I’m a vegetarian, I don’t cook, I know very little about food (I do know where to put it though), and I wouldn’t eat 85% of the dishes made on Top Chef (spoiler: everything this season is made with moose bacon, even the desserts). Still, I love the show.

The only thing I enjoy more than watching cheftestants plating their pâté and Padma parading around her insane body (out-cleavaging Gail is top priority) is reading Gabe’s weekly rundown and enjoying his succinctly-titled video caps. Simply hysterical.

I’m not even going to bother trying to learn their names or where they are from until half of them have been sent home. What am I, a stack of index cards?

Read: Videogum

But they don’t actually laugh at what I said.

“But Scott, what if maybe you’re just not funny?” No maybes: I know I’m not. So don’t say I am. Unless you can back it up with some laughter, coming from your body.

Befitting a tight little club, they laugh at each other’s stuff, of course, behind closed doors, literally. I found that out when I was standing right by the stage at the show headlined by Sarah Silverman recently in D.C. (see accompanying awesome phone-cam shot proving I was there).

It was actually amazingly raucous laughter, coming from a little room just offstage in which the performers who were waiting to go on were watching a live feed of the performer currently onstage, the kind of laughter that makes you laugh yourself, just based on how crazy it is. They were cracking each other’s shit up.

It was kind of endearing. I wish I had some kind of camaraderie like that with someones.

Another trait I’ve noticed is that stand-up guys and gals never don’t talk like stand-up comedians when they’re in public. Three or four of them in the back seat of the cab, talking among themselves, but always one at a time, no interrupting. Nothing normal-persony about their cadences: Not, in a casual tone of voice, “Hey, should we stop at this 7-11?” Instead, in a Carnegie Hall-filling voice to shame Ethel Merman, “How about these convenience stores in D.C., huh? [Insert topical local-oriented joke here, then riff a little]… AM I RIGHT?”

Stand-up and stand-up backlash are such old news now. I’m not gonna get into it. The debate happened, and like acid rain, the Heenes, what to do about nuclear waste, and other controversies, it faded away while you weren’t looking. Accept it: Stand-up is here to stay. It will never sit down.

I took my friend to the Silverman show with me, even though he assured me that he doesn’t like (“I hate”) stand-up comedy. I guess he didn’t get the memo about the end of stand-up backlash.

He explained that he gets bored with the inexorable twin topics of “shit/sex.”

He stood behind and just to the right of me during the show whispering, “See? That one was about sex. … See? That one was about shit. Sex. Shit. Sex. Shit.”

As we watched, I was laughing regularly at the jokes, it was A-game time for all but one of the comics, and it felt good to laugh after so much death and heartache, but I had to admit my friend was right.

I guess poop and poppers are the things that make us humans most uncomfortable, so they are the surest bids for laughs. And that’s why a few stand-up stand-ups, such as Jim Gaffigan, never go blue. They pride themselves on not having to. It takes infinitely more effort not to throw F-bombs (whether it be f*ck or f*art).

I tried something similar to stand-up recently, just to see how much stage fright I have. Telling stories, onstage, to an audience. Man, the extent to which I thought I would “kill” (this is showbiz speak for getting lots of laughs and being a big hit) and the amount of non-killing I did were distressingly the same! I marvel at the huge drop from the killfest I had imagined so clearly to the supremely disappointing reality!

In my mind I would own the room free and clear, everyone falling in love with me as I reluctantly leave the stage in a crush of jubilant applause. The reality was a reedy-voiced, nervous little overweight person blinded by the lights, a stranger to the use of a microphone, rushing through his story and so grateful to leave the stage it was ridiculous.

Turns out it’s harder than it looks!

I’ll get up there again soon, because I am a performer through and through, albeit it one with crippling stage fright. But something else is worrying me. I think I lack the requisite hunger for mass approval and the necessary openness bordering on exhibitionism.

I think I really truly generally don’t like “people” and you know what audiences are made up of? People… Audiences are full of them. It’s going to be a problem.

Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.

The Ultimate Washington Insider got past security once again (with a hypnotizing pocket watch) and hobnobbed with an odd bunch of major and minor celebs and a gaggle of ugly old politicians and talking heads at The White House Correspondents’ Dinner (The snarks call it “Nerd Prom”).

