Category: portland

The Continued Adventures of Dr. Spaceman!

Dr. Spaceman donned their scrubs and surgical masks, and with the assistance of 5th Spaceman Kris Lutsock, who is on the Famous Mysterious Actor crew, took the win in last night’s Trivia Titans contest! It was touch and go for awhile, with two tie-breaker questions- the answer to the final question was Steven Patrick Morrissey, so I felt at that time that we were born to win.
This year, my compatriots and I have become increasingly obsessed with the excellent, multi-colored, ridiculous and divine trivia of the Shan-Rock Empire.

We started going as a joke and as an excuse to eat french fries in a basement, but we accidentally won a few times and things got weird. Our team includes Andy Wood, who is founder and chief operational officer of the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and a Rylee Newton, former Hollywood Squares writer and Jimmy Kimmel guest, myself, a tap-dancer, comic, and fighter, and my spouse, whom I make drive me around and tell me childhood stories about the Hundred Years War.
For awhile, our team was named after various things from 30 Rock, the best living television show, including MILF Island, Never Follow A Hippie To A Second Location, and Every Week Is Shark Week, until another group that had used Werewolf Bar Mitzvah threatened to drop us like jive turkeys in the parking lot, so now we have settled on Dr. Spaceman, the physician who warns Tracey Jordan that bread is a silent killer and that science is whatever we want it to be.

Team Facts:

Team Leader: Andy Wood, A.K.A. The Cute Beatle- Science and Sports
Historian: Ryan Gosling-because he was there. Also, elf-related triv.
Arts and Stuff About What The Japanese Eat: Virginia Jones
Television, Film, And Weirdness: Rylee Newton
Team Motto: “Let Go and Let Garp”
Favorite Question Type: Natalie Portmanteaux
Member Most Likely To Dance Obnoxiously In Order To Annoy Other Members:Virginia Jones
Skee-Ball Specialist: Virginia Jones/Rylee Newton (shared duties)
Favorite Movie: All Coen Brothers Except The Ladykillers
Favorite I Don’t Feel Tardy Song: The Strangler’s Peaches
Special Team Trivia: 100% of Dr. Spaceman is blue-eyed
Our Nemesis Team: There are other Teams?
It all comes down to the finals this weekend, the Clash of the Trivia Titans at 5PM on Sunday. We may come back winners. We may come back losers. But we will come back…men. At least, those of us who were men to begin with.

*please note: I have gotten needlessly aggravated that internet searches for my former spouse turn up on my analytics, so I have replaced his name with Ryan Gosling, because screw him.

Auggie Roast Post-Mortem

Super-Christ Auggie-Star

A lot of people have been asking how the Auggie Smith roast went down. Here are the highlights as remembered by me:

Troy Thirdgill in a beautiful daishiki as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom I’ll bet you didn’t even KNOW was a friend of Aug’s. Amazing.

Dax Jordan on Lonnie Bruhn: If you took away the palsy, he’d just be cerebral.

Andy Andrist on Dax: What’s in his neck, it looks like… an elbow?

Me on Ron Osbourne: Doesn’t he look handsome? This is the first time I’ve seen him in pants that didn’t zip into shorts.

Aug on Holli: Holli Pappan, she’s the second-hottest comic in Portland, behind Andy Wood.

Me on Aug: He talks about having kids, but he doesn’t understand that you have to sleep with the same woman…for nine months…in a ROW.

Andy Wood on Mustard Man: Musty couldn’t be here, but he’s missed because…

Aug: You’re gonna do the Musty jokes?

Andy: I wrote ’em! I’m gonna do ’em!

Andy Wood on Richard Bain: Did you hear that Richard Simmons is going on the Richard Bain diet? He eats shit, but only when it matters!

Art on Richard: What’s it like when Richard tries to dress up for an event- AWK-WARD!

Dax on Virginia: She’s a vegan, she rides a bike to work, and she’s still fat!

Me: I’m gonna kill you.

Dax brought some show-and-tell, in the form of a forgotten storage trunk full of Auggie’s possessions, including a photo of himself on the toilet, and a Christmas Looney Toones tie, from the dark days when he was first learning to dress himself.

At the end of the night, as we stood around finishing our drinks and laughing at the pain we were going to bring to people who called us fat, we heard a majestic KA-WHUMP and turned towards the sound, many of us crying “Shit, Lonnie!”

But it was a tiny lady’s boots sticking in the air, and the semi-sober but very embarrassed Edie Van Ness was fished out from where she had fallen. Once it was clear that she was not hurt, we went back to laughing. She is in the center of this photo, which was taken pre-fall.

Front: Andy Andrist

Behind Andy: Richard Bain and Ron Osbourne

Keith Wallan, Arlo Stone, Edie Van Ness, Auggie Smith, Troy Thirdgill, Holli Pappan, Susan Rice, The Top of Andy Wood’s head, Me Looking Like an Ass, Dax Jordan, Art Krug. I am not speaking to fully a quarter of these people now! life is fun.

