“Oh, it’s not so bad…” reassured the beloved principal as he took a quick break to rinse himself down and shoo away the lingering bees and hornets. “People love watermelon during the summer, and this sure beats working at the 7/11 where I always run into kids from school during Free Slurpee Day.”

“Me and Mrs. B are fine – don’t you worry about it, but I really do have to get back to the fruits of my labor, if you know what I mean!” Principal Belding laughed before jamming his head into the watermelon helmet once more and donning the classic Captain Watermelon goggles that just make him look like the biggest dork imaginable.

Captain Watermelon can be seen on Santa Monica Pier from 10am – 4:30pm from now until Tuesday, August 12th when Los Angeles area schools resume for the 2015-2016 school year. Tipping is greatly appreciated for that poor bastard – you’ll no doubt agree when you see him for yourself…

The post Principal Belding Working Summer Job as Weird Melon-Wearing Man appeared first on Just Laugh.

The post Do something today… appeared first on Just Laugh.

Coming this fall to ABC – woohoo!

The post The Muppets are Returning to Primetime!!! appeared first on Just Laugh.

If you somehow haven’t noticed, it seems that somebody near the top of the television food chain came to the stunning conclusion a year or two ago that it’s ridiculously cheaper to challenge insane people to do really stupid stunts for cash than to actually write and produce a decent sitcom these days! Do the math – at a million dollars per star for each episode of Friends along a series of approximately twenty-two episodes, that’s…a lot of money! So even after giving away a million or two at the end of the seasonand dropping a healthy chunk of change on production costs, dung beetles, and Jeff Probst’s wardrobes, there’s still gotta be an easy fifty or sixty million leftover to help re-tile the executive washroom back at CBS headquarters…

Everybody Loves Cheese-Nips®
A light-hearted comedy based around everyone’s favorite cheese-flavored snack-food, the pilot episode deals with Bill Whitley (played by Harry Anderson) as he suddenly learns that his wife (Catherine O’Hara, or Shelley Long if she’s not available) has always favored Chex Mix® as opposed to Cheese-Nips®.Spike!
Although it has absolutely nothing to do with Spike Lee or his over-inflated ego, I’m sure that this appropriately titled sitcom starring a young terrier named Spike will have viewers 14-39 glued to their sets with anticipation! His family may always be dragging him to the most boring events around the state, but somehow Spike always seems to find an interesting aspect of any situation!

Back to the Basics
David and Cynthia Allen (played by David Spade and Brooke Shields) are quite possibly the last two people you would expect to see together, but their clashing personalities and everlasting sarcastic take on those around them make for the hilarious new comedy that will return Spade to his throne as the court jester of primetime! Pilot episode features guest appearances by Amy Yasbeck and Norm MacDonald as the couple argues about each others’ previous relationships.

Frog Legs
Just a group of neighborhood kids hanging around the small pond at the end of their block – what trouble could possibly come from such an innocent scene, right?! Three lucky young children will begin their Hollywood careers starring in this new comedy for families as parents are finally provided with a bit of insight as to what their children are actually up to when they go out to play! An hour-long pilot jump-starts the series as Tommy, Jimmy, and Suzie play a joke on their parents by slipping some of their slimy friends into various dishes at the neighborhood block party, sending several friends to the hospital…

Jack Says…
Jack Nicholas stars as God in this fresh new comedy that takes a look at what life on Earth is like when this supreme being stops being polite and starts being real! The pilot episode targets such social issues as homelessness, obesity, and people who talk to loudly on their cell phones in public.

A Special Note to Any Television Executives Who Just Happen to be Reading This:

Any or even all of the concepts above can be yours for a very affordable price – no reasonable offers will be refused! I’m available to fly out to L.A. and start shooting these babies as soon as right now, so get on the phone and let’s get these people laughing during primetime again – did you really think that those slutty shows about money and marriage were going to hold them off forever?! Have your people call, well, me, and we’ll do lunch…

Just don’t go taking my ideas and replacing any of my above characters with cheaper, third-rate actors, because the end product would be really disappointing! Besides, I already thought of that one and it just would never work, anyways – Paul Reubens as God?! I don’t think so!

The post Back to the Drawing Board appeared first on Just Laugh.

