Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor
Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.
Van Halen and The Police both recently announced reunion tours. I honestly believe I have seen this stated as fact on TV, radio and the internet… but it can’t really be true. I must be continuing to spiral downwards into the cuckoo’s nest.
On the off chance I’m not actually an Earth-bound vessel for a powerful alien named Zenochandragar, Sting and the boys are reuniting for the first time in over 20 years tonight on the Grammys.
Kids, if you have yourself one of them new fangled Digg accounts – or even if you don’t – please go here and give me some love. It took me a few days to write and I’d like to get it in front of as many people as possible. It’s my first official attempt at link-baiting. Fingers crossed.
Appetizer: Have you been sick yet this winter? What did you come down with?
I spent 11 hours in the emergency room in December, but that wasn’t due to sickness. I usually get way sick once a year, so I’m due. But I guess I also get sick when I’m wailing on my axe.
Soup: What colors dominate your closet?
Green, blue and black. I asked the yellow family to leave as they refused to respect the ‘no smoking’ ordinance. You can also change this answer to “Whatever Janet buys me”.
Salad: How would you describe your personal “comfort zone”?
My apartment I suppose. I keep a baseball bat beside both doors which adds to the comfort level. If I might quote Duran Duran for a second: “City Living, heavy trouble. City living rough. We are given angry hearts, but anger’s not enough”. Wait – Can I change my answer to Spike’s?
Main Course: On which reality show would you really like to be a contestant?
Tourette De France. No really, it’s a show. This Scottish kid named Charlie goes on a trip to Paris and along the way shouts the most remarkable things. I guess it’s not really possible to be a contestant on this show, so I’ll have to change my answer to I Love New York where there is at least the same staggering degree of prevalent mental illness.
Dessert: Which holiday would you consider to be your favorite?
Definitely Thanksgiving. It’s a time for old friends, deep-friend turkey and to stand around and scratch your head at how quickly another year has passed. I suppose I’m feeling a little old today because last night my friend’s daughter asked if she could call me ‘Uncle Dave’. She’s 37.
A firm believer in original content, I rarely quote OPP (other people’s penmanship) at length. But I saw this woman recently kicking ass on a news show, discovered her blog and have been meaning to at least mention the whole Boston bomb scare in passing. I wouldn’t make a better point than this:
I’m sorry Mario’s fabulous travel plans abroad may somehow be ruined by this “embarrassing” Boston incident. Shouldn’t he stay stateside and offer his considerable “bomb recognizing” expertise to Homeland Security?
Watching two 27-year-old “artistes” (one of whom is seeking “refugee status” from some slime hole) acting like children, I can’t help but think of guys and gals in the US armed forces 10 years their junior, in charge of billion dollar equipment, generally comporting themselves with considerably more maturity.
This incident, like Columbine, reveals deep generational fissures. And I’m on the side of the grown ups this time. I for one am relieved to discover that Boston’s first responders don’t waste their spare time watching unfunny Adult Swim cartoons.
Amen, Ma’am. Sure it was silly – but I definitely felt relief too. Yeah you know me!
I never remember my dreams. My sleep issues run so deep that my brain doesn’t have time for REM by the time I actually manage to get to snoozieland. But I took a cat nap today and had visions that were so strange and disturbing that I realized I should probably finish my Toronto story as means of exorcism. But first, I have to tell you about this fucking dream.
I was at my Grandmother’s house, which had been transformed into a building which was a cross between the movie House and various other naughty structures. Rickety, dark, old, evil smelling, foreboding – an uncanny resemblance to the real thing. My Grandmother was gone, presumably already in ‘the home’, and she had a large variety of animals left behind. All of which had to be killed. By me.
My sister was there, but she was busy packing stuff up and getting ready to leave for Boston. My task was domestic housepet genocide, and I was expected to do it by others in the house as casually as they were cleaning, organizing and inventorying. There were cats which I neck-wrung without difficulty (which is ridiculous because I love cats). A rabbit which I stomped. I think I drowned at least one hamster. A giant furry beetle which I tore into pieces and fed to other furry beetles before then massacring his buddies, too. But when I got to the attic there was one pet left which I could not bring myself to assassinate.
A large-eyed dog, some sort of terrier, was cowering from me up there, behind 30 years of curio crap. I picked it up, brought it downstairs and pleaded with my sister to quietly put it in her car and take it to Beantown with her. She eventually agreed, and I started taking loads of trash to the dump like I’d spent the morning re-arranging a sock drawer.
What is the worst or most bizarre dream you’ve ever had? Should I just check into an evaluation facility right now?
Why do I maintain this blog? It certainly isn’t easy to keep up momentum. I have many other things I should be targeting and focusing my effort on. As I’ve lapsed off quite a bit lately I’ve had to ask myself if I still want to keep it up. Other than to make blatant SEO-related plugs for things like crown moldings, it doesn’t serve any real purpose in my life. Actually that’s not true.
Maintaining this site is like talking to a bartender whenever I need to without the downside of spending $80 and then not showing up for work the next morning. It’s similar to going to a confessional and talking to a priest for 30 minutes about niche pornography without then being told to convert. It could be considered a virtual shoulder to cry on that doesn’t then dump me because I’m ‘too nice’. It is many things, it is nothing. A drop in the blogosphere bucket.
But really, we’ve had a lot of fun here over the years.
I’ve been listening to this tune all weekend after stumbling across it on a Best Of… Kinks compilation. It’s a real shame that a beardy kraut twat is talking over the ultra-eerie piano notes at the very beginning, but Dave Davies‘ Little Lord Fauntelroy coat is a delight to behold. This was recorded in the mid 60s on a West German TV show called BeatClub.
