Spoken Word
In college I organized rallies.
Friends pointed out that I was a little too happy about it.
​
That it wasn't just about El Salvador or South Africa divestment,
that I was doing this to get an audience to listen to me rant.
Ouch.
I wonder if Robespierre or Frederick Douglass or Eugene Debs
were really just spoken word artists,
not speaking to make revolution
but making revolution to be able to speak.
What's the point of the uprising if you don't have a story to tell?
Now that I'm a grownup lawyer,
I find I have to keep doing this to stay sane.
​
The law is full of lying and bullying and hideous silence. So after I take off my tie,
I crave talking to audiences in ways
they don't allow in federal court.
When I moved to Boston,
I got pulled into the gravitational field of
Brother Blue's story space.
​
Blue was ridiculously over-the-top, but that was his mission. His vivid craziness gave the rest of us permission.
You didn't have to worry
about being ridiculous in his company.
Here are audio files of some stories Blue's room pulled out of me.
the glorious madness of the 1996 African Cup final
speaking in tongues at a May Day rally in Harvard Square
the legality of an occult picket line
it's a radical thing to demand what they have promised you
my mother gets hit by a Marxist karma boomerang
the Ecstasy of Fake Science
In 2013, Donene and I went to the inaugural
Bad Ad Hoc Hypothesis Festival at MIT,
a showcase of Onion-style fake science TedTalks
in front of 1200 MIT students.
​
This is the brainchild of Zach Weinersmith, a prolific, hilarious mensch
who writes the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
​
I thought hey, I can fake the science better
than these MIT people can fake the comedy.
So I entered the next year and won.
​
I did it again in Seattle 2015, London 2016, and MIT in 2017 and winning it again in 2019.
I am two-time champion of fake science comedy!
​
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
wherein I reveal the origin of the Black Death
I'm not using quantum physics to make fun of Trump.
I'm using Trump to make fun of quantum physics.
​
Zach added MIT theoretical physicist Max Tegmark
to the judges' panel an hour before the show,
which was awkward since I made fun of him in my Powerpoint.
​
He said afterward that yes,
the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics
is best understood as comedy.
​
So I'm waiting for my Nobel Prize.
wherein I defend creationism as thanatosis,
a planetary self-defense strategy to convince predatory alien civilizations that we are too barbaric to colonize and too stupid to pose a threat
The theme was "Big Science" - proposals for ridiculously expensive experimental projects.
​
I argue that the Red Sox need to enhance
Tim Wakefield's knuckleball by building
a Large Hadron Collider under Fenway Park.
​
(Here's Tim Wakefield's reaction)
wherein I explain the evolutionary significance
of the "spare tire" in middle-aged males
and its connection to global warming