Month: September 2021

Categories
It Happened to Me Tampa Bay

We enjoyed Hasan Minhaj’s new comedy show, The King’s Jester

Anitra and I caught Hasan Minhaj’s new show, The King’s Jester, last night at the Straz Center. Long story short: He’s still on top of his funny story-telling game, and still able to weave the hilarious, harrowing, and heartbreaking into a single, beautiful thread.

There were two shows in Tampa last night: one at 7:00 (the one we caught) and a second at 10:00. These were the second and third shows of the tour — the first one was on Friday in Miami — and it had all the energy of a brand new venture. There are still tickets for this afternoon’s show in Orlando at 5:30.

It may help if you know a little bit about the story  where he spoke at the Time 100 gala in 2019 about how he called out Jared Kushner to speak to his buddy Prince Mohammed bin Salman “MBS” Al Saud (the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, with whom Kushner chats via WhatsApp) to free Loujain al-Hathloul, an activist imprison for championing women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia:

If you want to find out how one joke got him into comedy — and how another almost got him out of it — you should catch this show. I don’t want to give away too much, but if you’re a fan of his Netflix show, Patriot Act, you’ll learn its secret origin in its show.

If you’re concerned about these shows being possible superspreader events, you may be pleased to know that:

  • You need proof of a COVID-19 vaccination to be admitted.
  • You need to wear a mask to attend the show (and no food or drink is allowed inside the auditorium.
Categories
It Happened to Me

Current situation (Saturday, 4:00 p.m.)

My office. Tap to view at full size.

Well, that’s enough coding for now. Got to go get ready to go out for dinner and see Hasan Minhaj’s show at the Straz.

Categories
funny Music

Hurt (or: “Blue’s boo-boos”)

Thanks to John Poulos for the find!
Categories
Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay deal of the day: “Limited edition” life-size Spider-Man statue ($1,500)

To help promote the DVD release of the 2002 Spider-Man film (the one with Tobey Maguire as the titular character), Blockbuster commissioned a few thousand “limited edition” life-size statues for their stores. You can find a number of these status on eBay and various online reseller forums, and one’s just popped up in the Tampa Bay Facebook Marketplace — it’s selling for $1,500.

Here’s the copy from the posting on Facebook Marketplace:

Life-size Spiderman statue, Blockbuster Limited addition with base. Only 3200 made!
Has some damage to one foot and a few scrapes but other wise good condition.

Here’s a close-up of that foot damage:

Aside from that, it’s got the wear and tear you’d expect from a display at a once-busy store and twenty years’ passage of time.

As with any “collectible”, it has “certificates of authenticity” — they’re on the statue’s base:

Interested? Contact the seller on their Facebook Marketplace listing!

Categories
Music Stranger than Fiction

It’s official: Rick Astley is cooler than Morrissey

If you’d asked me back in 1991, when I was an alt-rock DJ — who was cooler: Morrissey or Rick Astley? — I would’ve been dead wrong. But now I know better.

Once upon a time, there was a brilliant English alt-rock band called The Smiths, who were fronted by one Steven Patrick Morrissey, better known as just Morrissey. They occupied an elevated place in my music collection, and you’d often hear them playing during my DJ gigs at Crazy Go Nuts University’s engineering pub.

As a (relatively) openly gay man — a tricky thing during the band’s time, which was from 1982 to 1986 — the child of Irish Catholics during the era of the IRA, a vegetarian, and lyricist for the excluded, he became a hero of sorts for people who didn’t quite fit in.

But from the 1990s on, he’s been showing his less savory side: the one that sides with the British far right, happily spouts white supremacist rhetoric, and has been all too willing to embrace fascism.

As one of his contemporaries, the great Billy Bragg, said in an interview with The Guardian:

“It stinks,” says Billy Bragg, who worked with, and loved, the Smiths during the 80s. “They were the greatest band of my generation, with the greatest guitar player and the greatest lyricist. I think Johnny [Marr] was a constraint on him … back then he had to fit into the idea of the Smiths. But now he’s betraying those fans, betraying his legacy and empowering the very people Smiths fans were brought into being to oppose. He’s become the Oswald Mosley of pop.”

For more:

To put a twist on a song title from The Smiths: There was a light, but it’s gone out.

Enter this guy:

Rick Astley’s image has changed over the years. Pop star in the late ’80s and early ’90s, forgotten in the late ’90s and most of the 2000s, and then came Rickrolling in 2008.

Since then, he’s had a slow but steady upward trajectory, having Rickrolled the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade…

…to performing with the Foo Fighters…

…to joining Choir! Choir! Choir! at a small live venue in Toronto (thanks to Eldon Brown for letting me know about this one!)…

…to making a great cover of Foo Fighter’s Everlong…

…and finally, performing Smiths numbers with English indie pop band Blossoms…

…including This Charming Man:

You can read more about his performance here:

While I still appreciate the beautiful work that Morrissey did back then — after all, there wouldn’t be a Smiths without him — it’s great to see Rick Astley taking up the mantle. It’s all the Mozzer goodness, and none of the fascism or white supremacy. It’s win-win!

Categories
Slice of Life

The Extrovert

I feel Todd’s pain.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

An early interview with Simu Liu (“Shang-Chi” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe)

For those of you whose first exposure to Simu Liu was through Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, you may not know that we’re both handsome Asian gentlemen who grew up in Toronto.

A lot of us know him as Jung from the Canadian TV series Kim’s Convenience (which you can find on Netflix), which in turn is based on a play that debuted in the Toronto Fringe Festival back in 2011. Kim’s Convenience has come a long way in ten years, and so has Simu.

Karim Kanji is a third handsome gentleman from Toronto, whom I know from my time as a developer evangelist at large in Toronto (we met during my Microsoft years). Back in 2017, when Kim’s Convenience was still in its first season, Karim interviewed Simu for his podcast, and you can find it here. Give it a listen, and find out about Simu not just before his hitting the big time!

(There are a lot of very “Toronto” references in the interview. Got questions? Need context? Let me know in the comments.)