It is that time of the year again. It was my 5th year in a row at Coney Island for the contest. I got media access this year and got to shove other photographers out of the way to get shots that probably 50 other photographers got. Pretty exciting. My man Joey Chestnut AKA the greatest American hero won a sudden death over time. It was all tied up at 59 hot dogs each in 10 minutes. They lowered it to 10 min this year because they did some research and found that the original contest was only 10 minutes. I am not sure that is a good thing. Anyway, Joey came out a head with a big lead after two minutes, but by 8 minutes Takeru Kobayashi was up two dogs. Joey came back and tied it at the last second. It was pretty exciting. They had to go into over time and be the first to eat 5 dogs. Joey won by roughly seven second. It was intense. I took far too many photos. You can see them here.

I have never really been an autograph collector exactly, but I had a few here and there. I had this one wall in my bedroom that I hung all sorts of stuff on. I had framed photos and a copy of the first record that came out on my old punk label and a three autographs:

1. The first autograph was John Snider from the Dukes Of Hazzard. I was a HUGE Dukes fan growing up and I found out that for a dollar her would send you a personalized autograph. It said “To Nate: God Bless. John R. Schneider.
2. The second was a letter that John McCain sent me thanking me for working/donating to his 2000 primary campaign. It is absolutely scary that a guy I would work so hard for would totally sell out and pander to the right like he has done. It pretty much makes me sick, but in 2000 I really trusted him and thought he would do a lot of good for this country.
3. The third autograph was from John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted. He was filming a scene in Old Town Alexandria, VA where my friends and I used to hang out every day. We kept yelling shit out whenever they started a take because we were punk ass kids. This guy Crazy Willy almost got arrested for it. I had been sitting watching this for about 30 minutes when I got an idea. I ran across the street to a CVS where a friend of mine worked… A girl who later got arrested for robbing a Ben And Jerry’s in full view of cameras where she was friends with half the staff who worked there. They came to her house a few hours after and found all the money, in a deposit bag with all the receipts. Amazing. Anyway, I ran into this CVS and asked her to hand me a WANTED poster that was hanging up. This guy had been hiding pornography in children’s books at the library or something. Anyway, I got this poster and got John Walsh to sign it. Awesome.

So, long story short… One day I realized when looking at this wall that all the autographs were of people named John. I thought this was very weird. I also am a big They Might Be Giants fan and they are both named John and I had their autograph… and when I was 10 I got John Ramita Jr’s autograph on an X-Man comic. These are weird conicidences. After that for about a month I became obsessed with collecting Johns’ autographs. I thought that since a signature is sometimes refered to as a “John Hancock” it was even more significant. I went on ebay and bought John Larroquette, John Lithgow and Neil Patrick Harris… okay, that last one is not a John, but it was only $3 and I am a pretty obsessive Doogie Howser fan.

Okay, long story short. I wanted to do something for a 4th of July update, so I decided to work on this idea of signing your “John”. John Hancock has the most recognizable signature in United States history. I wanted to do a little project to see how well people remembered their history books. Who remembers what his signature looks like? I just wanted to see peoples interpretation of it. I asked everyone to sign his name the way they think it looks on the Declaration of Independence and then I took a picture. I didn’t let them look at anyone else’s signature so everyone had their own view of what it looked like. Some people took it more seriously than others, and some people were just embarrassed that they didn’t know what it looked like. A surprisingly large amount of people had no idea what it looked like and basically mocked me for successfully completing 5th grade history class. I did not include those people in the project. Here are some interesting facts:

• Only 4 of 50 people underlined John Hancock. To me that is the first thing I think about with that signature.
• Almost everyone got the big J an H right.
• At least 5 people spelled his name blatantly wrong.
• It seems like 5% of the people involved in the project are completely illiterate.
• Two people wrote “John Han” and then drew a picture of a penis. Those people happened to be very close friends and did the exact thing as each other coincidentally only minutes apart. I made them redo them.
• Only one of the 50 people were actually named John.
• I shot 27 women and 23 men.

So what do we learn from this? I am not sure. But you should try the experiment on your own. Then look at his actual signature here. How did you do?

Check out all the photos here.

