Whoppers JR JR

Now THIs is a STORy all about HOW- I got to sit on my ass next to a beautiful lake for months at a time, looking at boats and spitting sunflower seeds at my feet… and got paid to do it. That’s right, with real money. Take that, millenials. You’ll never see money in your lives and I got it simply by kicking my sandals off and bronzin’ my bod. Suckers. Anyway, yeah so in high school, I worked at a lake in the summers checking out boats and jet skis as they went in and came out of Lake Minnetonka. Located about 30 minutes west of Minneapolis, Lake Minnetonka is the crown jewel of the Twin Cities lakes chain and absolutely no expense is spared to protect its beauty and innocence. It’s a bit of a super-lake, if you will, a collection of smaller lakes connected by man and Voltron-ed into one big body of water. And the lake is indeed huge, spanning like ten miles across and featuring strange pocks of thinly connected land that give Minnetonka more than 100 miles of shoreline. Every metro ...

It has recently and obviously come to my attention that I no longer have a beard. Such a drastic change in my visage should have been accompanied by just as drastic press release from my publicist but I know now that that release did not come. Rest assured, my fans, that this decision was not made lightly and was definitely not made after a beard-trimming event went terribly awry. No, this was the culmination of what some are calling the ‘Beard Era’ and its destruction was both right and warranted. Please be advised that this release includes several Pictures of a Sensitive Nature that are not meant for imitation, forgery or, least of all, mockery. Thank you. B E H O L D the much anticipated hi-res look at “Beard Kristian” As you can see above, the Beard adds a gravitas and a seriousness to my face that not even eyeblack can replicate. This is a primary reason that the Beard was grown, to make my enemies quiver under my stoicism and to make my ego feel like a Big Serious Man. Most...

To me, there is nothing funnier on this earth than a well-executed German accent by a non-German. The simultaneous high pitched squeaks and growly throat sounds mix with the baying ‘ya!’s and rollicking journey of the word ‘wienerschnitzel’ to form a sonic experience that I find hilarious and intensely appealing on every level. So it is with great shame that I admit that I can’t do a good German accent! Oh sure, if I listened to Werner Herzog talk about the Tragedy of Man for an hour, I could probably draft off of him and ham up a conversation about Das Hofbrau Haus for five minutes but other than that, I got bupkus. Soft German boy Üter from The Simpsons (Side note: for a cacophony of German accents that make me spit with laughter every time I listen, please go enjoy comedian Andy Daly’s German character August Lindt on Comedy Bang Bang and The Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project.) I really find all accents funny, anything different from the apathetic and clinical Midwestern speec...

The best way to get somewhere this summer is the bus. Everyone’s doing it, everyone’s loving it and by golly, why should you be left out of the fun?? Frankly, you shouldn’t! A bus ticket costs like $1.25 and folks, you might say it’s your ticket to… the world. In all seriousness, ride a bus this summer! And I don’t mean some gaudy tour bus, all abstract design seat covers and old ladies squinting through their leashed glasses at Le Chateau de Marseilles-sur-Bratwurst. A proper city bus with its creaky hinges and slack, swinging “Stop Requested!” cords that’ll take you to the zoo for cheap. Honestly, there’s no better way to experience a city and its people than to plop down on a bus and watch the world go by. Just by dint of sitting next to your fellow man and having to look each block in the face as the bus idols for 15 seconds at the light, you’ll understand everything ten times more than if you were sitting in your Ivory Toureg, looking down at your nav screen or fiddling with t...

