SACRAMENTO, CA—Claiming that it is “something every man deserves to do once,” local resident Carl Hilland, 32, told reporters Monday that, before he dies, he would like to throw a good, clean punch to somebody’s face.

God help me, so do I. I really do.

Has anyone ever wondered how hard they could hit a guy if they had to? I do, nearly every day. I will probably never get to find out.

This article claims that scientists have created a sheep that has 15% human organs. Does this scare the living crap out of anyone else, particularly when coupled with the photo above?

Well, I guess it’s OK, as long as that 15% doesn’t include the brain or, like, the buttocks. Because that would really look creepy.

Watch the comparison of the two routines here.

If anyone still has any lingering respect for Mencia, this should flush that away. Don’t tell me he never saw the routine — it’s Bill Cosby’s “Himself.” Everyone’s seen that show.

So, with excruciating pain preventing me from doing my job, I head for the emergency room. Turns out it isn’t broken, merely sprained. So here I am at home, seeing how fast I can type with one hand, thinking that with the whole day off I could get some serious drawing done — if I could fucking draw!

Gahh.

(image swiped from Some other Brad’s blog)

Most of this is exactly as you’d expect. Northern California, western Colorado, Northwest Oregon, Massachussets and Hawai’i are the darkest areas. But what’s up with Alaska? They must be flying it in up there. Oh, and that big red spot in the middle of Texas? Austin, baby!

I hate this time of year. It would be mitigated a little if I actually had it in my means to partake of some damn music, but $130 for a wristband? The hell with that.

So fuck SXSW.

That range, however, is not as narrow as Carlos Mencia seems to think it is.

Mencia, a stand-up comic and host of Comedy Central’s Mind of Mencia, prides himself on being politically incorrect. Half his act is devoted to jokes about race, class, sexual orientation, and (his personal favorite) disability. Nothing wrong with that. The other half, however, is devoted to Carlos Mencia… how brave he is for making these jokes in defiance of the apparently-all-powerful PC police, and how little he cares what other people think of him.

Talk about protesting too much. I’ve never known anyone who legitimately doesn’t care what people think of him who spends anywhere near as much time as Mencia does making sure people know how little he cares what they think of him.

Watch a half-hour of Mencia’s comedy, you get the distinct impression he’s the first comic to tread this territory. Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s clear he considers himself a groundbreaker as he slogs leadenly down paths cleared by Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, and others. The only difference with Mencia is that he’s a beaner rather than a kike, nigger, or drug-loving hippie.

There’s one other difference. All of those other comics created edgy, raw comedy that ultimately came from a place of love and compassion, but they masked it with offensiveness. Mencia comes across as the other way around. He likes to talk about how it’s important that we be able to say what we like and that it’s empowering to people like the disabled that we treat them no differently than anyone else, which includes making fun of them… in this regard, he positions himself as a champion of the disabled. However, I get the feeling after watching his routine that really what it boils down to is he just enjoys making fun of retards.

I may be totally off base about his motivations. But it always makes me suspicious when people make an issue out of how “politically incorrect” they are. It usually means they don’t have anything else going on. Is that the case with Mencia? Well… part of his routine was a descent into a completely pointless anti-Arab rant punctuated with him screaming “Get Ahmed!” His thesis seems to be that the USA kicks ass. Which is nothing more than pandering at its worst.

I agree with Mencia that issues like race, gender, disability, etc. need to be talked about, and joked about, freely — but to cast himself as some kind of crusader is just as disingenuous as when Larry Flynt did it. He’s just going for a cheap laugh. And when you strip away his self-righteous bullshit, he just doesn’t have a lot of material there.

What I’ve been wondering about lately is how the West Wing people are going to write him out of the show. One Farker suggested “Somewhere, Ed O’Neill’s phone is ringing.” This would make sense… O’Neill played Baker, the popular Pennsylvania governor whom most assumed would occupy the VP spot on the Democratic ticket that was later given to Leo. O’Neill is also a television powerhouse with sufficient talent to carry the show through what many consider to be its last season. Some have suggested that now Alan Alda will win the election. Come on. They’ve invested too much emotional capital in Matt Santos to have him tank at the polls. There was an attempt early on to make it look like it was a real horse race — they brought in Patricia Richardson and Steven Root as Alda’s staff, people you can easily see rotating into the regular cast of a major TV show. They divided the episodes between Alda’s Arnie Vinick and Jimmy Smits’s Santos in a fairly evenhanded fashion. But this season, they’re not even pretending. It’s Santos, all the way. Santos and McGarry. But how to get rid of McGarry now that Spencer is gone?

How do you write an episode completely expunging a character from the cast without having that actor to work with? Does Josh Lyman pick up a phone in the teaser, then solemnly turn to everyone and say “Leo’s dead?” Do they get a Leo stand-in and shoot him from the back, keeling over and dying? Maybe Leo doesn’t die. Maybe they find him face-down on the floor after a bender and it’s back to rehab.

Maybe they just recast the role, Bewitched-style. Maybe they write in a regeneration scene like in Doctor Who. A couple seconds of computer-generated Leo clutching his chest, then he glows and emerges as Rob Lowe. Nah, that’d never fly on this side of the pond.

However they do it, I won’t be glued to my set. My schedule these days has meant that I’m unable to watch The West Wing when it’s on, so usually I have to BitTorrent it later. This season has struck me as kind of weak, even compared to the Sorkin-free last two years, and being robbed of Leo is just one more nail in its coffin.

If you haven’t seen the show, then for God’s sake why have you read this far? And also, watch the first four seasons… they’re available on DVD and re-run on Bravo. Do yourself a favor.