It’s been about a month since we all had to suffer through the clear hoax that was the “Balloon Boy,” and the painfully protracted fallout that led to federal charges and talk of deportation, so that means that we’re due for another kid to steal our hearts and our attention.

I get it: we, as a people, are fascinated by almost any story that involves children in situations that are out of the norm.  I know this is a trend in society that’s been around for a while; this is why Kids Say The Darndest Things ever made it to air.  Having Bill Cosby ask you stupid Byron Allen-style questions is decidedly outside of the norm of human experience.

And that’s why it came as no surprise to me when this story was featured on the front page of CNN.com.

Far be it from me to say that hearing a 10 year-old say “gaywad” on national television isn’t funny, but that’s not enough to make this a story.  On the one hand, I’m completely sick of paying attention to anyone who doesn’t have pubes, but on the other hand, I really can’t wait to see the reactions from the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.  I feel like I watch enough of these shows that I can do a pretty good job of predicting what they’re going to say.

I will say sooth, after the jump.

1) This is just another hoax, a cheaper, less scary one, but a hoax nonetheless.  The dad is clearly gay, and he’s forcing his agenda onto this kid.  Is it any coincidence that the boy’s mother is nowhere to be seen?  Is this because the boy has TWO DADDIES?  Inquiring minds want to know.

2) If this kid is so interested in “liberty and justice for all,” why is he only focusing on the gays?  What about the poor, underage girls getting turned out in our inner cities every day?  What about liberty and justice for all…fetuses?  I don’t see this kid standing up, or sitting down as the case may be, for that.  The fact that he chose to only focus on gay rights clearly proves that this is a hoax perpetrated by the kid’s obviously gay dad.

3) Look at this kid.  Seriously, what a gaywad.

Oh, who am I kidding.  Those commentators aren’t going to touch this story, they’re way too busy with meaningful stories like the release of Sarah Palin’s book.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are certain questions in life that everyone asks, but no one seems to have all the answers to.  These questions are often contentious ones, and discussion of such questions invariably leads to flying fists and ruptured relations.  One such question came up at last week’s As Yet Unnamed Comedy Show (Tuesday nights at Eastside Tavern, 9:30ish), and, try as I might have to stop the bedlam, I could do nothing.  Now, in the safety of my own home, as someone who genuinely knows the answer to the question, I feel behooved to settle this once and for all.

I’m referring, of course, to the question of “what the fuck was going on with the old McDonalds advertising?”

Now, I accept that this is a big question, so I will break it down into smaller questions that will combine to tell you all you need to know about McDonaldland and its many happy inhabitants.

1) What was the Grimace?

Someone at the show last week was of the mind that the Grimace was a milkshake, but this person (you know who you are) is a damn fool.  While it is true that the Grimace loved the milkshakes, he is in fact a tastebud, that is inexplicably purple and ambulatory.  He was originally intended to be Ronald McDonald’s nemesis, but this didn’t test well, so they made him Ronald’s retarded flunky.

2) Did the Grimace have any relatives?

I’m so glad you asked.  In fact, the Grimace had an uncle named O’Grimacey, who lived in Ireland and looked a lot like the mucus beings from the Mucinex commercials.

He would come visit the Grimace for a month every March, and would bring with him the native Irish treat, the Shamrock Shake.

I have a couple problems with this aspect of the McDonaldland mythology.  First, it seems impossible to me that he could transport a month’s worth of Shamrock Shakes across the ocean in any way other than by oil tanker, and even then, that’s only realistic if McDonaldland is located on a coast.  Second,  how does it make sense that this guy from Ireland would choose to take a vacation every year around the stereotypical Irish holiday?  Where better to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day than Ireland?  Would the Grimace’s uncle from Rio come down for a month around Carnivale?  Would said hypothetical uncle bring with him rice and beans or coxinhas, the popular Brazilian chicken croquette?  It doesn’t add up is all I’m saying.

3) What was the deal with the Hamburgler?

