When’s the last time you had fun on New Year’s Eve? When you were 11 years old? Me too. New Year’s Eve is a horrible holiday. Actually I’m not even sure it is a holiday. It’s more like a societally-mandated festival of frustrated expectations (kinda like this health-care bill, am I right or what people).

But this year will be different. Blog reader and cultural go-getter SM is organizing a massive show/party at 92nd St Y’s Tribeca location. (Tribeca is one of the hippest neighborhoods in New York.)

I’m performing some “ha-ha”-type material along with about 10,000 other performers. There will be live music and conceptual art(?) and all sorts of culture flying every which way!

Come to this fun show! I think there’s even a party with DJs and karaoke (YES) afterwards.

Performers Include:
David Rees (Get Your War On) (that’s me)
Emily Flake (Lulu Eight ball)
Lianne Smith
Marykate O’Neil
Cat Martino
Deborah Johnson light show/space transformation
The Psychasthenia Society’s Jon Keith Brunelle and Daniel Vatsky
Video from Patrick Borelli
Griffin Newman
Daisy Rosario
Tony Carnevale
Ed Illades
Louie Pearlman
Bob Acevedo
Shannon Manning
…and many more, including surprise guests!

Let’s do this! Let’s have a fun New Year’s Eve we can all feel good about.

Looks like our incumbent punchline won last week’s Punchline Poll handily.

Maybe too handily … 85% is a suspiciously strong showing for an incumbent in an election with three challengers. That’s like Saddam Hussein territory. I smelled a rat.

So I did a little digging and found this.

Should we call in the UN to monitor the next Punchline Poll?

Multiple readers have sent in links to this article.

It seems google.com, the famous search engine, is entering the URL shortening business. Hoo boy, they must be really bored over there at google HQ. Do they really think they can take on my URL shortening service?

Look at their dorky URL: http://goo.gl/

Do they really think people will use that link? How do you even pronounce it? Maybe if it was called
http://urlshorteningserviceforgoogle.com or
http://urlshorteningserviceprovidedbygoogle.com

… but both their domains are still available. WAY TO GO, GOOGLE.

I guarantee that by the end of 2010, people will know me as “The Google Killer.” Because I’m about to perpetrate a heinous act of googlecide.

Reader JW responds to my post about the unexpectedly strong showing of last week’s winning punchline in this week’s Punchline Poll:

I voted for the incumbent punchline both times, but that’s only because of weak opposition. Did Bill Clinton really beat the Republicans in 1996? Or was Dole just a weak candidate? Questions to think about ….

“Weak opposition?” Are you kidding? One of this week’s candidates is “I’m a Martian; what do I care,” which has gotta be one of the greatest punchlines ever!

Meanwhile, the incumbent is winning at 85%!

Democracy is a dangerous thing. Will someone PLEASE stuff the ballot box before polls close this evening? I need an army of amoral agitators to keep pulling the lever for “I’m a Martian; what do I care,” which is Punchline #2 on your ballot.

THANK YOU.

Please don’t forget to vote in this week’s PUNCHLINE POLL!

Last week’s winning punchline is still polling strong at 76%! We may have a historic back-to-back victory blowout on our hands!

Here are the results as of 2:52 PM:

Punchline #1: “If Bill Kristol says America can still ‘win’ in Afghanistan, then they can. That guy’s right about everything.” (Last week’s winner.) (76%, 454 Votes)

Punchline #2: “I’m a Martian; what do I care?” (4%, 22 Votes) (You people are crazy; this is the best punchline, this should be crushing. –ed.)

Punchline #3: “The sooner the American empire crumbles, the sooner we can invade and eat their McMansions, which are like hamburgers for us because we’re Martians.” (8%, 45 Votes)

Punchline #4: “I bet Fluu’gorb 5,000 Martian-dollars that China would dominate the 21st century, so it’s in my interest for America to descend into hysteria and over-leveraged military boondoggles. SCORE.” (12%, 73 Votes)

Head over to the polling place to read the joke and cast your vote! Ballot tampering encouraged!

Polls close tomorrow (Friday) …

How did I miss this one?

Do I believe any of (Going Rogue)? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that (Palin) does, and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic …. It is the voice of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric (itself a rhetorical trope), love of country and instinctive (not doctrinal) piety. It says, here are some of the great things that have happened to me, but they are not what makes my life great and American. (“An American life is an extraordinary life.”) It says, don’t you agree with me that family, freedom and the beauties of nature are what sustain us?

If your only goal in writing cultural criticism is to make tweedy people at faculty parties sputter in bewilderment at your latest steaming pile of disingenuousness, maybe you should quit academia and spend more time in “small-town America,” absorbing all their “common sense” and non-doctrinal piety (whatever the heck that is, it sounds like a foot condition).

Stanley Fish, I love you! Keep doing what you do, and maybe we’ll all learn to “think again!” (Or is that the Atlantic’s motto? Sometimes I get my counterintuitive oracles confused.)

I truly don’t understand this guy. I get being counterintuitive and provocative and trying to make people “think again” or whatever, but come on … really?

In the end, perseverance, the ability to absorb defeat without falling into defeatism, is the key to Palin’s character. It’s what makes her run in both senses of the word and it is no accident that the physical act of running is throughout the book the metaphor for joy and real life. Her handlers in the McCain campaign wouldn’t let her run (a mistake, I think, even at the level of photo-op), no doubt because they feared another opportunity to go “off script,” to “go rogue.”

Dude, she was a governor and she quit her job. I don’t care if jogging is a metaphor for “joy and real life,” or if shooting wolves from a helicopter is a metaphor for despair and repealing the estate tax– this woman is stone-ass-crazy. Talk to her for thirty minutes about ANYTHING OTHER THAN ALASKA and get back to me.

Stanley Fish is nuts. It reminds me of that old saying: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Give a man a Stanley Fish essay, drive him mad for a lifetime.”