The Smarmy Carny

Mitch Hedberg was one of the funniest comedians around. His comedy was filled with observational humor such as, "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an 'Escalator Temporarily out of Order' sign, just 'Escalator Temporarily Stairs'. Sorry for the convenience". Back in June 2006, I blogged a few hilarious Mitch Hedberg quotes.

Unfortunately, Mitch died on March 29, 2005 of "multiple drug toxicity" (O.D.), and I thought we had heard the last of his hilarious ramblings.

This month, however, the Comedy Central label released a new Mitch Hedberg CD titled "Do You Believe in Gosh?". The CD is a live recording from two months before Mitch died and has plenty of material I had not heard before. The CD does have explicit language, but beyond that, this CD is simply hilarious. I certainly suggest you check it out!

Just a small sampling from the CD:

• My belt holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What [is] really goin on down there? Who is the real hero?
• Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool apotamus?
• In Venice, if you're not book smart but you do know what's going on, you've got "canal smarts".
• I taught myself how to play guitar, which was a bad decision because I didn't know how to play it. So I was a [bad] teacher.

Google is giving away $10 Million through Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced as "Project 10 to the 100th"). The money will go to fund between one and five ideas that will help humanity in a great way.

The guidelines are extremely loose for this project: They would prefer submissions in one of the following eight categories: Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter, and "Everything Else" . . . So even if your idea doesn't fit into the seven extremely vague categories, they are still willing to accept it.

Sure, those very basic guidelines are great and leave it open to your own creativity, but what sort of idea are they really looking for? The example Google offers to us is the Hippo Water Roller, which essentially looks like one of those heavy rollers used to even out landscaping, but filled with healthy drinking water. This allows people who have to transport their water supply to easily roll 24 gallons of water at a time, compared with a 5 gallon bucket of water on top of the head.

You can upload an ancillary video to YouTube to help you express or display your idea, but the meat of the presentation must be filled out via the web form. Google has put out a video presentation for their project:

How many people could your idea help?

All you need to do is submit your idea via the website before October 20, 2008. The submissions are reviewed and on January 27, 2008, 100 ideas will be voted on by the general public/Webosphere. The top 20 submissions will then pass to an advisory board, who will choose between one and five ideas, which will split the $10 Million prize equally.

For those looking to get rich from their ideas, you might want to look elsewhere. As the site's FAQ says:

Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen?
A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people.

The $10 Million is not going to the people who come up with these ideas. The money is going toward the development of these ideas to help make them a reality.

If coming up with a great idea to help the world just isn't your "thing", you can always try to win the $30 Million Lunar X Prize that Google has also posted. For that prize, you'll have to do a lot more than come up with ideas, though. $30 Million goes to the first team to send a robot to the moon, have that robot travel 500 meters along the moon's surface, and receive back video, image, and data transmissions here on Earth. You might want to hurry on that offer, though: 13 of the teams have been working on this since September 13, 2007, so you've got some catch-up to do!

How can you possibly pass up Cold Stone Creamery's World's Largest Ice Cream Social?

On September 25, 2008 from 5pm until 8pm, Cold Stone Creamery is giving away free 3 oz. "Make-a-Wish"-sized creations. This free portion is about 60% the size of Cold Stone's "Like It" (small) size, which is approximately 5 oz. The stipulations are that your sample will be Emily or Jack's Creation:

• Jack's Creation — Marshmallow ice cream with OREO® Cookies, Chocolate Chips and Fudge
• Emily's Creation — Nutter Butter® ice cream with White Chocolate Chips, Kit Kat® and Yellow Cake

These are two new flavors created by two Make-a-Wish children named — you guessed it — Jack and Emily, who are 9 and 10 years old, respectively.

Why free ice cream? Cold Stone is doing this for a good cause: About 85% of all donations given during that time will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Visit these official sites for the full "scoop":

• Cold Stone Creamery's Promotions page
• Make-A-Wish Foundation's page for The World's Largest Ice Cream Social

Kahala Brands owns Cold Stone Creamery, and some of their other stores are also having giveaways during the last week of the month. If you live near Blimpie, The Great Steak & Potato Co., Samurai Sam’s Teriyaki Grill, or TacoTime you can grab some free stuff from those locations, too! Of course, don't forget to donate to a great charity while you're there!