When he was 6, he was molested by Burger Beagle, the criminal hamburger enthusiast from Duck Tales.

4) Where did the McDonaldland campaign really lose it?

The campaign undoubtedly went way off the rails when they introduced the character CosMc.

CosMc was a many-armed alien who talked like Matthew McConaughey.  He lived on the moon, which made no fucking sense.  How did Ronald McDonald make it to the moon?  Don’t you tell me it’s magic.  I don’t believe in that shit.

5) What’s the difference between Officer Big Mac and Mayor McCheese?

Lettuce, special sauce, and one bun.  Also, Officer Big Mac makes considerably more money than Mayor McCheese, mostly because he was on the grift.

I hope this has cleared things up for you a bit, and that this question never causes another fight like the one that broke out at the last As Yet Unnamed Comedy Show (Tuesdays, Eastside Tavern).  Sweet lord, we’re lucky we all made it out alive.  

If you have any further questions regarding McDonaldland, feel free to drop them in the comments section.

Children, I’ve frequently accused myself of making very, very bad decisions.  Last week, I drunkenly picked only players from the St. Louis Rams and the Detroit Lions for my fantasy football team.  On the same night, I accidentally picked both team’s backup quarterbacks, being as I had no idea what either team’s depth chart looked like.  To do this, I had to get rid of Drew Brees and Payton Manning, both of whom I had locked in at a very reasonable price.  All in all, this was a night of really bad choices.

The truth about life is that it’s so easy and masochistically gratifying to dwell on my gaffs that I never really take the time to sit back and bask in the good decisions I have made in my life.  I think it’s time to do just that, right now.  As Puff Daddy might say, “come with me” on a journey (cue guitar lick).

In the summer of 2007, I was contacted by an upstart blog called “College On The Record (OTR).”  They wanted me to be an “editor” of what they described as “a University of Missouri themed comedy blog.”  They said that they were going to pay me $1000 for a semester (or a year, this point was always a little unclear).  I was skeptical, but very interested in money, and the potential pussy this might net me.

Once I agreed to join up, they pulled a massive 180 on me.  They renamed my position “contributer.”  The talk of pay got even more vague than it already was.  They started suggesting that I write stuff about “popular people on campus,” as if there was such a thing, and even if there were, I would know who the fuck they were.  Since I wrote under a pseudonym, I decided I would try to present myself as the king of campus, but got bored with the charade after one post.

To cut this story short, I quickly quit, realizing that this blog was going in a dicey direction.  And this decision, looking back more than two years later, may be one of the best I’ve ever made.

Perhaps it was because I was wistful; perhaps I was looking for validation.  Whatever the reason, I decided to visit the old blog the other day, and what I found made me feel wiser than Wavy Gravy after he kicked a young Charles Manson off the Hog Farm.

Apparently, OTR has rebranded themselves as “Your Online Frathouse!”  OTR is now “Omega Tau Rho,” which, as a student of Greek, offends me.  Anyone who’s studied Greek knows that omega is really more comparable to a “w,” whereas omicron is a better fit as an “o.”  That’s always troubled me; omicron is probably the most badass sounding Greek letter, yet so few frats or sororities ever embrace the letter.  I recommend they give that some thought.

But anyway, the blog has basically just become pictures of “hot chicks,” pictures of “cool people” “partying,” and a humor section that is basically just a repository of reposted Steven Colbert videos.  In the interest of fairness, I will concede that a lot of the chicks in their pictures are fairly hot, but then again, I don’t need an online frathouse for that; porno does exist.

They still boast being active on a number of campuses, but the Missouri site is conspicuous in its absence.  Also conspicuous in their absence are posts.  I’m one to talk, what with my very unimpressive last few months, but with all the people they’ve supposedly got working for them, they’ve only posted 4 times since March.  And two of those posts are just pictures of “hot chicks,” one of the posts racking up 43 comments, a feat I thought amazing until I looked closer and learned that 42 of them were spam ads for Uggs and free cigarettes.

