hey! here's my piece from last night's stand-up at the M-Bar in l.a.
everyone had to riff on the same topic: love and/or obsession.
remember, this is personal point of view humor, not set-ups and punchlines comedy.
Love or obsession? Did we learn nothing when Tina Turner asked: Whats love got to do with it?
I can trace my obsession back to late 1995.
Id just bought a PC and subscribed to AmericaOnLine. This was the early days of AOL, and I was able to use my name as my e-mail address. Nowadays, unless your name is Ezra or something unusual like that, thats not easy to do. So my e-mail addy is XxxxXxxxxx@ aol.com.
OK, now Ive shared my e-mail address with you and maybe that was a mistake.
So over the years I tried all of the typical on-line crap. Chat rooms, gaming, virtual sex, porn and their ilk.
You know, the usual stuff.
But nothing really grabbed me until I discovered the
THE GREATEST ON-LINE CREATION OF ALL TIME!
Im talking about eBay.
Now maybe youve bid for stuff on eBay, too, and youre thinking, whats the obsession?
Lets compare notes.
In 2 &1/2 years Ive purchased 342 items on eBay. Thats about 19 purchases a month.
Many of those items are things I once had or wished I could have, when I was a kid. It wasnt long after I discovered eBay that I realized I could buy virtually any toy that I grew up with. I can indulge all of my childhood obsessions because now I possess the one thing I didnt have when I was a kid:
Money.
So what have I bought?
Books I loved when I was a teenager. Dog-eared paperbacks yellowed with age, and the unmistakable bouquet of, well, old books. I especially searched for paperbacks about the cult-TV program The Avengers.
Ill buy almost any Avengers stuff because Ive never gotten over my boyhood obsession with Mrs. Peel.
(note to sg readers: you already know this to be true: check out "what gets me hot" on my profile)
Ive bought CDs long out of print. Old Firesign Theatre records, anything having to do with my favorite band, Supertramp, and anything Python;
Action figures from the X-Files, Star Trek & even Janeane Garofalo. Action figures my wife, Molly, annoyingly refers to as my dolls.
I believe you can measure the impact of anything in our culture by the speed with which their stuff winds up on eBay. I bought my Queer Eye for the Straight Guy whistle (that says Bad Fashion Blows) before the fifth episode aired.
Kill Bill Volume 1? I had my O-Ren Ishii clock before the movie premiered.
It wasnt long before Id spun out of control:
A Fawlty Towers Teapot
Beverage coasters from Absolutely Fabulous
A Man from UNCLE lunchbox
The Best of Family Affair
Paul Williams CDs
Soon I was buying items I already
owned, just so someone else couldnt have them.
Thats when I realized my obsession was an addiction. And as part of my 12-step solution, Im here today to warn you:
Theres danger lurking behind every eBay listing.
Sure, the toys and other stuff on eBay look good, but you need to know the ropes.
I didnt know the ropes when I first tried to buy Molly a birthday present in 2001.
Thats when I created my eBay account name, MollysBirthday.
Okay, now Ive shared my eBay account name with you and maybe that was a mistake.
Molly had wanted her own Zaxxon video-arcade game. Just like the big one she played in our neighborhood bar.
Well, there werent any of those for sale at the time, so I bought her a table top version, and with this purchase I learned my first eBay lesson:
Descriptions are often exaggerated.
When it says table top that doesnt mean a large item that consumes most of the top of a table.
It means "something no bigger than a calculator." This table top version was about this big. The joy stick was about the size of a Q-Tip. So here she was, trying to master the fine art of piloting a futuristic plane through enemy space -- with her bifocals and this Q-Tip thingy.
Here are some other eBay tips:
When it says good condition, thats a technical auction term that means like shit.
Mollys Zaxxon game was shipped with what I can only guess were the original batteries from 1985. They had leaked, oozing a rich brown gravy onto the inside of the box. And it was mailed from Canada, which Im sure violated some EPA hazardous substance regulation.
When an eBay item is described as rare, thats a technical auction term that means youll find no more than 20 or 30 exact same items listed for sale on eBay at this time.
Zaxxon games are still for sale today... Molly is just one of the rare people who own the exciting table top version in good condition.
Tonight Ive brought along one of my favorite purchases:
Some of you may recognize this item. Its from the 1960s, and no self-respecting spy-kid would be caught dead without this, the original transformer toy:
Its Mattels Zero-M camera.
Now, if you can all squeeze together so I can take a picture.....
(OK, SG READERS, THIS IS A PURELY VISUAL THING:
THE ZERO-M CAMERA IS A TOY CAMERA. WHEN YOU PRETEND TO TAKE A PICTURE AND PUSH THE SHUTTER BUTTON, IT TURNS INTO A PISTOL.
SO I HOLD IT UP AS IF TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE AUDIENCE AND...)
