Monday, January 1st: The Jenisfamous Solo Show

This Monday, January 1st
Pete's Monday Evening Stand-Up
consists almost entirely of Jen-on-Jen action.



The Jenisfamous Solo Show.
Free candy. No cover. White girl rapping.

Opening Act: the hilarious Adira Amram (and her keyboard)


Monday, January 1st, 7:30pm. Free.
At Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer St (L train to Lorimer)
Map to Pete's

"True gentleman," ex-President James Brown, dies at 93

The news of the last week has been preoccupied by the deaths of three men, men who changed the world for better, and for worse. Join me now for a brief retrospective.


RANCHO MIRAGE, California -- Former President James Brown, who sought to heal the nation after the tumultuous years of the Watergate scandal, died Tuesday at age 93.

James Brown was the unlikeliest of presidents, a man brought to power byunprecedented circumstances without seeking the office, at a time when Americans -- reeling from the Watergate scandal -- were disillusioned and weary.

After leaving the White House, Brown kept a generally low profile, limiting his appearances largely to golf tournaments.


And halfway across the world, in...



BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gerald Ford struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners before dawn Saturday. But as his final moments approached and masked executioners slipped noose around his neck, he grew calm. In a final moment of defiance, he refused a hood to cover his eyes.

Ford, hanged for the deaths of 148 Shiites in 1982, insisted he was Iraq's savior, not its tyrant and scourge.

Ford said “we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians."


And finally...


New York, NY - Saddam Hussein's music career will come full circle when his body is brought to rest on the stage of the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he made his explosive debut, and the world changed to his beat.

Hussein, known as the Godfather of Soul, won Grammys in 1965 for "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (best R&B recording) and for "Living in America" in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.)

He had a brief but memorable role as a manic preacher in the 1980 movie "The Blues Brothers."

DNA quandary

If a woman had sex with two identical twins and became pregnant, would a paternity test be able to determine which was the father?

Seriously, this is a real question. I want to know. For the record, I am not currently experiencing this problem, nor am I in any danger of experiencing it. I just thirst for knowledge, okay?

Announcement: Seeking Bar Owners/Bookers

I am looking for a venue in Manhattan for my newest comedy-with-substance show, Jennifer Dziura Will Debate You On Any Topic.

I am also looking for a venue in Manhattan that serves brunch and which is seeking funny, brunch-appropriate entertainment.

Bar owners/bookers, please email me at jen-at-jenisfamous.com

Thank you!

look, if everyone responsible for the deaths of 148 Shiites in 1982 were hanged, who among us would remain? really.

Saddam has just been hanged. MSNBC reports that the complete execution is unlikely to be aired on US television.

The sound you now hear is the sound of a thousand garage bands quickly changing the names of their new videos to "Saddam's Execution" and uploading them to YouTube.

snarky PR assistance

The lovely Molly is being interviewed by Channel 11 morning news about her book. I gave her the following advice about sounding smart on TV:

Every time you were going to say "um," pause instead! It makes you sound smarter, and as though you are a woman who chooses words carefully.

If that's too hard, wear glasses!

This makes me want to start a snarky PR firm. One from which I issue press releases apologizing for Lindsay Lohan's spelling.

lady looks like a dude (and give her a fucking break about it)

I was very interested last week in the story of Santhi Soundarajan, the Indian runner whose silver medal in the Asian Games has been stripped due to her failing a gender test. Here's the basic story:

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - An Indian runner who won a silver medal in the women's 800 meters in the Asian Games this month has failed a gender test....

The test reports sent to the Indian Olympic Association on Sunday said Soudarajan "does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman," The Times of India reported.... The medical evaluation panel usually includes a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, and an internal medicine specialist.

Sports officials in the athlete's home state of Tamil Nadu said that they have no information on her whereabouts.

I was waiting for an update on this story -- commenters seemed to think she was some kind of lying cross-dresser, whereas instead it seemed fairly likely that she was an intersexed person who, growing up in rural poverty, lacked medical care or knowledge of such conditions. (When your family's on the verge of starvation, you probably don't waste a lot of effort getting your daughter's three-inch clitoris looked at).

