Saddam's last word: "Ggghhhghghhhlghthththghhhh."
Something about a sled, I think.
But seriously folks. They had to wait for Ford to croak first before executing Saddam cuz the fool woulda pardoned him. Something about a long sartorial nightmare being over. Those blazers with too heavily padded shoulders ... weapons of fashion dysfunction.
This has been a confused mixture of a stereotypical neocon blogger character crossed with Mr. Blackwell's reaction to the execution of Saddam Hussein. Back to your regularly scheduled loud playing of bootleg mp3s and drinking of overpriced beer from the inaptly named "Buy/Low Liquors."
Friday, December 29, 2006
Paging Dr. Frood to the Men's Department
This is a post that should go in the "Celebrity Dreams" blog that Mr. Foojang started a few years ago, but since that never got off the ground, I'll put it here instead.
A few nights ago I dreamed that I was at a big picnic in a forested area in the summertime. It was warm, so I was wearing the standard-issue aging-hipsterino David Cross® cargo shorts and XL t-shirt, but later on in the evening there was going to be a sit-down dinner indoors, for some reason, so I was carrying around a pair of black houndstooth gabardine trousers.
Suddenly I felt a humanoid claw on my shoulder and heard a shrill southern voice exclaim, "Oh no! Those won't do a-tall!"
I spun around, and confronting me was a very perturbed Laura Bush. She snatched the pants from my hands and began scrutinizing them with the rigor of a Texas librarian.
"My word! Just look at these! Tsk! The cuffs are frayed, the hip pocket has a tear in it, and I can see right through both knees! Oh no no no, these pants are NOT acceptable!"
Luckily, the alarm clock rescued me at that time.
A few nights ago I dreamed that I was at a big picnic in a forested area in the summertime. It was warm, so I was wearing the standard-issue aging-hipsterino David Cross® cargo shorts and XL t-shirt, but later on in the evening there was going to be a sit-down dinner indoors, for some reason, so I was carrying around a pair of black houndstooth gabardine trousers.
Suddenly I felt a humanoid claw on my shoulder and heard a shrill southern voice exclaim, "Oh no! Those won't do a-tall!"
I spun around, and confronting me was a very perturbed Laura Bush. She snatched the pants from my hands and began scrutinizing them with the rigor of a Texas librarian.
"My word! Just look at these! Tsk! The cuffs are frayed, the hip pocket has a tear in it, and I can see right through both knees! Oh no no no, these pants are NOT acceptable!"
Luckily, the alarm clock rescued me at that time.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Back reference
Here's a nice back reference to a post from last summer, about the Thorndale Beach Apartments.
Hi Bob! A Chicago Experience
While visiting Chicago, IL, this past August, I managed to hunt down the apartment and office buildings that were used as establishing shots on "The Bob Newhart Show" during the 1970s. Also found the statue that TV Land dedicated to Bob in 2004. A fun little excursion for this diehard fan. Shot on August 21, 2006.
Hi Bob! A Chicago Experience
Holiday Dispatch
from the Land of Always-Night
No, that's not the cover from an old pulp novel -- that's a foto taken earlier today from out my "sun room" window. This is Chicago in December. Actually, this is Chicago between November and April, pretty much. Giant mushrooms sprout from the sidewalks, battered by ice floes bearing hapless Artic adventure-tourists falling from the cornices ... Doc Savage mounting surveillance cameras on every flat surface. Yeah, it's gonna be a long winter.
Season's Affective Disorder Greetings to all my regular readers (how do you stay so regular at this time of year? bran fruitcake?) and random stumblers (special holiday shout-out to all "I Hate Meeces to Pieces" Googlers). I expect this will be the last post until xmas is over, and probably won't get any hits until then anyway, so, mazel tov, and I hope the Baby Jesus doesn't let you down again this year.
Monday, December 18, 2006
All the obvious puns have been taken
As was pointed out to me via email earlier today, I have been "a little off my game" lately. It's true. Even the old familiar sight on the teevy of the SWAT team in action in my home town hasn't perked me up as it should. Although I did enjoy it.
Yeah, I'm talking about Bears defensive thug Tank Johnson's arrest last week in Gurnee on gun charges (six gats, zero FOID). Growing up in Gurnee, I got pretty used to living near various Bears (as well as certain mustachioed ex-head-coaches from certain Super Bowl Dos Equises) so nothing about that incident surprised me particularly much. But it was a nice touch to see helicopter shots of the subdivision across Rte. 132 from my old neighborhood, even if they mostly focused on Mr. Tank's (as Ma Moss is calling him) outsized McMansion wedged into a block mostly full of smallish aging ranch houses and split-levels, most of which did not feature several pit bulls living in the backyard. Although there were some nasty Dobermans around there that I occasionally ran across in the old days.
I said "familiar sight of the SWAT team" back up in the first graf. That's because Gurnee was a little bit more of a lively place in the early to mid 1980s than you might expect from a town of a few thousand brackish Northern Illinois–Southern Wisconsin-type persons. Village Hall called it "The Rural Community of the Future," which apparently was code for "Mayhem Central of Lake County of the Present (if you don't count Waukegan, North Chicago, and Zion ... or Round Lake on a bad Friday in July, any July)."
Just to list a couple of the noteworthy examples, in 1984, one of my classmates burned the high school down in a fit of rage, and a year or two before that, a motorcycle gang leader deliberately blew up his house with himself and his old lady inside, after setting a shotgun booby trap at the front gate (which, luckily for the GFD first responders, didn't work). Another classmate was stabbed to death by a Reagan-discharged mental patient at McDonalds (OK, that happened in Waukegan, so maybe that doesn't count).
Best of all was what happened during my sophomore year in high school. Briefly, what happened was that some nutjob living across the street snapped and robbed a drugstore at gunpoint and holed up at home with some weapons and stolen drugs and started telling the cops he was going to do some shooting at the school. So we got to go on the 1982 version of "crisis lockdown" ... which consisted, for me, of sitting around in German class all afternoon, looking out the window, watching the SWAT team assemble in the teachers' parking lot. Which was, I gotta say, as hella cool as it sounds. Long story short, they stormed the house (which I didn't get to see cuz it was around the corner from that classroom), and it turned out the nut had already offed himself. The end.
That's not the only "cops with big guns and body armor" story I have from my high school years, but I think I'll save the other one for some other post, if it ever becomes topically relevant (aka, tangentially related to a current news event).
The moral of the story, though, if there is one: Quit acting so righteously and indignantly shocked, Gurneeians. You can't spell "Gurnee" without GUN, after all.
Yeah, I'm talking about Bears defensive thug Tank Johnson's arrest last week in Gurnee on gun charges (six gats, zero FOID). Growing up in Gurnee, I got pretty used to living near various Bears (as well as certain mustachioed ex-head-coaches from certain Super Bowl Dos Equises) so nothing about that incident surprised me particularly much. But it was a nice touch to see helicopter shots of the subdivision across Rte. 132 from my old neighborhood, even if they mostly focused on Mr. Tank's (as Ma Moss is calling him) outsized McMansion wedged into a block mostly full of smallish aging ranch houses and split-levels, most of which did not feature several pit bulls living in the backyard. Although there were some nasty Dobermans around there that I occasionally ran across in the old days.
I said "familiar sight of the SWAT team" back up in the first graf. That's because Gurnee was a little bit more of a lively place in the early to mid 1980s than you might expect from a town of a few thousand brackish Northern Illinois–Southern Wisconsin-type persons. Village Hall called it "The Rural Community of the Future," which apparently was code for "Mayhem Central of Lake County of the Present (if you don't count Waukegan, North Chicago, and Zion ... or Round Lake on a bad Friday in July, any July)."
Just to list a couple of the noteworthy examples, in 1984, one of my classmates burned the high school down in a fit of rage, and a year or two before that, a motorcycle gang leader deliberately blew up his house with himself and his old lady inside, after setting a shotgun booby trap at the front gate (which, luckily for the GFD first responders, didn't work). Another classmate was stabbed to death by a Reagan-discharged mental patient at McDonalds (OK, that happened in Waukegan, so maybe that doesn't count).
Best of all was what happened during my sophomore year in high school. Briefly, what happened was that some nutjob living across the street snapped and robbed a drugstore at gunpoint and holed up at home with some weapons and stolen drugs and started telling the cops he was going to do some shooting at the school. So we got to go on the 1982 version of "crisis lockdown" ... which consisted, for me, of sitting around in German class all afternoon, looking out the window, watching the SWAT team assemble in the teachers' parking lot. Which was, I gotta say, as hella cool as it sounds. Long story short, they stormed the house (which I didn't get to see cuz it was around the corner from that classroom), and it turned out the nut had already offed himself. The end.
That's not the only "cops with big guns and body armor" story I have from my high school years, but I think I'll save the other one for some other post, if it ever becomes topically relevant (aka, tangentially related to a current news event).
The moral of the story, though, if there is one: Quit acting so righteously and indignantly shocked, Gurneeians. You can't spell "Gurnee" without GUN, after all.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Christmas is canceled ... no Baby Jesus this year
OK ... the experiment of not hating Christmas is officially over, due to the existence of this. Non-hatred of life itself is now at serious risk, in fact.
!!!WARNING!!! Sheer evil follows. DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT under any circumstances watch this video as far as the point where Santa appears to be going into labor in his sleigh. Mother Mary and Joseph. If this blog had a "safe word," I would call it right now.
Mike Love - Santa's Going to Kokomo
!!!WARNING!!! Sheer evil follows. DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT under any circumstances watch this video as far as the point where Santa appears to be going into labor in his sleigh. Mother Mary and Joseph. If this blog had a "safe word," I would call it right now.
Mike Love - Santa's Going to Kokomo
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Gravity City: Item 1: "Dodge the Thick Goop"
Like I said the other day, stuff falls off of stuff a lot in Chicago. For example, today's Sun-Times contains an account of the following:
Firefighters? Wow, flaming wet concrete! Get Ronny Howard on the horn -- it's time for a sequel to "Backdraft." Not sure what to call it, though.
"Cementdraft"?
"Cotton Candy 2"?
Seven pedestrians were injured Wednesday afternoon in the Loop when wet concrete fell from the 24th floor of a construction site to the street, according to police and firefighters.
Firefighters? Wow, flaming wet concrete! Get Ronny Howard on the horn -- it's time for a sequel to "Backdraft." Not sure what to call it, though.
"Cementdraft"?
"Cotton Candy 2"?
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Writer's Blockhead
Man, I am an uptight person. I'm always obsessing over the food inventory in my freezer, refrigerator, cupboards, etc. If there's too much, then I worry about using it up. Then when I start to use it up, I worry that it's running too low. If I have a bunch of leftovers, I worry about eating them before they go bad. If there aren't any leftovers, I worry about not having any. It's like a George Jetson machine, the crazy thing of not stopping.
I just spent several minutes thinking about something I could cook "ahead" for dinner tomorrow or the next day, just so my refrigerator is fuller, because there's almost nothing on the bottom shelf and it was making me nervous. Finally I just put some bottled water on the top shelf and displaced some stuff from up there to the lower shelves, to thereby provide for the illusion of population.
I'm not even kidding. I'm completely insane. This is just one of many ways that insanity exhibits itself when I'm trying to quit smoking for about the 6th time in the last 60 days. When I'm smoking, I just squint my eyes and say "fffffffuuuuck yyyeeewwwwww" to the kitchen, in between coughing fits.
INSIDE BLOGBALL: By the way, as if I needed a further excuse for the paltry recent posts on this left-headed step-monkey of a blog, I spent several hours last weekend cleaning evil malware from my computer, which I apparently came into on MySpace or YouTube or both. Due to lingering skittishness (as well as plain sickness of staring at the flickering screen, expecting it to break down again), I'm still using this machine at a reduced level of obsessiveness from usual, so the various Previously Promised Multi-Part Posts are getting delayed even more. Plus, how can I write when my parmagiano-reggiano cheese supply is down to zero, and I'm almost out of sliced chicken and multi-grain bread? Not to mention when I got half a head of romaine lettuce that ain't getting any younger, and four mixed-berry yogurts I gotta eat between now and next Monday or they'll turn into pumpkins? Kitchen management for one is a full goddamn time job, muthfuck. I apologize to no one.
I just spent several minutes thinking about something I could cook "ahead" for dinner tomorrow or the next day, just so my refrigerator is fuller, because there's almost nothing on the bottom shelf and it was making me nervous. Finally I just put some bottled water on the top shelf and displaced some stuff from up there to the lower shelves, to thereby provide for the illusion of population.
I'm not even kidding. I'm completely insane. This is just one of many ways that insanity exhibits itself when I'm trying to quit smoking for about the 6th time in the last 60 days. When I'm smoking, I just squint my eyes and say "fffffffuuuuck yyyeeewwwwww" to the kitchen, in between coughing fits.
INSIDE BLOGBALL: By the way, as if I needed a further excuse for the paltry recent posts on this left-headed step-monkey of a blog, I spent several hours last weekend cleaning evil malware from my computer, which I apparently came into on MySpace or YouTube or both. Due to lingering skittishness (as well as plain sickness of staring at the flickering screen, expecting it to break down again), I'm still using this machine at a reduced level of obsessiveness from usual, so the various Previously Promised Multi-Part Posts are getting delayed even more. Plus, how can I write when my parmagiano-reggiano cheese supply is down to zero, and I'm almost out of sliced chicken and multi-grain bread? Not to mention when I got half a head of romaine lettuce that ain't getting any younger, and four mixed-berry yogurts I gotta eat between now and next Monday or they'll turn into pumpkins? Kitchen management for one is a full goddamn time job, muthfuck. I apologize to no one.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
What poopery ... it's hubris, that's what it is ... bloggogance gone wild
No energy or inspiration for a real post, so here's these.
•Adhesive solution for NASA. You know how Space Shuttle tiles are always falling off? I think I have a solution. Egg Beaters. Because that fake shit has to be the stickiest substance ever created by mad scientists. Even if you use canola oil in a teflon-coated pan, you can't get it clean, even if you soak it in the sink half the fucking evening. I think it's made of horse hooves, space-age polymers, and boogers from teh planet Krypton. It only serves you right for eating fake eggs. Life's too short to eat fake eggs. Hell, life's too short, period, so I guess if eating fake eggs makes it feel longer, it might be worth it. And if you could eat Egg Beaters during a four-hour delay at Newark Airport, you would feel goddamned immortal.
