Category: Rosh Hashanah

Touching Down

by jaredsterncomedy, posted in comedy, fantasy football, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jared Stern, Rosh Hashanah

Hey there ‘Redheads… Happy Jew Year! Wow, it’s 5771 and shit is crazy… Seriously, where did the time go? Yes, last night the matzoh ball dropped and it’s Rosh Hashanah. A happy and sweet new year to one and all. One of my Jew Year’s resolutions is to check my lunch meat. Yesterday, I was halfway through a sandwich before I realized that beneath the bread and mustard on my hid the reptilian metallic sheen of bad corned beef. But there’s another high holiday to observe today. NFL Kickoff. I’ve got the preseason ass groove in my couch ready for some football. To celebrate, let’s take a ride on the blog flume…

Before I get to the promised breakdown of my fantasy football teams that I know you’ve all been waiting for, I want to take a quick second to thank my buddy T. Brad Hudson for including me in his Charm City cavalcade of comedy, Laffapalooza, last weekend. I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with some of Baltimore’s finest: Mike Storck, Sonny Fuller, Tommy Sinbazo, Mike Shader, Matt Baetz, and Dorian Gray. The venue we were in was right next door to the Maryland State Fairgrounds, where Justin Bieber was scheduled to perform that night. Thousands of people were crammed into the surrounding area. Parking was tighter than one of Bieber’s groupies. I’ll go ahead and admit, the bulk of this paragraph was just so I could type that last line. Anyway, it was a great show and I was flattered to be included.

Now, as I mentioned in the last installment, I’m an obsessive degenerate who is inexorably drawn to the statistical lap dance of fantasy football. I drafted four teams last week, one of which will hopefully rise above mediocrity and bring me virtual victory. My four teams are: The Minnesota Vicarious, The Wiseacres All-Pros, The Pandora Blueskins, and Viva El Comix Cafe. The last team is in a keeper league that I was invited to through a guy who saw my show at the Comix Cafe in Buffalo. The club has since shuttered, so I’m using the team to keep the memory of great laughs and greater buffalo wings alive. By the way, I realize that alot of you have tuned out at this point because you could not possibly care less about such things. While I’m hurt, I do understand. My blog. Deal with it. Aside from the keeper league, where my draft position was determined by last season’s middle-of-the-road performance, I got shafted in my random draft placement. I picked 12th of 12, 10th of 12, and 9th of 10. My other three teams are pretty similar because I had to use the same bottom-of-the-order draft strategy. So, let’s focus on Viva El Comix Cafe… My three kept players from last year’s team were Maurice Jones-Drew (JAX RB), DeSean Jackson (PHI WR), and Antonio Gates (SD TE). Keeping in mind that most of the other elite players in the league were kept by the other 11 teams in the league, here’s my roster:

QB: Sam Bradford (STL)
RB: Maurice Jones-Drew (JAX)
RB: Arian Foster (HOU)
WR: DeSean Jackson (PHI)
WR: Wes Welker (NE)
WR: Dez Bryant (DAL)
TE: Antonio Gates (SD)
OP: Ahmad Bradsahaw (RB-NYG)
K: Bill Cundiff (BAL)
D/ST: Green Bay

I realize I’m a little thin at QB, but I picked up the suspended Ben Roethlisberger to pick up the slack later in the season. I also think Bradford will have a better than average rookie season. I’m also banking on rookie Dez Bryant to come through. And hopefully Arian Foster lives up to the massive hype. By the way, OP stands for “Offensive Player” and can be filled by any offensive position, including another QB. There’s a guy in the league who has Drew Brees and Phillip Rivers in the same starting line-up.

Ok, that’s all I’ll put you through for now. I just wanted to get it out there. Can’t wait for the stats to start flying.

