Dan Crane

A profile of actress Gillian Jacobs I wrote for NYLON.

She was not wearing this bikini for our interview.

The High-End Matchmaking Service for Tycoons (my recent piece in New York Times)

A couple of weeks ago, prior to the US Air Guitar National Championships at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, I was bemoaning the hangovers I knew awaited me since we foolishly decided this year to schedule the air guitar national finals a mere weekend before the World Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland.

As host and “Master of Airemonies” for these events, my job is to set an example of inebriation for the competitors and crowd, as I often say from the stage: “One important rule here, please don’t be sober for this. It will just look stupid.”

So there I was, bemoaning my chronic hangovers, with their accompanying headaches—headaches so bad I cannot lay my head on my pillow and usually am forced to down 4 Advils and take 45-minute scalding showers in order to relieve the pain—when my friend and air guitar compatriot Mr. Hot Lixx Hulahan (aka Craig Billmeier) said, “A friend of mine claims to have a great hangover cure. I’ll email him.”

And, let me tell you — it changed my life! I’ve now road tested this thing in three countries with countless alcoholic beverages—from beer to Jägermeister‎ to whisky to wine, and plain and simple: it works. On the worst days, I woke up with a very mild headache and general feeling that I had not gotten enough sleep (I was averaging 3 hours/night in Finland). But in general, I felt great.

The guy, to whom I owe an immense amount of gratitude, just wrote a blog posting detailing his prescription.  I didn’t really follow this to the letter, mostly I just took the vitamins he suggested. Though I generally avoided eating red meat, the one night I did gorge a plate of Swedish meatballs, I noticed the hangover was stronger than the other days. Still, I no longer had the splitting, debilitating headaches of hangovers past.

So, THANK YOU AARON PROBE! And may this help the rest of you!

In short, go buy two bottles of vitamins:

•Vitamin B complex (with no added vitamin C in it)

•Milk Thistle

I took 1 of each pill each evening, about an hour or two before I started drinking, and then another 2 pills when I got home at anywhere from 2 to 5 in the morning. I woke up feeling great!

There’s another great piece by Mark Bittman in the NY Times today highlighting research that suggests that getting Americans to mere eat one more fruit or vegetable per day would lower health care costs and save lives:

Each additional serving of fruit or vegetable would reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease by about 5 percent, to the point where if we all ate the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, we’d save more than 100,000 lives and something like $17 billion in health care costs.

I’ve been doing my part by growing herbs, fruits and vegetables in my garden at home. Here’s what I’m growing at the moment:

Kale, arugula, 4 varieties of tomatoes, 4 pepper varieties, basil, sage, rosemary, thyme, mint, shiso, kumquats, oranges, lemons, limes, persimmons, blueberries, and strawberries. Obviously everything is not at harvest stage at the same time, but the summer has been amazing.

Today, for lunch, I made an omelette with sautéed chopped shishito pepper, diced cherry tomatoes, basil and goat cheese, with a side salad of kale tossed with olive oil, sea salt and brown rice vinegar.

Few things in life are as satisfying as picking things from the garden, cooking them, and then eating them.

Here’s a story I did on Fall Out Boy for the latest issue of NYLON.

They all turned out to be very nice, interesting and well-spoken gents. Their performance on Conan was pretty hilarious—referencing, for no particular reason, Spinal Tap.

I was looking for something the other day and came across this version of an amazing Polynesian song my old band The Easy Leis used to perform in Brooklyn.

I remember us all listening to a cassette tape of this track, transcribing a few words at a time, then rewinding it, playing back. It took hours and our transcription was entirely phonetic but it sounds pretty close, at least, to a non-speaker like myself…

Here’s a video of an “actual” version of the track.

[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loEeS46yvNs]

I’ll be reading/performing/competing at Literary Death Match LA on May 30. 

It’s more or less like competitive air guitar, but with words…

Where: Busby’s East, 5364 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles (map)
When: Doors at 6:30; Show at 7:35 (sharp); afterdrinks after
Cost: $7 preorder; $10 at the door

THE JUDGES  
Literary Merit: TBA!
Performance: Ali Wong, comedian extraordinaire, who’s appeared on The Newsroom & VH1’s Best Week Ever
Intangibles: Kurt Braunohler, comedic genius, co-host of Hot Tub comedy show

THE READERS
* Margot Leitman, a Moth Grandslam winner & author of Gawky: Tales of an Extra Long Awkward Phase
* Travis Sentell, screenwriter/novelist and author of Fluid
* Kathy Ebel, TV writer (Cold Case, Law & Order) and author of Claudia Silver to the Rescue
* Dan Crane, co-author of To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist (and called “Bill Murray trapped in the body of Sid Vicious…” by The New York Times)

Hosted by LDM creator Adrian Todd Zuniga.