•The eighties. There's eighties nostalgia, and then there's eighties nostalgia. Eighties nostalgia for me is this video of Bongwater with Screaming Jay Hawkins. Maybe this was actually in 1990 or even 1991. Anyway, close enough. Screaming Jay Hawkins at Biddy Mulligan's in Chicago was probably the best show I have ever attended. Unbe-goobledy-leevable. Lynda Barry was there. You could ask her if you don't believe me. And here he is prefacing Bongwater covering a Roky Erickson tune.
•More Screaming Jay, dammit. From the same TV show.
•Injustice. Nobody gives enough credit to the damn Sherpas, and it pisses me off. These rich asswipe "adventure tourists" are paying $50,000 a pop to be guided to the summit of Everest, and, meanwhile, the Sherpas are bounding up and down the goddamn mountain, pounding in fixed ropes and hanging ladders for these "North Face" catalog models, and they don't even get to take a cell phone video up there. It's like, "Hey, they have a genetic advantage and their bodies create more red blood cells and they like carrying backpacks full of bottled oxygen," like they're an alien species, so it doesn't count. Tenzing Norgay, bitch! OK, maybe I have been misapplying my college-educated "critical thinking" skills to this Discovery TV series. Or maybe not.
•Kramer in Nepal. "You're all a buncha Sherpas! That's what you are! Fifty years ago, Sir Edmund Hillary woulda had you upside down, with a cerebral edema shoved up your ass! You Sherpas! Oh, does that word scare you? SHERPAS! SHERPAS! SHERPAS!"
•Andy Dick in Nepal. "Well, I think you're justa bag of pooey old gay Sherpas, too! My nose itches. No, inside."
•Gravity City. Moving over to the flattest part of the world, I have an idea for a new running feature for this blog: Gravity City. Because it's pretty obvious that the force of gravity is greater in Chicago than anywhere else. Maybe that's why it's so flat. You can tell the gravity is stronger here because things are always falling off the buildings. I started paying attention to this phenomenon several years ago, and I think it's time to start documenting them in blog form. That should give me a lot of posts, because winter is the "heads up" season in Chicago. Every time the temperature gets up to around freezing, thousands of citizens are buried for weeks under mounds of ice and snow cascading off of skyscrapers like the Grim Reaper's Slushee machine. But it's not just a winter thing -- windows, scaffolding, terracotta tiles, folding chairs, sock monkeys, lame rock star poop, Batman, corrugated cardboard, wooden decks, department store mannequins, foie gras, bound and annotated volumes of Tom Dreesen jokes, bound and gagged Orca whales, counterfeit DVDs, smelt, and circus peanuts are just a few of the things that fall from Chicago buildings on a daily basis. So stay browsed.
•Adhesive solution for NASA. You know how Space Shuttle tiles are always falling off? I think I have a solution. Egg Beaters. Because that fake shit has to be the stickiest substance ever created by mad scientists. Even if you use canola oil in a teflon-coated pan, you can't get it clean, even if you soak it in the sink half the fucking evening. I think it's made of horse hooves, space-age polymers, and boogers from teh planet Krypton. It only serves you right for eating fake eggs. Life's too short to eat fake eggs. Hell, life's too short, period, so I guess if eating fake eggs makes it feel longer, it might be worth it. And if you could eat Egg Beaters during a four-hour delay at Newark Airport, you would feel goddamned immortal.
•The eighties. There's eighties nostalgia, and then there's eighties nostalgia. Eighties nostalgia for me is this video of Bongwater with Screaming Jay Hawkins. Maybe this was actually in 1990 or even 1991. Anyway, close enough. Screaming Jay Hawkins at Biddy Mulligan's in Chicago was probably the best show I have ever attended. Unbe-goobledy-leevable. Lynda Barry was there. You could ask her if you don't believe me. And here he is prefacing Bongwater covering a Roky Erickson tune.
•More Screaming Jay, dammit. From the same TV show.
•Injustice. Nobody gives enough credit to the damn Sherpas, and it pisses me off. These rich asswipe "adventure tourists" are paying $50,000 a pop to be guided to the summit of Everest, and, meanwhile, the Sherpas are bounding up and down the goddamn mountain, pounding in fixed ropes and hanging ladders for these "North Face" catalog models, and they don't even get to take a cell phone video up there. It's like, "Hey, they have a genetic advantage and their bodies create more red blood cells and they like carrying backpacks full of bottled oxygen," like they're an alien species, so it doesn't count. Tenzing Norgay, bitch! OK, maybe I have been misapplying my college-educated "critical thinking" skills to this Discovery TV series. Or maybe not.
•Kramer in Nepal. "You're all a buncha Sherpas! That's what you are! Fifty years ago, Sir Edmund Hillary woulda had you upside down, with a cerebral edema shoved up your ass! You Sherpas! Oh, does that word scare you? SHERPAS! SHERPAS! SHERPAS!"
•Andy Dick in Nepal. "Well, I think you're justa bag of pooey old gay Sherpas, too! My nose itches. No, inside."
•Gravity City. Moving over to the flattest part of the world, I have an idea for a new running feature for this blog: Gravity City. Because it's pretty obvious that the force of gravity is greater in Chicago than anywhere else. Maybe that's why it's so flat. You can tell the gravity is stronger here because things are always falling off the buildings. I started paying attention to this phenomenon several years ago, and I think it's time to start documenting them in blog form. That should give me a lot of posts, because winter is the "heads up" season in Chicago. Every time the temperature gets up to around freezing, thousands of citizens are buried for weeks under mounds of ice and snow cascading off of skyscrapers like the Grim Reaper's Slushee machine. But it's not just a winter thing -- windows, scaffolding, terracotta tiles, folding chairs, sock monkeys, lame rock star poop, Batman, corrugated cardboard, wooden decks, department store mannequins, foie gras, bound and annotated volumes of Tom Dreesen jokes, bound and gagged Orca whales, counterfeit DVDs, smelt, and circus peanuts are just a few of the things that fall from Chicago buildings on a daily basis. So stay browsed.
Friday, December 01, 2006
All I want is what I have coming to me! All I want is my fair share!
So, yeah, it definitely looks like Christmastime today in Chicago. Due to the snow, I mean. And here at CBRAT Central, I've been trying to get a little bit into the Christmas spirit this year, for a change.
I used to like Christmas a lot. I was into the lights, the decorations, all of it. Even the music. But then I got somewhat soured on the whole holiday that one time, when during the first act of the annual ritual viewing of my favorite TV special of all time (and perhaps my favorite thing in any category entirely), the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, my wife kinda dumped me. If turning toward me while sitting on her end of the couch and announcing that she wanted a divorce could be construed as "dumping."
But, shit, that was 10 fucking years ago. (That's 1996, for you math-impaired people out there.) I'm pretty sick and tired of being grouchy and stuff at Christmas.
When I got rendered single and moved to Chicago in 1997, I complained to my friend John R. that I was having a hard time "getting over it." He said to me, "Shit, STDPM, it's going to take you 10 years to get over that." Now John is gone, before the 10 years is even up.
Wow, that's kind of a bummer turn this post has taken. But my point remains. Ten years of being the Charlie Browniest guy I know has been more than enough. So that's my modest goal for this December -- to stop hating Christmas.
Hah! Good luck to me.
Anyway, I'm off to a pretty good start, breaking out the Vince Guaraldi "A Charlie Brown Christmas" record and thinking about how all the dust in my pigpen of an apartment might have been dirt that was once trod upon by Nebuchadnezzar. Sort of makes you want to treat me with a little more respect, doesn't it?
Now you say, "You're an absolute mess!"
Then I say, "On the contrary, I didn't think I looked that good!"
And that's what Christmas is all about.
This post has been brought to you by Dolly Madison. Bartender! Cupcakes and Zingers, all around!
I used to like Christmas a lot. I was into the lights, the decorations, all of it. Even the music. But then I got somewhat soured on the whole holiday that one time, when during the first act of the annual ritual viewing of my favorite TV special of all time (and perhaps my favorite thing in any category entirely), the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, my wife kinda dumped me. If turning toward me while sitting on her end of the couch and announcing that she wanted a divorce could be construed as "dumping."
But, shit, that was 10 fucking years ago. (That's 1996, for you math-impaired people out there.) I'm pretty sick and tired of being grouchy and stuff at Christmas.
When I got rendered single and moved to Chicago in 1997, I complained to my friend John R. that I was having a hard time "getting over it." He said to me, "Shit, STDPM, it's going to take you 10 years to get over that." Now John is gone, before the 10 years is even up.
Wow, that's kind of a bummer turn this post has taken. But my point remains. Ten years of being the Charlie Browniest guy I know has been more than enough. So that's my modest goal for this December -- to stop hating Christmas.
Hah! Good luck to me.
Anyway, I'm off to a pretty good start, breaking out the Vince Guaraldi "A Charlie Brown Christmas" record and thinking about how all the dust in my pigpen of an apartment might have been dirt that was once trod upon by Nebuchadnezzar. Sort of makes you want to treat me with a little more respect, doesn't it?
Now you say, "You're an absolute mess!"
Then I say, "On the contrary, I didn't think I looked that good!"
And that's what Christmas is all about.
This post has been brought to you by Dolly Madison. Bartender! Cupcakes and Zingers, all around!
Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!
Today's Snowy Day in Chicagoland Radio Personality News Today: Grobber Gets Work
El media gossip jefe Roberto Feder (from Fort Lee, New Jersey) writes:
So, the Grobber (best loved for recording former Cubs manager Lee Elia's 1983 profanity-marbled rantcapade for posteriority) has finally been hired. Albeit, by a Waukegan AM station that my mother used to call "Doubleyou Kiss R Ass" ... but work is work, right? Although you probably don't get fringe benefits for three hours a week.
Good move on the name change of the show, however. Especially considering that the former name would only make sense for two weeks a year. But ... are they sure they really want to conduct a radio talk show about pro football ... during the precise time-slot the Bears games are usually scheduled?
Ah, who gives a crap about football anyway? Only three months till Spring Training!
Veteran sportscaster Les Grobstein joins Len Ackerman and "Packer" Dave Rusch as hosts of "Pro Football Showdown" at noon Sunday on NextMedia Group north suburban news/talk WKRS-AM (1220).
The three-hour show, formerly called "Bears-Packers Showdown," is syndicated by SRN Broadcasting & Marketing, based in north suburban Lake Bluff.
So, the Grobber (best loved for recording former Cubs manager Lee Elia's 1983 profanity-marbled rantcapade for posteriority) has finally been hired. Albeit, by a Waukegan AM station that my mother used to call "Doubleyou Kiss R Ass" ... but work is work, right? Although you probably don't get fringe benefits for three hours a week.
Good move on the name change of the show, however. Especially considering that the former name would only make sense for two weeks a year. But ... are they sure they really want to conduct a radio talk show about pro football ... during the precise time-slot the Bears games are usually scheduled?
Ah, who gives a crap about football anyway? Only three months till Spring Training!
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Well, duh
| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop." | |
| The Midland | |
| The Northeast | |
| Philadelphia | |
| The South | |
| The West | |
| Boston | |
| North Central | |
| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes | |
Yes, I come from the portion of the country where they pronounce things correctly. Well ... except that many of us say "ruff" for "roof," which kind of bugs me for some reason. And I absolutely refuse to pronounce "Chicago" as "ShuhCAWgo" -- because there simply is no fucking way you can get that vowel sound out of a mere "a," and I don't give a shit who disagrees.
Also -- hey, quiz-making asshole or assholes, I gotta quesshun fer you (or youse). Why the fuck would I be annoyed to be asked whether I come from Wisconsin or Chicago? You gotta prahblim wit eeder a doze fine playsiz? Whyncha come over by here and say dat?
I AM from Chicago, ya knockwad! And I grew up 5 miles from da Wiscahhhnsin border! Ya jerk.
There, I feel better. A little unwarranted hostility is pleasant during periods of writer's blecch (see immediately previous post).
Writer's Blecch
I would do a post about having writer's block, because I currently have a pretty severe case of it, but I think that's kind of technically impossible.
Plus, one is wrapped up in "building" a new "product" for one's real job, and that's consuming most of one's word-manipulation capacities at this time.
In the meanwhile, Chicago sports fans, enjoy a new-ish web comic strip by the creator of "Palehose Six," Carl Skanberg:
Plus, one is wrapped up in "building" a new "product" for one's real job, and that's consuming most of one's word-manipulation capacities at this time.
In the meanwhile, Chicago sports fans, enjoy a new-ish web comic strip by the creator of "Palehose Six," Carl Skanberg:
Smells Like Mascot
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
I might be a Swedish redneck, cuz the nut don't fall far from the tree, ja, sure
What my moms wrote today:
Hi!
Your dad made reservations for Julmiddag, and I sent the money today. Don't forget -- Dec. 10 - 3 p.m. at Chevy Chase. (o: Probably won't have any lutefisk, though. A lot of the old Swedes were complaining about that last year. Also -- gasp! -- no glogg! Speaking of which, your dad says there's a whole bottle in the gun safe. Between that and the pear wine, we can get snockered tomorrow!
Love,
Mom
Sunday, November 19, 2006
"If I Didn't Do It (And I Didn't) Here's How I Didn't Do It," by Axl Rose as not told to Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss
After nearly ten years of promising that the album "Chinese Democracy" is just about to be released, Axl Rose has become the preeminent master of making a career out of not getting stuff done. And after the recent cancellation of a Guns 'N' Roses show due to safety officials' concern about the proximity of stage pyrotechnics to the band's firewater, Axl has begun plowing new fertile ground in the rich earth of celebrity inactivity.
Now, hot on the heels of much media hype for O.J. Simpson's new book, "If I Did It, Here's How I Did It (Psst, I Totally Did It)," offered here as a CBRAT exclusive are some excerpts from the ultimate "Where's Chinese Democracy?" story, "If I Didn't Do It (And I Didn't) Here's How I Didn't Do It," by Axl Rose as not told to Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss, soon not to be published by anyone.
Chapter One
The fire marshals have taken away my booze. This interview is over.
Chapter Two through Chapter Seventeen
Ibid.
Chapter Eighteen
Another day in the studio. Be a good man and pass the heroin.
Chapter Nineteen
Duhhh.
Chapter Twenty
Wore out my tenth vinyl copy of Ethel Merman's Greatest Hits looking for vocal inspiration.
Chapter Twenty-One
The dry cleaners lost my favorite bandana. Chinese Dumbasscracy.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Totally stuck. Should there be three "whoa whoa whoa"'s or four in the chorus?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Passed a KFC on the way to the studio. Reminded me of Buckethead. Called off the session.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Do you know where the fuck you are?!" Long story short, I didn't.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mind totally blown by realization that my name is an anagram of "Oral Sex."
