Category: Funny

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Coronavirus Log – Day 22: Cats too?

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What I’m thinking about

Government Loans. Today is the day that the government is accepting applications for small business loans. My business and millions of others are swarming to this. The current amount Uncle Sam is looking to loan out is 2.5 months of payroll. We’ll see how that goes.

Schools Staying Closed. As I mentioned last week, I’m not impressed with the current home schooling system that Mill Valley has. But, I can’t see us going back to school in the fall. Even if the curve flattens, there will be no vaccine, so I can’t imagine big groups being allowed. Nobody wants to the school that starts the next outbreak. That means we might be doing this home-schooling thing for a LOT longer than I had thought. Good thing Sasha and Diane put together two new desks for Hunter and S this weekend.

What else

Our Pets Too?! It was reported yesterday that cats can get COVID. Apparently a tiger in the NY Zoo tested positive. I never considered that my two cats could be my weakest link in my attempt to separate myself from the outside world. One of them is super skittish so she’s no issue, but the other, Lucious, is too damn friendly. As if we needed another thing to worry about.

Also, come on people, are you still not staying inside?

Other Stuff

This next one is a really great video. This is the kind of content I’m looking for people. Get creative:

Some next-level cat moves:

Cases

I’m switching up my case tracking. I’ve got a spreadsheet with the daily amounts and am going to just post the graph new cases/deaths. That seems to be the most interesting to me as I want to see when the World and US start plateauing and then going down. Let me know if you’d like to see something different:

That’s all. Have a great Monday everyone 🙂

*Only 64 more days to go

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Coronavirus Log – Day 18: Grocery Deliveries

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What’s on my mind

Food and grocery deliveries. My company, Onward, offers rides to seniors and those who needed extra assistance. Now, because getting older adults out of the house is a terrible idea, we are also offering food and grocery deliveries. I am surprised how popular this is. Literally everybody is trying to get the food from the grocery store to their house without them having to do it. It’s been interesting to see the requests we’ve been receiving.

It’s so popular that Instacart, the app that partners with grocery stores to deliver food to you announced they are looking to hire 300,000 new people. Three hundred thousand. This is a unique time in history when we all need the exact same thing.

Yesterday, I wrote about asymptomatic people and how bizarre it is. I read this feed from an ICU doctor who, over 7 days, treated 50 COVID patients. Her patterns about what patients look like is interesting.

A Tale of Two Americas. I work from home every day. When I look down my street, I see construction workers still working on homes. It does seem like the better-off are getting sheltered but the rest are getting shafted as it’s harder for some people to “go virtual.”

At My House

We’re powering through. Diane has taken the lead on home schooling and, in good Diane fashion, it making it super fun for the kids. There’s an amazing amount of playing, building and laughter coming from the house and yard.

Hunter has a lego Millennium Falcon that he just started yesterday:

Sasha has taken to FaceTiming her friends and showing them everything in our house. Yesterday her friend showed her how to do Memoji’s in FaceTime. I’m amazed that my 5-year old is now more savvy than I am with my phone. #DigitalNative

Other Stuff

Cases

  1. World: Cases 956,588, deaths: 48,583 (up 5,297 – daily increase of 25%)
  2. USA: Cases 216,722, deaths: 5,137 (up 1,056 – daily increase of 16%)
  3. Marin: Cases: 108, deaths: 6

On Wednesday, Trump said that we should expect 100,000-200,000 deaths in the USA. Wow.

2018 British Arrow Awards

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It’s becoming a tradition now for me and my family to go to the Walker Art Museum to watch the 2018 British Awards. It’s really pretty great to sit for an hour and watch the best commercials of the year.

This year it was noticeable about how many of them were about female empowerment (including the winner of Best Ad of the Year), which makes sense as it’s a topic capturing everyone’s mind share, everywhere.

My favorites of the year were these 5. They are pretty hilarious, cool, strong and, to use the British term, brilliant.

My favorite of the year was strange, ackward and just so funny. I have no idea what the ad is for but it’s still fantastic:

This next one is probably one of the funniest of the bunch, and I never even knew what Marmite was or that it could be so divisive:

This next one is really cute and captured our entire group. Even though it was the first ad we say, we all remembered it at the end

This one is just really cute and in the world we different it’s a great message of how kids don’t see color, race, etc.. Really well done

This one is just so epic. A move (the “tornado”) in a FIFA video game goes viral such that Ronaldo actually does it himself in a game and then goes even more viral to get other athletes to do it also. Really cool idea.

This final one is about the women’s Euro cup. The girl in the video just does a great job and is shows some great skill. Really liked this one

2014 Sport Video Roundup

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The videos and advertisements for sports flowing through the internets these days have been great.  Wanted to capture and share a few for y’all: 

 

Recently, there was a great new ad lauding Derek Jeter in the final year of his career (although it should be noted that Joe Mauer has posted better stats at age 31 than Jeter did at at 31)

Related to that, there’s a send-up of the above ad by Funny Or Die, not lauding Alex Rodriguez:

For the Timberwolves, I’m all in favor of trading Kevin Love for Wiggins to the Cavaliers.  Speaking of the Cavs, there’s a great mock video of Lebron and his “Coming Home” campaign mashed up with Dumb and Dumber.

Finally, this is over a month old, but the Beats ad for the World Cup was definitely the best one of the summer.  It came out right before the Cup started and got me incredibly pumped for it.  A great ad.

