Category Archives: Comedy

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More coffee with do the trick

Sam Bee needed more coffee before her bogus segment on Rwanda

Coffee! It’s what’s for dinner!

No, not really. Dinner around here is usually salmon, sweet potatoes and veggies but I do consume a lot of coffee.

People always ask, “What’s new?” I always want to respond, “Not much!” but that isn’t true right now. So, what’s doin’ in Stony Brook?

First, I heard that Samantha Bee did a segment in Rwanda with a focus on conservation and how they did with refugees. I wrote about that for Medium. The Human Rights Foundation had this to say:

On Monday, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) sent a letter to television host and executive producer, Samantha Bee, expressing concerns over how Rwanda’s dictatorial regime will likely exploit her show’s segment, “Rwandans and the UNHCR Are Treating Refugees with Empathy,” to whitewash its long history of grave atrocities against refugees and refugee camps, following the country’s 1994 genocide, as well as its ongoing deadly campaign of espionage, extrajudicial executions, renditions, and intimidation against Rwandan dissident refugees living abroad.

The Human Rights Foundation.

I used to really like Samantha Bee. She was great on The Daily Show. She did a segment about someone I wrote for and I was offended that she lumped the website I wrote for in with a bunch of satire sites (I do write satire but try to keep a firewall between satire and general opinion). I haven’t watched her show recently. I do think it is incredibly irresponsible to do a piece on Rwanda about how they deal with refugees without looking at all the people who have been displaced (or worse) by President Paul Kagame.

From critic to being complicit

The view Bee gave of Rwanda was not even close to accurate and the segment will be used by the government as propaganda. Nice job, Sam! You went from being a critic to being complicit.

In other coffee needing news, I have several shows coming up that will be great.

  • Friday, August 6 @ 8 pm (doors open at 6). Governor’s Comedy Club — the Lil Room. Levittown, NY.
  • Saturday, August 14 @ 5:30 pm. Greenwich Village Comedy Club. NYC (this is my favorite venue!).
  • Friday, August 27 @ 9 pm. Clyde’s (used to be Barton’s Place). Miller Place, NY.

Can you help keep me employed?

Ok. I am asking. I work for several non-profits. We work to get companies to not make money from or give money to governments that commit genocide and other crimes against humanity, we are also working to support the people of Myanmar in their struggles post the coup in February and to stop the genocide against the Rohingya. We are also working to free Paul Rusesabagina (Hotel Rwanda).This is important work but we need your help. If you can, please donate here.

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Wow. Do police ever bust real criminals?

VHS tape

I was on my new favorite website and doing my new favorite thing (posting funny things about news items) when I came upon a batshit crazy news item. The headline was, “A woman was charged with a felony for not returning a VHS tape. She found out 21 years later.” I had a stalker who threatened to kill me and I couldn’t get the police to take a report much less send out a warrant.

Apparently, Caron McBride, who moved from Oklahoma, where the tape was rented and never returned, to Texas. When she tried to change her name after getting married, she learned she had an outstanding warrant.

McBride, was charged with felony embezzlement of rental property in Oklahoma, where she previously lived, in March 2000 — more than a year after the tape of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” was to be returned, court records show.

From USA Today — emphasis added.

Felony embezzlement? What the actual fuck? She is not alone here. In 2016, James Meyers was pulled over for a broken brake light (he was white, so he is still alive) and was told there was a warrant for his arrest. He had rented and not returned Freddy got fingered in about 2001. The charges were dropped (D’Uh) but she is suing because that is tramautic. I hope she wins truckloads of cash.

After failing to bring it back, the local video store reportedly issued a warrant for his arrest. And there it sat for the last 15 years, until Meyers was stopped on his way to bring his daughter to school. According to a video he posted online, the police officer was “courteous” and explained to him that he had a warrant out for his arrest and would need to be booked.

Yahoo! News

First of all, how in the hell does a video store have the authority to issue a warrant??? Second, how is this a good use of a cop’s time? Of course, Kayla Michelle Finley had to spend a night in jail in 2014 because she never returned Monster-In-Law. She had rented it in 2005. Her story may be the most ridiculous. Not only did she have to spend a night in jail but:

The WYFF report says Finley was at the county sheriff’s office on another matter when an active warrant for her arrest was discovered. Chief Deputy Creed Hashe told the station that the store’s owner had asked a Pickens County judge for the warrant years ago when Finley didn’t return her video.


Finley spent the night in jail because her bond hearing couldn’t be held until Friday morning. A judge released her on $2,000 bond.

CNN

She had to pay a $2,000 bond??? Judges can let people go with no bond. This was a serious enough crime to give her a bond? When did video store owners wield this much power?

I keep hearing that the police have hard jobs and that’s why they are so amped up and shoot black people all the time. My experience has been that they haven’t been at all interested when someone threatened to kill me, raped me, mugged me or just sent harassing messages. Maybe if I said, “he rented a video and never brought it back” I would have gotten some help.

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Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and other random pandemic thoughts…

The state is closed because of the pandemic and I am sitting in my living room listening to Pandora and I am thinking about writing a brilliant post about this or that. I don’t because I am tired or I write something and it doesn’t seem very good. From now on, I want to update this more often.

How’s the pandemic treating you?

For me, the pandemic has been exhausting. My writing work has dried up. My house needs more than feels remotely possible to do. The cat litter needs to be changed and the cat is not happy about it.

I am so lucky to have a roof over my head, a kitchen full of food, I have power and an internet connection. I cannot even begin to imagine how painful it must have been to get through the 1918 flu and stay home without Netflix TV. I am tempted to look into whether violent crime rates soared as people had to interact with each other.