My freshman year of college, I went without TV for a year. By May, I felt I had gained a lot from not wasting my time in front of a television. Sophomore year, my roommate brought his own TV. By May, I realized how stupid I was for feeling that I had gained a lot from not wasting my time in front of a television.

I’m not one of those people who will schedule his life around a TV show, especially since Seinfeld is only on in syndication. But if I’m around and not doing anything that requires a ton of concentration, I’ll turn it on and my life will be better for it.

I like watching Sportscenter as I wake up in the morning, and as I fall asleep at night. The only thing better than new movies on HBO are old ones on Comedy Central, which also shows stand-up comedy for hours at a time. And it’s scientifically proven – old episodes of Cheers make food taste better. It’s kind of like Adobo that way.

Adobo commercials totally miss their mark. I first heard of Goya (Oh Boya!) when I was seven, but never tasted Adobo until I was in college and someone forcefully put it on my food. I have used it on everything since. Maybe Goya could just drop the commercials and use the money to pay people to knock on your door and sprinkle some Adobo on your dinner.

Some people call television the idiot box, and I think that’s true, to a degree. Televsion, like most good products, trusts the consumer to make the right decisions with how to use it. Ice cream is a wonderful product, but I imagine it’s not a good paperweight. Similarly, you will fail if you try to use TV as a way to baby-sit your kids or to educate your idiot husband that you only married because you got knocked up in the back of his truck. That was redundant. If you use the phrase “knocked up,” it obviously happened in the back of a truck.

Along with marathons of Twilight Zone and Bill Murray movies, there comes a certain price we have to pay. Like Lifetime, television for people who don’t like television. The one good thing Lifetime has going for it is The Golden Girls, which is less a show about four old ladies and more a show about making fun of everyone you don’t like.

TV can be the idiot box if you are an idiot, and like to watch other idiots interview more idiots about how their idiot wives cheated on their idiot selves with their idiot brothers (or idiot sisters). But to an educated consumer, television offers bite-sized entertainment, and I do not feel uncultured for enjoying it. Just because a TV set is smaller than a movie screen doesn’t make what’s on it any less worthwhile. Oooh, maybe I could get a TV set the size of a movie screen. That’d be hot.

I know that I’ve lost a lot of time watching TV. A kid I went to high school with grew up with no TV and he won the Westinghouse science talent search. But that is him, and I am me. I know that if I didn’t have a TV, I would just play more ping pong. Which is what I did all of freshman year.

One of the best shows on TV was Dream On, which was about a guy who thought in old TV clips. That’s perfectly accurate for so many of us because TV was our first look at the outside world. “How sad,” you might think. Only if your parents had that look be the wrong shows. My first look at the world was through a hundred little blue men who always triumphed over evil, followed by a bunch of robotic lions that united to destroy a common enemy who was always the same size as all five of them put together. If your kid’s first look at the world is two suburban teenagers who like fire, he’s going to burn down your house. But if you show him the right stuff first, he’ll probably remember the episode where the Smurfs told him not to play with matches.

And perhaps the best thing about TV is that it eliminates poor conversation. If you have something to say, you can shut off the TV and say it. But if you ever need to fill dead air, a little half-hour happiness is much better than prattling on about something useless. If you’d ever like to not talk to me, I’d be glad to come to your place and watch.

Unless your TV has a hole in the side of it. Then I think I’ll stay home and play ping pong.

The post La La La-la La La, Sing a Happy Song appeared first on Just Laugh.

Apparently, silence can be copyrighted.

I’ll bet you’re gaping, open-mouthed in stunned silence, as you read this. Yes, silence can be copyrighted. And by gaping silently at these words, you’re violating that copyright right now.

Okay, that last part isn’t true. But creating a silent track on your own CD can actually land you in some legal hot water, as Mike Batt, former member of the UK band The Wombles, is finding out. He’s facing a potential lawsuit for copying silence from avant-garde composer John Cage (“avant-garde,”from the French meaning “No one cares except a bunch of black turtle-neck-wearing-ramble-on-about-existentialism coffee house barflies.”)

According to the London Independent (official motto: “You’re Not the Boss of Me!”), Batt received a letter from the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, the British organization charged with collecting royalties for composers and publishers.

