So the Washington Post has finally stopped printing its weekday tabloid, Express, a mere 16 years after I tried to get them to give up on such a bad idea. In fact, I was so sure Express was foolish that I created a same-day-of-publication parody, Expresso, which was distributed at Metro stops right alongside the Post‘s confused hawkers. That is, I had the great help of the Washington City Paper staff, and its publisher, Jane Levine, who agreed to throw more than $10,000 at a fairly juvenile gag.

The inspiration for publicly mocking the Paper of Record came after reading the Post‘s article announcing why they decided to create the thing. Editors had noticed that half of Metro riders weren’t reading a newspaper. Their conclusion: That’s our market! My smug response from my breakfast table: No, those are the people you’ve already lost!

The Post seemed intent on creating a newspaper for people with no interest in reading newspapers. So I came up with the concept of “a paper for people who don’t like to read,” and the tagline: “Half the Content. Twice as Free!” And pretty much wrote all the content-free content, which was largely listicles, before that became a thing. Also took the photos of willing co-workers pretending to be goofs.

At the time, I was City Paper‘s Webmeister, in charge of its online music site, among other tasks. In addition to disliking the idea of what I perceived to be a dumbed-down news product — and note: I was also against the equally simplistic USA Today when it first appeared — part of my reaction against Express came from the fact that the mighty Post was marching into City Paper‘s territory, the free paper. In fact, Express’ initial rate card did undercut City Paper. I was not only opposed to Express on pretentious grounds, but also it was a real threat to my livelihood.

We printed 25,000 copies, I believe, along with bright yellow Expresso T-shirts for staffers to wear that morning at Metro stations around town. And we continued the joke by creating a website, u-love-expresso.com, which went to a gotcha page and then to City Paper‘s homepage. For all of this we won a “Format Buster” award from the Association of Alternative Newspapers.

Side note, as I was giving away copies at the Silver Spring Metro that morning, an older gentleman slowly walked up and, with a sad face, corrected me: “It’s espresso.”

Please enjoy this Q&A I did with the prolific author Mike Sacks (I reviewed him here and here) about his latest literary outrage, Randy: The Full and Complete Unedited Biography and Memoir of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S.!

Sacks claims that the book is a “self-published memoir of a thirty-something from Maryland found by me at a garage sale and that’s being re-published ‘as is.'” As the interview reveals, the work is really a vulgarly heartfelt homage to Maryland — largely Montgomery County — from a native son who strayed far from home.

One may also follow “Randy” on Twitter at @RandyIsDaMan, where the occasional reward is witnessing Randy’s Twitter feuds with the likes of Justine Bateman. What a world.

Maryland Native Mike Sacks’s New Novel Is The Most Montgomery County Thing Ever

From the Luddite Corner, here’s my Exhibit A in the case of Old Man vs. Clouds. No matter how much music Amazon, Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora say they have, there is a lot that isn’t available, and may never be. Don’t believe the hype.

Happy to have my first byline in Washingtonian magazine, an oral history of the Belmont TV jingle (“Whatever you want, think Belmont!”)

This extends my previous trifecta with Washingtonian. For several years, my band played the magazine’s annual “Best & Worst” gala, a swanky soiree based on its issue celebrating and castigating what the editors considered the high and low points of D.C. culture. The live event featured only the high points, where “Best” winners, mostly restaurants, were invited to host a booth and offer their wares. My band, I should note, was certainly not the best in D.C. Not sure how we got the gig, but they were usually fun.

As for low points, my group, Travesty Films, was once named the “Best Vanity Project” for our crowd-pleasing though admittedly low-brow comedy films. Thanks, I guess.

And then one year I was invited to be a judge for the Best & Worst issue, lending my expertise to the category of Best Movie Theater Popcorn. Arch Campbell was also a judge. We set up at the Uptown Theater to sample the snacks, including some microwave popcorn, which I didn’t think should have qualified. I can’t remember who we gave the prize to, but I recall being underwhelmed by all the options. For the record, the best movie popcorn was at the old Cineplex Odeon Wisconsin Avenue, which proudly boasted real butter — until the scolds at the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a “study” that declared buttered popcorn to be a health hazard. Cineplex countered with a statement pointing out that most Americans only go to the movies a few times a year and thus were hardly in danger of contracting heart disease from the multiplex. And then the company caved and changed the recipe to the same dreck as everyone else. Thanks, “science”!

As is often the case in journalism, one learns as much about oneself as the subject of one’s article. Though I’d been listening to the jingle for its entire 40-year history, I didn’t realize until I made the calls that I knew everyone in the band: Pete Kennedy on guitar, Shannon Ford on drums, high school classmate the late, lamented Wade Matthews on bass, and Jon Carroll and Margot Chapman on vocals.

Anyway, the article was fun to do. I got to use my clever Olympus TP-8 Telephone Pick-up Microphone, which I picked up after learning that Ryan Lizza used one to record his insane conversation with disgraced political nutjob Anthony Scaramucci.

Click the link to get the earworm stuck in your head all over again. You’re welcome.