Chapter Twenty-Six through Chapter Thirty-Three
Ibid.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Slash came over to tell me Billie Joe Armstrong still wets the bed.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Spent the day in the batting cage with Mike Piazza. Failed to learn to lay off the high heat.
Chapter Thirty-Six
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa." No, that's too many. Back to the drawing board.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The fire marshals have taken away my drawing board. Fuck it. I give up.
Now, hot on the heels of much media hype for O.J. Simpson's new book, "If I Did It, Here's How I Did It (Psst, I Totally Did It)," offered here as a CBRAT exclusive are some excerpts from the ultimate "Where's Chinese Democracy?" story, "If I Didn't Do It (And I Didn't) Here's How I Didn't Do It," by Axl Rose as not told to Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss, soon not to be published by anyone.
Chapter One
The fire marshals have taken away my booze. This interview is over.
Chapter Two through Chapter Seventeen
Ibid.
Chapter Eighteen
Another day in the studio. Be a good man and pass the heroin.
Chapter Nineteen
Duhhh.
Chapter Twenty
Wore out my tenth vinyl copy of Ethel Merman's Greatest Hits looking for vocal inspiration.
Chapter Twenty-One
The dry cleaners lost my favorite bandana. Chinese Dumbasscracy.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Totally stuck. Should there be three "whoa whoa whoa"'s or four in the chorus?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Passed a KFC on the way to the studio. Reminded me of Buckethead. Called off the session.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Do you know where the fuck you are?!" Long story short, I didn't.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mind totally blown by realization that my name is an anagram of "Oral Sex."
Chapter Twenty-Six through Chapter Thirty-Three
Ibid.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Slash came over to tell me Billie Joe Armstrong still wets the bed.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Spent the day in the batting cage with Mike Piazza. Failed to learn to lay off the high heat.
Chapter Thirty-Six
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa." No, that's too many. Back to the drawing board.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The fire marshals have taken away my drawing board. Fuck it. I give up.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire
I have some sad news to pass on.
Accomplished mail and stamp artist, painter, zine publisher, and friend of mine for over 16 years, John Rininger, died a few days ago at the age of 45.
We collaborated on numerous projects over the years, including the notorious magazine, Even Paranoiacs Can Have Enemies. He taught me most of what I know about zine publishing and introduced me to a lot of interesting people. He also fed me a lot of books that have had a huge impact on me, including the works of Max Stirner, Emil Cioran, and Eric Gill. He could be a very challenging and exasperating guy to deal with, but he was a big part of my life, and I'm going to miss him.
Goodbye, John R.
(The headline of this post is a translation of a Latin palindrome used in one of John's last zines, Catalyst Komics 807, published just a couple months ago.)
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
I'm in ur browzer, blogging my blog ... but barely
Pardon the lack of new material for the last couple of weeks. I'm gonna make up for that soon. But probably not until after this week is over, because I'm still recovering from my vacation and my brain is extremely tired. By the middle of the weekend, I should have the initial installment(s) of a new multi-part post in the classic "We Had Some Ultimately Non-Fatal Misadventures on the Way to Better Understanding of Oneself Blah Blah Blah, and Here's a Humorous Telling of the Tale" genre. Subject: Super Karaoke Fun Time Band road trip from Jersey City to Philadelphia, Saturday, November 11, 2006.
But that won't be until Friday afternoon, at the earliest. For now, here's a brand spanking new video for the song "Fire Needs Oxygen," co-starring members of the Jersey City Bridge and Pummel women's roller derby league and One O. Ball and a new set of Chains. It's kind of a preview of the upcoming motion picture of the same name, in a not all that really sort of way.
Otis Ball and the New Chains - Fire Needs Oxygen
POSTSCRIPT: Heh heh. I said spanking. Google perverts, strap it on and cinch it up, here! We need to macaca the Sitemeter stats on this thing.
But that won't be until Friday afternoon, at the earliest. For now, here's a brand spanking new video for the song "Fire Needs Oxygen," co-starring members of the Jersey City Bridge and Pummel women's roller derby league and One O. Ball and a new set of Chains. It's kind of a preview of the upcoming motion picture of the same name, in a not all that really sort of way.
Otis Ball and the New Chains - Fire Needs Oxygen
POSTSCRIPT: Heh heh. I said spanking. Google perverts, strap it on and cinch it up, here! We need to macaca the Sitemeter stats on this thing.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Travel can be broadening ... of the annoyance of me
Just got home from Jersey, after sitting thru a four-hour delay at the Newark Airport for a mystery reason. United Airlines, consider yourself disliked by one very powerful blogger.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Potpourri
Just a semi-random sprinkling of itemery here, to get some blogging in before I leave on the Great November Jersey City Road Trip, '06 version, this weekend.
• Dick Biondi jobful again. Robert Feder of "The Bright One" reports that oldies station doubleyou whatever it is (94.7 FM) has rescued legendary deejay Dick Biondi from Dante's first circle of aging radio talent Gehenna (aka, unemployment) to host a nightime show. Along with their recent hire of John Records "Yeah, I've made a career for 40 years based on pointing out that my real middle name is in fact 'Records'" Landecker, that makes three actual local human beings on that station. The third? Oh come on, it's Scott McKay. You didn't know that? I have more things to say about Scott McKay than Dick Biondi (whose appeal, frankly, I still don't get), so this bullet point is now about him. McKay kind of lost me when he admitted on-air during one of his first shifts for the station that he didn't really know much about, you know, rock music made between roughly 1954 and 1976 ... as in, "oldies" music ... but gee whiz, he was sure game for a college try! It also galled me when he'd say idiotic stuff like, in reference to the Kinks' "Victoria," for example, he said, "Wow, that came out in 1969? I always thought that was much more recent, like 1980 or something." But I guess he's OK. He plays what Scott "I'm the industry genius in New York who tapes and syndicates all the rest of the shifts" Shannon tells him to. At least they have a relatively large playlist, perhaps in an attempt to answer the plea of Carl from The Simpsons: "How 'bout some new oldies, geniuses?"
• KISS-tastrophe. I dropped a deuce when I heard this one. Our correspondent in New Jersey reports that his local Best Buy has sold out of the new KISS "Kissology - Volume 1 (1974-1977)" DVD box set, which was released on (skeddy, keeds!) Halloween. Allegedly, they sold 160 copies in two days.
• Maybe this one will be on volume two. In this YouTube embedded veddeo from 1979, enjoy Peter Criss and his buddy Johnny Walker Black having some trouble with the words (and, apparently, general theme, tenor, mood, and implications thereof, from, and within) to token chick ballad, "Beth."
• Paging Dr. Frood. I dreamed last night that I was at a big party in some kind of barn on a sprawling estate someplace, and I had an embarrassing moment with Keith Richards. Yes, Keith was at the party, and so was Mick. Jagger. There was a pizza on a table, and Keith and I both kept trying to grab the same slice. I'd go for one, and he'd reach at the same time, and then we'd mumble "sorry" and move to another one and the same thing would happen. It was like the pizza equivalent of the awkward hallway dance when you're trying to pass somebody coming from the other direction.
• No sir. One time about 10 years ago I was sitting in a crummy apartment next to the projects in Champaign watching a bunch of black gang bangers play Dungeons and Dragons (I shit you not) while I waited for my "friend" to get back with "some used books" I was buying from him. Somebody asked me what I did for a living and I mentioned something about how I used to be a lawyer but I got fed up with the lying bastards. One guy turned to face me and said, "My lawyer got me off of two counts of Murder One. I don't think he was lying to me." I wasn't sure what that meant, but I shut up real fast.
• Back in the New York groove. Friend of the Blog "Mr. Jacobson" (or is it "-sen"?; I can never remember) relates that his downstairs neighbor where he used to live in Northwest Edgewater or Southwest Rogers Park or wherever the hell it's called there, used to suffer under the delusion that she was the lover and soulmate of Ace Frehley. That's all there is to this story. Anyway, under the makeup, Ace looks like a Ramone in this veddeo.
• They really really hate them. The numero uno Google referral phrase for this blog for the past several weeks has been "I hate meeces to pieces." I wish I had more to say on the subject that I didn't have to look up on Wikipedia to come up with. The subject of Mr. Jinks the cat hating Pixie and Dixie the mice, that is. In their eponymous(e) Hanna-Barbera cartoon, that is. Which was produced from 1958 to 1962 but lived on for decades more in reruns. Featured one of my favorite cartoon voice artists of all time, Daws Butler. (Of course, Mel Blanc was the king, and June Foray and Stan Freberg did great work as well, but I digress. If you don't already know about those people you probably do not care. The Daws Butler wiki-bio is actually worth reading, though. Because I say so.) And then there was also Don Messick, the Baba Looey to Butler's Quick Draw McGraw. And come on, he did Scooby Doo. I mean, not in the Rick Santorum way. OK, maybe I'll just wrap this bullet point up.
• By the way. I hate it when people give me or anyone else shit about split infinitives. Everyone except the nuns that taught English to the baby boom generation -- and the people taught by them -- has joined the consensus that they're "unobjectionable." I like what Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says: "There has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive." Which is probably why every person I've heard object to them proclaims that they are objectionable because Sister Inguinal Hernia said so.
• Dick Biondi jobful again. Robert Feder of "The Bright One" reports that oldies station doubleyou whatever it is (94.7 FM) has rescued legendary deejay Dick Biondi from Dante's first circle of aging radio talent Gehenna (aka, unemployment) to host a nightime show. Along with their recent hire of John Records "Yeah, I've made a career for 40 years based on pointing out that my real middle name is in fact 'Records'" Landecker, that makes three actual local human beings on that station. The third? Oh come on, it's Scott McKay. You didn't know that? I have more things to say about Scott McKay than Dick Biondi (whose appeal, frankly, I still don't get), so this bullet point is now about him. McKay kind of lost me when he admitted on-air during one of his first shifts for the station that he didn't really know much about, you know, rock music made between roughly 1954 and 1976 ... as in, "oldies" music ... but gee whiz, he was sure game for a college try! It also galled me when he'd say idiotic stuff like, in reference to the Kinks' "Victoria," for example, he said, "Wow, that came out in 1969? I always thought that was much more recent, like 1980 or something." But I guess he's OK. He plays what Scott "I'm the industry genius in New York who tapes and syndicates all the rest of the shifts" Shannon tells him to. At least they have a relatively large playlist, perhaps in an attempt to answer the plea of Carl from The Simpsons: "How 'bout some new oldies, geniuses?"
• KISS-tastrophe. I dropped a deuce when I heard this one. Our correspondent in New Jersey reports that his local Best Buy has sold out of the new KISS "Kissology - Volume 1 (1974-1977)" DVD box set, which was released on (skeddy, keeds!) Halloween. Allegedly, they sold 160 copies in two days.
• Maybe this one will be on volume two. In this YouTube embedded veddeo from 1979, enjoy Peter Criss and his buddy Johnny Walker Black having some trouble with the words (and, apparently, general theme, tenor, mood, and implications thereof, from, and within) to token chick ballad, "Beth."
• Paging Dr. Frood. I dreamed last night that I was at a big party in some kind of barn on a sprawling estate someplace, and I had an embarrassing moment with Keith Richards. Yes, Keith was at the party, and so was Mick. Jagger. There was a pizza on a table, and Keith and I both kept trying to grab the same slice. I'd go for one, and he'd reach at the same time, and then we'd mumble "sorry" and move to another one and the same thing would happen. It was like the pizza equivalent of the awkward hallway dance when you're trying to pass somebody coming from the other direction.
• No sir. One time about 10 years ago I was sitting in a crummy apartment next to the projects in Champaign watching a bunch of black gang bangers play Dungeons and Dragons (I shit you not) while I waited for my "friend" to get back with "some used books" I was buying from him. Somebody asked me what I did for a living and I mentioned something about how I used to be a lawyer but I got fed up with the lying bastards. One guy turned to face me and said, "My lawyer got me off of two counts of Murder One. I don't think he was lying to me." I wasn't sure what that meant, but I shut up real fast.
• Back in the New York groove. Friend of the Blog "Mr. Jacobson" (or is it "-sen"?; I can never remember) relates that his downstairs neighbor where he used to live in Northwest Edgewater or Southwest Rogers Park or wherever the hell it's called there, used to suffer under the delusion that she was the lover and soulmate of Ace Frehley. That's all there is to this story. Anyway, under the makeup, Ace looks like a Ramone in this veddeo.
• They really really hate them. The numero uno Google referral phrase for this blog for the past several weeks has been "I hate meeces to pieces." I wish I had more to say on the subject that I didn't have to look up on Wikipedia to come up with. The subject of Mr. Jinks the cat hating Pixie and Dixie the mice, that is. In their eponymous(e) Hanna-Barbera cartoon, that is. Which was produced from 1958 to 1962 but lived on for decades more in reruns. Featured one of my favorite cartoon voice artists of all time, Daws Butler. (Of course, Mel Blanc was the king, and June Foray and Stan Freberg did great work as well, but I digress. If you don't already know about those people you probably do not care. The Daws Butler wiki-bio is actually worth reading, though. Because I say so.) And then there was also Don Messick, the Baba Looey to Butler's Quick Draw McGraw. And come on, he did Scooby Doo. I mean, not in the Rick Santorum way. OK, maybe I'll just wrap this bullet point up.
• By the way. I hate it when people give me or anyone else shit about split infinitives. Everyone except the nuns that taught English to the baby boom generation -- and the people taught by them -- has joined the consensus that they're "unobjectionable." I like what Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says: "There has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive." Which is probably why every person I've heard object to them proclaims that they are objectionable because Sister Inguinal Hernia said so.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Celebrity Birthdays, or, Wednesday's Child Is Full of Wooooo
Just a few of the celebrated people born on this date --
Larry Flynt
Anthony Kiedis
Lyle Lovett
Kinky Friedman
Bo Bice (!)
Bobby "The Brain" Heenan (!!!)
Marcia "Simpsons; Bob Newhart Show" Wallace
Rick "one-armed drummer from Def Leppard" Allen
Barbara "Hill Street Blues" Bosson
Jenny "naked blonde chick" McCarthy
Lynne "CNN Headline News" Russell
and
Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss.
Yep, we here at CBRAT have begun our 40th year on earth, and you can bet we're really pumped. Great. Yeah. Getting closer to death is great, and the time just keeps moving faster and faster. Fantastic.
Not a bad list of celebs, though.
Larry Flynt
Anthony Kiedis
Lyle Lovett
Kinky Friedman
Bo Bice (!)
