Some of my favorite NYC comics (including Luke Thayer and Dave Lester) combined forces to form hilarious Voltron and heap much deserved derision upon The Blind Side and all "It Takes A Village White Person To Raise A Black Child" movies.

This is a clip from my standup set last night at the Sycamore bar in Ditmas, Brooklyn. You should snow up the next time I have a snowcase. I'm really funny.

Melissa Pierce is making a movie called Life In Perpetual Beta, and she decided to interview me! She summarizes the documentary as follows:

Life in Perpetual Beta is a documentary film about the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live less planned and more passionate lives.

I met Melissa at SXSW Interactive (aka Geek Christmas) last year. We were waiting in a very long line for food, and we just started talking. She's a super cool, smart and motivated person, and this project sounded very exciting, especially given the structure of my multi-threaded life. 

When she was visiting NYC several months ago, we sat down for a few hours to discuss life, technology and the overlap thereof. The clip above is just a snippet, and I urge you to visit the film website and check out some of the other, more amazing, people she's roped in to this project.

The complete video of the panel I joined is in this post.

Twitter conversation about the stream is here...

Olympic Profiles in Courage

Rather than provide video coverage of events, sports analysis and other boring things you don't care to see, NPTV has decided to be truly original and bring you some of the amazing life stories of the individuals participating in the Games. It's a little something we like to call God Himself Couldn't Have Written This. So sit back, relax and enjoy the impossible.

Name: Yevgeny Krispykremakov

Birthplace: Somewhere in the Himalayas

Events: Men's Super-G Downhill, Men's Slalom, Men's Ski Jump

Yevgeny Krispykremakov is not your average world class athlete, but that's part of what makes him one of the best. You see, Yevgeny was raised by a pack of wild wolves in the Himalayan Mountains. For the first 10 years of his life, "Krispy" as his wolf family calls him, had no human contact. He hunted with the wolves, slept with the wolves and yes, he even danced with the wolves. There's a rumor floating around Chechnya that Krispy even sired a litter of wolfmen during his crazier days. It was this wolf life, walking around on all fours, which gave Krispy his low center of gravity and made him the envy of the competitive downhill skiing world.

On his 11th birthday, Krispy could no longer be satisfied living on the lamb, both literally and figuratively. After his adoptive father and uncle were poached by fur traders, Krispy decided that he would leave the pack behind and search for his real, human, parents. In order to keep up with his wolf family on hunts, Krispy had devised a primitive form of what we in the civilized world call skis. And it was on these "skis" that Krispy set out on June 3, 1905.

For 80 years Krispy skied from mountain to mountain in search of his roots. He evaded many a hunter who sought the legendary wolf-man. He survived the concentration camps at Auschwitz as well as both atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. When he wasn't enduring the worst suffering inflicted by man this century, Krispy was busy clearing mine fields in half a dozen war-torn countries around the world.

Then, on June 3, 1985, exactly 80 years after he began his search, Krispy was discovered by famed Russian wrestling and downhill ski instructor Boris Adonikov. Although Adonikov was not Krispy's father, the Russian treated the aged wolf man as if he were a long lost son. The then-120 year old Adonikov took Krispy under his wing and taught him everything he knew or didn't know about skiing and wrestling. Krispy was soon winning every major skiing and wrestling competition he entered. He was named Athlete of the Century by Sports Illustrated and even considered moving to the States to play professional basketball. Krispy was destined for the top. But God, it seems, had other plans.

On December 13, 1987, as he and father-figure Adonikov were rescuing abandoned wolf-pups from a frozen-over Lake Ladoga, tragedy struck. A group of American exchange students, heavily intoxicated with Smirnoff Ice, killed Adonikov with an intercontinental ballistic missile – an intercontinental ballistic missile intended for Krispykremakov.

Wracked by guilt, shame, sorrow, loss, fatigue, despair and diarrhea, Yevgeny Krispykremakov vowed never to ski again. He sold his skis and moved out of his cardboard box under the Blue Bridge in St. Petersburg. His neighbors were crushed.

Neighbor Idonna Givadamavic:

"I can't really say I miss him. He was this smelly old man who howled a lot. He did try to sell me some skis once, but I declined when I realized they were just meter sticks he had stolen from the local grade school and glued together. I reported him to the police. I hope he got help."

But help was nowhere near Krispy's postal code. He spent his days crying and his nights crying even louder. When he wasn't crying, he was drinking or whoring himself for a few kopeks at the local mine. Yevgeny Krispykremakov was living in Hell.

What Kremakov didn't know, and what defies all credibility, plausibility and possibility is that Hell was just warming up. The mid-1980s was not a good time to be a geriatric wolf-man from the Himalayas, and Krispy soon discovered that his fellow humans were none too happy about his existence. As he crawled toward the homeless shelter from another lonely night turning tricks, a group of drunken American exchange students shot Yevgeny in the leg... with none other than an intercontinental ballistic missile – the same intercontinental ballistic missile that killed Coach and Almost-Father Adonikov. Fate had stabbed Krispy in the back with a rusted knife and twisted it.

Because of a loophole in his healthcare policy, Krispykremakov's HMO denied him the reconstructive bionic surgery he needed to repair his leg. Left with nowhere to turn for medical assistance, Krispy amputated his own infected right leg... at the hip... with a Swiss army knife.

At 100 years old, with no family, no skis and only one leg, Yevgeny Krispykremakov had given up on life, but fortunately for the world of international downhill skiing, life had not given up on Yevgeny.

One Tuesday evening in January 1991, as Krispykremakov was wallowing in his own waste, a newborn baby drifted down the sewage canal where he lay. Krispy could not allow this innocent baby to die. On that day, he resolved to raise this baby boy, to be a father to this child that he himself had always wanted. He named the child Alexei Bornin Crapakov, which in English, roughly translates to "Alexei born in feces."

Little Crapakov became Yevgeny's new raison-d'etre. He cut way back on the drinking and the whoring, turning his attention instead to improving the plight of children worldwide born in sewage canals. He founded the world renowned Center for Children Born in Human Waste, and has dedicated 99 percent of his energy toward making it a success. With the other one percent of his energy, Yevgeny learned to ski again in order to honor the life of Boris Adonikov. For the past eleven years, Yevgeny, inspired by little Crapakov, has practiced his unique one-legged skiing in the Caucus Mountains. He returns today a changed man. Ninety-seven years after leaving the wolf pack, Yevgeny Krispykremakov aims for the gold in Salt Lake City.

God himself couldn't have written this.

My fellow New Yorkers were lovely, making sure I was ok. I rose slowly, tested all my joints and concluded that I hadn't broken anything. I continued my journey to Bereket and devoured the lentil soup. It really is delicious. I knew I'd be sore the next day, but counted myself lucky that more serious damage hadn't been done.

Then I got home and opened my bag. Here's the real damage:

My poor laptop

And my stainless steel Kleen Kanteen!!

A day later, with my head still hurting, I checked into the ER to make sure I didn't have a serious concussion. All clear in that department. Meanwhile, Apple has my laptop and will hopefully be able to replace the glass and part of the case. Most of my work is in the cloud online, so I'm able to use a backup computer to keep my life going.

Oh, and I'm finally getting renter's insurance. I'm about a decade late on that one.

In response to some of the comments so far, I just want to make clear who I blame for this: New York City's shitty mafia. I was in Chicago last week, and they had 10 inches of snow GONE the very next morning. What's happened to organized crime in the Big Apple that a prominent intersection can be left in such a state? 

In mid-November 2009, I had a chance to be the "Ask The Expert" expert for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. I got the offer because of my job hosting Popular Science's Future Of on Science Channel, but was still a bit nervous about just what I'm an expert in. My friends spared no ridicule in asking the same question, but I did it, and I ended up helping a lot of people make some money.

I can't reveal what happened on the show, but I can say that the process was really interesting. I got a form from the show asking what areas I was comfortable talking about, and we taped a bunch of the shows back to back. As you can see from the photo above, I was at home. They bring in the experts via Skype video!

My episodes are airing all week, so check your local listings! It really was a lot of fun