Contributor Bio: Doug Lieblich

Doug Lieblich is a comedy writer based in Los Angeles. Nurtured in a small suburb in Long Island, Doug attended Yale University and graduated Magna Cum Boner in 2008 with a special boner in History. He is now a hilarious and wildly successful writer with respected credits including "Around the Couch Blog bio" (Drafts 1, 2, and 5).

Doug is a sexually active omnivore with basic motor and cognition skills. He can be found on grasslands, taigas, and an unkempt apartment in Hollywood.

As a professional, Doug will remind you that you can hire him for your very own comedy writing needs. Price billing is as follows:

Fart joke: 3 dollars

Joke involving a lobster: 5 dollars

Farting lobster joke: 7 dollars (bargain!)

Politically germane observation: (Pre-Herbert Hoover: $1.50) (Post-Herbert Hoover: 30 dubloons)

Contributor Bio: CL

Between this bio and my pseudonym (which is my initials...OR IS IT?), no one who knows me will have much trouble figuring out who I am. But at least pseudonymity makes it hard to google me.

Let's see...I was born in Ireland, as was my entire (immediate and extended) family. We subsequently moved to Belgium, Connecticut, Indonesia, and Nebraska, in that order. I went to college with a few other ATC contributors and majored in economics, and as of the founding of the blog I'm in my third year of law school.

The third year of law school is essentially a reward for the first two years of law school, and one last chance to enjoy yourself before life as a lawyer (it is the Mardi Gras to a legal career's Lent, for all of you Catholics out there). As a result, I've had a great deal of free time this year, which I've spent attending concerts, watching comedy series that are no longer on the air, arguing about inconsequential things, and downloading music.

With my posts on Around the Couch, I'm hoping to avoid writing excessively about the things I think about most - the fortunes of my sports teams (all of which seem to have declined severely in the last five years) and whatever blog-discovered band I'm currently obsessed with - so that people who aren't me may be interested in reading my posts. Wish me luck.

Contributor Bio: Mike Corey

They shot the white girl first.

So it was for the first ever Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, perhaps the most iconic annual in the brief history of print journalism. But it is equally instructive in demonstrating journalism's 150-year rise and fall, blossoming before it was a sense of entertainment, and then taking a turn for the worse as muckraking and skin slowly surrounded the industry and forced the quality stuff into a virtual Thermopylae. It remains there still, fighting a massive army of cloned magazines and newspapers, indistinct and undistinguished all. But even the booby-tassled-horde that has made its living at grocery store checkout lines has begun to sag, as the internet gives readers access to more. And for free.

That plague long ago overtook television news, particularly after Rupert Murdoch decided that he didn't need broadcasters, but articulate models and actresses in order to draw a crowd, sprinkling in a few shock jocks to bring'em back for more. The Howard Stern School of Journalism.

This was once the industry I hoped to join while an undergraduate at Duke University. But during the 2004 presidential race, the indirectness of journalism dissuaded me from seeking it out as a career, and pushed me toward something that struck me as more urgent and satisfying: education. I still love to write—and am eager to do so with such a talented group of individuals on this blog—but have gone down a different path since my days as a sports and news magazine editor at Duke.

I moved back to Columbus, Ohio upon graduating, and began work at the Ohio Board of Regents as an educational consultant. This ambiguous term essentially meant that I was, euphemistically, a utility player willing to do whatever project was sent my way. I enjoyed it enough to pursue a master's in education administration, which I obtained from Ohio State in 2007. I then worked on a local political campaign for a few months, then at a non-profit called the Children's Hunger Alliance, and have since returned to the Board of Regents, where I will remain until fall when I will matriculate in law school.

Although my career has gone down a different path, I continue my writing hobby through aroundthecouch.com, a sports column for GoDuke and by being a member of the USBWA.

The rest you'll learn in time. In the meantime, enjoy the latest Swimsuit Issue. It hit newsstands Wednesday.

Contributor Bio: Fidel Martinez

Fidel Martinez is a freewheelin' ramblin' and gamblin' man. He hails from the great state of Texas, with a couple of stints in Chicago and Oshkosh, Wisconsin (yes, the town of Oshkosh B'gosh'). He's got everything he needs, he's an artist, he don't look back. Interests include writing fictions and elaborate stories that make you forget they're not real.

Contributor Bio: LeKeith

Between the ages of 0 and 4, my two favorite shows were, inexplicably, I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners. No one in my family knows why I was drawn to these pioneering sitcoms over programming more suited to my demographic. Or why I preferred these particular black-and-white shows over honorable others like Dick Van Dyke. Or if I even understood what I was watching.

What they did know is that I was comfortable watching Lucy get in and out of every scenario imaginable but needed to hold someone's hand for the first 30 seconds of each
Honeymooners episode. Here's why: In the opening credits, there is a depiction of Ralph Kramden's face - bearing an ear-to-ear grin - projected onto the moon. For whatever reason, that image was "hide under the covers" scary to me.

