So………………..

I’ve loved Nick Swardson for a while. His character on Reno 911 is one of the best, and his stand-up specials have been funny too. Even when I found out he was straight, I still liked him.

So I was super excited to see he’s got a show.

Until I watched it.

Two episodes in, I’d say the overall quality level of the skits is a 5.5 out of 10, with some as high as 7.5, but none that are amazing, and quite a few that are 2.0.

He’s said in an interview “I have this memo thing on my phone that’s packed with horrible ideas, immature jokes.”

And it feels like a lot of these came straight outta that phone memo.

I’ll keep watching, but not forever.

(in that same interview, he was asked about how come he plays gay so much, and said: “It literally just snowballed. It was just a random choice for the Reno 911 character… then Art School Confidential all of a sudden got greenlit, and I was doing Scotty Kangaroojus on The Showbiz Show—but you’ll never see him again… I don’t want to do any more gay characters. I just don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want my MySpace clips to all be like, “Heeey, guuuys!” … it’s really just a personal, creative choice. None of my characters are gay anymore…except for in Chuck and Larry, where I’ll be playing Jessica Biel’s gay brother”).

My hometown paper (the surprisingly good Register-Star) just ran a solid article about the state of homelessness in the county where I grew up.

The prompt for the article is a forthcoming report on that subject, from William Moon, “the Social Services Commissioner of Delaware County, who has over 35 years of experience in the field.” On principle, I disapprove of this methodology - an “expert” agency bureaucrat who (presumably) has no direct personal experience of the problem he’s studying, developing an analysis and set of recommendations for how to deal with it. Unless he’s incorporating extensive, substantive involvement from the homeless men and women of Columbia County, I believe his report will have a lot of blind spots. But I like a lot of what he says, and he minces words only the slightest bit when it comes to the cause of the problem - rich folks moving in:

“For years there had been an adequate supply of cheap housing in the city of Hudson,” the report states. “In the 1990s, this pattern began to shift as older tenement houses in Hudson were bought by individuals more interested in classic architecture than in using them as rental housing on the low end of the housing market.”

And if Hudson takes this guy’s advice in one important area, it will be light years ahead of New York City:

“Moon does not recommend the county open a shelter, citing capital costs and staffing/support costs to run it that may actually increase costs per person…  “…homeless persons should be provided emergency housing in a congregate setting leased and/or owned by the county.”"

The “shelter-first” model in New York City has led to the creation of a big, bloated, expensive shelter-industrial complex - spending $856 MILLION last year, to house an average of 38,000 people a day. New York City is a very different landscape than rural Columbia County, but one important factor is absolutely identical: people want housing, not shelter.

Next Magazine has a great interview with my friend Tom Cardamone, and Tom’s brilliant as he always is, but the real eye-opener here was something the writer tossed off as an aside at the very beginning… the fact that Chuck Palahniuk is gay.

Wait, what?

So I went and researched it, and sure enough, it’s true.

Shit. Now I have to go read that crap again, and see if maybe I was dismissive of it because of all the hetero-testosterone love for Fight Club that fueled all the boys around me in college. I projected his fans onto him - and maybe not even his fans, but the fans of a movie made of one of his books, which we all know can be light years apart from the book itself. Maybe his writing is mimicking patriarchy so as to brilliantly dismantle it? I didn’t get a glimmer of that from actually *reading* him, but hey, books are half in the mind of the writer and half in the mind of the reader.