treefroggirl

posted by Thomas on Oct 27

posted by Thomas on Oct 25

posted by Thomas on Oct 25

Found this at the NY Times.

Remember the old Wassup commercial? No? Ok. This is one of them.

Why am I posting it? Because the original actors are back with a twist on it.

posted by Thomas on Oct 23

A couple of weeks ago I posted The Great Schlep to my Facebook and Bunin commented about it and told me that he is friendly with Sarah Silverman. Bunin is in a sitcom and is a very talented actor and improv performer living in LA for a little over ten years now, so his being mates with S.S. didn’t surprise me.

Told him that she was performing in London soon and that I might go. He said that if I saw her after the show I should say hi and that he and I are friends.

This made me giggle.

The odds of me seeing Ms. Silverman after her performance and saying, “Um. Hi? Sarah? Hi. I’m friends with Bunin. Um. Hi. Yeah. And he’s my friend and you’re his friend so I thought… um. We could be friends. . . Wanna braid each others hair?” were rather slim indeed as she was performing in the 3,000+ seat Hammersmith Apollo. Don’t think he realized that she wasn’t going to be in a little comedy club.

Don’t think Sarah realized either.

It wasn’t her fault they kept us waiting in the lobby for an hour plus. It was like being on the tube only with a bar. It wasn’t her fault that her supporting act Steve Agee was ill and did not perform. They had a video feed where he said something I couldn’t understand for two minutes which was annoying considering their trying to set that up is what kept us schvitzing in the lobby for ages.

You could feel the audience could maybe turn on her. It was in the air. When she came out she quickly got the audience on her side. No small feat. I was laughing so hard I was crying. At one point Sarah said, “This is going really well! I can’t believe I was nervous about this all week.”

And it was. It was going really well.

Then the show ended after she had been on stage for about 45 minutes. We assumed it was joke… or a way to get an encore. We clapped. We stayed sitting. We slowly stopped clapping. The lights came up. But not all the way. Were they needing us to clap more to get her to come out? We clapped more. We slowly stopped. She wasn’t coming out. This couldn’t be the end. Really? We stayed sitting.

Sarah bounced out wearing her slippers, “Go home! I don’t have anything prepared! I’m not Chris Rock. We had a good show.”

She tried to riff a bit with the audience. Some of it worked. Some didn’t. Someone suggested she sing a song. She shook her head, “I shot my load.”

Up in the balcony where I was, a guy suggested Give the Jew Girl Toys, but she didn’t remember the words so he prompted her all the way through it which was kinda funny. Then a woman up in the balcony shouted out that she was over hyped and didn’t deserve the ticket price. We all booed the woman that was heckling.

She tried to take some Q&A but it was really uncomfortable and you could feel she wasn’t in control. “I need to leave on a laugh.” She said. We all wanted to give her a big laugh. Each second felt like forever for me so it must have felt like years for her. Finally she got enough of a response and she exited stage left.

Walking out, I heard someone say, “That was the most surreal end of a show I’ve seen in my life.” On the tube I heard someone else say, “No more of these American comedians.”

A lot of the reviews say she bombed. That isn’t accurate. She was also not booed off the stage. I only heard two hecklers.
She had a fantastic show. Sure it was old material, but it was great and from all the people laughing for those 45 minutes, the audience thought the same.

The problem is there is no way in hell when people have paid nearly 50 quid that you only give them 45 minutes of entertainment. If there had been an opening act and if we hadn’t been corralled in the lobby for Donkey’s Years, I suspect it would have been a different ending.

I do think it is disappointing that someone that has been doing stand-up as long as she has, didn’t have something in her back pocket. It is really too bad.

It was a fantastic show that curdled at the end. In some ways, that is worse than bombing.

posted by Thomas on Oct 22

Real America? And I’m not part of that? And people that don’t AGREE with you aren’t real Americans???? WTF?

Man, this smacks of 1950’s rhetoric.

Thank you Jon Stewart.

Ditto from me. Fuck all y’all.

posted by Thomas on Oct 22

I’ve become a twitter addict. I wasn’t always this way. When I first heard about Twitter I thought, lame. Why?

Then I got sucked in to the vortex.

For those that don’t know, twitter is a quick 140 character status update.

Yes. That is all it is.

Where it gets addicting is it is a way to share little moments that you want to throw out there and it can be fun to look back and see where what happened. Other times it is pure navel gazing. It can be amusing (and dangerous) when you are sitting in the pub or you just had a fight with your partner. You must be very careful of drink tweeting.

I currently love twitter however because Stephen Fry is following me. Mr. Fry is following me along with over 9,000+ others and he is only doing that because I started following him, but it’s rather groovy.

I think I like twitter because it is another way of telling a story and another way of connecting to people. I also think it is rather elegant to see what you can communicate in such a small space. . .

You can read my tweets here. Warning. I curse. You know that. And a lot of what I say isn’t very interesting, but you also knew that too.

posted by Thomas on Oct 20

Hello readers,

As a few of you know, the Search and Display teams in the London office decided six months ago that they wanted to do a community project. We did research and a number of things presented themselves. Many were ready made corporate community events where we would have walked in, done a bit of painting or planting or picking up rubbish for a few hours before we headed off to the pub to toast our altruism.

That wasn’t what we wanted. We needed something bigger.

We came across a Barnardo’s affiliated charity, The Sunrise Children’s Centre in Kent. They work with disabled children, many that are autistic and while their centre is lovely, there is a lot that could be done to spruce it up.

After months of planning and fundraising, next week a large group of us will be going to the centre over two days to replant a sensory garden, revamp their games room, paint their pergola, install a sound system, build a tools shed, and lots of other projects to make the centre that much more inviting for the kids.

Our fundraising efforts have included pub quizzes, a big central London party with the venue donated by an exclusive member’s only club, X Box tournaments, bake sales and general begging at Cardinal Place and Thames Valley Park (and e-mails such as this). Team members with birthdays during the last few months have donated their birthday money that normally purchased cake and a small gift to the centre.

Thus far we’ve raised £3,194.72 which with Microsoft matching funds becomes £6,389.44.

And this is the part of the e-mail that you knew I was driving at. We need a little more help. Our budget is really tight. While many materials have been donated or sourced at a cheaper rate, we still have had to buy many of the things that will make our work at the centre a success.

Can you give even a small amount? Just £5.00 will go a long way… If you give online at our Just Giving page, the funds go directly to Barnardo’s: http://www.justgiving.com/microsoftadvertisingcommunityproject

We are trying to do something really special with our Giving campaign. Will you be a part of it and help us?

I know I have been quiet on the bloggy front recently, so how about a bit of quid pro quo? If ten of you. Just ten of my readers donate even the smallest amount, I promise to post every single day for 90 days. I’ll even make some of those posts good.

If not… well. Perhaps it is time to close things up at the frog?

posted by Thomas on Oct 20

posted by Thomas on Oct 19

posted by Thomas on Oct 16

Stuart was made redundant today along with a ton of people in the UK office.

Good times.

Things will be fine. I just feel terrible because he worked so very hard for them and put a lot of his heart in it.

For years I have been saying he should look somewhere else because the way they did business was so Mickey Mouse, but he said no. That he liked the Company and beleived in what they were doing.

Oh well. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. And start all over again.