Unfortunately Dave had a stroke in an elevator at the BBC a couple of years ago, so his clowning days are all but over. I have a new appreciation for the Kinks, namely their work through the late 70s prior to the 80s hits like ‘Come Dancing’ which I remember from childhood. And not fondly. Dig into the back catalog if you ever get the chance – particularly ‘Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy‘ which went on to be an unlikely cover for Queens of the Stone Age in 1998.
I discovered Floodle today while reading one of my favorite marketing blogs. At first look, it is a handy dandy resource for eBooks, Top 10 lists, etc. Pop-advice, if you will. Some sample features include 101 recipes for the deep fryer, Caring for your Pet Hamster, The Big Book of Puppy Names, Credit repair, and my personal favorite (if you know me you’ll get this,) Miracle Vinegar. But I’m not mentioning the site because it’s just a great collection of free information.
What isn’t readily apparent when you visit the site for the first time, is that the owner is only posting things that he finds for sale on eBay. But he is posting them for free! He is like the Robin Hood of eBay – pointing to and providing for free information that unscrupulous hacks are charging the uninitiated a lot of money for. I wouldn’t mind this so much if the sellers were also the people who had written the material. But they’re usually not – they are finding content readily available for free online and then posting it for sale on eBay. Do you follow?
That’s not to say Mr. Floodle is a saint. Many of these articles he himself has purchased from eBay. His payoff is advertising revenue – you’ll see that the site has ads. But I really admire his model and concept, and have added the site to my favorites, as I suggest you do as well. There is some great reference material here that many schmucks are paying through the nose for. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 65 Tried & Trusted Amish Recipes to get through before lunch.
The TV signal on my bedroom/office desktop is stuck on one channel. And this channel is A&E. Since I began working from home a month and a half ago, I have become an authority on CSI: Miami, college boxes, Forensic Files, Crossing Jordan and a host of other depressing modern cop shows in syndication. And about every 20 seconds there’s an advertisement for the Sopranos, whom the network has just purchased. I have seen it so many times, I may never be able to watch the Sopranos again. But I can watch this:
I work well with music or television on in the background. It’s comforting. Like when you leave the radio on for your dog if you’re going to be out all day. It can also lead you to discover CSI Miami and the many hilarious fan-made YouTube edits. It’s a time-tested formula: David Caruso puts on his glasses, utters a one-liner worthy of a school play, the opening scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again” punctuates the gravity of said one-liner and then leads into the opening sequence. It’s almost like the Pythagorean Theorum in terms of reliability. I want to make up my own Horatio Caine one-liner for fun. Play along if you’d like.
Detective: “It looks like Angela’s killer was good at covering their tracks, Horatio“.
Horatio: “Maybe, but Angela here… isn’t good (glasses on) … at NOT being dead.”
Roger Daltrey: “Yeeeeeeoooooooooow!“
Herculean is the second single off this just released album from Damon Albarn’s (Blur, Gorillaz) The Good The Bad and the Queen. He’s quite the prolific songwriter and has managed to convince Paul Simonon (The Clash) and Simon Tong (The Verve) to round out this alt-punk supergroup. And let’s not forget the producer, Danger Mouse, who himself has a little song you may have heard once or twice last year.
I was beyond skeptical when I first read a blurb about them, but I love this song – and the first single Kingdom of Doom – very, very much so. The hats are just the icing on the cake.
The only reason I passed chemistry in high school is because Mr. Murray didn’t want to look at me for another year. That having been said, short of mixing up a glass of Tang, my lab skills and knowhow are extremely limited. But I made some magic happen last night.
Admittedly, I was a little remiss in my cat box cleaning duties this past week. I tore out Boss’ corner – swept, mopped and then disassembled his covered litter box. After dumping out the good stuff, there was a large clump of wet mud near the bottom I had to break apart with a scraper I keep handy for just this purpose. Just call me Mr. Boston construction. I got most of it out, but the stench of ammonia was unusually bad. Dave Pye the Science Guy decided it would be a good idea to dump a few capfulls of straight bleach into the mix.
I knew right away that there was something special taking place. The bottom of the box started to hiss and fizzle straight away. I think I may have giggled – until the vapors hit my nose. By the time I realized I needed to get the hell out of the area, I’d inhaled a good quantity of a vapor I can only describe as overpowering. I opened my replacement windows but the strong, medicinal smell hung in the area for about an hour. I can still feel a little burn in my lungs as I type.
Eventually the smoke cleared, and I was able to rinse everything and put it back together. Boss’ poops and peeps palace potential are squared away. I wonder what I created for that brief moment. Perhaps I may have inadvertently cured cancer, or immunized myself forever from the common cold. But I’m probably just a lazy retard who should take better care of his cat.
A young Bobby D’s excuse as to why he took a whiffle ball bat to a classmate?
“He tripped me up during the sack race, a little bit.”
Recorded January 19th 2007 in the North End of Boston MA, the third podcast in the series features discussion about Sidney Crosby, the Washington Capitols, MySpace, our brand new hockey tshirts, a deluge of silly audio clips thrown in for funny measure, and our homie – little Philly Kessel.
This is some funny stuff, people. It’s a little on the long side, but we had a 2 month lull to cover. My audio editing abilities are creeping towards “a little better”, and you have to stay with us the full 23 minutes just to hear all the fart sounds and SlapShot quotes. If you’re on the market for a ridiculous hockey podcast, check us out.
Fly is my favorite song off the new album, World Container, and although there isn’t a video for it yet, I did find this concert clip recorded in Belgium back in May. There’s some pretty good Downie Dancing throughout, and I love the guitar solo – which sounds much better on the record and reminds me of the one note solo from Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl, which I maintain is the best guitar solo ever. Yes, I said one note. World Container is the best Hip album since Phantom Power, and they’re playing at Avalon here in Boston in February.