Last night I went to Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco’s North Beach to see my favorite comedian Russell Peters perform. This was my first time at Cobb’s, it was a lot bigger than I imagined. Since I got there late, I had to settle for a seat at a table way in the back.
Russell Peters did not disappoint. I was also surprised that it was all new material, all of it stuff I haven’t seen or heard before. The man is a comic genius. Most of his material consists of ethnic jokes, and he makes fun of everyone. Chinese, Indian, Jews, Latinos, and Blacks: no one is safe, not even white people. But he did say some stuff that also made me pause and think. One such example is when he said, “I’ve always told people that I’m Indian. It’s really easy to define ourselves ethnically, but no one knows what they are culturely… I look Indian, but I never realized how not Indian I am until I went to India.” For the most part however, I was ROTFLMAO.
The audience was mostly Indian and Asians with a smattering of other ethnic groups thrown in. I found it really funny because we really responded well to the self deprecating ethnic jokes. There were two warm up acts for Russell Peters and it was a study in contrast. The first, a Filipino guy was hilarious and set the atmospheres. But the second, a white guy, told mostly really hardcore sexual jokes. That totally didn’t hook with the crowd. Most people were like “huh?” which was funnier than the jokes. I felt sorry for the guy.
But… then Russell Peters set everything right. He’s still here for the rest of the weekend. So if you’re lucky, you can still scalp some tickets (they’re officially sold out). In case you don’t, here’s a sample of his old material:
This weekend I attended a friend’s birthday and it made me realize just how old I am getting. In the twenty six years that I have roamed the earth I have learned many important life lessons which I think I should start sharing. These aren’t going to be philosophical life lessons but instead a series of practical tips that have helped me so far. So without further ado…
Life Lesson #1 – Public toilets
We all know the situation; we’re out in public and then have a terrible stomach ache. Being nowhere close to the comfort of your own home, you need to find a clean public toilet.
Most people think the best place is to find a restaurant. However, often times you can’t find a clean one where you can just walk right without getting accosted by a host/hostess. Instead what you should look for is a hotel. Hotels always have great bathrooms and you can shamelessly walk right in, pretend you are a guest, and do your business.
Now I do agree that hotels are less abundant than restaurants but if you spend an extra five minutes in the car looking for one, you’d be surprised, there are more than you think.
Okay so once you get into the bathroom, I always have this problem. The way the toilet seat covers are designed it makes it so that the bottom flap (see picture below) always touches the water.
As the water soaks up the paper, it drags the whole cover into the bowl. This means you probably have at most 30 seconds to take off your pants and sit down.
The way to avoid this problem is to simply tear off either the bottom half of the flap so that it doesn’t touch the water. I can’t stress this enough because it will save you so much time in life setting a new cover.
That’s it for now, stay tuned for other life lessons…
I really like Krav Maga. It’s one of the few martial arts that was invented after guns. It teaches you practical self-defense against realistic threats such as chokes, knifes, and assault rifles. It was designed to be easily learned, but difficult to forget. The movements are natural and for the most part instinctive.
In my first class, we did bunch of warm up drills, lots of punching, palm strikes, kicks, then for the last part, I learned a easy choke defense. I am completely sore… my back is killing me, but it feels good. I’m going to try to do Krav Maga twice a week… and see how far I can get with it.
I found an awesome Krav Maga video on youtube… enjoy.
Today I went to open an investment account at Charles Schwab. Instead of opening an account online, I actually went down to their offices and talked to a real person. Since I live in San Francisco, I went down to their headquarters at 101 Montgomery Street at 8:30 am.
After I finished everything and on my way out, I took the elevator. Waiting with me, was an older man, with white hair, in a very elegant blue pin-stripped suit. We got in the elevator together.
We were the only ones in the elevator and the old man asks me, “so, how did Schwab treat you today?”
I looked at him and answer, “good, good. I just opened my first account.”
He looks at me and asks, “how old are you?” (For some reason, I get asked that question all the time)
I reply, “25.”
He goes, “ha… that’s a good time to start.”
Then we arrived at our floor (we took it for only 1 floor). We then went our separate ways. And I was thinking to myself: who was that guy? Could it be… nah… really? Did I just talk to Chuck?
So I went home and googled Charles Schwab (the man). And this is what I found. Sure enough… that was the old man I saw in the elevator.
For those of you who don’t know Buzz Aldrin - he’s the 2nd man on the moon!
I became a space fanatic when I was 12 years old - okay, I admit, the coolness wore off when I realized that my bad vision would prevent me from being an astronaut. (tear) But nevertheless, I pretended to be an astronaut by looking at a bunch of pictures and watching NASA WebCast (this was ‘98 mind you and webcasts were ‘rare’ and ‘difficult’ to get working).
Oh - and the most important part of the entire space excursion was playing Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. This was by far the most difficult game I have ever played. The goal is to do a moon landing and make it back alive while racing against the USSR. There were a great many quirks about the game - if your rocket blew up, you to start R&D on rockets from the beginning. You train your crew, and then have to keep them motivated by putting them on missions. I’m not a gamer at all, and this was one of the only games I really liked.
So - Saturday we went to Yuri’s night Celebration at Nasa where we actually got to meet Buzz Aldrin. That was awesome. I asked him what he thought of the space program - interestingly, he said “We should stop putting out the fires of today, and instead take a longer term look into the future” Wow - digging a little deeper, I found that from Buzz’s point of view, NASA can do a lot better than it has in the last 2 decades.
Delivering on visions such as going to Mars - I asked Buzz what he thought. His response was “We have to think about today - not how to get to Mars, but once we get there, what we are going to do and plan R&D accordingly” One example is rapid deployment of teams - it takes 6 months to get to Mars with a crew of 6. We are definitely going to need to think about how we can do ANYTHING with 6 people. That’s so little!
Today the team took a trip to go see the Olympic torch! We really wanted to take advantage of the benefits of living in the city.
We arrived at the planned route at the right time but unfortunately no one was there. The only people to be found were pro-China demonstrators on one side and China protestors on the other. Though it was quite an event, after 20 minutes or so we realized there was no way the torch would ever come through where we were. In addition the live blog feed we received from our phones said the torch had gone “missing” in a warehouse near the ballpark. Deject we headed back to the office.
To make matters worse, we took a wrong turn on the way back, which landed us in traffic gridlock. Curious as to why a usually free flowing street was suddenly at a standstill we looked around and saw the street in front of us had been closed. Well, we all put two and two together, parked the car in a random lot, and immediately ran towards the street closure.
It was a fortunate coincidence that we just happened to bump into the new path of the torch! Here are some pictures:
