review every ten years? You are so pitifully naive.

• Every Census form is woven with fiber-optic “smart thread” that records information about you and your home every moment that it is in your possession. The form itself is a cover — there is no need to answer the questions. You could send it back blank and they would still know everything about you, Janine.*

• The letters of all the words on the Census questionnaire form an anagram. When properly decoded, the anagram reveals the location of an underground Masonic temple, which contains the bones of every world leader dating back to 1452.

• Census forms are tabulated in a block of cells under the NORAD command center at Cheyenne Mountain, CO. The tabulators are a sect of statistical zealots who have forsworn all familial ties. They have had their vocal chords surgically removed, so that they cannot speak of the results to one another.

• Anyone between the ages of 14 and 17 who selects “Dominican” and “left-handed” on a Census form is flagged for referral to Major League Baseball.

• Door-to-door Census workers are a mix of Homeland Security agents scouting for potential threats, Immigration officials on the lookout for anyone in the country illegally, and real estate agents who want to get a sense of who’s moving soon.

• Citizens who do not fill out and return the Census form are fined $5,000. The fine is quietly collected piecemeal over the course of the next ten years, drawn in small amounts disguised as fees on utility/cable/phone bills.

• The 2020 Census will require all respondents to submit fingerprints, eye scans, and DNA samples along with the questionnaire. Everyone’s DNA will be sequenced in time for the 2030 Census, which will require a full brain scan of every man, woman and child in America. For the 2040 Census, we will be replaced by meticulously crafted clones.

• The Department of Commerce is very close to a deal that will outsource all future Census activities to Google. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is a childhood friend of Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

• One person from the 2010 Census will chosen at random to win $250 million. Another will be selected for execution on live television. The individuals will be notified in secret one month before it is announced to the public. Both will be given a card with the other’s name. Hang on a second, I think I just accidentally wrote Christopher Nolan’s next movie.

• Algorithms used by the Census Bureau are able to detect predisposition toward extremist views. Individuals who index high on these scales are flagged for FBI review, and referred to Major League Baseball.

• The Census is perpetuated by East Coast, Ivory Tower eggheads who are trying to prove that mankind has defeated God.

*Hopefully someone named Janine will read this.

Don’t go into the living room, Mom and Dad are fighting again.

Those of you outside the New York area probably missed the excitement, but ABC went off the air for several hours on Sunday, vanishing from LCD screens while the clock ticked down to the Oscars. The disappearance was a negotiating tactic in the dispute between ABC’s New York affiliate and Cablevision, who are having a gentleman’s disagreement on the topic of which one of them should bend over and bite his own ass. The argument goes more or less like this:

>10 PRINT “ABC: Bite your own ass.”
>20 PRINT “Cablevision: No, you bite your own ass.”
>30 GOTO 10

My neighborhood isn’t in Cablevision’s territory, so the whole situation was little more than a charming subplot in a day otherwise dominated by laundry and Mass Effect. Well, except for two things: A) The lingering specter that this would drag on until Tuesday, sparking an uprising of “Lost” fans which would cripple the city. B) The unshakable feeling that I had seen this before. Like, a lot.

The “Lost” uprising fizzled when ABC returned to Cablevision fifteen minutes into the Oscars telecast. And not a moment too soon — there were only five and a half hours to go until Best Picture.

He was their Neda. What, too soon?

However, I doubt I’m the only one who got that wave of déjà vu. This same exact feud keeps happening. Television networks and cable providers are having the same spat over and over. Earlier this year it was HGTV and The Food Network, which went off the air (okay, off the coaxial data stream) on Cablevision, and nearly did the same on Time Warner. In December, it was Fox and Time Warner. The CBS affiliate in Boston went at it with Time Warner in January 2009. Comcast and The NFL Network had their turn in May. Viacom nearly pulled their entire suite of cable networks from Time Warner and Bright House in 2008, which would have blacked out Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and several others.

The playbook for these match-ups only has two pages. Each side hastily sets up a “Save Television!” website, and then runs advertisements that cast the other side as blood-frenzied murderers of fun. Viacom’s ads against Time Warner depicted SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer crying. Crying! Are you kidding me? SpongeBob I get, he cries at the drop of a hat, but Dora? In tears? Now you’re messing with my nephew. Now it’s personal.

