Overpriced two-drink minimums and potato skins; bad Clinton jokes on late night—these used to be the hallmarks of comedy, an art relegated to the controlled environs of comedy clubs and network TV. Fortunately, in the late ’90s, a daring breed of comedians began rejecting the status quo altogether and, by taking cues from the indie-music world, started reviving comedy as a savvy and groundbreaking art form. Mock Stars delves headfirst into this revolutionary scene, tracing the evolution of indie comedy as part of the underground music circuit and into mainstream America. Through candid interviews with the major players, including David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Neil Hamburger, Maria Bamford, Fred Armisen, Aziz Ansari, Jon Wurster, Aimee Mann, and dozens of others, Wenzel reveals how comedy is becoming relevant—and dangerously funny—again.

You can find more of Mr. Wenzel’s work in the Denver Post’s music section.

1. The Beach Boys – Lets go away for a while
2. The Mountain Goats – See America Right
3. CFTPA – Tonight was a disaster
4. The Mendoza Line – It’ll be the same without you
5. R.E.M. – New Orleans Instrumental No. 1

Not that staring at a screen is bad… I mean, it’s what I’m doing right now, and I’m not paid for this. And having the DNC in town is exciting — it makes Denver feel like a city. There’s a Chicago level of folk walking the street. There are protesters. And buttons. I have seen more photos of dead, mutilated fetuses in the past week than I have my entire life. The anti-abortion protesters are doing a swell job of raising my awareness of how classy they are — but heck, this isn’t about being classy. It’s about people without a voice-through-standard-power-structure-means making their voice heard in do-it-yourself style. Unfortunately, this DIY method of voice-raising doesn’t go much further than yelling. Or getting arrested. Or some combination of the two.

And I’m painting the protesters with the same glossy wash that they paint their opposition … heh, heck, I’ve seen one civil conversation between folk who disagreed, and if there has been one civil exchange of ideas and facts I bet there have been more. Go, discourse, go.

So, work. A lovely problem reared its head Monday: javascript files hosted on our corporate parent’s server weren’t loading for users of InternetExplorer 6 unless said users force-refreshed their browsers. That means 25 percent of our audience, and 99 percent of our newsroom, weren’t seeing a bunch of important to semi-important stuff on denverpost.com. That problem still rages, and it’s not being blamed on me anymore.

The newsroom Tuesday was slow and I got out after eight hours. Wednesday was twelve straight hours of stuff. Getting into the breaking-news zone’s exciting, but then that part of me asks “yeah it’s exciting for you, but do people out there really care?” There’s a lot of one-way thinking in newsrooms when it comes to news judgment. I write that because of the ridiculous lack of attention given to the reasons people click the things they click on any given news site that I’ve observed and participated in at all (both) the newspapers I’ve worked at. Anyway.

The Denver Post reporters are doing a wonderful job of leaping into this DNC Twitter age — we’re out-tweeting the Rocky on the trivial stuff (celebs) and the important stuff too. That’s fun. I nabbed a news-tip tweet from a follower that turned into an article today. You can see the whole history of Post DNC tweets here… these updates are now also running on the PoliticsWest homepage, and in the DNC sidebar that runs on lots of our articles.

My boss said CNN took inspiration from the Post’s homepage lead-photo treatment in their layout — they look similar, certainly, and CNN launched that after we did.

Non-work: Yesterday a group of revolutionary-minded ruffians took tea bags to the pool in Civic Center park. When I find photos of the brown water I will share. Also, people were protesting bird porn (meh), and others were protesting Pepsi … asking them to bring back Crystal Pepsi.

And for some strange reason, this photo of this Falun Dafa float from Monday has more than 6000 page views. I don’t get it.

Also, tonight I went to the MSNBC outdoor stage by Union Station to watch their wrap-up hour. Man their shit’s fancy.

We’ve got a bunch of journalists in from other newspapers, which means more people, which means the newsroom is sounding more alive than ever. Woop.

At noon, when working on putting together the special-DNC layout for the Post’s web site’s home page, I accidentally pushed the development draft of the site live. This meant the dummy photo I was using, of the cute miniature hippo-looking thing, cameo’d on our site’s homepage for a good two minutes. It was funny, in a bad, bad way, and it brought my coworker Becky to tears she was laughing so hard.

At that point in the day I’d already had a couple more fails under my belt, and it all made sense. The newspaper, the hippo — I was marching in the Fail Parade. FailHippo was the FailMascot, and I was nowhere near the end. I took a quick screenshot of the homepage fail — screenshots were my lens on this parade, and I was going to document every fail from here on out.