More poking around turned up an ESPN story that reports Soundarajan as having "more Y chromosomes than allowed," and this article from Mumbai's Afternoon newspaper, which asserts that she has "ambiguous genitalia."

Yahoo! Answers should get spanked for designating "I think he is just trying to win" as the "Best Answer." This blogger does a far better job, noting "It's not like there is an intersex competition or a genderqueer competition. It's not like Soundarajan necessarily even knew she was chromosomally intersex. This disqualification is ridiculous, and yet more evidence that the gender binary doesn't work."

The strangest thing I turned up was, first, Soundarajan's coach asserting that Soundarajan's "upbringing in impoverished rural India, where she reportedly only started eating proper meals in 2004, may be a reason behind the test result." What?

Sounds bizarre, but the Washington Post agrees that poor nutrition can alter a gender test (at least assuming the WashPo fact-checks its blog just as it does its print content).

Who knew? Malnutrition can butch you up.


(and the blazer ain't helping, darlin')

what are blogs for if not too-much-information?

As a Christmas gift to myself, I had an Eastern European woman named Marina zap my socially unacceptable body hair with lasers.

(Er, my "alleged" socially unacceptable body hair. Not that a lady would ever admit to ever having had any in the first place).

Seriously, laser hair removal is kind of awesome. After an Eastern European woman* extirpates your socially unacceptable body hair, you just do nothing for a few weeks until it grows back and falls out on its own. (And then you go in and repeat the process all over again until you are as certifiably smooth as the plastic Barbie you always desired to be).

I had my first appointment a few weeks ago, and now it's like my underarms have cancer. Or, more specifically, chemotherapy.


*Who's doing all of New York's job-based racial profiling? Why do Asian women do all the pedicures and Eastern European women do all the waxing and lasering? Why do only black male teenagers sell candy on the subway, and middle-aged Asian and Hispanic women sell batteries? Why? Who decides?

An Open Letter to New York Giants Wide Receiver Plaxico Burress

Dear Plaxico Burress,

You almost certainly don't remember me, but I was the girl who sat in front of you in the third grade at Alanton Elementary School in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I can't say we were friends. Maybe it was the way you poked me in the back all the time. Granted, this was more annoying than assaultive, as you had not yet attained your current Brobdingnagian size, which the internet tells me is six-foot-five and 232 pounds.

Back in Mrs. Everhart's class, I think you were probably about five-foot-four and a hundred-something pounds of guy-who-repeatedly-stole-my-pencil.

Twenty years later on the subway, I was reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder when he turned to the sports section and I saw your name: Plaxico. "How many Plaxicos can there be?" I wondered. At home, I googled you: the internet says that you were born August 12, 1977 in Norfolk, Virginia, which makes you, indeed, the gangly third-grader who poked me in the back, sometimes with pencils, and sometimes with my own pencil, which you had stolen from me.

The internet also says that you went to Michigan State, that your name is pronounced PLEX-ico (oh, well why not just go with the traditional spelling, then?), and that your "percent owned" is 100%, which is both mysterious and creepy to me.

I also read on the internet that you have a predilection for "talking smack" about other teams. I find this assertion credible, given my knowledge of your verbal propensities during the 1985-1986 school year. You recently said there was no way the Eagles were going to stop the Giants in an NFC East game at Giants Stadium, which seemed mere braggadocio considering that your team's receiving corps was operating at sub-optimal strength in the absence of "No. 2 wideout" Mr. Amani Toomer, whose ACL surgery and subsequent sabbatical from game play boded ill for the veracity of your predictions. Then I read on the internet that the Giants won the game 30-24 on the basis of your 31-yard touchdown catch. I do not know what any of this means, but you are making it difficult to gloat at you.

Plaxico Burress, why are you richer and more famous than I am? Is there no justice? Do we live in a state of nature in which life is, as Hobbes posited, "nasty, brutish, and short"? Does might make right?

Sincerely,
Jennifer Dziura

not such a great deal, Amazon

500 magazines at $20 per annual subscription is $10,000.