“We just crossed a line, Diego! Can you point to where Diego and I left our dignity? ………. Great! I knew you could!”

Meanwhile, those of us who just want to watch TV in peace are stuck in the middle. We’re getting treated like something here, though I can’t decide what. There are too many directions to go with this one, so I’ll list a few just to cover my bases:

• There’s the aforementioned divorce parallel — Mom and Dad throw dishes at each other while we lie on the floor of our rooms in the dark with headphones on, listening to “Pretty Hate Machine.” Or, you know, whatever the not-twenty-years-ago equivalent of “Pretty Hate Machine” would be.

• You could go with the image that we’re pawns in a chess game, but chess takes careful thought and planning. These feuds have neither. If anything, it’s more like we’re the checkers in Connect Four — it’s a little mind-numbing, nobody really wins, then we get dumped onto the table, swept into a fraying box, and crammed back into the hallway closet behind the winter coats.

• The networks and cable companies are Robert DeNiro and Sharon Stone in “Casino.” We’re the safety deposit box full of jewelry and cash. Wait, they both might be Sharon Stone, staggering to their deaths in some filthy hotel hallway after their friends have bled them dry and used their cash for coke. Actually yeah, they’re both Sharon Stone.

• One is Don Draper and the other is Betty. Each had distinct visions of what this marriage was going to be like, each wants that vision imposed on the other, each has their own leverage. We end up as Sally in this one — stealing money from Grandpa, lying to get attention, and basically on a frantic collision course with the summer of 1968. What, like that’s not where they’re going with the Sally character?

• Both sides are Longshanks, King Edward I of Britain. “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish, the dead cost nothing.” We’re the Irish. Sorry, I saw “Braveheart” on a cross-country flight a few weekends ago, it’s kind of been stuck in my head.

Those meatballs don’t look half bad. But why is the bottom of the pot so clean?

The knee-jerk reaction to these disputes is that it’s all about greed. Good ol’ American corporate soul-reaving, a sacrifice on the altar of the Almighty Dollar. To be honest, I’m not so sure that’s what’s really happening. The broadcasting industry has been around for decades, it’s not like they weren’t greedy before. This sounds more like desperation. Their way of doing business is melting. None of them know what to do, so they’re taking it out on each other, and on us.

Besides, you’d have to be awfully desperate to piss off “Lost” fanatics. I mean Jesus Christ, taking away “Lost” in its final season is like canceling Christmas, only if all the children in the world were meth addicts. And orphans. And the government executed Santa on live TV. Some of the meth orphans won’t see the execution, because their cable company will have blacked out the network in a contract dispute. They will be considered the lucky ones, because they didn’t have to watch Santa die.

Well, lucky for a meth orphan, anyway.

It’s me! Playing Hamlet! But with 97% less Shakespeare!

Exciting news for those who live in New York and have sworn a blood oath against me! I will be descending from my mountaintop fortress an unprecedented eight times over the next couple of weeks. In fact, I will be out in the open, without bodyguards, without even so much as a Kevlar vest. You may never have a better chance to strike. And the reason for my carelessness? Living, breathing art — the kind where you pretend to be another person entirely.

This Wednesday night, Point of You Productions presents the return of “A Midwinter’s Tale,” based on the 1995 screenplay by Kenneth Branagh. We were proud to present the world premiere of the stage adaptation in 2004, and have brought back the production as part of Point of You’s 10th anniversary celebration. “A Midwinter’s Tale” is the story of a desperate man (me) going to desperate measures (trying to direct “Hamlet”) during desperate times (specifically, the week before Christmas). Not to give anything away, but the thing that ensues is hilarity.

When: March 3-13, Wednesday through Saturday @ 8:00PM
Where: The American Theatre of Actors, 314 West 54th Street, 8th Floor
Why: Bear in mind what I said about hilarity ensuing.
Tickets: $18
Reservations: Tickets can be purchased in advance through TheaterMania.

