I'm always interested in the points of view of the public. Maxim magazine has come forward with their opinion of the twelve worst comedians of all time. This is only an exhibition, this is not a competition, please no wagering. These are merely opinions. We report, you decide that they're wrong. Here goes:

12. Carlos Mencia
If this is what comedy is going to be like when Mexico takes over America, then we're voting for anyone who promises to put a 50-foot barbed-wire electric fence from Texas to California?and then another one around our TV.

11. Christopher Titus
Chris makes jokes about abusive fathers beating their children.

10. Judy Tenuta
We think it's fair to call Judy Tenuta an organ grinder, not because of her acumen with an accordian, but for her ability to shred our insides with her shrill voice and pathetically schticky act.

9. Kathy Griffin
Is she a gay dude? We're asking for serious.

8. Gallagher/Gallagher II
Wait, is this Gallagher or Gallagher II? We can never tell those guys apart. Is Gallagher that comedian who tries to "make a difference" with his free-love hippie jokes, only to realize that people just want to see him smash a watermelon with a hammer? Or is that Gallagher II?

7. Paula Poundstone
Remember that time Paula Poundstone was busted? That's by far the funniest thing she's ever done.

6. Sandra Bernhard
You're not attractive, and that makes you angry. We understand. But why not use some of that unattractiveness to make you funny, too?

5. Louie Anderson
Being fat is one thing, but being fat and pathetic is just sad. C'mon, Louie?if you're going to be a huge tub, you need to embrace it. Choke down cheesecakes onstage. Do a bit on getting aroused while rubbing your own man boobs. Talk about how your s***ts are bigger than Gary Coleman. In other words, be a funny comedian.

4. Yakov Smirnoff
We get it?life in Russia was difficult. You had to wait in line for everything (even toilet paper!). But you know what's worse than life in Russia? Having a schtick that only plays to 75-year-olds in Missouri who still think Communism is the enemy.

3. Whoopi Goldberg
Soccer moms love Whoopi 'cause they think she's "edgy." Soccer dads are terrified of Whoopi 'cause they think she looks like the "Predator." We don't like her because we like "comedy."

2. Margaret Cho
"Mothers are difficult! But my Asian mother very difficult mother to have! She say things like, 'Me rikey flied lice.' She a very Asian mother!"

1. Sinbad
We're not sure what we hate most about Sinbad. Is it the neon pants, the annoying dangly earring, the oversized Reeboks, or the fact that he doesn't drink? Oh, wait, now we know. It's the rotten jokes that he always tells. That's what we hate most about Sinbad.

From my own viewpoint, Carlos, Griffin, and Whoopi are hideous, while at least four of the others are no longer relevant. Christopher Titus must be pretty bad because I've never heard of him. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for these people to list the ten or twelve best comedians. It starts with the late Johnny Carson and goes down about two notches from there.

Bob H

 Last week I posted a series of commandments for the proper use of a cell phone. This viewpoint was immediately rebutted by the lovely and talented(and apparently chatty) Ms. Whispered Promise. I don't mind differing viewpoints from mine(people have every right to their mistaken opinions), but Ms. Promise turned to one of the lowest forms of retaliation I have ever seen. That would be rationality and common sense. If I'd known it would be necessary to stoop to levels I have never visited before, I would surely have increased my medication.

But now, due to the thundering groundswell of apathy which has surrounded this topic, I am forced to offer Part II of the debate.   