The MCPS sent him a standard license form for his Postmodern composition, “A One Minute Silence,” because he listed Cage as a composer, and supposedly demanded royalty payments for his own 60 seconds of non-sound.

“Postmodern” is German for “avant-garde.”

The MCPS claims Batt used a quotation from Cage’s piece “4 minutes, 33 seconds,” a composition composed entirely of four minutes and 33 seconds of dead silence. Cage, being the clever avant-garde artist, named the piece to match it’s length. It should have been titled “Truly Pointless and Stupid” so it could have matched the concept instead.

But Batt says this isn’t true. “My silence is original silence,” he told the Independent, “not a quotation from his silence.” And as he said in a National Public Radio interview this week, the composition is also original, “. . . because it’s digital.”

Oh well, if it’s digital, then what’s all the fuss?

The problem started when Batt gave credit to “Batt/Cage” on the composition (he said he did it “for a laugh”). But according to Andante Magazine, Gene Caprioglio, a representative of Cage’s American publisher, says that Batt listed Cage on the credits for “obvious reasons. . . to evoke Cage’s provocative 1952 composition.”

Provocative? What’s so provocative about four minutes and 33 seconds of dead silence? The song would be provocative if it were a cover version of “Inna Gadda Davida” played on a xylophone made of herring tins, but just because it’s as silent as a church on Monday morning doesn’t make it provocative. It makes it BORING!

But Caprioglio was steadfast. “If Mr. Batt wants to produce a minute of silence under his own name, we would obviously have no right to the royalties.”

Cage, obviously having some sort of genius’ foresight that his “masterpiece” would possibly be copied by musical ne’er-do-wells, left strict instructions that allowed “4:33” to actually be any length. However, there was no word as to whether the title of the song would change as well, to say, “2:18,” “17:00,” or “Dear Lord, Will This Thing Never End?!”

Cage’s publishers, in an allegedly greedy attempt to get the thousands of pennies earned from Batt’s composition, are arguing that Batt actually copied “4:33,” but since his song was 3:33 shorter, he only copied part of it.

“As my mother said when I told her, ‘which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?'” Batt told the Independent.

What about those little 4 second gaps between songs on CDs? Who owns the copyrights to those? Does Cage, since he wrote the original recorded silence? But would Batt have a shot at them, since he was the first one to record silence digitally, and CDs are a digital medium? And since they’re only 12% as long as Cage’s original “masterpiece,” will the royalties be prorated?

One could conceivably argue that silence existed long before there was life on this planet, and therefore silence is actually public domain, just like “Happy Birthday.”

But that’s not all. This silence controversy came just a few months after Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Network, said that when we don’t watch TV commercials, we’re committing theft.

There’s that open-mouthed gape again. Let me explain.

In an April 29 interview in Cable World, Kellner railed against TiVo, fast forward buttons on VCR remotes, and flipping through the stations for three minutes. If you use any of these devices or tricks to avoid television commercials, he says, you’re committing theft.

“Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. . . (a)nytime you skip a commercial or watch the button, you’re actually stealing the programming,” Kellner told interviewer Stacy Kramer, without explaining what he meant by “watch the button.”

“What if you have to go the bathroom or get up to get a Coke?” Kramer asked.

Kellner responded: “I guess there’s a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.”

Gee, thanks Jamie. I’m glad you have “a certain amount of tolerance” for me not peeing on my couch as I watch your network.

And since when do I have a contractual obligation with the network? If I’m contractually obligated to watch commercials, aren’t they contractually obligated not to broadcast a load of crap? (Please make your own jokes about network programming and bathroom breaks.)

I’d be interested in watching the commercials if they weren’t the only things worse than the actual shows. I mean, who wants to watch Steve Urkel on old “Family Matters” reruns, or every single Atlanta Braves game? And don’t give me that nonsense about everyone having different tastes, and trying to meet the programming tastes of different viewers.

Why is it that you can’t meet my programming tastes, but I have to sit through “Can you hear me now? Good!” The whole thing is enough to make me go Elvis Presley on my TV and shoot it. But I’m sure Kellner will have some reason why I can’t, like it violates his Constitutional rights to make me watch commercials for feminine freshness products.