I had the honor of interviewing Dick Gregory for WPFW radio in 2008. Basically, I said “Hello,” and he pretty much filled the next hour with wonderful anecdotes of his pioneering days in comedy and philosophical stories on all manner of subjects. Gregory was a very sweet fellow in person, happy to pose for a photo with some random white dude. The interview was for a pledge drive and the goal was met, for which I can take no credit.

Gregory’s importance in comedy cannot be overstated. Follow Kliph Nesteroff on Twitter; he has been posting amazing stories about and pictures of Gregory for the last couple days. Nesteroff is the author of the essential book, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels & the History of American Comedy, and clearly can see into the future as well as the past.

Here is the Washington Post‘s excellent obit.

I get to the bottom of the mystery that is Mike Sacks‘ latest book, Stinker Lets Loose. Is it in fact his latest book? Or is Stinker Lets Loose something more. Something more sinister? Or something wonderful? America needs to know.

Mentioned is my attempt at a re-novelization of the novelization of the original Ocean’s 11 movie starring the Rat Pack, Frank, Dino, Sammy, etc. One may find that effort here.

By all means, do check out Mike’s podcast, Doin’ It With Mike Sacks, interviews with comedy cognoscenti as well as original amusements.

Pleased to have worked with Metro Teleproductions on this introductory video for the Office of Compliance.

If you lived here, you’d be stuck in traffic still

If you’ve been to Wheaton Plaza lately (excuse me, Westfields Wheaton), you might have noticed a small construction site. The sign out front boldly proclaims this new development as “Kensington Overlook.” The overlook part is definitely correct, as the couple rows of townhouses overlook Kensington by a good mile or more, that town being actually located so far down University Boulevard as to be invisible.

Yet, the builder’s website declares in no uncertain terms that Kensington Overlook is “a sophisticated enclave featuring 25 new townhomes…located just 4 miles north of D.C. in Kensington, MD.”

Very little is correct about that. This “sophisticated enclave” is literally a tiny triangle of scrub land at the entrance to a large shopping mall. Your backyard is the parking lot for Target, across the two-lane entranceway is the Giant grocery story, and your front yard is a busy six-lane commuter road. Of course, all builders use the word “luxury” to describe what are the usual stick-built structures, with Tyvek-thin walls and a facade of inch-thick brick or stone-like substance.

Montgomery County’s approved planning document [PDF] places this enclave squarely within the Wheaton Sector Plan. So, yeah, you can walk to Costco. And the Metro. That’s good “smart growth.” But put on your most comfortable hiking boots for the long, exhaust-filled trek to Kensington.

Of course, whoever buys these sad dwellings will probably overlook that.

For those who don’t care to read, here’s a video version:

(To be fair, real estate developers have been attaching fanciful names to their projects forever. In the real estate boom of the 1980s, Regardies, a business magazine which closely chronicled the industry’s movers and shakers, published a wheel that you could cut out and use to automate the naming process. Along one axis were words like “Orchard,” Forest,” “View,” etc.; another offered lofty-sounding, often British-inspired words to match, such as “Warwick,” “Manchester,” “Heights,” and, well, Kensington. Never mattered if there ever was an orchard or a view. One may do this now online, here: http://lewenberg.com/sng/)

Filler ad from the Unicorn Times.

The best job I ever had, certainly the best job title, was Filler Editor for the Unicorn Times. Whenever an ad fell out, which was often — and often on deadline — I was tasked with filling the space. Which I gleefully did with the help of some spiffy clip art and the photo archives of ’70s rock bands.

The Unicorn Times was a monthly arts and entertainment tabloid that published from the early 1970s into the early 1980s, when the much better organized Washington City Paper came to town and finally squeezed it out of business. Unicorn was the brainchild of a jovial Irishman who started the paper largely as a way to get free drinks. In exchange, he offered to print the entertainment schedule of various nightclubs and when he had enough bars lined up, voila, a newspaper.

Unicorn grew into much more than that, launching some actual journalists. I never wrote for the paper. I was nominally the production manager, in charge of pasting up the ads, though I also delivered the papers once they came back from the printer in West Virginia. (Once, I got to deliver the “boards” as they were called to Morgantown, which was an exciting day trip.)

Many of the fake ads were blatant come-ons for ridiculous products and included what I thought was the obvious gag of demanding money for a “free” catalog. And the address was always my father’s post office box: Box 602, Rockville, Md. Dad was a traveling salesman and I guess he thought he needed a PO Box as the mark of a serious businessman. I was fascinated by the idea and used it as my address for the comic books I subscribed to.

Some of my jokes were apparently too subtle. I created a fake record company whose entire catalog was devoted to songs of the humpback whales, which was a thing at the time. Such supposedly spurious titles as Reggae Songs of the Humpback Whales, featuring Bob Marley and John Denver did not seem at all insane to the Library of Congress, a representative of which wrote a letter asking that I send over my catalog.

The above filler ad is but one example of my publishing outrage recently unearthed from the Nuttycombe Archives. The rest are on my Tumblr site. Enjoy.