Apatosaurus pusillus, shown here at 125% magnification

The smallest dinosaur fossils ever found belong to Apatosaurus pusillus, known to archaeologists as the “pygmy bronto.” Native to the western regions of what would later become the North American continent, pygmy brontos lived during the Lower and Middle Jurassic periods. Adult males stood around three quarters of an inch tall, measuring on average three inches in length from nose to tail. They roamed in great herds that often numbered in the hundreds. Vast though these herds were, they likely passed undetected through the plains, appearing to other animals as nothing more than a rustle in the grass. Indeed, evidence of pygmy brontos falling victim to predators is rare. They were herbivores, consuming what vegetation they could reach and standing atop one another — sometimes thirteen or fourteen at a time — to reach low-hanging leaves. Fossil records of Apatosaurus pusillus end abruptly 160 million years ago. Archaeologists believe that they were wiped out by the impact of a tiny asteroid.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I would be appearing in a horror movie. I suppose it might sound made up, considering this site has also claimed that squirrels live for 800 years, and that redheads are allergic to cardboard. But it’s true — I am playing a character named Doug in “The Killing of Jacob Marr,” written and directed by Brad Rego. Who is Doug, you ask? Well don’t, because I’m literally the Red Shirt in this movie. Regardless, I spent the weekend of January 8th at a cabin in South Kortright, New York, and learned a few things worth sharing.

First of all, it’s not called long underwear anymore, it’s called baselayer.
We knew in advance that the temperature was going to be somewhere between Iceland and Hoth. It’s been years since I needed long underwear, but I figured my life may well depend on it, so I did a little shopping. I wandered aimlessly around EMS for a good ten minutes before I realized I was looking for something that doesn’t exist anymore. “Long underwear” is something your mom made you wear to go play in the snow when you were nine. These days? Drop the term from your vocabulary. What you need is baselayer. Baselayer is … well, it’s long underwear, but it’s long underwear that sounds 500% more bad-ass. It’ll keep you warm in the tundra, it’ll keep you cool in the desert, and if you’re outside in extremely normal temperatures, I suppose it’ll keep you comfortable in that too. That’s the danger of walking around a place like EMS — they make everything sound so cool, you wonder how you ever got by without it.

We got to use flares! Without question, the highlight of the ditch incident.

Bing’s mapping software needs some sort of internal setting that knows what season it is.
Five vehicles made the trek to the cabin. I rode up with my friend/cousin (long story) Gerard, along with Amy the costume designer and Scott the sound guy. Gerard’s scenes don’t film until the spring, but he’s a jack-of-all-trades technician and kind of crazy so he volunteered to come stand in the cold with us and lend a hand. We hit the road at 7:00 PM Friday, with directions printed out from Bing Maps. In theory, Bing saved us twenty minutes by sending us on a nifty shortcut through some winding back-country roads. In reality, it was snowing in earnest and Bing sent us on a shortcut through some winding back-country roads. At one point, as we hooked a precarious left, I asked, “Wait, is this paved?” It wasn’t a joke, I actually wanted to know. Sliding into the ditch was probably inevitable, the only surprise was that no one was hurt and the car wasn’t damaged. However, it was definitely stuck. One of the front wheels had nothing underneath it, and was spinning freely in the air. There was no way to get out unassisted. We needed help.

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Help us make meth! I mean, art. Make art.

Exciting new for those who live in New York and wish to bring me cupcakes in person! I will be breaking security protocol to make an appearance outside my isolated mountain compound. The reason? To amuse the shit out of you, dear reader.

Point of You Productions, the theater company I helped found (and have been working from the inside to take down ever since), has reached its tenth anniversary. To kick off the celebration, we’re holding a night of stand-up comedy. All proceeds will go towards our 2010 season. I’ll be performing, as will several good friends of mine. Tickets are $20, and include a free drink ticket. Additional drinks and other concessions will be crazy cheap — because that’s just how we dot-orgs roll.

When: Friday, January 29th, 8:00 PM
Where: Gotham City Improv, 48 West 21st Street, 8th Floor
Why: To help support art and stuff
How: By making you laugh and getting you drunk, not necessarily in that order
Reservations: (212) 613-6138
No seriously, why: Okay fine, we need the money to build a meth lab, okay? We made some bad decisions and got ourselves into some trouble, and now we need to make a bunch of meth. It’s not like we’re happy about it. Is that what you think? You think we’re happy that we managed to get into this mess?