The last-ever episode of The Nooner went up today on SNY.tv.

For a variety of reasons, I can’t quibble with the decision to pull the plug on the show, but I still find it a bit sad.

It’s sad because I spent about the first two hours of every workday for the past 22 months writing jokes for the show, and that’s a whole lot of energy to invest in anything. And getting paid to write comedy has long been a dream of mine, and since writing for The Nooner became part of the job for which I’m salaried, I was able to convince myself that I was, indeed, paid to write jokes.

And it’s sad because we had such high hopes at the start, and I fear we failed on them at least partly because too often the show wasn’t funny enough.

I wrote it in conjunction with Jeff, the show’s producer, and though I’m certain we came up with a good deal of actually funny jokes over the nearly two-year run, it was really, really hard to churn out three minutes a day of entertaining material every single day given how little time we had to create it and the limitations on our content created by this network’s (totally reasonable) standards on decency.

Jeff insists the show worked to a point, and that the fact that it ran for nearly two years and had sponsors for most of that time means it was a success. He’s probably right. It was something good that ran its course, I guess.

But the process grew increasingly tiresome as it became clear that the show was not blowing up like we hoped it would. We found ourselves repeating material a ton, which is a cardinal sin in comedy writing. We wrote so many damn fat jokes about Eddy Curry, then CC Sabathia, then Rex Ryan, then Bengie Molina.

Brittany Umar, the host of the show, was awesome throughout. I don’t know that she had much of a background in comedy before she started working with us, but she picked it up amazingly quick. She’s also incredible at reading a teleprompter, which I can attest is much harder than it looks. Plus she put up with so much of our nonsense, and was game for absolutely everything we asked her to do on camera.

Anyway, the upside to the show’s departure is that the extra couple hours every day should benefit readers of this blog, since I should have a lot more time to think and process what to write in this space. I’m excited about that.

It’s just a little depressing to see a lot of hard work just sort of drift off into cyberspace.

I’m considering starting up a podcast, so I’m curious:

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On second thought, some of the choices there might skew the results a little, so let me be more specific.

I’m considering starting up a podcast, unaffiliated with SNY (but certain to be shamelessly linked from this blog) with my former college roommate Ted Burke, one of the most entertaining people I know, and with whom I co-hosted a campus TV show in college.

We’d talk about sports some, for sure, but I’m hoping to pull off something more akin to a variety show format: some combination of scripted jokes and sketches, debate, and interviews.

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All the REO Speedwagon talk the past couple of days made me think of the following video, courtesy of my some of college roommate Ted’s high school buddies. It was their entry for a Denver-area radio station’s contest to create its new commercial, and somehow I don’t think it won. Something about them not actually playing REO Speedwagon on that station:

The inimitable Mike Salfino found this, on the Barnes and Noble page for Linda Cohn’s autobiography:

“Linda Cohn is far hotter than her ‘girl in the locker room’ persona would suggest. I’ve been with her backstage at a rock and roll show. . . . I know.”
—Kevin Cronin, lead vocalist for REO Speedwagon

So there we have it.

I don’t know what Kevin Cronin is implying there, and I don’t think I want to.

I have had precisely one interaction with Linda Cohn in my lifetime. I was covering the Women in Sports Foundation’s annual awards dinner at the Waldorf Astoria for WCSN.com a few years back.

The event probably featured a solid 15-to-1 woman:man ratio — not to mention a ton of beautiful celebrities and free drinks — so it was a pretty sweet gig.

Anyway, the line at the ladies’ bathroom was out the door and down the hall and there was no one else in the men’s room. It so happened that I was using the men’s room at the same moment the women at the back of the line, all hellbent on girl power I suppose, decided to revolt and storm the men’s room.

I had no idea this was going on, of course, and I wanted to look good for all those beautiful celebrities. So while the bathroom attendant was struggling to keep the horde at bay, I was straightening my tie and fixing my hair, totally oblivious to the developing riot right outside.

As I primped, a woman yelled from the doorway, “OK, you can fix your makeup later!”

I looked toward the entrance, and it was Linda Cohn, leading the surge. Startled and humiliated, I ducked out of the bathroom as the crush of angry women stormed past the overwhelmed attendant.

But I heard no REO Speedwagon lyrics that evening.

OK, I apologize for the lack of posts today, but some minor good news:

The “categories” linked on the right column of this blog have been broken since the start. Until today, when you clicked them, you could see the entries in those categories, but not the titles of those entries, making them pretty much useless.

Today, with some nifty copy-and-paste work and way too much time spent staring at code, I fixed them. So now you can more easily browse the things I’ve written about Taco Bell.

Also, last week I added an e-mail link to the box to the immediate right of this post. Please, if you see anything hilarious or awesome that you feel merits a TedQuarters post, send it along.

OK, I posted this on Twitter and only Catsmeat was goodly enough to respond. I’m looking for an answer, and I’m not looking to accept something as simple as “oh, Internet ads something have random pictures attached to them.”