`Cute' cell phone ring tones drive colleagues crazy Tip: Trade `Ice Ice Baby' for simple vibrate Music has charms to soothe the savage breast. So says William Congreve, who apparently never worked in an office full of cell phones and their many ring tones. According to a survey by Randstad USA, a staffing and work-force management company, 30 percent of employees say the ringing of their co-workers' cell phones is their greatest annoyance of the workday. Really? It's one thing when a cell phone goes off inside a movie theater (many have hailed the New York city ordinance that slaps a $50 fine on anyone whose cell phone rings at movies and public performances), but aren't workplaces expected to buzz with various sounds and activities? Considering all the sounds we encounter in a typical day -- clacking keyboards, conversations, traditional telephones -- what is it about a ringing cell phone that jars us so? Diana Deutsch and Trevor Henthorn, researchers in the psychology department at University of California, San Diego, wonder if the so-called "earworm effect" is the culprit. Unlike the typical "brrring!" of the conventional phone, the song snippets of many ring tones insidiously wend their way into our heads. That's good for the phones' owners, who immediately can identify it as their personal ring. That's bad for everyone within earshot, now left with "Ice Ice Baby" playing on a continuous loop in their heads. "The more musical the snippet, the worse it should be," Deutsch says. "It's sort of a ghastly thing to project onto the public." Were Deutsch assigned, for whatever reason, the task of creating the most annoying ring tone ever, she would employ a phrase from a well-known melody. Presented repeatedly as a ring tone, she says, it could plague people for hours. Her second choice would be a repeating up-down glissando -- a rapid series of low-to-high notes -- which stimulates more neuronal activity in the auditory system than steady tones. "Also, if I wanted it to be really annoying, I'd make the glissando as close to a police or ambulance siren as possible, so as to set off alarming associations that could last for hours," she says in an e-mail. Perhaps cell phone sounds are still so new and varied that we've yet to absorb them into our mental vocabulary of everyday sounds, so they simply don't blend into our environment. And with their electronic beeps not found in nature, maybe these tones shock our senses on an unconscious level that ambient organic sounds don't. Etiquette expert Jacqueline Whitmore says it might be more simple: We just haven't learned to use them properly. People often will go to lunch or to make copies and absentmindedly leave their cell phones at their desks. "I'm finding that people bring their cell phones to work because this is their lifeline to their home and to their family," says Whitmore, who has the singular job title of "national wireless etiquette spokesperson" for Sprint. "Where the problem lies is that people are forgetting to put them on silent or vibrate mode."   Bob H

 

I was merely minding my own business the other day when I noticed that according to the calendar on my wall, I am about to turn fifty-two years old. Just how did this happen? Why wasn't I notified sooner?

It seems like it was only 34 years ago when I was dozing off at my high school graduation waiting for some boring fifty-two year old to finish telling me how I was going to be one of the new leaders of the free world so I could leave this ceremony and start drinking. As far as being one of the leaders, none of this is my fault. I sat on my bifocals when I was about thirty.

Everything was going along quite nicely for a time. I really enjoyed it when I became twenty-one. I was an honest to goodness grown-up, not that this is necessarily a good thing, and people had even begun to call me "Mister," as opposed to the more customary "Dorkface."

But it was never really in my plans to like turning twenty-one so much that I would do it twice. When I was twenty-one, we believed there still hadn't been enough advancements made in modern medicine to allow people to continue to live until the age of fifty-two.

Now here I am reaching 52, and trying to prove that I'm still a productive member of today's society. Frankly, I find that it takes a lot of the pressure off when you remember that you never were all that productive in the first place.

And you find that aging gives you the best possible excuse to become senile. The bar has been lowered, and young people do not expect you to be trendy. That's because you have become their parents.

Young people only consider people your age to be an embarrassment if you live within one hundred area codes of the mall they inhabit. They don't realize that you used to go out too. When you were their age and dinosaurs roamed the earth, you always went to drive-in restaurants and ordered the brontosaurus ribs which occasionally tipped your car over. But you never let that bother you.

Now you find that the money you spent going out many weekend nights pretending you were a "party animal" is better served to use on a new washer/dryer set, so you don't have to go out of the house quite as often on cold winter nights. Young people may find this amusing. Well go ahead and laugh. It's all funny until I get in front of you in traffic with my Rascal.

And it becomes even tougher when like myself, you are a single fifty-two year old. Now the twenty-five year old down at your job who only did the Playboy shoot because she needed money early in her career has an extra supply of restraining orders waiting at home for you ever since you gave her that line, "Until I saw you in here, I thought this was the no SMOKIN' section!"

Suddenly your turn-ons have become sloth, gluttony, and coveting the last piece of pie. Your turn-offs are attempting to ask your doctor about Levitra and Lipitor, and when you roll over on the couch and crush the television remote.

Also when you get older, you find that certain parts of your body are no longer where they used to be. And you can't just visit your local Jiffy Lube for the $19.95 oil change and tune up special. That tight, finely tuned machine that is your body has decided to sprout something resembling a sack of doorknobs around your thighs and posterior region.

At this point in your life your self-esteem may be at its lowest. It doesn't even help you when you buy Quaker Puffed Rice cereal in order to drown out the noises coming from your body. And you realize that the most extreme sports you participate in are speed reading and jumping to conclusions. Your favorite hobbies have become power blinking, and braiding the hair in your ears.

To fight back you do what any self-respecting adult would do. You step back, and take stock of all of your numerous life accomplishments, think of your family and friends, and upon reflection, decide that someone is going to pay for this. So you carefully begin to plan your mid-life crisis.

I learned this when I took time out from my second childhood to schedule my mid-life crisis early a few summers ago when I turned forty-nine.