But this gives me an idea for a song I call “3:57.” I’ll do an extended cover remix of Mike Batt’s “A One Minute Silence” interspersed with the “Can You Hear Me Now?” phrase every nine seconds. I’ll call it “Avant-Garde People Are Morons For Buying This CD.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go violate my contract with network television. But I’ll make sure I don’t violate John Cage’s copyrights when I do.

The post Can You Copyright a Toilet Flush? appeared first on Just Laugh.

You see, it’s contract renewal time on Sesame Street, flagship of the CTW. After watching the stars of hit shows like “Friends” and “ER” rake in more than a million dollars per episode, greed has come home to roost on Sesame Street.

“It’s not fair,” said one Sesame Street star, who asked to remain anonymous. “Some of us have been here since Day 1, and we’re still making the same crappy salary. I don’t know about anyone else, but Bert — uh, I mean my roommate — and I can barely afford our apartment, thanks to all those damn Yuppies and their regentrification.”

The same burning question is on everyone’s mind in the neighborhood: how could one of the most popular children’s shows continue to pay its actors the lowest salaries on television?

“I don’t know what crap the network is trying to pull,” thundered Snuffleupagus, Big Bird’s on-screen best friend. “I know they can afford it, because they’ve added so many “corporate underwriter” spots to the show credits, we barely have enough time to do the show. So where’s the money going?”

But not everyone shares these feelings. A few of the veteran actors still remain true to their art. They’ve reached millions of kids, and get satisfaction from knowing that nearly every kid in America can read because of their work. Muppets Cookie Monster and Big Bird, as well as human actors Maria and Gordon are more than satisfied with their $75,000 annual salary.

“Sure, it not much in New York, but me not need much, except lots of COOKIES!” said Cookie Monster in a recent appearance on “Meet the Press,” before trying to devour Tim Russert’s toupee.

Big Bird echoed the same sentiments on a recent “Jim Lehrer Newshour” appearance. “We’re not in it for the money. We do it for the kids. If it was about the money, I’d be in the NBA, playing for the Atlanta Hawks.”

But relative newcomers to the show, including superstar Elmo, Barkley the giant dog, and Rosita believe they deserve the big salaries their network TV counterparts are raking in.

“We’re not asking a lot,” said Rosita. “We know this is public television. We’d be happy with just 50 grand an episode. I mean, look at what that hack Barney is doing. Not only does he make 175K per show, but he gets 20 points off the back end from all the merchandising, plus 10% of all syndication fees. The guy is one of the most annoying people since Rush Limbaugh, but he’s got it made.”

“Ruff” agreed Barkley.

Elmo slapped his fuzzy paw on the table. “Tell me about it. I do my own 15 minute segment every day, PLUS all the other stuff on the main show, and I don’t even get half a point from my own ‘Tickle Me Elmo’ dolls. But the Big Purple Jerk gets residuals from sleeping bags, vitamins, and #&%$@! footie pajamas!”

Elmo paused for a drink of Evian. “I don’t think we’re being unreasonable. ‘Between the Lions’ is even making more than we are, and they’ve only been around for a couple years! We just want to get paid what we’re worth. Plus our cut of the merchandising revenue.”

Rumors of a contract dispute by many Muppets have generated an avalanche of discussion and controversy on opinion pages and news programs over the past month. The speculation among Public Television insiders is there may even be a strike before filming for the upcoming fall season begins.

“That could be devastating. Can you say devastating?” said Fred Rogers, star of ‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.’ “The same thing happened to the ‘Electric Company’ back in the ’70s. The stars demanded more pay, but the network executives canceled the show instead. Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and Rita Moreno were the only ones lucky enough to land on their feet after it was all over.”

“Aw, that’ll never happen,” dismisses Oscar the Grouch, one of Sesame Street’s founders. “There are too many of us who will stay on. Oh sure, there’ll be some rough times if guys like Elmo go. I’ll admit he’s one of our more popular characters, but hey, we got along fine without him for 20 years. Besides, Elmo’s ego is growing out of control. Just last week he kicked an intern for bringing him jelly instead of jam for his toast.”

“The network brass would be stupid to let me go,” Elmo said, puffing out his fuzzy chest. “My face has been plastered on more t-shirts, lunch boxes, and sing-along videos than Grover, Big Bird, and Ernie and Bert combined. I’m their golden boy, and they know it.”