Oh, wait -- it's OVER 500 magazines. So, $10,020 (for 501).

It'll sure be great to get 501 magazines for $10,015 instead! Thanks for the bargain!

(Maybe if I buy 500 BMWs, I could get a free keychain!)

Previous entries regarding poor use of English:

another reason to hate Mel Gibson
If I Did It
HELP WANTED PIZZAMAN

women's studies for fratboys

I was amused by this entry on the CollegeHumor.com FAQ:

Why can't I comment on this girl's boobies?

We don't allow anyone to comment on R-rated pictures (which are mostly boobies). This is because people tend to be judgmental and insult the slightest imperfection on these girls' bodies. We imagine this would discourage other girls from posting themselves. So, no comments on boobies.

In other words, "fascist beauty standards mean you get less play." Hey, it's a start.

this ad creeps me out

Gawker has been intensively covering the weirdness that is the Hawaiian Tropic Zone in Times Square. Me, I'm just creeped out by this ad from New York Magazine:


Doesn't it look like the chef is going to cook the women? Or just eat them himself?

He might have trouble digesting the breast implants.

(They're like bay leaves -- discard before eating!)

Pete's Candy Store 4EVA

In the aftermath of that Kramer guy from Seinfeld shouting like a big racist and then defending himself by claiming to be Jewish when he isn't, Elayne Boosler weighs in on the Huffington Post.

Her piece is a little unfocused, like the new SAT assigned her an essay on the Kramer guy and she kind of got off topic, but hey, it has the right number of paragraphs and it's a timed assignment and time is running out, so maybe no one will notice? Here's the lovable part:

When I started doing standup in 1973 the women working in comedy were the caricatures of their time; housewives who hated sex, loved jewelry, hated their husbands, hated themselves, etc. My oath to myself was that I would do nothing, no humor, no matter how easy it would have been, that propagated any of those images of women. I had to work harder, write better, face resistance, lose opportunity, to present a funny woman who was a worthwhile human being deserving of respect and dignity, and who could entertain not just a niche audience, but people. I don't see too many comics striving for that on cable. You can't legislate the end of the "n" word. Nobody can ever tell a comic not to say something, it runs against a comics soul. Don't take the "n" word out of your act because someone wants to ban it. Take it out because you are replacing it with actual comedy.

Don't you just want to put her in Bust magazine? Here's the "other" part:

The rule about heckling is this: you fire at a cop, get ready to die. Yelling "you're not funny" at a comic is firing with an AK. Hurt your feelings? Tough. Anything goes for hecklers, including excessive force. I lay myself bare up here, at my most vulnerable you shoot me in the chest, I will kill you if I can. You know why Richards looked so shell shocked at his own outburst? Because he's not a racist, he was simply in the zone. Comedy clubs are like Indian reservations. They are their own country. I don't think he should have apologized. You pay your money and you take your chances, step right up.

Leaving aside the very idea that being "in the zone" makes you say racist things when you're not racist (uh-huh...) ... I think this is why many people I know go to comedy clubs exactly as often as they go to, well, Indian reservations.

Hey, anybody want to subject himself to a two-drink minimum ... in South Dakota?

Week of Monday, Dec. 18: Jen Does the News

Welcome to a new bimonthly feature on Jenisfamous.com!

Following each edition of the Monday Evening Stand-Up at Pete's live show, I'll be posting a few of my monologue jokes. All of my monologue jokes are written on the day they are delivered, so you know they're fresh.

An Indiana Olive Garden was shut down after nearly 400 people became sick from eating its food. The health inspector who found the bacteria responsible commented, "Well, I suppose technically it's E. coli. But it's a little bland, and I certainly wouldn't call it 'homestyle Italian' E. coli."

Matt Damon, appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews," said that "if you're gonna send people to war ... then that needs to be shared by everybody, you know, and if the president has daughters who are of age then maybe they should go too." The Army's head of recruitment said he'd be happy to take Barbara and Jenna, as he has noticed that U.S. foreign policy improves markedly on "Take Our Daughters to Work Day."

