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Archive | Time Out New York

Exciting news; static cling; clarification

Teresa Strasser, Adam Carolla, me

So much to tell. First of all, yes, I am the new news girl on the Adam Carolla Show. I got the word over the weekend but it was a secret which is why I didn’t do my own show on Sunday. I debated and while I knew I would be able to pretend not yet to know I just didn’t delight in the idea of having to lie to my viewers who would be asking if I knew yet, and so I did the next best thing: went sweater shopping.

How’d it go? Fuckloads of static cling is how it went. And then I had that moment of pulling off a sweater and hearing the crackle and looking in the mirror and seeing my hair look like this

and knowing I was in for a painful shock the next time I touched anything metal.

But back to more pressing matters. I’d like to just take this moment to clarify two things no one has really landed upon yet. They both involve today’s podcast.

The moment where we’re talking about my old band and Adam asks the name and I say The Angoras and he says “There’s a sheep and a rabbit?”and then I say, as if I’m some kind of moron, “On my amp?” What I was referring to was our singer’s practice of draping our amps and hardware with plastic animal figurines or stuffed animals when we played live. During the podcast recording we were staring at a photo of me playing live in the band which the producers dug up and there was a pony on my amp, hence my confusion.

And another note about that photo. It was taken in 98 or 99 and I was carrying around a good 30 more pounds, apparently in my legs. Not that it’s important that I issue this disclaimer but I’d just like to start our relationship (the one where I overexplain stuff) on the right shallow foot.

And also, I’m not loving the way my dress looks in the photo of me, Teresa and Adam. Ok done!

Wait, one more thing: You should read Teresa and Adam’s books. I read both and loved them.

Oh wait, another thing I want to make clear. During the audition process I referred to myself as a “polyglot” when discussing my practice of counting to twenty in French and Spanish while I’m at the gym on the treadmill. I was joking! I was not actually bragging about my ability to count to twenty in foreign languages as much as making fun of the idea that that would be something to tout. Did that make sense? I didn’t think so.

Ok, see you guys every day!

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Puppies, wisdom teeth, Dustin, socks, hoarding, babies

I’m the kind of person who can feel attachment to just about anything, as evidenced by the way I name my plants and can’t bring myself to buy a fish because I know it would crush me to find Fred or Skippy (the name of my fish) belly up and to feel I had failed him. The irony, and now I’m not sure if that’s the correct usage of irony or the casual incorrect usage which eventually will become the correct usage since words are losing their distinct meanings and pretty soon we’ll all walk around “bemused” with “notorious” iPads that “literally” say “MLGHRF” on them and what was I saying? Oh yeah, the odd or unexpected thing here is that I can’t bring myself to buy a fish and yet I dream of having a puppy. You might be thinking, “Don’t you mean a dog? You know that puppies don’t stay puppies forever, right?” however I really just mean a puppy. I definitely don’t have time to deal with anything that’s losing cuteness and gaining size by the day. In fact, I fully intend to make any puppy I purchase sign a contract stating that either party may terminate the arrangement at any time.

I was thinking about attachment though because vronsfan2005 got his wisdom teeth out and tweeted about it and I got mine out some years ago and I was remembering that a few days before the procedure I was sitting in my chair at Time Out New York thinking, “These teeth will never be in this office again.”

I can also recall having trouble throwing away a sock many years ago, and Dustin (who is not my boyfriend! I realize that my blithe references to him may scare off potential suitors and I’m in  no position to scare off any potential suitors since my biological clock is ticking hard and I really want to get married and have babies immediately, in fact that’s what I tell guys I go on dates with when I explain that Dustin is not my boyfriend). Where was I? I really need to quit going on these long parenthetical tangents and then thinking I can get myself back on track. I’m a writer, so if anyone can I can, and yet it’s as if I’m driving a car and while trying to get back home I lose interest in retracing my steps and instead decide to just pull over and build a new different home. So my point was that Dustin is not my boyfriend, we’re just friends, but once  he busted me about my socks.

Anyway, I think maybe I’m a proto-hoarder. I have hoarding tendencies. Of course, I think probably everyone does which is why that show is so popular.

Oh and RSVP to my Ustream show on Wednesday, won’t you? It may or may not feature Jim Norton. It will definitely feature me talking about this whole online dating thing.

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The Daily Alison (Bacon jam, hold the pants… with guest Joel Stein)

A few things: After this interview Joel Stein got in touch to say that with hindsight he would have changed his answer to apple butter. “The correct answer is mustard!” I yelled into the phone, even though he’d emailed me. Sometimes I do not know how to get through to that man. Also, here’s the article he mentioned where he took the Narcissistic Personality Disorder Test.

Oh and I think I said that he used to write for TIME but he very clearly still does write for TIME. I don’t know what to say for myself.

And lastly, if I were a wiz at audio editing I think I could have punched up the audio when he was talking to make for a more enjoyable listening experience however I’m not an audio editing wiz, nor even a video editing wiz. My expertise is limited to being delightful and having great hair. It’s a shame. If you happen to be one of the aforementioned wizzes though, do get in touch.

