Self-Proclamation

If you're reading this, I'm guessing you were able to hunker down in your fort made of bread and toilet paper and weather the Blizzard of 2016. I think it's a little early in the year to be handing out titles like that, but it is accurate. It is, so far, the one blizzard of 2016. I'm finally dug out from the wall of crusty brown blech that my car was plowed behind. It's a good thing too because I have places to be. I got a call out of the blue from my friends at the Arlington Drafthouse and I'll be featuring for one of my comedy heroes this weekend, Emo Philips. His sing-songy absurdism spoke to me in the formative years of my sense of humor. His voice, harmonized with the monotone of Steven Wright, made beautiful comedy music. I'm really looking forward to sharing a stage with him. And you can experience it live and in person, simply by clicking the link on your right. Speaking of convenient link clickage, please to click on the big pink button and cast a vote for me (@FunnyJared) as DC's Best Twitter Personality. Validate my ego's parking.

You may think this blog is just an exercise in self-importance, and you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Good job. Here's a cookie. However, I am not nearly as self-important as the guy I encountered yesterday, while walking down Connecticut Ave. I had my earbuds in, so I could pretend to be listening to music, while actually listening in on out-of-context snippets of the conversations of passers-by. You should try it sometime...

"I'm just not warming up to Lisa like I thought I would."

"Have you thought of getting it lanced?"

"We need to motivate the team. Go buy chocolate."

It's just a wonderful tableau of the extra ordinary (note the space). So, I'm getting some juicy non-sequiturs, when suddenly, I hear a piano playing behind me. It was on a street corner, so it could've been an enterprising busker. I turned to see a guy, maybe in his twenties, with a JBL speaker around his neck, pumping out the stirring classical jams. It wasn't music that anyone could rightly complain about but it was loud enough to cause people to take notice. He figured a charge of disturbing the peace wouldn't stick because the disturbance was so darn peaceful. It was simultaneously inspirational and obnoxious, motivational and rude, tasteful tastelessness. This guy was forcefully providing the soundtrack to my stroll. Listen, buddy, I've got the chorus of voices in my head for that sort of thing. Take your joyous jangle elsewhere.

And if I am self-important, at least I'm not self-proclaimed. I was talking to a buddy of mine who deals with booking guests on a radio show. He was telling me that one upcoming guest was billed as a "self-proclaimed sexpert". He said, "She gives blowjob classes." To which I replied, "Is there a recital?"

Think of the power of self-proclamation, though. Just because she says she is, she's now a sexpert, whatever that is. She was probably sexhausted of sexplaining herself without sexaggerating, so she made a sexecutive decision to sexceed everyone's sexpectations. Steve Miller says that some people call him a space cowboy and no one really believes him, but if he was a Self-Proclaimed Space Cowboy, then get this guy some spurs and a space helmet. On my taxes I'm going to list myself as a self-proclaimed religious institution. Let me make one thing clear. Any claims made about me should be made by someone else on an amateur level.

It Begins...

Hunker down, people. Brace yourselves. Batten down the hatches. Gird your loins. Katy, bar the door. May the bread, milk, and toilet paper be with you, because a storm is coming. Not just any storm, mind you. A historic storm. That's right, it's going to be histormic (I'll let myself out). Death awaits ye, one tiny flake at a time. The truly historic storm will be the massive flood of crappy "Winter is Coming" and photoshopped AT-ATs on the highway memes that will sock in social media. Personally, I think all of this hysteria was cooked up by the Sliced Bread Lobby. Best thing, my ass.

The official name for this two day swath of doom dandruff is Winter Storm Jonas, which would be a great name for an albino pro wrestler. The agreed upon hip name for it is Snowzilla. That's the best the hive mind could come up with? Here are some alternatives:

Eddie Blizzard
White Privilege
Snowlestra
Ice-IS
Cold Slither

Before I go any further, I'd like to call your attention to the giant pink button on your right. You're going to want to click on that button and cast a vote for me (@FunnyJared) as Best Twitter Personality in the Washington City Paper's Best of DC 2016 Reader's Poll. I don't care if you don't read it. I don't care if you live in DC. I want to make Twitter great again. So please to vote for me and validate my narcissism. I came in second last year and I'd like to claw my way to the summit of the mountain of your support. You are the wind beneath my wings.