But other cast members are afraid of what a strike could do to them. “It’s awful,” says Grover. “I don’t think I can find work anywhere else. I’ve been typecast. People see me, and all they can think of is that cute little blue monster in the “Stupid Waiter” sketches. I’ve done nine years of summer Shakespeare theatre with Patrick Stewart, for God’s sake! But do you think I’ll ever get anything bigger than a walk-on part in the next Die Hard movie? My last movie role was playing a #$*&% Grover doll in a department store window. How’s that for typecasting?!”

So what does the future hold for the cast and crew of this public television mainstay? Can things return to the way they were, back in the show’s halcyon days? Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end of innocence? Will Sesame Street be brought to you by the letters Q and B, or by tax shelters, stock options, and mutual funds?

Only time will tell.

The post Trouble on Sesame Street appeared first on Just Laugh.

But after watching one-and-a-half episodes of The American Embassy on Fox (official motto: “If animals can attack it or celebrities can box with it, we’ll air it”), I can’t keep quiet. I have to speak my mind and rant about how bad this show is.

First of all, the good news. Even though it was April 1st, the Fox Network was not pulling an April Fool’s prank when they announced the cancellation of The American Embassy after four episodes.  Of course, this is not a great loss, since there were only six episodes “in the can.”

While some Embassy viewers may think “in the can” actually means “in the toilet” — and they wouldn’t be far off — that’s actually hot-shot TV exec talk for “filmed, edited, and ready to be spoon-fed to a bunch of mouth-breathers who are still PO’d that ‘The Hank Azaria Show’ got the axe.”

So why did Fox boot the show originally titled “Emma Brody?”  That’s easy:  It stank.  It reeked.  It smelled.  It was rank.  And it had the lingering odor that comes from driving past a hog farm with your windows rolled down.  In other words, it was awful.

The American Embassy is — or was — about a bunch of beautiful 20-somethings and young 30-somethings living their dramatic, profound, and life-shaping adventures as bureaucrats in the American Embassy in London.  Their jobs are — or were — to issue visas, deny visas, talk
about visas, and hobnob with English royalty when they’re not messing around with visas.  The result is something nearly as tedious and painful as a chess match between Cameron Diaz and Gary Busey.

Cameron: I take your prawn with my horsey guy .

Gary: That’s pawn.  And I think he symbolizes the dark-pawn shadow in all of us.

Cameron: Um, whatever.  Do you think I look pretty?

Think of Ally McBeal, Thirtysomething, and a really crappy version of The West Wing all wound up into a politically correct diversity rainbow at the Foreign Service Office dealing with glamorous and exciting paperwork.  And despite the attempts to make their boring and mostly-pointless bureaucracy seem life-or-death important, it only served as a backdrop to the 20-something angst, soul searching, and navel gazing.

Angst?  ANGST?!  Why do we need yet another show about beautiful people with all the emotional depth of a high school prom spending all their time exploring their angst, dealing with their angst, and having deep ruminations about their angst?

I don’t want my country’s bureaucrats to have angst, I want them to be content with their lot in life.  When these people are deciding whether to grant visas to potential terrorists, I don’t want angst to play a part in their decision making!  I want them to be bored, complacent, and generally nasty.

I don’t want our country’s safety to hinge on how improbably-blonde Emma Brody torments herself about whether she should go to the Prime Minister’s Barbecue and Hoe-Down with Doug Roach, the arrogant, yet beautiful 20-something CIA agent, or Jack Wellington the selfish, yet beautiful 20-something English Lord who’s engaged to a loveless, yet beautiful 20-something English snot.

I don’t want terrorist threats to be decided while — as I read in the episode guide — Emma “ponders the question: ‘does romance exist in the world’?”

Yes it does, now go stamp some visas!

One could argue that since I’m not a critic, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but there are other critics who agree with me, which means I’m right.

One critic is Ron Martinez of the-buzz.com, who called the show “. . . pure dread.  [It] appears to be a blatant, highbrow attempt at milking the current patriotism craze for all its worth, with a little Ally McBeal thrown in for the needed demographic punch.”

