Circle Jerk at the Square Dance

Top Ten Wednesdays: What's slowly killing us?

2012-03-14T16:12:00.001-05:00

Extra lethal edition!

12) Steak through the heart.

11) Springing forward...to our graves!

10) Serving expired Newt.

9) Suspense over where Peyton Manning will decide to destroy his sports legacy.

8) Gravitational pull of couch.

7) Excess Santorum emissions.

6) Trying to collect money for the NCAA pool before the tourney starts.

5) Lack of anything more stimulating in our lives than the opening of an Olive Garden.

4) Blogger constantly fucking with comments.

3) Trickle-down economics becoming trickle-down waterboarding.

2) Gelatinous blob seeping under the lab door.

1) (tie) Watching John Carter/Watching John Carter's box office returns

Friday Random 11

2012-03-09T12:43:00.000-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Last Saturday evening, The Lovely Becky and our lovely daughter were supposed to go on a trip. TLB’s parents are retired, and every winter they take off for the Carolina coast for a couple of months. TLB and Libby were going to see them for a few days. I was staying home, so I offered to serve as the chauffeur. I drove them to the airport to catch a 7:00 PM flight. I came back home and did the kind of thing I can only do when I am home by myself. No, not that, you perverts. I threw in a Rush concert and cranked the sound while I ate sushi and sugar-free ice cream donuts. What’s got two thumbs and knows how to party? This guy.

I was just getting through the foreplay portion of my Nerdgasm when I got the text that TLB’s flight got cancelled. She was stuck in a line waiting to get rebooked. I turned off the concert, changed out of my sweats (aka party pants) into my jeans, and went out to O’Hare to help Libby-wrangle.

It took almost FOUR hours for TLB to wait in line to get rebooked. The Day After Tomorrow storms that ripped through the South screwed up everyone’s travel plans, and apparently the airline known as U Numbnuts Impressively Deliver Excess Dumbfuckery just happened to have a new computer system installed, which played a major role in this one-act play behind the counter:

1) Ticket agent types on computer keyboard for 17 minutes.

2) Agent interrupts adjacent agent and asks if that agent has any idea WTF is going on.

3) Adjacent agent stares at screen for six minutes past the moment where silence becomes officially uncomfortable and finally points.

4) Original agent types for another 17 minutes and then tells customer they need to see the other agent.

5) Repeat.

When I first lived in New York City, I took the subway, which often resembled cattle being shipped to the abattoir. I remember during one extra-packed trip where the car’s AC was out and the mass of Manhattanites was being extra pushy/sweaty/stinky, I had a vision of running through the subway car with a chainsaw, cutting down everyone in my path like Speed Racer’s Mach V sawing through a forest, leaving just a bunch of shins standing on the floor. That was tame compared to what I was thinking while watching the biggest airline in America attempt to reroute passengers. I wondered if perhaps they had upgraded to Windows 95.

Anyway, after all that time, TLB finally had her chance to speak to an agent. The agent then told her that she had already been rebooked on a 7:45 flight the next day. That would have been really great information to know FOUR FUCKING HOURS AGO. Oh, hi, major airline, I’d like you to meet my friend, e-mail. Have you two ever met? Here’s his friend, text messaging.

So, it was now late and we had to go back home and get an abbreviated sleep to get up and get to the airport in the morning. Still, no big deal: the trip would be persevered and I would resume my Rush-fest. We got up at 5:30, trudged out the door, and I again dropped off my wife and my daughter.

I returned home. I had just pulled off my boots when my cell rang. “Guess what?” TLB said. “We were rebooked on the 7:45 PM flight.” Now, granted, it did say 7:45 PM on the boarding pass TLB got. However, it is also good customer service to point out, when rebooking someone, that you are putting them on a flight 24 fucking hours later than when they are supposed to leave.

Of course, with this being a brief trip, it wasn’t really worth going at this point. TLB got her tickets refunded and I headed back to O’Hare to pick them up. Four round trips to the airport and no one left. The only consolation prize was that we all stopped for McMuffins. And that Libby behaved in such a stellar matter that I’m worried I may screw up her good nature and leave her with visions of treating annoying subway passengers like virgin timber.

Tunes….

1) “Relayer,” Yes. I apologize for this twenty-two minute session of arpeggiated reacharounds (thankfully held to just eight minutes due to YouTube length restrictions). I’m perfectly fine with long songs that go somewhere, but even though this is supposed to be some kind of side-long suite on the futility of war, it comes across like five pasty dudes making the musical equivalent of an o-face for a third of an hour. Although it is a perfect candidate for heavy rotation on 3Bulls! Radio.

2) “Jacob’s Ladder (Live),” Rush. In the second installment of Harry Peter and the Goblet of Hypocrisy, our hero drinks deeply from a mystical Canadian well while saying that what he just wrote above totally does not apply to a nine-minute epic about sunlight peaking through storm clouds being framed as an atmospheric battle.

3) “The Weaver,” Paul Weller. In the concluding part of the trilogy, Harry Peter and the Magical Mod Suit That Miraculously Still Fits, a noble Englishman rides in on his Flying Vespa of Graceful Aging and rescues our hero from the ravenous Wanking Troll that lives in the Musical Library of Chaos.

4) “Touch,” Bright Eyes. So goddamned earnest it should be called “Jim Varney.”

5) “Hypnotize,” Notorious B.I.G. And now for something completely different. I know that being able to know the date of your death would be an incredible burden. I am precisely the kind of person who shouldn’t know that. It could be fifty years from now and I would be doing something like calculating how many videogames I might be able to finish or how many times I can reasonably expect to have sex (adjusting for age and Viagra use). However, the big advantage is that you would know exactly when you could stop giving a fuck. Have six months left? Bye-bye job, bye-bye gym, I’m taking the family to the buffet for breakfast every morning before we hit the music store so I can buy that drum kit I always wanted, followed by a trip to the movies/amusement park/beach every night. Plus I’d know whether to keep up my insurance premiums and whether I should be a completely vain tool and dye my graying chest hair.

6) “It’s a Curse,” Wolf Parade. As I just demonstrated, pretty much a theme song for my brain. In fact, when the trip got cancelled last weekend, I was relieved. I used to do the “mine” dance like any spouse/parent when left alone for a few days of adolescent ID indulgence. But after a few years of working at home, it has lost its luster a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about working at home. I’m not brain damaged, it’s awesome. However, seeing as I spend quite a few stretches stuck alone with this just this neurotic sponge between my ears, I relish my TLB and Libby time more than ever.

7) “Hot for Teacher,” Van Halen. Still gets me thirty years after being in the target demographic for this, although my 41-year-old self abhors the way Ms. Physical Education conducts herself in the cafeteria. Mostly because, in her demonstration of stripper dancing, she’s really only reaching visual learners.

8) “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” The Ramones. As I mentioned on The Facebook, the hoopla surrounding The Simpsons 500th episode sent me on a quest to pick my favorite Simpsons episode, because what better way to spend my time that arbitrarily determining something that no one other than myself could possibly care about. I dug out my Simpsons DVDs and, after watching the five episodes on my top five, picked the “Rosebud” episode where Mr. Burns finds his long-lost teddy bear, Bobo. The thing that put it over the top was the cameo by The Ramones (as well as the call for the murder of The Rolling Stones). I wound up listening to the DVD commentary for the episode, and the funny thing is the Simpsons staff said that The Ramones were huge Simpsons nerds and, after they made their appearance on the show, would contact the staff to ask the kinds of detailed questions only true nerds would do. Which in turn reminded me of this famous SNL sketch. Which in turn pretty much demonstrates how I turn my amusing little hobbies into a colossal waste of time.

9) “Mlàdek,” Russian Circles. I really do think there is a right way and a wrong way to wank. If you’re going to have me listen to a rock song for more than five minutes, it better take me somewhere. Good Yes does that—throw on some “Roundabout” and I will follow you both in and around the lake. A good jam will do that, too. Something like Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying” can take its sweet time because every minute is another 60 seconds of my Q-zone being stimulated by Jimmy Page’s slide guitar and John Bonham’s groovy drums. This Russian Circles album is good wank. It’s sort of instrumental metal (I’ll pause for a moment and just say to any female readers who made it this far, I’ll see you again at song ten) but there’s a lot of texture to it. It shifts because you can’t just hammer home a riff for seven minutes, but those shifts don’t feel like a taking a trip through the various exhibits of the Museum of Prodigious Musical Proficiency and Excess (especially the Yngwie Malsteem wing). So if you dig this, give the album a try.

10) “Good Times,” INXS and some dude. I remember buying The Lost Boys soundtrack on cassette because I loved this song and also really liked the movie. The song still holds up. The movie, not so much. For all my white-hot hatred of The Goonies, this movie is pretty much The Goonies during adolescence, complete with zits and attention deficit disorder and uncontrollable erections courtesy of Jami Gertz (who I had a star-crush on back in the days before star crushes transformed into those dream list things where I’m supposed to let TLB have sex with Jon Hamm if the opportunity presents itself, assuming I don’t bed him first). I’ll tell you what I wish I could do, though: make a video mash of Jack Bauer vs. Teether Sutherland. How shocked would vampire Kiefer be when he goes to drink Jack Bauer’s blood and gets a mouthful of ice water? Suck on that, Sutherfucker!

11) “Once in a Lifetime,” Talking Heads. I know they are celebrated art rock pioneers blah blah blah. But there is something about David Byrne’s ‘Head persona that always reminded me of one of those nerdy serial killers, that guy riding the subway who has an actual chainsaw in his gym bag and is just waiting for the right moment to use it so he can show those goddamned arrogant squirrels who’s got the biggest pair of walnuts now. You may ask yourself, how did this head get in my duffel bag? You may ask yourself, what is that smell coming from the crawlspace? You may say to yourself, I am actually not the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. And you may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?

On that note, have a good weekend.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What last-minute campaigning are we doing for Super Tuesday?

2012-03-06T14:57:00.000-06:00

Special extra voter indifference edition!

12) Vowing not to pull out of the birth control debate until we're satisfied.

11) Sending a secret message to the Lil’ Ron Paul Secret Society reminding them to vote for the candidate who doesn’t drink the Ovaltine of race mixing.

10) Showing up drunk at an Ohio rally, dropping our pants, and challenging the other candidates to prove that they’re “presidential material” until Callista pulls us off the stage.

9) Proving we’re just like everyone else by answering “no” when asked if we have any Grey Poupon.

8) Making robocalls to undecided cyborgs who walk among us.

7) Promising to lower gas prices by having Jesus create a year’s supply of fuel out of two empty barrels, a bushel of corn, and a T-Rex thigh.

6) Bonding with the common American male voter by visiting a strip club and showering the dancers with stock options.

5) Rallying Paul supporters by going bunker to bunker.

4) Shaking hands with minority voters without immediately using hand sanitizer or handcuffs.

3) Standing up for family values by making sure our wives have no part in governing their lady parts.

2) Setting up a Cash-4-Polls station in districts where we’re losing to that sweater-vest wearing, rhythm-method failing, Google-bomb-smeared dickbag.

1) Reminding voters that we are the candidate most like them: overweight hypocrites who are completely unelectable.

Friday Random Viking Metal

2012-03-02T15:11:00.001-06:00

I'm a little late to the raiding party with this merry band of hirsute Swedes, but I have been playing the Frigga out of this the last couple of weeks.

Blast beats? Check.
Surprisingly catchy chorus? Check.
Reference to Ragnarok in said chorus? Check.
Synchronized hair twirling (see 3:30 mark)? Check.
Eye rolling from my wife? Check x2.

Unfortunately, I am swamped with work and lack time for a proper Random 11, but I think this will provide musical enjoyment (unlikely for most), unintentional comedy (much more likely), or an opportunity for mocking in comments (extremely likely).

Have a good weekend!

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we rich folks so unethical?

2012-02-28T22:19:00.002-06:00

Special extra crass for gold edition!

15) Final test of Skull and Bones initiation is to take candy from a baby.

14) Inherited an insatiable taste for precious metals at birth.

13) Moral compass doesn’t come standard in Rolls Royce.

12) Refuse to be common when it comes to decency.

11) Capitalism is spelled with two I’s, not a bunch of U’s.

10) Tend to fall from grace more quickly due to weight of golden parachute.

9) Consider it consensual when our naughty investors practically beg us to Ponzi their assets.

8) Colorblindness makes it impossible for us to see black and white, only green.

7) Would gladly have a conscience if they sold them at Tiffany’s.

6) Don’t consider it insider trading if it happens outside on the golf course.

5) Our health plans fully cover bleeding hearts.

4) What you call “cutting people off in traffic” we call “promoting the Bentley brand.”

3) Nice guys finish last and we graduated suma at Harvard Business School.

2) Got used to having people clean up our shit after we got the key to the executive washroom.

1) Laws are for people who can’t afford lawyers.

Friday Random 11

2012-02-24T20:49:00.001-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

President Santorum. God help me, but part of me wants to see that happen. That has to be one of the signs of Armageddon, right? And lo will the horseman ride, and ye will know it is Him by the stench in the air and the frothy mix of thy most unholy expulsions and the oil of passion. And if by some stroke of dumbfuckery he actually gets the nomination, where would that put Romney in terms of worst Republican candidates of all time? How can you spend a gazillion dollars, have shoulders you could land a C-120 on, and have the kind of winning squishy centrist cracker platform that appeals to people who are conservative idiots but don’t want to appear like conservative idiots, and then struggle against Newt Gingrich and a guy who says Satan is giving America the shocker? That’s worse than losing to Eli Manning, twice.

1) “Staying Fat,” Bloc Party. Seriously, my fucking theme song. I gained ten pounds over the holidays, mostly because I am like Pac Man and must EAT OR DIE. So The Lovely Becky and I decided to go on the lo-carb South Beach Diet, which has worked wonders for me in the past. The problem is the first two weeks are completely carb-free. They suck like the precious rock candy I would step over the still-warm body of my mother to shove in my piehole, which I can’t even call a piehole anymore. In typical fashion, we also started our diet by pigging out like we could smell the Santorum Administration riding in and wanted to eat as much pizza, wings, and sweets as possible before the Rapture. Although I guess if gluttony is a sin, that probably means that bakers, confectioners, and Culvers will be left behind. That’s a tribulation I can live with.

2) “Paint It Black,” The Rolling Stones. This always reminds me of high school. Sophomore year we studied poetry in English. Our teacher pulled the move of letting us bring in songs to analyze. This one girl brought in “Paint It Black,” and her explanation of it actually confused me to the point where I have no clue what this song means. I brought in “Witch Hunt” by Rush, which is a song about how bringing Rush songs to your English class will not get you laid.

3) “Lived in Bars,” Cat Power. I would like this song better now if it was called “Lived in Bars of Chocolate.” Seriously awesome, even sans chocolate.

4) “Bad Connection,” Yaz. AKA one of the songs other than “Don’t Go” or “Only You” on Upstairs at Eric’s. Could only find a live version, which made me ask, "There are live versions of Yaz songs?"

5) “Leaf House,” Animal Collective. If you can beat off while walking a tightrope, juggling a monkey with your free hand, and reciting Proust from memory, while I will give you props for creativity and difficulty, I still don’t want to watch you beat off.

6) “I Am the Walrus (Live),” Oasis. Of course, after slagging off Animal Collective, this cover of the classic Beatles tune comes on and I start bopping my head, even though I know all of the Animal Collective spirit of the original gets Blueshammered by the Fighting Gallaghers. Plus they wank the shit out of this at the end. So what do I know? Tangent: TLB has turned Libby completely against Rush. Libby will offer, unprovoked, a hearty “I HATE RUSH” on occasion. However, when I was singing to her before bed the other night, she asked, “Can you sing me more Beatles songs?” I immediately relayed this to infamous Beatles-hater TLB like I had just won my O.J. prize.

7) “Heart Skipped a Beat,” The xx. This would have definitely been on a mixtape from me. I would have laid on my bed, listening to it on headphones, hoping she was listening to it at the same time, and that even though she made me feel like the drums after the guitar solo on “Tom Sawyer,” I know that would really annoy her to put that on a mixtape, so would she please accept this instead?

8) “Burn Hollywood Burn,” Public Enemy. Twenty-two years later and White People Solve Racism is still what gets nominated for Academy Awards. Then again, Flavor Flav didn’t exactly help the cause.

9) “Don’t Look Back,” Boston. Except for “Foreplay/Long Time,” I can’t listen to them. This is coming from someone who wore a hole in my Boston tapes. Amazing video, lying somewhere between concert footage from Almost Famous and Blue Oyster Cult trying to give the Bruce Dickinson the cowbell levels he demands.

10) “High and Unhinged,” Les Savy Fav. Love, love, love. Fantastic couplets delivered by a guy who looks like Zach Galifikanis’s balding brother.

11) “Complete Control,” The Clash. Favorite Clash song of all time. What more is there to say? And what better way to end the list? Bonus: Maybe the Clashiest video of all time.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What are we giving up for Lent?

2012-02-22T22:22:00.000-06:00

10) Putting the VA in “vagina”

9) Mistaking hope for change

8) Filling up the tank

7) Fantasizing about our teachers

6) Not sounding like a Dick

5) Listening to a bunch of white guys whose only move is The Perp Walk preach about rhythm methods

4) Not randomly punching people in the face because we gave up smoking

3) Probing for holes along our nation’s border

2) First Lady Callista

1) Lent

Top Ten Tuesdays: What are we doing for Valentine's Day?

2012-02-14T11:58:00.001-06:00

Special extended love you long time edition!

14) Handing our true love a Valentine made out of the restraining order.

13) Asking the representative at 1-800-FLOWERS if they have same-day shipping on baskets of actual broken hearts.

12) Deregulating all of Callista’s activities during alone time even when we use our safe word, “Alinksy.”

11) Grabbing the Hitatchi Magic Wand and an electronic cigarette.

10) Opening a bottle of wine, playing some Carly Simon, getting our sewing needle, spreading out the surveillance photos, and going to town on the voodoo doll.

9) Treating our significant other like the pool boy/au pair.

8) Showing off our extensive collection of half-eaten Valentine’s Day candy on a special episode of Hoarders.

7) Trying out that K-Y stuff before getting kicked out of Target.

6) Going to a restaurant by ourselves, pretending to take a call that our date was killed, and getting a free meal and/or pity sex.

5) Including some sweetheart candies along with the bottle of lotion before lowering the bucket into the well.

4) Sending our spouse a very romantic text message.

3) Throwing steamed milk on every happy couple we serve at Starbucks while yelling, “Now you know what true love really feels like!”

2) Getting Boehner’d without birth control.

1) Wait, it’s Valentine’s Day? Fuck!

Friday Random 11

2012-02-10T18:15:00.001-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

This weekend is the shittiest weekend of the year: the first weekend after the end of football season. I feel a sports void only football can fill. As much as I like the NBA, college basketball, and baseball, football by far has the best ease-of-following to entertainment ratio. Baseball is like trying to keep up with a soap that you could only possibly watch all the time if you were unemployed. You miss a week and come back and there’s some dipshit from Triple-A starting because the starter landed on the 60-day disabled list when he accidentally got grapefruit juice in his eye. With basketball, while it’s fun to watch, you can pretty much coast until playoff/tournament time before you really have to pay attention. With football, I can watch a game on Sunday and maybe Monday, read a little on the Web on Tuesday, and I feel like I could step in as a guest house for Partdon the Interruption. “Tony, I am positive Peyton Manning will never throw again. In fact, I have it on good authority from the Internet that he can’t even feel his penis when he masturbates. How is he going to grip a football?”

Onto the tunes:

1) “Bad Reputation,” Thin Lizzy. Speaking of Mannings, you can pretty much use Eli Manning and the Giants's last two Super Bowls to explain what the hell happened to the econmy. In 2007-08, the last great football dynasty was on its way to unprecedented success, a 17-0 season that needed just one win over Manning the Lesser to achieve the best football season in NFL history. It was led by the most prolific offense in history, with a coach who wasn’t above cheating to get results and a pretty boy QB who traded supermodel girlfriends like cheesecake futures. Instead, the rails came off bus before anyone knew what happened. Tom Brady was outplayed by Eli Manning, a player who the series The League once referred to as “that goddamned mouthbreating dummy.”

After that happened, the NFL was complete chaos. Nothing made any sense anymore. Teams won without being able to run or play defense. The Arizona Cardinals made the Super Bowl, a sure sign of the collapse of civilization. The formerly robust Patriots couldn’t win a playoff game, let alone a Super Bowl. And the most buzzed about quarterback in the league was better at genuflecting and avoiding non-marital coitus than throwing a screen pass without skipping the ball off the turf.

In the meantime, Eli Manning took a beating despite his success. No one really believed in him. Even this year, as his numbers were crazy—he threw for the sixth-highest season total in history—he was like the Dow. Sure, he was up, but it seemed like only the 1% of fantasy football players who owned him were benefiting while the other 99% of us were missing the games because we ditched cable to save money. He wins again, and still everyone thinks not only that it’s a fluke, like Anthony Michael Hall having sex at the end of Sixteen Candles, but that we’re never going to get back to the era of great, reliable dynasties and that we should be thankful things don’t suck more. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Eli Manning, America’s quarterback.

2) “Fade to Black,” Metallica. A song about suicide for those non-sports fans who just waded through 500 words about football. The irony of this song is that these days Metallica does make me want to kill myself, at least the part of myself that once said, “I really like their new direction” when the black album came out.

3) “Muzzle of Bees,” Wilco. I really hate to say this, but I like the idea of Wilco better than Wilco’s music. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the only album of theirs I really love. Jeff Tweedy is really creative, they have a lot of soul, etc., but at the end of the day I’d rather hear Uncle Tupelo or the first Son Volt album.

4) “Six Months in a Leaky Boat,” Tim Finn, Bic Runga, and Dave Dobbyn. A great live version of the Split Enz classic that's sadly not on the YouTubes, but here's Tim and Neil Finn. I really want to go to New Zealand before I die, but I’m fucking terrified of the flight. I do okay when it’s just a few hours in the air, but I can’t sleep on planes, and after 20-some hours in the air I guarantee I’d be seeing a gremlin Tebowing out on the wing. God help me if I had been born 100 years ago and adrift in a leaky boat. I’d be the panicky idiot who gets eaten by the first week at sea. OH HEAVENS, IS THAT A SHARK? Nevermind, it was just some kelp. I do apologize for the false alarm. Say, why are you sprinkling sat on my leg?

5) “Have You Fed the Fish Today,” Badly Drawn Boy. That’s what would happen when the scraps of me were thrown overvboard. I love singing this song even though I really have no idea what it means. Is it about taking responsibility every day? What if I just buy one of those self-feeders for the aquarium and check back in a week? Does that mean I’m a bad fish parent, like giving my kid a box of Cookie Crisp and a half-gallon of milk and telling her daddy needs to sleep for a couple more hours?

6) “Pass the Mic,” Beastie Boys. This song is 20 years old. How is that possible? Jesus Christ, at this rate I won’t make it to theatrical release of The Hobbit, let alone New Zealand.

7) “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” The Smiths. My daughter falls into this category. Libby is off the charts in terms of height. A cashier recently thought she was seven. She’s three-and-a-half. Part of me is loving the basketball domination potential of this growth. I’d love to see her be unstoppable in the paint and back her way into a full-ride scholarship. But I also don’t want her to be freak tall either. That’s a rough road for girls. So I’m hoping Division 1 shooting guard or small forward size.

8) “Boys Don’t Cry,” The Cure. Still, it will be hard for me not to live vicariously through Libby if she winds up being good at basketball, because I have always wished I was good at the game. Instead I have been a terrible hoops player my whole life. My friend Tom reminded me of an event from junior high that illustrates the gap between this ambition and ability. We used to play basketball at recess (when we weren’t playing D&D). At the time, I lived in the DC area and Patrick Ewing was playing ball at Georgetown. One day, for reasons unknown, I decided to charge the net to see if I could dunk. I sprinted toward the hoop (sans ball), yelled “EWING” and jumped as high as I could. Instead of the rim, I got both hands about halfway up the net. Now, our playground was just a parking lot, and the hoops were positioned by the parking blocks that bordered the lot. I swung on the net until I was almost horizontal. I then let go. I fell and the small of my back hit the parking block. I still don’t know how I wasn’t paralyzed, and every time Tom brings this up, he says he thought I was paralyzed because of the thud I made when I landed. Anyway, it will take a lot for me not to pushing Libby to dunk, because I’d still risk a shattered backbone if I thought I could jam that rock home.

9) “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” The Darkness. They randomly showed up in a Super Bowl commercial, and I laughed that they must be paying their rehab bills, but lo and behold, they are back with a new album. I was completely sucked into this song when it came out, using irony as a thin camouflage for what is my occasionally horrible taste in music. I’m not making that mistake twice. What’s that? Am I air guitaring this right now? Why would you ask such a silly question, of course…wait, I can’t type during the solo.

10) “SWLABR,” Cream. Clapton gets all the press, and of course he’s amazing. I, however, dig Cream for Ginger Baker, both because he played the drums so well and because he often did so while wearing a cape.

11) “The Humpty Dance,” Digital Underground. Great hip-hop track? Or greatest hip-hop track? Either way, even an unabashed Darkness love like myself loves shaking my booty to this.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Friday: How are we spreading Santorum?

2012-02-10T11:02:00.001-06:00

10) Beginning with some master debating to prime our caucusing.

9) Getting our base really excited by talking about creating a frothy mix of church and state.

8) Acknowledging that watching a black guy have his way with our beloved country is driving us sooo crazy.

7) Explaining that any stains on our Congressional record were the result of ramming home our lengthy legislative agenda.

6) Showing our hardcore credentials by getting our knees and thanking God for showering us with His copious blessings.

5) Promising that we will work tirelessly to hand jobs to any hard-working American who wants one.

4) Finishing ahead in a crucial three-way primary while the frontrunners beat off attacks from each other.

3) Having donors throw money at us after showing our rising polls.

2) Allowing only men into our fox holes.

1) Starting slow so that we could peak and come from behind simultaneously with the election in November.

Friday Random 11

2012-02-03T17:02:00.002-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I got a text from my youngest brother, Snake Anthony, this week. “I’m about to platinum Skyrim. Fuck my life.”

Skyrim is the videogame/digital heroin that has gripped once upstanding men such as my brother. It has gripped me, too. In fact I haven’t played in two days and I’m feeling slightly twitchy, like I need my dungeon crawling fix.

The platinum part refers to the diabolical practice of granting achievements in videogames. When the Xbox 360 came out, it introduced the practice of giving the player points for accomplishing certain objectives in games. Some are easy, like score a touchdown in Madden. Some are hard, like score a 99-yard touchdown in Madden. Each game has a fixed number of achievements you can get. Each one also has a little name, often cutesy or punny. For instance, if you get 20 headshots in a first-person shooter, you get a 50-point “Dude, That Was My Skull!” award. (Note: not a real achievement, but should be.)

I thought this was the dumbest thing ever when I first heard about it. What do you get with achievements? Nothing, save bragging rights from other nerds. Not only can you not use achievements to do something useful, like get laid, the act of getting them will take the place of doing something useful, like making yourself more attractive by not holding a controller in your hand and screaming “Munch on those nuts, little squirrel!” to the 12-year-old you’re playing in Call of Duty.

But then I got a 360 and got my first achievement. When you get one, it makes a little noise and pops up. Sometimes achievements are secret, and you don’t even know that jumping on the princess’s head to make her sneeze out mushrooms that turn to gold coins was actually rewarded. I was looked like a bass in a fishing game (which nets you a five-point "You Da Gorton’s Man" achievement).

The Playstation 3 took this one step further by handing out little bronze, silver, gold, and platinum trophies. You get a platinum trophy for a game when you achieve all the others. Now when confronted with the gnawing accusation that you were wasting your life playing games, you could open a virtual trophy case and say, “Oh, really? Who’s laughing now, dad? Oh, and can I live here for another six months?”

As a fellow Skyrim player, I have seen the list of achievements. Getting the mystic platinum trophy is not something one acquires easily. Dare I say it would take less time to take a ring of power to Mordor and catch a ride home from a giant eagle, with time for a stop in Rivendell for a three-day bender with a pair of wood nymphs and a dwarf of undetermined gender. But how long exactly?

A couple days later, I had my answer. “Platinum. Done. Fack. 120 hours.”

That’s a lot of work to feel both secretly proud and very publicly ashamed. You could watch the entire series of The Wire twice in that time. They should at least give people like my brother a t-shirt that says, “I platinumined Skyrim” on the front and “Who wants to fucking touch me?” on the back. Either that or total consciousness on your deathbed. A little something, you know, for the effort.

Tunes…

1) “Long Distance Runaround,” Yes. I really hope that Newt Gingrich stays in the race. The GOP nomination process will become as boring and limp as a Mormon key party the minute Romney gets the nod (which is inevitable), and Ron Paul is like most SNL skits, a great premise that becomes repetitious and tiresome after the first 30 seconds. Santorum will only become interesting if he gets caught speading Santorum of the couch of some Nevada bathhouse. The race needs Newt, because while the prospect of a Gingrich administration is both ridiculous and appalling, watching him delude himself into thinking he’ll be president is fascinating. Of course, that would require him keeping a vow.

2) “Cult of Personality,” Living Color. Nice follow up, iTunes. You are becoming more genius by the day. This is easily in my top five of favorite guitar solos of all time. I think this was in Guitar Hero III and it the solo was such a blur of colors is was like going through the Star Gate in 2001. (Side note: freakiest goddamned "music" ever in a movie.) The Vernon Reid of plastic toy guitars I am not. Note: Live performance from Arsenio! God bless the Internet.

3) “Standing in the Shower…Thinking,” Jane’s Addiction. I wish I could work in the shower all day long, because there is no better place I think. It would require solving quite a few problems: hot water, environmental waste, electrocution, and modesty issues when videoconferencing, to name a few. But I could probably write my novel in a month if I could find a way to do it in the shower. And, from the TMI file, The Lovely Becky hates getting ready when I am in the shower because I take scalding showers, which steams up the bathroom and makes things like makeup application difficult (for her, I have no problems putting my makeup on). Take a water temperature needed to repel a group of Normans storming your castle walls and lower it by 3-5 degrees and that's what I like. If there is water in hell I may wind up feeling both refreshed and productive.

4) “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” Van Halen. It is appalling that they have gotten back together. It’s bad enough to Mick Jagger shaking his moneymaker, but the idea of old David Lee Roth talking about reaching down between his legs and easing the seat back is unappealing when his car seat probably has one of those beaded back rests to help his sciatica. And God help the first five rows if he breaks out the chaps.