Bobby "The Brain" Heenan (!!!)
Marcia "Simpsons; Bob Newhart Show" Wallace
Rick "one-armed drummer from Def Leppard" Allen
Barbara "Hill Street Blues" Bosson
Jenny "naked blonde chick" McCarthy
Lynne "CNN Headline News" Russell
and
Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss.
Yep, we here at CBRAT have begun our 40th year on earth, and you can bet we're really pumped. Great. Yeah. Getting closer to death is great, and the time just keeps moving faster and faster. Fantastic.
Not a bad list of celebs, though.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Time to change time again
Uh, I can never remember. It's fall forward and spring back, right?
It doesn't really matter. I might as well leave the clocks where they are, or just shut them off completely. I have nothing approaching a rigid schedule, anyway. I come and go more or less at will, mostly sitting still in front of a flickering screen of some kind ... oh yeah, I guess there's a reason to change the clocks: So I can know when it's time to watch TV. Maybe I should just finally get that Tivo I've been resolving to get for about three years now. Then time will finally mean nothing.
And time, or at least TV, stands still during the off-season anyway, especially on days after nights in which, to paraphrase Al Pacino in Godfather 2, this old man drank too much wine. Today was the first baseball-less Saturday in over six months, and I spent half the afternoon in a hung-over stupor fruitlessly riding the remote. Which was not pretty, because I just can't get into college football. After resorting to watching an episode on the Create network of Lidia the crazy fat bald Italian chef making gnocchi for about the fourth time, I realized that I was no longer very excited about getting an extra hour this weekend. Then I took another nap.
It's a challenge stuffing 4 ounces of living into a 10-pound bag.
It doesn't really matter. I might as well leave the clocks where they are, or just shut them off completely. I have nothing approaching a rigid schedule, anyway. I come and go more or less at will, mostly sitting still in front of a flickering screen of some kind ... oh yeah, I guess there's a reason to change the clocks: So I can know when it's time to watch TV. Maybe I should just finally get that Tivo I've been resolving to get for about three years now. Then time will finally mean nothing.
And time, or at least TV, stands still during the off-season anyway, especially on days after nights in which, to paraphrase Al Pacino in Godfather 2, this old man drank too much wine. Today was the first baseball-less Saturday in over six months, and I spent half the afternoon in a hung-over stupor fruitlessly riding the remote. Which was not pretty, because I just can't get into college football. After resorting to watching an episode on the Create network of Lidia the crazy fat bald Italian chef making gnocchi for about the fourth time, I realized that I was no longer very excited about getting an extra hour this weekend. Then I took another nap.
It's a challenge stuffing 4 ounces of living into a 10-pound bag.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Baseball is now over
In case you were wondering, statistically speaking, the 06 St. Louis Cardinals rank among the worst champions of all time. Their numbers are terrible. It's widely believed (including by me) that they got into the playoffs as a fluke and didn't deserve to be there. And then they mowed em down. Buncha fucked up ignint and injured rednecks, with a midget at short, and a pissy midget at that, no sense a humor atall. Wow, I hate them, but I'm glad they won. Oughta piss a lot of sports nerds off.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
A Brief Stupid Dispatch from Kolickybabistan
Everyone on-jumping bandwagon of stupid fake Borats this days. Make example, thinkly veingled secret Naked Raygun show ... so why should this blog except? (Besides sheer stupidly, that is.) Yes!
Onlies, I, Stronger Than Goat Beet Moss-Covered-Roof-House, am ripping off instead original dimwitted eurasian web yokel, Mahir. Straight to bullock's anus, my people alway fable-tell. Watch out, he kiss you. You need get shot of tetanus. Is favorite Kolickybabistanian drinking game.
I like musics. Here is rare nougat from smoked hot Dekalbistan skomorokhs scene, in oval of 1987. Itinerant rascals Otis Ball & The Chains make rehearse of classical Kulak protest song, "My Tiny Little Member Tender, Yes?", using new high-tech windmill stole from Industrial Commisariat for energie juices make go electric balalaika for you enjoy. Is nice. Dos equis your bongo.
Otis Ball & the Chains - Try a Little Tenderness
Onlies, I, Stronger Than Goat Beet Moss-Covered-Roof-House, am ripping off instead original dimwitted eurasian web yokel, Mahir. Straight to bullock's anus, my people alway fable-tell. Watch out, he kiss you. You need get shot of tetanus. Is favorite Kolickybabistanian drinking game.
I like musics. Here is rare nougat from smoked hot Dekalbistan skomorokhs scene, in oval of 1987. Itinerant rascals Otis Ball & The Chains make rehearse of classical Kulak protest song, "My Tiny Little Member Tender, Yes?", using new high-tech windmill stole from Industrial Commisariat for energie juices make go electric balalaika for you enjoy. Is nice. Dos equis your bongo.
Otis Ball & the Chains - Try a Little Tenderness
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Otis Ball & the Chains - Rat Fink 1986
And now, because you didn't ask for it not to be posted, more vintage OB & the Classic Chains.
Friday, October 20, 2006
It's the Fucking World Series, Nurse Ratched: Yeah Hup, Tigers! YouTube Mixtape
It's World Series time, and in the easily misinterpreted words of Randle Patrick McMurphy, "Somebody get me a fucking wiener before I die!"
In honor of the Motor City hosting the Fall Classic for the first time in a little while, here's these. Turn up the speakers.
MC5 - Kick Out The Jams
KISS - Detroit Rock City (Paul Lynde Special)
Iggy & The Stooges - TV Eye/1970 (Cincinnati Pop Festival -- if you watch only one embedded YouTube video on this blog this week, make it "Charles Manson's Birthday," but if you watch two, make this the second one)
Ted Nugent - Wango Tango (also has suburban Chicago ties -- we miss you, Ma Nugent)
Suzi Quatro - 48 Crash
Funkadelic - Cosmic Slop
Special Bonus: Radio Birdman - TV Eye (not from Detroit, but the Australian Detroit Sound kicks ass)
And Because Too Much Is Never Enough: Radio Birdman - New Race (Yeah hup!)
In honor of the Motor City hosting the Fall Classic for the first time in a little while, here's these. Turn up the speakers.
MC5 - Kick Out The Jams
KISS - Detroit Rock City (Paul Lynde Special)
Iggy & The Stooges - TV Eye/1970 (Cincinnati Pop Festival -- if you watch only one embedded YouTube video on this blog this week, make it "Charles Manson's Birthday," but if you watch two, make this the second one)
Ted Nugent - Wango Tango (also has suburban Chicago ties -- we miss you, Ma Nugent)
Suzi Quatro - 48 Crash
Funkadelic - Cosmic Slop
Special Bonus: Radio Birdman - TV Eye (not from Detroit, but the Australian Detroit Sound kicks ass)
And Because Too Much Is Never Enough: Radio Birdman - New Race (Yeah hup!)
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Do You Remember Rock and Roll Public Access Video? (STD/TV: Sorta Part Two, Sorta Part One, if You Don't Count the Earlier Tease Post as Part One)
Ah, anniversaries! They're the stuff of remembering things that happened a round-number's-worth of years ago.
Most people like to commemorate the happy anniversaries -- weddings, graduations, formations of businesseseses -- but I like to pause now and then to mark the passage of blocks of time since the occurrence of various hurtful, humiliating, and disastrous things, too. Maybe even moreso. There sure are more of those to remember than the good times.
And here's the story of another one. Maybe it really even happened the way I'm about to tell it. You'll have to take my word for it.
It was Autumn 1986, and my favorite ex-Cub, Bill Buckner, had just blown Game 6 of the World Series for the Red Sox (speaking of bad anniversaries relived over and over for eternity). Anyway, I was spending my evenings hosting a late-night public access talk show on the _______ cable system's STD/TV channel. I think it stood for Standard Television Display Television, but I'm not sure.
The name of my show was STD/PM, and it was pretty popular. Well, my mom said it was good. She also used to say that girls smiled when I walked into a room because they liked me, and not because they were stifling a mocking laugh. I guess that's also why they made those sinus infection noises with their noses and excused themselves right away ... but I'm digressing here.
So one day station management decided -- several years behind the rest of the nation -- that music videos were the new big thing, and it was time for STD/TV to join the videolution. They killed my talk show to make room for the new format, but they were willing to let me stay on as head veejay. I was in no position to refuse.
Now I just had to choose what to use to launch STD/TV's Music Video Cable Access Now With Video Featuring Music. You know, our "Video Killed the Radio Star." But I needed a fresh hook. The premiere was set for November 12, so I headed for the men's room and grabbed an almanac.
What happened on November 12 in history? Let's see. A lot. 1918 -- Austria becomes a republic. 1927 -- Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party AND the Holland Tunnel opens. 1969 -- My Lai. Ooh, maybe a bit TOO negative. But what's this? 1934 -- Charles Manson is born.
Bingo.
Now, Charles Manson's 52nd birthday was not exactly a round number, but I had been led to understand that Mr. Manson was very fond of card tricks, and there are 52 cards in a standard deck (sans Jokers), so ...
STD/TV was far from an award-winning public access cable channel, but it had a pretty phenomenal video library. With minutes to airtime, I located the perfect video. At the time, I didn't know much about it, except that it was by an obscure band from Hoboken called Otis Ball & The Chains. And the name of the song was "Charles Manson's Birthday."
The rest is history. Painful, painful history. Long story short, that was my last day in the employ of STD/TV.
I was really disappointed I didn't get to stick around a bit longer to play the follow-up hit, "Carl Mannberg's Bar Mitzvah" ... although that wouldn't really make a lot of sense anyway, because I'm pretty sure "Carl Mannberg" is a Swedish name.
Hey, by the way, what do you call a deaf Swede? Hard of herring!
We would also have accepted, "Vutever y'vunt! He can't hear ya anyvay!"
OK, why is Count Dracula second-guessing my punchlines now? Never mind, just watch this video.
Thanks to the magic of YouTube: Otis Ball & The Chains perform "Charles Manson's Birthday!"
Coming soon: On November 12, 2006 -- STD/TV returns!
Most people like to commemorate the happy anniversaries -- weddings, graduations, formations of businesseseses -- but I like to pause now and then to mark the passage of blocks of time since the occurrence of various hurtful, humiliating, and disastrous things, too. Maybe even moreso. There sure are more of those to remember than the good times.
And here's the story of another one. Maybe it really even happened the way I'm about to tell it. You'll have to take my word for it.
It was Autumn 1986, and my favorite ex-Cub, Bill Buckner, had just blown Game 6 of the World Series for the Red Sox (speaking of bad anniversaries relived over and over for eternity). Anyway, I was spending my evenings hosting a late-night public access talk show on the _______ cable system's STD/TV channel. I think it stood for Standard Television Display Television, but I'm not sure.
The name of my show was STD/PM, and it was pretty popular. Well, my mom said it was good. She also used to say that girls smiled when I walked into a room because they liked me, and not because they were stifling a mocking laugh. I guess that's also why they made those sinus infection noises with their noses and excused themselves right away ... but I'm digressing here.
So one day station management decided -- several years behind the rest of the nation -- that music videos were the new big thing, and it was time for STD/TV to join the videolution. They killed my talk show to make room for the new format, but they were willing to let me stay on as head veejay. I was in no position to refuse.
Now I just had to choose what to use to launch STD/TV's Music Video Cable Access Now With Video Featuring Music. You know, our "Video Killed the Radio Star." But I needed a fresh hook. The premiere was set for November 12, so I headed for the men's room and grabbed an almanac.
What happened on November 12 in history? Let's see. A lot. 1918 -- Austria becomes a republic. 1927 -- Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party AND the Holland Tunnel opens. 1969 -- My Lai. Ooh, maybe a bit TOO negative. But what's this? 1934 -- Charles Manson is born.
Bingo.
Now, Charles Manson's 52nd birthday was not exactly a round number, but I had been led to understand that Mr. Manson was very fond of card tricks, and there are 52 cards in a standard deck (sans Jokers), so ...
STD/TV was far from an award-winning public access cable channel, but it had a pretty phenomenal video library. With minutes to airtime, I located the perfect video. At the time, I didn't know much about it, except that it was by an obscure band from Hoboken called Otis Ball & The Chains. And the name of the song was "Charles Manson's Birthday."
The rest is history. Painful, painful history. Long story short, that was my last day in the employ of STD/TV.
I was really disappointed I didn't get to stick around a bit longer to play the follow-up hit, "Carl Mannberg's Bar Mitzvah" ... although that wouldn't really make a lot of sense anyway, because I'm pretty sure "Carl Mannberg" is a Swedish name.
Hey, by the way, what do you call a deaf Swede? Hard of herring!
We would also have accepted, "Vutever y'vunt! He can't hear ya anyvay!"
OK, why is Count Dracula second-guessing my punchlines now? Never mind, just watch this video.
Thanks to the magic of YouTube: Otis Ball & The Chains perform "Charles Manson's Birthday!"
Coming soon: On November 12, 2006 -- STD/TV returns!
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Flash! Exclusive Bulletin! The (Imminent) Return of STD/TV!
Colicky Baby Records and Tapes is proud to announce, now, a special celebration in honor of the 20th anniversary of STD/TV. It was Nov 13, 1986 and STD/TV was on the air! Or ... cable. There must be some air in cables? I think they use satellites. Although there's no air in space. And it was public access cable. I don't think they have satellites. Anyway ... The very first video aired cabled was "Charles Manson's Birthday" by Otis Ball & the Chains.
The response was overwhelming. We were immediately removed from the air. Cable. Public access.
But on Nov 13, 2006, we return! And we're coming back with a world premiere! The debut of Otis Ball & the New Chains with two brand new videos!! (That's one exclamation point per video!)
Bookmark this blog and return often. Yes. Always.
Coming soon: Details! Soon!
The response was overwhelming. We were immediately removed from the air. Cable. Public access.
But on Nov 13, 2006, we return! And we're coming back with a world premiere! The debut of Otis Ball & the New Chains with two brand new videos!! (That's one exclamation point per video!)
Bookmark this blog and return often. Yes. Always.
Coming soon: Details! Soon!
Friday, October 13, 2006
The Name of This Song Is Not "Bernadette" -- Doing Battle with a Dead Medium
I don't have a CD player in my car, or even a cassette deck, and I am so far away from having enough energy or patience to set myself up with one of them iPod radio magillicuddies that you wouldn't believe it. Three or four days a week I drive 25 miles to and from work, which takes about an hour each direction.
Therefore, I listen to the radio a lot. Radio today is perhaps the most dreaded mass medium of all. The vast majority of it is horrible, and getting worse every year. Nobody wants to listen to the radio anymore, and I don't blame them.