On May 17, 1972, Don Gorske ate a Big Mac.

"No big deal," you might say, but Gorske never stopped. In that first month in 1972, he ate 265 Big Macs.

Due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder, Gorske continued eating Big Macs every day. In fact, Gorske has had less than 10 Big Mac-less days in those 36+ years since. According to the AP, Gorske recently hit the 23,000 Big Mac milestone. Currently, he generally eats two Big Macs a day.

What, you don't believe Gorske? Lucky for you, he has also saved all of his Big Mac receipts for all those Big Macs!

Gorske wrote a book about his experiences titled 22,477 Big Macs

Watch this video to get an idea of what the man is like . . . and no, he's not obese!

Here's to you, Mr. Obsessive Compulsive Big Mac Eater.

Thanks to the success of MXC and then Wipeout, we're seeing a rash of Japanese game imports coming to the U.S.

I'm not sure about the rules exactly, but it really does seem straightfoward. The contestant stands at the end of a runway in front of a pit of water. A large wall with a certain shape comes toward them, and the contestant has to contort their body into the shape of the hole so they remain in the playing area instead of being swept into the water. Some holes/shapes require laying down, jumping, and teamwork.

Fox's casting call earlier this summer requested same-sex teams of three players, which seems to have been the format for the original show as well.

Of course, reading about the show tends to be fairly boring, while watching these people play the game is much more enjoyable:

Now go ahead . . . start filling out that application. You know you want to try it yourself!

Billy Reid of Very Tasteful puts out consistently catchy songs on his website. One of his latest tracks, and True Story is no exception.

The video for this song is one of those "photograph" videos. It's missing the "photograph-turned-to-video" element, but still worth watching.

He also released a video of Swim Now, a song based on the Christopher Guest's SNL sketch "Men's Synchronized Swimmers" featuring Martin Short and Harry Shearer.

Let's talk summer Olympics, shall we?

As with most people, I enjoy when the Olympics are on, because it gives you the chance to watch all sorts of . And let's face it — this isn't the 70s, when the Olympics took up "all three" channels for the entire day. You don't have to be inundated by the Olympics in the 21st century, because there are hundreds other channels to choose from! But nonetheless, despite the positive aspects to the Olympic Games, there are always things to complain about.

• I really enjoy getting a chance to watch some of these sports that you really have little or no opportunity to watch at any other time except every four years. Watching some of these sports, I also realize that we can't really take watching them more than once every four years. For instance, I have an extremely low tolerance for watching televised weightlifting, and while professional badminton is cool to see, I usually change the channel after a few sets.
• What's with this growing trend the past 10 years or so to run 5+ minute highlights for each and every Olympic athlete that you've never heard of before, and to run 30+ minute documentaries on the athletes you have heard of? A few athletes genuinely do have a story worth being retold, and Phelp's achievements really do take 30 minutes to retell. But many of these stories are average, boring people whose only interesting feature is that they're good enough at their sport to make it to the Olympics on behalf of their country.
• Sports that involve judges are never as enjoyable as races (e.g. swimming, track, cycling) and sports with an objective scoring system (e.g. soccer, basketball, table tennis). You basically watch gymnasts do these incomprehensible flips and turns in the air, and all you can tell is that it is bad when they fall down. The scores come out and you really just have to shrug and let the announcers assure you that it's an appropriate score.
• If I have to hear one more sportscaster ramble on and on about how so-and-so's coach is her dad, I'm going to lose it. We get it, but it's really not that uncommon. Many 16 year olds competing in the Olympics are that good because their parents did the same thing and have pushed their kids to follow in their footsteps. And since these parents are living vicariously through their children's accomplishments, they become control freaks and insist on coaching.

I'll take the summer Olympics over the Winter games any time, but we can discuss that in two years when those come around.

Thoughts, agreements, complaints, or criticisms? Please feel free to comment.