5) “Pandy Fackler,” Ween. I don’t get them and honestly I don’t want to. I was sort of fascinated by Ween for a bit because they were so goddamned weird that I made the mistake of thinking they must be good. But sometimes weird is just weird, and they give off too much of a creepy uncle vibe. Yeah, he can play the shit out of his guitar and he’s really smart, but you don’t want to get stuck with him waiting for the isolated upstairs bathroom at your aunt’s house. I do, however, love that some hipster ad agency guy thought it would be a swell idea to hire them to write a jungle for Pizza Hut (their best song because it’s their shortest).

6) “I’m Eighteen,” Alice Cooper. I was too stupid and horny to be confused at 18. I knew I was going to college and that I wanted to have sex. Even when my medical study plans evaporated after my first chemistry midterm, I still knew I was going to get a degree and that I still wanted to have sex (with drinking standing by as a helper monkey/platonic friend if the latter didn’t work out). There was always another class/test/paper/party/bar/visit from TLB to keep me focused and/or content. Even in my 20s, I was just happy to be working and living in New York and then Chicago. No, my version would be called, “I’m Thirsty-Six,” and go I’m looking at these reports while sittin’ in my cube/the boss is calling me and IT’s blocked YouTube/I’m getting’ pounded and I’m all out of lube/I’m thirty-six and I don’t like it! Of course, now I get to work at home wearing whatever combination of sweats/jeans/hot pants I desire and can crank Alice Cooper when it shows up, so I’m good.

7) “Blister in the Sun,” Violent Femmes. Now here’s some Friday music. Funny college anecdote: My dorm roommate and I used to play this album a lot. We were going down to the mailboxes and he was humming this song. There was one other guy getting his mail, and as the three of us retrieved our letters and were leaving, we heard this guy starting to him “Blister in the Sun.” That’s some old school earworming, before you could just slap a YouTube thingy on The Facebook. I always think of that whenever I hear this song now. Unrelated: EPIC MULLET IN THE VIDEO. There is so much party in the back of the bassists hair I feel like I need a rehab stint at Supercuts just from looking at it.

8) “Destination Ursa Major,” Superdrag. A lost gem from the 1990s. Major labels have killed many a good band, but I have tended to enjoy indie power pop bands that got to take their songwriting talents to big studios. As much as I love this crackle and hiss of early Guided by Voices, I am a big fan of the stomp that they achieved on their two major releases.

9) “Go With the Flow,” Queens of the Stone Age. I got a whole new appreciation for drummers when I tried to play this on Rock Band. The first time I played this, I was winded, and this was even before I was in my current post-parent creampuff state, back in my Branimal salad days. It’s three minutes, and I thought I can do anything for three minutes (insert TLB joke here). But I couldn’t keep up and had to stop. How does Neil Peart do this shit for three hours? Alas, I can’t play it now because I done broke my Rock Band drum pedal, and there appears to a shortage of replacements—spare pedals are selling for $90 online by guys who are all about the money instead of the music, man! The invisible hand of the free market once again punching me in the nuts.

10) “You Know I’m No Good,” Amy Winehouse. I love the Tanqueray couplet she pulls off. It’s too bad she died, because regardless of how fucked up she was, she was talented and I think she could have made some great music about getting back from the edge of the abyss. At the same time, because my brain knows it’s no good, when someone like Amy Winehouse dies, I imagine Abe Vigoda sitting back in his easy chair and marking another vertical line in a notebook that tallies how many people he’s outlived. You want the secret to immortality? Find out what he eats and make a pill out of it.

11) “Portions for Foxes,” Rilo Kiley. It’s interesting to get a woman’s perspective on things. Jenny Lewis sings that “the talking leads to touching, and the touching leads to sex, and then there is no mystery left.” Whereas if a guy was singing this, he’d sing “the talkin’ leads to touchin’, and the touchin’ leads to sex, and…what do you mean and, that’s it, that’s the trick.” We apparently have differing opinions on what constitutes the prestige.

Seriously, though, how are men in charge? I think women could walk around with a little pen like they use in Men in Black, only instead of flashing some kind of amnesia light, it flashes boobs. Some guy is blathering on about his fantasy team or how he’s going to squeeze an extra five horsepower out of the Mustang or how feminism has been the undoing of America and, boom-boom. When he comes back to reality and asks what happened, you tell him he was just about to take the garbage out or cook dinner for the kids or withdraw from the race. Problem solved. You're welcome, women of America.

Have a great weekend.

Ahem, Pinko

2012-01-27T13:44:00.001-06:00

Random 11coming later, but here is a little entertainment for now.

Here's the context for the title of this week's 11. No, really, it's a real link!

It is amazing how the Rickrolling gag never gets old for me. It’s the perfect Internet trap. You can’t tell it’s coming. Even if you suspect it, you won’t know for sure unless you click. Wile E. Coyote would marvel at the super geniusness of it.

It reminds me of another personal meme that never gets old for me: making Z-related nicknames for my brother Tickle’s friend, Z, aka Pancake Z. Just this afternoon, Z commented about how he had predicted in August that Peyton Manning’s career in Indy would be over and that the Colts would suck bad enough to draft Stanford QB Andrew Luck as his replacement. “Just call me NostraZamus,” he wrote, to which I replied, “The propheZ has cum true!” (Side note: we always, always, always write “come” that way in our e-mails. I am seriously worried that some day I will slip and spell it that way in a work e-mail.) I could make Z-puns all day. In fact, whenever we see anything that has a Z on it, we take pictures of it and text Z or post it on his Facebook page. If I could find a way to make money off of that, I’d gladly wok 80 hours a week.

Z was also a topic of converZation (seriously, it’s hard to stop once I start) this week. See, Z currently does not have TV service at his house. This is partly for economic reasons, partly because Z wanted to see what it was like, and I think partly because Z thinks this will make him smarter as he does read more without TV. However, Z is an avid spots fan, which means he is left to the devices of sports radio. Sports radio makes you stupid. You could be a physicist on the verge of proving string theory and one hour of listening to Jake in Joliet tell you what’s wrong with the Bears will render you mentally incapable of working at a McDonalds. They have done lab tests where overexposure to Mike and Mike in the Morning caused lab rats to become obese, inert, and start wearing Zubaz pants in public (true story). The other thing is that listening to sports on the radio sucks. We had a poker game at Z’s over Christmas and listened to the Bulls game and it blew transistors. So this week I asked him if he was going to have a Super Bowl radio party. I just imagine us sitting in a circle around the old Philco, drinking beers and eating snacks. It would be amaZing.

Okay, tunes….

1) “Soma,” The Strokes. I could have used soma this week to help me sleep through Libby’s late night partying (Warning: this is going to be one of those blogs in this post. Lots of kid stuff on my mind.) The worst night saw her not actually getting to sleep until 10 pm, then waking up four fucking times, including a 2:30 am wakeup where she was singing in her room. Of course, she woke up for good about 45 minutes earlier than usual and was as awake as if she’d just had her blood replaced with 5-Hour Energy.

2) “Hateful,” The Clash. The other rough thing was that Libby was sick in a gastrointestinal sense this week, so much that we had to switch back to diapers during the daytime for a couple of days. Our potty training had been going very well, so much so that it’s been probably 2-3 months since I last had to deal with anything more than a wet diaper. In the interim, I think I repressed all the bad changing memories, because I was in full GAH!!!! mode when I had to face the peril again. It was like getting lulled into a false sense of security when the Cold War ended, only to wake up and find a hardline Soviet Government back in power. Awful.

3) “Man in a Suitcase,” The Police. I have always been fond of this song because, considering I’ve had something around 787 mailing addresses in my 41 years, I’ve always felt rather itinerant. Until now. We bought our current house with the idea that it could be ours until they take us out feet first. Part of me feels relieved, the idea that the next time I move, I literally won’t have to lift a finger (unless via rigor mortis). The other part makes me feel like I just converted to Scientology and it’s not taking. So wait, I’ve got this Thetan living inside me? Is that why I’m 30 pounds overweight?

4) “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” Green Day. As much as I loved American Idiot, it feels much more dated than it actually is. The Bush Administration feels like a million years ago to me. Maybe that’s another example of repressing memories of dirty diapers.

5) “Song 2” Blur. I could play this every Friday while making Z puns for two solid minutes.

6) “Overkill,” Men at Work. Over this years, this quietly became one of my favorite songs of the 80s. I was all vegemited and what not by their first album, but this song and “It’s a Mistake” from the Cargo follow-up are the ones that stuck with me over the years. Plus it sounds of the 80s without being completely trapped in the 80s. Essential.

7) “House Of Balloons – Glass Table Girls,” The Weeknd. I am so white that I need a Siouxsie and the Banshees sample to lead me into a perfectly groovalishish bit of hippity-hoppity R&B. I only wish I was in a Vegas club at four in the morning, bobbing my head along while drinking a Stoli gimlet bought with the house money after having one of those craps table runs where people come over to bet on your rolls.

8) “Ok Pal,” M83. A good tom-tom fill makes an electronic drum beat. Unless you just want to get oom-sah-oom-sah’d to death, you need something to break up the repetition a little. This has those great boomy, reverbed 80s fills that pack some thunder without getting in the way of the beat. Seriously, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming would be regarded as a seminal album of the 80s if it had been recorded 30(!) years ago.

9) “The Bends,” Radiohead. The big benefit of working home by myself is that I can Turn. This UP. Side note: I don't think I've ever seen a clip from Later With Jools Holland that doesn't kill.

So another parenting thing on my mind this week is the vibe other parents sometimes give off when you say you only have one kid, especially when you are my age and it’s looking like you will have an only child. The vibe is that you have it easy, maybe even that you’re not a real parent. Isn’t so easy to have just one? Well, allow me to retort. This week, when my baby had the bends, I had to stay home from school with her. And when you are locked in a house all day with a solitary three-year-old, you are the canoe and they are the river. You’re only going where they want you to go. There are no siblings to play with, no other children to occupy their time by coloring/playing dress-up/seeing what happens when you put the cats in the dishwasher. I was the sole source of entertainment. Sure, Libby can sometimes settle in to lay with her toys, but I get maybe 20-30 minutes tops before she demands that I entertain her. DANCE FOR MY AMUSEMENT, FAT MAN! I can maybe buy a little more time if she’s watching a movie, especially one she hasn’t seen before (this one’s called Pulp Fiction, you’ll love it!). But then I feel like a completely irresponsible dickbag, which ruins whatever reprieve I was trying to get. So after a day home with her, I feel like I did four sets at a resort in the Catskills. One can only get on all fours and pretend to be the Daddy Puppy for so long before getting distracted. After all, dogs have short attention spans.

10) “Run to Your Grave,” The Mae Shi. Not that I’m suggesting that it’s easier to have more than one kid. God no, you people are fucked. There were four in my family and it is amazing that our mother is both alive and still speaking to us. My youngest brother Snake Anthony and I were not too bad, both staying out of trouble and hiding our indiscretions fairly well. My brother Tickle was another story. He tended to get into more spectacular scrapes, such as getting into a car accident with the only other car in an otherwise empty parking lot (true story). My sister E, when she wasn’t getting caught, would be so overwhelmed with pride at not getting caught that she would then tell my parents how she didn’t get caught. You could give her $40 million on the condition that she couldn’t tell anyone she just got $40 million and the deal would be voided before she could sign the nondisclosure agreement. Unrelated: I really love this song.

11) “The Bleeding Heart Show,” The New Pornographers. Who can’t use a little more hey-lahs in their weekend?

May you have the weekend of your dreamZ.

Friday Random 11

2012-01-13T16:42:00.000-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

This month marks five years of the Random 11, a feature I started after I got an iPod for Christmas in 2006. I’ve written 168,000 words since then, with a few of those not even connected to dick jokes.

Yesterday was also the first day of the season that I needed my winter boots. I’m honestly starting to become very Republican on this global warming thing. Just round up all those swimming polar bears, open a few new zoos, and turn on the ice maker. Extinction solved and I can still wear shorts on New Year’s.

1) “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” The Rolling Stones. This would perfect for a Cialis commercial. Boomer couple goes to a Stones concert and is right in the front row. The voice-over guy talks about how you want to be ready when the mood strikes while Mick sings the song. Then after 45 seconds of medical disclaimers, the song climaxes, and before the husband can hustle his wife to the back seat of the Lexus, Mick reaches out, pulls the wife onstage Courtney Cox-style, and takes her backstage, throwing one last wink as the voice-over guy says, “Keep the rock rolling with Cialis.”

2) “Punk Rock Girls,” The Queers. The Lovely Becky and I have talked about Libby as a teenager and how we would react to Libs dyeing her hair. TLB came up with a great solution: Libby can dye her hair any color she wants, but she’ll get a surprise when her mom shows up with her hair the same color. However, piercings will be right out because I’m not becoming a pin cushion to make a point.

3) “My Delirium,” Ladyhawke. I have been tired all week because I am a dumb ass. Why am I a dumb ass? Because my fatigue stems from playing videogames late at night instead of sleeping like a responsible adult. Because I try to be a responsible adult and not play videogames around my toddler-age daughter, I wait until she’s asleep. Unfortunately, I have been playing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which is a crack rock shaped in the form of a 20-sided die. Oh, I’ll just play for an hour or two, I say to myself, with the delusion of an alcoholic hitting happy hour for the appetizers. Four hours later I’m woozy, incoherent, and not wearing pants. This is why I never played World of Warcraft, because I’d be like one of those Korean gamers who dies after forgetting to eat. (I made the mistake of starting Skyrim while Libby was awake, just to check it out. How bad could it be at the beginning, I thought. Of course, the game opens with a beheading and a dragon killing everything in sight. What’s got two thumbs and is father-of-the-year material? This guy.)

Bonus fun material: An absolutely killer bit about videogames from comic Dara O’Briain. He destroyed me with laughter when he started talking about Metal Gear Solid.

4) “Gideon (Live),” My Morning Jacket. Probably makes my All-Crescendo List.

5) “Nothing,” Stabbing Westward. I don’t know if Trent Reznor ever got royalties from these guys, but he should have. Also, the title of the album is Ungod, which is Latin for We are trying too hard to be edgy.

6) “Time for Me to Fly,” REO Speedwagon. My company used to have a yearly conference in Vail, Colorado. I got to attend the last year we held it, and while I certainly worked, the experience was bookended by two of the drunkest nights out with coworkers I have ever had. The first night there (the day before the event started), and after being warned that drinking in high altitudes can exacerbate the effects of alcohol if you’re not used to it, I had an evening where I started drinking 7-and7s, switched to Maker’s on the rocks because I wasn’t getting drunk fast enough, then switchied back to the 7-and-7s because the Maker’s was making me blind (along with the nicotine blitz I was getting from the smart decision to smoke). Thank God I didn’t need to start the next day until 11.

When the event ended, we went to a bar where this one guy was a musician in residence. He had a big fat book of covers you could request, and in my drunken happy state (it had been a great week and we were celebrating a successful event) I requested this song and sang along with it. I would have popped a lighter in the air if I had one at the time. I feel a bit of shame because this is a sappy, sappy, sappy song, even if in deep dark places I don’t talk about at cocktail parties, I really do love it.

7) “Snowblind,” Black Sabbath. I don’t think Ozzy’s talking about winter drifts in January. For all the perils of today’s society, I am glad cocaine was no longer chic by the time I reached an age where I might have been tempted to try it. Because there’s no way if I was 20 in 1977 that I wasn’t doing a couple of lines before heading to a Foghat concert. That’s why I stick to booze—I tend to get too sleepy by the time I would do any real damage. The last thing I need is to get hooked on something that would have me playing Skyrim for 56 straight hours.

8) “Ray,” Aimee Mann. Amazingly not on the YoutTube. Year ago TLB—a giant Aimee Mann fan—was discussing with me why she liked Aimee Mann so much, and she launched into this discussion of Mann’s rhyming couplets and how she is so creative in how she structures her rhymes and will often string together a several quick lines of rhymes. I said, “She sings real pretty.” Guess which one of us is the professor. This song is real pretty, too.

9) “Rock N Roll,” Led Zeppelin. The other day, my mind wandered into this weird daydream where Alex Lifeson of Rush personally thanked me for sending him a copy of my award-winning novel (as well as commenting how funny I was on The Colbert Report), and then asked me, being a giant Rush fan, what kind of setlist they should play on their next tour (I wish to Cookie Jesus I was making this up). In mid-daydream, I actually stopped to give this some thought before replying to imaginary Lifeson that they would absolutely slay everyone in attendance if they opened with a cover of this. Which, all psychiatric concerns from how I reached this conclusion aside, would indeed melt the faces of every Rush fan in attendance. Or at least the ones who were not seated in the imaginary front row like I was. And no, Geddy did not pull me onto the stage Courtney-Cox style.

10) “Late Night Conversation,” Josh Rouse (decent cover version). One of the downsides of having a large collection of music on my computer (far too much for my 80 gig iPod to hold anymore) is that I don’t always get to listen to a lot of it. Which is a big reason why I love doing this post each week—sometimes something comes up and I go, “Oh, that’s good, I should get it,” before remembering that I have it. Incidentally, after Skyrim, late-night conversations with TLB are the next largest source of sleep deprivation. It’s literally like the lights go off and we start shooting the breeze (and no, that’s not a euphemism). So my two biggest sources of not getting enough sleep are running around an imaginary fantasy world and talking to my wife while in bed. It’s a damn good thing I’m married because I would have no fucking clue how to woo a woman these days.

11) “Wonderwall,” Oasis. I know Von hates this, as does TLB, but I love it. It has that universality that I think great singles have, where it can appeal to a lot of people who normally wouldn’t agree on anything. For instance, let’s say that I was talking with Beyonce, who also was complimenting me on my appearance on The Colbert Report. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when this song started playing, we both said, “I love this song.” And then we’d laugh and say, “Jinx, by me a Coke,” and then Jay-Z would have his guy Pain-Luv dangle me from the penthouse balcony. That’s good songwriting.

Bonus: “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” Guided By Voices. A new classic sounding GbV song from the classic GbV lineup. Worth watching this performance from Letterman to see, as one YouTube commenter put it, “the sinkable Greg Demos.”

Have a great weekend.

Spreading Santorum

2012-01-11T22:39:00.002-06:00

I recently found out that Rick Santorum graduated from the same high school I did. Furthermore, I found out that, like I did, he only attended his senior year, because like my father, his father was a military man who was transferred to a new base before little Ricky's final year of high school. We were also both raised Catholic and we both stubbornly and sometime illogically stick to our core beliefs despite logic dictating that we should seriously revise said beliefs. Ergo:

Santorum: Gay sex is icky because my old vengeful God says so.

Me: The Cubs have hope because my new dreamy GM says so.

I'm reluctant to dig any deeper because further similarities will leave me feeling frothy and unclean.

Top Ten Wednesdays: How are we being misquoted by the media?

2012-01-11T12:30:00.000-06:00

10) Meant to say that the welfare system suffers from the blahs, not, you know, what it sounds like what we said.

9) Were misquoted when we said our husband Marcus was gay for the French horn. He just loves watching guys blow into those things! What's wrong with that?

8) Actually said we need to keep those sticks from crossing our borders. Seriously, have you seen the brush near El Paso?

7) Forgot to include in America’s armor when we said our top foreign policy priorities would include looking out for the chinks.

6) Really said that minor teas should be banned from the food stamp programs. Lipton should be good enough for you people. Um, meaning tea drinkers who are on welfare.

5) When we said we would bomb Iran back to the Bronze Age, we actually meant Stone Age.

4) Left out under the collar when we said lesbian moms make us hot.

3) We were really making a favorable comment about the zoo-run media—we just love that new Cameron Crowe movie and wish Hollywood would make nothing but movies about wholesome families buying exotic animal preserves. Also, we love Israel, we're just not in love with Israel.

2) Was referring to cigarettes when we said all fags must burn.

1) Said we had to get rid of that nagger in the White House. Because of our extreme prejudice toward regulation and not, you know, those people. Meaning naggers.*

*I must give credit to South Park for this joke because that would be the white, er, right thing to do.

Friday Favoritist 11 of ‘11

2012-01-06T13:30:00.000-06:00

Featuring special guest, Another 7 of '11

Happy Mayapocalypse! Who’s ready to party like it’s 999 AD?

My brother Tickle stayed with me over the holidays, and he was lamenting a bit about a gift he received: $70 worth of iTunes gift cards. He had no idea what to buy, in part because he doesn’t like new music nearly as much as old music. (I helped him on both fronts by suggesting the new Black Keys and Physical Graffiti).

I do not have that problem, and I’m not sure if I’m thankful for it or cursed. You could give me a $700 iTunes gift card, and while I would be very grateful and sprint into the digital stacks with the zeal of a meth addict in a Walgreens, I guarantee I would hit a wall of regret at $699 because I would think of something else I would HAVE to have. (“I could really use that live Big Star reunion record!”)

I would say overall that’s a blessing. Music has been such a huge part of my life that I would hate for my musical interests to be perpetually stuck in the past. Sure, I will have soft spot for the songs I played when I had sex for the first time/drank for the first time/got high for the first time/rolled a 20-sided dice for the first time (hello, Rush!). But every year I find a bevy of new personal classics that get added to the Playlist of My Life (formerly known as the Mixtape of My Life).

This past year was no exception. The following are my favorite 11 songs of the year, plus an opening act of honorable mentions because I got to 18 and couldn’t bring myself to cut any more. These are not necessarily the “best” songs of the year, although I have a disturbing number of similarities to Pitchfork’s list. There are instead my favorites, songs I played the most, sang the most, and air-drummed the most.

Another 7 of '11

“Video Games,” Lana Del Rey. There are a couple of funny things about this year’s list. First, I am aware than my previous lists tend to be helmet parties (not to be confused with a Helmet party, although they have the same gender ratio). But I had five female artists make the cut this year, which is progress for me. I am slowly moving my male-female balance from D&D convention to Star Trek convention. Baby steps.

The other funny thing is that I have always been more music oriented than vocal oriented, which explains how I have been a Rush fan for more than 30 years. This year, though, I was drawn to a lot of songs with strong vocal performances. In fact, dare I say this year’s list is wank-free, with one possible exception in the #2 song. And this song by Lana Del Rey encapsulates the year. It wowed me the first time I heard it the same way Neko Case did. Lana Del Rey could sing about tax returns and I’d listen just to hear her sing “child-care tax credits.”

Although the song is called “Video Games” and her last name is the same as a popular science fiction publishing imprint, so I haven’t exactly escaped the shackles of male nerdom.

“The Thanksgiving Filter,” Drive-By Truckers. Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This song exemplifies what the Truckers do so well: provide such level of details that you feel like you’re having Thanksgiving with this unhappy family and hoping that singer Patterson Hood has saved you a few puffs off his joint so you can get through the holiday without beating someone with a drum stick.

“You Can’t Say Kingston Doesn’t Love You,” Title Fight. Sometimes I just need a great two minutes of rocking (as The Lovely Becky will sadly verify).

“Shake It Out,” Florence + the Machine. Holy shit can she sing. That note she hits at 3:08 at the start of the final chorus gives me goose bumps every time I hear it. But more than that, I love that this song sounds big without sounding like some autotuned club mix monstrosity. It raises the roof without requiring you to raise your blood alcohol content to make it interesting.

“Down by the Water,” The Decemberists. When I got on Facebook, I did it because I had a high school reunion and was connecting with a lot of old friends. The funny thing is that I wound up not talking much with my closest HS friends, in part because I think we didn’t get over losing touch (admittedly, 90% my fault). Instead, I wound up interacting more with other non-BFF classmates who have become some of my best Facebook contacts, in part because we tend to have entertaining high school interactions—lots of jokes, puns, and entendres. In fact, I have a hard time dealing with Facebook when something serious happens to one of my FB friends, because the format feels so goddamned trite for anything beyond funny cat videos or dick jokes. The reason why I like this Decemberists song so much is because it’s like making a great FB connection with an old friend. It sounds just like I remember The Decemberists I knew and loved, and we’ve picked up right where we left off after we lost contact after The Crane Wife.

“Weekend,” Smith Westerns. I had the same reaction to this I had to The xx: how does a group of embryos make such killer music? Seriously, had I been more reckless and fertile in my youth, I could have fathered this entire band. And why are they smoking in the video, and carrying axes, and holding guns? WHERE ARE THE PARENTS? So, great song, but docked a few spots for making me feel old.

“Livin’ in the Jungle,” Black Joe Lewis and The Honeybears. I heard this for the first time in Vegas, when I went for my cousin Youngblood’s bachelor party. I didn’t write about that trip for a couple of reasons: one because, while entertaining, it didn’t really break any new Vegas blogging ground, and two, because there was actually a serious moment that I wanted to keep private, yet would feel dishonest if I wrote around it.

However, there is one great story from that trip. My brothers Tickle and Snake Anthony joined Tickle’s friend Smoke and his buddy Bruce at a bar that opened out on the Vegas Strip. Bruce, not knowing the power of Tickle, bet my brother that he could not get 20 random pedestrians to come out from the Strip and into the bar to either shake his hand or hug him. The time limit: one hour. “One hour?” I laughed. “He’ll be done in 20 minutes.” Sure enough, Tickle went full Tickle and started calling out and waving people over. Sure enough they came and shook hands or hugged him. One guy came over and asked if he knew Tickle, because he looked familiar. “No, I’m just a random guy trying to win a bet,” Tickle said. “Oh,” said the man, “Well, this is my wife,” and just like that Tickle hit a two-fer. He got another guy who was wearing a T-shirt with Oscar the Grouch and the word TRASHED written across it to come over. It was such an awesome shirt that Smoke tried (unsuccessfully) to buy it for $50. The best was a group of older tourists who came over and asked us, “Are you Canadians?” We said no, and they said, “That’s funny, because you’re acting like Canadians.” Tickle wracked up seven hits in about ten minutes, at which point Bruce called off the bet. So this song makes the list because it makes me think of friendly, drunken, hugging Canadians, even if it is a booty-shaking bit of James Brown R&B.

Okay, onto the finalists….

11) “Helplessness Blues,” Fleet Foxes. Like Lana Del Rey, they could literally sing about anything as long as they do so in harmony. This makes me feel like I do when I drink Fiji Water after a hangover, especially if I get one of the liter bottles that’s extra cold from the back of the case. I am instantly rejuvenated and purified, and whatever mental toxins I have floating around get flushed out.

10) “Marked,” EMA. Of course, rock music is not all shiny happy people and sparkling clear water. It’s dirty, druggy, and deathly, and that’s what made me stop and take notice when I heard this song the first time. The screeches of the fret board are the sound of angels losing their wings, one horrible mistake at a time. But then she turns it around at the end and offers just enough hope to stave off musical suicide. The harshness of it makes it hard to enjoy, but I can’t think of another song that grabbed me quite like this one.

9) “Birthday Cake,” Lucky Ghost. I’ve been on a gaming message board for years, long enough that I have gotten to know a number of the guys (100% helmet party). When the guy who is Lucky Ghost mentioned he had released an album as a free download, I did my virtual friend duty of downloading it and giving it what I figured would be one polite listen. What I didn’t expect was to play this album over and over this year. Could this really be from the same guy who whupped my ass in Madden? It’s a completely infectious mix of indie rock, crunchy 90s alternative, 80s synthpop, and in some places even some sprinkles of 70s prog—something that the title Sex Griddle would not suggest. This is the final track and a perfect coda to the album, a stirring cityscape of a love song that I almost always have to play again when I hear it. You can get the whole thing here for free.

8) “Holocene,” Bon Iver. A real challenge for Bon Iver would be to make an album I don’t love. For Emma, Forever Ago is a bona fide classic, and the Blood Bank EP has what I think is his best song in the title track. So even with autotune and drum machines and fucking with the cabin-in-the-woods formula, he managed to give me another album of everything I loved about those two offerings without just sounding like he just followed his past formula. I honestly don’t know how people can’t be moved by this.

7) “Barton Hollow,” The Civil Wars. Maybe it’s the influence of the band’s name, but this song makes me think of Cold Mountain, of a man and a woman separated not just by distance but tragedy and terror and trauma, walking hundreds of miles in the hopes of escaping into each other for five minutes. The other thing I love about this song is that I don’t mind the male singer’s voice. On a lot of male-female duets, I often want the dude to get the hell out of the way (cram your leather, Hendley, I’m here for Nicks’s lace). But The Civil Wars really complement each other and blend together perfectly. I could have easily picked a half dozen tracks from this album, but this is the one that jumps out at me the most.

6) “Pumped Up Kicks,” Foster the People. I know that some people are going to probably skewer me for this, and I admit I feel like a hipster cobag for liking this song. At the same time it was the catchiest fucking thing I heard this year and I was singing along about shooting kids by the second chorus. I suspect I’ll have an MGMT reaction to this down the road, an empty tequila bottle of nausea and regret, but damn if it isn’t fun getting down to the worm.

5) “Heart in Your Heartbreak,” The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I am going to just come out and admit it: I need a little emo in my life. I find that funny because I am at 25 years past the target demographic for stuff like this and, if I may be immodest for a minute, I have nothing to be sad about. (I apologize in advance to TLB for making her fall out of her chair.) I am happily married, I have a wonderful daughter, I am back in a city I love, and I make a decent living while working out of my house. The only thing I really regret is not having published a novel yet, but if I may again be immodest, I think that is going to change, possibly before the Favoritist of 2012 gets written. Yet I feel a need for some sadness in my life because there is a part of me that enjoys feeling a little miserable. So songs like this give me a little huff of heartbreak, packaged safely in an upbeat tempo and a doctor-approved four minutes.

4) “Get Away,” Yuck. Pure college rock gold. This sounds like it was recorded live at a left-of-the-dial station sometime around 1993, when the band was making its catchy-but-noisy indie-label debut, before signing a three-album deal with Geffen and multitracking out the rough edges. This a great song from a great album, and I only wish I could still fit into my button-fly Levis and Late Night With David Letterman t-shirt so I could fully immerse myself in the alternative rock universe Yuck came from. Plus, have you seen the drummer's hair?