This is how it breaks down:

9:00 a.m.: Newspaper Fail.
9:15 a.m.: In a call with our corporate parent, I get frustrated and mean with the guy on the phone about a mistake I think they made. Personal Fail.
9:30 a.m.: I forget my camera at my apartment. I needed my camera because it’s broken, and I took the long way to work to walk by and drop it off at the camera-repair place. Mental Fail.
9:45 a.m.: I show up to work late. Fail.
10:00 a.m.: I do some internet sleuthing, and I realize the mistake I thought our corporate parent made was actually a mistake that I made. Total Fail.
10:30 a.m.: When fixing the javascript that loads a chunk of video on our homepage, I had our site CMS open. I needed to edit two files in the CMS to make this fix, so I had each file open in a separate tab. I made the fixes, and saved both files right after each other. The CMS messed up and swapped the files I was saving, breaking the video again. Fail.
11 a.m.: I leave my cube to hit the 10th floor for a soda, and forget my employee pass on my desk. Have to go to the lobby and have the security guards buzz me up. Fail.
Noon: FailHippo graces the Denver Post’s homepage.
2:00 p.m.: Our CMS buckles under the weight of something, and starts returning “503 – Server Too Busy” errors. CMS Fail.
3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.: RSS delivery on the Denver Post’s site ceases, due to a “ISAPI Extension Error- 1″ error. CMS Fail.
3:30 p.m.: CSS delivery to the Denver Post site becomes erratic, making the homepage look like jumbled junk. Server Fail.
4:00 p.m.: While explaining the FailParade to a co-worker, the co-worker replies “Fail Parade 2007!”, forgetting that this is 2008. Brain Fail.
5:00 p.m.: I hadn’t eaten yet, but I had brought a nectarine with me to work. I took a bite of that tangerine, and instead of tasty delicious I tasted underripe fail. Food Fail. Consistency Fail: Luschek noted that I typed “tangerine” there, when I meant to write “Nectarine”
5:30 p.m.: The DNC-headline list on the homepage I was working on gets pushed to the homepage, creating an out-of-place large blue block there. Fail.
6:00 p.m.: Overheard Fail in the newsroom:

Editor: “You misspelled Barack Obama’s name!”
Reporter: “I did?”
Editor: “Yes. You can’t do that.”

I got out of work at 7:30 p.m., and walked down to get my bike. I thought that the parade would end when I left the building. I get downstairs and outside, and no bike. My bike’s not there. Gone. I had locked it to this gate thing that the building Starbucks has around its outdoor seating — and that gate thing was gone too. So I go back inside, and the security folk know where they put everything, including my bike. Fail Averted.

Otherwise, on today’s stage I had sexy server stuff, super-sexy CSS stuff, 40 sent emails, another warranty-scam phone call, a bowl of jelly beans, a kitten photo, an attempt to explain why twitter matters to the newsroom during this DNC, and … the Denver Post Pep Rally.

Lunch I met up with Ricardo and John, music and theater reporters. We ate cheeseburgers. On the walk back John nailed the awesome part of covering the DNC: “The best part of the DNC is there aren’t any editors saying, ‘oh, well, we did it this way before,’ because nobody here has done this before.”

Today the Denver Post’s home-page got a HTML nip-and-tuck treatment — it now loads lot faster, and for those who know why this matters, we exchanged about 50% of the tables on the site for CSS. Then there’s the Akamai caching of our apps servers, another app server transfer, twitter and feed scrapers, this online quiz app I gotta get out the door … it goes on. I sent 42 emails today, had four meetings, and worked overtime. Answered four phone calls, and made another three. I hardly ever talk on the phone at my job. Talked with the guy from the Weather Channel about the Denver Weather-O-Meter — the Weather Channel had been the worst at forecasting Denver weather … until this week, when they somehow turned it around and got out of the cellar.

Sixteen months ago, when Denver got notice it would be the location of the DNC, I was skeptical about all the effort and attention the Post was putting into this one-off event. I’m still slightly skeptical, but man this is going to be fun.

Oh yeah, and also, I converted my mom’s resume from a Claris Works document (.cwk) into an .rtf today. For those who don’t remember, Claris Works was acquired by Filemaker back in 1998. I’m a champ.

It’s a strong local effort for a newspaper that calls itself the voice of freakin’ Colorado, and I love me a good strong local effort.

It’s this weekend, and this year it’s two days instead of one. You can buy a two-day pass for $22 (with service charge). Apparently there is no option if you only want to go one day. That’s kind of a lame way to “keep things simple,” and I hope I’m wrong about it, but from surfing the Denver Post Underground Music Showcase website I can’t see any other way.

So, yeah. If you have the means, you oughta go.

Two days later a reporter (Brian Malnes) and a photog (Karl Gehring) were among the few dozen at the monthly tetris match, and today there’s an article about Tetris League in the Denver Post.

I felt a little nervous about it, what with me working for the Post and all. My co-workers on the online team knew I play competitive tetris, and some of them knew I was pretty good at it (according to the Tetris League site I’m the best player to never have won it all). But if there’s any video game out there that’s a contender for an Olympic sport, it’s tetris. And if any ship is going to sail into Olympic-land, it’s going to be flying the Tetris League flag. Tetris League. Last Wednesday of every month. Check it out.