But E! Online’s critic, identified only as Wanda, loved the show.  “Although it has gotten the ‘Ally Goes to London’ rap,” she wrote on E!’s website, “American Embassy is hardly a McRipoff.”  Wanda, who seems to be more of a puppet for the entertainment industry, also said “Embassy has a fantastic script. . . (b)y the end of the first episode, you’ll be so head-over-heels for Emma Brody, you’ll be asking, ‘Ally who’?”

I think Wanda needs a demographic punch administered to her computer screen.  While The American Embassy DID have a script, “fantastic” is not the word I would use for it.  The word I would use starts with an S, and ends with the termination of my columnist career if I ever put it in print.

So, thanks to Fox for having some sympathy on its viewers for getting rid of a show that could only result in serious brain damage to anyone foolish enough to watch all four episodes.  The only way I can watch anything associated with that show again is if Fox’s Celebrity Boxing II
features a grudge match between The West Wing’s CJ Craig and American Embassy’s Emma Brody.

Emma: So Jules, there you have it.  The feelings I share between Doug Roach and Jack Wellington only reaffirm my belief that —

CJ: Whap!  Pow!

Now THAT’S Must See TV.

The post Bring Back Xena Warrior Princess appeared first on Just Laugh.

Earlier this month, NBC renewed television’s top-rated sitcom, Friends, for its ninth and final season, quite the monumental occasion for two distinct reasons:

• For the past eight years, Friends has acted as an antidote for all that is wrong with our lives in this day and age, leaving us wondering how we’ll be able to sleep at night after it’s off the air.
• The contract between the six principle cast members of Friends and NBC promises each of the Friends a whopping $1 million per episode, totaling a cool $24 million for the season, each, leaving us wondering how they’ll be able to sleep at night…

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed Friends over the years just as much as everyone else, although I must point out that I wasn’t the least bit emotional when that one guy dumped the one girl to go out with the other girl – hell, you’d need a flow-chart to keep these things straight and I’m just too lazy to devote that kind of time!  Nevertheless, seeing as I’m not personally paying them out of my own pocket, I can openly say that the show is hilarious and worth every penny.  Honestly, entertainment is really the only thing worth spending money on in this day and age, and if it comes down to a toss up between the entertainers themselves getting a bulky paycheck or some executive producer who’s never even seen the show, well then by all means, give Matthew Perry and his friends a raise!

It’s not really uncommon to see these kinds of numbers as the final season of a popular television series is announced, but they’re still typically staggering enough to blow any of us who actually work for a living clean out of the water!  Only a few years ago, Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen both finished up their last seasons, bringing home over a million dollars per episode each, although it was common knowledge that their supporting actors comparably earned only a fraction.  Mad About You co-stars Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt raised the bar by requiring equal salaries for their last episodes, but who’d have ever thought it would’ve gone this far?  Friends is now the most expensive half-hour sitcom in television history, which leaves me with this question: Where do we go from here?

Think about it – when Friends is gone next year, the only primetime programming left from the last millennium, aside from FOX’s The Simpsons, will be Frasier and that alone is enough to leave me worrying about how I’m going to be spending my evenings in the future!  The war between Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link has left both networks realizing that instead of throwing all of their money away, even though the game show market technically died in the ‘80s, maybe they should’ve been using it to come up with some new programming.  I refuse to watch anything starring Reba McIntyre or any of the previous cast members from Seinfeld, with the exception of, oh say Jerry Seinfeld, so they’d better not even think about putting the six friends through the same ordeal!

We’re all getting tired of the reality TV kick, too, and I’ll be the first to admit that as much as I’d enjoyed the previous seasons of Survivor, that’s getting a bit old, too.  I’m honestly surprised that Fear Factor actually got renewed for a second season – I guess I just didn’t realize that there were any disgusting things left to consume after the first season!  Needless to say, we’re running out of entertainment fast here, people, and before we know it, we’ll be spending our time outside, playing baseball and interacting with our fellow man…what’s it going to take to get these networks to understand that this can’t be allowed to happen?!?!?!?

So what’s my solution to this huge mess?  The way I see it, there are two methods that could be used to overcome this obstacle:

1. Mope around, assuming that the problem will take care of itself.  Threaten to fire any writers who don’t turn in some good ideas before they leave for the weekend.  Come Monday, hire a new band of writers and start the process all over again.  Note that although this doesn’t really solve the problem, it’s fairly cheap…
2. Send me a check.  Put a few extra zeroes behind it and I’ll come up with the best comedy you’ve ever seen – what’ve you got to lose, other than ratings and sponsors, of course?