3) “Midnight City” M83. Playing this after Yuck makes me feel like I’m traveling back in time, a fact heightened by the fact that the Chicago suburb where I live served as the location for every John Hughes film from the 1980s. (We live about a mile from the house Cameron kicked the Ferrari out of in Feris Bueller’s Day Off.) Even the sax outro feels like it stepped out of a fusion-powered DeLorean. However, the reason why I and so many other armchair critics have flocked to this song is that it just kills. It is perfectly constructed, from the sound of the synths to the Euro-ish vocals to the digital tom rolls of the drum machine, with the saxamaphone opening up the skys and taking us to retro heaven at the end. Simply put, this would have been a favorite in 1982, too.

2) “Rope,” Foo Fighters. No one makes rock albums anymore. They try, sure, but they either come out like Nickelback or like Queens of the Stone Age, which winks a bit too much to go to 11 for me. There’s a special blend of womp, melody, and swagger that rarely get blended together these days. So leave it to one of the few modern music stars who understands how to be a rock star, a gum-chewing, arena-playing front man who writes songs with choruses that should be coming out of Camaro speakers at high volume. He also just happened to make the best album of his Foo Fighters career, an album that has an analog sound even when coming out of my hard drive. This is my favorite song from that album, in no small part because there’s a bit of tricky 2000s Rush wank at the beginning, a thumpy riff that twists and shouts, “Are you ready to rock?” before delivering chorus that climbs to the top of Marshall Mountain. Nothing got a double-arms in the air Fuck yeah from me this year like “Rope,” except….

1) “Whirring,” The Joy Formidable. I was sure when I first heard “Rope” that was going to be the song at the top of this year’s list. Songs like that are why I am a life-long rock fan. But then this song randomly came across my ears one day, driving in my un-rocking Volvo station wagon, kid in the back and WXRT on the radio. It was big and heavy, but balanced with the light and sweet female vocal. I made a note to remember “Joy Formidable,” went home, and bought the album. To my pleasant surprise, I found that the album version was even better, with a jamming four minutes of swirling guitars and double-bass pedal beats tacked on. No sooner was the big fat finish finished, a peel of feedback fading into my speakers, then I hit repeat. So it turns out I was completely wrong, that they do make big fat rock albums, it's just that they are sometimes made by blond Welsh women who sing like the Cocteau Twins but rock like the Foo Fighters. It’s finding songs like “Whirring” that make me happy I love music more than nostalgia, that I still get a giddy high from digging through new releases hoping to find a new addition to the Playlist.

Have a great weekend and a great 2012! If the world does end, I hope you at least have your iPod handy when it does.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What last-minute campaign efforts are we making in Iowa?

2012-01-03T10:39:00.000-06:00

10) Making it a hate crime to refer to any location as “Buttfuck, Iowa.”

9) Vowing to use the power of the White House to ensure Cedar Rapids wins Best Picture.

8) Offering a Thanksgiving 2012 tax credit for Americans who replace gravy with delicious ethanol.

7) Spreading Santorum flyers on every hog pen, cow pasture, and rest stop.

6) Relaxing labor laws so more young Iowans can reap the benefits of being children of the corn.

5) Reassuring voters that we will read the President’s Daily Brief as thoroughly as any newsletter bearing our name.

4) Slitting forearm open to prove to caucusing Iowans that Mitt Romney is not a robot.

3) Promising that every able-bodied male who votes for Michele Bachmann will receive a hug and have a Biblical passage whispered in their ear by Marcus.

2) Demonstrating our commitment to the free market by requiring all tipped cows to right themselves.

1) Convincing every caucus that our brand of conservatism is fresh, clean, pure, and mild.

The Ron Paul Holiday Newsletter

2011-12-23T12:02:00.000-06:00

Hello, friends. Ron Paul here. I hope everyone is having a wonderful time preparing for Christmas or celebrating Chanukah, although if you are celebrating Chanukah, you should really consider converting to Christianity. I would hate to see such a prosperous, thrifty, shrewd people as the Jews spend eternity in endless hellfire because of their deicide of our Lord and Savior. Really, it’s just four Gospels, a few letters, and some pretty entertaining revelations, so why not?

Like all of you, I am dreaming of a White Christmas, and not in the meteorological sense, if you catch my drift. And by drift, I mean racial and religious overtones. Think of how much better this country would be if, after a long day of shopping for presents and gorging yourself on eggnog and sitting on Santa Claus’s lap, you could freely express the Christian sentiment of the holiday by saying, “Merry Christmas” to your fellow white Christians. You wouldn’t have to worry if someone would be offended because they were Jewish or if they were only saying “Merry Christmas” because they were debating whether to steal your presents. I’m not talking about the Jews in the latter example, of course. They would just buy your presents at a fraction of the price you paid. I’m talking about the blacks.

Now, friends, I know lately some have accused me of wanting to start a race war. That is hogwash. First, I abhor war, not so much for the killing as for the price tag and that you have to wear a uniform. No self-respecting Libertarian would pay for the experience of being told what to do, wear, and kill. I am also not a monster and don’t want to actually kill black Americans. I just want them to go away. You know how you may have a friend you used to like, but then you don’t like them, so you start to ignore them in the hopes they will take the hint and stop asking you to do things for them, like give them welfare or stop when they hail a cab? Most smart people would take the hint and maybe head to Liberia, but you know what they say about non-whites and smarts. So I instead think we should maybe give out welfare in the form of vouchers for plane tickets to Africa. I think that’s very generous and that while coach is no picnic, it beats being in the bowels of a ship for three months. Am I right?

Some of you may say, “Dr. Paul, some of the casual acquaintances that I say are my best friends are black. Wouldn’t it be wrong to deport them?” First, thank you for calling me Dr. Paul. Maybe if more rap songs advocated that kind of politeness and obeying local law enforcement officers, we wouldn’t even have to discuss this voucher business. Second, it is not wrong. Look, even some of my best friends are huge drains on the system, because they take and take without giving. Look at my very good friend Herman Cain, who is black. He was accused of sexual harassment because he wanted women to provide him with sexual gratification. Except for that one woman he groped, he jumped straight into his pleasure. That’s a very big government approach to getting off. Instead, he should have offered nipple or clitoral stimulation first, to set up an exchange for penile pleasure. That’s just good free market practice. Although, I want to make it clear, I do not advocate free love. Like many Libertarians, I believe in preserving my precious bodily fluids and not just giving them away for free. I expect a commitment to at least a clean house, three daily prepared meals, and anniversary fellatio. That’s the kind of romantic exchange we should demand from the invisible hand of the free market.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, the blacks. Would I be sad to see some of them go? Of course. Like many of you, I have great respect for Colin Powell, Greg Gumbel (although not that hate whitey brother of his), and Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But the truth is that we don’t need them now that we have Mexicans. They do everything we expect of blacks for a fraction of the price, from agriculture to making us feel superior. Even in two areas where blacks dominate disproportionately, sports and entertainment, we can still use Mexicans instead. Instead of Barry Bonds, we have Albert Pujols. Instead of Whitney Houston, Jennifer Lopez. Instead of Bill Cosby, George Lopez. And thanks to God’s glorious creations of Tim Tebow and Miley Cyrus, coupled with tremendous advances in cloning, we soon may be able to return sports and entertainment to their Caucasian roots, just like the Bible says. Then we’ll be able to build that 2,000-mile-long wall of fire along our Southern border that’s been on my Christmas list for thirty years

So, friends, as we celebrate this holiest of holidays (or should be celebrating, if you catch my drift, my Jewish friends), I wish you a very Merry White Christmas. And, in the spirit of giving, won’t you please consider donating to my campaign? After all, I am the only candidate fighting for the things you people believe in (as opposed to the things those people believe in). All I ask is that you not send federal greenbacks but make your donations in gold specie or through my new Internet service, PayPaul.

Sincerely,
Ron Paul

Please note: The views expressed by Ron Paul in The Ron Paul Holiday Newsletter may not actually be the views expressed by Ron Paul the presidential candidate. Ron Paul’s name on the masthead and his signature are by no means an endorsement of the ideas expressed here, unless those ideas would convince you to vote for Ron Paul, in which case he’s not saying he doesn’t support them. In fact, let’s just say that Ron Paul had absolutely nothing to do with this newsletter at all, except that he would really, really love it if you would contribute to his campaign.

Top Ten Thursdays: What's on our Christmas lists?

2011-12-22T15:39:00.001-06:00

Special extended Grand Ol' Holiday Party edition!

12 TeabaggersTebowing

11-year-olds laboring

10 courthouse commandments

9 jailbird judges

8 whitewashed newsletters

7 hetero foxholes

6 Santorums spreading

5 gold standards

4 harassment settlements

3 foreign wars

2 ex-wife endorsements

And a white guy in the White House!

Friday Random 11

2011-12-16T23:39:00.000-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I had a fun lesson in parenting this week. The Lovely Becky and I are trying to get tougher about not letting Libby throw a fit when she doesn’t get her way. This actually does not happen very much, but it does occur and we figure we should nip this in the bud before leniency on having another candy cane at bedtime leads to her having a meth addiction by age fourteen (welcome to things that keep me up at night).

Libby is really good about going out in public. We are fortunate that she rarely loses her shit when other people are watching. It’s usually only in private that she pulls her Baby Joan Crawford act with us (NO COLD BOBBAS! [what we call her sippy cups of milk]). The other night we were going to go out to eat, but Libby started being crabby and arguing about putting her shoes on. We gave it a couple minutes and finally said that was it, no going out to eat. She got very upset and earned a time out, but we stuck with that threat. Eventually she settled down and all was right in the TLBrando household again.

The next night, we decided to go out to eat since we were also denied the night before. Everything was fine, but in the car Libby started getting crabby again. She has a specific Crabby Voice, a voice she can produce on cue if asked to tell people what her Crabby Voice sounds like. She started complaining about something completely random in that Little Golden Books Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness way toddlers have. After about twenty seconds, I cut her off and reminded her that it was not too late to turn the car around (hello, Dad, nice to hear your voice coming out of my mouth) and that we could cancel the night out the way we did the night before.

Immediately, Crabby Voice that had been more full of rage than a rat in a case changed into Nice Voice. No transition, no tears wiped, just a switch thrown and shenanigans gone. Tantrum? No, acting!

Good to learn before I get suckered into buying a pony.

1) “The Metro,” Berlin. At one point, this was one of the most underrated synthpop songs of the 1980s. It was lost in the critical shuffle due to the goofy novelty of “Sex (I’m A….)” and the commercial payoff of a Tom Cruise sex (I’m not gay but my Thetan is) scene in Top Gun. But now I think due has been given and it is recognized as a great piece of Roland/drum machine/handclap pop. Which is good, because saying things are underrated has gotten very overrated.

2) “Surgical Focus,” Guided by Voices. I recently saw a picture on The Facebook of Drs. Hawkeye and Trapper of Hot-in-Toronto fame. Trapper was wearing a suave sport jacket and t-shirt, looking like he was starring in a reboot of Miami Vice. Hawkeye was clad, head to toe, in full country-and-western regalia: big hat, shirt with arrows and sparkly buttons, tight jeans, and cowboy boots, with a mustache that looked like it provided the wildest ride at Brokeback Mountain. This came after I recently saw a grizzled Hawkeye sporting a beard and insulated jean jacket like he stepped off the deck of Deadliest Catch. And these guys are neonatal doctors. Think about the next time you take your kids to your physician.

3) “Tiny Spark,” Brendan Benson. One of the other dudes in The Raconteurs, which is a bit like being one of the other guys in a scene with John Holmes. But Benson can whip out some great power pop.

4) “Up the Junction,” Squeeze. I am one of those people who rummages through the bargain CD bin at Best Buy, digging through musical chum like The Best of Mac Davis and After the Fire: “Der Commissar” and 9 Shitty Songs That Aren’t “Der Commissar” to get to a gem like Squeeze’s Singles 45’s and Under for four bucks. You just don’t get the same feeling of treasure hunting from iTunes or eMusic.

5) “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream,” My Morning Jacket. I don’t even recognize them anymore. To me, this almost sounds like a Flaming Lips song. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there’s a fine line between experimenting and losing your identity musically.

6) “The Swish,” The Hold Steady. I started going to the gym (again) after about a four-ish month layoff (again), doing the hamster treadmill dance of thinking I’m running away from death. It’s not easy to make this couch exodus, so I have to distract myself from thinking I’m having a heart attack. I do that by not only playing music, but often fantasizing about being in the band playing the music. The Hold Steady are probably my biggest go-to elliptical machine rock fantasy band. I see myself playing lead guitar, looking Keef-cool while Craig Finn runs around looking like Elvis Costello after too many Jolt Colas. This is what I do to be “healthy.”

7) “Mother,” The Police. Might make the top 10 of songs I hate the most. Almost hypnotic in its awfulness. You know it’s bad when you’re saying, “Hey, could you just play the one about falling in love with the sex doll?”

8) “Let’s Go to Bed,” The Cure. Has anyone ever fantasized about having sex with Robert Smith? Even when he was young and thin and didn’t look like he was In Between Buffets? I know he’s been with the same woman forever, and I wonder if it’s because he found someone who said “yes” to the title of this song and he decided to lock that down for life. Then again, I met TLB while wearing a shirt with Robert Smith’s face on it, so maybe there is some sort of emophradesiac effect I am unaware of.

9) “When You Sleep,” My Bloody Valentine. Bloody overrated, but this is the one song that emerges from the warped drone of this album that doesn’t make me reach for the skip button.

10) “She,” Green Day. Maybe it’s because so many modern rock bands have pillaged the 80s for their sound, but classic alternative from the 1990s actually sounds older to me than, say, “The Metro.” Three dudes on guitar, bass, and drums playing catchy pop punk? No synths, no autotune, no irony? Might as well be Buddy Holly in stereo. I love it, though, even if I never would have expected Green Day to last long enough to make it to Broadway.

11) “Hey Joe,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience. So is it okay to feel groovy about a song where I guy shoots his straying girlfriend/wife and flees to Mexico? Because this is in my Holy Hendrix Trinity of “Manic Depression” and “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”. I would also totally support a female singer recording a version called “Hey Jo” about a woman going to shoot her man down, if that makes it any better.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What else are we using predator drones for?

2011-12-14T12:09:00.009-06:00

Special extra collateral damage edition!

13) Enforcing new federal Bovine Upright Larceny Law.

12) Delivering candygrams.

11) Making damn sure no one cheats in the carpool lane.

10) Showing Santa that there are consequences for putting us on the naughty list.

9) Providing additional surveillance and suppressive anti-personnel fire while stalking celebrities (ModelTMZ only).

8) Supporting additional “sanitation/improvised percussion removal” in nation’s financial districts.

7) Utilizing twin T-shirt cannons to fire XL-sized ordnance into the upper decks.

6) Ensuring that we won’t have to wait in line during the next iPhone launch (requires iHellfire app)

5) Guiding drones to our cubicles so we can do our jobs without the threat of soul-crushing ennui.

4) Getting optional tow package to pull our car home from the bar.

3) Adding panorama shots to our sex tapes.

2) Keeping those damn kids off our lawn once and for all.

1) (tie) Putting star on top of Christmas tree/Lighting the menorah.

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we suspending our campaigns?

2011-12-06T16:30:00.003-06:00

10) Taking a hands-off approach to running for president.

9) Going to prepare for 2016 by reading Wikipedia entry for every country on earth.

8) Plan to campaign for equal rights after losing job to equally unqualified white guy.

7) Unable to leave house after wife purchased electronic dog collar and invisible fence.

6) Decided to run for a position we were much more qualified for, president of Penn State.

5) Launching new chain of pizza parlors that let you put as much sausage as you want in your pie.

4) Wanted to return to more lucrative fondling opportunities in the private sector.

3) God whispered, “What, you thought I was serious?”

2) Not prepared for the media trying to find out things about us.

1) Didn’t actually look up meaning of suspended until we already made the announcement.

Friday Random 11

2011-12-02T13:01:00.004-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

The American people are not always the brightest of the bunch. We distract ourselves with minutiae, can be incredibly shortsighted, and often act like a bunch of fickle mush heads. I include myself in that collective “we,” as I spent more time than yesterday than I care to admit checking the status of the big toe of LeSean McCoy, the Philadelphia Eagles starting running back, because his ability to play for my pretend football team could make me a small amount of money and, more importantly, convey a windfall of nerd bragging rights. Yes, we are people of the land, the common clay of the West.

Yet even the most linguistically challenged American moran can smell bullshit when it’s being served up as an electoral appetizer. And no one has served up more bullshit than Herman Cain, a man who built his fortune throwing a bunch of cheap crap on dough and saying said dish could not be refused.

His entire campaign has been one smelly serving after another, from his knowledge of foreign policy to his economic plan to his ability to keep his hands to himself. What’s kind of unique about Cain is that his strategy for covering up each scandal is bury it under an even bigger dung heap of stupidity. The current affair conundrum is the perfect example. After getting accused for harassment and infidelity, a woman comes forward to say she and Cain have had an affair for thirteen years, and affair the conveniently ended just as Cain decided to become president.

Rather than denying it—a usually fruitless but expected tactic—or admitting it, the King Solomon of Bad Decisions decided to cut this turd in half and say he didn’t have a romantic relationship with the woman, but helped her out financially because they were friends. A creative out for sure, and one that could possibly have worked until his wife said she had no idea Cain was friends with this woman.

That is where Cain’s Tower of Bullshit Babel finally collapsed. Men will be friends with women. They will help their female friends. They may even be friends with women their wives don’t particularly like. But no straight man would secretly give money to another woman behind his wife’s back for more than a decade without some kind of slap and tickle going on. Maybe it’s not full-blown according-to-Hoyle carnality, but there’s going to at least be a soiled dress, a spoilt cigar, or an uncoiled dong.

This is what I don’t understand about candidates. They know that the press will uncover almost anything about their past. If you were running on a vegan platform, the New York Times would produce that hot dog you ate five years ago when you were really drunk and starving and the scent of steamed cow lips and assholes was overpowering. Bad touches, bad grammar, racial slurs, racist pastors, drunk driving, draft dodging, South American strolls, South American snorts, shady investments, shady associates, and especially extramarital excursions will all come out. I think Obama got elected primarily because he could string two sentences together and appears to have given his presidential pardon exclusively to his wife, an old-fashioned concept so revolutionary in modern politics it seems like meeting someone who churns their own butter.

If anything, this is where Gingrich probably has a big advantage. Everyone already knows what a hypocritical asshole he is, which eliminates the element of surprise.

Okay, now that I feel so great about our democracy, I’m ready for music.

1) “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” The Cure. Who better to lift one’s mood than Robert Smith, because you know there's at least one other person in this world more depressed than you?

2) “O My Soul,” Big Star. I don’t always listen to power pop, but when I do, I choose Big Star. Stay catchy, my friends. Seriously, there should be a talk like the Dos Equis Guy Day. Or better yet, Talk Like the Guy Talking About the Dos Equis Guy Day. I know that would be a capitulation to advertising invading creativity, but those commercials are funnier than 75 percent of the sitcoms on TV. I would come up with something for myself like, “He once K.O.’d a man with a punchline.”

3) “Looks That Kill,” Motley Crue. A song I love from a band I hate. They are the embodiment of everything stupid about 80s metal: faux Satanism, lyrics that made Winger look literary by comparison, the inability to discern between sexy and sexist, self-destructive behavior, monstrous egos, and a bewildering look that borrowed from the New York Dolls, S&M shops, American Indians, and The Road Warrior and/or the NFL. But holy hairspray, this song rocks my face off. No intro, no lead-in, they just kick the door in and start spraying riffs and drums.

4) “S.S. Fort Jams,” Fang Island. When I lived in Da U.P., I had NFL Sunday Ticket. It was ridiculously expensive, but we were in the Packers TV market, had little competition for our entertainment dollars (especially since moose wrestling was free), and our household would suffer a severe economic setback if I hung myself out of boredom. One of the things I loved was that, if you had the Ticket, you could watch compressed recaps of all of the NFL games. They literally cut out all of the commentary, commercials, and assorted grabass into about 25 minutes of pure gridiron goodness. That’s kind of what Fang Island does with prog. They squeeze out all the fruitiness into a concentrated few minutes of pure jamming. Plus they have a guitarist who plays in a star-covered wizard's cowl, which is almost as cool as an eye-covered wizard's cowl.

5) “Rag Mama Rag,” The Band. One of those songs you have to really stop and listen to in order to appreciate. There is so much stuff going on here and everything fits together perfectly, kind of like The Lovely Becky’s holiday cookies when they in their original, not pulverized form.

6) “Spoonman,” Soundgarden. Not only the sole rock song to feature a guy on lead spoon, but also the only song ever written about a guy playing spoons. It makes me wonder if he has a whole collection of spoons. “We wanted to give the song more of a baritone, so I went with my grandma’s silver serving spoons, with a little ladle overdubbed for effect.” It also seems like a song that would have been ripe for a Weird Al parody called “Kazooman.”

7) “Honky Tonk Woman,” The Rolling Stones. I suspect that 50 percent of my dislike for the Stones stems from the tongue logo, and the other half comes from Mick Jagger. I hate watching him perform; he moves around the stage like a duck with a live Roman candle up its ass. I like Keef, I like Charlie Watts, I like Ron Wood, and while Bill Wyman is a cradle robber, he has the decency to keep his mouth closed. But the logo and Jagger make me think of Mick licking every time I hear them.

8) “Crash,” Dave Matthews Band. Goonies hate. If they ever made a movie about Stuff White People Like, any DMB album could serve as the soundtrack. It takes a lot to make me think, “Boy, I really wish I was listening to Coldplay instead of this.”

9) “Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The really scary thing about Pepper Spraying Cop isn’t the act itself—history is full of authority figures abusing their authority. It’s when people like Megyn Kelly say that the abuse of that authority is perfectly acceptable. (I also don't trust people who replace a perfectly good vowel with a "y." What have you done with than "a"!) Because once you accept that a bunch of peaceful protesters can get blasted in the face with pepper spray, it’s not too great of a leap to think it’s okay for them to get tased, bashed, and eventually shot in the face, and before you know it a never-again moment like Kent State is back in fascist fashion.

10) “The Quest for the Wizard's Rod on Wank Mountain, Part LXIX: Into the Crypt of Phrygian Fartblasting,” Dream Theater. I would rather be pepper-sprayed than listen to this. At least that doesn’t last as long or sting as badly. Let’s try again.

10) “Favourite Food,” Tokyo Police Club. These guys are half the age of Cream Beaters and have already eclipsed them in songwriting ability. Speaking of youngsters, I went Christmas shopping at a store that rhymes with Pest Pie. I was looking for a gift for Libby, a Disney princess camera that she saw and begged us for. It was on sale, so, dutiful dad that I am, I went to the store and approached some blue-shirted Bieber to help me find it. He asked if it was for me, because that is such a clever and completely original joke. He couldn’t find it, and he proceeded to ask no fewer than four other Pest Pie employees, all dudes, if they knew where the princess camera was, and he started each query the same way, “Hey, [INSERT NAME OF SLACK-JAWED DRONE], you look like a pretty princess. Would you know where this camera is?” Four times. And better yet, his fine fellows asked me if it was for me. HA HA, IT IS FUNNY THAT A GROWN MAN WITH A WEDDING RING AND SOME GRAYING HAIR IS BUYING A PRINCESS CAMERA. IT MUST BE FOR HIS PERSONAL USE! I swore that the next guy who made the same stupid joke was going to get slashed across the jugular with the sharp shards of the princess camera packaging. Then, after listening to the same routine four times, I found the camera on my own. This is why people shop on Amazon.

11) “Roundabout,” Yes. The main fantasy football league I’m in involves ten guys. The most recent member is the oldest, Andy. He’s the cousin of one of the other guys and only a few years older than me, but for some reason one of the other guys started calling him Uncle Andy and the nickname stuck. He also at one point asked him, “Uncle Andy, what were the 60s like?” which set off a reaction of Uncle Andy is old jokes that have lasted about a year and a half.

These are not the same repetitive princess camera jokes; we put a lot of creativity into how old Uncle Andy is. For instance, his opponent this week named his team “1492” and wrote “In 1492, Uncle Andy sailed across the Ocean Blue.” Among other references, we have placed Uncle Andy at the Battle of Hastings, the first Thanksgiving, the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, the assassination of William McKinley, and the Great Depression, of which we asked for tips for surviving fiscal crisis that didn’t involve cooking and eating members of the Little Rascals.. We have asked him what the world was like before electricity, running water, female voting, and football. He has been accused of being senile, confused, sleepy, and of very untoward behavior toward flappers during the Roaring Twenties. As I was typing this, someone sent an e-mail mentioning that Uncle Andy used to race chariots when he was a teen.

At this year’s draft, I had my iPod and asked for requests. Uncle Andy asked for Yes and I put “Roundabout” on. Not sixty seconds in the selection was voted down and Uncle Andy banned from making any musical recommendations. For once, I found myself having to come to his defense, much in the way I would help someone across the street or open a jar of pickles for them.

Have a good weekend.

This is me writing a blog post about Arnold Schwarzennegger talking about Total Recall

2011-11-26T13:22:00.006-06:00

I love Total Recall. In fact, I think it is Arnold at his most Schwarzenneggerist, because he's trying so hard to be a movie star. Early campy shit like Conan and Commando were just Arnold showing he could flex and speak lines phonetically at the same time. The Terminator was a brilliant solution to the question, "How can we get people to watch Arnold for two hours when his acting is so robotic?" But Total Recall is Arnold as action hero. He tries to be loving, be tough, be dramatic, be funny, and be as confused as Philip K. Dick was when he tried to write the ending to the original story after his speed wore off. Throw in Paul Verhoven, the director who never met an exit wound or unecessary boob shot he didn't like, and you have sci-fi action comedy gold, Jerry.

But don't take my word for it. Let Arnold tell you about all the great parts of Total Recall in The Greatest DVD Commentary Ever Told.

He had me with the little laugh he gives after talking about using a character as a human shield. Who knew a T-800 came with a sense of humor?

The whole thing makes it sound like McBain talking about one of his movies. It reminded me of a little McBain bit I wrote for a Simpsons spec script I once wrote:

Homer and Bart sit in the living room, watching TV. Homer is in his underwear. On the television, a preview for a new McBain movie is running.

McBain is wearing a white dress a la Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, along with a blond wig. He is approaching a group of Mendoza’s thugs on the street. McBain is communicating secretly with a hidden mike and earpiece.

MCBAIN
I see Mendoza’s goons, chief.

CHIEF (VO)
Nice work, McBain. In that disguise, they’ll never recognize you.

The goons see McBain and begin to wolf whistle as he approaches.

MCBAIN (to the chief)
They think they’re getting a hot date, when they’re really going to get hot lead.

McBain walks over an open vent in the street. Air blows up, lifting his skirt and revealing an impressive arsenal of firearms around his waist. The goons reach for their guns, but McBain is quicker. He pulls out two submachine guns and empties the clips into the criminals. He looks down at the bodies on the street.

MCBAIN
I guess blondes have more guns.

ANNOUNCER
See McBain get dressed to kill in, Some Like It Dead.

Oh, to have been a writer for that show.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What are we thankful for?

2011-11-23T13:16:00.002-06:00

10) Declined “full-ride” football scholarship to Penn State.

9) Early Black Friday deals on pants with elastic waistbands.

8) That friendly arrest server offered us extra pepper on our shit sandwich.

7) Kid brother still hiding his bong in the same drawer.

6) Replacing ten hours of awkward family conversation with football.

5) Mother’s drinking problem will make her more receptive to the news that Lance is more than just a good friend.

4) Customized shopping cart that includes jacks for jumping over store aisles; a retractable cockpit for shielding us from the odors, bodily fluids, and gunfire of fellow shoppers; and retractable saws that ensure we'll get to that 99$ plasma TV before anyone else.

3) Taking a day off from still being unemployed.

2) Not having to be bothered with things like names, facts, or manners, because we are a member of the United States Fucking Congress, bitch!

1) Boners.

Friday Random 11

2011-11-18T15:44:00.003-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I’m so ready to rock I’m just going to plug in and spin the knobs (heh-heh, I said knobs).

1) “Somebody to Love,” Queen. There are only three things I have not liked about parenting: 1) Not sleeping enough, which is thankfully subsiding in toddlerhood, 2) Cleaning up poop, which is at least being relocated toward the toilet, and 3) Watching shitty movies. Libby does in fact like a lot of decent films, and studios like Pixar have made flicks that parents can enjoy as much as the kids. But every once in a while I get subjected to some piece of regurgitated penguin food like Happy Feet, which I bought for Libby unseen because she wanted “the penguin movie.” It’s like Glee for flightless waterfowl, and the only redeeming moment in it is a fairly stirring rendition of this song. But now the sequel is out and Libby—having just been to her first movie in the theater—wants to see it. What they need to make are 3D glasses for adults that actually block the kids’ movie and play something like Mad Men episodes. "Sure we can stay for the credits, sweetie, Christina Hendrix isn't finished changing yet."

2) “Mass Romantic,” The New Pornographers. The first song off their amazing first album, but unfortunately it kind of has the effect of reminding me how much I used to like The New Pornographers. It’s like a romantic relationship that has gone to the friend zone: Three albums that were nearly perfect, followed by two that have left me feeling like we were just going through the motions together. Then we had an argument because the band asked me if I was seeing its BFF, Neko Case on the side, and I said no, I mean, we met for one solo album, and that was purely platonic. But then they found out that I secretly bought all of her albums, causing the confrontation where I said TNP just didn’t do it for me any more after Challengers. We didn’t talk for again for a while until I bought their last album, and had a perfectly pleasant experience that nevertheless only served to remind me how hot and heavy we once were, especially when I was on my slow descent into alcoholism. Now we just occasionally run into each other at Starbucks.

3) “Whiskey Bottle,” Uncle Tupelo. About as close to a power ballad as I think Alt Country gets.

4) “Cause=Time,” Broken Social Scene. There’s a mellow Dinosaur Jr. vibe on this song, though I definitely feel the absence of a J Mascis freakout solo. This may also be the first album I ever bought solely because of a high Pitchfork review. Please don’t hold that against me, the Internet and I were still young and kind of unpredictable.

5) “Caroline,” Concrete Blonde. Very much the older sister of “Joey.” I also loved that Johnette Napolitano played the bass and sang, just like a certain Canadian I admire. Although she sang about alcoholic guys, sad women, and hungry vampires, instead of music-hating priests, journeys through black holes that led to encounters with Greek gods, and union-busting trees.

