We missed this one in the exhaustive crush of pre-Oscars stories. Ben Karlin, former Onion writer and current executive producer of The Daily Show and Colbert Report — the yang to Jon Stewart's yin — was profiled by the Times last week. And hidden inside the paper's ubiquitous "everyman" gushing ("favors jeans and boots in winter and shorts and flip-flops in summer") was the revelation that rather than ask Comedy Central for a car service or limo to shuttle between the shows' separate studios on the West side, he got them to finance a scooter. Seems reasonable, and we're pretty envious of dudes who ride Vespas like it's no big deal. But then we read this line about his "frenetic on a good day" schedule:

the shows tape one after the other, two blocks apart

Two blocks apart? We've got a suggestion: How about push the second taping back, and, I don't know, walk?

From the Onion to Comedy Central to the Oscars [NYT]