This one goes out to everyone who has Ad Blocker on their browsers.

I don’t do it. I let the ads come. I click on skip for the ones that have the skip button enabled after 4 seconds. It’s fine, I can deal with the creeping tension; after all, I have lived in a time when loading a 7-minute YouTube video would take 45 minutes. And even if I cannot skip through the ad, that’s okay too. I go get myself a coffee, or check Twitter. I mean – really, people? With all the time on our hands nowadays, the least you can do is to surrender to serendipity every now and then, okay?

Because that’s how I found out about Simon Rich. All of you who already know him, you can walk away now, nothing for you here. Thanks for dropping in, guys. We will talk more next time.

The rest of you, we need to talk about Simon Rich. So this guy, right? He writes for the New Yorker, has a bunch of published stuff. Short stories, a few novels.

Uh, no, they do not show ads for books on the ol’ videorama – it was a trailer for a TV series called Man Seeking Woman. It premieres tomorrow, apparently. I watched it because Jay Baruchel was in it, and my Undeclared cred demanded that I give my man Steven Karp my undivided attention as he waltzed through hailstorms, torture, and blind-dating a troll, all in the quest for love. The TV show looked like an over-the-top examination of 21st century romantic cliches, the kind of laugh-out-loud absurdity that Silicon Valley brought to the table last year.

Digging into details about the show, I found out that the show-runner, creator and exec producer was this gentleman mentioned above, and apparently the show was based on one of his short story collections called The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Stories. Which I finished reading just now. It’s a short book that can be finished in under an hour, and it was funny funny. I laughed out loud at nearly every other page; some are politically incorrect, others not as funny overall, but they are all distinctive – and weird. I plan to go read his other books now, and I hope the show lives up to its zany premise.

Here are some of his New Yorker stories available for free online.

Unprotected. (The first story in The Last Girlfriend, very Toy Story-esque)

Sell Out. (a four part serialization, and is supposed to be a Seth Rogen movie soon)

I Love Girl. (also from The Last Girlfriend)

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