Also, I wanted to give a shout out to my buddy Chris White over at the DC Improv. He's a giant history nerd and he's embarking on an ambitious project to find the funniest POTUS ever, called Headliner of State. I'm the silky voiced announcer for this project, so please listen as we begin our search. New episode every Monday.

Speaking of... speaking, I recently got hired to be a part of another cool project that you can consume. I'm going to voice an audiobook, a suspense thriller called "The Watershed". I've finished recording the first chapter and I'm very excited to read out loud to you. If I can get paid for reading out loud, maybe I can get some cash for chewing with my mouth open. This is a big step for me, not only because it's professional voice work, but I normally fall asleep when I read. Thank goodness I'm standing up in the recording studio. The big challenge is trying to affect a woman's voice without sounding like a Monty Python sketch.

See you after the world ends.

Powerblog

Happy Belated New Year, or bloated New Year, if the post-holiday weigh-in at my gym is to be believed. My trainer gave me a body mass index test and it told me that I'm 30% body fat. That's like and entire leg made of fat. That's a problem. What's an even bigger problem is that an entire leg made of fat sounds delicious to me right now. It's a never-ending cycle. My fitness goals will be even harder to hit thanks to my recent introduction to another scrumptious obstacle: Strawberry Pretzel Salad. Stop making that face and let me explain. It's a Pittsburgh delicacy made using strawberries, Jell-O, Cool Whip, and cream cheese, with crumbled pretzels as the outer crust. So far, it's my favorite stretch to the the definition of "salad".

The new year is about new beginnings, and what better way to clean the slate for 2016 than to win the Gross Domestic Product of Burundi. The Powerball lottery jackpot is a staggering $1.4 billion at the time of this writing. Your odds of winning are slightly less staggering, but only in the way getting hit by a piano from ten floors up is less staggering than getting hit with a piano from twenty floors. I do not care. My disregard for the odds is Han Solo-like. All I know is that somebody has to win, and why can't it be me?

When the lottery gets to Scrooge McDuck swimming pool levels, people who focus on the astronomical odds will take the sour grapes mindset, "I wouldn't want to win anyway, because that kind of money would ruin me." Well, to those people I say that kind of money could ruin a person, but it could also turn them into Batman. Listen, I get that money doesn't buy happiness, but with that kind of money you can afford to make everyone else around you miserable, making you seem happier by comparison. It's all about perspective. I saw a piece on the news at a local liquor store filled with hopeful people. One woman was asked what she would do with the money. She said, "I would buy a new car and pay off some debt." SOME debt? How many payments do you have left on your space station, lady?

I worry that whoever does win the jackpot won't have the imagination to properly enjoy it. Obviously, some of it goes in the bank, so you can live the life that Hans Gruber was denied at the end of Die Hard. He just wanted to be, "sitting on a beach, earning 20%." The cash payout for this jackpot is going to be roughly $800 million after taxes. Even if you put half of that away, you still have $400 million to play with. So, for the imagination impaired, I have some suggestions for what to do with the money...

1.  Tila Tequila thinks the Earth is flat because she can't see the curve, so you can use part of your winnings to shoot her into space, thereby solving two problems.
2. Hire a mobile orchestra to follow you around and perform your theme song that you contracted John Williams to compose for you.
3. Reboot Titanic.
4. The Playboy Mansion is for sale for $200 million. The only problem is that Hef conveys and he gets to live there until his Faustian contract is up.
5. Interstate zip lines.
6. Pizza party.

Just a couple ideas I've had floating around. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the passing of rock icon, David Bowie. I will admit to not being familiar with a lot of his music, but he had a hand in shaping my childhood as I'm sure he did with many of you as Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth, the modern (in 1986) muppetational take on The Wizard of Oz. The soundtrack to that movie was one of the first albums I ever owned, and I have a special place in my heart for movie characters that have my name (Jareth was close enough when I was 11). I think I speak for everyone when I say, "Fuck Cancer." Maybe whoever wins the jackpot can funnel a couple hundred million into eradicating it, but they'll probably just buy a car. Ziggy, we hardly knew ye...