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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Distractionfest 2008: day 3 - Coffee, IKEA, and Mark Malkoff madness

Well, I guess I didn't promise my friend James that Distractionfest would be on consecutive days.

And after all, isn't the internet mostly just distraction anyway? So, in some sense it's like the old saw about kids' day when we were growing up : on the internet, every day is D.

Besides, I haven't been able to do much with Distractionfest recently because I've been...well...distracted.

But without further ado, here now is Distractionfest, Day 3.

I've recently discovered the comedy stylings and general hijinks of Mark Malkoff. I think I first ran into him on YouTube. He's a comedian, a filmmaker and a writer for (I think) Stephen Colbert.

Apparently his apartment in New York needed fumigating recently, and none of his friends could put him up while he waited for the poisons to recede. Finding hotels to be ridiculously overpriced, he did what any sane, rational person would do - and moved into IKEA in Paramus New Jersey. I'm honestly surprised no one's thought of this before; I'm even more surprised that IKEA - seemingly - went for it. Below is the introductory video for the series which lays out the situation and gives you a sense for how most of it will go. You can access the subsequent days spent at IKEA either on his webpage or via YouTube.



And here is his first day, moving in: hijinks ensue! Good humour.

The other thing which Mark is known for, and which I think is a bit cooler than the IKEA gig, is visiting all 171 Starbucks Coffee locations in Manhattan in 24 hours. It is crazy cool - he had to plot his trip to make sure he took in the 24-hour locations in the middle of the night; he had to buy something at each store; he started out bicycling but the caffeine wore on him. I wonder if he's come down from the high yet? Anyway, the entire lark was recorded and is available on YouTube; a fun watch, and nothing if not a modern-day Herculean Labour - which begs the question, what would be the latter-day equivalent of cleaning out the Augean Stables? Answers on a post card via this blog, please. But in the meantime, feast your eyes on 171 Starbucks:



Tomorrow Some subsequent day on Distractionfest 2008: Improv!

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