And yes, of course, Ricky Schroeder and the mother from “Wonder Years” were there. Why even ask?

• View Photos On Huffington Post
• More on Facebook

“YOU Were Meant for Greatness.” Those words are stenciled in black spray paint on a gray electrical box on my street. When I first saw this curious graffito, I indulged in a faint little smile. Some days as I passed it on my way home from work it almost made me cry. So many (other) toothless, hopeless wrecks in my neighborhood, you know, need some courage and a kind word. Hope. Then one day I noticed the little anarchist’s A in a circle underneath it. Ruined the whole thing. Now it’s taunted me for a year and a half of my not-great existence. I avoid it now like the curse it obviously is. One of these nights I will paint over it. Those messages that are born of anarchy die of anarchy, too.

***

We’re well on the other side of the wrenching election that brought such stirring hope and change to every molecule of our collective national being. Many have commented to me about how incongruous Mr. Obama is to them. They still can’t shake a dreamlike feeling. Did we really shed the poisonous Bush regime in favor of a young, smart, attractive, liberal president with a sense of humor and “compassion” that isn’t just a cruel joke, or will we wake up violently from this dream? At the same time, creeping across the proscenium, sneaking inwards from our peripheral line of vision, is a stealthy nightmare. “This Economy”®.

***

I’m going to say what President Barack and his guys have been hinting around at. It’s this: Everything is going to vanish, in stages. Every. Thing.

***

Think of all the vanished answering machine messages in the world, in all the languages of the world. Gone forever. Don’t be so confident that everything you say and do is cached in those “safe” and capacious server farms out in the middle of the country or wherever they are. Answering machines once thought they were indispensible, too. They didn’t see the next thing coming, and now they’re buried deep in a dump. I’m talking to you, Internet. The anarchists are not just going to let you keep going.

***

As the Depression solidifies into Armageddon, we’re all going to have to get more comfortable with committing a lot more crime, too. The average Joe of the near future is going to make Mad Max look like Paul Lynde.

***

I have some ideas for how to profit from the end of the world. I started by registering as a trademark the words “this economy,” so every time one of you uses those words you have to pay me a royalty.

I heard on TV that a lot of down-laid/out-sized people are starting businesses of their own because there are no jobs. I heard the trend is for groups of friends to set up cookie shops in abandoned office space. Like squatting, but the business version.

I think we can do better than a creepy bake sale in a ghost office park, don’t you? See what you think of my first few ideas for businesses to start:

1. Internet II. We all take for granted that there can only be one World Wide Internet. Why? Think of how much $$$ the first Internet generated for its inventor, Bill Gates. Don’t you want to be Bill Gates? He’s got all the money. Get all Chinese on his ass, steal the knowledge you need and build it. Anarchist-proof it. Then underprice him. This current Internet is vulnerable, and it CAN BE BEAT.

2. Eviction Shields. Your pitch to customers: “Don’t let them evict you. Fight back.” The evictioneering field is saturated. But that in itself has created a new business opening: Provide people with ways to eviction-proof their home, such as moats, impenetrable steel doors, and of course strategically positioned snipers. Offer an end-to-end eviction-prevention system and people will pay as much as they can to stave off the inevitable for another week.

You may ask, “But, if they are broke and losing their house, where will the people get the money to pay for the Eviction Shield?” I anticipated that question…

3. Shadow Economy Job Training School. The non-shadow economy, the big one, is f*cked forever, let’s face it. But that means the secondary, “shadow” economy will “boom” all the harder. Lots of former IT workers, secretaries, and HR recruiters have no clue how to get into the cockfighting or drug-dealing business. That’s where you come in.

“But Scott, where will people get the money to pay the tuition at your crime school?”

Maybe I’ll offer scholarships. At exorbitant interest rates. I’ll read up on how the predatory mortgage lenders and banking-product people ran their scam, and get an idea of how to do this. Before angry mobs kill them all.

By the by, I’ve got lots more ideas for Depression-busting businesses you can start, but they’re a little shocking/disturbing, Jeff won’t let me put them on here. (I’ll give you a hint: One of them involves Soylent Green.) Drop me a line and I’ll send you the complete list for $2.

