Nerd Shirt Dialectic

July 22, 2009

I am ambivalent about this shirt from Forever 21:

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On the one hand, it’s sort of cute.  On the other hand, it’s sort of poking fun at nerds (I believe those glasses have tape on them). 

The shirt also implies that the wearer is not a nerd (otherwise, it would say “more than I love math class” or “more than we nerds love math class” or “more than other nerds love math class,” if by chance the speaker, though a nerd, were overpowered by love).  

Here I appeal to the time-honored comedy tradition that one may only tell jokes about one’s one disadvantaged group: if you’re not a nerd, can the nerd-talk.

Also, who wants to be loved by someone who’s bad at math?  Dear god, not me.  Of course, who wants to be forever 21?  Probably people who are bad at math.

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New York City Spelling Bee Photo

July 21, 2009

Thanks to photographer Rob Goldberg! Click here for the set, featuring winner Dominique Vance and 30+ other sesquipedalian spellers.

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“The Bee” on Urban Dictionary

July 19, 2009

Thrillingly, I discovered myself on Urban Dictionary! (Although, somewhat ironically, my name is misspelled in an entry about a spelling bee).

“The Bee” is defined as:

The Williamsburg Spelling Bee. An adult spelling bee that takes place in Brooklyn, NY. Created by bobbyblue, Jennifer Dzuira, & Andy McDowell.

Example sentence: Did you go “the bee” the other night?

Glad to appear on a website also useful in cataloguing the nomenclature of novel, gang-affiliated sex acts.

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Meat vs. Meet

July 14, 2009

Incidentally, I am aware that, in my newsletter below, I spelled “meat” (flesh consumed as food) as “meet” (encounter or become acquainted).  

As the longtime host of a spelling bee, I find this embarrassing (not embarassing or embarrasing).  I don’t know what got into me.  It may be because some primal, orthographical part of my brain had just selected “deer” over “dear” and simply couldn’t handle two homophones in a row.  Incidentally, all of the following are homophonic phrases:

  • dear meat - The way one addresses a letter to one’s dinner, perhaps to apologize?
  • dear meet - The way one addresses a letter to the participants in a swimming competition?
  • deer meet - A place where swinging single caribou get together. 
  • deer meat - The thing I meant to say.  I ate it grilled, and in soup.

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The Quarterly Newsletter

July 14, 2009

Below is the edition of my Quarterly Newsletter that just went out. If you’d like to receive these newsletters in your very inbox, please click here.


Greetings!

I’m so happy to be sending you a quarterly newsletter, but I respect your time, so here’s what’s about to happen:
  1. Jen on Tyra Banks! (The inside story, plus a link to an interview in which I talk about the relationship between grammatical parallelism and comedy)
  2. One-Woman Show (one time only, and I should be delighted for you to attend)
  3. Jen Pontificates

I hope you will stick around — in the environs of this email — until the pontification.

Sincerely, and thank you,
Jen


Television and Interviews

Three weeks ago, I got an email from the Tyra Banks show.  A producer had watched my jokes about makeup and fashion on YouTube, and would I be available for a “Top 25 Moments of the Tyra Banks Show” special, and, oh, Quentin Tarantino is also doing it?

The shoot happened June 29th, at Tyra’s studio in Chelsea.  I didn’t meet Tyra (or Quentin). 

This is one of those VH1-style shows, like “20 Top Big Hair Video Moments,” wherein comedians comment on the clips as they go by.  I commented on “Big Ones vs Small Ones,” “Tyra Goes Undercover as a Man,” and “Face Your Fears” (in which Tyra overcomes her fear of dolphins, and another woman overcomes her fear of … pennies).

The special will air repeatedly throughout August on The CW.

I’ve also been interviewed recently by Wisecrack Zine, a Chicago-based outlet about women in comedy:

Click to read the Wisecrack Zine interview, “Jen Dziura: Spelling Out Success in Comedy”


One Night Only: Jen’s One Woman Show (with toga!)

Friday, August 7th
9:30 pm
$10

The P.I.T.
154 W 29th St, 2nd Fl

Only 43 tickets are available, so it might perhaps be prudent to obtain said tickets prior to the performance, should you wish to attend, an act by which I would be pleased and honored.
“What Philosophy Majors Do After College” is comedian Jennifer Dziura’s one-woman show of hilarity and the greats of Western thought.  After graduating from Dartmouth with a degree in philosophy, Jennifer held job titles including nude art model, egg donor to a gay man, subject of medical studies — and finally, comedian.  The show includes Jennifer’s “History of Western Philosophy in Fifteen Minutes,” an irreverent romp through the great thinkers from Socrates to Sartre.
Pontification

I have endeavored to keep this email reasonably brief, as what is entertainment but the process by which the entertainer secludes himself in some dark place, collects all the normally-interesting things he might have said throughout his quotidian affairs, and concatenates them, hoping to achieve some compounding of interest, such that his personality is like a frozen bullet of orange juice concentrate, which he then offers up to those looking for a citrus hit, and then he goes to sleep, spent, after drinking multitudinous fluids in an attempt to replenish his supply of personality?