6) “Light-Rail Coyote,” Sleater-Kinney. Inspired, if I’m not mistaken, by a coyote actually riding the Portland rail. That’s the difference between the West and the East. A coyote isn’t getting on the New York Subway or the Chicago El. But you never know when something wild and furry is going to get on public transportation in the West. Although in L.A., it would likely be a dude on his way to respond to an ad on Craigslist.

7) “Little Sister,” Queens of the Stone Age. Libby has started asking about having a brother or sister. That’s extremely unlikely unless The Lovely Becky has been selected as the Immaculate Receptacle for the Second Coming. We’ve had to have conversations about how some families just have a mommy, daddy, and one little girl. It of course pains me to not be able to fulfill her request, which is probably why I will eventually buy her a pony.

8) “It’s Thunder and Lightning,” We Were Promised Jetpacks. If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap! Good thing this is Scottish. TLB’s sister and some of her Canadian relatives just took a trip to the land of single-malts and exposed male legs. I was so jealous. The trip TLB and I took there in 1997 was one of the best times of my life, touring a bunch of castles, envisioning myself on the parapet slaying foes like Sir Lancelot at a wedding, and then washing the day down with Scotchy-Scotch-Scotch. The only thing I didn’t like was driving, not because it’s the opposite but because Scots drive like they are Japanese pilots trying to sink American aircraft carriers. We did a bit touring off the beaten path which involved driving down one-track roads, which wouldn’t have been so bad if there weren’t crops that obscured the road ahead. I was literally driving on faith, hoping that some giant truck wasn’t whipping toward me at speeds that sound so much more dangerous in kilometers.

9) “Teardrop,” Massive Attack. Pretty much impossible for me to not bob my head while this plays, which makes it hard to write.

10) “That’s What You Get,” Paramore. Why do I like this song so much? Between this and Rush, I cocked up Three Bulls Radio something fierce, but this is so much more embarrassing than Apollo and Dionysius fighting for the soul of man. I feel like I should be shopping for leggings at Justice while complaining about why Taylor won’t return my texts, probably because he’s with that skank Montana. And yet, what happens to the volume knob? It gets turned up. Additional embarrassing revelation: I spelled Dionysius correctly on the first try. How exactly did I get ever get laid?

11) “My Morning Song,” The Black Crowes. A little more age and gender appropriate. Turned up even louder so I can feel the slide guitar, weed, and B.O. that went into making this song. Seriously, how would you like to be stuck with Chris Robinson in a recording booth. “Hey, Brando, could you bring up the vocals?” “Sure, but only if use this bar of Dial before I wrap it in a sock and beat you unconscious.” Still, worth enduring some fried nasal passages to hear the orgasmic reprisal of the chorus at the end.

Bonus track: “Love Removal Machine,” The Cult. I can’t let this go. Working with Rick Rubin would be the reverse of working with Chris Robinson. He’d say to Ian Astbury, “Could you try the vocal again, only throatier?” and Ian Astbury would say, “I think there’s a ferret living in your beard.” By far my favorite AC/DC ripoff track of all time and a plastic, fantastic way to head into the weekend. Have a great one.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What questions are stumping us?

2011-11-16T15:14:00.003-06:00

10) Could you point to the part of the doll where your spine was removed?

9) When you first met your accuser, were your pants on?

8) Can you name the three branches of the federal government, governor?

7) How many hours ago did you take that Viagra?

6) Is it true that your father was the only African American member of the German Wermacht?

5) Don’t the Occupy Wall Street camps actually have 35 percent less urine and fecal matter than the average New York street?

4) Tell me the truth, do they look real?

3) Tim, have you ever gone deep before?

2) Could you give us any reason—any at all—to convince us that you could run the American government better than a mediocre pizza chain?

1) Are you my daddy? / Who’s your daddy? (tie)

Friday Random 11

2011-11-11T16:24:00.004-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Never has that line been more appropriate than on Nigel Tufnel Day. In honor of the best friend of the patron saint of footwear, I’m only going to play the first 11 random songs that I feel truly go to 11.

The logical choice to honor Nigel Tufnel on 11/11/11 would be to link to the Spinal Tap segment about the amps that go to 11. But my favorite part of the movie is this scene, which made me laugh louder than anything else in the movie the first time I saw it because it caught me completely by surprise. It is arguably the greatest dick joke in cinematic history.

1) “Coma,” Guns N’ Roses. It’s a bit funny that the two songs that top my list of favorite GnR ditties are “Mr. Brownstone” and “Coma.” That’s kind of like saying my two favorite TV shows are Man Vs. Food and America’s Next Top Diabetic (“Sweet! – Entertainment Weekly). Speaking of which, I think a big reason I watch Man Vs. Food is to see if someone has a heart attack on television. “I just ate 16 pounds of double-fried bacon cheddar custard éclairs, and they were so delicious, I could….OW!!! Oh, I knew I should have skipped the Mt Fudgerest sundae! Gack!” It’s like the NASCAR of eating, you watch for the crash, not the race.

2) “Big Poppa,” Notorious B.I.G. At least he wasn’t on a diet when he was gunned down by Tupac’s people. How much would that suck? You lose 100 pounds because you want to be healthy when you get older, only you die the minute you leave Weight Watchers because you’re caught in an East Coast-West Coast rap war. Ain’t that a B?

3) “White Line,” Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Neil Young and Crazy Horse always go to 11.

4) “I Get Wet,” Andrew W.K. I would have played the shit out of this when I was 16. It would have been blaring out of my stereo when I was getting ready for a party, Dep’ing my hair and rolling my cargo pants, before adding my acid-washed jean jacket (collar up, of course). Unfortunately this came out when I was 31. Which makes me feel really old because that means Andrew W.K. has been around for 10 years in recorded form. Love this video because the intro is very reminiscent of Mach.

5) “You Can’t Say Kingston Doesn’t Love You,” Title Fight. Of course, when said party turned out to be a bust and the girl I wanted to talk to was instead talking to that other guy, and the cops broke everything up before I could have my second-swig of warm Beast that my buddy snuck out of his older brother’s room, I’d have come back and put this bit of breakneck melancholy on my headphones and contemplated what went wrong while fantasizing about how it could have gone right. Strong possibility this song shows up on the Favoritist of 2011 list.

6) “Holy Flames of the Firespitter,” High on Fire. FIRE! This makes me want to drive a tank through an army of orcs. Hey Sauron, think a nazgul can stop an armor-piercing round? Not if it's forged from mithril by an elvish maiden, motherfucker!

7) “Bad Luck,” Social Distortion. Mike Ness’s arm tattoos go to 11. I think he actually has tattoos on his tattoos. I am not inked at all because tattoos don’t suit me. I would never be able to just get something small like TLB in Viking runes with the L extending up to form a spear that impales a heart (to signify that I’ll love her until I get impaled on a Viking spear). No, I’d do something ridiculous like have the entire scene from Pulp Fiction where Jules and Vincent shoot the guy that took the case storyboarded on my back.

8) “Dumb,” Nirvana. It sucks when guys like Cobain die too young, but I also have a hard time imagining what they would have done if they lived. Like I heard Hendrix on the radio the other day, and the same thought ran through my mind, but then I couldn’t imagine what he would have done. Synths in the 80s? Snoop rapping on a remake of “The Wind Cries Mary” in the 90s? Playing a guest solo on Kelly Clarkson’s album in the aughts? Same with Cobain.

9) “How Soon Is Now,” The Smiths. About as 11 as Morrissey gets. I was very sad when this popped up in a car commercial. I don’t really mind that bands need to sell their songs for advertising—they gotta make a buck. But it has to match the product. Phoenix or Band of Horses pushing a few autos? That’s fine. Morrissey doing the same? That’s almost as bad as Modern English shilling for a horrific bathroom experience.

10) “Mountain Song,” Jane’s Addiction. Insanely fun to play on fake plastic drums and an absolutely blistering live version of this, complete with Perry Ferrell looking like Peter Gabriel would have looked if he had been on heroin and grown up in LA. Come to think of it, if Cobain had lived, maybe he would have turned into Perry Farrell.

11) “Unchained,” Van Halen. If you strip Spinal Tap of their “Stonehenge” tendencies, they pretty much could be a parody of Van Halen (or VH the embodiment of ST). Tell me that you couldn’t apply this review—“the musical growth rate of this band cannot even be charted…they are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry”—to a lot of Van Halen albums? But still, I have always liked this song. It has a lot more heft and a lot less Roth-glazed ham than a lot of other songs. There's also classic Michael Anthony face around the :40 mark. I'd have looked that happy if I got to make millions of dollars slapping the top string of a bass guitar.

That’s it for today. Remember to have a good time all the time.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What's derailing our presidential campaigns?

2011-11-09T15:55:00.003-06:00

10) What God’s voice tells us tends to sound much less commanding and sane when we repeat it to the media.

9) Letting all rebuttals being handled by our parasitic twin.

8) Knowing now why voters cry, but acknowledging that it is something we can never do.

7) Public wants to give ignorant morons from states other than Texas a shot at the White House.

6) As a testament to our libertarian commitment to curbing executive authority, we have only one campaign promise: if elected, we will commit ritual suicide.

5) Endorsed by Joe Paterno.

4) Tendency to shove hands deep into pockets, throw head back, and say, “Ohhh, that’s a tough nut to crack,” when asked about gay marriage.

3) Proposed enforcing reproductive violations by setting up remote breed cams in women's va-jay-jays.

2) Campaign posters have only been printed on the sides of milk cartons.

1) To be eligible for any jobs we propose to create, each American must first sleep with us.

Friday Random 11

2011-11-04T16:26:00.005-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

The road to blogging is paved with good intentions.

I have sat down every day this week, ready to drop some golden nuggets of comedy, only to find myself unable to think of anything to say. I have been saying funny things in the bricks and mortar world, and I drop the occasional bon-mot in my Facebook status update. But when I have been trying to be funny in any form of organized form—say, in a top 10 list—I have been banging my head against an invisible wall.

There have been times in the life of this blog (six years now, holy crap!) when blogging has been unconscious for me, as if I was taking dictation from my own writing staff. There was this great collaboration between anger at the political circumstances of the country and the satirical targets that were delivered on a silver platter.

Since Hope and Change (now known as Change We’re Hoping For), things have gotten different. I’ll be the first to admit I was pulled in by the charisma of the President of the United States (not to be confused with the former Preznit). I didn’t expect a revolution, I didn’t really expect more than some redecorating, maybe a different political feng shui. What I did not expect was the extent of change to be moving around a couple of rugs and calling it a day. Or thinking about knocking out those restraining walls separating the have room from the have-not room and determining it’s the thought that counts.

I figured the current crop of GOP Presidential Clowns would light a satirical spark, but it did the opposite: it made me sad. Post-Bush, this is the best the Republicans could do? The ROM-NEY 2012 Cybernetic Candidate, a Texan who seems to think less than the previous brush-beater, the most bat-shit crazy candidate to ever gain national attention, the less-charismatic brother of Clarence Thomas, and the crazier twin of Ross Perot. To quote a certain Heather, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.

I have always been a political animal, but I’ve found myself running away from the news, throwing myself into fiction or the inanities of videogames or fantasy football. I’ve probably read more about the various pulls and strains of running back Peyton Hillis than I have about the Republican field (and goddamn my stupid ass for not believing in the Madden Curse when I traded for that 240-pound hamstring pull).

But I find myself coming around again. After struggling a bit with putting a novel in the drawer (for now) and trying to get a new one off the ground, I had my Eureka moment a couple weeks ago. I feel myself channeling the ol’ satirical spittle into a character that maybe, just maybe, could become a great literary pie-in-the-face to the brain-dead conservative movement that is both hilarious and terrifying, because what happens if one of those people actually wins? If Herman Cain was president and have Angela Markel an indecent proposal she can’t refuse, what would happen if she did? Would we be nuking Nuremburg because of blue balls? And God help the Middle East if he gets anywhere near Queen Noor.

So this is a long-winded way of saying I not only want to start blogging again, I need to start blogging again (and commenting, too). It’s the only thing that’s going to keep me sane.

Tune time….

1) “Imaginary Friends,” Nada Surf. I did have the pleasure last week of seeing the incomparable Von, the tremendous Jennifer and her trusty sidekick Grizzled, and for the first time, the man who puts the animated in re-animated, ZRM. The circumstances were both bittersweet and familiar—bittersweet in that we toasted both the passing of Von’s dad and the arrival of her birthday, familiar in that we met in a bar in my old neighborhood, a place The Lovely Becky used to frequent regularly. It was a blast. It’s so interesting to meet residents from the bloggerhood in the flesh. We get to dispense with chit chat because we have been chatting for years. We already know about things like love for Canadian progressive rock, double-entendre swordfights, and waste receptacles that have been used and abused. By the end of the first round the filtbot had pulled up a stool and joined us, and the only thing were missing was a comments box. It was awesome.

2) “Von,” Sigur Ros. Okay, how randomly awesome and creepy is that. THE PLAYLIST IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

3) “Sex (I’m A…),” Berlin. And there’s the filthbot. Also one of the most hilarious male vocal turns this side of Right Said Fred. It’s literally like a jealous husband trying to put his arm around his hot wife while the press yell at him to get the fuck off the red carpet. Look, Mr. I’m-A-Man, I didn’t buy this album to hear you whisper “suck” during the outro, okay? Why don’t you go jump in front of The Metro?

4) “I Confess,” The English Beat. I have never been a big fan of this one. It’s a bit like the bastard child of Spandau Ballet and Morrissey. I like a more grind and less whine from my Beat songs.

5) “Super-Charger Heaven,” White Zombie. So completely in my wheelhouse. Distorted guitars turned to 11? Check. Thick, propulsive beat? Check. Completely random and hilarious references the occult? Checkity-check-check. From the “DEVIL MAN” in the chorus to the sound bite, “It is not heresy, and I will not recant!” I am sucked in completely whenever this is summoned in iTunes.

6) “Digital Love,” Daft Punk. Wow, that’s quite a three-song switch. The only bad thing about hearing Daft Punk is that I instantly wish I was someplace where I could be dancing to Daft Punk. I love how they save the heavier bass for the first couple minutes of the song. And how many Francophone neu-disco anthems have a killer guitar solo at the end? It’s like someone constructed a dance song based on results from a focus group consisting of only me.

7) “She Bangs the Drums,” The Stone Roses. They are touring! I know it’s sad and that nostalgia is the first sign you’re both old and no longer cool (not that I ever was the latter, but a boy can dream), but the idea of hearing this live makes me really fucking happy, and I may speak in tongues during “I Am the Resurrection.” Judging by the current pictures, though, I wonder if they are doing this to raise money for Botox injections. Regardless, I’m happy to throw in what will certainly be a very un-rock-and-roll amount of money for tickets.

8) “Fight Till You Die,” Pennywise. Bad Religion minus the thesaurus, which will either make this sound like pedestrian punk or music to Piscean ears. This album was prime Discman commuter material for me when I was fighting crowds on the subways of New York. Back the fuck off, I’m wearing a sweater vest and shirt with a banded collar!

9) “It Could Be Sweet,” Portishead. This past Halloween has taught me that I would sell out my country, my parents, and possibly my wife for a couple of Hundred Grand bars. The Lovely Becky bought them for the kids, but instead I have been devouring them with the ravenous bloodlust of an alien from War of the Worlds. It’s one of the most perfect confectionary creations ever: chocolatey, caramely, chewy, and crunchy, a precisely balanced representation of the four candy groups.

10) “How Deep Is Your Love,” The Rapture. I got Pitchforked when I bought The Rapture’s debut based on an elusive 10.0 from everyone favorite hated arbiters of indie rock taste. This, however, is a great song, precisely because it is a song, not a bunch of beats, bleats, and serrated guitars that covered their first record. The keyboards even pack a little Funky Bunch punch for good measure.

11) “A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Ideas,” The Fucking Champs. If you have a metal bone in your body, you will be compelled to bang your head for the first two minutes of this instrumental riff-o-rama. Imagine if Metallica had decided to stop sucking and singing sometime in 1989 and you get an idea of what this sounds like. I always have this album in my car because whenever I need to channel my inner Road Warrior and battle through traffic, this makes me feel like I’m wearing football shoulder pads and carrying an Easton aluminum bat that’s topped with a skull. METAL!

Bonus track because I’m a pleaser, not a teaser:

“Kiss on My List,” Hall & Oates. I was talking to TLB the other day and made mention of something being irrelevant and she said, “You mean like John Oates.” This elicited a stern reprimand from me, because Oates is much more than a pretty mustache. He is the digestive enzyme that makes songs like this so yummy in my musical tummy. He is not Andrew Ridgeley with a hairy lip (ironically, Ridgeley has more hair on his lip than his head these days). And who doesn’t want to have someone’s kiss on their lips as we head into the weekend?

Have a good one, and if you can’t love the Oates you want, love the Oates you’re with.

Friday Random 11

2011-10-21T16:03:00.003-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I have not been writing nearly enough and it’s bringing me down, so I’m going to skip the usual liner notes and jump straight to the album for inspiration.

1) “Straight in at 101,” Los Campesinos! I’m not sure how I feel about thinking in social media terms. I spend a good deal of time doing mental likes when I read or listen to conversations, and I become disappointed when I hear something tremendously entertaining that I can’t share here or on The Facebook (yes, I have boundaries, although they porous). Recently I had a hilarious exchange that ended with someone saying, “I couldn’t come in a condom if I fucked for 12 hours.” My first thought was that I wanted to go out and share the whole thing, but for confidentiality reasons I can only offer the punchline and not the setup. Other times I encounter something that I can share and immediately stop paying attention to the rest of the conversation because I’m trying to remember the wording for a status update. I fear this has already made me stupider than I was B.Z. (Before Zuckerberg).

2) “Pyramid Song,” Amnesiac. I like Radiohead, but I rarely find myself fired up to listen to Radiohead. Maybe some of the songs on The Bends and occasionally “Let Down.” Usually I’m more subdued, thinking, “oh, Radiohead, nice,” which makes me wonder if I actually like them or am just being a pretentious music tool.

3) “Let Them Eat Rock,” Upper Crust. I have mixed feelings about the Wall Street occupation protests. Not mixed because of the occupation—I feel like those protestors should have broken into the posh boardrooms and left behind some toxic assets of their own. But the whole thing feels too disjointed to be effective. Maybe it’s because my perception has been filtered through the media, which decided the whole thing was disjointed five minutes after it started and will hold onto that view like a dog chomping down on its favorite chew toy. But part of me wonders if there is an inherent disjointedness in liberal protest and grass-roots movements, a tendency to say, “discover your desks, children” instead of trying to focus on certain messages that would resonate more, because that would make it less grass-roots and more movement. Consequently, instead of these protests raising serious questions about wealth, money, and influence, we're listening to people discuss the presidential merits of the CEO of the worst pizza chain in the country who just unveiled one of the most regressive federal tax plans in history. All of this is making Canada sound more appealing to me, plus moving there would significantly increase my chances of meeting Rush, dazzling them with my wit, and being invited to join the band as an honorary fourth member (a fantasy that’s only slightly less realistic than “President Dennis Kucinich.”)

4) “Destroy 2000 Years of Culture,” Atari Teenage Riot. Of course, then I hear something like this and want to cut off the head of the Wall Street bull and put it in the bed of the Goldman Sachs CEO. Maybe we need more screaming Germans telling us what to do.

5) “All Right (Oh Yeah),” Local H. Pack Up the Cats gets on my list of Seriously Underrated Albums of the 1990s, but making lists like that also gets on my list of Tired Memes I Should Stop Doing. Except I can’t help myself. I make lists all the time, sometimes just for myself, and then argue mentally with what’s on the list of the order. Like, should Pack Up the Cats be on the Seriously Underrated list or on the Seriously Overlooked list because it was a pretty well-received album? The lesson here: You should feel sorry for The Lovely Becky for having to live with this.

6) “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” KT Tunstall. I try not to get too hung up on whether music falls into the dude or dudette category. After all, I unabashedly have proclaimed serious love for “Since U Been Gone” and at least one Paramore song—how much masculine shame could I possibly have left in the testosterone tank? But KT Tunstall does inspire a bit of guy guilt. I’m sitting home alone right now listening to this and I still feel a little bit wimpy for not just listening to this, but liking it. The worst part is that recognizing how stupid that is has absolutely no impact on how I feel.

7) “Changes,” David Bowie. So the Arab Spring has turned into the Arab Ass-Whooping. TLB asked me yesterday if I had seen the Quadaffi/Gaddafi/Raffi/Saltwatertaffy death pictures. Surprisingly I hadn’t, save for a brief glimpse of some blurry video on Anderson Cooper (which I shouldn’t bother watching because all I can think about is how dreamy he is instead of whatever catastrophe he’s discussing). This is another sign of Internet overload. Ten years ago I would have been online looking for grisly Dangling Chadaffi death video. Now it takes something more than just a bloodied body to catch my viewing attention, especially when there are so many cute pets doing AMAZING tricks to grab my clicks.

This is also a lesson to any kids out there thinking they want to be a dictator. Remember, someday you’ll be in a spider hole or an irrigation ditch or a Romanian funhouse/presidential mansion, being dragged to your (hopefully) quick death by the very people who once praised you for convincing them to confess their love for you after 37 hours of “enhanced” interrogation. In the interim, you only get to have endless wealth and complete power for three, maybe four decades, tops. So resist the urge to stage a coup and instead stay in school, get your law degree, and take oodles of PAC money so you can rise to power the legitmate way, lest you someday be cornered in a Tripoli port-a-john that gets turned upside down, drowning you in the most unwashed of masses. Although I would definitely watch that dictator death on Tosh.0.

8) “Is There a Ghost,” Band of Horses. On my list of Recent Album Openers That…, never mind, I’ll just click Like.

9) “#1 Hit Song,” Minutemen. Subversive 80s triple albums…those were the days. Mister, we could use a man like D. Boone again.

10) “Mrs. Robinson,” The Lemonheads. I know it’s such an alternative-by-the-numbers cover—take beloved classic song and play it faster, loudier, and sloppier—but I am always happy to hear this. Makes me want to dance at a Kum And Go with Winona Ryder and Janeane Garofalo while we complain about what a cobag Ethan Hawke is.

11) “Wasted Years,” Iron Maiden. If I had to pick one singer who I think it would be the most fun to sing like, the Bruce Dickinson would be one of the finalists. There’s something so entertaining to me about his Katherine-Hepburn-in-a-leather-codpiece delivery. Sure, I would love to shatter stage lights by channelling my inner Geddy or belt out sexual fruit metaphors like Robert Plant, but the Dickinson vibrato is hard to top for pure fun, especially because I’d be able to yell things like, “Scream for me, Sao Pa-u-l-l-l-l-l-l-o-o-o-o-o-!!!!” between songs. Again, feel sorry for TLB.

Bonus non-metal track for metal haters (because I care about leaving everyone with a feel-good song for the weekend):
“Battery Kinzie,” Fleet Foxes. If you take your speakers, point them at your car, and play this song through them, snow will melt off your windshield, guaranteed!

Have a great weekend.

How my brain works

2011-10-13T23:00:00.002-05:00

I'm at my company's office for a couple of days of meetings. This morning I went into the kitchen to get coffee. Some nice soul had left a coffee can next to the coffee maker, with a note that said, "A gift from New Orleans." The first image that flashed into my mind was opening the can to find a shrunken head inside.

I need an off switch.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What new TV shows are we watching?

2011-10-11T17:01:00.002-05:00

Extra TiVoLicious Edition!

20) 20,000,000 Broke Girls (Syndicated nationwide)

19) Twitter Wars! Only on The History Channel

18) Terror No More: Conservatives attempt to win the War on Terror by traveling back in time to convert Muhammad to Christianity (Fox)

17) C.P.A.—Watch the excitement add up! (CNBC)

16) Creepy Uncle (Adult Swim)

15) David Hasselhoff and Charlie Sheen star as two swinging private dicks in the detective comedy Herpes and Clap (Spike)

14) Better Versions of Shitty American Knockoffs of British Shows (BBC America)

13) American Economic Horror Story (Fox Business News)

12) See TSA agents find more than contraband in Is That a Bomb in Your Pocket or Are You Just Glad to See Me? (Lifetime)

11) America’s Got Desperation (All major news networks)

10) Hear the screams as we go from hair to bare on Waxed to the Max with Kelly Clarkson (Bravo)

9) The XXX Factor (HBO)

8) Really Hardcore Internal Organ Pawn (Discovery)

7) Yelling About Sports—24/7/365 on ESPN

6) Soon We Will Rule the World, My Minions! (OWN)

5) Aaron Sorkin returns with the new White House drama Hope-Less. (NBC)

4) See what happens when hot dog vendors take off their rubber gloves in Wiener Wars (NGC)

3) Man Vs. Myocardial Infarction (Travel Channel)

2) Greeters! (WalMart Network)

1) Flee, the story of a high school glee club that still finds time for love, laughter, and song amid a zombie apocalypse. (Chiller)

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why was our conviction overturned in Italy?

2011-10-04T16:24:00.002-05:00

10) DNA evidence found covered in Alfredo sauce.

9) Prosecution’s portrayal of us as a sex-crazed, thrill-seeking nymphomaniac made us very, very, very sympathetic to the Italian court.

8) Received a credible alibi when Iran testified that we were spying on their nuclear reactors during the night in question.

7) Our Italian defense lawyer leapt over every accusation rolled out by the prosecution and hammered away at every flaming cross-examination hurled at the defense until he killed the guilty verdict.

6) Surprise testimony by Roberto Benigni put court in such a good mood, it had to acquit.

5) Defense made compelling case that we were victim of mistaken identity and that the real killer was Amanda Hugginkiss.

4) Plea bargain allowed for acquittal in exchange for immediate execution of entire Jersey Shore cast.

3) Pissed that the Brits leaked the original verdict online, so court aired the alternate ending instead.

2) Found out that prosecution’s entire case was lifted verbatim from an episode of Red Shoe Diaries.

1) Guy with the beard and star-spangled hat sitting in the back of the court kept making throat-slashing gestures to the judge.

Friday Random 11

2011-09-30T17:49:00.004-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I don’t know why the United States went through the trouble of coating blankets with cholera and giving them to the Indians. They could have just had the Indians handle toddlers. I went from phantom illness last week to chest cold today, courtesy of my little bundle of germs.

In fact, I had to explain to my daughter why it's not a good idea to lick random objects. We were in the post office last week, and the counter walls have some glass panes. My daughter decided that said glass was eminently lickable. I told her not to lick the glass, but that only seemed to increase the lick appeal of the glass, but also created a punchline to a joke she kept repeating over and over, laughing each time I pulled her away. I had to take her out of the post office and deliver a lecture about why we don’t lick glass.

--Libby, don’t lick things like glass or walls or anything else.

--Why?

--Because it’s yucky and you’ll get germs.

--What are germs?

--Germs are things that make you sick.

--Why do they make you sick?

Here we reached the three-question maximum most parents run into. I could have patiently explained the mechanics of bacteria transfer and the immune system and whatnot and turned this surface-licking incident into a teachable moment. Instead, I said:

--LIBBY, JUST DON’T LICK THINGS!

Because all I wanted was a) to have her not get sick and b) to avoid being the parent of a kid who licks things. Now, this behavior is perfectly normal among three-year olds. However, my daughter is the size of a five-year old, which is where random taste testing of counters, walls, and windows ventures into “look at that kid” territory.

Of course, this didn’t completely end our dialog. She quickly found a whole in the complete ban of licking. In the car, Libby asked:

--Can I lick suckers?

Which, of course, she could. We further elaborated that suckers were okay, as were ice cream and popsicles. Within 60 seconds my child had already found four large holes in the licking ban. I can’t wait for her to outsmart me on things like borrowing the car, dating that boy who needs a haircut and needs to look at me when he talks, and if drinking is bad for you why does Daddy seem so happy while watching football or gambling with Uncle Tickle?

On to the tunes….

1) “Rock the Casbah,” The Clash. I think that every time a pundit says “Arab Spring,” Thomas Friedman should have to take a drink, and then the lazy butthole who uses that phrase has to suck the moisture out of his mustache. It’s been almost a year, time to talk about this like big boys and girls and not parrots asking for a cracker.

2) “Ragged Wood,” Fleet Foxes. Makes me want to don a flannel shirt, climb a redwood, and yodel. Which is much better than donning a flannel shirt, climbing a redwood, changing into women’s clothing, and hanging around in bars.

3) “Beat on the Brat,” The Ramones. This song is the anti-“Luka.”

4) “In the Meantime,” Helmet. Fuck and yeah. Helmet’s re-entered my rotation a bit because I’ve been trying to get my doughy ass back into shape and songs like this make me feel like I can dead-lift a stack of Marshalls and carry them up a stair machine made of skulls.

5) “Weekend,” Smith Westerns. Chicago kids who do manage to inject just the right amount of Beatlemania into their songs. One of my favorite songs of the year.

6) “You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You’re Told),” The White Stripes. I think this was written about Todd Palin.

7) “Three Days,” Jane’s Addiction. A band I would have liked a lot more if Perry Farrell didn’t creep me out so much. I have always found him unsettling, and that makes it hard for me to love Jane’s Addiction, even when they produce a song like this that’s a mind-blowing mesh of grunge, punk, progressive rock, and love oils. But it always makes me think of Perry Ferrell, his oversized head and aggressive nose and hair that alternates between bleached dandruff trap and greasy 70s porn helmet. Him singing a 10-minute song about a druggy threesome conjures the mental image of a funk so powerful even George Clinton would have run away screaming in fear. The papier-mâché album cover showing a little bit of shaft doesn’t help.

8) “Elevation,” U2. It’s like they got together and said, “let’s write a party song.” Not for some party after a Live Aid or the Concert for Grenada or Artists Against Excessive Restaurant Portion Sizes. An honest-to-goodness party where Larry Mullen, Jr. actually smiles and The Edge puts on a foam hat with two beer holders and Adam Clayton dyes his hair five colors again and Bono uses “party” as a verb. No donations are solicited, no guilt is issued, and they vow to not stop partying until Sting finishes having sex in the back bedroom.

9) “Ace of Spades,” Motorhead. Makes me want to don on a leather jacket, climb a Harley, and yell at the guy in flannel who’s yodeling from a tree.

10) “The Flame,” Cheap Trick. I still can’t believe this is how I commemorated my wedding to The Lovely Becky. It’s a case study in being careful with what you play at the start of a relationship. It’s not like I could have made a mix tape of Ozzy or Dio songs when we started dating. I played with fire as it was by slipping “Closer to the Heart” in there. I couldn’t pick The Cure because I was actually happy (this is pre-happy Robert Smith), and New Order was too quick and dancy. Any kind of metal ballads were out, and I worried that going the Styx or REO route would make me seem like too much of a pussy. So I reached for the next “best” thing, because hey, they recorded “Surrender” and that song rocks, and this song was slow and it was about love and it would be perfect!