(thanks to Kesner and Matt for sharing these first)

Happy Holidays: My Holiday Reading

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I did a lot of couch reading this holiday and as a result found some good stuff on the interwebs and thought I’d share…

1. The Paul Rudd & Conan video

Paul Rudd has been going on Conan O’Brien’s show for 20 years.  Each year he brings a clip to promote a new film. Apparently, every time he brings the same video clip every time. Here’s a video showing all of them. This is pretty hysterical. 

2. Bill Gates’s Good News of 2013

Here’s a post from Bill Gates about the good things that happened this year. Gates is out there solving real problems and he has such a unique perspective of how things are improving on a global level. This is worth reading.  For instance, he lets us know:

Half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990. That’s the biggest decline ever recorded. And hardly anyone knows about it! 

3. Billy Joel at MSG

Billy (now age 64) hasn’t released a record since 1993 and hasn’t toured since he wrapped up his last gig in 2010, but he’s still changing the music business. He recently signed a deal with Madison Square Garden to play a concert there every month. A good article in businessweek.

4. Maria Bello’s Modern Family

I’ve always loved Maria Bello as an actress.  She has an interesting personal life too. She’s penned a good essay in the NYTimes about her children and romantic situation.  It’s good and worth a read.

   

5. NYTimes and New Yorker vs. Buzzfeed and Gawker

The online advertising world is changing.  Sites like Gawker and Buzzfeed are grabbing lots of traffic and some good ad dollars.  This article looks at how publications that try to be more exclusive (and thus have less traffic) are trying to compete.  Hint: it’s not going to work out well for them. 

6. Be Nice to Cats

We have two cats and love them (most of the time) and I loved this video of a mean old woman getting karma right in the face.

7. Pregnant Virgins

Here’s an Interesting study here of 8000 women about how they got pregnant.  Almost 1% of them said they got pregnant with no men involved (and no in vitro or other reproductive technology).  Here’s to immaculate conception.

Happy Holidays everyone.  (note: if you want to regularly get my links, follow me as @MikePLewis on twitter)

SNL and Wes Anderson’s Parody Trailer

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Saturday Night Live is definitely hit or miss.  Sometimes they can crush a skit but then the follow that up with 4 skits that aren’t even remotely funny.  That said, i watch every week and generally find myself laughing at least at a few of the skits. 

A recent skit that Diane and I both loved was this Wes Anderson horror movie trailer: 

What’s even better is the guy who created the short blogged the whole thing and talked about how hard it was to mimic Wes’s style – and how hard it is to film a horror movie trailer in the middle of NYC.   Its’ a great read if you love Wes Anderson films.  Makes you appreciate how hard his crazy style is. 

Well done SNL. This is why I’m a regular viewer. 

 

Jerry Seinfeld Still Has It

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I love watching standup comedy.  I’ve always thought that good standup is 50% content and 50% delivery. Some people are great at delivery (Sam Kinison, Aziz, Michael Richards) and some people have great content (Patton Oswalt), some are just pretty good at both (Jim Gaffigan, Daniel Tosh), while the legends are great at both (Chris Rock, Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle). 

It had been a while since I’d seen Jerry Seinfeld do standup, but I recently went and saw him that the Buell Theater in Denver.  Let me tell you, he killed it. I was crying for most of the show.  He’s still got it. Here’s a clip of some of his new stuff that he did on Jimmy Fallon: 

I also listed to him on Howard Stern where he did a really long interview.  He goes deep into his process of creating a joke and while he’s still doing comedy. I love long interviews like this.  

Some items

  • Talks about how bad network TV execs are about being able to determine what is funny. What they are good at is finding funny people, but the more involvement 
  • He was offered over $100 million to do another season of Seinfeld show
  • He has a strong sense that timing is everything. He knows how great his TV show was, he’s loath to do another one, he knows it could never be as good. As he says, you can love a comedian at an hour and 10 minutes and hate him at an hour and  30 and that’s why he had to end the show.  He said that the audience would turn on him if they did another season. 
  • He thought that Martin Short could have played the Kramer character
  • He saw no need to put women and blacks on “Seinfeld,” but after ten episodes Colin Quinn told him he was gonna get in trouble for it, and he did.

Take some time to play

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My mom sent over this video over the weekend and it is great.  You’ve probably seen it.  If not, it’s a good reminder that sometimes you need to stop what you’re doing and remember to have a little fun every now and again.

‘This is 40’ and the new wave of comedy

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I just saw “This is 40” last night on a double-date with my sister and TheBoss. I was hesitant going in because many critics have crushed Judd Apatow’s latest film calling it a sloppy, overlong, self-indulgent mess.

 

I felt differently though. I found it to be brutally honest and to go for uneasy truths over quick payoffs.  And this is the way comedy seems to be headed now.  The film feels less like “Knocked Up” and more like a 2.5 hour episode of “Louie.”

There’s a quote in Flavorwire from comedian Mike Birbiglia about how this trend is emerging, 

“I’d like to think that we’re part of a comedy movement right now that’s moving away from observational comedy and into something that’s more personal and real. But it’s just one person’s opinion — it’s what I prefer because I feel like it has more heart to it. It’s got more teeth. And I feel like in some ways it’s a response to the Seinfeldian era of comedy, which was observational to a point of brilliance. I mean, Seinfeld did it so well, and there were so many mimeographs of that style, and then at a certain point, those mimeographs became so boring … It’s actually more difficult to just tell your story, and tell it honestly, and admit that you’re wrong about things in a way that’s entertaining.”

I can definitely see this happening. It’s in the Louis CK specials and in Lena Dunham‘s “Girls.”  It’s a cool trend and I like where we’re headed.