And this experience is perfectly normal. It's all right to buy an expensive, convertible sports car and then join a fancy new gym a week later. I know it's all right because the finest psychiatrists in South Jersey told me so from their new vacation homes in Bermuda.

But your geezability quotient will help you to make a smooth, yet increasingly lumpy transition into life after fifty. You generally pick up a few pearls of wisdom along the way, such as these:

I was a lot happier when comedians made me laugh instead of trying to tell me what to believe politically. Although a lot of politicians are really good at stand-up comedy.

The state lottery has it wrong. In South Jersey you've got to pay to play to win.

I would really like to buy a watch somewhere which contains that specialized, dynamic new feature of telling you what time it is.

 You should look forward to getting away from your job every day so you can enjoy your private life. If the reverse is true, something is very wrong.

Just slow down. Take the time to take the time.

I'm sure you have your own ideas to cope with aging, like eliminating calendars and mirrors from your home. And you young people who will become the new leaders of the free world will have this to look forward to someday. I just want you to remember that I am currently senile, and none of this is my fault. Thank you.

 

Bob H

 How about ten facts for Friday? I found this and thought it was well worth sharing. I'm not familiar with this writer, but a lot of valuable ground is covered here.
The Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette

There comes a time in any technological revolution when some basic guidelines need to be laid down. It happened when e-mail exploded on the scene and people started to learn some basic dos and don'ts around the new medium. For example, if you copy the boss in on an e-mail message to a colleague, it means that you are through kidding around. No one teaches these things in company training; they are just things that get learned.

Well I've reached the point with cell phones where I feel the need to lay down the law. There are some real abuses of wireless technology being perpetrated all around us, and the time has come to create some social order out of the cell phone chaos. This is by no means an exhaustive list simply because as the technology evolves, new annoying traits will surely emerge. But commandments usually come in tens, so think of this as the first Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette, with amendments to follow:

1. Thou shalt not subject defenseless others to cell phone conversations. When people cannot escape the banality of your conversation, such as on the bus, in a cab, on a grounded airplane, or at the dinner table, you should spare them. People around you should have the option of not listening. If they don't, you shouldn't be babbling.

2. Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings. Or Beethoven's Fifth, or the Bee Gees, or any other annoying melody. Is it not enough that phones go off every other second? Now we have to listen to synthesized nonsense?

3. Thou shalt turn thy cell phone off during public performances. I'm not even sure this one needs to be said, but given the repeated violations of this heretofore unwritten law, I felt compelled to include it.

4. Thou shalt not wear more than two wireless devices on thy belt. This hasn't become a big problem yet. But with plenty of techno-jockeys sporting pagers and phones, Batman-esque utility belts are sure to follow. Let's nip this one in the bud.

5. Thou shalt not dial while driving. In all seriousness, this madness has to stop. There are enough people in the world who have problems mastering vehicles and phones individually. Put them together and we have a serious health hazard on our hands.

6. Thou shalt not wear thy earpiece when thou art not on thy phone. This is not unlike being on the phone and carrying on another conversation with someone who is physically in your presence. No one knows if you are here or there. Very disturbing.

7. Thou shalt not speak louder on thy cell phone than thou would on any other phone. These things have incredibly sensitive microphones, and it's gotten to the point where I can tell if someone is calling me from a cell because of the way they are talking, not how it sounds. If your signal cuts out, speaking louder won't help, unless the person is actually within earshot.

8. Thou shalt not grow too attached to thy cell phone. For obvious reasons, a dependency on constant communication is not healthy. At work, go nuts. At home, give it a rest.

9. Thou shalt not attempt to impress with thy cell phone. Not only is using a cell phone no longer impressive in any way (unless it's one of those really cool new phones with the space age design), when it is used for that reason, said user can be immediately identified as a neophyte and a poseur.

10. Thou shalt not slam thy cell phone down on a restaurant table just in case it rings. This is not the Old West, and you are not a gunslinger sitting down to a game of poker in the saloon. Could you please be a little less conspicuous? If it rings, you'll hear it just as well if it's in your coat pocket or clipped on your belt.

Well, I'm all thou-ed and thy-ed out, so there you have it: the first 10 rules of using your cell phone. Most of these seem like common sense to me, but they all get broken every day.

If thou has suggestions for additions, I welcome thy thoughts. Write to me at dan_briody@infoworld.com.

Bob H

Well, the World Cup is almost over, and baseball season is beginning to hit its dog days. Of course, for the Phillies, those began in April. But no matter. We're looking for a record setting event which will get people involved again. Look no longer.

 

Bob H