11) “The Boys Are Back in Town,” Thin Lizzy. I don’t go out of my way to play Thin Lizzy that much, but I’m always happy when it pops up. A great song for getting ready for the weekend.

Speaking of TLB, The Countess came out in paperback this week, and TLB has been doing quite a lot of great blogging about the book and the infamous lady who inspired it.

Have a great one.

Ancient and Modern

2011-09-27T12:37:00.003-05:00

[The following is Special guest post by Zombie R. McDonald, Chief of Neurosurgery Buffet Tasting at Empire of the Senseless. ]

Welcome. Welcome to the Cheesehead Infestation Installment of Circle Jerk At The Square Dance. For those of you that know Brando, or worse, share his allegiances, this may... not be pleasant.

Because we did wager blog posts upon the outcome of the Bears-Packers game, and despite the “utterly random football stylings of Jay Cutler” the Bears did fall.

And I need to interject here that I totally liked the Bear’s throwback uniforms.

Hey, I ain’t gonna rehash the game here. You can get that elsewhere. I recommend calling Brando, if you don’t mind a lot of profanity. And some tears.

But I come here not to bear-y the Bears (see what I did there?). OK, I will leave the fucking funny to Brando. FACK, amirite?

I have to admit that over the first few games, the Packers have been lousy at pass defense. Also inexplicably, the Lions are in first place, mainly because they stomped the shit out of a couple of teams to result in a similar 3-0 record, but have a huge advantage in Points For. But in the end, the Packers are 3-FUCKING-0, the Vikings are winless, and the Bears....well.

Yanno, I grew up in Wisconsin. Probably saw a few Bart Starr games on the t-v, not that I remember. I know we saw at least one game when they still played in Milwaukee. I saw a finals game at Lambeau, the last game played before they finished the Big Remodeling.

But the Packers have always been known as a tough team, and one of the longest lived teams in the NFL; what the NFL won’t tell you is that the Packers are a SOCIALIST team, owned by a non profit corporation, with any number of cheeseheads holding stock certificates, but also unable to move anywhere else. No fucking wonder the NFL made it impossible for any other team to organize around the same ideals. But fuck you; we believe in blue collar workers in Wisconsin, and that’s what we do. Until, of course, Turdwaffle Walker slimed his way into the Gov, but my blog will cover that somewhat more. O, I digress. Also of some interest is the fact that the waiting list for Packers season tickets has topped 80,000 names.

Growing up in Wisconsin, with nearly-genetic sports allegiances, we viewed people from Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois with suspicion at best. These are the people who have, with us, formed some of the most long lasting and legendary rivalries. They called us Cheeseheads. We not only wore it proudly, but turned it into money making opportunities; we aren’t stupid.

But fuck me, I ain’t here to talk about football. I am here to talk about friendship.

I have to admit that I have never been good at making friends. I have always been more than a bit of a geek, and kind of bookish; that did not bode well in high school and when I made friends, those friends were deep. That continued into college; I had acquaintances, and I had those I called my FRIENDS.

And I have always recognized that I don’t make friends easy, but I do it HARD. Few friends, but they are loved.

And so, what happens when the Internet intervenes? Through luck, chance, and the fact that I just became an obnoxious presence at several blog sites, I came to know some people: Jennifer. Snag. Von. Fish. Pinko Punko. MenD. Plover. Thudner. Chuckles. Kathleen. mikey. Righteous Bubba. Those fuckers who live upside down. I am sure I am missing someone, and I blame it on the drink and the tears. And I came to know those people, and I call them my friends.

They are as much friends as anybody I have ever known, and not the less because I haven’t met them all.

Wife Sublime and I refer to them semi-sardonically as “imaginary digital friends” and she is is always bemused when we travel somewhere and inevitably meet some of them. (It is surely a random happenstance that whenever this happens, there is drunkenness)

I really looked forward to meeting Brando when his wife did a book reading up here, and unfortunately child sickness prevented it; perhaps Brando might get over his Wiscons-aversion long enough to visit Summerfest next year.

Brando and I share a number of weird, geeky commonalities; not the least of which is a love of the band Rush. We both wave that banner in the face of daily ridicule and uncoolness. And rock on.

But here; One of my first ever concerts, as a weedy highschooler, was Rush on the Permanent Waves tour. And a couple of years later, I took a young lady to see the Moving Pictures tour; it was her first real rock show, and apparently the noise, the crowd, and the lasers disrupted her higher cognition to the point that she eventually married me.

There are all kinds of ways to find friends. And if they mean something to you, then the interface----digital, music, or meatspace--- what’s the difference?

There are two ways to end this post. One would be to talk about how much I love all the people who read the shit I sometimes write, and the other would be:

Hypochondriamatic

2011-09-23T14:59:00.002-05:00

I woke up in the middle of the night with a blinding headache and sweating from head to toe. I had felt fine before bed, but my head throbbed and I felt a wave of nausea that was on the fence of stay in stomach/sprint up the esophagus. My first thought was that this must be what menopause feels like.

I tried to go back to sleep, figuring it was just a fluke, but I couldn't shake how much my head hurt and how much I was sweating. I started thinking about how I had missed my blood pressure medication this week. Yes, I have high blood pressure. The doctor believes its from family history and my practice of strapping a bag of chips to my face and eating like a Cool Ranch mule all day long. I like to think it's from being so hot that my blood just boils. Either way, I have to take pills to control said gluttony/hotness. There was a screw up with my refill this week, causing me to miss five days of pills, until I finally got them yesterday.

So my brain switched from menopause jokes and sleepy nonchalance to what if I'm having a heart attack/stroke/lycanthropy episode? I quickly ruled out the latter, as the only thing I've been scratched by recently is a cat, and werecats tend to just sleep all day and lick themselves, which makes it an attractive disease. Regarding the heart attack/stroke angle, I told myself in my best Balkie inner voice, "Don't be ridiculous." But I kept thinking that I'm old enough to not completely write it off. Unlikely, yes. Impossible, not at all.

I thankfully fell back asleep and woke up before work with the same symptoms but a clearer mind. I figured if I was going to die, it would have happened already. I also told my symptoms to TLB, who assured me I was indeed overreacting and probably ate some bad leftovers the night before. Laughing at my paranoia, I asked her if she thought when she'd met me that she'd wind up with the neurotic version of me for the rest of her life.

"No," she said. "You were pretty cocky back then. You felt like you were hot shit having lived in San Diego, you were tan, you were in really good shape...."

I began faux-sobbing, although a part of me was crying a little inside.

I debated calling into work. When you work at home, it's hard to justify taking a sick day because you lose the "don't come in and infect everyone" excuse. Usually if I'm not horking, I'm working. But my mind pulsed like house music at a night club, so I decided to take the day off, sleep, and soak in the aching joy of the sick day, when I feel like I'm 12 again and home from school.

In lieu of the random 11, I'll just do one song today:

Incidentally, the Zombie and I have a little wager on this weekend's Bears/Packers game: the victor gets to post whatever he wants on the other's blog on Monday.

Top Ten Thursdays: What should we be getting a MacArthur genius grant for?

2011-09-22T16:24:00.003-05:00

10) Pheromone that causes men to become aroused when their female companions shop for shoes and handbags.

9) Hemp-powered engines that make everyone hungry for green energy sources.

8) Genetic crop research that causes Brussels sprouts taste like donut holes.

7) Discovering a new element, Sheenium, that is impervious to toxic levels of stimulants, sexually transmitted diseases, and film roles.

6) Creation of eGarlic app that protects e- readers from bad vampire fiction.

5) Our pioneering work in rabbit and roadrunner control studies.

4) Digital video recording technology that takes our recorded programs and automatically just shows us the good parts.

3) Our application of string theory to the study of feline behavior.

2) Holothin® technology that makes us appear svelte to others without having to sacrifice our love of Ding Dongs.

1) Political platform that successfully convinces millions of middle class voters that their dwindling salaries are less of an issue than the tax burden of the wealthy businessmen who likely laid them off.

Friday Random 11

2011-09-16T16:24:00.003-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I am using Skype today for the first time (sadly for work rather than anything naughty). I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long, because in retrospect it would have been nice to use during the three years I was in the UP's Overlook Hotel. (All snow and no sun make Brando go something something.) I also feel rather silly because, while I am not necessarily a cutting-edge tech guy, I tend to adopt fairly early in the new tech progress. I jumped into e-mail back when I had to go to the computer lab at school to access it. Of course, I used this newfangled technology to e-mail D&D trivia questions to my old Dungeon Master and best friend, Tom. Yes, Al Gore built this system with his bare hands so I could send messages like “How many hit dice does a Mind Flayer have?” Seriously, how have we survived as a society?

Speaking of Tom, he is coming to visit this weekend. Our D&D days are decades behind us, but as I’ve mentioned before, we still play an old board game called Grav-Ball that is like hockey set in zero gravity with a heavy lead ball and a killer robot for a referee. We are intensely competitive about it and have saved all of our sheets listing the players on our teams from the ages of 14 to the present day. It is ungodly nerdly but we love playing it. In fact, should the two of us ever find ourselves spending the shower portion of our golden years in a nursing home, we would probably spend our days playing Grav-Ball and yelling out things like “assault!” and “strike with ball!” until the orderlies sedated us.

However, this does remind me that I’d best make any attempts to romance The Lovely Becky before my friend arrives, because there is a minimum two-week loss of attraction after she watches me play this game.

1) “Hurt,” Johnny Cash. Who’s ready to slash their wrists this weekend? Love the song but it’s harshing my impending nerdgasm.

2) “Mr. Tamborine Man,” The Byrds. It’s appropriate that this was released in 1965 because it really sounds merger of both ends of the Sixties. There’s the poppy British Invasion sound in the ringing 12-string guitar, but a flowers-in-your-hair vocal delivery that foreshadows said flowers in said hair.

3) “Game of Pricks,” Guided by Voices. The recorded version sounds like 90s lo-fi Byrds, although they tended to Who it up when they played it live. I was listening to a lot of GbV for the first time in a while yesterday, including the entire Live From Austin City Limits where they sounded completely drunk. Seriously, Robert Pollard is well on his eighth or ninth sheet near the end of the show. That’s the “aw, fuck it” attitude that made them so entertaining and also prevented them from being huge despite writing some of the catchiest rock songs since the British Invasion.

4) “Mystery,” Dio. Really, really, really not very good. I loves me some “Rainbow in the Dark” or “Last in Line,” but the last thing Dio ever needed to do was slow things down and reflect on the mysteries of life. It’s a good illustration about sticking with what you know, which in Dio’s case was dragons and demons.

5) “Back in the U.S.A.,” MC5. The things we learn from Wikipedia. Since iTunes showed this was released in 1970, I wondered if it was written in response to The Beatles “Back in the U.S.S.R.” So I consulted our truthiest online resource to find out, no, it’s a cover of a Chuck Berry tune and that The Beatles song was a bit of a parody of the Berry song. The more you know…. I also have to take this moment to admit (if I haven’t before) that I am a Wikipedia junkie. When I was a kid, I used to go to the library a lot and read encyclopedia entries (control yourselves, ladies). I’d be looking up something for school and then find myself looking up everything but what I needed to look up for school. That was especially true if the encyclopedia had anything about the occult, tanks, rock music, pro football, or female anatomy (not necessarily listed in order of interest). That would often spur a trip to the stacks to find out more about Aleister Crowley, the firepower of a Panzer versus a Sherman tank, or something called the G-spot. And now I can do all of that on one site right from my desk, with the addition of not being burdened by boring facts or the library’s fascist requirement to wear pants.

6) “Seether,” Veruca Salt. During the 90s, while I enjoyed a lot of the music coming out, I definitely looked back longingly on the 80s—the bubblegum of the pop, the politicalness of the punk, and the pomposity of the power metal. During the first decade of the Aughts, I found myself looking straight ahead as the Web opened up a cornucopia of indie rock that I might not have otherwise overlooked had a Wikipedia entry on Winston Churchill not mentioned that his favorite band was The New Pornographers. But now, with 2011 nearly in the rearview mirror, I am going through a bit of 90s nostalgia. I’ve been combing eMusic for 90s alternanuggests like this, fun blasts of distorted Nirvana-esque pop that were the popcorn shrimp of alternative radio. I just find it funny that my nostalgia skipped a decade.

7) “Come on Eileen,” Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I was about 12 when this song came out, in that mid-point where my interest in dragons still competed with my interest in girls. On top of that, I came from a conservative Catholic family and went to Catholic school, which meant I was well acquainted with the word “fuck” but not necessarily well educated on all that went into said word. I remember talking about this song with a pair of female classmates who were a little more world wise than I was. They kept making a comment about “come… on Eileen” and I kept saying, “Yeah, that’s the name of the song. What’s so funny?” They repeated it a few time and laughed at my inability to get the joke. Let me tell you, there are few things more emasculating at that age than being out-dirtied by a couple of girls, and the psychological fallout is probably that I go out of my way to know the slang for every possible organ, act, and occasional felony.

8) “Born Slippy (Nuxx),” Underworld. One of those songs that can only be listened to while dancing or driving, and even driving is a stretch. Like a lot of electronica back in the 90s, it’s stretched by endless percussive repetition, which is great if you’re drunk at a club, not so great if you have to, say, focus on something. Plus it makes me think of Trainspotting which makes me think of creepy babies and appalling toilets.

9) “Calgary,” Bon Iver. I never expected “snow-blown Wisconsin folk” and “Kanye” to go together, but the autotuned falsetto works really well on the new Bon Iver album. I even get a little bit of a Daft Punk vibe when the drums and synths show up. He managed the tough trick of still sounding like himself without repeating himself from the first album.

10) “Back of the Van,” Ladyhawke. Love, love, love. First, it manages to sound of the 80s without sounding like a pale imitation of much better songs. More than that, it really nails the nervous excitement I felt when I was a teenager and finally had left those dragons behind. The first time I ever kissed a girl (avert your eyes, TLB) was in the back of a friend’s van—and not just any van, but one of those conversion vans that could quickly be converted to a heavy petting zoo. My friend and his girlfriend were in front, while I and my date were in the back, riding to the beach at night. I had never done more than held hands with a girl, primarily because I had the romantic self confidence of a frightened ostrich. I was now poised for my first kiss, and I was so nervous, it’s a wonder I didn’t piss all over the futon cushion in the back (seriously, this van was a hotel on wheels, it’s a miracle that my friend’s parents let him drive it). But said kiss happened and every bit of nervousness and memory of previously missed opportunities and razzing from my friends melted away into just pure happiness. The funny thing is, while I was way more confident in myself by the time I met TLB the following year, my first date with her was full of the same nervousness, until we broke the ice and found a warm bliss center inside. This illustrates again why music kicks ass; as much as I love reading and movies and games, no other form of pop culture lets me personalize it as much as music.

11) “Walking to Do,” Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Great, great tune, one of my favorites by him, with a breakdown in the middle before he comes back with a louder version of the chorus. I listen to a lot of Ted Leo at the gym and I always think this sounds like the perfect concert closer, so it’s a fitting way to end the list today.

Have a great weekend and let your nerd flag fly!

Top Ten Wednesdays: What will we do if elected president?

2011-09-14T15:35:00.002-05:00

10) Will permanently shift the U.S. government’s official position on sex education to “missionary.”

9) Will change the social safety net into a real net that will hold the unemployed in place until there are jobs available.

8) Will support a strict originalist interpretation of the Constitution that will make it illegal for anyone to be president if they only count as 3/5 of a person.

7) Will save money by putting social security funds into a lockbox that old people will never figure out how to open.

6) Will vow to keep gay romance away from the church altar and instead leave it in the confessional where it belongs.

5) Will support the right of Americans to die whenever and wherever they choose to fall into a coma.

4) Will require schools to strengthen the counting skills of children by using Bible verses and ammunition calibers.

3) Will strengthen faith in science by making science faith-based.

2) Will cut taxes so that the rich can stimulate a robust American recovery by creating more jobs for Guatemalan housekeepers, Mexican greenskeepers, Brazilian waxers, African adoption officers, French restaurateurs, Italian designers, Dutch jewelers, German automakers, and Swiss bankers.

1) Will promise not to trigger the Rapture until our second term.

Friday Random 11

2011-09-09T15:38:00.003-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Months of the football lockout, of worrying about how I would feel the void left by no Bears games and no fantasy leagues, were swept away last night after one of the best season-openers I’ve ever seen. That happiness makes me feel dumb, and I should feel dumb, because rooting for sports teams is stupid. All summer, I read about the lockout, hoping that a group of billionaires, millionaires, and thousandaires could resolve their differences so I could watch enormous men assault each other and then listen to Terry Bradshaw try to use his words on the post-game show. Added to the gnawing feeling that this was a colossal waste of time was a twinge of guilt that the sport I love to watch may be destroying athletes’ brains faster than a gallon of turpentine being passed around the parking lot before a Judas Priest concert. The only thing missing was a Sarah McLachlin song playing in the background while a bunch of concussed football players look blankly into the camera.

But then the lockout ended, I drafted my fantasy teams, and Green Bay once again found a reason to exist. Huzzah to distractions! I was even able to forget the pants-soiling idea that the Mayan prophecy of the world ending in 2012 could be coming true thanks to the Perry campaign. Hey, at least I’ll get to see one more Super Bowl before that happens.

1) “Celluloid Heroes,” The Kinks. Will we ever walk down Hollywood Boulevard and stand on top of Snooki’s star? We might not recognize it at first because the name will be partially obscured by vomit, but there it will be. Think it won’t happen? Well, they gave one to John Stamos, so anything is possible.

2) “Barely Breathing,” Duncan Sheik. I can’t tell if this is a guilty pleasure for me. It wouldn’t be if I was female, it would just be romantic. But for a dude to like this…well, it might even be too wimpy for a scene on Friends where Ross is pining for Rachel but can’t have her because he came out to Chandler, but only because he swore off women because he didn’t want to get divorced again, but just as he decides to take a chance and tell Rachel the truth (around the time the bridge of the song kicks in), he sees Rachel kissing Joey, except they are just practicing for Joey to kiss Phoebe, and then Monica shows up and tells Ross that Rachel would have him if he’d pick music that didn’t make his balls shrink. That’s a shame, because I like this song, but I’d also feel more comfortable requesting the Goo Goo Dolls before asking for this.

3) “You’re Only Human (Second Wind),” Billy Joel. I don’t even know why I have this. I fucking hate Billy Joel. I had my period where I found his singalong stories interesting and I may have even belted out “The Piano Man” a few drunken times in my life. But now, it’s a level of hate probably only surpassed by The Goonies and Brett Favre. And yet I will not delete this, because I don’t delete anything from my music collection. I even have Volume III of Joel’s greatest hits, which makes me want to fill my ears with gasoline and use a lit match for a Q-tip. I’m like a music hoarder. Becky would have to intervene with me, and just as we’re about to delete it, I’ll start crying and saying, “But I might want to hear ‘Uptown Girl’ someday! He and Christie were so happy!” And then they’ll sedate me and agree that we won’t permanently delete the files, just keep them in the Recycle Bin.

4) “Russian Autumn Heart,” The Church. That’s better. This is one of my Songs I Love Despite Having No Idea What It’s About. I mean, I think I’ve owned this album for 20 (!) years and I have played this song hundreds of times. If you asked me what it was about, I’d take a minute and then say, “A girl, I think. And maybe the foliage around St. Petersburg.” But who needs lyrics you can understand when you’ve got a great ringing riff on your Rickenbacker?

5) “Up on Cripple Creek,” The Band. In my Admire but Don’t Listen To folder. Great band, that’s why they are The Band. But like Dylan or jazz, I never get into them.

6) “Dominion Road,” The Mutton Birds. Fantastic guitar pop from New Zealand, with a great chorus that stutter steps from the verses and jumps into a nice guitar line.

7) “Subdivisions,” Rush. I got a package from my mother for my birthday, opened it up, read the card, and then unwrapped the gift: a Blu-ray copy of Rush’s Snakes and Arrows Live concert. The only Rush video I do not own. From a woman who referred to Rush as “that Chinese music” when I was growing up and blaring “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” out of a boom box. It’s the greatest gift she’s ever given me (or second greatest if you want to get picky and count life) because it was not only perfect, it probably burned her fingers to even touch it. That’s love and also how I’ll probably feel when I give Libby the Bieber Box Set.

8) “I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll,” Nick Lowe. What Mssr. Lowe is implying here is that he knew the bride when she used to have sex, which seems so quaint now. Who doesn’t know a bride who used to rock and roll? Even one of those little purity pledge pains in the ass probably has a few dry humping skeletons in the laundry hamper. Don’t get me wrong, I generally applaud the openness of our society, but we probably have gotten too open. Today, this song would be “I Knew the Bride When She Used to Flash the Blackhawks Bench” or “I Knew the Groom When He Used to Tweetpic His Junk.”

9) “Livin’ in the Jungle,” Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears. The end of summer means the end of summer songs, which is a shame, because there are few things I love listening to more than a great summer song. Case in point, this booty-shakin bit of James Brown’s chicken that just begs to be played on a hot day while drinking a case of cold ones and watching attractive 20-somethings dive into your backyard pool (okay, so maybe that doesn’t happen to me, but it’s what I see when I close my eyes). You just won’t feel that while listening to this when wearing a sweater.

10) “Once,” Pearl Jam. Three studio albums from Nirvana, 20 years of studio albums from Pearl Jam. There is no justice in the universe. (Plus Scott Weiland hasn’t had the good manners to die of a heroin overdose, but that's a rant for another song). Still, I do like the original PJ album, but I’ve never seen the point after Ten and maybe Vs. If you’ve heard one grungy set of mumbling from Eddie Vedder, you’ve heard them all. Also, video shows PJ playing this at a Seattle band competition.

11) “A Little Respect,” Erasure. I feel like I should butch this up by playing some more Duncan Sheik, but fuck it, I’ll throw my hands in the air and wave them like I just don’t care about people questioning my sexual preferences. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you should never avoid listening to something because you care what people will think about you listening to it (how else would I have remained a Rush fan?). Another thing I’ve learned is that it’s fun to dance like a gay guy. That’s why gay men always look so happy while they are dancing. It’s the guys dancing like they are straight who look awkward and miserable.

Have a good weekend!

GOP Nearly Sets Record for Most Number of Dildos Displayed During a Debate

2011-09-08T10:59:00.002-05:00

Controversy erupts over downgrading of Ron Paul to “butt-plug” status

WASPTOPIA, CA – Herman Cain. Rick Santorum. Jon Huntsman. Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul. Michele Bachmann. Mitt Romney. Rick Perry. As the candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination filed into Ketchup Hall at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, Library, and Sanitarium, the enthusiastic audience applauded what they thought was an historical occasion for the GOP: The largest number of dildos ever displayed during a presidential debate.

A controversial, last-minute reclassification would put the record out of reach and leave the Ron Paul campaign complaining of a conspiracy to “make Ron Paul pull out of this race.” Nevertheless, most pundits agreed it was as impressive a display of conservative political dildos as the Republican party has ever witnessed.

Certainly the diversity of the dildos on display was the most varied the GOP had ever seen. Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney represented the traditional crooked and white dildo wings of the party, which historically have driven the Republican presidential process. Rick Santorum, once part of the traditional dildo wing, isnow firmly lodged in the bent anal dildo camp that appeals to certain hardcore members of the Republican party but is too painful for most Republicans to consider.

However, four very unorthodox dildos have been thrust into the Republican limelight. Businessman Herman Cain is only the second black dildo to ever be considered for president by the mostly white party. While not a frontrunner, he is seen as a smoother, sleeker version compared to the bumpy dildo that was former African American GOP candidate Alan Keyes. Unfortunately, Cain has not only bucked tradition, but he has courted controversy by inserting himself into some sticky debates, such as whether he would consider a Muslim for his cabinet.

Jon Huntsman of Utah was perhaps the most realistic dildo of the field, one representative of the modest stature and appearance of the average middle-class Republican voter. Huntsman did not try to force his way into the debate or pound such popular issues such as whether global warming was real. Yet, while admired for his approach, the former governor is considered too unimposing and veiny to appeal to many voters, and the audience seemed less than satisfied with his performance during the debate.

Ron Paul is by far the least conventional of the GOP dildos, a squat, inflexible candidate whose hard-headed approach is his main draw to like-minded voters looking for a more freewheeling, unrestricted governmental lifestyle. But like Cain, Paul lacks broad appeal and seems only able to fill a libertarian niche in the race.

Michele Bachman came into the debate standing tall and erect after her performance in the Iowa straw poll, and she clearly looked ready to ride the momentum generated from that climactic victory. She is the pink strap-on of the field, feminine and yet masculine at the same time. But while she appeals to both male and female voters, many have wondered if she was simply a temporary stand-in for a larger male candidate.

That certainly seemed to be the case as the focus shifted to the biggest dildo in the race, Governor Rick Perry of Texas. Perry is considered by many to be the ideal representative dildo for the GOP nomination: big, white, and sporting a large base. He is also a man who revels in his dildo status. “He doesn’t try to hide what he is,” said John Harris of Politico, one of the moderators. “Furthermore, Perry did what smart dildos do: He waited until there was a clear opening and then pushed his way in.”

The buzz around Perry caused a clear vibration of excitement among the audience, as they routinely applauded and cheered his performance. He scored the most when he engaged the other frontrunner, Romney, in direct swordfights, tussling with the former Massachusetts governor on job creation and health care. His blunt discussion of what he would do to Social Security, income taxes, and the direct election of senators—talk that until recently seemed far too risqué for mainstream political discourse—only seemed to excite the crowd that much more.

Moderator Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News also garnered a cheer from the crowd when he said that the eight dildos simultaneously on televised display was a presidential record, breaking the old one set by the second Democratic presidential debate of 1988. However, that enthusiasm was quickly quashed when it was determined that Ron Paul was technically a butt-plug and not a full-fledged dildo. The classification came at the behest of the Republican National Committee, which explained in a press release that, “while we appreciate the important role Mr. Paul plays in the act of nominating a presidential candidate, his stature, appearance, and constant state of being a pain in the ass make it clear he is more of a rectal plug than a true dildo.”

“That’s a lot of crap,” Paul said when reached for comment. “The whole thing stinks, and it’s indicative of how I’ve been buried in this whole debate. But at the end of the day, categories don’t matter. All that matters is that I represent the real desires of Americans. You may not see me as much in this debate, but you will definitely feel my presence.”

Despite the controversy, the debate was considered a successful display of the varied dildoship of the party. It was also a clear victory for Perry, whose campaign seems to be gaining stamina as the rest of the field flags a bit. After the debate, Brian Williams summed up Perry’s performance in one statement, “He’s clearly the Jeff Stryker Monster Cock of the field.”

Friday Random 11

2011-08-19T11:58:00.002-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I had my fantasy football draft last weekend (well, my main fantasy football draft). I’ve been in this league since 2006, and most of the other nine guys have been in it that entire time as well.

We met at the league commissioner’s house, located in a small Illinois town for the beginning of a guy’s day. We played basketball for a couple of hours, then poker, before we headed into our draft. We drank and grilled and generally indulged in alcoholic and digestive gluttony. Once the draft ended, we headed to a townie bar where the female bartender plied us with a shot called an Apple Pie that indeed tasted just like apple pie. We drank a whole pie's worth. We capped off the night when my brother Tickle bought a tight pink tank top that had the bar’s name on it and we all took turns wearing it. I suspect a picture of me in that item of clothing will surface at some point (I’m surprised it hasn’t been posted to my Facebook page yet).

The funny thing about this group is that four of the ten guys work in secondary education. The commish who hosted is actually the principal of the local high school. Three of the other guys are teachers. And here they were, drinking like fish, acting like fools in a bar, and revolving an entire day around building a pretend football team.

When I was in school, I never would have imagined my teachers and administrators doing this, because I never imagined them having lives. They seemed like animatronic figures in a museum who only came to life when the school bell turned on, and then shut off with the final bell of the day. They didn’t need companionship. They didn’t spend their weekends getting plowed with their friends. They were just teachers. In my mind, that was all they did. Even being married to The Lovely Becky didn’t change that perception—her father was a teacher, but he spent most of his free time talking about what happened in school (or Vietnam, which sometimes sounded less scary than the school).

I would have been shocked to find my teachers engaging in drunken shenanigans, wildly inappropriate humor, gambling, and idiotic hobbies. If I had walked in on a group like those present at the bar the other night, I’m not sure what I would have made of them. On the one hand, I might have thought it was the coolest thing ever and seen them as real people with lives outside of school.

More likely, I would have snapped a pic of the principal in a skin-tight pink tank top and kept it as my get-out-of-jail free card for the rest of my school career. Lucky for our commish that none of his students were out bar crawling with fake IDs that night.

Tunes….

1) “Can’t Buy Me Love,” The Beatles. I appreciate the late Beatles more—the adventurousness, the way they shattered the boundaries of pop music so much that they still sound like one of the most experimental groups in history—I like the early Beatles more. Those early songs are like perfect diamonds. It was interesting to see what strange jewelry they would later craft, but there’s such a simple beauty in holding a single, flawless gem in the palm of your hand.

2) “Mamma Mia,” ABBA. Fucka mia.

3) “Since You’re Gone,” The Cars. I have always loved the interplay between the click track and the drums that drive this song. Also, Ric Ocasek is 62, which seems almost as unbelievable as his still being married to Paulina. I saw him on Colbert when the Cars played, and I will say that he is like Geddy Lee in that he looks better now that he’s older. Neither of them will ever be considered good looking, but they don’t seem quite as ugly as they did when they were younger. That’s a benefit of having the looks bar lowered as you age. You can be an ugly-ass 35-year-old, but if you still look a lot like that ugly-ass 35-year-old when you’re 55, people will say, “Hey, he looks so much better than he used to.” That’s one of the only things about aging that I’m looking forward to.

4) “Set Yourself on Fire,” Stars. Self-immolation has got to be in the top five for awful ways to kill yourself. In fact, I’d go so far as to put it at number one, above jumping out of an airplane (at least you get to enjoy the rush of the fall) and having sex with Anne Coulter (she always feeds after she mates, so it’s basically a form of suicide). First, there’s the buildup to immolation. You’re pouring gasoline or charcoal fluid on yourself, or wearing your best little black Kingsford Match Light Molotov Cocktail dress. There’s the anticipation that pretty soon you’re going to look like the cover of the Wish You Were Here album. Then there is the obvious pain of being on fire. A lot of times I microwave dishes and then, like a dumbass, take them out of the microwave without using any protection for my hands. Two seconds of touching hot glass after two minutes on high and I’m screaming like I just dipped my fingers in acid. How could anyone volunteer for that feeling? Sure, self-immolation makes a dramatic statement about killing yourself, but so does taking a vial of pills and hiring a skywriter to trace your suicide message above your ex’s/boss’s/dictator’s apartment/office/palace.

5) “Head Like a Hole,” Nine Inch Nails. At the age of 40, there aren’t any songs in my collection that I won’t listen to out of some sense of age-inappropriateness. I’ll rock out Whitesnake’s “Slide It In” like I did when I was 15, for example, or any number of punk anthems that were aimed at the time at people who are my age now. In that respect, I’ll channer my inner industrial rage whenever Trent Reznor makes an appearance. But what about 20 years from now (assuming a giant sausage grenade doesn’t lodge in my heart and explode before then). Will I be cruising down the street in a convertible K-car hybrid, Panama hat on my head and wearing sandals with socks, singing “I’d rather die than give you control!”? I hope the answer is yes.

6) “Skin of the Night,” M83. I loves me some electronic tom-tom beats. This song cries out for a scene where Demi Moore and Andrew McCarthy have sex on a waterbed in a room full of Nagel posters.

7) “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song),” Concrete Blonde. Count Chocula on a crutch, the vampire thing needs to fucking die. They are the least interesting of the classic scary monsters. Zombies? Always awesome. Werewolves? Not only scary, but also amazing basketball players. Ghosts? Scary enough that you can base entire shows of people on night-vision cameras going “Did you hear that?” every time a cockroach farts in an old asylum. Demons and possession? Two words: Pea soup. But vampires? Best case scenario, they seem like roadies for Bauhaus. Worst case, they seem like Keanu Reeves trying to show range. I’m hoping the next trend is a Creature from the Black Lagoon revival. What’s scarier than parking your Chevelle at Makeout Pond, only to be assaulted by a frog-man who craves man-flesh? That critter never got his due.

8) “He’s My Star,” Poster Children. A terrific specimen of 90’s alternative that was sadly overlooked. It does the quiet/loud/quiet/LOUD thing really well. Trivia: These guys once crashed at TLB’s house in college.

9) “When You Don’t See Me,” Sisters of Mercy. Weirdest tour pairing ever? These guys touring with Public Enemy in the 1990s. What would those fans have in common?

Sisters of Mercy Fan: “My father doesn’t understand me because I wear eyeliner and lace and write poetry in the style of Byron, although much darker.”

PE Fan: “My father was murdered by the Klan.”

Sisters of Mercy Fan: “Oh, how dreadful. I weep bitter tears for your loss, although there is a dark beauty in agony, don’t you think?”

PE Fan: “Why do you smell like Cinnabon?”

10) “Never Gonna Change,” Drive-By Truckers. You could use this as the theme music for a new show, The Real Dukes of Hazzard County. Bo would be a hardworking country boy caring for his cousin, Luke, who was left paralyzed after a terrible stock car racing accident. But Bo loses his job at the American flag plant after production is moved to China. He also cares for his cousin, Daisy, a single mom of two whose husband was murdered, but in caring for her, Bo struggles with his romantic feelings toward her. Desperate for cash, he turns to his Uncle Jesse, who reveals that his derelict trailer in the woods is just cover for a lucrative meth enterprise. However, he runs afoul of Boss Hogg, a crooked contractor who wants total control over all the drug traffic and rules through his heartless right-hand man, Sherriff Roscoe P. Coltrane. Hogg has it in for the Dukes (and his eyes on Daisy), but is thwarted by his deputy, Enos, whose mild-mannered bumbling is just an act to conceal his real identity as an undercover DEA agent. Enos becomes conflicted because of his feelings for Daisy and a real affinity for Uncle Jesse (the father he never had) and his duty to root out drugs from Hazzard. Will love win out, or duty? Tune in Fridays at 10 PM to find out.

11) “Purple Rain,” Prince and the Revolution. Get out your lighters, people, but make sure you keep the flame away from your lace cuffs. That shit’ll ignite faster than a feud with Morris Day.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Thursdays: Why are we dropping out of the presidential race?

2011-08-18T10:37:00.003-05:00

10) Lost voters by repeatedly injecting family values into campaign intern.

9) Said we would curtail agricultural subsidies even though everyone could smell ethanol on our breath.

8) Only wore the minimum required amount of American flag flair.

7) Put a little too much dark into “dark horse” for our political base.

6) Couldn’t shake the tag of being the boring Mormon.

5) Strong disdain for federal government caused us to cough “bullshit” after every campaign promise we made.

4) Khakis couldn’t conceal excitement when discussing the slippery slope of gay marriage.

3) Instead of hypnotizing voters with our eyes, we put them to sleep with our voice.

2) Plan to curb social security costs and promote conservation by relocating endangered gray wolves to America’s nursing homes was not received as well as we hoped.

1) Allergic to straw.

Friday Random 11

2011-08-12T11:49:00.004-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Hello there, nice to see you again. Sorry for being away so long. I was away on business, traveling to Nigeria to claim a lottery prize. I was informed by the Minister of Prizes that I had been hand-picked among millions of people on the Internet to claim a lottery prize that was left unclaimed. He even e-mailed me the part of the Nigerian constitution that showed it was legit. So I hopped a plane to Lagos and was met by the minister and four of his strapping interns. They took me to the alley where they had the lottery money stashed for safe keeping and yadda yadda yadda my therapist says the nightmares should stop in a couple of years. The lesson, of course, is don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

1) “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend,” The Mr. T Experience. I read a couple of things this week poking fun at the time-travel fantasy of going back and killing Hitler, which is perpetually in the top two of time-travel fantasies (only occasionally topped by meeting Jesus, as if he wouldn’t know you were coming). The funny thing about the Hitler-time-travel fantasy is that it relies on the logic that Nazi Germany would have completely collapsed without Hitler. You have a gun, you get Hitler’s mustache in your crosshairs, and pow, no more World War II. As if the rest of the Nazis would have no clue on how to proceed. “Der Fuher ist dead? Was die Fuck are we going to do? Did anybody take notes in the last meeting? I remember something about Poland but I feel asleep from all the Schnitzengrubers I ate for lunch.” Or if you went back and killed him as an infant, that it would have also stopped anti-Semitism in Germany. People like Goebbels would be lost, thinking, “Boy, we have all of these problems after World War I. If only there was an ethnic or religious group we could use as a scapegoat, but I can’t think of one.” It just goes to show that time-travel is often not a viable solution to our problems.

2) “Sister Havana,” Urge Overkill. Probably in my top 10 of favorite songs from the 90s because it makes me think of Ric Ocasek covering Cheap Trick. I also used to hear it a lot on Chicago’s Q101, the Windy City’s alternative station, which sadly just bit the dust about a decade after the term “alternative rock” did. Q101 was a classic commercial alternative station, essentially a radio version of MTV’s Buzz Bin. But for every Better for Ezra of Harvey Danger, they would play Nirvana or Rancid. It was a good listening stop on days when I felt like a rat in a cage despite all of my unresolved anger issues.

3) “The Bends,” Radiohead. Best song ever written about a bad Taco Bell experience.

4) “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” Led Zeppelin. I love the church organ opening and Bonham’s steady beat changing into big fat fills during the chorus. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, as great as the fourth album is, the first Zeppelin album is my favorite.

5) “The Needle Has Landed,” Neko Case. I get goosebumpy from the harmonies because they are so damn perfect. I really need to see her live at some point.

6) “Cousins,” Vampire Weekend. We just celebrated our tenth anniversary of our annual family vacation with TLB’s family. We travel to North Carolina every August to frolic in the waters of the Atlantic, eat a trawler-load of fried seafood, and generally unplug and unwind from the world. I’ve always enjoyed the trip, even when we were childless, because it was a great way to spend a week drinking beer, reading a couple of books, and potentially paralyzing myself via feats of aquatic-based prowess. But it has become far more enjoyable since the arrival of Libby. My sisters-in-law both have a boy and a girl each, all between the ages of four and nine, and this year in particular the gang of five cousins had a blast. They dug in the sand, they played in tidal pools, and even did a bit of shoreline surfing on boogie boards and innertubes. Libby has started to understand the concept of siblings and has asked if should could be a sister. It’s sad to tell her that she probably won’t be—it would take 20 grand and a team of scientists to even have a chance—but it’s easier to tell her she's likely to be an only child when she is near cousins that she already treats like siblings. I really hope they stay that close as they get older.

7) “The Patient Ferris Wheel,” The Gaslight Anthem. I am from the school of thought that originality is not a big requirement for rock music. It’s nice when you run into it, but I think you need heart more than anything else. I’ll take four guys from Jersey channeling their inner Springsteen on two guitars, bass, and drums over sound collages and polyrhythms and other fancy-pants shenanigans.

8) “Here Comes the Rain,” Chris Knight. I played this album that was recorded in a trailer in Kentucky as I drove through Kentucky, TLB and Libs asleep in the car, leaving just me, the road, and a man on his guitar. That’s my version of meditation.

9) “Tonight We Fly,” 20/20. I miss record stores and I am sad to see physical music dissolving into a series of 1s and 0s stored on PCs. At the same time, I have discovered so much more music because of it being untethered from retail locations and shared on the Internet. I never would have found this power pop gem browsing the stacks at Tower Records.

10) “Lights & Music,” Cut Copy. Now is the time on CJSD when we dance!

11) “Helter Skelter,” The Beatles. The Fab Four at their most punk. Also probably McCartney’s most Lennon song. It’s hard to believe it’s by the same man who would go on to record “Silly Love Songs.”

Hidden bonus track

“Paradise City,” Guns N’ Roses. Tomorrow I venture out to a quiet town in the middle of Anywhere, Illinois to join eight other men and one guy via Skype as we indulge in our fantasies of being pro football GMs. It’s a league most of us have been in for years, and this marks the first time we have had zero turnover among the 10 owners By all rights I should be embarrassed if not completely ashamed by how much I look forward to this every year. But like my beloved fake drumming game, fantasy football indulges a desire that is as strong as it is completely out of reach. So tomorrow I will spend the day discussing the groin status of running backs while drinking excessively with a bunch of other sports nerds, all in the hope of finding the lucky combination of gridiron production that will give us bragging rights for the year and a bit of cash in our pockets.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What are we really worried about?

2011-08-10T16:20:00.001-05:00

Special extra fretting edition!

11) Double-dip recession in hairline.

10) Stimulus failing to produce sufficient growth in pants.

9) Conservative uncle who tells us he can cure our homosexuality if we spend some time alone and pray together very, very, very hard.

8) Silicone insolvency reducing our chest rating from DD to A.

7) Toxic climate in Washington has reached Full Frito.

6) Norwegians.

5) Getting embroiled in a caloric quagmire during an endless buffet at Golden Corral.

4) Canadian acquaintances will be able to make us perform unspeakable acts for one of their precious dollars.

3) Won’t be able to resist Michelle Bachmann’s eyes when she floats outside our window and asks to be let in.

2) Retirement will be ruined due to our heavy involvement in bacon futures.

1) Having to save money, spend within our means, buy houses we can afford, drive small cars that get decent gas mileage, and show a little economic prudence instead of spending like drunken sailors who downed a fifth of Viagra and before taking their leave in the Glory Hole District.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What else are we hacking into?

2011-07-20T15:32:00.003-05:00

10) The Matrix.

9) Hand not holding our cigarette.

8) Best-seller lists.

7) Chastity belts.

6) Stuff rich white people don’t like.

5) A prison full of FAIL.

4) Former "business" associates who didn't know how to keep their mouths shut.

3) Any occupied womb we choose,

2) Our belts with a hole punch.

1) The sources of our power.

Top Ten Thursdays: Why are we refusing to compromise on the debt ceiling?

2011-07-14T22:07:00.003-05:00

10) We were elected to restore the Judeo-Christian values of this country, and that means we should stick to our guns and not make peace with our political enemies.

9) Plus we all know that taxes are an affront to Jesus.

8) Jesus came to die for our sins, and that meant crucifixion. That wasn’t going to happen if He only got a nail in one hand, right?

7) That’s why we have to rescue the American government from its fiscal sins by crucifying it.

6) The biggest way we can reduce our deficit is by cutting entitlement programs, because if there’s one thing the New Testament teaches us, it’s that you shouldn’t just give poor people stuff for free.

5) That goes double for free medical care, which is the work of Satan.

4) And lets face it, this whole mess was caused by the Democrats and their tax-and-spend ways.

3) They are trying to win political points by increasing tax rates and unfairly asking the rich to pay more than their fair share in taxes….

2) When everyone knows that when the rich get richer, everyone else benefits. Isn’t that the Christian thing to do?

1) Besides, everyone knows austerity is for poor people.

Top Ten Thursdays: What have we been convicted of?

2011-06-30T11:53:00.003-05:00

Special extended deliberations edition!

12) Loving too much, especially when it comes to our staffers.

11) Making Donald Trump look intelligent, thoughtful, and competent by comparison.

10) Living up to our last name.

9) Sending a full load of cash all the way to Tide country.

8) Having pretty hair if it was still 1987.

7) Extolling the virtues of sticking with one partner while sticking it in another.

6) Inappropriate flexting.

5) Trying to claim the Dominican Republic as a dependent.

4) Committing crimes against fashion.

3) Using too many checks to increase our balances.

2) Overlooking that “going directly to jail on corruption charges” was in the job description.

1) Having no convictions.

Happy Birthday

2011-06-23T11:30:00.003-05:00

Today marks three years since the War on Childlessness ended. It's going by fast but I am loving the ride.

Here's Libs recent performance as a flower girl.

Top Twenty Thursdays: How are we rewriting history for our presidential campaigns?

2011-06-16T10:49:00.002-05:00

Special extended revised misinformation edition!

20) The United States is a Christian nation because it was founded when the pilgrims rolled away Plymouth Rock from the tomb of Jesus.

19) The colonies revolted against the British Empire because Great Britain unfairly taxed the colonists to fund universal leechcare.

18) The Constitution is protected from undoing by activist judges because, at the very bottom, it says “P.S., no backsies”

17) There is no separation of Church and State in America because the original states and the New Testament didn’t allow divorce.

16) American Indians marched on the Trail of Cheers as they gleefully left their native lands to create reservation casinos.

15) The Civil War started over breach of etiquette by the North.

14) Jim Crow laws were enacted to protect newly freed African Americans from the burden of being white.

13) The Spanish-American War was fought over the introduction of bilingual education.

12) The Sixteenth Amendment on federal income taxes was an April Fool’s joke, but because news was slow back then, nobody got the joke until April 15, after it was ratified.

11) The Great Depression was named after Americans’ sadness over the socialism of the New Deal.

10) During World War II, Japanese Americans were interns for the U.S. government.

9) The Cold War started because Ronald Reagan wasn’t president.

8) Joe McCarthy knew who the communists in the American government were because they were colored red while everyone else was in black and white.

7) Hippies were only supporting peace ironically.

6) Nixon had to leave office because he really wanted to hear what Democratic presidential nominees had to say.

5) The United States won the Vietnam War because the United States never leaves a war until it’s been won.

4) In 1981, ketchup became the state vegetable of America.

3) Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by tearing down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands.

2) Bill Clinton had sex on the Constitution while using the American flag as a condom and eating a bald eagle.

1) The Republicans won the 2000 election decision because Jesus Christ and George W. Bush have the same number of letters.

Friday Random 11

2011-06-03T16:23:00.002-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Holy balls, has it been six weeks since I did this? Time flies when you’re not having fun.

I have been in a creative funk for sure. Being busy with work has certainly kept me away from writing dick jokes/missives about Canadian prog rock. But it’s been more than that.

After climbing to the mountain of getting a draft of a novel done, I was on a big high. Then I started trying to revise it, and also shared it with a couple of trusted advisors (you can probably guess one of them). That process confirmed something that I already suspected: that I had a draft with some pretty funny stuff in it but hardly something resembling a real novel.

The Lovely Becky has said the hardest criticism you receive is the kind that reveals a bit of truth you know but try to suppress. She summed up my novel perfectly: it was like an action buddy comedy. I have nothing against action buddy comedies, and they can certainly be lucrative. But I didn’t spend two years of my life trying to write a mildly entertaining book. I want to write a searing social satire of American foreign policy and hubris, a book that could be a Catch-22 for the War on Terra era. That’s a lofty goal and I doubt I’ll get there, but fuck if I’m going to settle for meh-cond place. You can’t shoot for the moon by building bottle rockets, even if bottle rockets are kind of cool.

At the same time, I realized I had to put the book away for a bit, to get space from it and also so I could start another novel that was the 1B to my 1A.

That caused some emotional complications for me. I realize this is a perfectly normal part of the writing process, but like an adolescent battling with puberty, I had never gone through this before and didn’t know how to act. So I reverted to my usual MO: feeling sorry for myself and not writing anything. Hence not only the lack of novel #2 writing but also any blogging.

I always have to go through this process, unfortunately. It’s like I have to sweat out all my you suck vibes, like the cold sweat of a hangover, until I feel like I can face the creative process again. The first part of that is realizing that feeling sorry for yourself has never, ever produced any actual work. If it did, I would be the James Patterson of negative self image parties.

The second part is sitting down and doing the work. I started the new book, and even after just writing a little bit, I love it. I feel like I have something really special on my hands, and not only do I think it’s benefitting from having written a shitty first draft of another book, it has the punch of some of my favorite posts I’ve written here. Which in turn reminded me how much I have missed blogging.

So it feels nice to be back and to feel like myself again, and what better way to celebrate that than with some tunes.

1) “Urgent,” Foreigner. One of those groups like Loverboy who are kind of terrible but have a handful of songs I really, really like. This song and “Hot Blooded” are insta-crank material whenever I hear them on stations with lunkheaded slogans like “Where Classic Rock Still Lives!”

2) “When You Were Young,” The Killers. It’s a toss-up between this and “Mr. Brightside” for songs of the last 10 years that I most like to sing when no one is listening. “Mr. Brightside” probably wins due to the absurd theatricality of the lyrics, but this has a louder arena-shaking quality to it, where I can see myself picking up one of the stage lights ala Bono in Rattle and Hum and shining it into the upper rows as I sing, “When you were youuuuunnnnnnng!” That would be completely awesome.

3) “Army Bound,” Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. He borrows a little bit of the bass line from The Kinks “Victoria” before turning up the rock, especially with the marshalling guitar riff at the end.

When I’m at the gym and doing any mindless cardio stuff like riding the bike, I love to throw one artist on random and do the rock star fantasy thing as mentioned in #2 above. Ted Leo gets the nod a lot because his music is energetic and I see myself on stage, sweaty and singing pointed barbs about my sorrowful country.

4) “Cody, Cody,” The Flying Burrito Brothers. I should really listen to them more often. I don’t like Crosby, Stills, and Zzzzzzz, but this sounds like CSN covering Wilco, which is not surprising because Wilco sounds like Uncle Tupelo covering The Flying Burrito Brothers.

5) “Caught In a Mosh,” Anthrax. Speaking of gyms, I just recently started hitting the weights again (after letting the weight hit me). It’s so very, very difficult to work out again after a long layoff, and every time I have a layoff, I vow to never have a layoff again. It’s a vicious cycle like time travel in the Terminator movies (“but how can the Terminator come back if it was killed before, unless he went forward in time to make it possible to go back, or maybe he went back before he was killed and then went forward…fuck this, let’s just listen to the remix of Christian Bale swearing at the crew.”) Anyway, I need all the support I can get, both physically from forcing my muscles to move and mentally when I have to start over with baby weights. Anthrax comes in handy for that.

6) “All the Small Things,” Blink-182. I have confessed this before, but I really like Blink-182. Beneath the horndog puns and high school antics, they can both write catchy little punk pop ditties like this or crank the speed like this. And I’m obviously a sucker for horndog puns.

7) “Norway,” Beach House. I need to stop buying albums I think I should buy. This one got a lot of raves, but didn’t do much for me when I sampled it on eMusic. However, said raves convinced me it would be a grower. Sadly, it is still just a lump of potting soil on a sunny day. I’m not sure why—after all, I like stuff that’s definitely in the same pop zipcode as this. I just feel, as they say, that there’s not a lot of there there. It’s a bunch of pleasant-sounding stuff that happened.

8) “Dance Song ’97,” Sleater-Kinney. The Lovely Becky and I officially rejected the new IFC sitcom Portlandia. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a sketch show from Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, guitarist of the late, great Sleater-Kinney. They do pieces about Portland specifically and about liberal/progressive culture in general. I love the idea of mocking those things, because it’s good to have your sacred cows roasted. One of my favorite SNL sketches of all time is “Dukakis After Dark” which skewered so many late-80s liberal icons. The problem with Portlandia is that, while it’s very creative and the ideas are original, there are no jokes. We watched an episode where Aimee Mann was working as a housekeeper because the music industry is in the toilet, and while clever, it wasn’t funny, which is important if you’re writing “comedy.” It’s almost like someone decided to make a sketch show out of New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces, which is the sketch show I will be working on if I wind up in hell.

9) “Angel,” Massive Attack. Starts out so menacingly until the female vocal shows up. Is she my savior? Or my adversary? Will she show me the way out of the computer program that we are trapped in, or will I learn she has been sent by an android Rutger Hauer to seduce me before she kills me after we mate? Or will we start out on opposite sides before realizing we must unite to prevent both Keanu Reeves and Ridley Scott from making any more movies, unleashing a slow-motion fury of automatic gunfire as the empty shell casings hit the floor in perfect time with the drum beat? That’s the beauty of Massive Attack, they are so deep.

10) “She Sells Sanctuary,” The Cult. Oh hells yes. Easily one of my top 10 80s songs. I was really into The Cult back in the day (as the kids say). I saw them open for Billy Idol when they were supporting Electric and Idol was supporting being Billy Fucking Idol. Just as The Cult were singing “Rain,” Ian Astubury’s mic went out. The band kept playing anyway, and finally he got a new mic at the very end of the song. I remember feeling ripped off that they didn’t stop or play it over. Sure, keep playing when something off the B-side of the new album doesn’t go right, but don’t skimp on the hits, bucko.

The other two things I remember were having a perfect view of Idol guitarist Steve Stevens standing on the side of the stage before the show and talking to two women wearing, shall we say, the costumes of the sexually liberated. The other was of a guy in front of me. He was the size of a pro football linebacker and was dressed in a pink t-shirt, white baggy pants, and a pair of pink Nike slip-on shoes. He stood up and shook his groove thing throughout the entire Billy Idol set in one of the greatest displays of amateur male Caucasian dancing I have ever seen (outside of Trapper, that is). God, I miss the 80s sometimes.

11) “Just Like Honey,” Jesus and Mary Chain. The Lovely Becky and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary last Saturday, which is amazing considering we are both 29. Anyway, we celebrated on the Friday night before with a terrific dinner and then a so-so trip to see The Hangover 2 (My review: See the movie you loved all over again for another $12!) However, said screening was awesome because we were two adults out for a night in the city and watching a movie with penis shots and smoking monkeys and Billy Joel jokes instead of something animated and cute. Let me say that the built-in babysitting of family members alone has made the move back worth it.

On the actual anniversary, we had company: Tickle, his wife, and my one-year-old niece. However, we also had Tickle’s friends Veetz, Smoke, and Pancake Z. They were originally supposed to come for game 6 of the Heat-Bulls (fuck!), so instead the dudes played Risk. And then the next night the dudes came over again and we played Rock Band (with the ladies, too). Note that this was all done with the blessing of my wife, which is why I am one of the most happily married men I know. If I may paraphrase Chris Rock and use one of Jennifer’s favorite words, “New pussy don’t let you nerd out!” And one of the reasons I love my wife is that she never, ever prevents me from nerding out, even when she’s making fun of me for saying things like, “I will drive you from Kamchatka!”

Have a great weekend. Oh, and I wasn't sure if I was going to finish the last Vegas piece, but Tickle and Smoke reminded me of some funny stuff, so I'll get it done soon.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What advice are we giving graduates during their commencements?

2011-06-01T22:13:00.003-05:00

10) As college graduates leaving the hallowed halls of higher education, the world is your oyster. Except for those of you who majored in humanities and social sciences. Your world will be the deep fryer and, if you show a little initiative, the shake machine.

9) When it comes to the choices you make in life, remember this: it is better to have had cheezburger and eated it than to have never had cheezburger at all.

8) Ask not what your country can do for you. Seriously, don’t ask, now’s not a good time.

7) If you don’t know what to do, consider graduate school. Not only will you be able to still suckle at the teat of college, but in 5-7 years, you will have the honor of being called “Dr. Loser” in the unemployment office.

6) Success in business is much like success in college: study hard, work hard, and when those two things fail, cheat like a motherfucker.

5) Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life. However, it is an excellent way to get on reality TV.

4) You have seen many changes in your lifetime. The birth of the Internet. The easiest access to pornography in human history. The ability to stalk exes and see if they got fat and/or wound up with someone who is fat. Sexting. Having acts that were once outlawed as high depravity now being considered just another Saturday night. You may not be the Greatest Generation, but you bastards are sure as hell the Luckiest Generation.

3) Never underestimate what can be done with one chubby kid, some trashy Eurodisco, and a Web cam.

2) Benjamin Franklin once said an investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Please keep that in mind when your student loan provider sends you your default notice.

1) Gunga gulunga, gunga gunga lagunga.

Oprah Winfrey Leaves Earth for O: The Planet

2011-05-25T16:14:00.002-05:00

CHICAGO – As the countdown approached for the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, much speculation was made about what Ms. Winfrey would do after ending the iconic program. It turns out her plans were out of this world.

Ms. Winfrey’s tearful goodbye was not just for her viewers, but to the planet Earth, as she announced her plans to leave for her own planet, GO-GRL-12954, which will be known as O: The Planet, located in a system near the constellation Orion that was also rechristened the O-lar System.

“I would like to thank all of humanity for being so very, very malleable,” Ms.Winfrey said. “I will miss my ability to influence you, from the books you read to the food you eat to the presidents you elect. And I would like to thank the Earth itself, for being so hospitable, for providing air to breathe, water to drink, soil to grow delicious food, and an atmosphere that is so warm and friendly to television broadcasting.”

Not only did the studio audience weep at the announcement, but so did the heavens, as massive thunderstorms unleashed sheets of sad, sad rain across the Chicagoland area.

However, the frowns of her studio audience soon turned upside down as Oprah unleashed one last surprise.

“The void of space is a lonely place,” she said, in a rhyme penned by her close friend, Maya Angelou. “So as I go far away starting today, I’d be honored if you’d colonize my new base.
“That’s right! You’re going to outer space!” Ms. Winfrey exclaimed, pointing her finger at the crowd. “And you’re going to outer space!” She repeated the phrase and finger pointing several more times before taking out her iPhone and entering a secret code.

The sets in the studio immediately reclined and turned into hyperbolic sleep chambers, used to keep the audience in stasis during the trip. The stage flipped over and became a command center, complete with a reclining leather captain’s chair provided by La-Z-Boy. Within minutes, the entire studio had been transformed into an interplanetary starship, the U.S.S. Harpo.

“Now let’s meet your crew!” Oprah said. She introduced Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Oz, First Mate Dr. Phil, and the captain of the Harpo, Gavin MacLeod, adorned in his costume from The Love Boat. “We blast off in T-minus five minutes,” Captain MacLeod announced, “so please use this time to visit the restroom or say a final farewell to your loved ones.”

Nearly all of the studio audience were thrilled. “I can’t believe I’m going to space with Oprah!” said Fern Rabinski of Northbrook, Illinois. “It’s like a dream come true.” When asked if she had any friends or family she was leaving behind, she replied, “None as cool as Oprah!”

Jennifer Drummond of Chicago was also ecstatic to go. “I was trapped in a loveless marriage with a couple of kids who took me for granted. Now I get to start all over on a brand new planet. My horoscope was totally right!”

A few audience members/colonists were not so gung ho. “Not that I would ever say no to Oprah,” said Laurie Wilson of Columbus, Ohio. “But I would have liked to have hugged my kids goodbye, you know? And I left my iPad in my hotel room.”

Another, LaVerne LaRoux of Gary, Indiana, brought up a practical point. “I love Oprah and all, but there are no men in this room, at least not straight ones. A girl’s got needs, and while I love my Oprah sisters, I don’t love my Oprah sisters, know what I’m saying?”

No sooner had Ms. LaRoux brought up the point of companionship than Oprah made one final announcement. “Ladies, there’s one final thing. I know you are leaving behind husbands and boyfriends, but I’d like to introduce you to something better. Say hello to the STED-MAN 3000!”

A fleet of humanoid robots emerged from behind a door, one for every member of the audience, and marched toward the seated members. “They are yours to keep and do what you like with!” Oprah said. According to the flyers that came with the STED-MAN, it was an advanced service/pleasure bot with a wide range of domestic, romantic, and communication skills, including confectionary, housekeeping, insect killing, “vibrational massage,” and listening. A cheer rose from the crowd as the STED-MAN models immediately began administering foot rubs and asking the audience how there day was going.

When asked about the nature of the planet and the starship, a U.S.S. Harpo spokesperson was not very forthcoming. The planet had been purchased from NASA for an undisclosed sum, and the starship’s means of propulsion was “proprietary information that we do not wish to give to our competitors, lest there be other talk-show planets springing up all over the universe.” Sources who wished to remain anonymous said that the White House had given Oprah top-secret documents on faster-than-light travel as a “favor for 2008,” but the U.S. government would neither confirm or deny that report.

As takeoff time neared, Oprah told her audience to strap themselves in. “Dr. Oz, take us out!” she cried.

“Darn it, Oprah, I’m a doctor, not a captain!” he replied.

All media and non-passengers were escorted to the launch area, as the starship rumbled to life and blasted high into the air, but not before writing “Thanks!” in a plume of white smoke.

In an unrelated story, hundreds of non-celebrities were killed due to severe burns caused by intense heat and flame.

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we withdrawing from the Republican presidential race?

2011-05-24T16:47:00.002-05:00

10) Have actual skeletons in closet.

9) America not ready for bold plan to have White House gold plated and available for business conventions and bar mitzvahs.

8) Used war chest to snort blow off hooker’s chest.

7) Hate government so much that can’t talk about being president without giving ourselves a round-house kick to the face.

6) Totally thought that Rapture guy was right and wanted to shift focus to being president of Heaven.

5) Married third wife during our second wife’s wake.

4) Birth certificate lists us as being “spawned.”

3) Found out presidency has no stock options.

2) Nervous that winning nomination would require to talk to a black man.

1) Failed to meet Constitutional requirement that the President have a pulse.

The kind of things I talk about at a child's first communion dinner, or why I am going to hell (part 467)

2011-05-17T13:53:00.003-05:00

This past weekend I was at a dinner to celebrate the first communion of the daughter of an old friend of mine. I used to work with her and also with another couple who was seated with us.

While my friend and her daughter were making the rounds talking to guests at other tables, we got on the subject of Coldstone Creamery. My friend Goat said that three Coldstone's had gone out of business in their neighborhood. When TLB and I said we were surprised, Goat's boyfriend Guy said it was because the cops had found out about the glory holes in the bathrooms.*

This prompted Guy and I to create a new Coldstone creation, the Glory Hole. We decided that it should be a rectangular slab of ice cream, dipped in chocolate to make it hard like a bathroom stall wall. There would be a hole in the middle with a cream wafer sticking out, topped with a dab of whipped cream.

"And you can't ask for it," I said. "You have to signal the clerk that's what you want."

"Yeah, you have to make a couple of hand gestures and tap your foot," Guy added.

It would also only be available in the Gotta Have It size.

Lord only know what we'll talk about if we're invited back for confirmation.

*Greetings, Coldstone legal team! Please be aware that Mssr. Guy's comment about the presence of glory holes in Chicago-area Coldstone Creameries was a joke and not at all a slander against the clean, well-lit, handjob-free restrooms at your fine chain of ice cream parlors.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What special punishments are awaiting us in hell?

2011-05-03T17:18:00.003-05:00

Special we're only human and that guy was a huge asshole edition!

10) Mandatory attendance at the alternative punishment festival, Hot Lava Enemapalooza.

9) Strapped to the Table of Endless Nipple Waxing.

8) Have to listen to every squeaky 12-year-old boy playing Call of Duty describe how they would have killed us.

7) Netflix queue only contains Gigli.

6) Every time Charlie Sheen commits a sin, an IED goes off in our scrotum.

5) Chained to a chair in the George W. Bush War on Terra Speechification Dome, presented in quadraphonic stereo.

4) Forced to work as a New Recipe Tester for Taco Bell, with no bathroom access.

3) A starring role in the Lucasfilm movie, My Dinner With Jar-Jar.

2) Imps in Satan’s furniture workshop turning us into a chair for Rush Limbaugh.

1) 72 virgins awaiting us are all guys from a D&D convention.

Vegas

2011-04-28T18:45:00.001-05:00

I'm off to Sin City again, where I'm sure I'll be hearing this voice every single facking day. Back next week, hopefully with some interesting tales to tell.

Friday Random 11

2011-04-22T15:20:00.002-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

It is a glorious day today. Not just because we get reminded that some nice bloke took the trouble of dying for our inability to resist forbidden apples from smooth-talking serpents. But because I have my life back. My company launched our new site this week, and I finally feel like I found a grove of banana trees to satisfy the monkey that’s been screeching on my back for two months.

Of course, I’ve now entered the “looks great, here’s something I found wrong” phase of the project, but that’s so much easier to deal with than preparing to launch a site.

Tune time....

1) “Letter to My Son,” Bloc Party. Dear Jesus, I’m really sorry you have to go through with this whole crucifixion thing. At the time, the idea of original sin seemed pretty damn original, and I was still a swinging single God, not a Father, so having to send my Son to die for the sins of my creation didn’t seem like a big deal. I wouldn’t call it an oversight because I don’t make those, but I certainly wish I could go back and rethink the process. Problem is, if I did that, those idiots would definitely think I was making a mistake and we can’t have that. So off you go. And no, I can’t send the Holy Spirit, because he’d just freak everyone out and besides, they’d never get the nails through. Love, Your Father Who Art Still in Charge.

2) “Heaven and Hell,” The Who. LOL, iTunes is on a mission from God today. John Entwistle was a funny, funny guy. This is such a great poke at the concept of the afterlife. Of course, I hope the afterlife exists because it’s the only chance I have of seeing the original Who live. Or would that be dead?

3) “Burial,” Peter Tosh. Okay, now iTunes is kind of freaking me out a little bit. Does Genius recognize holidays? Is it building me a special Stations of the Cross playlist? Should I expect to hear Rush’s “The Trees” next Arbor Day?

4) “Shaky City,” The Plimsouls. We have returned to your regularly scheduled secular programming. No vid for this one, so we'll go with the hit.

5) “Mykonos,” Fleet Foxes. The Lovely Becky and I officially rejected the new IFC sitcom Portlandia. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a sketch show from Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, guitarist of the late, great Sleater-Kinney. They do pieces about Portland specifically and about liberal/progressive culture in general. I love the idea of mocking those things, because it’s good to have your sacred cows roasted. One of my favorite SNL sketches of all time is “Dukakis After Dark” which skewered so many late-80s liberal icons. The problem with Portlandia is that, while it’s very creative and the ideas are original, there are no jokes. We watched an episode where Aimee Mann was working as a housekeeper because the music industry is in the toilet, and while clever, it wasn’t funny, which is important if you’re writing “comedy.” Anyway, this song made me think of that because Fleet Foxes are such a tailor-made NPR liberal band who would be kind of a joke if they weren’t so fucking awesome.

6) “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles. I am a big Beatles fan but not a big White Album fan. Obviously classic, original, groundbreaking, Rolling-Stone-spongeworthy, etc. but much like Portlandia, while I appreciate it, I never found it that much fun to listen to over the years. Well, I was playing some Beatles songs for Libby and played this one, which she liked. I hadn’t heard it in a while and was sucked in by the off-kilter beauty of it. I wound up listening to the whole album again and realized I was completely wrong about it. Except for “Revolution 9,” that sucks just as much as I remember.

7) “Too Much Too Young,” The Specials. With TLB and I both turning 40, we’ve talked lately about being older parents. When we both married at the age of 23, while we didn’t expect to rush right out and start begetting, I don’t think either of us expected to be chasing after a toddler when we were 40. Our parents both had us in their early 20s, so by the time they were 40, we were on our way out the door, not trying to learn how to poop on the potty (well, at least TLB wasn’t). I definitely wish I had the energy I had when I was younger, as I sometimes feel like I’m not active enough with Libby even if I try my best to be. Sometimes Daddy just needs to have a drink and let Yo Gabba Gabba do the baby driving. At the same time, I feel like I got so much stuff out of my system before being a parent. I felt ready and dedicated by the time I held my child in my arms the first time, and in my case, I think that was the right path for me. Even if that means I might be having to poop in a diaper by the time she’s potty training her kids.

8) “Saving My Face,” KT Tunstall. I know this song is about as heavy as a grande skim latte with fat-free whip cream, but I really like her voice. It’s not always easy to be charming when singing.

9) “Safe European Home,” The Clash. There’s a great dual-dynamic to the lyrics here. On the one hand, Strummer seems to be poking a pointed stick at the classic white European fear of vacationing among non-whites. At the same time, he seems to be acknowledging that there is some reason for that fear, that if you poke your jolly sunburned face around certain parts of Kingston, you’re going to be wishing you were back in your safe European home. On top of that, it flat-out rocks, too.

10) “Redmen and Their Wives,” Guided by Voices. I think the concept of the farewell tour should be abolished completely. Case in point: Guided by Voices touring just a few years after their Electrifying Conclusion tour, on their unofficially titled We Could Use the Beer Money Tour. And that’s fine: I love that bands get back together and go back out on the road. I don’t even care if they get back together for the money. I like money, so I appreciate the motivation, and as long as it is convincing, I don’t mind someone faking enjoyment for my benefit. Just don’t call it your final tour unless you all plan to kill yourselves after the last encore.

11) “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” Monty Python. Required listening for me on Good Friday. Can you imagine what the ‘baggers would do if someone tried to make a movie like Life of Brian today? Holy Grail is funnier and more entertaining, but Life of Brian has more balls.

Have a good weekend, and happy whatever-holiday-you-may-or-may-not-be-celebrating.

Top Ten Wednesdays: Why have we been neglecting our blogs?

2011-04-20T21:08:00.002-05:00

10) Get writer’s block after 140 characters.

9) Have reached peak LOLCAT.

8) Saving ourselves for the next election year.

7) Gave up blogging for Lent.

6) Haven’t figured out how to get iPad to automatically generate interesting things to write about.
5) In the process of faking own death.

4) Channeled the political rage that used to motivate us to write into Angry Birds.

3) Employer found the blog and learned what we have been doing in the employee bathroom.
2) Got our first prescription for Viagra.

1) Vowed not to start blogging again until we stop relying on cheap dick jokes for content.

Friday Random 11

2011-04-15T17:53:00.002-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Yesterday was a special day for The Lovely Becky. She turned 40, and what’s particularly amazing about it is how aging does not phase her at all. I have never met anyone who welcomes getting older more than my lovely wife. She greets every birthday with open arms, whereas I tend to run from them like a half-naked teenager fleeing Jason in Friday the 13th, only to get impaled just as I reach the boathouse and think I’m safe. In addition to providing the usual heartfelt birthday wishes, I also remarked, “Wow, this means I’ll never again have sex with someone under 40.” Which is also a good way to ensure you will never have sex again.

In her honor, and out of respect for the three people who may be reading this, I also promise today’s list will be Rush free, despite my being still higher than Geddy Lee’s voice from the show the other night.

Tuneage time.

1) “Rock Rock (Till You Drop),” Def Leppard. I think they would win the award for Best Band Font. In fact, there should be a Def Leppard font, because it would make my command to Turn It Up look so much cooler.

2) “Brass Monkey,” Beastie Boys. This is when I miss having a subwoofer on my PC. I feel like I’m cruising around San Diego with my friends looking for someone to buy us beer.

3) “Black,” Pearl Jam. From so Jazzy Jeff to so Debbie Downer. This is my favorite Pearl Jam song, due in no small part that I can do a reasonable job singing it, especially the final verse (I know some day you’ll have a beautiful life etc.). That’s a pretty small group of songs.

4) “Cocaine Blues,” Johnny Cash. One of the first songs Libby loved, courtesy of my mother-in-law who always played her best of Johnny Cash CD. This song would start and she would begin dancing in a circle around the room while Johnny Cash told his tale of chemical abuse, murder, and incarceration. Now there’s a kid’s show I would watch.

5) “Surfing With the Alien,” Joe Satriani. One of my favorite guitar instrumentals. Impressive while also being expressive, with a couple of dazzling solos that dance with the song instead of hitting it over the head, throwing it in the trunk of a car, and speeding off into Wank Canyon.

6) “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” Camera Obscura. Perfect pop music. Catchy, lush, friendly, and just a wee hint o’ Scottish accent in the chorus to add a sprig of exoticness. This should be required playing for all Fridays.

7) “Peek-A-Boo,” Siouxsie & the Banshees. Oh, how TLB used to dance to this. In fact, TLB was quite the dancer. We used to go dancing at this rancid hole-in-the-wall of a club, the kind of place where you could walk into the bathroom and offer someone $10,000 to do ten pushups and they would turn it down. It was redeemed by its high-alcohol/low-dollar drink quotient and the fact that it played great music, including my first encounter with New-Wave themed nights. Anyway, TLB would just throw herself into whatever was playing, and her head would be this twirling mass of copper hair (her bottle preference at the time). I always marveled at how she could do that. For me, dancing, like many other aspects of my life, is marred by my self-consciousness. Apparently I will do almost anything for a laugh except dance like a white guy who can’t dance.

8) “E-Pro,” Beck. I expected this Friday to be D-Day +2, two days after I triumphantly finished my work project and basked in the glow of a successful new Web site, a day where I would be doing the Random 11 while drunk and possibly pantsless (sorry, but sometimes a fella just needs to feel free). Unfortunately, after several hours of trying the other night, we had to call it quits. There’s nothing quite like working until 1:30 in the morning only to realize it was all for naught and you get to do it again. Yay! It’s also awesome when a technical person is explaining the reason for said problem and you can’t understand a thing they said. I may as well have had a Finnish person telling me I had cheese popcorn dust all over my face. Come to think of it, that would have been better, because at least it meant I had been eating cheese popcorn.

9) “Wrong,” Archers of Loaf. Nineties revival has arrived. I’ve purchased a couple of recent albums where the barely-able-to-shave musicians sound like they are trying to sound like this song. Which is good, because this song is fucking awesome. However, it’s also alarming, because it means that the Retro boat is sailing past the 80s, and the next port of call is Oldies. I’m not ready to be old enough to have the music of my youth be considered something with “old” in the classification.

10) “Charm Attack,” Leona Naess. Sounds a bit like what I imagine Sinead O’Connor would have sounded like if she had grown up in L.A. instead of Ireland. There’s a very factory-produced flavor to this, without much originality, but it’s put together well and gets me tapping my foot and turning it up whenever it plays. That also could serve as a metaphor for why I like eating at The Cheesecake Factory as much as I do.

11) “Bulletproof,” LaRoux. Not only did I never like Yaz, I used to do a an imitation of Alison Moyet to express my displeasure with Yaz. Yet I not only crank this Yaz-clone every time I hear it, I often play it two or three times in a row. I think the singer’s hair cast some sort of spell on me. It’s especially awesome to turn it to the point where it’s a shade under too loud and sit at the sweet spot between the speakers, letting the synths jump around from left to right. A very nice way to cap the list.

Have a great weekend.

The light at the end of the chunnel

2011-04-08T16:09:00.004-05:00

Project completion/salvation, thy name is next Wednesday. A day when I can stop thinking about headlines and HTML and get back to blogging about boobies and boners. Incidentally, Arthur C. Clarke is a moron. He thought computers would be able to hijack manned expeditions to Jupiter when they can't even explain to me why my Website keeps crashing. SPEAK ENGLISH OR DIE, HAL, YOU 'RUNTIME ERROR UP YOUR DINGLEBERRY NODE' MOTHERFUCKER!

I do actually hate to be a big baby about all this. In all honesty, this site launch is going much better than the last one I had to do a few years ago. It's been a lot of work but the payoff will be that my job will actually get easier once I get done. The problem is that I am what the French call layzee d'inherent, so I tend to bitch a lot when I work a lot.

However, in addition to soon having more time to spend with family, friends, and captioned pictures of kittens, I have two other fun things awaiting me this month. Next week, I will be seeing a certain Canadian power trio who have been called, "the greatest rock and roll band in the known multiverse."¹ I can think of few ways to celebrate the end than "In The End":

Note: This is unfiltered Geddy, so do not play near glass objects or in the presence of dogs (especially of the snow²variety).

Then, at the end of the month, I have another Vegas trip, the first since fatherhood. We are celebrating the pending nuptials of my cousin Youngblood, and plan on throwing him into a waterproof marriage sack full of vodka and making him drink his way out. For extra bonus corruption at no charge, his brother Zoolander will be attending as well, mere days after he turns 21. Our³ goal is to make sure that while Youngblood and Zoolander look exactly the same on the outside, their souls will be unrecognizable to their respective love interests. Depending on how much we drink/how much we lose at the tables, we may also entertain ourselves by channeling Danny Gans via Ouija. Although being possessed by him would probably cause my head to spin around while I did a bad impersonation of a possessed Austin Powers speaking backwards Latin.

Seeing as I am a just and loving blogger, I will provide an alternative soundtrack for those who aren't through being cool about Rush.

¹Brando, "The light at the end of the chunnel", Journal for same-sex country-and-western-dancing, 2011.

²You've been rushrolled.

³Mine and Tickle's and whomever else wishes to join in the corruption of two pretty straightforward young men with impressive abs.

Friday Random 11

2011-03-25T15:21:00.003-05:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Is it possible to have Stockholm Syndrome with a piece of furniture?

I have been spending the majority of my time for the past two months sitting in my office chair, working on getting a new Web site done for my company. I have been very fortunate in that my job doesn’t usually require a lot of long hours, making it very easy for me to balance work and personal life. But this is a big project and I’m coordinating it, hence my ass has been glued to said chair.

After a couple of weeks of a lot of late nights and weekend work, I felt like I was held hostage by my chair. I resented it, hated it, even feared it, because when you work at home and have a lot of work to do, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that you should be working. I made plans for escape, all of which were basically unrealistic and would likely have me gunned down in a hail of job firing.

The last couple of weeks, though, the chair and I have begun to develop a relationship. It needs me to sit in it 10-11 hours a day. Meanwhile, I have to acknowledge that, while I wish I wasn’t sitting in it that much, it is really a comfortable chair and its demands to be sat in are reasonable.

Anyway, I am sorry for not visiting everyone’s blogs more in recent weeks. After spending that much time in the chair, in front of the computer, I’ve been taking any opening I can to sprint to my rescuer, the couch. Project is almost done, though, and I hope to return to my regularly-scheduled loafing during work hours.

1) “Rasputin,” Turisas. Turisas is a “battle metal” band from Finland. No, really, there’s a subgenre of metal called battle metal. That subgenre is actually a subgenre of another subgenre called “Viking metal.” What is Viking metal? It is metal about all things Viking—conquering, plundering, fighting, sailing, and then doing all of those things again in Valhalla. Battle metal simply filters out the quieter parts of Viking metal—say, when our hero is reflecting on the friends he lost conquering, plundering, fighting, and sailing—and focuses instead on just on fighting or preparing to fight. It’s kind of like how traditional porn takes the time to examine the conflict of how those penniless sorority girls are going to pay for the pizza they just ordered, whereas battle porn just skips to the inevitable solution.

Anyway, this video takes battle metal and merges it with an old Eurodisco tune from the 70s. Somehow, it’s magnificent, and the video just kicks it up a notch by looking like an amazing beer commercial. I’m seriously tempted to go to Vegas next month in animal furs and battle paint.

2) “Ways to Make It Through the Wall,” Los Campesinos! I honestly have no idea how people work 60-plus hours all the time. I know people who do it, in part because work has become fused with their personal life like the arms on Dr. Octopus. In a lot of ways, work has become the new religion for many folks, especially white collar workers. In some cases, it’s because they like what they do—and if so, more power to them. But I think for a lot of people it’s an escape from personal obligations, or feeds a need to be an authority figure. I definitely don’t want to spend more time away from my family so I can spend more time reviewing the WENUS.

3) “The Celibate Life,” The Shins. I may have told this story before, so excuse me if I repeat myself, but with it being Lent and this song discuss the celibate life, I can’t help but be reminded of the time when I started rethinking Catholicism.

It was my senior year of high school at an all-boys Catholic school. I had a faith and morality class taught by a young priest (insert your “no touching in the Water and Wine Room” joke here). He had done missionary work in Central America, which cause him to do things like pronounce “Nicaragua” like someone overacting on a Univision soap opera. But generally speaking, he was a good guy.

However, one day we got to the lesson about sex, specifically birth control. Father Pronunciacíon wrote three categories on the board: Natural, Artificial, and Unnatural. Under the first category, he listed the rhythm method and abstinence. Under the second the usual suspects: condoms, the pill, IUDs (it was the 80s). What was labeled unnatural? Anal, oral, and masturbation.

For the first time, I remember being actually offended by a priest, because being 17, I happened to enjoy one of those unnatural acts on a near-daily basis (insert your “Was it anal from the priest?” joke here). I believe the two words that came to mind were, “fuck this.” I raised my hand and asked the priest a question: If it was a natural impulse to procreate, wouldn’t we have to consider celibacy unnatural as well?

Father Pronunciacíon got redder than a Sandinista at a May Day rally. He sputtered out an angry response that showed the hard (so hard) road that the celibate travel on. I thought, this is ridiculous that we are even having this conversation, and stupid that something that doesn’t hurt anyone is considered some kind of affront to God.

An epilogue: During the same class, we actually educated father on what “gerbil sharing” was.

4) “Rest Your Head,” The Wrens. I really wish they made records faster than once a decade. However, they work day jobs, too, so I understand if they have been held hostage by their chairs. Sadly, no clip, but great song.

5) “Hands Off, She’s Mine,” The English Beat. I Just Can’t Stop It is one of the most underrated albums of the 80s. I’m not even a big ska guy and I love it.

6) “Best for You,” Bad Religion. Dedicated to fish and Pinko.

7) “Basement Parties,” Matt Pond PA. After years of fighting it, I have started to actually mature and enjoy getting older. But one thing I will always miss are young people parties. I love getting together with adults, talk about interesting topics, and also not have to worry (usually) about people fighting, puking, manufacturing relationship drama, having sex in my bed, etc. However, I have a twinge of nostalgia for those low-key parties of high school, college, and early adulthood, just sitting around and drinking with friends, talking about stupid stuff and just feeling young and not having a care in the world. Although I also hope to get to that old and carefree stage, where I’ve lived long enough and paid enough dues that I don’t give a shit about a lot of the dumb things that often require our attention.

8) “Little Too Late,” Pat Benatar. I wish I was making this up, but sadly I am not: I have had some conflict about whether I should buy the Pat Benatar pack for Rock Band. I already have a couple Benatar tracks from previous games, but this one has “Shadows of the Night” (which I hate to admit loving) and “Love Is a Battlefield.” On the one hand, I know I should just get them. But there’s a real fear of should-shaking, choreographed dance-fighting mockery from my lovely wife while I struggle to figure out the drum pattern to “Battlefield.”

9) “Cherry,” Amy Winehouse. It’s a shame such a great voice is attached to such a train wreck.

10) “Young Hearts,” Free Energy. Some day the weather is going to warm up, and when it does, I’m going to be blasting Free Energy like I did last summer. A great warm-weather band. There’s a very classic 70s feel to this song, kind of like how Spoon’s “The Underdog” echoes Billy Joel, but without bearing the burden of being Billy Joel.

11) “Mystery Achievement,” Pretenders. Great bass line, great vocal by Chrissie Hind, great way to enter the weekend.

Have a good one.

Top Ten Wednesdays: How are we making ourselves more attractive to the Tea Party?

2011-03-16T09:07:00.004-05:00

10) Showing a lot of ankle.

9) Suggesting that all Muslims be considered terrorists until they exclusively target British citizens and Irish Protestants.

8) Putting ourselves in their frame of mind by repeatedly hitting our head with a shovel.

7) Declaring that the creeping socialism of America will prevent it from catching up to the unapologetically socialist countries ahead of us.

6) Claiming that it was only our hunger for liberty that made us stick our wedding hand in the nookie jar.

5) Showing our pro-gun, pro-religion stance by vowing to shoot the wall between church and state with our legally concealled bazooka.

4) Accepting an honorary home-school degree, lovingly made with crayon.

3) Simultaneously tackling anti-white and anti-rich bias by noting that if it wasn’t for rich white men, black people never would have made it to America.

2) Campaigning in a red, white, and blue monster truck that runs on baby seal oil.

1) Promising to release our liberty from the tyrannical clutches of a secular nanny state and put it back in the righteous hands of a vengeful god.

Friday Random 11

2011-03-11T14:09:00.004-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

Something happened today that hasn’t happened to me before, a convergence of things that made me quite happy.

--The Lovely Becky didn’t have to go to campus today, so we decided to have a lunch date. We picked sushi because it was one of the things we missed terribly in the UP and we haven’t had any in a long time.

--There are a number sushi places nearby, so I decided to go to Yelp for help. I have never used Yelp before, because the only thing that yelps in the UP is an animal after you’ve shot it.

--Yelp pointed us to a place we would have overlooked, a small, non-descript sushi joint at the end of our block. There was the usual Yelp nonsense, the one sniffy guy who was all, “the rolls are okay but I don’t think the nigiri is that great because I’m an insufferable munchwagon” (I’m paraphrasing). But everybody else had pretty strong praise.

--We walked up the street, ordered, took a bite, and were immediately in OMG SO GOOD 5-STARS heaven.

Walking back to the house, I literally felt filled with the spirit of Kathleen and Pinko. Using the Internet to find good sushi and then getting there in a pedestrian fashion. The only thing missing was a red track suit and a list of three novels I read on the walk to the restaurant.

Tune time!

1) “I’m Looking Through You,” The Beatles. I don’t know if this was ever used for a Wonder Years montage, but it feels like it should have.

2) “Station,” The Meat Puppets. I suspect ZRM will have a good Meat Puppets story in the comments. I never really listened to them much beyond their semi-hit “Backwater,” but the sound of this just takes me back to college, drinking on a Friday afternoon to prepare for more drinking on a Friday night. In fact, my alma mater has a campus-run pub on its grounds. That seems like a terrible idea to me now, even though it was awesome then. I worked at the campus bookstore, and on Fridays I would head over to the pub with my buddy Moe and start our consumption ritual—a couple of pitchers each to “warm up” for the evening. We didn’t even bother with glasses, Moe and I would just order two pitchers and drink straight from those. Then we’d go to another place that had a drink special, five drinks for the price of one. The catch was you could only order two drinks per person and the special lasted one hour. We would guzzle through those so we could get that fifth drink before the hour was up. I thought it was the greatest way to stretch my meager bookstore wages/Stafford student loan dollars. Stupid sexy drinking, why do you have to be so attractive?

3) “Jackson (Live),” Johnny Cash and June Carter. It takes a lot of balls for a woman like June Carter to sing in front of a bunch of prison inmates.

4) “Song 2,” Blur. I’ve heard it a million times and each time it makes me want to charge onto a football field and tackle someone. Like get a full head of steam and launch headfirst into them, James-Harrison style. Or, in my more continental moments, run onto the pitch and tackle someone soccer-style, perhaps giving one of those Italians or Spaniards who always do the phantom flops something to really writhe in agony about. This also gives me an idea how to fix the flopping in soccer: if a player flops, the player he flopped against gets a free kick at him. You're welcome, FIFA.

5) “About a Girl,” Nirvana. Speaking of suicides, the new New Yorker has a David Foster Wallace story in it, and the bio mentioned that DFW has a new novel coming out. He committed suicide in 2008, around the time I started working on my novel. My novel is not only coming out and in fact I realized recently that it needs some very substantial rewriting and that I need to rethink a lot of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, because writing takes time. However, I can’t help but feel rather sheepish about being outpaced by a a dead guy (albeit a very talented one).

6) “Wicked Gil,” Band of Horses. Gil just isn’t a wicked guy’s name. Darth Gil, Gildemort, Gil Lecter, The Great and Powerful Gil. Even Tim is more menacing.

7) “Straight to Hell,” The Clash. Probably the saddest Clash song and also one of their best.

8) “The Humpty Dance,” Digital Underground. Awww, hells yeah! I’m heading to Vegas at the end of April for my cousin Youngblood’s bachelor party. Dr. Hawkeye is attending, and nothing will transform him to 100% Hawkeye status like this song. Sadly, Dr. Trapper has to go to a competing bachelor party that weekend. So many IVs, so little time.

9) “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen. I’m not a big Boss fan. I recognize his brilliance and all that, but I hit my musical stride right around the time Born in the USA become Overplayed in the USA and I never quite recovered from the media tongue-bathing he received during that time. “Born to Run,” however, is one of the all-time great rock songs. It’s personal, it’s epic, it’s hard, it’s gentle…you can listen to it 100 times and pull out a different nuance. I’m always happy to hear it.

10) “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” The Who. I bought Rock Band 3 recently, which, combined with having my own house again, reignited my love of toy drumming. I moved Branimal up to the expert drum level, surprisingly holding my own on a fair number of tracks. Fills still give me trouble, but if I Meg White it I tend to do okay. However, The Who Pack I purchased has always been my Moby Dick (not to be confused with Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick”). I mean, look at this fucking thing. I can last about 10 seconds on that (TLB, please feel free to insert joke here). The other day I was playing a random set list and it threw me a Who track, “Sea and Sand” from Quadrophenia. I got about 60% of the way through before I failed. I swore to myself that I could beat it and started over. That attempt fell over and sank into the swamp. I started again. That attempt burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp. But on my fourth try, I felt possessed with speed-addled, Mod-drumming, Moon-the-Loon goodness. My right foot pumped the bass peddle, my hands surprisingly made sense out of the insanity of the chart, and while I reached the end a little bruised and bloodied, I finished the song…just as TLB came down the stairs. With complete seriousness, I threw my drumstick-gripping hands into the air and yelled, “KEITH MOON, BABY!” I’m sure there are few times in my life that my wife wanted me less.

11) “Ruby Soho,” Rancid. One of the best bands to end a Random 11 with.

Have a fantastic, five-star review weekend.

Helping The Lovely Becky

2011-03-10T09:42:00.003-06:00

I was in bed last night with The Lovely Becky (who is tearing it up in Italy with La Contessa Nera) discussing her idea for a story. She talked about writing a fictional short story or maybe even a novel based on the poor working experience that drove her from white-collar life and into grad school and subsequently authorship and professorhood.

TLB: I want to have her work at some kind of scientific or academic environment, like a journal. But it would have to be an office where most of the employees were women.

Me: How about a gynecology journal? She could work for a publication called Vagina Today.

Top Ten Wednesdays: Why did we get fired from our hit TV show?

2011-03-09T09:42:00.006-06:00

Special 12-step edition!

12) Scene blocking ruined by our constant, visible erections.

11) A winter scene turned nearly fatal when the show inadvertently discovered what we had stashed in the fake snow.

10) Spent the entire third act of our last show doing an a-capella rendition of The Doors’ “The End.”

9) Complained that the show’s creator wasn’t an anti-anti-Semite.

8) Our comedic eye-rolling turned into non-comedic eyes-rolling-back.

7) Paid all the female assistants by shoving twenties in their pants.

6) Other recovering addicts on the show kept trying to get high by cutting us and drinking our blood.

5) At the staff birthday party for the kid who plays the half-man, showed up at Chuck E Cheese with five strippers and a case of Courvoisier.

4) Got to the point where no one knew or cared who our father was.

3) After every punchline, kept shouting “that’s what she said!” and high-fiving the key grip.

2) In a rare moment of sobriety, notified the producers that our hit sitcom was completely devoid of humor.

1) Offended everyone in Hollywood when we said, "We're bigger than Xenu!"