Although I’m guessing that they’ll most likely attempt the first method, don’t say I didn’t offer!  Just let it be known that while the networks are vainly trying to win back viewers with That ‘90s Show, The George Whent Show and The Weakest Link – Friends Edition, I’ll be out doing the one thing that I dread most of all – physical activity.

Ok, so I’ll probably really be taking a nap, but I’ll definitely be dreaming about doing physical work!  Nevertheless, just in case NBC or ABC want to call to negotiate about that deal, I’ll keep my phone by the bedside…

The post For $2,000,000 an Hour, I’ll be Friends with Just About Anyone… appeared first on Just Laugh.

That’s right, I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a broadband Internet connection at my house, quite possibly making it the best home improvement step I’ve ever made!  You could probably consider me one of the original Internet geeks, ranging back to the times of telnet and gopher, when a graphical interface was nothing more than a wet dream.  The first time I connected to the Internet was sometime in the early 1990s; I was only about 11 years old or so.  We didn’t really even know what this Internet-thing was all about, but after months and months of pleading I finally convinced my Dad to let me try it out.  We only had a 1200 baud modem (translate: r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w…)  and the computer itself was a “laptop” that could maybe display four or five lines at a time, so there wasn’t much to see…

Obviously things have drastically changed since then and the entire concept of the World Wide Web has been completely altered to now accommodate graphics, music and even animation.  Am I the only person who remembers Lynx???  Ok, those days pretty much sucked and we knew it, but at least you could view the full potential of a text-based Internet over a dial-up connection using it.  Nowadays it’s not uncommon to be able to take your lunch break and return to find that the page which you were attempting to load before you left is still loading…I hate to use such a cliché, but does the term World Wide Wait ring a bell?

I had used “permanent” Internet connections in other places before, mainly businesses and schools, but trust me, this doesn’t even come close to having a real connection!  Besides, who wants to look at porn in the middle of the campus computer lab, anyways?  Let me tell you, the difference in speed makes surfing the Internet an entirely new (and even tolerable!) experience!  There’s certainly no more waiting for those dirty pictures of Anne Heche to load, or so I’ve heard…

Anyone who uses the Internet for anything more than checking e-mail once a week owes it to themselves to invest in broadband, whether it be via cable modem or DSL.  If you live in that rural of an area where it still isn’t available, then I suggest that you either move or start making daily phone calls to your local cable company until they bite the bullet and realize that it would be cheaper to run a special line out to your house rather than keep an extra person on staff just to answer your phone calls!  And ladies, even though you think that your man is only using the ‘net to look up sports scores and stuff, he’ll definitely appreciate the increase in his ability to download pornography, too!  He’s going to look at it regardless, so why not speed up the whole process a little?  You know what they say: What’s better than downloading your porn 10 times faster?  Downloading your porn 100 times faster, of course!  Hmmmm, 100 times faster…

The truly addictive part of the upgrade was that I didn’t just get the cable modem.  Oh no, the package also came complete with digital cable as well, which as any couch potato knows is the next best thing to having an actual life!  Some may call it the poor man’s satellite (although after seeing the bill, I couldn’t imagine why…), but 250 channels is good enough for me, at least for now!  I’ve got over 50 different movies I’ve already seen and another several dozen sitcoms I couldn’t care less about available at my fingertips at any given time, not to mention the specialty channels such as Animal Planet, Discovery’s Animal World, The Science Channel presents Animals, Disney’s Animal Kingdom Live and The Spice Channel…

I figure between cable tv and my laptop with Internet access, there’s really no reason for me to ever have to leave the couch now.  I do get hungry from time to time, but if I leave a trail of money by the door, the pizza delivery boy will usually catch on and bring it right to me.  I’m still working on a solve for the whole bathroom-thing because I just don’t have good enough aim to use the empty beer bottles and I definitely won’t be trying the diaper thing again…

If the last bit made it sound like I was a little lazy, that’s not my intention at all because in real life I’m actually extremely lazy!  And you know what, I really have no problems with that – They say I’m lazy, but it takes all my time – words spoken by a true man.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a little downloading to do…

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