Martini Shot

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot, I talk about the audience, which has been practicing a kind of social distancing since the moment Netfix started streaming — or, if you want to get deeper, since YouTube dot com turned on the juice. Now it’s Hollywood’s turn to stay home.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I realize that there are two kinds of people in the world. We’re all either R2D2 or C3P0 or Wile E Coyote or the Road Runner or Moses or Complaining Israelites or Jeffrey or Ina.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot, I try to figure out how YouTube made fifteen billion dollars, and how to handle breaking up with my barber. They are deeply linked, I promise.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I reveal what a friend of mine confessed to me years ago. One time, when she was babysitting an infant, all it did was sleep, which bored her. So she woke it up and made it cry. Sometimes we’re the baby. And sometimes we’re the babysitter.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I talk about the newest venture in Hollywood and how people like to say, Never Gonna Work about things that, you know, really could work.

This is Rob Long, and on today’s Martini Shot I get really angry at something that hasn’t happened yet, and then get angry when it doesn’t happen, and then don’t know what to do with all of that pre-anger when it everything turns out okay. I’m like the opposite of a Buddhist.

This is Rob Long, and on today’s Martini Shot I watch a group of people refuse to pay the cover charge at a jazz club and think, I wonder if those people pay for Netflix.

This is Rob Long and I need to offer a trigger warning on today’s Martini Shot. It’s about my wonderful dog Illy. And it ends the way all stories about wonderful dogs end. In a lot of tears and a lot of gratitude.

This is Rob Long, and on today’s Martini Shot I try to work at a co-working space but discover that what people do at co-working spaces is take a lot of breaks from working.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I do my annual new year’s purge of all of the ideas and articles and clippings I’ve saved, thinking they’d be great shows, but I haven’t done anything with them, so time to give them away.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot, I act like the famous, late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, by ruining what should be a nice quiet evening watching television.

This is Rob Long, and on today’s Martini Shot I present my ID to the guard at the studio gate and wait to be waved through, and when I am, I’m elated, but also a little disappointed because, well, now I gotta have the meeting.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I talk about what it must be like to be down a well and to look up and see the stars, and why a place I know in Hollywood is trying to do something like that for homeless youth.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I learn what a keynote speaker is, and I learn that it’s someone who can just talk about anything and make it seem like it’s about work. Sounds like my kind of job.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot although I am not technically a licensed pilot I do pilot a plane to takeoff. A real plane. Into the sky. But I do not land it, as my presence here proves.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I decide to pitch a show that I’m pretty sure won’t ever get made, but I do like the title: "Liza Minelli, Private Detective."

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I break the first rule of show business, which is "Nobody Pays for Homework". It’s basically a history lesson.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I wear a jacket to a party and someone tells me it looks good and then asks if it’s vintage. No, I say, I am vintage. The jacket is just the jacket.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I discover that there’s a place where slightly used but still sought-after brands can be bought for cheap. It’s the RealReal, the YouTube of retailers.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I remember a few weeks ago, when videos of unidentified aerial phenomena surfaced, and the Navy said, yeah, those were UFOs, and then we all went Huh and moved on, instead of freaking out like every single science fiction movie predicted.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I suddenly remember I blocked someone’s number when I see on Facebook that they’ve died, and yes I know that makes me a bad person.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I am called courageous for doing something I had no choice but to do, and for doing something else I had no idea was risky in any way, so I’m not really courageous per se as much as cowardly and thoughtless. Tomato tomahto.

This is Rob Long, and on today’s Martini Shot I stretch the limits of apology by comparing driverless cars, navigation software, binge watching television, and the really great Amazon BBC show “Fleabag.” I’m not sure it totally works.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I talk with authority about Deep Fakes — those digitized and undetectable fakes of actors and well-known people doing and saying things they didn’t — and I look enthusiastically at the possibility of a Deep Fake Rob.

This is Rob Long and on today’s Martini Shot I have a super groovy singer friend who tells me that the reason I don’t like the sound of my own voice is because I don’t know how to breathe, which is weird because I’m breathing right now, but it turns out she’s right. I mean, I’m out of breath from just saying that.