I don't want to work, I want to bang on the plastic drums all day

2011-03-04T09:22:00.004-06:00

I am still in Big Important Project hell, trying to defeat the hydra blocking my way to Completion Nirvana, and I am armed with only a butter knife and a pack of damp matches. So, sadly, very little time and brain space for creative writing.

However, there has been much music, because it's nice to have a good 4/4 beat when you have to row the oars on Pharaoh's galley. The other day I did the monthly eMusic dance, trying to maximize the credits I have each month to keep up with what the kids are listening too. At the end of that dance, I always have a little left over for just a song or two, and I take those few remaining shekels and troll for old 80s songs I would love to own again.

I browsed around for a while before a random neuron said, "Let's see if they have this...."

Which they did.

One of the most underrated songs from one of the most underrated bands of the 80s. I played this cassette to death, especially in the car where I could crank it and yell out "BIRTH, SCHOOL, WORK, DEATH!" The guitars are just ferocious, and the whole album is a great bit of catchy six-string contempt, nihilism, and bile.

It occurred to me as I listened to this, for the first time in ages, that when I first heard this, I was still well in part two of this four-part saga, and I'm now about 40% of the way through part three. That's the bad part. The good part is I still want to shout those four words as much as I did when I was 17, and would also love to have this song available in plastic-drum mashing form.

Jerking will recommence next week. Have a good weekend.

Is Daddy funny?

2011-02-22T20:27:00.004-06:00

A typical night at the home office of CJSD International, Ltd. My daughter is in the bathtub and we are discussing the subject of whether her mother and new Italian literary sensation The Lovely Becky is funny.

ME: Libby, is Mommy funny?

LIBBY: Yeah.

ME: Is Daddy funny?

LIBBY (pauses): No.

ME: What? Daddy's not funny?

From the other room comes a triumphant cackling as if one of the Graeae had just snatched Perseus' nutsack from him.

TLB: That's my girl!

ME (making a sad clown face): I don't think she understands what "funny" means.

TLB: You'd be less hurt if she'd called you fat.

ME: Damn right. (Moving into another room out of Libby's earshot). Fuck if I'm going to read her stories in all these different voices, trying to make her laugh. I might as well be a sack of shit reading Green Eggs and Ham.

TLB: Except a sack of shit reading Green Eggs and Ham would be funny.

ME: Goddamnit.

No time for love, Dr. Jones

2011-02-16T08:37:00.004-06:00

It is all finding lost luggage and mandolin strings in the middle of Austin for me this week. No drugs, no sex, some rock and roll, but only as background noise as my office chair and I grow increasingly resentful of each other, like a WASPy couple who hate each other but let their hatred fester silently beneath a veneer of civility.

I don't say that for sympathy. My job usually doesn't require that kind of time commitment. We just happen to have a big project and a tight deadline, which sounds much hotter than it actually is. As such, my dick joke reservoir is running a little dry (please feel free to insert witty rejoinder in comments*)

However, this presents an opportunity to play a song that ~~all~~ ~~most~~ ~~some~~ one of you will love:

For the haters, you can fast-forward to around 2:25 for Tremendous Geddy Face. It's only a quick flash, but he looks like he surprised himself with his own awesomeness.

*that's what she said

@FridayRandom11

2011-02-11T15:43:00.003-06:00

#1morerandomthan10

I was originally going to ditch this week’s post because I’m really busy with work. My company’s going through a big Web site redesign, and sadly we haven’t invented content management software that can take my half-assed verbal directions and create a pristine Web site. And here we thought by 2010 we’d have to worry about psychotic computers building the most kick-ass Arnold Schwarzenegger wax museum statues ever or taking over our missions to Jupiter.

A Non-Random Friday disappointed me, because I love both rocking on Fridays and writing about rocking on Fridays. After I was on our corporate Twitter account today, though, I thought, why not do today’s list in Tweet form? So here you go, comedy in 140 characters or less, or your money back!

1) “911 Is a Joke,” Public Enemy. One barometer for if racism is still a problem: does one race fear calling the police more than others? http://bit.me/whitey

2) “Returning to the Fold,” The Thermals. @lapsedcatholic: Being Catholic is like being Jewish. Even if you don’t practice, you still consider yourself a member.

3) “Hold My Life,” The Replacements. @EddieMoney1 can suck a fat one. This is the song that makes me wanna go back & be in my poster-covered room w/ headphones on #leftofthedial

4) “Working Class Hero,” John Lennon. Do we even have any working class heroes anymore? Do we even have a working class?

5) “Fleur De Lys,” Juliana Hatfield. Underrated, sweet, and crunchy, like kettle corn. #alternativeisheretostay

6) “We End Up Together,” The New Pornographers. Two straight disappointing albums. Can’t tell if it’s because the first 3 were just too awesome & these just pale, or if they aren’t good.

7) “Elsewhere,” Sarah McLachlan. Lilith Fair Indigo Grrls jokes aside, she can really sing and creates great atmosphere on her songs. So, like button for me. #sensitiveguys

8) “All Your Kayfabe Friends,” Los Campesinos! @millennials Pls. don’t get freaked out if you see me dancing at a Los Campesinos show. Swear I’m good old and not Dateline NBC creepy old.

9) “The Long and Winding Road,” The Beatles. @TheRealPhilS: Should we now refer to your production technique as the Prison Wall of Sound?

10) “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” Jay-Z. Must be played at 3 am through a trunk sub the size of Rhode Island as you drive in a neighborhood full of sleeping kids #notbitteratall

11) “Autonomy,” Heartless Bastards. More yes, yes, yes for me than the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. Have had a soft spot for female rockers since Leather Tuscadero. #Ms.MeDeadly

@allofyou: Have a good weekend!

Top Ten Wednesdays: How are we promoting democracy in the Middle East?

2011-02-09T13:51:00.005-06:00

10) By supporting the right of Middle Eastern people to have a say in their own political futures and elect the governments that they want, rather than live under the yoke of dictatorship!

9) Unless that government is, you know, a little Muslimy.

8) Look, we were founded under the written principle of all men are created equal, but we have an unwritten part we also follow, that some men are more equal than others. (Okay, that part used to be written, too.)

7) The problem with giving power to the people is that you sometimes get people in power that you don’t like, and while we support freedom, there has to be some limits.

6) It’s not that we won’t recognize governments that are run by Muslims, we just prefer that they act a little more Christian.

5) Even better, why not have Egypt be led out of the desert of oppression to the milk and honey of democracy by a nice Jewish boy?

4) But if that can’t happen, it’s not a bad idea to have someone who’s been Western-educated hold freedom down until it’s ready to grow up.

3) Someone like a president who will step down but not leave office. Or a general. Or maybe a shah, which sounds so glamorous!

2) Because if we’re not careful, what’s happening in the Middle East could happen here, the way it did 235 years ago.

1) Finally, if there’s one thing we know about American foreign policy, it’s this: You can’t harvest freedom without spreading a lot of fertilizer first.

Friday Random 11

2011-02-04T12:05:00.005-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

We added another cat to our household yesterday. The Lovely Becky and Libby brought home Truman (so named after Mizzou’s mascot), a two-year old ball of mellow orange fluff. He joins our six-year-old ball of orange fluff, Jonesy, who seemed a bit lonely after losing his pals Bubba and Bugsy this past year.

Truman

Jonesy

As you can see, Truman and Jonesy could be brothers. In fact, I came upstairs yesterday and saw one of them sitting in Libby’s chair like a little prince. It took me a moment to tell it was Jonesy. “Your majesty, you look like the piss boy!” I told him. The problem with making pop culture jokes with cats is that they don’t deliver the rebuttal line.

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m glad we have two cats in the house again. Yes, TLB, you have that in writing.

Tune time….

1) Lucky Ghost, “Made in America.” Social networking has been blamed for the unraveling of social ties as we ditch face-to-face interaction for tweets, comments, status updates, and likes. But this song is another testament to how social networking can connect you with people you otherwise would never know. It’s from a guy I’ve known as Slumberland, a fellow poster from a videogame message board we’ve both posted on for years. We’ve interacted in post form and also playing games online, but never met or talked outside of gaming. Without that social networking, I never would have known about Slumber’s album, Sex Griddle (how can I not love that title?), an album that has been in heavy rotation for the last few days. It’s a great bit of rocking new wave that pulls from the 80s without stealing from it. I hear The Killers and The Postal Service with even a few proggy keyboards thrown in for good measure (don’t worry, this is wank-free music). I highly recommend downloading it.

2) “Headache,” Liz Phair. Sadly, headaches are what Phair’s new music trigger. It’s a shame she went from Exile in Guyville to Avril in Blahville in just a couple of albums.

3) “The Trooper,” Iron Maiden. METAL! And nothing is quite so metal as a song based on “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Bayonets, swords, cannon, bugles…Okay, so bugles are not really metal unless you hook them up to distortion pedals and a stack of Marshalls. This is my favorite Maiden song, mostly because the bass line really sounds like charging cavalry and Bruce Dickinson sings like he’s waving a flag to rally the troops. Related: I wish someone would make a simulation where you could experience what it's like to perform in front of 50,000 Brazilian rock fans. A helmet you could wear that allows you to yell, "SCREAM FOR ME, RIO!" and hear the fans yell back before they start a soccer chant in your honor.

4) “Title Track,” Death Cab for Cutie. And now for something completely different. Actually, after the sturm and drang of “The Trooper,” this sounds like a post battle letter written by Private Emo, who is portrayed by Elijah Wood in the Ken Burns documentary. My dearest Emma, I was filled with jubilation after surviving the great battle, until I received your letter that you have left me for that mandolin player. I dare say that I shan’t recover and will be in my room for the remainder of the war.

5) “Tall Trees,” Crowded House. We actually have two tall trees that we need to cut down this spring, a pair of pines that get needles all over everything. They are the plant equivalent of sand. No matter how much we vacuum, I have at least one case per week where I’m walking around the house and then, STAB! One of those fuckers ambushes me from the threads of the carpet like a piney Viet Cong.

6) “Poltergeist,” Les Savy Fav (song not on YouTube, so I'm using another from the same album). The clown is the part of the movie Poltergeist that always scares the shit out of everyone, myself included. Killer clown dolls are one of the scariest things among scary things that don’t really exist. The part of that movie that scares me even more, however, is the scene where JoBeth Williams is in the kitchen. She goes to the cabinet and then turns around a second later and all the kitchen chairs are stacked on each other. Gets me every time because it looks so real and seamless in the movie.

7) “Drown,” Son Volt. Just a stomping good time and a textbook case of the proper use of cowbell.

8) “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin. True story: this has been banned from all classic rock stations in Arizona.* Also, this illustrates why I cannot ever be president. If was running for president and my birth records were questioned by a bunch of tinfoil wearing knuckledraggers who had eaten too much dirt and stared at the sun too long, after issuing the usual denials, I would order my campaign manager to make this my new campaign song, just to fuck with those idiots.

9) “I Will Follow (Live),” U2. I don’t have a bucket list, mostly because creating such a list would have me obsessing how much time I have left to accomplish everything on that list. I have a difficult enough time with tasks popping up in my Outlook, let alone something like “See the Sphinx” that I have to snooze for 20 years. However, one definite bucket list item is seeing a concert in Red Rocks. Also, if I had a time-traveling DeLorean, I would consider setting it to go back so I could see U2 play Red Rocks in 1983. My parents’ future happiness and my existence could wait until after we finished singing “40.”

10) “Rock of Ages,” Def Leppard. Def Zeppelin in the Random 11 two weeks in a row, which is like getting forks in one’s ears two weeks in a row for my lovely wife. We don’t really see eye-to-eye on the hard rock, mostly because she grew up in a place where every day was like a Beavis and Butt-Head marathon, only without any punchlines, jokes, or hope of a change in programming. But me? I want rock and roll, especially thumping, Mutt-Lang-produced British hard rock that opens with pig German and also has another textbook case of awesome cowbell.

11) “This Charming Man,” The Smiths. I agree with a lot of others that this is their best song. It reminds me of watching old movies where actors and actresses would conceal the subtext of the animal lust and longing beneath wit and banter. Watch North By Northwest and see how Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint would love nothing better than to forget the whole conspiracy and tear each other’s clothes off. Yet they show so much restraint and put all that passion into a kiss. Given the title, tagline, and level of discourse this blog usually revels in, it may come (heh-heh) as a shock that I like subtlety, but I really am impressed by the old-fashioned movie flirting. Morrissey pulls that off brilliantly here, in a gay context no less.

Hidden bonus track: “Find Your Way Back,” Jefferson Starship. I don’t know why I like this fucking song so much, because I realize it’s a thick slab of classic corporate rock idiocy. Yet every time it plays, I have to crank it, especially the throbbing part that leads to the guitar solo. It’s times like these that I question my qualifications to write about music. Sad sidenote: Pretty soon no one will know what a hidden bonus track is.

Have a great weekend. I abstained from writing about the Super Bowl because the thought of another Packer title gives me anal leprosy. Should the Cheese Monkeys pull it off, however, I hope the zombie parties til his limbs fall off and slowly crawl back toward his torso.

*Not actually true although not surprising if it were true.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What new snowstorm-related nicknames are we coining?

2011-02-01T11:35:00.002-06:00

10) Snowgasm
9) Frigidiculous
8) Disiceter
7) Snowbulation
6) Freezapallooza
5) Hirosnowma
4) Frostnarok
3) Snowitnam
2) The That’s Not a Barometer in Jim Cantore’s Snowpants Storm
1) Snowkkake

Friday Random 11

2011-01-28T12:23:00.003-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

I went to the Packers-Bears game last week. Despite the loss, the day itself was great. We started at a bar, took a “party bus” to the game (a schoolbus with a keg in the back), ate chocolate whip cream straight out of a can, drank from both our officially purchased drinks at the stadium and the unofficial whiskey and schnapps we brought in, bitched and froze during the terrible first half, screamed and warmed up during the exciting second half, and after the loss made our way back to the bar on a bus that, while still containing a keg, had lost the “party” part.

That’s a sucky part about being a sports fan—no matter how well your team does, it’s the final thing that happens in the season that sticks with you. The Bears had a good year, much better than I or any other fans I know expected. I should celebrate that and look back fondly on what was generally a fun season. Instead, I feel like I did after the Super Bowl a few years ago, very disappointed to have my favorite team get so close and yet pull up lame.

I also know that being this passionate about beefy millionaires colliding into each other with tremendous force is a silly passion to have. But I can’t help myself. I’ve been a Bears fan since around the time I was seven and wearing my Walter Payton footie pajamas. I have a huge amount of history with this team, and no matter how much they disappoint or how ridiculous pro sports are or how much Jay Cutler sulks, I can’t quit them. After all, I don’t know what my brother Tickle and I would talk about.

1) “Message in a Bottle (Live),” The Police. “So Lonely” is my personal Police favorite, but I think “Message in a Bottle” is their greatest song. They took their reggae and rock influences and fused them into something that sounds very unique. I also like the reverse approach to slow-fast/quiet-loud, where the verses rock out and the chorus slows down to a reggae pace.

2) “Killer Parties,” The Hold Steady. As you get older, your quotient of killer parties definitely declines. That’s probably for the best, as us geezers have to save our dwindling brain cells instead of washing them down into our livers in a drunken frenzy. Still, there’s something about going to a truly killer party, where you just don’t have any cares in the world and let yourself completely give in to having a good time. I don’t do that nearly enough, and maybe that’s why I like Vegas so much. Or taking a party bus to a Bears game.

3) “Chiquitita,” ABBA. I was about to make a snarky ABBA comment, then remembered I watched all of Hall and Oates Behind The Music: Remastered the other night. In other words, I don’t have a mustache to stand on.

4) “Hello Goodbye,” The Beatles. It is amazing to me that, 40 years after they broke up, The Beatles are still one of the most creative groups in rock history. They’re not my favorite, but I can’t think of any other band that managed to be so innovative and yet still so damn catchy.

5) “Let It Go,” Def Leppard. Of course, after that fine bit of Beatles haute cuisine, I am even more delighted to wolf down this hair-band cheeseburger. It’s stupid (not clever), it’s sexist (not sexy), and yet whenever any of their songs from High ‘N’Dry or Pyromania come on, I immediately reach for the volume knob (heh-heh, I said knob).

6) “Mrs. Rita,” Gin Blossoms. One of the four or five songs off of New Miserable Experience that I never get tired of hearing. It’s got just the right balance between Beatles chime and 90s crunch. I also like that it doesn’t really sound dated.

7) “Allentown,” Billy Joel. Speaking of sounding dated. However, I am glad this came up, because 30 Rock had an amazing Billy Joel gag last night. A lot of times when I watch comedy shows I love, I fantasize about being a writer for them. I don’t do that with 30 Rock because I don’t believe I’m funny enough to write for that show. There are almost always at least two moments where I have to pause the show because I am laughing so hard.

8) “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” Pat Benatar. My love affair with fake instrument playing is a long one. I used to air guitar this song using a toy spear as my guitar—a fake Indian or Zulu spear that I got from Disney World or some other theme park back when you could sell violent, quasi-racist toys to children. For some reason, I felt less stupid pretending that toy spear was a guitar instead of just playing an invisible one. This is why children are not allowed to vote. Also, there is just a ridiculously long amount of cheering before this video starts.

9) “High and Dry,” Radiohead. Quite a different take on the title than Def Leppard’s. I think it would be awesome for Radiohead to put out an entire album of cock rock covers, all done Radiohead style. Imagine them doing serious covers of Whitesnake’s “Slide It In” or Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.” The entire staff at Pitchfork would spontaneously combust. That alone would make it worth it.

10) “Mrs. Robinson,” The Lemonheads. One of my Facebook friends put “I miss The Lemonheads” as his Facebook status this week, so apparently iTunes is now trolling Facebook, too. Soon we will have no secrets because the machines will know all! Unrelated: Evan Dando is so dreamy.

11) “Misty Mountain Hop,” Led Zeppelin. Awesome and well known, so no need to expound on that. However, I would like to mention that I think America has reached a dangerous James Franco saturation level, or Peak Franco. He acts, he directs, he writes, he paints, he rescues puppies, he grows perfect irony mustaches, he’s working on a Ph.D. an astroneuralbiosurgerology, a doctoral program he created from scratch for which he serves as its only grad student, his advisor, and the program chair…we fucking get it. You are better than us. You’re smarter, you’re handsomer, you’re nearly a match for Spiderman whereas we would still be hanging from a flagpole in a Spidey net. Now please go away so I can return to my normal levels of inadequacy.

Here’s hoping you have a good, Franco-less weekend.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What will we hear in tonight's State of the Union?

2011-01-25T17:26:00.004-06:00

10) To make universal health coverage more palatable to Republicans, all those without health coverage must first undergo leeching and faith healing before being able to see a doctor.

9) American holdings in hope and change will be sold and invested in the more profitable blood and oil funds.

8) The White House will promote more Judeo-Christian values by requiring all sex in the Lincoln Bedroom to be missionary-position only.

7) A request to make political discourse more civil and non-confrontational by changing calls to kill our political opponents into requests for our political opponents to commit suicide.

6) In order to reduce the future demand on social security, all Americans will be required to consume a plate of fried cheese every day.

5) Plans to improve educational performance by allowing students to take “Xbox” as a foreign language.

4) A challenge to the energy, auto, and music industries to make a car that runs on alternative rock energy.

3) That in order to convince the American people that Democrats are the right choice for America, they must act more like Republicans.

2) A counterpoint by John Boehner outlining how Republicans will reduce government spending to 1908 levels.

1) A pledge to reduce our deficit without cutting spending or raising taxes by continuing our search for a magical unicorn that shits bricks of gold.

Top Ten Wednesdays: How are we improving relations with China?

2011-01-19T12:21:00.002-06:00

10) Conducting joint culinary exercises under the commands of General Tso and Colonel Sanders.

9) Stimulating job creation and trade by allowing a 20% increase in lead content in Chinese-made toys/toothpaste/baby food as long as China uses U.S.-made lead.

8) Allowing Yao Ming to defend the low post with an AK-47.

7) Working off our debt to China by doing their laundry.

6) Collaborating on a secret project to put North Korea in a giant sack and drown it in the Pacific.

5) Strengthening cultural ties by finally greenlighting, “Fortune Cookie: The Movie”

4) Easing tensions by forbidding U.S. news outlets from using the words pollution, human rights violations, environmental disaster, imprisoned Nobel Prize recipient, or mass recall due to high levels of toxicity when reporting on China.

3) Letting them acquire California on a rent-to-own plan.

2) Requiring all unwed U.S. mothers to receive government assistance only if they agree to go on a date with a lonely Chinese man.

1) Getting drunk together and prank calling Japan at 4 a.m.

R.I.P. Bugsy

2011-01-17T12:57:00.002-06:00

For the second time in six months, The Lovely Becky and I have had to put a cat down. This time it was Bugsy, aka Stinky, who contracted pancreatic cancer. He was 14, fairly old in kitty years, but still, we hoped we would have had him for at least a couple more.

Bugsy was a dumpster rescue from Brooklyn, and he always had a bit of a New Yorker's attitude. He took no shit from any cat, and while he would occasionally start trouble, most of the time he just wanted to go about his business without being bothered. He got his Christian name because he was a champion bug chaser in his youth. I gave him his nickname of Stinky because he was also a world-class cat-box-bomb dropper.

When TLB first brought him home, he drove me crazy, both because he was a frequent toe-nibbler and also because he loved to bother our older cat, Bubba. Once Bugsy matured, though, he became an incredibly friendly, unassuming cat, content to sleep and warm laps and never really cause problems.

His unassuming nature made it easy to forget he was around, and yet his absence now is very apparent. He was a good cat and our lives were better because we had him. R.I.P., Stinky.

Friday Random 11

2011-01-14T12:16:00.003-06:00

It’s one more random than 10!

It’s nice to actually post a Top Ten Tuesday and a Friday Random 11 on their designated days for the first time in forever. It’s also very nice to have this be the debut Random 11 for my new computer speakers. My old ones pooped out after nearly eight years of loud, booming service, and my spoiled, bratty ears couldn’t deign to stoop down to sticking with the crappy Dell speakers I had temporarily turned to.

I wish I was above material things bringing me happiness, but I’m really not. I was giddy about having an excuse for shopping for new speakers. Giddy. It’s not like I even bought anything super fancy, some hand-made computer speakers crafted by Italian monks who take a vow of silence so that they can better hear ever decibel of awesomeness from their tweeters. Still, I did my Internet research, actually bought the same Klipsch speakers that had died, did more Internet research, had immediate buyer’s remorse, returned said speakers the next day, ordered different ones off Amazon, bounded up the stairs to fetch them when they were delivered, and forced my poor wife to sit in my chair while I gushed about how great they sounded. Yes, I am a crazy person.

Music time...

1) “Nitro (Youth Energy),” The Offspring. I love when I start this off and get exactly the kind of song I need. It’s a blah day outside, and for whatever reason the longest Fridays are always the ones before a three-day weekend. So a bit of fast-paced 90s punk revival is a welcome jolt of 3-minute energy.

2) “Super Inuit,” Holy Fuck. I’m not a big dance/electronica guy, but I like Holy Fuck because they bring a rock show ethos to their music: real instruments to go with the electronic/sampling gadgets, with a lot of jamming to go with the grooving. I also love the “Who’s on First” potential with their band name:

--Holy fuck, who is this?
--Holy Fuck
--I know, I love it. But who is it?
--Holy Fuck
--What the fuck? You trying to keep it a secret or something? Don’t want other people to like your precious little indie band, because if other people like them then you won’t be able to? All I want to know is who they are so I can get their album.
--Holy Fuck!
--Fine...asshole.

3) “Don’t Let It Bring You Down (Live),” Neil Young. I laugh when Neil sings “lorries” in place of “trucks.” Hey, we speak American in this country, you dirty Canadian communist. This is from the Live at Massey Hall 1971 album, which is an incredible live album—stripped down, just Young and his guitar or piano. It reminds me that he’s one of the rare artists who sounds as good stripped down as he does amped up. He can sing a quiet, folky song and then turn around and jam out 10-minutes of fuzzy, Crazy-Horse fueled, feedback-drenched rock.

4) “Hallelujah (Live),” Jeff Buckley. The Lovely Becky and I take turns putting Libby to bed each night. This involves getting Libby to brush her teeth, picking out a couple of books to read, and then singing her a couple of songs. I have a three-song block I go to: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Rock a Bye Baby,” and “Libby in the Sky With Diamonds,” my own customized cover of The Beatles classic. I pick these because I sing slightly worse than Ringo and these three songs are not terribly challenging. TLB, on the other hand, has a lovely singing voice, and one of her regular songs is “Hallelujah.” As amazing as it is when I hear Buckley sing it, it really gets me when I hear my wife singing it to our daughter. It’s also funny whenever Libby hears the song outside of the bedtime context, because she gets excited and starts saying, “Mommy sing this to Libby!”

5) “Dog Years,” Rush. This is in my top 5 for worst Rush songs ever, mostly because the lyrics are just dreadful. Just stanza after stanza of cringe-inducing plays on dog-related words, with the point of how life is precious or some shit because dogs live less or something. Let me tell you, if I could stay home and lick myself and just piss wherever I felt like it when I was outside, every day would be a festival.

6) “You’re All I Have,” Snow Patrol. I hate the term Adult Album Alternative. It’s one of those radio programming subgenres where they play stuff that rocks a little because you’re still young enough to rock, but not too much, because you don’t want too much rocking when you’ve got the kids in the Dodge Caravan. Snow Patrol is like the opening band for AAA. At this point, I would normally make some further joke about how this is soft rock for the post-Weezer set, except that I like this. That triggers a process of being mad at myself, because truth be told, I feel like I’m too cool for AAA, except that I’m really not, and I get annoyed at being a music snobby cobag in the first place. It’s because of stupid internal arguments like this that I wish I could occasionally take my brain out and let it cool on a window ledge for a couple of hours.

7) “Boris the Spider,” The Who. John Entwistle was a weird, weird guy. This song always leaves me a bit unsettled because it’s got the strange chorus and the “creepy-crawly” bit, which instinctively makes my skin itch like I have a spider on me.

8) “Hummer,” Smashing Pumpkins. I was sitting at a light next to an H2 the other day, and TLB said, “That guy’s going to love filling that up when gas is five dollars a gallon.” So true. There’s also a former Hummer dealership I pass whenever I go to Iowa City. It used to have rows and rows of Hummers lined up. Now the lot is a lot more sparse, and they took down the huge HUMMER sign on the side of the showroom building, except you can still clearly see the outlines of the letters. Even though I’m happy to see the Hummer go, it’s still kind of depressing to see the failed remnants of our hubris on display.

9) “Great Salt Lake,” Band of Horses. I have no idea what this song is really about, but that doesn’t get in the way of me enjoying it. It makes me think of all the times I’ve flown out west and how much I love looking out the window when I reach the Rockies. I like to look out at the desert and see the big stretches where there’s nothing, except for maybe a lonely ranch or a tiny, tiny town. I think about how breathtaking it must be to wake up and see the red-browns of the canyons and hills. Then I think about how much it would suck to be trapped in that area when a bunch of giant worms come to eat you. Pop culture has really ruined my mind.

10) “Pump It Up,” Elvis Costello & the Attractions. My Rock Band drums died this week. I went to play them and they wouldn’t turn on, which is the electronic equivalent of dying peacefully in your sleep. I’m actually surprised it took three years considering the amount of ham-fisted, out-of-time abuse they took while I attempted to play along with songs like this. I was far more bummed out about their passing than a grown man should be, but damn if those drums and I didn’t have some fun on our pretend tours. Oh, if that green pad could talk....

11) “Remedy,” The Black Crowes. A great album despite the annoying title. The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is one of those overly complicated for no reason titles, like putting on a pair of dress pants when you’re just going to 7-11 to get some milk. I remember buying it despite the title because I really liked their first album. Glad I did, because it’s been a staple for me for nearly 20 years. I love how everything is arranged meticulously, yet they still get the energy of playing in a roadhouse to a room full of drunks. Great sound + drunk energy=awesome in my rock book. Also great because I don’t think my nose could handle the smell of seeing The Black Crowes live.

Have a great weekend, and go Bears!

Top Ten Tuesdays: How are we reacting to the Arizona shooting?

2011-01-11T12:25:00.003-06:00

Special extra defensive edition!

15) Why are you blaming conservatives? We didn’t have anything to do with this!

14) Oh, sorry, you actually weren’t blaming conservatives. There’s a lot of that going around.

13) Because, and we want to make this abundantly clear, when we put a crosshairs on someone, we don’t mean they should actually be killed. We mean that they should be eliminated.

12) From office! And not eliminated, no one is saying eliminated. You know, let’s just scrub that from the record. Besides, those weren’t crosshairs. Those were surveyor’s marks, like you’d use when mapping the political landscape or deciding if a bridge should be taken out with an airstrike.

11) Fuck, sorry, we can’t help ourselves with the military analogies. That’s all they are, analogies. You know, Republicans:Godliness::Guns:Freedom.

10) Likewise, when we show up at rallies against the government with guns at our sides, we don’t actually intend to use those guns. They’re an accessory, like necklaces or a watch. Well, not a watch, you can use that, especially when you need to see if it’s time to kick some ass!

9) Sorry, got off track again. We’re not actually kicking anyone’s ass for real. Except during an election. Then it’s open season.

8) Not for hunting! Conservatives don’t hunt humans, except for Dick Cheney.

7) Why are you bringing up Cheney again? He’s not even in office anymore!

6) The other thing is, you liberals have to stop taking things so literally. We don’t actually intend to water the tree of liberty with actual blood. We're talking about peaceful change, and we can't understand why you're confused about our intentions.

5) This is just a case of a mentally unstable person acting on his own. If only he had gotten the help he needed, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

4) Of course, I’m not suggesting that we have some kind of government program for the mentally ill. That’s socialism. I’m sure there will be a free market solution when someone finds a way to make money off of poor crazy people.

3) What’s that? How did he get a gun if he was mentally unstable? Show me the part of the constitution that says crazy people can’t own firearms. Look, you can’t hold up the gun-buying process for the vast majority of the non-crazy gun-buying public just because a few whackos were able to purchase firearms. That’s plain nuts.

2) Simply put, we can’t let the actions of one madman deter us from showing up public gatherings bearing arms, talking about bloody revolution, and targeting politicians for removal. We’re only doing that because we’re trying to restore this country to its Christian roots, and if we don’t do that, then the Islamofascists will win.

1) The bottom line is this: When it comes to this shooting, conservatives are definitely not responsible.