That’s not a problem Chez Chadwick (aka Chateau Squirrel). I live here with my cat, yes the aforementioned Squirrel. She bites me sometimes but it all works out.

Meanwhile, I am tired all of the time and am getting nothing done. I got up today at nearly NOON. Noon! I was up late and finally took a pill to sleep at about 3:00 am. Was I up doing something creative? Working on comedy or that memoir I keep yapping about? No, I was watching Criminal Minds.

Now things have to change.

Well, it looks like Long Island is about to start opening up. I will still wear a mask when I go out but there are other things I am going to do. There will be at least three posts per week. I am also doing some online comedy. You will be able to catch most of it on my YouTube channel.

For now, I know of one show I am doing this week. The Tabernacle of Hedonism. It generally starts on Wednesdays around 10:30 EDT (note, I said EDT. We are living in daylight savings time people, get your shit together.) I am submitting a video tomorrow. Note: on June 10th, the show will be a marathon of the 10 pandemic shows. The new season is set to start on June 10.

You can read more about Tom Miller here.

Just to stay current… I am now …

On Instagram and Tik Tok. I wonder if younger people think, wow we have these cool social media sites and now all these older people are crashing our party! Probably. I will try to post some of that here.

Thank you and let me know if you have any questions.

pandemic cat eats cheese
I will rip off your face if I want. Lucky for you, I am busy right now.
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Meet Tom Miller

"Tom Miller: A never ending performance"
Both photos by John Sloan
https://homemagazinegainesville.com/tom-miller-a-never-ending-performance/

One of the first people I met in Florida was Tom Miller. When I first moved to Gainesville several years ago, I wanted to get involved in my new community. As a comedian, I also wanted to perform comedy but wasn’t optimistic about my prospects. One person I met my first week in the city told me about an open mic/variety show Tom Miiller did. Here is one of my first performances at the Tabernacle and another one.

Enter the Tabernacle of Hedonsim hosted by Tom Miller

The Tabernacle of Hedonism hosted by Tom Miller just celebrated its 35 birthday recently. Some have called it the “longest-running variety show in America.” It has a very dedicated audience who have followed it from venue to venue around the city, which he likes to call “the center of the known universe.”

What is a typical show like? There is no typical show. Every week offers a different experience. No matter what happens at the weekly show, it is always entertaining. But all of this sounds like a very clinical report of something that is not. Miller is a great promoter of the freedom of expression. There is NO censorship. At one show, they had the stage in the windowfront of the venue and the “Naked Poet” took it all off. Passersby on the street had no idea what to think. Neither did I.

Artists need a space to feel safe to create

For me, the best part of the show is the feeling of safety in what I did. I am a comedian. I want to make people laugh. I also am a satirist and sometimes good satire is not always funny. Add to that the fact that sometimes I just want to rail against a society that has turned its back on truth and facts and you get me searching for a place to express that. I found opportunities to do all of that at the Tabernacle. Whatever I did, I always found support for it here. Even when I wasn’t happy with what I was doing, people supported me.

But wait, there’s more

So, Tom Miller is a performance artist. Yes and no. Miller has done some amazing performance art — installations? Exhibits? I am not sure what they are called officially but from his tribute to Truman Capote to staring at Ted Cruz‘s mouth for hours on end, his pieces work on every level.

Lest you think that is all he does, Miller has more for you. He writes stage and screenplays. The Accrosstown Theatre ran his play, UMMU last year. I have been lucky enough to have read several of his screenplays, including Elmer’s Saucer. If that does not get made into a movie, it will be proof to me that everything good in the world has died.

Recently, I started to seriously listen to his music. I am currently obsessed with Little Green Girl, which reminds me of David Bowie and David Byrne but like everything he does, his music is just fantastic. And I have not even gotten to his paintings.

I could go on for days about how impressed and inspired I am by Miller. While I was in Gainesville, he made me want to be more creative. Now that I am in New York, his influence is still there. I am pursuing my creative dreams more than ever before. I also want more of the world to experience the genius of Tom Miller. We all need a little more of his brand of art in our lives.

Here is my most recent video that I have from there. Learn more about him here.

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What do you think? Are we insane?

twitter trump jesus lord

The United States has elected some interesting people. Over the years, we have had pro wrestlers become governors. Actors have been president. For a long time, we even had a leprechaun in the House of Representatives. (Yes, Dennis Kucinich, I am looking at you. Right at you.) Being insane is not going to disqualify anyone from elected office here.

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on Februar...

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now, we have elected a reality star. Some people say Donald Trump is also a successful businessman but his business model seems to be shit to me. He goes into a place, gets a bunch of government money, takes out some loans, hires local companies, they do the work, he never pays the, he files for bankruptcy, he moves to a new place to repeat all of that. While I never went to Trump University, I don’t think that is a good model to follow. It’s an insane model to follow.

Now the Tweeter in chief does not seem to understand that he has moved to a new world. He can no longer control every aspect of the story that is told about his life. Now people listen to what he says and expect him to say things that are, if nothing else rooted in reality. The problem is that for Trump, reality has always been whatever he wanted it to be. When the media asks his representatives about his claims, he calls them “rude.”

No, Mr. President, it is not “rude,” that is what they are paid to do. And coming from the most caustic person in politics, you have no business calling anyone rude. Ever.

What I am left wondering, amid the claims by Sean Spicer that when Trump said he was bugged, Trump was using air quotes or from Kellyanne Conway that Americans’ microwave ovens are turning in us, how does the world view us? I would love to know.

Take the poll! Let me know what you think of us!

[democracy id=”2″]