In New York, WPIX Channel 11- currently the CW, formerly the WB - shows a Honeymooners marathon on New Year's Day and has been doing so for as long as I remember. Every 30 minutes is a chance to face my fear, which is both thrilling and terrifying. I can't remember the
exact moment I got over Gleason's face - if I ever truly did - but I remember to respect it. And to respect the moon. And Alice.

Contributor Bio: Observation Deck

The man known to the world simply as Observation Deck died today at the age of 26. His life is most notable for its complete lack of distinction. Friends and acquaintances remember Deck as an eccentric hermit whose ramblings lacked all semblance of coherence or purpose. Deck’s penchant for drollery finally found its calling in an online weblog enigmatically titled "Around the Couch."

Deck started his life in the Orient where he grew to love his eventual adopted country through the prism that was Growing Pains and Full House, two of the only forms of pop culture that were deemed acceptable by the censors in the motherland.

Arriving in the United States in the ninth year of his life, Deck was shocked and awed by the fact that San Francisco wasn’t always sunny and Long Island wasn’t always cloudy.

After diligent study and what could only be described as complete “bullsh-tery,” Deck enrolled in a prep school in New York City on a scholarship and proceeded to matriculate at college in Connecticut.

Following college, Deck was inspired to pursue public service and embarked on a journey to the nation’s capitol where he quickly realized why the early residents of Maryland and Virginia were so quick to cede this particular wedge of land.

Deck’s long and rather circuitous path finally brought him to his beloved blog in the latter part of his 26th year on earth. He could be found writing tracks on the desirability of puffins and treatises on the much maligned infield fly rule. But just when he had given what he thought was his last full measure of devotion to his blog, Deck’s life was cut short in a freak gasoline fight accident.

Deck is survived by his blogmates: Fidel, Boomer Jr., Mike Corey, CL, Standard, Josh Cain, je, ned, and LeKeith.

Contributor Bio: Ned

Please post your answers in the comments to this post. Then read below the line.

1 – Adj.:
2 – Noun:
3 – Place:
4 – Present Verb:
5 – Noun:
6 – Activity:
7 – Gerund:
8 – Plural Noun:

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Ned Young was raised by a (1 – Adj.) ___________ (2 – Noun) ___________ in the heart of (3 – Place) ___________ . Currently, he (4 – Present Verb) ___________s in New York City, the big (5 – Noun)___________ . His interests include (6 – Activity)___________, (7 – Gerund)___________, and (8 – Plural Noun): ___________, which he plans to write about frequently. He is the Editor-in-Couch of aroundthecouch.com

Contributor Bio: Josh Cain

Josh Cain is a globe trotting adventurer masquerading as a respectable corporate citizen. By day a slightly out of place office worker, by night a jujitsu fighting, pun-making, obscure-country visiting explorer of the absurd. Josh's primary goal in life is to get himself into as many awkward, dangerous, or otherwise interesting situations as it takes to generate a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes which he will endlessly repeat until his friends pre-empt him with the oft-heard "yeah, you've told us that one before."

Since his days as a humor writer in high school and college and a staff writer for the now defunct video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, Josh's audience for his stories has primarily been confined to bar patrons and females on increasingly uncomfortable first/only dates. While his friends and fellow bloggers discuss music, politics, and ways to make the world a better place, Josh lies in wait until the perfect opportunity to bring up the time he was almost murdered in a Turkish brothel or make artful use of the phrase "that's what she said." With this blog, his inane bar room ramblings are now yours to enjoy and relate to others as though they were your own. You are truly blessed.

Contributor Bio: je

Hailing from Binghamton New York, je attended Cornell University and graduated in 2005, finally majoring in Philosophy. A technologist by profession, je fell into it by accident after college, but is pretty much useless if you ask him to fix your computer. He spends his workday solving business problems with technology. In his free time, he is a glutton for information, haphazardly amassing a substantial knowledge about pretty trivial topics. He regularly takes a half dozen movies to the face over the course of a weekend, and enjoys cooking when his stomach can be patient.

He lives in Manhattan with his imaginary pet cockatiel, Lola. Follow him on twitter http://twitter.com/seemonkea

Contributor Bio: RTTF (“Rachel The Token Female”)

Rachel the Token Female (RTTF for your abbreviation pleasure) is a left-wing, drunken-philosopher type with an awkward sense of humor and a love of bowling. But (to quote Samantha Bee of the Daily Show speaking of Sarah Palin) what’s most important here is that she has boobies. She will bring a "feminine perspective" to Around the Couch, with all the mediocrity that that implies.

Rachel was raised in the lush environs of Irvine, California, and now makes her home in New York City. There she is employed in fighting bureaucratic baddies with the irrefutable power of statistics, and her mind (official title: Research Analyst at the Vera Institute of Justice). Rachel graduated from Yale in 2006, where she had the dubious pleasure of spending her college years with Fidel Martinez. She is also writing a novel.

Contributor Bio: Standard

Eric Vivier, who would like to be (but is not currently and will never be) known as "Standard," is from Buffalo, NY. He now lives in Madison, where he is a graduate student in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.