But, a lot of the time, I enjoy the challenge. I like to confront radio head on. I ain't takin' no guff from no dilapidated mass medium!
There are a couple Chicago rock stations that purport to be special, and occasionally they play something good. There is a decent oldies station with a pretty big playlist. But the preset buttons get a hell of a workout from me on every commute. It's like hunting snipe. And since I only have a few preset buttons in my crappy car, I've learned how many pushes of the tuning button up or down it takes to get to the next station that might, maybe, possibly be playing something I can stand to listen to, or, maybe even like. So when I run out of presets to monitor, I'm flipping two up or eight down to try another one. Still, sometimes I can't even find a single passable commercial radio station that isn't playing ... a commercial.
In Chicago, we are lucky to have several very good noncommercial stations, and I'm lucky enough to be able to tune many of them in -- among them, WNUR, WLUW, WZRD, WDCB -- but their programming is erratic, as it should be, and their geographic coverage areas are mostly pretty limited. Although sometimes I can leave it on one of those stations for the whole trip.
I don't listen to WBEZ.
So, yeah, that's how the commute generally goes. Plus, whenever any Four Tops song comes on the oldies station, no matter which song, I like to yell "BERNADETTE!!!" at the top of my lungs, especially in the summertime when I have the window rolled down.
When they come to take me away, you can say you saw it coming.
Therefore, I listen to the radio a lot. Radio today is perhaps the most dreaded mass medium of all. The vast majority of it is horrible, and getting worse every year. Nobody wants to listen to the radio anymore, and I don't blame them.
But, a lot of the time, I enjoy the challenge. I like to confront radio head on. I ain't takin' no guff from no dilapidated mass medium!
There are a couple Chicago rock stations that purport to be special, and occasionally they play something good. There is a decent oldies station with a pretty big playlist. But the preset buttons get a hell of a workout from me on every commute. It's like hunting snipe. And since I only have a few preset buttons in my crappy car, I've learned how many pushes of the tuning button up or down it takes to get to the next station that might, maybe, possibly be playing something I can stand to listen to, or, maybe even like. So when I run out of presets to monitor, I'm flipping two up or eight down to try another one. Still, sometimes I can't even find a single passable commercial radio station that isn't playing ... a commercial.
In Chicago, we are lucky to have several very good noncommercial stations, and I'm lucky enough to be able to tune many of them in -- among them, WNUR, WLUW, WZRD, WDCB -- but their programming is erratic, as it should be, and their geographic coverage areas are mostly pretty limited. Although sometimes I can leave it on one of those stations for the whole trip.
I don't listen to WBEZ.
So, yeah, that's how the commute generally goes. Plus, whenever any Four Tops song comes on the oldies station, no matter which song, I like to yell "BERNADETTE!!!" at the top of my lungs, especially in the summertime when I have the window rolled down.
When they come to take me away, you can say you saw it coming.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Easter Egg
By the way, for the less keen-eyed of you, not to mention the less "in the know," if you scroll back down to the Windy City Rollers You Tube vid a couple posts ago, watch closely for a brief cameo by Friend of the Blog, Kirby The Beekeeper, in full regalia.
Hey, MySpace Cadets
If you, too, fiddle around with Rupert Murdoch's social networking site, check out Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss's profile and don't be shy with the add-friend requests.
Friday, October 06, 2006
This is the hairy person / Who caused the sun to shine
Please welcome the baseball off-season official favorite sports team of the blog to the Colicky Baby Records and Tapes family: The New Zealand (Rugby) All Blacks.
Early Warning: One month from now, the All Blacks will be kicking England's pasty asses in London in 2006 Internationals action.
POSTSCRIPT: Runner-up with a bullet for the CBRAT sportsteam league of the baseball off-season: The Windy City Rollers.
Early Warning: One month from now, the All Blacks will be kicking England's pasty asses in London in 2006 Internationals action.
POSTSCRIPT: Runner-up with a bullet for the CBRAT sports
I've miles and miles of files, pretty files of your forefathers' fruit, and now to suit our great computer
From the random bits of dreck in my My Documents folder comes this chemically induced gem from October 2004:
2004 is the year that killed Spalding Gray
Do you realize that 2004 is the year that killed Spalding Gray, Rodney Dangerfield, AND Jacques Derrida? I know lots of people croak each year, but this seems like an insane trio. Mind you, I was not any kind of student of Derrida, but there has always been something about him that made him easy to make a joke about despite microscopically minimal understanding of or even exposure to his work. And I dug that, and I thought he'd always be there for me.
And the other two ... my brothers. I debride necrotized tissue from my soul at their passing.
I had a dream about being in a half-submerged dumpster being towed by a tugboat in a blackish shallow bay, and in the deep end of the half-submerged dumpster was a giant octopus, snarling its obsequious tentacles up toward me, apologetically caressing me, cowering high in a dry corner.
See, I have this theory of information science that there are two modes: "needing stuff," and "finding stuff." And they are not necessarily, even not probably, simultaneous. So, what this leads me to, is the belief that bookmarking is an enormously important, and often overlooked, feature of a research tool. OK, so I spend an hour or two some night, or I hire a doe-eyed law school research assistant geek to write me a "memo" about it, god knows the cowering pre-pubes need structures like that, to look it up in my handy online research toolage ... OK, so, I found what I want -- now I want to fucking put a goddamn heavy rock here, or a giant magic marker arrow, or a festering monkey butt, I dunno, but what I want is to MARK this goddamn page, because I will be able to USE this page 1 million times during my career, like 80 times a day, because this passage here is the one I wanna quote, I wanna put it in every brief, I wanna fuck it with my trial advocacy, I wanna suck it with my appellate advocacy, and by god, by god, by ... god ... I had ...better .. be ... able ...to .. GET ... BACK .. TO .. THIS goddamn piece of text that I ...SWEAR ... I ... DID ... NOT ... HALLUCINATE ......... and if I can't find that fucking thing in one fucking second, I will cancel this piece of shit faster than I can insult the fuck out of your cheap piece of shit suit, you dickless loser.
2004 is the year that killed Spalding Gray
Do you realize that 2004 is the year that killed Spalding Gray, Rodney Dangerfield, AND Jacques Derrida? I know lots of people croak each year, but this seems like an insane trio. Mind you, I was not any kind of student of Derrida, but there has always been something about him that made him easy to make a joke about despite microscopically minimal understanding of or even exposure to his work. And I dug that, and I thought he'd always be there for me.
And the other two ... my brothers. I debride necrotized tissue from my soul at their passing.
I had a dream about being in a half-submerged dumpster being towed by a tugboat in a blackish shallow bay, and in the deep end of the half-submerged dumpster was a giant octopus, snarling its obsequious tentacles up toward me, apologetically caressing me, cowering high in a dry corner.
See, I have this theory of information science that there are two modes: "needing stuff," and "finding stuff." And they are not necessarily, even not probably, simultaneous. So, what this leads me to, is the belief that bookmarking is an enormously important, and often overlooked, feature of a research tool. OK, so I spend an hour or two some night, or I hire a doe-eyed law school research assistant geek to write me a "memo" about it, god knows the cowering pre-pubes need structures like that, to look it up in my handy online research toolage ... OK, so, I found what I want -- now I want to fucking put a goddamn heavy rock here, or a giant magic marker arrow, or a festering monkey butt, I dunno, but what I want is to MARK this goddamn page, because I will be able to USE this page 1 million times during my career, like 80 times a day, because this passage here is the one I wanna quote, I wanna put it in every brief, I wanna fuck it with my trial advocacy, I wanna suck it with my appellate advocacy, and by god, by god, by ... god ... I had ...better .. be ... able ...to .. GET ... BACK .. TO .. THIS goddamn piece of text that I ...SWEAR ... I ... DID ... NOT ... HALLUCINATE ......... and if I can't find that fucking thing in one fucking second, I will cancel this piece of shit faster than I can insult the fuck out of your cheap piece of shit suit, you dickless loser.
Never mind the colicky baby, just read this
As a source for biting and apt commentary on Chicago media (with a strong focus on the increasingly shitty Sun-Times and continually flaccid Tribune), The Beachwood Reporter is what Colicky Baby Records and Tapes would be if I had any talent, energy, or work ethic. If you're interested in Chicago media and the news business in general, it's a daily must-read. Here's a fine small excerpt from today's installment:
Ouch!
The Greene Room
It's looking more and more like Mark Foley's behavior was an open secret. The Tribune will have to tread lightly on chastisting Hastert for ignoring this or being so out-of-touch with his members that he was unaware of it, because that's just what [Tribune editor Ann Marie] Lipinski and her minions argued about Bob Greene, whose behavior was widely known to everyone else.
Ouch!
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Things I Will Not Be Doing to Kill Time During the Baseball Off-Season
About 10 years ago, a Chinese doctor once accused me of being "obbashesshive-commapursshive," which diagnosis I rejected at the time, but with reflection I've come to appreciate his insight. His analysis was off with regard to subject matter -- he was thinking I was obbashesshive-commapurshhive about my job, which I definitely am not. But fixating on the summertime game with the white ball and the wooden sticks and the overpaid jerks ... I guess I have been overdoing that a little bit for the last few decades. And with that condition in mind, I admit that I probably will be spending an inordinate amount of time between now and Spring Training following the usual baseball off-season bullshit: managerial and coaching hirings and firings, player trades, various effluvia from the Arizona Fall League and Venezuelan winter ball action, and, in more desperate moments, a little football and maybe even some hockey.
It's probably more fruitful to contemplate what I'm not going to do during the long, cold months ahead. So I'm starting a list, and here's item one:
(1) Downloading any more Sufjan Stevens mp3s in an effort to understand why the tastemasters have been cumming so hard over him and his boring, overrated crap the last few years.
That should open up a few minutes over the next 180 or so days.
It's probably more fruitful to contemplate what I'm not going to do during the long, cold months ahead. So I'm starting a list, and here's item one:
(1) Downloading any more Sufjan Stevens mp3s in an effort to understand why the tastemasters have been cumming so hard over him and his boring, overrated crap the last few years.
That should open up a few minutes over the next 180 or so days.
Young people today: What's with all the dignity?
So Zipgun and STDPM caught the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show over by The Vic the other night. The Affirmatively Expressive Clappy fellas have turned into quite polished pros in the last year, which could be a negative sign, but it was still a pretty good little indie rock confab. I can't get used to the current crop of teeny boppers, though. They seem to think the name of the band is Keep Your Body As Still As Possible No Dancing Allowed.
Yeah, that's right, Grampa, reminisce about all that pogoing you did back during the Great Depression. Sure. That's cool. Today's kids are just smarter, is all. That dancy-leapy exuberant kind of behavior can, like, get you kicked out of a club, old man!
Speaking of old men, here's a clip of Get The Clap Say Ouch on Dave Letterman's show, aka the "I Can't Believe This Ancient Artifact Of A Show Is Still On TV; I Never Watch It Anymore" program:
Next stop for Clamp That Thing It's Leaking Bad: Beer commercials and ESPN Sports Center interludes. Following that, Betty Ford, a long period of absence, and, finally, a triumphant reunion at the Fox halftime show for the 2031 Super Bowl in a double bill with Mission Of Burma.
Yeah, that's right, Grampa, reminisce about all that pogoing you did back during the Great Depression. Sure. That's cool. Today's kids are just smarter, is all. That dancy-leapy exuberant kind of behavior can, like, get you kicked out of a club, old man!
Speaking of old men, here's a clip of Get The Clap Say Ouch on Dave Letterman's show, aka the "I Can't Believe This Ancient Artifact Of A Show Is Still On TV; I Never Watch It Anymore" program:
Next stop for Clamp That Thing It's Leaking Bad: Beer commercials and ESPN Sports Center interludes. Following that, Betty Ford, a long period of absence, and, finally, a triumphant reunion at the Fox halftime show for the 2031 Super Bowl in a double bill with Mission Of Burma.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Cubs fans finally complete transformation into walking rectums with dumb blue caps
Yeah, STDPM and The Dez made the scene at yesterday's Last Cubs Game (Thank God) of 2006 -- and a sad scene it was. I'm not a big fan of Dusty Baker*, and people have a right to be a dick, I guess, but the "Bye Bye Dusty" signs and gratuitous booing served as additional confirmation that Cubs fans have turned into that most hateful and despicable of sports enthusiasts -- Red Sox fans.
The fact that there are any Cubs fans at all is bewildering enough. The fact that in 2006, more than 3.12 million tickets were sold for the last place team's 81 home games is a mystery for the ages. But the fact that an apparent majority of these people paid among the highest prices in professional baseball to show up and boo, cuss, and whine like ... well, like little Bostonians -- that's just something else.
Well, now they don't have Dusty Baker to kick around anymore. Unfortunately, there's about zero chance that the Cubs won't suck hard again next season. And three million people will show up to complain about it.
But that's an easy prediction to make, even on the first day of the off-season. Yes, the 2007 Cubs will stink to high heaven. Unfortunately, I have a bad feeling -- supported by nothing other than intuition -- that the White Sox are going to be stuck in 3rd place all next year, and by July, a large and loud contingent of fans will be screaming for Ozzie Guillen's head on a plate.
OK, that's it. This is my last Cubs or White Sox-related post of 2006. Here come the playoffs. You're dying to know who I'm rooting for, right? Well, without elaboration, I'm rooting for the not-Yankees and not-Mets above anyone else, but I suppose I can support the Dodgers and A's, if that's what it's come to.
*For the record, I was one of the few hoping they'd keep Baker, and that they'd strangle Mark Prior and ship Kerry Wood to Guantanamo ... but I digress.
The fact that there are any Cubs fans at all is bewildering enough. The fact that in 2006, more than 3.12 million tickets were sold for the last place team's 81 home games is a mystery for the ages. But the fact that an apparent majority of these people paid among the highest prices in professional baseball to show up and boo, cuss, and whine like ... well, like little Bostonians -- that's just something else.
Well, now they don't have Dusty Baker to kick around anymore. Unfortunately, there's about zero chance that the Cubs won't suck hard again next season. And three million people will show up to complain about it.
But that's an easy prediction to make, even on the first day of the off-season. Yes, the 2007 Cubs will stink to high heaven. Unfortunately, I have a bad feeling -- supported by nothing other than intuition -- that the White Sox are going to be stuck in 3rd place all next year, and by July, a large and loud contingent of fans will be screaming for Ozzie Guillen's head on a plate.
