Ahem

Ahem!

This hereby serves as a final reminder that I've moved my blog to my new website, johnsellers.com. Please update your links -- if you even bothered to bookmark this nonsense in the first place, that is.

Also, this hereby serves as yet another excuse for me to publish a video of a monkey riding a bicycle.

Forevermore

After five years and 454 posts, I am hereby and forevermore moving this blog over to the much-simpler-for-me johnsellers.com.

Please update your links.

This is your new RSS feed.

Enjoy the silence.

WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
Hoagie crumbs stuck in my sweater!

Frontin'

Here's the interview I did with John Cleese.



WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
Why is Chase Bank messing with me? They be frontin'!

Teleportation

I am interviewing Lost's Jorge Garcia today, who it turns out has a pretty sweet blog called Dispatches from the Island. Here's my favorite post.

In the next few days, I'm going to post a list of the top ten little things that annoyed me this year. And in the next few weeks, I'm going to be moving this blog over to johnsellers.com -- but only after I figure out how to do that. But this is what it's going to look like.

Finally, I'm going to stop titling each of my posts after random favorite songs. Instead, I shall name each post after my favorite word in said post.

WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
Why hasn't teleportation been invented yet? That way I could get to the post office without a hassle.

Wolf Like Me

And here is my interview with Benicio Del Toro.

WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
Goddamn cold.

Pac-Man Fever

I have three Q+As out right now. In order of how well I think I did with them, they are:

1) Michael Ian Black, which appears in this week's issue of Time Out New York.



2) Scott Weiland, which appears in the December issue of Spin magazine (which also contains an excellent article about Echo and the Bunnymen):



3) Emile Hirsch, which I banished to the Time Out New York website because he didn't give me enough stuff to work with.



AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, Chasing Ghosts, the documentary in which I am used for comic effect, is airing on Showtime all month.

WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
It's colder than 1,000 Antarcticas outside!

Jenny (867-5309)

Until ten minutes ago, I had completely forgotten that this existed. And when I did remember, I thought it had aired on Fridays, ABC's late-night comedy sketch show (costarring Larry David and Michael Richards). Instead, it was the Lorne Michaels-produced The New Show, which only lasted six episodes in 1984. When it aired, I thought this sketch was the funniest thing in the world. Wow.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
Where my muffin at!?

Frogs

Speaking of Wayne Coyne, the interview was for an upcoming issue of Spin magazine to promote Christmas on Mars, his insanely wacky -- and just plain insane -- debut as a movie director. If you've ever wanted to see Fred Armisen plaintively singing "Silent Night" just minutes after a marching band whose members all have vaginas for heads walk over a baby and crush it to death, then by all means go see this movie.



And speaking of Spin, its editors have graciously allowed me to conduct some full-page interviews with people I never thought I'd talk to. For the September issue, I yakked on the horn with the still very much bad-ass Ice Cube. Out this month, my interview with stripper-obsessed impresario T-Pain. And in December, they'll print my conversation with Stone Temple Pilot Scott Weiland.



And to cap this very good day off -- Obama even won Indiana! -- this week's newly published Time Out New York features my interview with Paul Rudd, who is more awesome than Joe Biden's mother.

To celebrate all this good news -- although after staying out until 3am last night, I probably don't need any more of that -- I am listening to my new favorite song by the Flaming Lips, which isn't at all new, as you'll no doubt see by this straight-outta-the-early-1990s video:



WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
I've tried, but I am finding that it is impossible to be angry today!

She Don't Use Jelly

In honor of this soon-to-be-historic election -- and because I'm busy as hell and off to interview Wayne Coyne in a few minutes -- I hereby re-post something I wrote two days after the presidential election in 2004.

WELCOME TO DECISION 2004: THE HANGOVER

The cure: a rather large sandwich

The candidates: a meatball parmagiana hero and a turkey hero with melted provolone

Excerpts from their stump speeches:

MEATBALL: My fellow Americans, I come before you with two simple words: Eat me. I am asking you to put your faith in me, in the simple fact that when you take a bite of me, you'll understand the strength of my conviction. Also, you will understand the taste of a kick-ass marinara sauce. I get this from my father, god rest his soul, who told me that I need to remind myself who I am every single day. And, my friends, I'm going to tell you exactly who I am. I'm a meatball!

TURKEY: The other candidate tries to pass himself off as being "what you crave." He claims to be a "hearty meal." He claims to "cause babies and serial killers to cower in fear of his rich, tangy meatiness." And, let's be clear, this is probably true. But what he's conveniently leaving out is his record. Remember the last time you ate a meatball hero and it sat like a lump inside you for five hours? He'd like you to forget about that. Remember that time when you stayed up all night dealing with heartburn? Remember when you cleared an entire room with the aftereffects of a meatball hero? Of course you do, but he's pretending that you do not. What he's offering you is simple: Immediate tastebud joy followed by many, many hours of pain and shame. I am offering you a ticket out. Choose turkey.

The action: The meatball hero jumps out to a big, early lead in the dumb, hungry electorate in Sellers' stomach. It's a fine strategy, as the stomach commands a whopping 150 electoral votes. But the signs we're seeing from the turkey hero should give its supporters hope. Its campaign is attacking the area around the stomach -- the spleen, the liver, the kidneys. These are the real battlegrounds of this election. So it's close. Right now -- with the skin, the body's largest organ, leading the pro-turkey charge -- it's looking like a virtual dead heat. In fact, things are shaping up exactly as we predicted. If things stay the way they are in the lesser organs, it's going to come down to -- surprise, surprise -- Sellers' brain. And from the looks of it, we could be waiting on this decision all afternoon. Sellers is clearly of two minds here: He knows the turkey is the best thing for him, but goddamit, it's a motherfucking meatball! This could take a while.

The result: Meatball parmagiana hero. Like the brain ever listens to reason.

WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
I'm not going to jinx anything.

Why Can't I Touch It?

Two things happened this afternoon. The first is that I realized that I'm addicted to Googling the names of contestants on Family Feud. The second is that I discovered Trivial Pursuit: America Plays, hosted by Christopher Knight, aka Peter Brady.

Is it me, or are a lot of trivia shows these days lowering the bar on the intelligence level of their contestants? Which only makes them more awesome to watch. Case in point from one of today's episodes:

Question: What movie introduced the character Indiana Jones?

Contestant 1 (probably late-20-something woman): Temple of Doom.
Contestant 2 (probably early-30-something woman): Uh, The Temple of Doom?
Contestant 3 (proabably early-30-something guy): Actually, I believe it's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Wow.

Anyway, here's my interview with Mystery, the fuzzy-hatted host of VH1's The Pick-Up Artist.



WHY I'M ANGRY TODAY
Sandwich coma.