Who the hell is this guy?

This bearded, wild-haired fellow has been haunting sidebar ads all over the Internet for months, and I can’t find any reasonable explanation. Usually I’m pretty resourceful when it comes to finding out about weird stuff that’s on the Internet — I have access to Google, it turns out — but I can’t seem to find the right string of search terms.

I should note, though, that searching for “sidebar advertisement beard man” — not in quotes — did lead me to this article, so my efforts weren’t entirely in vain.

Anyway, I have so many questions: Why is this man the face of debt relief? Is this supposed to be the type of person these ads are targeting, or the type of person that will come get you if your debt spirals so far out of control that you end up living on the streets?

Even if you want to tell me that these photos are randomly attached to these ads, this guy comes up with enough frequency that there has to be a very limited numbers of photos that are ever attached to the ads. So then, why this guy and not a sunset, or, I don’t know, a parakeet or something? How did that happen? Could this possibly have been the product of someone’s conscious decision?

And where did the photo come from? Who is this bearded man?

Please, Internet, help me. If anyone has any answers, I welcome them.

Back in the early days of TedQuarters, one of the most lively comments-section debates came in a post about cheesesteaks and how they’re overrated. Chris M, Intrusivity, Catsmeat and Will all confirmed the existence of the grease trucks at Rutgers, and something called the fat sandwich.

Yesterday, I had one. And it was good.

Good enough to make the trip to Rutgers worth it even despite the awful, awful beating my Georgetown Hoyas took at the hands of the miserable Scarlet Knights, and despite the terrible, constant buzzing noise emanating from the rafters of the Rutgers Athletic Center.

Fat sandwiches are, by definition, some awesome combination of hilarious meats and fried things, and basically every combination of things the grease trucks offer on sandwiches is available under one name or another.

The sandwich I had was called the Fat Kushion, and — get ready for this — it featured:

Cheesesteak, bacon, chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, french fries, jalapenos and hot sauce. I got mine with ketchup.

It was exactly as good as it sounds. It looked like this:

The key to the fat sandwiches is that they’re not really as overwhelming as they sound. Having so many items on them does not mean they’re tremendously stuffed with stuff — the sandwich makers understand proportion. That’s good, and it’s important. One thing we stressed when training new workers at the deli was the appropriate proportion of meat:cheese:other stuff.

You can’t really tell from the above picture, but there were probably two chicken fingers, two mozzarella sticks, two slices of bacon, a couple thinly sliced steak-umm meat pieces and a few jalapenos in there. Then they topped the whole thing off with french fries. Delicious. I probably should’ve taken another picture while I was midway through the thing, but I was too busy cramming it into my mouth at disgusting speeds.

You can’t really distinguish any of the things inside it while you’re eating it. I definitely feel like I sensed a little bit of mozzarella stick flavor at one point, and I certainly tasted hot sauce. Mostly, it’s just a giant messy heap of delicious meatpile, and it’s totally amazing.

So next time you’re in New Brunswick, New Jersey, go to the grease trucks on College Ave. Buy one of these things and eat it. Unless, of course, you hope to live past 50. In that case, you’re on your own.

As far as I’m concerned, this nation’s Golden Age came from 1861-1913.

Now I recognize that the Civil War and plenty of other terrible, horrible  things happened in that span, but I also know that, across those years, nine of the 11 presidents had facial hair. Never before and never since has this great country seen such an explosion of glorious whiskers.

And though he may not have been the greatest Presidentially of the mustachioed and bearded Presidents, one man stands head and shoulders — nay, neckbeard and sideburns — above the rest in terms of facial-hair magnificence: Chester A. Arthur.

I’m convinced that Chester A. Arthur was born with his muttonchops. Seriously. Probably this has something to do with how few likenesses there are available online of Chester A. Arthur as a boy, but even the youngest available portraits of the man feature the impressive chops.

At times in life, and indeed, during his presidency, they would grow so wild as to constitute truly freakish facial hair, like something you’d see at a Korn concert in 1998. The dude had shoulder-length mutton chops. Unreal.

Another fun fact about Chester A. Arthur — which is decidedly not a fun fact for James Garfield — is that Garfield’s assassin shot him specifically so that Arthur, his vice president, could take over. That’s the only time that’s happened. The Wikipedia says this has something to do with rival factions within the Republican party at the time, but I’m unwilling to rule out the idea that assassin Charles Guiteau was just showing some horribly misguided and overzealous respect for Arthur’s awesome muttonchops.

Anyway, here are various likenesses depicting Chester A. Arthur’s muttonchops:

I actually just spent my last 10 minutes making a terrible photoshop rendering of what it might look like if Barack Obama brought back awesome Chester A. Arthur muttonchops, but then I grew concerned that there might be some sort of law in place about drawing facial hair on pictures of sitting Presidents or something. But he should do it, believe me. It’d make politics so much more interesting.