In a 12 round decision fight, Barack Obama is the Democratic Nominee for President in 2008.  I hope I helped in some small way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0epOJNpKag[/youtube]

When people ask me my ethnic background I have been known to say that I am 1/4th Swiss, 1/4th Scottish and 1/2 Texan.  I am not quite sure of the hillbilly roots on my fathers side, but its a pretty reasonable guess that his family was living in Texas between 1836 and 1845 when Texas was known as The Republic Of Texas and was in no way part of these United States.  And since I don’t really know what else I am made of (I have heard rumors of French, Irish, Dutch and German) I just consider myself part Texan.  My father spent the first 20 sum years of his life living in Denton, TX a small one horse town suburb of Dallas.  My grandmother still resides in Argyle which is a 0 horse town which is pretty much a suburb of Denton.  (Full disclosure, my grandmother owned at least one horse and at some point in my life it tried to buck me off and I held on because even at 9 years old I was a bad ass.)  My grandmother is also pretty much a bad ass and she proved to me that living in a trailer home is not as bad as it is made to seem in the movies.  She also retired from her job when she was 70 in order to become a truck driver with her husband who taught me to shoot a gun when I was like 7.

Anyway, I could write many paragraphs about my father’s life in Texas before he quit eating meat and became a sell out corporate lawyer and bought me this Mac Book, but that is not the point of this blog entry.  The point is to show you this NY Times article my dad sent me this morning about the Denton, TX rock scene.  The article talks about how Denton is the new Austin and the hipsters are leaving Austin because it is too commercial and trendy.  Now I have spent a good deal of time in both Denton and Austin and I will tell you this:  Denton is pretty much the town that George McFly grew up in in the first Back To The Future… Austin is not.  The funny thing is, that the NY Times article said almost EXACTLY that about a decade after I first thought it.  Denton has like one record store and 3 bars and this amazing hardware store that my dad told me has not changed since he was a kid in the 50’s.

There is a college there UNT, of which my father is a proud alum.  He briefly played on the same football team there as Mean Joe Green and he played clarinet in the school marching band. That is not exactly living the rock and roll dream but I do now own a copy of the UNT marching band’s record, which is exactly one more records than I have from his surf rock band who’s dream of fame was horrifically ended when their lead singer was run over by a motorboat and killed.  But these are the things you have to deal with when you are living in Texas.

Anyway, next time I am in Denton, I am going to have to check out this so-called rock scene.  It sounds fun.

Download: Midlake – Roscoe
For more Free Denton music check out Anyone’s Guess.

Because of my love of the HBO show OZ, about a year ago a friend recommended I check out the Wire which has a lot of the same cast. Over the last year I watched the entire series right up to the final episode ever that came out a few weeks ago. (Speaking of the last season of the Wire, I shot the after party to the season 5 premiere.) It was sad to see the end. I was talking about this to a friend and he recommended I check out The Corner which was a mini-series on HBO that was based on a book of the same name which eventually spun off into the Wire. The writer of the book, David Simon, was also the man responsible for Homicide back in the day. I used to watch that show and since it was filmed in Baltimore I have met tons of people in my life who have appeared as extras and such. I grew up in DC, and Baltimore is about an hour away and I have spent a lot of time there. The Corner and the Wire are also based on Baltimore which is probably one of the reasons I did the show so much.

Okay, let’s get back to the point of this post. The Corner like I said was based on a book. That book as a work of non fiction. The Corner the mini-series is fictionalized, but it is based on actual people. At the end of the series they interview some of them. The heroin addict mother on the show I recognized from a cameo she had in the Wire so I googled her. Her name is Fran Boyd. What I found when I looked her up was this amazing article in the New York Times about her recent marriage to a man named Donnie Andrews.

Donnie Andrews was the basis for the drug dealer murdering anti-hero on the Wire, Omar. Omar is by far my favorite character on the show, and probably everyone’s favorite character. I was shocked to learn he was based on a real person, a real person who was serving a life sentence for murder… That is until David Simon introduced him to Fran Boyd.

“They had a hunch Mr. Andrews, who was turning his life around by earning a general equivalency diploma, taking college-level courses and studying the Bible, could influence the life of Ms. Boyd, who was still nodding out in the old neighborhood. They gave Mr. Andrews her phone number.”