In my refrigerator right now, my roommate and I have fourteen beers. Usually, we have many less than that, three or four or even zero. Fourteen is the high water mark and ladies and gentlemen, it feels great. Have you ever had zero beers in your fridge? Perhaps you’re the luckiest among us, someone who does not deign to live without a sixer chilling in the chiller. You own some sort of direct pipeline from your nearest brewery and you are never without suds. I am not one of you and the nights I’ve closed the fridge door at 7pm with a frown on my face and an empty hand formed into the perfect aluminum can holding claw have been far too many. For what is a night without an ale but a sad metaphor for our times… I dream of an era where every man, woman and of-age child will be able to crack a “Cold One” whenever they please whether it be after work, before dinner, after dinner, before the news, after the news or before bedding down for the night! In these strange and uncertain days, mu...

You know that person in your life that you’ve known forever, perhaps it’s your sister or dad or grandma, that person that just instantly puts you at ease with their presence? Maybe they’re always there with a joke when it’s needed most or maybe they just get you. Maybe their voice has colored the ambient background of your life for since you first came online while drinking apple juice out of a sippy cup at the dinner table. It’s these people that form the bedrock of our lives and we go back to them again and again when things get tough or even when things are good! Life’s just richer with them there. What I’m getting to is that for me, two of the people I can set my emotional watch to, well, I’ve never even met them. I stared at them on a London stage a few years ago, fidgeting nervously after the show as I debated whether to introduce myself at the after show bar. (I went home, whomp whomp.) These two men who have been the soundtrack to countless days of mine in the last nine or so...

Folks, tomorrow’s the beginning of Memorial Day Weekend and I’m going up to the lake to swing in a hammock and uncomfortably swim through seaweed patches while looking out for dock spiders. With the three day weekend kicking off, tomorrow signals the start of Long June, everyone’s favorite time of the summer. What is Long June? My friend, what isn’t Long June? Long June is brats on the grill, Long June is drinking beers in the damn sunlight for once, Long June is accidentally melting your sandals by the fire pit. Long June is a state of mind, man. But most importantly, Long June is a recent temporal invention, consisting of those dog days starting Mem Day Weekend and ending after the Fourth of July weekend. That’s Long June, baby. Invented by The Great Debates podcast, some have said that summer’s greatest memories are made during Long June, a chunk of heaven that transcends any single holiday. Christmas? Inferior. Halloween? Throw it in the trash. Fourth of July? Annexed, motherfucke...

The other day, I was at my local greengrocer picking up some sausages when I laid my eyes upon one of the finest irony sweatshirts out there: “PATRIOTS” it blared, with a smaller “New England” right below it. And climbing all around the wordmarks, in lil pads and lil helmets and throwing lil footballs were a flock of Garfields. Just a bunch of America’s Favorite Orange Jerk Cats running Hail Marys around “PATRIOTS.” It was amazing and I instantly wanted it. Not unlike this shirt, which someone is holding up to his perfectly continuous neck. That’s good eBaying! I really really wanted it and that’s saying something because since I’m a human being, I hate the Patriots and everything Pats-adjacent. But oh my sweet goddamn do I love Garfield. I’ve adored Garfield since I was probably six or seven, a time in my life where you would rarely find me without one of those classic long-book comic anthologies tucked under my arm. Garfield At Large, Garfield Takes the Cake, Garfield Sits ...

I’m currently watching the Minnesota Twins play baseball. It’s not something they’ve been very good at lately. They lost something like a hundred games last year and ever since they lost to the Yankees in the playoffs for the seventh straight year, they’ve been dogshit. So it’s notable that they’re pretty damn good this year! They’re tied for first place or something like that, Miguel Sano is crushing balls to Mars and Byron Buxton is Angels-in-the-Outfielding his way to some truly impossible catches. Go get it, young Bux. pic.twitter.com/c7oEFf1zEB — MLB (@MLB) May 4, 2017 Last night, they even piled up twenty-one goddamn hits and came back from a 6–0 deficit to win 14–7. I watched it while at my weekly bar trivia and for the first time in years, I waited to go to the bathroom so I could watch a Twins at-bat finish up. We got some GOOD Twins baseball! This delightful start to 2017 has brought memories of the mid-2000s Twins to mind. Twins teams that regularly made the pla...