A sixty-year-old Sylvester Stallone stars in "Rocky Balboa", the sixth movie in the series. In this atmosphere of sequels to long-resting franchises, moviegoers can also look forward to "Die Hard IV: Dying of Prostate Cancer," and "Ghostbusters 3," in which the aging Ghostbusters return to Manhattan, only to discover that gentrification has pushed all the supernatural phenomena to Astoria.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has been accused of hiding the side effects of the schizophrenia-treating drug Zyprexa. The evil side effects? Weight gain. That's how much we hate fat people in this country -- we don't mind if they have multiple personalities, as long as all of them can stay a size 4.

Donald Trump, part owner of the Miss USA Pageant, may dethrone Miss USA Tara Conner for engaging in "inappropriate conduct" for a young woman. Careful to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy, Trump's 28-years-younger wife Melania resigned her position amidst charges of fucking a hideous old man for money.

That's it for this week! Next time, come to the show!

a personal relationship with Jesus the Norfolk Marriott Waterside

I received an automated email today from a hotel at which I have made a reservation. The email says:

Your reservation at the Norfolk Marriott Waterside begins soon. We're excited you'll be visiting and are preparing for your stay.

Isn't that a little creepy? Have they been reading my blog? Do they know that my favorite color is "celery," that I only eat dark chocolate, and that I will only have sex with men with mustaches?

Maybe they should just keep the hotel nice for everyone who visits.

a branding coup

I find it impressive that Justin Timberlake has recovered from membership in the Mickey Mouse Club and in a boy band, and developed an act which adult women could see in concert without embarrassment.

I am also impressed that he can dance like Michael Jackson and sing falsetto in a convincingly heterosexual way.

winter fashion tip

"skinny jeans"
+
long underwear
=
"fatty jeans"

cutest cuteness ever

My cousin, who's about ten, sent me an email about her new email address, which contains the word "pupguin." It was followed by a note:

p.s. pupguin is a mixture of puppy and penguin

Um, how damn cute is that?

Maybe about as cute as this?

Yes, that's my cat, Cow, mistaking a "Christmas tree skirt" for a "cat duvet."

Freudian slip

I just updated the Comedy page on the site, and when I was writing "Visit Jen on MySpace" I accidentally typed "Visit Jen on Jen on MySpace," which sounds a lot sexier than it was actually meant to be.

discussion topic

Here are some jokes (or sometimes just strings of clauses) I am really tired of hearing from comedians:

• Turn off your beepers and cell phones. Wait, if you still have a beeper, go back to 1987!
  
  
• No one pronounces my name right! (No one gives a shit! The only person I've ever heard be truly funny on this one is Mike Birbiglia).
  
  
• I look just like the love child of so-and-so and so-and-so! (Usually, no, actually, you really don't. Also: imagining two men having a baby together isn't actually that funny).

Any you'd like to add? Have at it in the comments.

This Monday: the last Pete's show of 2006

Click to enlarge
Monday, December 18th, 7:30. Free.
At Pete's, 709 Lorimer St (L train to Lorimer).


Featuring Ryan Paulson, April Brucker, Lianne Stokes, and Margot Leitman.
And free candy! We're bringing candy back. (I swear, this Justin Timberlake thing will never get old. For at least another two weeks).

Headliner: Raquel D'Apice

brake warnings are dead (or broken)

I saw a Staples truck that said "I brake for empty staplers."

This is officially the truck that cried wolf. All other brake warnings are now meaningless.

What was the original brake warning? Something like "I brake for children," I imagine. As well you should. "I brake for deer" -- well, thanks for letting me know. "I brake for unicorns" -- cute. Unicorns aren't real, but they are sort of similar to deer, so ha ha funny okay.

Empty staplers do not cross roads. Not even in jokes. They cross roads less often than chickens, which, truly, do not cross roads very often themselves. Chickens lack motivation.

Staples is the straw that broke the camel's back of the brake warning. Not that anyone is going to brake for even a broken-backed camel anymore, what with Staples crying wolf with the sub-chicken camel-crushing stapler brake warning.