OK, that's it. This is my last Cubs or White Sox-related post of 2006. Here come the playoffs. You're dying to know who I'm rooting for, right? Well, without elaboration, I'm rooting for the not-Yankees and not-Mets above anyone else, but I suppose I can support the Dodgers and A's, if that's what it's come to.
*For the record, I was one of the few hoping they'd keep Baker, and that they'd strangle Mark Prior and ship Kerry Wood to Guantanamo ... but I digress.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
No no no no no no no
No more posts or news items or web blurbs or wax cylinders or cave paintings -- nothing in any medium, anywhere, ever -- about the goddamn Dustin "Screech" Diamond sex tape. Please!
Bad Internet! Bad!
Bad Internet! Bad!
Monday, September 25, 2006
It's Liza with a "z," not Lisa with an "s," cuz Lisa with an "s" goes ... sssmash your weird little face, mutherfuckerrrr!!!
From the world of pathetic and demented celebrity gossip:
(Emphasis added.)
And that was just on their honeymoon!
But seriously, folks, I'm pretty sure that dudes are spending good moneys to obtain tender scalps at the newest "SoFo" attraction, Sir Spa ("Where Men Get their Go"* -- fine purveyors of "Bumps Be Gone" and other awkwardly named products and/or services). And I have a feeling that they'd pay at least double to get them tenderized by Liza. For a little extra, she'll sing a medley of her mom's hits while she renders that bad boy tender. If that's what you're into, you sick little well-groomed monkey.
*(unregistered, but asserted to be common-law service mark)
NY judge throws out suit against Liza Minnelli
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York judge on Monday dismissed a $10 million spousal abuse suit against Liza Minnelli filed by her estranged husband David Gest, who claimed the entertainer assaulted him in a drunken rage.
...
Gest sued for $10 million, saying in the suit that Minnelli's assault caused him "throbbing pain, severe headaches, vertigo, nausea, hypertension, scalp tenderness and insomnia."
(Emphasis added.)
And that was just on their honeymoon!
But seriously, folks, I'm pretty sure that dudes are spending good moneys to obtain tender scalps at the newest "SoFo" attraction, Sir Spa ("Where Men Get their Go"* -- fine purveyors of "Bumps Be Gone" and other awkwardly named products and/or services). And I have a feeling that they'd pay at least double to get them tenderized by Liza. For a little extra, she'll sing a medley of her mom's hits while she renders that bad boy tender. If that's what you're into, you sick little well-groomed monkey.
*(unregistered, but asserted to be common-law service mark)
Friday, September 22, 2006
Touch & Go 25 - Big Black - Racer X
This is probably my favorite of the several YouTube vids from the Touch & Go fest from about a million years ago that has been posted yet ... in terms of quality of sound, selection of material, and the fact that it was pretty close to my vantage vis a veeee the live event.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The name of the band was Bongwater
I said a few days ago that I was gonna redesign the site and write all sorts of shit worth reading and crap like that, but it turns out that I am trapped in some kind of cosmic phenomenon that is causing time to move too fast to get anything done. Like, by the time I get up, shower, get dressed, and drink some coffee, it's 10 p.m. So, blog redesign and the rest of Operation Stop Sucking is cancelled for now, due to twisted physics. And, OK, general lack of interest on my part. Hell, the only reason this blog still exists is that a rogue gravitational field traveling through the galaxy has prevented me from hitting the "delete" button. For now, here's a cheap YouTube post.
(Video: Bongwater - The Drum)
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Not Quite a Sonnet
The Pale Hose doth break my heart
with errant bat and faulty throw
Still's better to have soared so much
that solar rays do melt one's wings
than crawl around like Cub or such
and dine on soil with lowly things
We flew so high that none can ken
how bittersweet the landing's splay
But when snows transfix The Cell athwart
and Farmio plays golf all day
we'll wait for spring's warm winds to blow
to start again this futile art
this game for boys played by rich men
who poot perfume each time they fart
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Are you dready of some feets balls?
Sigh. Baseball season is all but over, and college and professional "foot" ball is already dominating the cable sports channels. Unfortunately, try as I might, I find football to be almost unwatchable. The only thing that makes it even slightly entertaining is the increasing similarity I've noticed over the years between professional football and a combination of a fruity Broadway musical and a weepy soap opera. Every Sunday, the Jets and the Sharks get together for a good cry about some stuff their dead fathers said to them back in Gigantic Freak Of Nature Camp, when they were 9 years old and weighed a mere 785 lbs. And then they dance!
Yes, NFL football is, by far, the gayest of all sports. And that includes Beach Felching (catch it on Cumcast Spurts Net). The fact that the Bears have just been penalized 15 yards for "celebrating in an unfair way" confirms this fact.
(Tweeet!) "Unnecessary use of confetti by number 83, offense! Excessive cake decoration by number 42, defense! Illegal surprise party! Ten yards! Of silk chiffon!"
Yes, NFL football is, by far, the gayest of all sports. And that includes Beach Felching (catch it on Cumcast Spurts Net). The fact that the Bears have just been penalized 15 yards for "celebrating in an unfair way" confirms this fact.
(Tweeet!) "Unnecessary use of confetti by number 83, offense! Excessive cake decoration by number 42, defense! Illegal surprise party! Ten yards! Of silk chiffon!"
Friday, September 15, 2006
Local Media History Geek Alert:
Vintage 1982 Keyfax Nite Owl Vids from Channel 32 on YouTube Now
Wow ... total nostalgia trip. Just crazy. Y'see, Theo, way way back in 1982, WFLD-TV 32 experimented for a while with running this blocky computerized news burgoo, with music backing it. As its name suggests, "Nite Owl" ran in the wee hours, and for some reason, I and a few other insane kids found it captivating -- at least for a few days. And now some
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Today in Self Google Stalking Today:
Dirty Filthy Edition
It's true when they say "the Internet is forever." Still floating around from the early days of Teh Series of Tubes is the following, a short chapter from the defunct unfinished novel "Cole Stoma" that your humble blogger posted a brief decade ago to the usenet group alt.sex.stories and that was chosen as one of the month's "best of" by mysterious porn-fiction reviewer "Celeste" and archived for all eternity at this very not-safe-for-work site. Here it is, for your adults-only enjoyment. The real name of the guilty has been redacted, but an old pseudonym has been retained in the interest of history. In addition, the strong urge to edit has been resisted. Get your Kleenex ready. You have been warned.
The following is Copyright 1996 by Tomb Lung all rights reversed marca registrada patent pending ad hominem corpus delicti cogito ergo cum.
Parsley Garnish and the Prostate Tooth
or, Little Open Big Pinch Plays Dentist"War or peace, hate or love. What difference does it make? It's the same God, same Satan; they're just fucking us up different dentrifices."
-- Noam Crosby
Little pinch here, little pinch here, little pinch here. Open big, open big, open big. Little pinch. Open big. Open. So John Kitchener calls to make an appointment with the heterodontist; been having trouble with this prostate tooth he used to pimp for.
I tell him forget it, come on over here. We'll fix him up. Comes in with three feet of unwaxed floss up his can and a water pick on full blast.
"You holdin' out on me? You fuckin' holdin' out on me?"
Pathetic orgone bag. Tension so thin you need a soup spoon. No tension, no release.
Half-inch-thick layer of tartar on his perineum. I sigh and start scraping.
Open big. Little pinch now.
John kisses me hard on the lips without warning or warmup, screws his wet mouth onto mine righty tighty crossing the threads as the torque and the heat and the friction welds our lips together. He injects his tongue like molten plastic into a mold, sneaks it in there, lolls it in, without force or ambition. I don't fight, and wonder why, like Larry Tate wondering why he just gave Darrin a raise after the schmuck fucked up the Macmillan account.
He kisses me again under the big lamp hanging from the ceiling like a robotic scrotum, incandescent brimstone glare shining into his eyeballs and his red retinas staring deep into not only my third eye, but my third soul. Hot enough to melt amalgam, I grope him out of the chair and we fall to the floor in a clench. My hygienist, Dinah, straps on a big black vascular dildo--a perfect match to her Abyssinian skin--and fucks me in the ass while I massage John's ailing prostate with the blunt end of my dental pick. He moans as I tickle his aching gland and tease him to erection.
I rub his glans against my pussy lips in a figure eight pattern to moisten the purple head; I grab his cock at the base and stroke his septum with my burning clit. I force him inside me and begin to gyrate, sweating and moaning. I reach up to the spit sink, grab the suction hose, and press its mouth against my clit. My nub to distends grotesquely into the plastic orifice, sucks a good inch into the tube like a billion frayed nerve endings being slurped from the bottom of a cup through a krazy straw; my shrieks drown out the brapping raspberry noise of it.
Everything on earth is swollen and red. "You're gonna have to gas me," John whispers.
"No need. I've got it piped in through the ventilation system."
"Oh yeah. Ohhh yeeaahhh . . ."
Dinah emits a frustrated whimper, scowls. She points at her dripping cunt in mock distress.
"Anita," she moans (her pet name for me). "Who has put this pubic hair on my crack?"
"Professor Thrill," I coo (my pet name for her). "Are you a scorned woman?"
"Ooh, Anita . . . Aneeeeeeeeeta . . ."
I ball up a soft wad of impression material, jab the putty-like goop onto the bit of my drill, and jelly it up. About thirty thousand rpm applied to that bitch's clit, her puckering vulva; she jerks spasmodically from the excess stimulus, cums in shimmering white waves. We collapse into fetal mounds of exhausted joy.
John stands over us, towering and surging with orgasmic power, jerking off with both hands, spraying a constant arc of tapiocal jismic mucilage over us, cascading us with sizzling hot cum, drenching our naked, writhing bodies, droplet by droplet, spurt by spurt. Dinah passes out, three fingers buried in her cunt, and then everything fades away from me, too . . .
I don't know when Kitchener leaves, but he's still cumming when he does; leaves a slug's slime trail of it down the hallway and into the parking lot.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
"Make no small blog plans"
That's what Daniel Burnham said on his blog, "Teh Blog T4at W0rx0rz," about 100 years ago. "They have no magic to stir men's Site Meter stats."
In view of this dictum, Colicky Baby Records and Tapes is going to undergo a revamp imminently. I was going to wait until the baseball season ended, but, frankly, the CBRAT staff has pretty much overdosed on America's Pastime for this year already. The White Sox are still in the hunt, but we never have much of a stomach for a close pennant race. Especially one that "we" seem to be losing. And we -- that is, I -- have some free time coming up in a few days, so the time is ripe for change.
I don't know what I want to do with the look and feel yet, but it will likely remain pretty basic. Any changes along those lines will mainly be aimed at improving readability. The main initiative under consideration is into improve the blog's multimedia capacities by spending a few bucks on opening an account with one of the web's many file hosting services (first step: choosing which one). So, in the near future, look for more mp3s, with much more convenient download options, as well as the capability to play tracks right in the blog (probably using those little del.icio.us java dealies you've probably seen around the web) to see if you're interested before bothering with a download. I have plenty of odd and interesting audio on hand to parcel out webbially.
So if things work out the way I envision, Colicky Baby Records and Tapes will finally live up to the second half of its name. And you can bet that it will remain just as colicky.
In view of this dictum, Colicky Baby Records and Tapes is going to undergo a revamp imminently. I was going to wait until the baseball season ended, but, frankly, the CBRAT staff has pretty much overdosed on America's Pastime for this year already. The White Sox are still in the hunt, but we never have much of a stomach for a close pennant race. Especially one that "we" seem to be losing. And we -- that is, I -- have some free time coming up in a few days, so the time is ripe for change.
I don't know what I want to do with the look and feel yet, but it will likely remain pretty basic. Any changes along those lines will mainly be aimed at improving readability. The main initiative under consideration is into improve the blog's multimedia capacities by spending a few bucks on opening an account with one of the web's many file hosting services (first step: choosing which one). So, in the near future, look for more mp3s, with much more convenient download options, as well as the capability to play tracks right in the blog (probably using those little del.icio.us java dealies you've probably seen around the web) to see if you're interested before bothering with a download. I have plenty of odd and interesting audio on hand to parcel out webbially.
So if things work out the way I envision, Colicky Baby Records and Tapes will finally live up to the second half of its name. And you can bet that it will remain just as colicky.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
The Rumor Bong
... we join this transcript of the 9-12-2006 episode of The Cross-Country Super Knucklehead Political Pundit Funtime Show, Starring Dez Desmond and Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss, already in progrefs:
STDPM: ... but then there is nothing particularly radical about any of those prognostications.
DEZ: Okay, then, here is a radical prognostication: I say that, when you total up the votes for all Democratic House candidates and all Republican House candidates, it'll turn out that more votes were cast nationally for Democrats than Republicans, but thanks to the magic of gerrymandering and low level vote fraud, the Repubs keep control of the House.
Or Bin Laden is killed on October 4. Mark your calendar. (That's a 10-4, dead buddy).
STDPM: If Bin Laden is killed on 10/4, the Republicans get at least 60% of the popular vote, easy. Whether he is or not, I'm still predicting that the GOP will be GAINING seats in both chambres (that's pronounced "Schaumburg," Frenchy!), as well as somehow managing to pick up three Supreme Court seats (possible scenario: Stevens and Ginsburg trip over Kennedy's new heart stent and they all die in a fiery explosion). PLUUUSSSSS, if that's not pessimistic enough for you, a fourth branch of government will be formed (the "Exelaturiary") to replace the media (the "Fourth Estate"), and it will consist entirely of a papier mache (pronouced: "Downers Grove") bust of William Randolph Hearst made out of back issues of the Wall Street Journal editorial page from Q4 2001.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
We are pleased to report that David Yow kept his pants on
It has been a long time since the last post of any substance, but it will have to wait a little longer. The CBRAT staff is recovering from attending two-thirds of this weekend's Touch & Go Records 25th anniversary fest at the Hideout Block party, over by there. Give us a break; we're old. And we're guessing the vast majority of the 7,000-odd other people in the audience (median age: 38 going on a hundred and twenty-three) feel the same way. Next time they should set up a Ben Gay® tent next to the Goose Island® vendor. I'll be the one riding the Rascal Scooter® with the Blatant Dissent bumper sticker on it. Rocking like my life Depends® on it.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Oh, the humanity!
When I started making this cheap little jpeg collage, Jose Contreras had allowed the first two Red Sox batters to reach base, and it was looking like it was going to be another long dreary night for the White Sox. By the time I was done Photoshopping and returned to following the game, Contreras had gotten out of the inning unscathed, and the White Sox had scored four runs. The Pale Hose went on to win 8 to 1.
Oh, and the Tigers and Twins both lost.