Mr. Andrews, also a former heroin user, understood her struggle and her pain. His first wife was murdered three years after he went to prison. He began calling Ms. Boyd frequently. Their conversations were sometimes “four and five hours long,” he said. After a $2,900 phone bill, limits were set on their calls. He used less expensive communication, too, sometimes writing three or four letters a week.

After Boyd and Andrews began talking, Andrews helped Boyd quit drugs forever and Boyd did everything she could to get Andrews paroled. After calls and letters and even convincing the DA who prosecuted Andrews to testify at his parole hearing he was released after 17 years. Andrews has turned his life around and now works security at a church and works in anti-gang outreach programs in Baltimore. Fran has been sober for many years and works in outreach programs for drug addicts. And in August of last year they were married.

I could not imagine a happier ending to a story that could have ended so badly for both of them. At the end of the Corner they tell you what happened to the people on the show since the book was written. They were not good stories. This one is, and it just goes to show you can never write people off.

The Onion News Network released one of my favorite of their videos so far today. Despite that McCain completely sold out his socially liberal beliefs in order to pander to the right wing and I am pretty positive that he would be a huge determent to this country if he was some how elected, I do find the fact that he can make a bow and arrow out of bamboo and his own hair and kill a man with his bare hands relatively impressive. He is probably the only candidate running for president that has willingly killed people. Semper Fortis motherfucker.

McCain Declines Secret Service, Dares Assassins To Try Something

MoveOn.org had a contest to make a commercial for Barack Obama. Over 1000 people sent in video and it seems like they posted them all. I watched them for over an hour and I didn’t find the one that had some people I know in it. Hopefully I will get a link to it from them and can post it. So many of the videos I watched were exactly the same. They just had people of different races talking about hope or reciting his speeches. Or they had little kids saying cute things and talking about he future. Or they just had Obama talking over patriotic images. Or they compared him to Lincoln. It was pretty much those four commercials over and over again mixed with various talking points and bullshit about hope and change, but I did find two that I really loved. The top one is an interview with a 100 year old republican who is voting democrat for the first time in her life. She probably voted for Calvin Friggin’ Coolidge. That is if women even had the right to vote then (they did). The second uses images of toys to illustrate Obama’s political platform. Check out the ones below and then watch the others here. If you find any you really like, post them in the comments. Word.

Today we have two new signs that the world is ending.

Firstly, my greatest hero died recently. Honestly I did not even know him by name, but I do appreciate his controbution to the Earth daily. His name is Al Copeland and he founded my favorite restaurant Popeye’s Famous Chicken And Biscuits, which was evidently named after Popeye Doyle from the French Connection. This is a fact that I did not know, but am very glad to know. Speaking of the French Connection once I met someone who swore to me that he was Gene Hackman’s son, but he had never heard of the French Connection. He just kept talking to me about how he was once in a movie with Will Smith.

Secondly, giant Star Fish may or may not be taking over the world. I can’t imagine they would grow this large with out some plans of world domination. They cannot possibly have good intentions. As a man of science, I find it horrifying that we do not know about everything living in the sea. There could be Nazi’s or Communists or even bigger sea creatures living deep in the ocean training, getting ready to make us their slaves and we would never know. I have gone ahead and created a petition asking world leaders to drain the Earth so we know exactly what is down there so we can tag and number them and keep these monsters in line. Also, in a slightly unrelated note I take some issue to the creative language used in this article. Why the hell would an Associated Press article describe the giant star fish as “the size of big food platters”? What? What does that even mean. How do you define the size of a food platter… or a big food platter? And why would you associate mostly inedible mutant sea creatures with food? Bastards.

Don’t forget to sign the petition! These monsters must be stopped!

My friend Seth Herzog sent out an email about his interview with the NY Post yesterday. He, as well as several other of my friends/acquaintances were interviewed about underground comedy in New York and how while standard two drink minimum comedy clubs were on the way out, underground clubs were thriving. The article laments the end of Invite Them Up, but points out shows like Seth’s Sweet and Eugene Mirman’s other Show Veil Of The Maya are kicking ass weekly. Anyway, it is a pretty long article and it features a lot of people I think are amazing, so I figured you guys should read it. So READ THIS ARTICLE! And then watch the first episode of Horrible People that features some of my favorite alt-comedians in New York. Although only one of them, my future wife Kristen Schaal, is mentioned in the article, it is still brilliant.