To be continued…

Late and Untitled

by jaredsterncomedy, posted in comedy, ginormous, HBO Comedy Festival, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jared Stern, Rosh Hashanah, ziddio.com

Hey there ‘Redheads… Once again, I’ve neglected you. And, once again, I apologize. And, yes, it’ll probably happen again. It’s nearly two weeks deep into September and a couple things worth noting have happened in and around my immediate vicinity.
First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Time flies by so quick, you blink your eyes and *poof* it’s 5768. Man, 5768…shit’s crazy. Yes, apparently Jews as a people feel so much guilt about the past, that we’ve bent time and space to escape our many neuroses. We’ve built a time machine that runs on a mother’s disappointment. We can travel to the far reaches of the 4th dimension, but we never call…we never write.
Second, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! This blog is officially two years old. It’s going to start throwing tantrums if you don’t start paying more attention to it. Usually, when this digital doodle pad hits some sort of arbitrary milestone, I make a bunch of self-important calculations and self-congratulations. Not this time. I’ve been delinquent too long to cop-out and give you some half-assed clipblog. I’d rather use my whole ass and give you something worth a couple seconds of your diverted attention.
Third, a couple of overdue somber acknowledgements. The final curtain was drawn on operatic great, Luciano Pavarotti. Let’s all wish his pallbearers a speedy recovery. So, the comedy world’s go-to reference for fat guy jokes in the 80’s and 90’s is now gone. Time to update. Might I suggest Aretha Franklin?

She has some pipes…she ate a church organ.

Speaking of which, the fat lady gave a rousing rendition of “Give My Regards to an Indifferent Audience” at Soho Tea & Coffee. The impressive four-year run of the open mic came to a close a couple weeks ago. I was one of the proud few who played the violin while the ship slowly sank into the ocean of lattes and blank stares. Chris White and Larry Poon gave rousing performances to end the evening. Big thanks to Paul Schorsch for keeping the stage going for as long as it did. Soho, we hardly knew ye.

Portait of a crappy set…

Ok, so because this is a space designated for my random thoughts, I figured I’d try to sketch out one of the bits I tried out that night. It has met with varying levels of success, but I haven’t found the right pacing or phrasing to get it where it deserves to be. So please enjoy as I slap together a skeletal structure for this bit. Any feedback is welcome and encouraged…and away we go…

We’ve gotten lazy. Language and communication is a vast natural resource, but the guy in charge of running the filter has fallen asleep. Allow me to explain. I was thumbing through the dictionary the other day (play along) and I came across the word inconspicuous, which is ironic by itself, but that’s not where I’m going. The definition for inconspicuous was…not conspicuous. Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Webster. Chances are, if I’m looking up inconspicuous, I’m not stuck on what in means…get off your stack of phonebooks and define something. Pure laziness. I blame the internet. When I was a kid, and I wanted to find out more about a word or topic, I would go to the library to find a reference book related to that word or topic. Now, kids just go online and find…porn related to that word or topic. And now they’re just adding words to the dictionary willy nilly. Jiggy is in the dictionary. I’m pretty sure Will Smith doesn’t know what jiggy means. I’m starting to realize why immigrants don’t want to learn the goddamn language. It’s getting embarrassing. They just put “ginormous” in the dictionary. If you use “ginormous”, then you are a 12-16 year old girl or you just tried to describe that picture of Aretha Franklin (I use a different tag on stage, but this is a family blog…or something). Ginormous is a combination of “giant” and “enormous”, and it, of course, means big. Here’s my major issue. The dictionary is for people who don’t know the meaning of a word…and for people who need to steady a wobbly table. If you take a look at “ginormous” and can’t immediately glean its meaning, then you don’t need a dictionary…you need a helmet and a t-shirt that says, I Hug Too Hard…spit out that Mattel toy you’ve been sucking on. If the dictionary insists on including these hip, trendy, combo words to cater to the lol generation, I’d like to suggest another combo word to help balance things out… Fucktard. Allow me to break this one down for you. It’s a combination of “fucking” and “retard” and it is primarily used to describe people who use the word “ginormous”. Use it in a sentence? I thought you’d never ask. I can’t believe some fucktard put ginormous in the dictionary.

So, what’cha think?

One last thing before I go. Three of my bestest comedy pals, Chris White, Erin Jackson, and Mike Storck have made it to the semis of the Lucky 21 contest for the HBO Comedy Festival. In order for them to advance, they need your votes. Chris has put together a short video to explain the process…

Vote away!!

To be continued…hopefully before October…