What I’m trying to say is that College OTR is more of a ghost town than Myspace.

It’s good to know that though I may make frequent poor choices that make my friends lose faith in my ability to make football picks, when it comes to bigger things, like knowing when a project is a sinking ship and I need to get off, my instincts aren’t so bad.  However, the fact that I’m still trying to do a podcast and judging local “rap battles” seems to fly in the face of that revelation.  Oh well, no one’s perfect.

Ladies and gentlemen, I know that Friesen Point has been dead for a while, but I am here to tell you that it is back, and in a big way.  There are going to be a few minor differences which I will lay out here, mostly matters involving organization:

1) There won’t be any more Top Five Lists.  These have been pretty much carried over onto my podcast, The Symposium, soon to be available on iTunes, but now available for direct download.

2) The entirely truthful transcripts from the lives of Barry Sonnenfeld and Will Smith have gotten too big for their britches, and will now be posted at a blog all their own entitled The Entirely True Life of Will Smith and Barry Sonnenfeld.  I’m currently putting up the original transcripts, one every few days, and once I work through the back catalog, there should be about one new one per week.

3) Friesen Point will now be for pretty much everything else.  Pop culture criticism, bullshit essays, overly drawn-out arguments about mid-90’s sci-fi TV shows in the comment section; it’ll all be here.

I realize that at this point it’s probably pretty hard to believe me when I say things are getting back on track, but the difference between all the other times I said that and this time is that this time I mean it.  It’s back on, people.  To quote 8-Ball and MJG, “It’s time to ride.”  Also to quote 8-Ball and MJG, “9 times out of ten the bitches bad news, hit the dick and actin’ like motherfuckin’ fools.”  That may have nothing to do with the matter at hand, but I like 8-Ball and MJG.  If you don’t like that, I’d like to ask you this: have you been featured on a Rappin’ 4-Tay track?  No?  Guess who has…that’s right: 8-Ball and MJG.  Remember your station.

Ladies and gentlemen, there may be nothing that bothers me more than when someone new in my life learns that I have roots in the Mennonite church, and then they invariably ask “so you’re Amish?”  It’s not that I have some sort of pride about my heritage, it’s just annoying.  It’s tantamount to the frequent question I get, “how long did it take you to grow that beard?”  It’s lame, people.

Seriously, if I have one piece of advice to give everyone in the world, it is this: never be the person who asks the first question that comes to your mind.  You have to know that whatever comes to your mind first is going to be, at least 99% of the time, the first thing that comes to everybody’s mind.  And really, how is it going to affect your life to know how long it took me to grow this beard?  Live your life, friend.  Grow your own beard and see how long it takes you.

But I’m getting off course here.  I was talking about being Mennonite.

I’ve always felt that the source of that shitty question I always get is that there really aren’t any Mennonite or Amish celebrities which people could use to differentiate between the two cultures, the two faiths.  Thankfully, Verne Troyer, of Surreal Life fame, has recently revealed that he grew up Amish!

Unfortunately, there still isn’t any Mennonite celebrity, so I’ll just use myself as the representative for the Mennos.  Here I present to you a side by side comparison of myself and Verne Troyer, may now the difference between the Amish and the Mennonites be clear.

Verne Troyer (Amish): Captured on film drunkenly peeing on a rug, while standing on motorized scooter.

Dan Friesen (Mennonite): Captured on film drunkenly peeing on a tree next to the 13^th hole of the Lake Of The Woods golf course.

Verne Troyer (Amish): Has a porno tape out on the market.

Dan Friesen (Mennonite): Has seen every porno tape out on the market, but has made none himself.

Verne Troyer (Amish): Can drive a horse and buggy.

Dan Friesen (Mennonite): Can sort of drive a stick-shift, but suspects that his recklessness with the throttle is doing some serious damage to the tranny.

Verne Troyer: (Amish): His parent make homemade apple butter.

Dan Friesen (Mennonite): His parents make him slightly uncomfortable to be talking about beating off so much on the internet.

