Pop Culture Blog: Music, Movie and Humor

Leveraging low-hanging synergies outside the vertical fruit box since 1999.

Pigskins and Puppies


in Animalistic, Sporty

I commemorated the holiday this year by sleeping until 11am, finally finishing the massive Brother Fish and then cleaning up my house. As all of my clients are American, no one noticed or cared about my personal day, and I hope everyone is currently gorged on turkey and watching TV with a glass of dry white left over from dinner in their hand. It snowed up here in Portland for the first time this morning and I realized since this house was built in 2004 no one has actually lived here late in the season enough to see snow. I am going to take some photos for my folks tomorrow and I’m sure it will be as strange for them as it was for me. Raise that glass to me at this point and toast to my not freezing to death in a couple of months only to be discovered come spring sitting upright and bearded in the filthy dining room with a half-finished letter bomb in front of me.

OJ Thanksgiving

Does anyone know who won the Concord / Bedford football game today? I couldn’t find it mentioned online. I did get one especially exciting piece of news, however. Pixie, the mother of my soon to be puppy, is almost ready to drop. The breeder sent me some adorable new photos and poor Pixie looks fit to pop. She is due by the end of the weekend, apparently, so I may be making a trip over to Seeley’s bay to see my future best friend very, very soon. Wee Shepherd Pye cometh!

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Eat a Little Turkey, Feel a Little Jerky


in Consumables, Heartwarming

It’s sad and quite a bit shitty to be sitting alone on what is usually my very favorite night of the entire year. The night before American Thanksgiving is when you’re supposed to travel back to your home town, hit a local bar or house party and get sillier than a horn of plenty with your high school friends whom you only ever see once a year on this night. When I returned from England in 1999 after about 5 years away from the Concord scene, I thought the tradition was long since dead. Little did I know the fun we had yet to have over the next 7 years. The Red House, the reunions, the Razzi. Many of my contemporaries couldn’t care less about staying in touch with their old school crew and that’s their prerogative – God forbid I should someday have a family and “normal life”. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way, and I sure miss y’all tonight.

The best Thanksgivingy passtime I could come up with for my self this evening was to sift back through folders and folders of old photos and assemble my favorites into a 60-deep Ghosts of Thanksgiving Past gallery. I hope you laugh if you were there and snicker a little bit even if you weren’t. At the very least you can watch us lose our hair. I’ll surely be tasting Jimmy’s deep fried turkey tomorrow as I catch up on work while all my American clients take the day off to stuff their respective faces. Great memories, great friends and trust me kids – there’s no way I’ll miss it two years in a row.

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Wednesday Wadio: The Castaways ‘Liar Liar’


in Wednesday Wadio

I’m not trying to be obscure. I’m not trying to be retro, kitschy or cool. This song made it onto my iPod courtesy of the Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels soundtrack and it’s been haunting me in my car for a few weeks now. Guy Ritchie effectively took a page out of Scorsese’s book with his uncanny ability to dig up obscure old music and give it new life at the movies. After you get over the shock that the first part of this Castaways classic is actually being sung by a man you’re in for an ethereal masterpiece of ‘Garage‘ rock – a genre of which bands like The White Stripes and Hives are direct descendants.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lovzdcIFmCQ&feature=related[/youtube]

I’m pretty sure that the song is firmly lodged into my subconscious because it was a favorite of The Pill DJ at the night’s various locations around Boston. When it was held every Friday at the Upstairs Lounge in North Station my friends and I were frequent and loyal attendees. What a delightful little moment in Beantown nightlife that was. Sigh.

The song reached #12 on the Billboard 100 in 1965 and made the band the epitome of a one hit wonder. They still exist with one original member intact, and in addition to Liar Liar they’ve apparently added ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ to their repertoire and are available for weddings and bar mitzvahs throughout greater Minnesota. You can legally download a full MP3 version of Liar Liar from the Castaways’ website, and if you like what you see in the video make sure that you do – as the compressed audio really doesn’t do this remarkable little song justice. Please listen and enjoy.

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Reality Bites Itself in the Ass


in Television

I finally got Direct TV… any TV… and the holy grail that is American reality television is once again mine after 7 long months of seclusion. I don’t watch a whole lot of it intently, but I do tend to keep it on during the day while I am working and soak a lot of it up through some sort of crapola osmosis. As you can imagine I have made some observations.

People who write MTV in the hopes of getting their ride pimped seem more interested in possessing a reliable car that doesn’t have to be hotwired or towed on a daily basis than having a tropical fish aquarium with a blacklight mounted in their back seat. It’s all well and good to have 6 high definition flat screens in your hatchback, but they won’t really help you when you when you’re stalled at 3am while a meth addict taps at your windshield with a hook. The guys who soup up these cars are extremely good at painting an intricate spider web on the hood of a car, but I’d rather see them get under it. How about a spinoff starring MC Serch entitled ‘Fix my Transmission’?

There’s Something About Miriam is a tipping point. A frightening one. I think the show was inevitable, it just took reality producers 15 years (the genre was technically born in 1992 with the first episode of The Real World) to find a transsexual that could actually fool anybody. More shows are going to feature shocking twists the contestants didn’t sign on for and more humiliated people are going to sue, kill themselves – and even kill others like the guy who’s best friend came out and professed his love for him on Jenny Jones a few years ago. After they got back to their small town, the crushee whacked the crusher. There’s a difference between introducing a surprise guest and introducing mental anguish – and the backlash is coming.

A PE fan since the day in 1986 when I first heard Rebel Without a Pause pumping out of a boom box at JV basketball practice, I have been glad to see Flava Flav’s fortunes increase via his second wind on Surreal Life, Strange Love, Flava of Love and his Comedy Central roast. Let’s face it, the man has a financial responsibility for every sperm that’s ever swum through his sack. I hear that “My 13 Children and Their 5 Mothers Thank God Everyday for Introducing me to Brigitte Nielsen” is currently in development.

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