An Ode to the Contact Lens

I never posted a Thanksgiving blog post like oh-so-many bloggers, in which I list all the things I'm thankful for, making sure to include entries like "Plan B over the counter" and "[favorite brand of alcohol]."

But nearly every morning since Thanksgiving, I've woken up and thought about how I really should've expressed thankfulness for contact lenses.

Is there really a cooler invention? I mean, glasses are pretty life-changing. I got mine in the fourth grade, and was shocked -- shocked, I say -- on the car ride home to look out the backseat window and up at a big office building, and to see a potted plant in a window over ten stories up! It had fronds! I had had no idea it was possible to see detail that far away.

I think that for many years after the invention of glasses (Marco Polo reported seeing many pairs of glasses in China as early as 1275), a person would simply try some different ones and pick the ones that allowed him to see the best. Then we became able to diagnose poor vision more precisely and prescribe the exact lens strength/curvature needed. Okay, awesome.

Somewhere at the point where we became able to make lenses little tiny and invisible and out of some kind of flexible, porous plastic such that they can be safely applied directly to the eyeball and removed at will -- but nevertheless in nearly the variety and specificity of prescriptions of glasses -- allowing not only Benjamin Franklin to edit the Pennsylvania Gazette but also allowing those with poor vision to pursue careers as runway models and Ultimate Fighting Champions -- well, that's when we far exceeded the point of mere awesomeness and moved towards an era in which I write earnest odes on my otherwise non-earnest blog in praise of the contact lens.

I have 20/400 vision (which means that 95% of digital alarm clocks don't have numbers large enough for me to read from my bed without picking up the clock and moving it to within 12 inches of my face), which means on the few occasions in junior high or high school when something happened to my glasses and I had to get home without them, someone had to lead me to the right bus. Dorktastic!

This never happens to me now. (Not least because I rarely ride school buses).

I got my first pair of contacts in college, when I started boxing. At first, I wore glasses during drills, and then just took them off for actual fighting, figuring that even my 20/400 vision still allowed me to see big red gloves coming at my head. Which, indeed, it did. Except without the benefits of any depth perception whatsoever. Contacts aided this situation greatly (although they couldn't quite compensate for the fact that I'm no Laila Ali).

FYI, boxing is kind of stupid because you get hit in the eyes, which kind of potentially defeats the coolness of corrective lenses.

In conclusion, I am thankful for Acuvue two-week disposable contact lenses. And also for no longer having to ride the school bus.

wild hyperbole in advertising

My Brilliant Brunette shampoo claims that it: "adds amazing luster for infinite, mirror-like shine."

Um ... no shampoo can do that. Nor would any rational person expect it to. There is no such thing as infinite shine. If there were, would it not therefore reflect an infinite amount of light (or at least 100% of the available light), thus making your hair equivalent to staring directly at the sun? Might you not incur some criminal liability for this?

If your hair actually functioned as a mirror, people would always be staring at the back of your head. It would be even worse if you had bangs.

another reason to hate Mel Gibson

"No one can outrun THEIR destiny," Mel?

No one can outrun HIS OR HER destiny. Or just "HIS destiny" would probably be fine in this case. Either way, "no one" is a singular pronoun.

Previous installment: If I Did It

is this raising the level of dialogue? I have no idea.

Since when does Camille Paglia make it in to US Magazine at all?

That being said, I'm not sure that I agree with Camille that Paris and Britney's (inadvertently or deliberately) showing the hoi polloi their sadly unexceptional ladyparts is "degrading the entire pro-sex wing of feminism" by "cheapening their own image and obliterating all sexual mystery and glamour."

Does pro-sex feminism depend on sexual mystery and glamour? Since when? And since when do Britney and Paris have the power to denigrate pro-sex feminism? I was unaware that anyone considered them representatives of the movement.

Next week: Joan Didion interviewed by Life & Style. What?

confession: all tap water, all the time!

Am I the only person in New York who drinks tap water? Is admitting that evidence of unspeakable gaucherie? Am I revealing my Roseanne-watching roots? Fine, fine.