Kumoricomedy!


Kumoricon is an annual convention dedicated to Japanese anime, and features three days of cosplay, video rooms, exhibitors, panels, video games, manga, and bizarre fan creations. We went as Leigh Bowery, who is not from anime, but we got our pictures taken a lot anyhow.

My friend Pete had a special DDR game with 13 songs from his label, Diskowarp, at table 17.  Hundreds of barefooted people and one guy in a Furry outfit jumped on my DDR pads, which now must be bleached, and the surrounding booths heard the song “Oh Oh Oh Sexy Vampire” one thousand times.

If extreme dedication, shut-ins in leotards, or nerdiness make you sad, you shouldn’t come to this kind of event -but the DIY costumes, and the clashing of cultures really is something to see: I saw a hundred Links, a couple Howls, one Old Gregg, and dozens and dozens of beautiful Gothic Lolitas. These kids are all communicating with a visual code that I can’t understand, but for damn sure they don’t want to talk to you. Many of them can’t make eye contact, but oddly they will ask for hugs.

Anime nerds in their natural habitat, in the park across from the mall.

How to annoy nerds: Yell at them “We’re readin’ MAGAZINES!” and take their picture without asking. How to excite them: Yell “Matt Damon!”

Consumer Review: MyVu!

Woot.com


Every once in a while, electronics clearinghouse woot.com runs an event called a woot-off, which is a good way to make me buy stuff, because it makes purchasing needless electronics into a game, with timers and sirens and competition and congratulatory messages.

Recently, I got swept up in the madness and got the MyVu Personal Media Viewer, a purchase based on overcaffeination and the promise that I would look like Geordi LaForge. It plugs into an Ipod 5th Gen and gives a floating, Viewfinder-sized video image from your Ipod in glasses. I got it for fitty bucks, and am pleased to see that the parent website offers it for two hunnert, because that makes me look like slightly less of a sucker.

Maiden Voyage

First thing: obviously, they look awesome on. As I put them on during my train ride this morning, I was slightly self-conscious plugging in the attached earphones. Put in your ear-plugs, put on your eye-shades, you know where to put the cork. The video screens on the inside of the glasses are about the size of a fingernail each, and in a dark room, it looks like you are watching a small screen in a theatre.


The video quality is the same as the Ipod. This toy would make most sense to use to watch vids on a long car or airplane ride. I like the privacy of it. The two screens made me feel a little cross-eyed upon first wearing, but I got used to them.

(People keep commenting on my gloves, but I swear they’re just to wear on my bike!)

Now I see this clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. There never has been a choice for me. I am a nerd. I know it, Jackie Kashian knows it, and woot knows it.

Self Reflective Blogging

POSTSCRIPT: ZOMG, Woot found my post and linked to it from their blog- so if I link back to a blog linking to my blog, will the universe implode? Let’s see!

POSTSCRIPT PART DEUX: Well, the Woot.com link was interesting, as I watched 800 people traipse through my blog over the next couple days, leaving neither comments nor footprints, just like they were never here at all. Maybe there’s a lesson there about the internet. Et tu, page hits?


The real thing I wanted to mention was the danger of wearing the MyVu Personal Media Viewer in public. I wore them on the train one day and realized that an ex-boyfriend was in kicking distance and I had to pretend not to be myself, or if I was myself, absolutely I was not wearing wack-ass glasses.Yes! I am an asshole.

Oh, Oh, Oh, Sexy Vampire!

My friend Pete, owner and proprietor of Disko Warp records, mentioned to me the other day that his single, Oh Oh Oh Sexy Vampire, had gotten a lot of attention because people thought it might be connected to the teen novels by Stephanie Meyer, the “Twilight” series.

I hadn’t heard of it, when I was a teen we went to Anne Rice for our sexy vampires. Then, I went to a party and wound up getting into a discussion with a group of girls that were obsessed with the selfsame series aimed at teens, but read by adults, as all too often tragically happens.

I pointed to an article that posited that vampires had to be fictional, because mathematically they are impossible. If every vampire created a vampire every day, in five days we’d all be vampires, like some sort of bloodsucking Ponzi scheme.

By day 4, none of us would be going to parties, because we’d all be locked in our houses wearing neckbraces and garlic necklaces, because holy shit, there are fucking vampires out there! This girl got REALLY MAD and refused to laugh at any of my hilarious jokes. People suck, and that’s why I’m becoming a vampire. At least then the sucking will have some sort of purpose.

Meeting Roddy Piper

I am hosting for the fantastic Troy Thirdgill and feature Darrin Meyer at Portland’s Harvey’s Comedy Club this weekend, and last night who stopped in but “They Live” star “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, as handsome as ever with a titanium hip.