Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

The Day After Tomorrow (and I don't mean Tuesday)

Today is my mom's birthday. She is 82. Happy Birthday, Mom! (No, she doesn't use the Internet, although it may have piqued her curiosity when B helped her organize and schedule her Florida trip online at Christmastime.)

Just before I woke up, I dreamed that my boss at the college-test-prep-company was running a comedy night, and I'd signed up for a stand-up spot. I went to tell her I was dropping out of the line-up, but she wouldn't let me, so I had to do my three minutes onstage. (For those of you who don't know me, I am NOT funny. Sarcastic, yes. Funny, no.)

Well, the crowd liked me, they really did. So much so that I was one of a handful of comedians called back to do an encore. And all of it - even the opener - was improv, not a single prepared joke or riff.

Sometimes the funniest things are those that are unintentional. Take the movie "The Day after Tomorrow" - please. It's the campiest thing ever - and I don't really think they were going for camp. It's not just that it's bad science, or no science at all; it's not just that the characters are stock figures interacting in stock ways (see http://i-girl.diaryland.com/040602_76.html for a hilarious analysis); it's that the complete rejection of the logic of time-space-causality as organizing concepts of reality sends it right over into camp. Need to walk from Philadelphia to Manhattan in a howling blizzard through 25-foot drifts? Yeah, that should take a day or two. Or turn on the grill in an abandoned Burger King? Even though all the other utilities on the planet are frozen solid, the BK gas line still works fine.

I saw the movie with some climatologists who were all prepped to critique the science. How disappointing for them: there was no science to critique!