Some of you may think this is something of an elementary analysis of the two faiths, and all of you people would be wrong.  This is really all you need to know about the Amish and the Mennonites.  Amish people pee in living rooms, make their own pornography, drive buggies, and make their own preserves.  Mennonites pee on golf courses, watch too much pornography but make none themselves, feel uncertain about their ability to drive, and feel a certain amount of shame about their art.

I certainly hope this clears things up, and from now on people can stop asking me how long it took me to grow my beard.

Now, a lot of you people out there like to talk about how stupid, and creepy, and out of touch, and “aspergers-esque” Glenn Beck is.  And I would have been right there with you, up until about ten minutes ago.

There’s no denying that Beck has a history of severe drug addiction (as he’s talked about it on multiple occasions), and an argument can be made that, now that he’s sober and doesn’t have drugs to excite him, he’s had to find something like sensationalism and fear-mongering to fill in that gap.  Some might say that he “gets high” on making people think that their lives are in serious, immediate danger and that only he himself has access to the truth that just might save the lives of their family.  Some might say that he is about as useful and as informative as a piss-drunk three-time loser who spends their entire life hurting everyone around them only to one day realize what they’ve done and cry crocodile tears, and that the only real difference between the two is that when the drunk cries, no one puts it on TV.  I am not one such person.

And here’s why: Glenn Beck is the only real, big, loud voice still screaming about the swine flu, or as people who want you to take the flu seriously call it, “the H1N1 virus.”  So many of you like to compare Beck’s tenacity and unwillingness to let go of a story to Nancy Grace’s still continuing coverage of the long-since-called-off hunt for Natalie Holloway; and you people are assholes.  Whereas Grace is just exploiting mild racism and parental impulses to create ratings, Glenn Beck is a hero who recognized that this was a story that had legs, regardless of what detractors, public response, or facts say about it.

Everyone knows that the way to tell if a disease is a serious threat or not is to ask yourself, “have any celebrities come down with this thing?”  If not, it’s clearly not that big a problem.  If so, you may have to take this outbreak a little more seriously than you have been.

Up until a couple days ago, no celebrities had really come down with the H1N1 virus.  There was talk about Ron Weasley catching a case, but that story never really developed.  Then, about a week ago, LA Galaxy Forward Landon Donovan contracted the dreaded plague.  And then, mere hours ago, it was revealed that Alvaro Uribe, the President of Colombia has a confirmed case of swine-pox.

Listen up, ladies and gentlemen: your lives are in serious danger, and the only person who is preaching the truth is Glenn Beck himself.  All you “always say quit” liberals need to get over your issues and hear the truth: swine flu is serious business.

If swine flu wasn’t the real deal, would the president of a country that’s less than 1/6^th the size of the US of A and an athlete who plays a sport that’s slightly less respected than The Real World/Road Rules Challenge (which is technically a sport, jerk) have caught it?  I think not.

It’s time to grow up and get your shit together.  Get out there, buy a gas mask and some duct tape, never talk to anyone face-to-face again (especially South American heads of state), and of course don’t forget to watch Glenn Beck, weeknights on FOX.  If you want to really assure your protection from the Swine Scourge, be sure to listen to Glenn Beck’s radio show as well.  It’s just too bad Senor Uribe wasn’t a fan of truthful conservative talk; it might have saved him from having to get a slightly painful shot or take a moderately sized pill.

In an interview with Larry King, our old friend and gum connoisseur Chris Brown did some spectacular PR work, working hard to repair his image after being sentenced to “clean stuff” as punishment for beating Rihanna.  It’s good to know that society works like a bad sitcom pitch; you commit a felony, you get to become the public’s maid.

Oh, and it bears mentioning that this is what he was wearing on the show:

Jesus; he looks like the gayest member of the Nation of Islam.  Wait, wait…I’m getting off track here.  Let’s refocus.

Chris Breezy had this to say:

“When I look at it now, it’s just like, wow, like, I can’t believe that that actually happened.”