Originally I intended this to be another colicky graphical whine, but I'm posting it anyway tonight, because it seems to have magical talismanic powers.
Never underestimate the power of colicky thinking.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Yeah, you cuchi all night long
It must have been post-Thon dementia (with maybe a little touch of post-Steve Irwin stingray impalement thrown in), but last night I dreamed that I was watching a movie on late-night cable called "Bon Scott's Charo" -- kind of a twisted biopic featuring everyone's favorite Love Boat guest star as a member of everyone's favorite Australian wrrrrock band.
And, yes, I know that "You Shook Me All Night Long" was a Brian Johnson song, dammit, but I couldn't think of another AC/DC tune that "cuchi" would fit into off the top of my head. And with the White Sox malaise infecting the CBRAT staff with severe depression of the affect en la cabeza lately, halfassed efforts are the most we can muster.
New White Sox drinking game: Every time Paulie Konerko hits into a double play, smash a bottle of booze over your head. Better lay into a few cases, and about 1,000 yards of gauze.
And, yes, I know that "You Shook Me All Night Long" was a Brian Johnson song, dammit, but I couldn't think of another AC/DC tune that "cuchi" would fit into off the top of my head. And with the White Sox malaise infecting the CBRAT staff with severe depression of the affect en la cabeza lately, halfassed efforts are the most we can muster.
New White Sox drinking game: Every time Paulie Konerko hits into a double play, smash a bottle of booze over your head. Better lay into a few cases, and about 1,000 yards of gauze.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Don't worry ... it's only SEPTEMBER
Yeah yeah yeah, there's a lot of baseball left, and it's a marathon, not a sprint, blah blah blah, but can the White Sox please stop sucking now? They're running out of time to go on that promised hot streak ... you know, the one that they haven't had for the entire second half of the season.
WILDLY IRRESPONSIBLE PREDICTION: If the White Sox don't make the playoffs, I predict that Ozzie Guillen will not return as manager for the '07 season. You heard it here first! So when I turn out to be wrong, at least you'll know I was early.
In other news of baseball misfortune, Cubs catcher Michael "The Bayonne Bleeder" Barrett is on the DL after creatively using his nads to block a foul tip the other day, sustaining an intrascrotal hematoma that required surgery.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Hoyven Glaven! It's Telethon Weekend!
Frank reunites Jerry and Dean on the 1976 Telethon. Nothing remotely this memorable or interesting will happen this year.
Tomorrow's happenings will be dominated by about the 9 thousandth iteration of the Jerry Lewis Patronization of the Crippleds Fest, aka the MDA Telethon. "The Thon," as aficianados sometimes call it, is a pale fraction of a shadow of a nubbin of a frail remnant of its former
Just kidding. I know damn well who Pat "Smokey and the Bandit and many other fine films and television shows" McCormick is. Except ... uh oh. IMDB says he died in July 2005 of a stroke. Damn damn damn!!!
Anyway, this year could be interesting -- well, probably not -- but what I'm driving at is that this year Jer's basing it in Vegas, so maybe there will be added celebrity hijinks as a result.
Why Vegas instead of Hollywood, where it's originated from for the last 750 millennia? Well, AP quoted Der Jermeister as saying,
"There's something about Los Angeles that subjugates it."
Upon hearing this, longtime Thon rat and ersatz funnyman Norm Crosby was heard to exclaim, "Subjugates! I didn't even know Jerry was a grammarian. Remember, to subjugate the blurb you must always reactivate the unnatural infections, not to mensa the erections to the rule."
Happily, IMDB confirms that Norm Crosby remains living.
More Thon blogging as the weekend regresses. This year for sure, we find a cure, dammit!
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Naguib Mahfouz, 1911-2006
Esteemed Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz -- author of many books, including Midaq Alley, The Thief and the Dogs, Miramar, The Harafish, and the famous Cairo Trilogy -- has died at the age of 94.
Monday, August 28, 2006
I hate meeces to pieces
They're back, after a hiatus (as far as I know) of more than nine months -- little rodents -- in my apartment. I guess I should get a cat. That, or fall back into the habit of carrying a broom around and announcing myself every time I enter a room. "Here comes the angry human! Better not be any goddamn mice in here!"
It might be a coincidence, but it seems like whenever significant carpentry work is being done on one of the apartments in the building -- as is happening now -- the mices appear. And considering that almost all the work here is done by immigrant laborers ... holy shit! I'm being invaded by Mice from Aztlán! No wonder that one I surprised in the kitchen last night around 4 a.m. was screaming "¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!" as it fled behind the stove. They're trying to "reconquista" the southwest region of my apartment! Except the kitchen is in the northwest corner. Hm. Theory needs more work, I guess.
At any rate, a certain nervous guy had a hard time falling back asleep last night, under the circumstances, and when he did, he had unrestful dreams about voles, marmots, and possums nipping at his heels, so ... the whole "this time for sure, I'm a-gonna get up extree early tomorrow morning (maybe even before 10) and a-get a jumping start on finally advancing my stalled life out of this rut and onto the fast road into actuality-land!" plan sort of went by the wayside. Also, it's raining. I dunno about your house, but around here, a period of insomnia + a rainy day = sleeping late. Especially when telecommuting is added to the equation.
P.S. This post would include a snappy stolen cartoon image of Mr. Jinks the cat and Pixie & Dixie the mice, but it doesn't, because Blogger sucks and isn't working right again. Or should I say still isn't working right? Because it never works right. Welp, I guess that's what you get for nothing.
It might be a coincidence, but it seems like whenever significant carpentry work is being done on one of the apartments in the building -- as is happening now -- the mices appear. And considering that almost all the work here is done by immigrant laborers ... holy shit! I'm being invaded by Mice from Aztlán! No wonder that one I surprised in the kitchen last night around 4 a.m. was screaming "¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!" as it fled behind the stove. They're trying to "reconquista" the southwest region of my apartment! Except the kitchen is in the northwest corner. Hm. Theory needs more work, I guess.
At any rate, a certain nervous guy had a hard time falling back asleep last night, under the circumstances, and when he did, he had unrestful dreams about voles, marmots, and possums nipping at his heels, so ... the whole "this time for sure, I'm a-gonna get up extree early tomorrow morning (maybe even before 10) and a-get a jumping start on finally advancing my stalled life out of this rut and onto the fast road into actuality-land!" plan sort of went by the wayside. Also, it's raining. I dunno about your house, but around here, a period of insomnia + a rainy day = sleeping late. Especially when telecommuting is added to the equation.
P.S. This post would include a snappy stolen cartoon image of Mr. Jinks the cat and Pixie & Dixie the mice, but it doesn't, because Blogger sucks and isn't working right again. Or should I say still isn't working right? Because it never works right. Welp, I guess that's what you get for nothing.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Are we no longer there yet?
Contrary to the hopes and prayers of Matt Drudge and the Wall Street Urinal's Bernard Lewis (and, sometimes, my own self, but for different reasons), the world was not destroyed yesterday by Iranian Preznit Ahmedashanananashananananashanananashananananashana-
nanashananananashanananasshananananayipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip-
mummummummummummumgetajob.
Allegedly, yesterday was to be the day on which the "Hidden Imam" (al-Waldo) returned from his trip to the corner store for cigarettes or wherever he went centuries ago and started some kind of Penalty Kick Phase of global history involving such well-loved characters as Gog and Magog, and not to mention ZOG, Kermit the Frog, and Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs. All wearing beer goggles, no doubt. And jogging togs. Drinking out-of-season egg nog and pausing from reading their favorite blogs, all the world's peoples would stand agog -- bug-eyed -- in a fog. "We did our best to shut them out and banish them to a vague netherworld," an ecumenical council of religious elders would exclaim, "but they tricked us by claiming to be a plumber here to fix a clog." I personally was hoping they'd at least settle the argument once and for all -- what sounds better, digital or analog?
But nothing. Not even a Chapstick-related air travel delay.
Well, the Tigers did shut out the White Sox, beating them for the second time in a row. So it wasn't such a great day after all. Prophesy fulfilled!
nanashananananashanananasshananananayipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip-
mummummummummummumgetajob.
Allegedly, yesterday was to be the day on which the "Hidden Imam" (al-Waldo) returned from his trip to the corner store for cigarettes or wherever he went centuries ago and started some kind of Penalty Kick Phase of global history involving such well-loved characters as Gog and Magog, and not to mention ZOG, Kermit the Frog, and Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs. All wearing beer goggles, no doubt. And jogging togs. Drinking out-of-season egg nog and pausing from reading their favorite blogs, all the world's peoples would stand agog -- bug-eyed -- in a fog. "We did our best to shut them out and banish them to a vague netherworld," an ecumenical council of religious elders would exclaim, "but they tricked us by claiming to be a plumber here to fix a clog." I personally was hoping they'd at least settle the argument once and for all -- what sounds better, digital or analog?
But nothing. Not even a Chapstick-related air travel delay.
Well, the Tigers did shut out the White Sox, beating them for the second time in a row. So it wasn't such a great day after all. Prophesy fulfilled!
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Sad Day in Polka: Walter E. Jagiello, Aug. 1, 1930 to Aug. 17, 2006
"Lil' Wally the Polka King" -- co-writer of the "Let's Go, Go-Go White Sox" theme song (an mp3 of which does NOT appear on this blog, despite daily visits from Google-searchers looking for such an animal) -- has died at the age of 76. The Chicago Tribune's obit is here.
As we all know, there is no beer in heaven, so I hope you drank plenty of it here, Wally. And I'll try to pick up the slack for you in your absence.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Scumbag Worm-meat Idiots
Well, that was pretty fun.
This was covered so heavily that if you care about it at all, you already know about it, but after doing crappy throwaway posts about the firings of Bobby Skafish and Larry Lujack, it would feel wrong if I didn't at least superficially cover the surprise impromptu reunion of Steve Dahl and Garry Meier yesterday. Also, I've gotten half a dozen hits from searches on Steve and Garry-related keywords, thanks to coincidentally having mentioned them in the Larry Lujack post from the other day.
So, yeah, it happened, and I thought it was pretty entertaining. Garry was pretty funny, and Dahl seemed kind of sparked by it. Buzz Kilman didn't seem 100% happy, though.
Podcasts are available at http://podcast.medianext.com/stations/wckg/?d=FM for a limited time. So download lively, radio nerds!
Also -- it's an embarrassment of multimedia riches -- the bizarre demon monster that is YouTube supplies the following:
Friday, August 18, 2006
Thursday, August 17, 2006
It's, It's The Ballroom Blitz: Intro the First: Deep Background
Careful readers (hah) of this blog now know what I did with my summers during the late '80s. So now I'm setting myself up to deliver a treatment of what I did during the school years.
I was an honors student, graduated Magna Cum Laude, and got a bunch of academic awards that I don't think I even saved, but that's the last time I'm going to mention studies, because they were highly secondary to my main occupation in college: Outlaw Media Mogul.
OK, maybe I have to mention studies once more, briefly, to make sense of that. I double-majored in print journalism and international relations. The latter was my real major; the former I threw in because ... well, there aren't many Political Science shops in my neighborhood to work for.
It's hard to get rich as a newspaper reporter, too. But I was a newspaper junkie from early childhood, and I had been writing for publication off and on since I was 15, so it was a pretty natural choice, and I tend to make the lazy choices in life, coach.
My first paying job was writing a "chicken dinner" type column for my hometown newspaper, which I did for about two and a half years during high school. A "chicken dinner" column is more or less what the nickname suggests -- ultralocal stuff. Church suppers, junior high basketball results, birthday announcements, civic booster stuff. But they would pretty much print anything I wrote -- and paid me 30 cents a column inch for it. Not that I tested them much, but I did write a few personal and probably narcissistic columns about weird stuff that happened to me and my family -- like stumbling into an FBI bust of a crooked beef racket (transporting under-grade beef -- due to cancerous tumors in the meat and the like -- across state lines from Pennsylvania to Maryland) and enjoying the experience of looking at a bunch of cops with big shotguns making the decision whether to shoot first and ask questions later, or maybe instead let the nice nuclear family from Illinois just pick up that black and white portable TV from crazy Uncle Dave's apartment over the butcher shop and leave in peace, because the family's Number One Son can't get through a week in the mountains without television. ("Screw you, coppers! I want to watch Letterman!") So, in a way, it was kind of like an early blog experience. Hell, if you had a blog -- or a chicken-dinner news column -- you'd probably write about that, too.
I've always had one problem fitting in when it comes to the newspaper biz, though. Put diplomatically, the problem was this: That profession is full of idiots, jerks, and dullards. There's no bias in American media, I'm telling you -- unless stupidity and hopeless squarenosity is a form of bias. Well, I tried to be diplomatic. Believe me, I could have said worse.
An exception to this basic truth -- and the one that hooked me on mass media foolishness -- was my experience in the spring semester of 1987 -- the year I spent at College of Lake County for two reasons that made sense at the time: my freshman year at Northern Illinois was a drag; and I wanted to stay in Lake County so I could stay shacked up with The (academically disinclined) Stickler in my parents' basement. Anyway ... that semester I was the News Editor of the campus weekly -- which was, to be frank, a piece of shit, although I had fun with it, and I think I did some decent reporting. Except for the time that I tried to cover a Board of Trustees meeting with the Editor in Chief, Tony, after we'd smoked a big hunk of hash in the paper's office (which was housed in a small trailer on the outskirts of campus) and we kept busting up laughing so hard that we had to leave ... after about 20 minutes.
That was a wild bunch, the staff of the CLC Chronicle. None of them had professional aspirations -- which is what probably made it fun. Luckily, we only had to put out about 8 tabloid pages a week, so there was plenty of time for underage drinking, petty vandalism, and even pettier feuds with the dorky uptight student government and their Dean Wormer-like staff adviser. I pissed them off the most when I decided to completely ignore the student council election that year -- although they did prevail upon Tony to slap a lame box graphic on page 1 with the candidates' names at the last minute.
I did some actual news reporting, too -- just not irrelevant bullshit like student council crap. The best piece I did was a two-part, lengthy piece about ecological misdeeds and political shenanigans by a nearby landfill that was trying to ramrod a permit through the county board allowing them to expand against the will of most of its neighbors.
Anyway, I went back to NIU the next year, along with The Stickler, and I immediately joined the student paper there. I had a pretty lackluster career in which I wrote zero stories and was on the staff for about three days. The contrast was just too much to take. During my first year at NIU, the student paper there did a really hard-hitting, meticulous expose of financial crimes by the university president (the details of which escape me now), which brought about his ouster. When I joined the paper, I was all revved up for war ... but instead I found a building full of bland and scrubbed little young Republicans, full of ambition to "give Reagan a fair shake in the media" and other twatty horseshit.