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The Daily Alison (Part 1, where Will Forte is writing a MacGruber movie)

Ok, I’m not going to lie. This is a little slow at the beginning but you people need to slow down and take a breath anyway. Seriously, you’re like a blur with all this to-ing and fro-ing. And fro-yo-ing. Some of those toppings are going to fall off if you keep this up and I will be damned if I’m going to just follow after you picking up your sprinkles and pokies and jimmies and scrapple. And joeys. (Tiny chocolate covered baby kangaroos.) (That’s disgusting.)

Anyway, here’s the story I wrote about Kirstin Wiig referred to in the episode and here’s more on Will Forte.

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Drawers; Drew Toal

So I’m back in NY and I haven’t unpacked yet but there’s something I need to say before I do that and also I’ll probably need to sit around for awhile and possibly I’ll never unpack. I just don’t like unpacking. I don’t really like packing either. I’ve got a problem with things. I never quite know what to do with them and I have trouble getting rid of them. Over the vacation I was hanging out with the friend I dubbed Phil in the last post, although I could totally tell you it was the friend I dubbed Collins because seriously, how would you know? He had this bank of very small drawers with tiny things inside them. Tiny Tabasco bottles and those runts candies and teacup poodles and thimbles. Actually they were thimble poodles. They’re so cute but I can’t help but feel sorry for them.

Actually, none of those things were in the drawers. I don’t really know what was in the drawers, probably nails of various sizes and washers and thumb tacks and twist ties and earring backings and paper clips and Q-tips and cotton balls and perfume samples and ribbons and very small scarves and packets of Splenda.

Oh! Speaking of, my landlords who are the best landlords ever got me a Facts of Life DVD and a book of recipes featuring Splenda for my bday! Aren’t those the best gifts ever? They are!

So back to the small drawers. I looked at this bank of drawers and felt so calm and relaxed looking at it. It was like a waterfall screen saver or nature sounds. It was the organizational equivalent of a rainstick, except rainsticks are cheesy and make me think of didgeridoos, which are noisy.

I was so profoundly affected by the small drawers that I thought to myself, “Self, take note of this and do the equivalent in your New York apartment.”

As I write this I’m sitting inside a small drawer and to my left is my sleeping drawer and to my right is my showering drawer. The only thing is that it’s kind of difficult to use the bathroom in the middle of the night because it’s hard to open the drawers from the inside and once you manage to get the thing open you have to throw yourself over the edge and then cling to the whole bank of drawers and then, because they all look the same from the outside it’s easy to forget which is which. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

Wait, none of that was what I meant to say. Damn!

What I meant to say was that there’s this young whippersnapper with whom I worked at Time Out New York by the name of Drew Toal who has informed me that he wants to challenge my media empire. “It’s lonely in the upper quadrant of the lower middle,” I warned him, but there was no getting through to him. He has a blog and I’m remiss in not linking to it so go there and get to know him.

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puppies and lesbians

I don’t mean to blow smoke up Gawker’s ass by linking to them twice recently but their referring to Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson as “lesbadoodles” cracks me up.

Incidentally, when my friend Dustin and I worked at Time Out New York we wanted to breed puppies in the kitchen and call them TONYdoodles. Somehow that morphed into discussions of doodledoodles, but I can’t remember why exactly.

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Saget bio

The Bob Saget Biography Channel Bio that I was interviewed for aired. I know this because I received a nice note about it from someone who saw it and then found me on MySpace, which is how I find out that most of the Biography Channel Bios that I was interviewed for are airing. I added a couple air times to the upcoming TV appearance sidebar on the side of this page. I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t remember what I said, nor what I wore. Something brilliant, surely. (Something brilliant being what I said. I imagine what I wore was a sweater. I would never use “brilliant” to describe clothes, anyway, unless I was in Britain taking the piss and chatting up mates on my mobile.)

Need more Bob? Or more me? Or more me on Bob? Here’s my Hot Seat interview with Bob Saget.

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Appliance interruptus

I woke up this morning sleep-blogging, or rather sleep-storming, or rather thinking about fodder for a potential blog post which struck me as brilliant in my not-awake state. It would have looked like this:

Very Specific Reassurances

1. They can’t vacuum forever.

2. ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (this is where I fell back asleep again)

Sadly I can’t see the appeal of this list beyond people whose upstairs neighbors vacuum for what seems like forever early in the morning.

In other news, I added to the list of articles I wrote recently and list of articles I wrote long ago (on the right side of this blog). It really breaks down to stuff I wrote for Time Out New York and stuff I wrote for the OC Weekly, so maybe some day I’ll change the way it’s labeled. The TONY stuff shows more restraint, but overall the OC Weekly stuff is probably more fun to read—arguably more creative—and I don’t quite know why that is. That’s not true actually, I do know why it is, but I’m still unsettled by it.

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