I’m not entirely sure what the context of this quote is, but I can only assume that Chris is talking about allowing some Smurf version of Tucker Carlson to dress him for a national television talk show appearance.  Get it together Brown!

Hello, my dear friends and loyal Friesen Pointers.  I come to you today with good news, which may not be news to some of you.  I have officially launched my new podcast, The Worst of Both Worlds.

The show is conceived as a fun comedic conversation between myself, my co-host Ryan Beck, and a different guest each week.  It’ll also serve as the new home for my ever-popular Top Five (now Top Six) Lists, which it turns out are more fun when discussed.

We’re still working out the schedule of production here, so we may end up posting two episodes in a week, then nothing for two.  Or maybe we’ll get our shit together and do it how we’re supposed to and put out exactly one a week.  To paraphrase Enya, only time will tell.

Be that as it may, the website where you can find the podcast is http://www.friesenpoint.libsyn.com.  So far, we have three episodes up, which are as follows:

Episode 1: Ryan Beck, my roommates Swearngin and Fox, and I chat it up and discuss the Top Five Real World/Road Rules Challenge Cast Members.

Episode 2: Nick Gifts, Fox, and I get together to talk about knives.  The list in this episode was deemed not worth posting, so was edited out.

Episode 3: I was lucky enough to corral two of the premiere comedians in Columbia, Kyle Ayers and Brian Sturgill into my studio, where we basically just discuss food the whole show.  Included is the Top Six Subway Sandwiches List.

I hope that at least some of you will check some of these out, and if you like it, please help spread the word.  I’ve really appreciated all the support you’ve all given me over the last few years, and I hope we can take this next step together, or something else that sounds equally queer.

Thanks again, and happy listening.

As I mentioned earlier, I am fortunate enough to be involved in a sitcom project taking place here in Columbia, and the trailer for the first episode is now available on the Youtube.  It stars Caplee Spiller, Jason Rosenbaum, and myself (no weak links in that lineup), it is written and produced by Robert Rasmussen, and filmed and edited by Mark Nanneman.  It was a real kick filming this, and I assure you that if you don’t find the finished product funny, that’s an indication that you don’t know what funny is.

Without further ado, here is the trailer:

Hello there, children.  I know that I’ve been quite derelict in my blogging duties for some time now., and I have some solid excuses for you, four of which are true.  That’s right, one’s a lie.

1) I just finished up my college career, and making that final push took up a lot of my time.

2) I just moved, and for someone as lazy as me, that takes about a month or two of planning and gradual packing.  Plus, now that I’ve moved in, I don’t have internet access yet.  I’m actually writing this from my work place.

3) So much of my creative energy has been focused into the As Yet Unnamed Comedy Show, as well as a couple other projects I’ve been working on.  My friends Robert Rasmussen, Mark Nannaman, and Caplee Spiller are very motivated filmmakers here in town, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in a number of video work they’ve been doing lately.  Once any of the finished products are online, you’ll see some quality stuff.  Finally, I’m putting together a podcast that, ideally, we’re going to start recording this week.  As it stands, the podcast will be called The Worst Of Both Worlds, and feature myself and my comedian friend Ryan Beck as the hosts with a rotating set of guests from Columbia’s burgeoning comedy and arts scene, as well as some frequent visits from my former roommate Nicky Gifts.  As soon as it comes together, you’ll be the first to know.

4) I was recently attacked by a bear, and though I survived, the bear ate my sense of humor and my right arm.

5) My dear friend Jason Rosenbaum has started a blog dedicated to karaoke, which just so happens to be a subject I know a lot about.  Not surprisingly, he’s asked me to be a contributor to the blog, and I’ve posted the first installment of my instructional series “How To Karaoke.”  The blog has been pretty good so far, so if you have any interest in music, karaoke, or jokes, I recommend you check it out.

Alright, that’s all for now.  I promise to get back to a more regular schedule in terms of my writing.  Much like the South, Friesen Point will rise again!