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

Jackie Mason | May 27, 2007
[hidden by author request]


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 »

Final Chapter

The movies that are going to be written about in Brittany Murphy's obituaries are Just Married, 8 Mile, Clueless, and maybe Sin City. But the one most sadly relevant is a movie that few people saw, The Dead Girl. Each chapter of the movie shows how a different woman is affected by the discovery of a woman's body in a field, until the last chapter doubles back and shows us her haunting final days. Go »

R.I.P. Mom

You were so still in your bed when I could finally sit down beside you, a few hours after the facility notified me that you had died. I hadn't seen you be that peaceful in years, your eyes not scanning the room for clues, your hands not turning over each object in front of you for endlessly repeated examination. I whispered to you the most urgent and most precious things I had to say, the secrets and atonements and wishes foremost on my mind. Go »

Crash

There are some dangerous intersections in our neighborhood, where trucks come barreling through after the light turns red. This morning, Kelly and I were waiting at the light when she dropped her sunglasses. "Fuck beans," she muttered, unbuckling her seat belt and leaning forward just as the light turned green. Go »

Unmitigated Gall

Life gets unpleasant quickly when your gallbladder stops working. TMI alert. I spent all day Friday with sharp pain in my abdomen, diagnosed as spasms from my gallbladder trying to expel a stone. Go »

Tom's Ball Smells Like Apple Pie

For the last four months, I've spent Tuesdays at a bowling alley playing in a just-for-fun league. Score was kept, but the mood was friendly and non-competitive, except for one of my teammates who kept competing with us instead of the other teams. :-) I struggled with it at first, partly because I thought I was signing up for a six-week league and it turned out to be a sixTEEN-week league, and partly because my skills had somehow diminished even though I'm in better shape now. Go »

Upsetting the Pace

Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on homosexuality (link): "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts... I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way." Go »