On a personal note, I moved to Wall Street, to the 25th floor of a 50 floor highrise that was once an Art Deco bank. I now live two floors above comedian Sara Benincasa and am soon to live just a few blocks from my BFF, artist Molly Crabapple, which convinces me that Wall Street is the new Williamsburg.  Also: we have old Dutch buildings, and some place that George Washington dined before going into battle.  Goat cheese salads taste that much better with a bit of the dust of military history.

Jen at the palace in StockholmI just went to Sweden (see deer meet photos on the blog), for no special reason other than that I could reasonably predict that it would be edifying, as well as freakishly clean and safe.  It was.  I ate a great deal of herring, sometimes with pickles and cabbage; it’s a wonder that Swedes ever make out.  Next month, after my show, I’ll be passing through Edinburgh and Toronto.

Chelsea Mind Games, the weekly intellectual game show I have been running at the Chelsea Market for a year and a half, has come to an end.  The Chelsea Market, home to the Food Network, has decided to host (and pay for) only events about food.  They thanked me for bringing so many new people to the Market.  I expected this sometime, of course: Chelsea Market was paying me to put on a nerdy game show in a mall.  Next to the fish market.  The European tourists the Market courts were nonplussed; the fashion models stopping by for sample sales were flummoxed.  Of course, several hundred smart people from all over the city — from ages 7 to at least 70 — came and competed, and, I think, enjoyed second dates free from the bar scene, and met people who wanted to discuss probability and combinatorics, and shouted out “Ouagadougou!” when asked for the capital of Burkina Faso.

So, I have a little more time on my hands — a salutary state of affairs.  I will look for a new location for a Mind Games-like event, but in the meantime, I have a one-woman show to perfect!  This is the show I premiered at Ars Nova in February, shortened a bit so as not to tarry on our journey from Socrates to Sartre.  After August’s show, I endeavor to take the show on the road to colleges across the nation, and also in Toronto, where a strange number of people seem to like what I do despite my never having paid their city any special attention (a situation I undoubtedly ought now remedy).

Jen at the palace in StockholmOf course, I would like you to come on August 7th, and sit in a hard folding chair drinking an inexpensive beer and feeling slightly smug for watching a show that involves a slideshow of philosopher-busts when other perfectly functional humans have chosen to see The Proposal, with Sandra Bullock.  I am also running the New York City Spelling Bee on July 18th.  The Williamsburg Spelling Bee begins again on August 3rd.  I no longer run a comedy show at Pete’s; I just grew weary providing, on a biweekly basis, ten minutes of contextless jollity.  I want context.  I seek to provide at least as much context as humor.  So, August 7th.

If you intend to write a review of my show for any publication or blog, I can get you in for free.  Ditto if you are an unemployed philosophy major and seem nice.  You need only email.

Sincerely,
and thank you so much for your attention to this email amid the many emails to which you undoubtedly allocate less attention,
Yours,

Jen

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Insane Headlines of the Day

July 10, 2009

Emily McCombs, on Twitter, clued me in to this mind-blowing headline.

Not half an hour later, I discovered “5 cm. fir tree removed from patient’s lung“!

My mom used to tell me not to eat the apple seeds, or a tree would grow in my tummy. But she was joking. But this! Fir tree! Also: it seems like the doctors took out a lot of this poor guy’s lung, considering the problem was the fir tree. It’s not like that’s going to spread to your liver and kill you.

In the comments below the fir tree article, someone wrote, “In Soviet Russia, tree grows you!”

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Back From Sweden

July 9, 2009

TimeOut’s Stockholm guide insisted I drink coffee at this particular cafe (this picture is from the perspective of my sitting in front of the cafe, looking out on the rather more interesting square), which serves said coffee from a “200 year old samovar.” It was just a cafe, and a crowded one at that. Until I went looking for the ladies’ room, an endeavor requiring a trip down some vertigo-inducing spiral stairs into several adjoining medieval vaults — the sorts of places where torch-lit Viking parties perhaps ended in wenches being removed from their bodices. I felt like a bit of a dork being so impressed at someone’s 400 year old basement where they keep their bathroom.

This reindeer soup was disgusting. The salmon was fine. Things are the same all over the world: don’t eat in tourist-trap restaurants that don’t need to cultivate repeat business (because another horrible cruise ship will drop off some gullible Americans tomorrow — Americans who will eat the worst meatballs Sweden has to offer, purchase commemorative spoons, thimbles, and stuffed reindeer, and go back to their cruise ships, satisfied that they have been someplace exotic).

I caught the changing of the guard at the palace; the soldiers on the left just left behind the guy standing alone on the right and took with them the guy who had been standing in that spot all day. I like this picture because the “guard stand” on the left is just a picture of a guard stand. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

That’s it! Back from Sweden. Next Wednesday is the last-ever Chelsea Mind Games. My one-woman show is August 7th.

Oh, and if Sweden is too far, apparently there’s a “Little Sweden” in Lindsborg, Kansas.