Click!
And good night!
xxxooo
everyone had to riff on the same topic: love and/or obsession.
remember, this is personal point of view humor, not set-ups and punchlines comedy.
Love or obsession? Did we learn nothing when Tina Turner asked: Whats love got to do with it?
I can trace my obsession back to late 1995.
Id just bought a PC and subscribed to AmericaOnLine. This was the early days of AOL, and I was able to use my name as my e-mail address. Nowadays, unless your name is Ezra or something unusual like that, thats not easy to do. So my e-mail addy is XxxxXxxxxx@ aol.com.
OK, now Ive shared my e-mail address with you and maybe that was a mistake.
So over the years I tried all of the typical on-line crap. Chat rooms, gaming, virtual sex, porn and their ilk.
You know, the usual stuff.
But nothing really grabbed me until I discovered the
THE GREATEST ON-LINE CREATION OF ALL TIME!
Im talking about eBay.
Now maybe youve bid for stuff on eBay, too, and youre thinking, whats the obsession?
Lets compare notes.
In 2 &1/2 years Ive purchased 342 items on eBay. Thats about 19 purchases a month.
Many of those items are things I once had or wished I could have, when I was a kid. It wasnt long after I discovered eBay that I realized I could buy virtually any toy that I grew up with. I can indulge all of my childhood obsessions because now I possess the one thing I didnt have when I was a kid:
Money.
So what have I bought?
Books I loved when I was a teenager. Dog-eared paperbacks yellowed with age, and the unmistakable bouquet of, well, old books. I especially searched for paperbacks about the cult-TV program The Avengers.
Ill buy almost any Avengers stuff because Ive never gotten over my boyhood obsession with Mrs. Peel.
(note to sg readers: you already know this to be true: check out "what gets me hot" on my profile)
Ive bought CDs long out of print. Old Firesign Theatre records, anything having to do with my favorite band, Supertramp, and anything Python;
Action figures from the X-Files, Star Trek & even Janeane Garofalo. Action figures my wife, Molly, annoyingly refers to as my dolls.
I believe you can measure the impact of anything in our culture by the speed with which their stuff winds up on eBay. I bought my Queer Eye for the Straight Guy whistle (that says Bad Fashion Blows) before the fifth episode aired.
Kill Bill Volume 1? I had my O-Ren Ishii clock before the movie premiered.
It wasnt long before Id spun out of control:
A Fawlty Towers Teapot
Beverage coasters from Absolutely Fabulous
A Man from UNCLE lunchbox
The Best of Family Affair
Paul Williams CDs
Soon I was buying items I already
owned, just so someone else couldnt have them.
Thats when I realized my obsession was an addiction. And as part of my 12-step solution, Im here today to warn you:
Theres danger lurking behind every eBay listing.
Sure, the toys and other stuff on eBay look good, but you need to know the ropes.
I didnt know the ropes when I first tried to buy Molly a birthday present in 2001.
Thats when I created my eBay account name, MollysBirthday.
Okay, now Ive shared my eBay account name with you and maybe that was a mistake.
Molly had wanted her own Zaxxon video-arcade game. Just like the big one she played in our neighborhood bar.
Well, there werent any of those for sale at the time, so I bought her a table top version, and with this purchase I learned my first eBay lesson:
Descriptions are often exaggerated.
When it says table top that doesnt mean a large item that consumes most of the top of a table.
It means "something no bigger than a calculator." This table top version was about this big. The joy stick was about the size of a Q-Tip. So here she was, trying to master the fine art of piloting a futuristic plane through enemy space -- with her bifocals and this Q-Tip thingy.
Here are some other eBay tips:
When it says good condition, thats a technical auction term that means like shit.
Mollys Zaxxon game was shipped with what I can only guess were the original batteries from 1985. They had leaked, oozing a rich brown gravy onto the inside of the box. And it was mailed from Canada, which Im sure violated some EPA hazardous substance regulation.
When an eBay item is described as rare, thats a technical auction term that means youll find no more than 20 or 30 exact same items listed for sale on eBay at this time.
Zaxxon games are still for sale today... Molly is just one of the rare people who own the exciting table top version in good condition.
Tonight Ive brought along one of my favorite purchases:
Some of you may recognize this item. Its from the 1960s, and no self-respecting spy-kid would be caught dead without this, the original transformer toy:
Its Mattels Zero-M camera.
Now, if you can all squeeze together so I can take a picture.....
(OK, SG READERS, THIS IS A PURELY VISUAL THING:
THE ZERO-M CAMERA IS A TOY CAMERA. WHEN YOU PRETEND TO TAKE A PICTURE AND PUSH THE SHUTTER BUTTON, IT TURNS INTO A PISTOL.
SO I HOLD IT UP AS IF TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE AUDIENCE AND...)
Click!
And good night!
xxxooo