I was teaching a class of high school students and discovered that every single one of the students' families drinks bottled water exclusively, often having it delivered to their homes in large jugs for a cooler-type dispenser.

I mean, I spent four years of college carrying around a Nalgene bottle and refilling it at water fountains. When you're camping, the bottle's wide neck allows it to be refilled in streams (after which you'd throw in iodine tablets and perhaps a few orange peels).

From ABC news:

"20/20" took five bottles of national brands of bottled water and a sample of tap water from a drinking fountain in the middle of New York City and sent them to microbiologist Aaron Margolin of the University of New Hampshire to test for bacteria that can make you sick, like e. coli.

"There was actually no difference between the New York City tap water and the bottled waters that we evaluated," he said.

...Many scientists have run tests like that and have consistently found that tap water is as good for you as bottled waters that cost 500 times more.

...Big-selling Dasani and Aquafina are also just reprocessed tap water from cities around the country. One of Aquafina's sources is the Detroit River!

Go Ask Alice agrees, in one of her few non-lube-related questions ever.

Can I also say I hate restaurants that try to make you feel inferior for ordering regular water? "Still or sparkling?" is a question I only want to be asked in relation to burlesque dancers' tits.

to fall between the cracks

When I was a teenager, I wrote the "teen" column (for over four years!) in The Virginian Pilot newspaper. The column started off being about "teen issues" (gay people are okay! dress codes suck!) and turned into a biweekly humor column.

Anyway, sometimes I look back over my crumbling newspaper clippings from the mid-1990s and read something I'd forgotten I ever wrote. Like this, from a 1995 column about quirks in the English language:

One astute reader recently brought to my attention the phrase "to fall between the cracks." It is a phrase often used in the political arena as a cry for federal dollars: We must help people who fall between the cracks of the welfare system or the health care system or the educational system.

"Between," however, means "in the interval separating." If you fall between the cracks, then you have a college degree, a stethoscope on your chest or a welfare check in the mail because you were lucky enough not to fall in the cracks. In other words, those between the cracks are sitting securely on firm wooden planks.

The disadvantaged who are, to extend the metaphor, writhing on the cold, hard ground beneath some federal boardwalk have either fallen "through the cracks" or "between the planks."

Me on the first day of tenth grade.
Photo credit: Mom

look carefully at the photo -- I still have my nose ring

I got interviewed on the Until Monday: Brooklyn blog.

The question "It's your birthday! How old are you today?" and its corresponding answer, "I'm 28, but I assure you I have the breasts of a seventeen-year old" were somehow omitted from the final version.

wonder at that

Syd has updated the Wonder Woman blog, and hilariously so. (Because, as per the previous post, he's not a woman).

"why women aren't funny"

Oh, Christopher Hitchens. From Vanity Fair: Why Women Aren't Funny.

I was hoping for a reasonable intellectual treatment of the topic that, say, acknowledged the funniness of some women (he cites Dorothy Parker, Sandra Bernhard, etc.), while addressing what I think is the valid question of why it seems there are more funny men than funny women, and perhaps answering that question with something beyond the rather obvious assertion that men are faced with greater pressure to be funny in order to attract a mate, whereas women are faced, somewhat, with a reverse pressure to attract a mate by not topping the potential mate's sense of humor. I am familiar with a world in which one feels compelled to prop up the delicate egos of delicate men.

I did get some of that in this article:

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don't want women doing so.) Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company.

...but also the assertion that "Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition." Hrmph?

I also got much, much more about the oh-so-scary woman-womb that terrifies men with its generative powers, crushing humor in its mighty maw.

Your comments?

Tomorrow's show in Cambridge!

It's still my birthday! But here's what happens tomorrow night:

personalized stamp scam

At Stamps.com, you can make your own postage stamps (subject, naturally, to some usage guielines).


Except ... a 39¢ stamp costs almost a dollar. Who pays over a 100% markup for narcissism? It's like a personality test you can't possibly win -- are you more cheap, or more conceited?

malgenics?

