Comedian
by Scott Hardie on May 25, 2007

The bad news: I have a miserable cold (thanks Charlotte) and I slept for an hour last night.
The good news: I had to speak in front of a hundred people today.
Why is that good? Because every once in a while, my company asks me to host an event, and I get to boost my stature while doing something I love, which is making a crowd laugh. Today's occasion was a roast for the longtime HR director upon her retirement. Nothing is more fun than getting to rip into the senior executives in public and getting laughs instead of worrying about a pink slip. And when it's a roast, there's no such thing as too mean. Let the individual speakers pay the compliments and go for the warm fuzzies; I'm there for the zingers.
I was afraid having a cold was going to sink it at the last minute, since I can't talk for long without having a coughing fit. Instead, I talked my kind coworker Marlon into reading the speech from a sheet of paper while I pantomimed next to him, and damn if that didn't work out to be even funnier.
What a great way to spend a birthday.
One Reply to Comedian
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

What We Kept
One winter in the mid-1970s, my grandfather Donald was hospitalized with a serious infection in his foot. Being diabetic, he went out of his way for years to avoid any infections or other hazards, but his luck had run out. On Christmas Day, he was informed by the doctors that they would have to amputate his foot the next morning. Go »
Gingerbread Office
I don't often join in Kelly's craft projects, and it's even rarer for her to join in one of mine. But that's what happened last week when my company held a gingerbread house contest, and Kelly pitched in to help the team that I signed up for. We decided to make a "north pole branch" of our Sarasota office. Go »
Dumb Question
Why is it called "word to the wise" when you're telling someone who doesn't know? Go »
So Long, NCSA Primer
Someone asked me for help learning HTML today. I turned to my trusted traditional source, the good old primer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, but alas, it has finally been removed after all these years. This was one of the major how-to guides in the early years of the web, and it's the very guide that I used to teach myself HTML one weekend in 1996, from which this very site you're reading has since evolved. Go »
More Free-Fallin'
A skydiver's chutes won't open, he falls 12,000 feet and survives with minor injuries, and the whole thing is captured on his helmet camera. (link) You have to click on the speaker to activate the sound. Go »
Jackie Mason | May 27, 2007
[hidden by author request]