No Title Neccessary

My Reader has hit a critical mass of 300 unread posts. The reasons for this vary from studying for the GRE, to work being really busy, to life being busy planning certain events, to simply not wanting to deal with 300 unread posts, to a myriad of other excuses. I'm not going to apologize for any of them. Life happens, sometimes things other than blogging take priority. It's happened to you and it happened to me. I'm slowly working my way through them all. In the meantime, here's a wrap up of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in case you couldn't make it.

I went down with five friends. The original intention was to be out the door by 8:15 and there by 9 so we could get some kickass seats. But we downed a bottle of tequila the night before, and didn't wake up until 8:15, so we weren't out of the house until 9. Still by 10:15 or so, we'd pulled off a pretty decent spot, all things considered. By 11:30, this is what the crowd looked like.

So yeah, it was pretty crowded.

At noon, the Roots came on and played a 40-minute set, half of which was with John Legend. It was glorious. Here's a clip of the Roots sans Legend so you can almost feel like you're there.



After the Roots came the Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie. They were recently in DC for the National Science Fair. It's possible that they were also filming an episode while they were here, word is that Barack Obama will appear on the December 8th episode, featuring the Archimedes Death Ray for the thousandth time.

Anyway, they conducted a series of fun "experiments" with the crowd, the first of which was seeing how long it would take for a wave to travel through a crowd of (what they thought was) 150,000 people (which turned out to be more like 215,000 people).



Then they saw if men or women could do the wave faster. Clearly, men have more practice with this and won by a full two seconds. DEAL WITH IT.

Finally, Jon and Stephen came on. Jon walked to the stage like a normal person, Stephen was hoisted up from his fear bunker 2000 feet below the surface of the earth in a Chilean miner rescue pod. At some point, Jon brought out Cat Stevens (who's apparently now known at Yusuf), to sing "Peace Train." Stephen didn't find this scary enough, and brought out Ozzy to sing "Crazy Train."



Stevens and Ozzy dueled trains for a while and my mind was blown by the fact that they were sharing a stage at all - and that Ozzy was still alive - until Jon and Stephen compromised by bringing on the O'Jays to sing "Love Train." (This video's not mine)



Other notable guests:
-Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who showed Stephen that not all Muslims are scarey
-R2D2, who showed Stephen that not all robots are scarey
-Kid Rock + Sheryl Crow + T.I. (from prison) = one mediocre performance that I sat down for
-Father Guiddo Sarducci (Also not my video) (Just by happenstance, this random person was just a few feet behind me. You can actually see me turn around and look back at him at 0:41, I'm like right in the middle of the shot. I don't know if that's incredible, or incredibly creepy.)
-Fear itself, embodied in a giant puppet of Stephen Colbert. (photo source)

After John Oliver (dressed as Peter Pan for some reason) killed Stephen, Jon spent the lat 20 minutes being serious and saying things that were actually meaningful. Rolling Stone has the full transcript, but my favorite quotes were

Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster? 

and

Not being able to distinguish between real racists and tea partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rich Sanchez is an insult -- not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put forth the exhausting effort it takes to hate. 

and

We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is ... torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do.  We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don't is here [in Washington] or on cable TV. 

So that's it. That's all you ever needed to know about the time when 215,000 people showed up and declared that they're not crazy, despite the whole event being batshit crazy.