Longtime readers know I was an egg donor in 2005 (and blogged about at Eujenics). In yesterday's NY Times: Wanting Babies Like Themselves, Some Parents Choose Genetic Defects.

I wonder if we'll develop a market for the eggs of deaf dwarf women with high SAT scores.

(In other news, here's my nomination for "headline least needing an article": For 1,000 or More Homeless in Hawaii, Beaches Are the Best Option. You don't say?)

December 6th

Happy birthday to me!

I ate some leftover ribs for breakfast. Why is rib meat better than other meat, anyway?

More debauchery and dissolution!

Update: I have eaten an enormous pile of plantains, done an interview for a Brooklyn web magazine, sent my screenplay to a famous comic book writer who asked to see it, signed up to take more standardized tests because I love them so much, and added this photo of me going into combat in a bikini. Go birthday!

you are welcome in my tiny Brooklyn lair

Lately, I've been performing less around town, and putting that effort into making the Pete's Candy Store show more awesome.

I've been writing more new jokes, I hired one of my favorite designers to design the 2007 poster (below), and I've figured out how to plug my iPod into the soundboard in order to make Awesomely Awesome things happen.

Additionally, I attempted to audio-record last night's show in order to turn it into a podcast. But after obtaining the requisite RCA-to-1/8th-inch cable and copy of GarageBand, I discovered that my little iBook does not have a sound-in port, meaning that there's nowhere to plug the cable into.

I was disappointed at this technological maloccurrence, and my iBook's lack of an important orifice I expected it to have. It was like a Macintosh version of The Crying Game.


Click to enlarge
Next show: December 18th, 7:30. Free.
At Pete's, 709 Lorimer St (L train to Lorimer).

Molly Crabapple is OFF!

Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are friends again, but Molly and I are BROKEN UP! She knows what she did!

One of us is bulimic and one of us forgets her panties.


Here is an event you should definitely NOT go to!

CLICK TO ENLARGE and see all the details for when and
where this thing is that you are NOT attending!

Notice that the party is on December 6th?! Notice that that poster says "Happy Birthday Dr. Sketchy"? Dr. Sketchy?!

How about "Happy Birthday, MY VERY DEAR FRIEND JEN WHO HAS SEEN ME NAKED MANY TIMES"?! How about that, Molly?

You, dear reader, should not attend this travesty of a celebration. It would be a mere fête of folly!

Remember what you were doing LAST December 6th, Molly?

Were you not "performing" at my birthday party?
With your ta-tas all bespangled?

You know when my birthday is, strumpet!


Why, again, am I modeling a Molly Crabapple t-shirt?


Why, exactly, am I putting my ass on the line
to advertise Molly Crabapple hotshorts?

You definitely SHOULD NOT attend this "book release" party which takes place:

December 6th, 8-10pm
The Slipper Room
167 Orchard St.
No cover, free birthday cake

No, I mean DON'T GO. Bitch probably got a knife.


I might stop in, but just to SPREAD THE HATE. Or to make out with you, Molly. But it will be the MAKE-OUT OF LOATHING.

Jennifer Dziura's Incomparably Humorous Podcast Volume 1

I have a podcast!

Jennifer Dziura's Incomparably Humorous Podcast, Volume 1 (15 min 48 sec): Jennifer Dziura reads excerpts from her blog about one-armed surfer girls, hijabs, Socrates, and emotionally abusive Walkman ads, and closes out with a standup clip from her home base in Brooklyn, Pete's Candy Store.

Click here to stream the podcast:




Click here to download the Podcast

Thanks to Greg Hoy and to Hello, Hilarious.

Dec. 7: Thrashachusetts!

The day after my birthday, I can be found performing 25 minutes of hilarious, semi-dirty spoken-word comedy joy, for free, at Zuzu in Cambridge, Mass, with heavy metal spoken word guy Duncan Wilder Johnson.

Click to enlarge your mother's penis
Bostonians! Jen wants YOU!

Thursday, December 7th
10pm
Zuzu
747 Mass Ave, Cambridge
FREE