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Palaces and Deer Meat in Stockholm

July 4, 2009

Gamla Stan is one of the islands — the central and longest-inhabited one — that makes up Stockholm. The royal palace is there, along with myriad medieval buildings. I love medieval buildings. America has none of them. Initially, I was delighted by all the narrow, winding cobblestone streets, the tiny alleyways, and the heavy wooden doors suitable only for those under four foot eleven:

Soon, though, I realized that a great many buildings from, say, 1500 had been turned into kitchy souvenir stores and we-knit-this-reindeer-sweater-ourselves boutiques. Can’t keep a bunch of medieval buildings unchanged forever, I suppose. But it’s bizarre to look past a bunch of yarn or plates featuring photos of King Carl XVI Gustav and see an arch before a wall of large, roughly-hewn exposed brick or stone, and think … damn.

This medieval building has been turned into a store that sells women’s clothing from India. In the basement, below multitudinous batik dresses, Indian furniture is for sale in the “vaults”:

This is the lunch I ate. Prittypana consists of diced potatoes and beef, which one then makes more exciting by the addition of that egg yolk you see here:

A lot of restaurants have “kok” in their names. (I inferred from having seen the word on both bars and home furnishings stores that it means “kitchen”). A ten year old could laugh all day at the many instances of “kok,” “fart” and “vag.”

This man’s job is to guard the Swedish royal palace from tourists, possibly by distracting them with his hat.

This man must protect the cannons from tourists. In a game of Rock Scissors Paper refitted as Swedish Royal Guardsmen, Tourist, Cannon, what would trump what?

This looked like a nice, boring legend on the office door of some kind of company. Except it says “Important Looking Pirates.” Which is, um, awesome.

Me near the palace in Gamla Stan.

The wind is blowing my hair in a slightly different direction in this one.

Oh, and I ate reindeer for dinner. In sauce. With potatoes. After a herring appetizer and before a strudel. So if Santa doesn’t come this year, you know whom to blame.

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24 Hours in Stockholm

July 4, 2009

Malaysia Air served me a very respectable fish curry, noodle salad, and coconut pudding last night.  Those flight attendants were mightily friendly.  The flight — on one of those huge double-decker planes — flew to Stockholm and then on to Kuala Lumpur.  It was funny, when we disembarked, to see those going on to Kuala Lumpur and those staying in Stockholm split off into two different lines; it looked basically as one might expect (Asian people on one side, blond people on the other).

I am staying in Stockholm at the Hotell Anno 1647 — as in, built in 1647 and later retrofitted with electronic keycards and indoor plumbing (not, certainly, in that order).  I selected the hotel specifically for its historicity and proximity to historical sites; however, the downside is that there is no elevator, and my room is really, really small: 

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My hotel is near this thing (the word for elevator is “hissen,” which, in the case of some elevators, is pleasingly onomatopoeic), the Katarinahissen:

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Here is the view from a cafe where I had a new type of beer I can’t remember how to spell:

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Here is me in front of some water.  I think this is a view of Gamla Stan.  (Not totally sure; Stockholm is actually a bunch of islands, but they’re very small islands, and you can, in most cases, walk from island to island.  The Brooklyn Bridge it ain’t). 

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Off to Stockholm, With Many Caveats

July 3, 2009

Continental comprises* of a bunch of assholes.

Some months ago, I bought a vacation package to Stockholm on Priceline.  Today, due to my own daredevilish time management, I missed my flight.  There was also a Holland Tunnel clog and a cab driver who didn’t know how to get around Newark, but seriously, it was a 5pm flight — you’d think a woman of some inner resources could find her way from point A to point B given a solid day to do so.

At this point, Continental did not need to comprise a bunch of assholes.  Even in the very best case scenario — “Oh look, we have a confirmed seat for an overnight flight leaving two hours later than the one you had originally planned!” — I am still destined to suffer for my crime.  Tacking hours onto an overnight international travel experience is punishment enough.  Instead, the woman at the counter gave me a lecture and booked me for a flight to Stockholm tomorrow evening.  When I suggested that I would be happy to be on the flight to Oslo that was leaving soon — because, as a woman with some inner resources, I can get from Oslo to Stockholm, and talk to many interesting Scandinavians in the process — the woman at the counter looked at me as though I were stupid, and informed me that Oslo and Stockholm are in different countries.  This, as I clearly was manipulating a map of Europe on my iPhone, contemplating how much of a fun adventure it might be to fly into Brussels or Geneva.  I got nowhere with Continental.  

I called the Intrepid Young Journalist, who used the internet to discover that, while all other airlines were offering last-minute flights for $1300+, Malaysia Air had a flight to Stockholm leaving, well, now — I am writing this at the Malaysia Air gate, as the juvenile and infirm are pre-boarding — for $528.  I took the AirTrain to Terminal B, where a nice (Malaysian) woman sold me a ticket for $398!  And then, despite the fact that I was buying a plane ticket to a foreign country two hours before the flight would board, she apologized for only having middle seats.  But then it turned out she actually did have an aisle seat.  I’m going to go sit in it now.  More soon! 

*I struggled with “comprises” versus “is composed of” and went for concision.

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