Oh-hey-look I’m writing about Facebook again. Instead of getting rich off a similar pyramid scheme, or “marketing myself” off-Facebook, where it count$, I’m sitting around in the dingy Facebook Fascination bathwater we all seem to be wrinkling up in.

Neverandnonetheless, I started a group late last month on The ’Book (as I call it), called “Frandor Forever.” No big deal, I’ve started one before. I just invited a few friends from college to join me in an online celebration of photos of ourselves from back in the day. It was as easy as pushing a button, 1-2-3. Not many bells and whistles on the Facebook groups, kids.

But when I pushed the button, something exploded. And I think I’ve figured out why.

First, an explanation of what it is. The official blurb on the group page is: A Facebook group to share our memories of Michigan State University and Greater East Lansing circa 1985-1995, give or take.

Originally, I had sent the following Facemail (as I call it) message to about 15 college friends on Facebook:

I want you all to know that a little bodega on Columbia Road a few hundred yards from where I live in Adams Morgan/D.C. underwent some construction this summer and then last week unveiled what they had been working on: They turned a corner of their store into an OH YEAH YOGURT. Remember that place in East Lansing? Across from Pinball Pete’s… I believe it was then replaced by Caffe Venezia… Long live OH YEAH YOGURT! Who knew it was a chain that can survive decades and creep up on you and scare you like that?

Well, everybody started talking about the old days in this Facemail message thread. It was getting out of hand, with lots of new responses all the time, so I said, You wanna know what? I feel a Facebook group coming on. What should I call it?

Frandor is this trashy, weird shopping center named for the husband and wife that developed it in the mid-20th century — Francis and Dorothy Something — in East Lansing. So the name Frandor itself in an insider tip to people who attended MSU but also left campus once in a while. By not making an explicit reference to Michigan State, I was being a little more roundabout with the naming than, say, “Spartan Pride” or “MSU Memories.” It was code, a dog-whistle to my friends, though it’s served to keep (I hope) the former fratboys and fratgirls out. Then as now, I’m a snob. It’s the difference between:

Now, what else would encourage the sharing of memories? Maybe the word “forever.” Frandor Forever. Nicely alliterative, also reminiscent of John Waters’s script for the never-filmed sequel to Pink Flamingos, dubbed Flamingos Forever. John Waters was our patron saint back then. Before his movies lost their teeth and Hairspray slipped down to middlebrow schlock.

Forever also implies our own immortality, which we all believed in when we were 19. And here’s me coming to my point. I think the reason hundreds and hundreds of people have now joined Frandor Forever is that we’re all pushing 40 (from one side of the number or the other) but we’re on Facebook, which was designed… for whom? For college kids. And what are we reminiscing about? College. Where are we doing it? Right in the very midst of oblivious present-day college kids. An unspoken invitation lurks for these young whippersnappers to come look at what the truly cool once looked like.

Anyway, the more we discuss what bands we were in, or went to see (I saw the Pixies live in 1989, okay?), or liked, and look at pictures of ourselves smoking and drinking and living in filth (John Waters’s ideal) and dressing up and being badass and young and thin and beautiful, the more flattered we become with our best memories of ourselves.

In the hundreds of photos that FF members have posted, it’s become manifestly clear that we were the kool kids at Moo U. Even with the pics of people I don’t know, who were there at the same time as me, otherwise not so interesting, the amazing fashions alone are worth the price of admission.

I’m sure some totally not-kool kids have waltzed in to the group under my non-watchful eye. Welcome, all! Like multi-colored food items, aging unkool and aging kool kids all come out the same color in the end. We all get equalized by Father Time, the Equalizer.

There have been lots of news articles about how the average age of Facebook members is slowly creeping upward. But no one has said why.

Here’s your answer. For the 40ish set, Frandor Forever (or your own time- and place-specific online reunion where people belatedly “meet” people and put names to faces they recognize from parties 20 years ago but never met at the time, where people demand that college-town luminaries join Facebook in order to participate in the group, where a detail in a photo makes dusty corners of your brain open up to let little clusters of memories fly out) is what Facebook was meant for.

Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.