The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

If you’re looking for a good time in Toronto tomorrow night, I recommend checking out the Pink Collar Comedy Tour, featuring four rising comedy stars making their name on New York’s stand-up scene:

• My friend Erin Judge (Comedy Central)
• Carrie Gravenson (Catch a Rising Star)
• Abbi Crutchfield (VH-1)
• Kaytlin Bailey (Stand Up New York)

Here’s a little more about the Pink Collar Comedy Tour’s comedians:

Erin Judge has appeared on Comedy Central’s “Live at Gotham” and at comedy clubs and festivals all around the world. This Brooklyn native recently released her first stand-up album, So Many Choices by Rooftop Comedy Productions to rave reviews.  When she is not touring she produces the popular comedy hour The Afterlife at New York City’s historic Sidewalk Cafe.

If you want to see Erin in action, check out this video of her stand-up in October 2013!

Carrie Gravenson, a native New Yorker, won the 2009 New York Underground Comedy Festival’s Emerging Talent Stand-Up Competition and was a runner up in 2009′s Catch a Rising Star Stand-Up Competition. She was a semi-finalist in the Ventura Comedy competition and the She Devil comedy contest in 2012.  She also co-produces “The Tomfoolery Hour,” a popular monthly comedy showcase in New York City.

Abbi Crutchfield is a comedian, writer and actor from Indianapolis, IN listed as one of the 18 Funny Women You Should Be Following on Twitter by Huffington Post Comedy. She produces two live comedy hours in New York City: The Living Room Show and Positively Awesome. You can read her work on Witstream.com. She has been featured on VH1 and MTV as well as in national commercials.

Kaytlin Bailey is the founder of the Pink Collar Comedy Tour and performs regularly at the famous Vagabond Cafe in the West Village of Manhattan. Her nothing-to-lose honesty and brazen comedic style are sure to make you laugh, or avoid eye contact with your significant other…and mom. She is originally from Raleigh, NC and a College of Charleston alumn.

They’re performing in Toronto tomorrow night — Wednesday, February 5th at 9:00 pm — at The Flying Beaver Pubaret (488 Parliament, on the west side, a block north of Carlton), and tickets are $10 in advance.

Here’s an album that turns 25 this year: The Pixies’ second studio album, Doolittle, released in April 1989. Here’s the whole album as a YouTube playlist, to help get your morning going.

Here’s the track listing for Doolittle:

• “Debaser” – 2:52
• “Tame” – 1:55
• “Wave of Mutilation” – 2:04
• “I Bleed” – 2:34
• “Here Comes Your Man” – 3:21
• “Dead” – 2:21
• “Monkey Gone to Heaven” – 2:56
• “Mr. Grieves” – 2:05
• “Crackity Jones” – 1:24
• “La La Love You” – 2:43
• “No. 13 Baby” – 3:51
• “There Goes My Gun” – 1:49
• “Hey” – 3:31
• “Silver” (Francis/Deal) – 2:25
• “Gouge Away” – 2:45

If you’re looking for alternate, more raw versions of the song, here’s a compilation of the demos of the Doolittle songs:

I’m a firm believer in the Chinese rule for food: anything with four legs that isn’t the table is fair game to cook and serve on a bed of rice.

Remember, the easiest way to get your hands on horsey goodness is…

And let’s not forget the horsey universal mystery of Swedish meatballs, as put forth in Babylon 5:

Click the photo to see the source.

Homonyms: a closed captioner’s worst enemy.

I suppose that this is a good time to include this Kids in the Hall clip…

…as well as this one (watch it until the end):

In case you missed part one, here it is.

My friend James walked past a branch of the Royal Bank today (and yes, I’ve been a customer of theirs since 1987) and saw this through one of the windows of their ground floor street-facing meeting rooms:

The text of the whiteboard reads:

RRSP Loans

1) Rebuttle [sic] from last week’s objections

a) I don’t have enough money right now

b) I need to speak to my accountant first

How do we overcome this?

It’s a reminder that you have to be careful about what you leave visible in ground-level offices with windows facing the street. I don’t think we know enough about the context of the meeting during which this was written on the whiteboard, but it’s worth noting that:

• The way it’s phrased — and once again, there isn’t enough context to know the intent — it appears as though the bank is trying to find a way to quash the very sensible objection of wanting to talk to one’s accountant before taking on a loan. An RRSP is one of the better financial tools available to just about every Canadian — a saving vehicle and a tax shelter — but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t talk to your accountant first. My suggestion would be to encourage customers to talk to their financial advisors, but also provide some kind of incentive to come back and apply for a loan after they’ve done so.
• They should turn sensitive material that could potentially make them look like dicks away from the window.
• Considering that even the entry-level jobs at banks require a university or college degree, it’s sad that there’s someone there who thinks that “rebuttle” is the correct spelling.

Click to see the post at full size.

Here’s a post that appeared in my Facebook feed quite recently. Still. Laughing. Hard.