The difference between the CLC student paper and the NIU student paper was like the difference between Delta House and Omega House. (In nerdy journalism terms, that is.)
So I quit ... or was I fired? I think it was mutual. I said some pretty nasty things to the editor and managing editor that pretty much burned the bridge, although I don't remember what they were. At any rate, that paper, its building, and its staff were enemy territory from then on.
Trouble was, I still sat through half my classes with these assholes. For a while, it was a one-way hate-stream, though, because nobody knew me from Ratso Rizzo ... until I started publishing my own paper.
The story of The Public Address System (nee MUSH!) deserves (and would require) its own obsessive memoir, but it factors heavily into the saga of The Ballroom Blitz, so I think I've gotta set it up right. But flashing past a lot of details, during the last two years of my five-year college burgoo, I was pretty well known and disliked among my journalism student colleagues as a Crazy, Irresponsible, and Possibly Dangerous radical weirdo. Which was just what I set out to accomplish.
The Public Address System. The basic facts: A small rotating group (de facto editor and publisher, yours truly, under the pseudonym "Mr. Newspaper"; de facto business manager, advertising director, layout editor, photographer, and all-around good sport, The Stickler; and de facto art director and cartoonist, Kurt "Kirby" Kiesel were the most consistent staff members) published a handful of 8-page issues of a tabloid rag (print run of 5,000). We didn't have a computer or any budget for any equipment at all. I typed every word we published into little columns and rubber cemented them onto pasteboard sheets. We took headlines to Kinko's to blow up to size, and pasted them down. We were about 75% satire and 25% news. It was a hell of a lot of work -- laying out an issue took two all-nighters, all-dayers in a row, and then we'd drive the masters to a very good-natured printing plant in Naperville, get up the next morning at 5, and guerrilla-dump copies in every building on campus. Then catch a few hours of sleep and get ready for the fallout. It was, in short, the most fun I have ever had in my life.
Aside from the labor and a chronic shortage of good material, the biggest problem was money. And that's where the Hustling came in. Which might have been the most fun of all. I didn't care for selling ads -- I had nothing against it, but I couldn't handle the Jackie Gleason "hat in hand" routine of asking a business to part with $20 or $50 for some farkakta pretend newspaper bullshit. We sold a few ads, thanks to The Stickler and Kurt, which helped, but that only accounted for a fraction of the cost of printing.
The way we paid for the paper was by promoting rock shows in the basement of the campus Wesley Foundation. The Wesley Foundation basement was actually a pretty vital venue at that time. The Smashing Pumpkins played there, and Jesus Lizard, and The Didjits. Those shows were sponsored by a couple of dudes named Dan Grzeca and Greg Dunlap, who were putting out a rock zine called THIS. It occurred to me that if Dan and Greg could finance their mag that way, so could we.
Only Dan and Greg were mostly interested in hobnobbing with the Chicago punk boys, whereas I wanted to publish a newspaper. So my focus was on maximizing profits. First of all, we'd only get bands that would play for free. This eliminated anybody with a name, but there were zillions of desperate bands out there, and local high school kids were desperate for entertainment. Second thing, the band would have to use their own amps as a sound system -- no dropping $150 on a P.A. (No pun intended. We did break this rule once or twice, and we probably even paid one or two of the bands a few bucks when it was necessary.) Third, no guest list. None. No girlfriends, no "plus ones," nothing. I was ruthless about that. I have never been so ruthless about money, before or since. I was homing in on damn near 100% profit, and nothing was gonna stand in my way.
It was a successful strategy. At least, we got the cash we needed to pay the printer. The shows also served as pretty huge promotional events in themselves, and were ... well, not dull or boring at all, as far as insane harrowing adventures go.
The story of The Ballroom Blitz is about what was going to be the biggest, best, kickingest assingnest Public Address System show of them all. We were building up a head of steam as a newspaper, accumulating readers, getting a lot of encouragement. And we had Our Man in Hoboken, Otis Ball, coming back to town on his first Midwest tour after being signed by a label that he'd probably prefer I leave nameless.
Otis had headlined our very first benefit, for our first issue, which was actually a sort of predecessor under the name of MUSH! (I came up with the name, I'm sorry to admit -- it played on the fact that the NIU sports teams are called "The Huskies" -- as in, "Mush, you Huskies!"), which was a whole nuther story. Let's just say that Otis played the first newspaper benefit show at the Wesley. I bet he doesn't even remember.
Also on that bill was June Bug Massacre (for you documentary completists out there) and somebody else I can't recall, a woman folksinger.
That show went okay, although it was really more of a learning experience than a successful fund-raiser. A foot wetter. An introduction to the art of crowd control, collection of admission fees, and cleaning up afterwards.
I have an anecdote about that last item, and then we'll call this monster a blog post. After that show, I was stacking chairs and picking up cigarette butts and beer cans along with six or seven others, and generally winding down. Somehow I got cornered by this goofball bus driver and gay activist guy, Jim Mc_______, who was in the mood to chat. Jim Mc_______ was a piece of work ... he eventually was fired from his bus driver gig for waving coat hangers around while driving the bus and delivering monologues about how abortion would not be a problem if the genders would just fuck among their own.
"I'm a bisexual," Jim Mc_______ announced.
"Oh," I said. "I guess that does double your chances."
"Yeah," he said. "You know, I don't get people who are exclusively straight or gay. I mean, they're all just hung up on genitals."
"But that's where all the nerve endings are," I said.
That got rid of him.
I was an honors student, graduated Magna Cum Laude, and got a bunch of academic awards that I don't think I even saved, but that's the last time I'm going to mention studies, because they were highly secondary to my main occupation in college: Outlaw Media Mogul.
OK, maybe I have to mention studies once more, briefly, to make sense of that. I double-majored in print journalism and international relations. The latter was my real major; the former I threw in because ... well, there aren't many Political Science shops in my neighborhood to work for.
It's hard to get rich as a newspaper reporter, too. But I was a newspaper junkie from early childhood, and I had been writing for publication off and on since I was 15, so it was a pretty natural choice, and I tend to make the lazy choices in life, coach.
My first paying job was writing a "chicken dinner" type column for my hometown newspaper, which I did for about two and a half years during high school. A "chicken dinner" column is more or less what the nickname suggests -- ultralocal stuff. Church suppers, junior high basketball results, birthday announcements, civic booster stuff. But they would pretty much print anything I wrote -- and paid me 30 cents a column inch for it. Not that I tested them much, but I did write a few personal and probably narcissistic columns about weird stuff that happened to me and my family -- like stumbling into an FBI bust of a crooked beef racket (transporting under-grade beef -- due to cancerous tumors in the meat and the like -- across state lines from Pennsylvania to Maryland) and enjoying the experience of looking at a bunch of cops with big shotguns making the decision whether to shoot first and ask questions later, or maybe instead let the nice nuclear family from Illinois just pick up that black and white portable TV from crazy Uncle Dave's apartment over the butcher shop and leave in peace, because the family's Number One Son can't get through a week in the mountains without television. ("Screw you, coppers! I want to watch Letterman!") So, in a way, it was kind of like an early blog experience. Hell, if you had a blog -- or a chicken-dinner news column -- you'd probably write about that, too.
I've always had one problem fitting in when it comes to the newspaper biz, though. Put diplomatically, the problem was this: That profession is full of idiots, jerks, and dullards. There's no bias in American media, I'm telling you -- unless stupidity and hopeless squarenosity is a form of bias. Well, I tried to be diplomatic. Believe me, I could have said worse.
An exception to this basic truth -- and the one that hooked me on mass media foolishness -- was my experience in the spring semester of 1987 -- the year I spent at College of Lake County for two reasons that made sense at the time: my freshman year at Northern Illinois was a drag; and I wanted to stay in Lake County so I could stay shacked up with The (academically disinclined) Stickler in my parents' basement. Anyway ... that semester I was the News Editor of the campus weekly -- which was, to be frank, a piece of shit, although I had fun with it, and I think I did some decent reporting. Except for the time that I tried to cover a Board of Trustees meeting with the Editor in Chief, Tony, after we'd smoked a big hunk of hash in the paper's office (which was housed in a small trailer on the outskirts of campus) and we kept busting up laughing so hard that we had to leave ... after about 20 minutes.
That was a wild bunch, the staff of the CLC Chronicle. None of them had professional aspirations -- which is what probably made it fun. Luckily, we only had to put out about 8 tabloid pages a week, so there was plenty of time for underage drinking, petty vandalism, and even pettier feuds with the dorky uptight student government and their Dean Wormer-like staff adviser. I pissed them off the most when I decided to completely ignore the student council election that year -- although they did prevail upon Tony to slap a lame box graphic on page 1 with the candidates' names at the last minute.
I did some actual news reporting, too -- just not irrelevant bullshit like student council crap. The best piece I did was a two-part, lengthy piece about ecological misdeeds and political shenanigans by a nearby landfill that was trying to ramrod a permit through the county board allowing them to expand against the will of most of its neighbors.
Anyway, I went back to NIU the next year, along with The Stickler, and I immediately joined the student paper there. I had a pretty lackluster career in which I wrote zero stories and was on the staff for about three days. The contrast was just too much to take. During my first year at NIU, the student paper there did a really hard-hitting, meticulous expose of financial crimes by the university president (the details of which escape me now), which brought about his ouster. When I joined the paper, I was all revved up for war ... but instead I found a building full of bland and scrubbed little young Republicans, full of ambition to "give Reagan a fair shake in the media" and other twatty horseshit.
The difference between the CLC student paper and the NIU student paper was like the difference between Delta House and Omega House. (In nerdy journalism terms, that is.)
So I quit ... or was I fired? I think it was mutual. I said some pretty nasty things to the editor and managing editor that pretty much burned the bridge, although I don't remember what they were. At any rate, that paper, its building, and its staff were enemy territory from then on.
Trouble was, I still sat through half my classes with these assholes. For a while, it was a one-way hate-stream, though, because nobody knew me from Ratso Rizzo ... until I started publishing my own paper.
The story of The Public Address System (nee MUSH!) deserves (and would require) its own obsessive memoir, but it factors heavily into the saga of The Ballroom Blitz, so I think I've gotta set it up right. But flashing past a lot of details, during the last two years of my five-year college burgoo, I was pretty well known and disliked among my journalism student colleagues as a Crazy, Irresponsible, and Possibly Dangerous radical weirdo. Which was just what I set out to accomplish.
The Public Address System. The basic facts: A small rotating group (de facto editor and publisher, yours truly, under the pseudonym "Mr. Newspaper"; de facto business manager, advertising director, layout editor, photographer, and all-around good sport, The Stickler; and de facto art director and cartoonist, Kurt "Kirby" Kiesel were the most consistent staff members) published a handful of 8-page issues of a tabloid rag (print run of 5,000). We didn't have a computer or any budget for any equipment at all. I typed every word we published into little columns and rubber cemented them onto pasteboard sheets. We took headlines to Kinko's to blow up to size, and pasted them down. We were about 75% satire and 25% news. It was a hell of a lot of work -- laying out an issue took two all-nighters, all-dayers in a row, and then we'd drive the masters to a very good-natured printing plant in Naperville, get up the next morning at 5, and guerrilla-dump copies in every building on campus. Then catch a few hours of sleep and get ready for the fallout. It was, in short, the most fun I have ever had in my life.
Aside from the labor and a chronic shortage of good material, the biggest problem was money. And that's where the Hustling came in. Which might have been the most fun of all. I didn't care for selling ads -- I had nothing against it, but I couldn't handle the Jackie Gleason "hat in hand" routine of asking a business to part with $20 or $50 for some farkakta pretend newspaper bullshit. We sold a few ads, thanks to The Stickler and Kurt, which helped, but that only accounted for a fraction of the cost of printing.
The way we paid for the paper was by promoting rock shows in the basement of the campus Wesley Foundation. The Wesley Foundation basement was actually a pretty vital venue at that time. The Smashing Pumpkins played there, and Jesus Lizard, and The Didjits. Those shows were sponsored by a couple of dudes named Dan Grzeca and Greg Dunlap, who were putting out a rock zine called THIS. It occurred to me that if Dan and Greg could finance their mag that way, so could we.
Only Dan and Greg were mostly interested in hobnobbing with the Chicago punk boys, whereas I wanted to publish a newspaper. So my focus was on maximizing profits. First of all, we'd only get bands that would play for free. This eliminated anybody with a name, but there were zillions of desperate bands out there, and local high school kids were desperate for entertainment. Second thing, the band would have to use their own amps as a sound system -- no dropping $150 on a P.A. (No pun intended. We did break this rule once or twice, and we probably even paid one or two of the bands a few bucks when it was necessary.) Third, no guest list. None. No girlfriends, no "plus ones," nothing. I was ruthless about that. I have never been so ruthless about money, before or since. I was homing in on damn near 100% profit, and nothing was gonna stand in my way.
It was a successful strategy. At least, we got the cash we needed to pay the printer. The shows also served as pretty huge promotional events in themselves, and were ... well, not dull or boring at all, as far as insane harrowing adventures go.
The story of The Ballroom Blitz is about what was going to be the biggest, best, kickingest assingnest Public Address System show of them all. We were building up a head of steam as a newspaper, accumulating readers, getting a lot of encouragement. And we had Our Man in Hoboken, Otis Ball, coming back to town on his first Midwest tour after being signed by a label that he'd probably prefer I leave nameless.
Otis had headlined our very first benefit, for our first issue, which was actually a sort of predecessor under the name of MUSH! (I came up with the name, I'm sorry to admit -- it played on the fact that the NIU sports teams are called "The Huskies" -- as in, "Mush, you Huskies!"), which was a whole nuther story. Let's just say that Otis played the first newspaper benefit show at the Wesley. I bet he doesn't even remember.
Also on that bill was June Bug Massacre (for you documentary completists out there) and somebody else I can't recall, a woman folksinger.
That show went okay, although it was really more of a learning experience than a successful fund-raiser. A foot wetter. An introduction to the art of crowd control, collection of admission fees, and cleaning up afterwards.
I have an anecdote about that last item, and then we'll call this monster a blog post. After that show, I was stacking chairs and picking up cigarette butts and beer cans along with six or seven others, and generally winding down. Somehow I got cornered by this goofball bus driver and gay activist guy, Jim Mc_______, who was in the mood to chat. Jim Mc_______ was a piece of work ... he eventually was fired from his bus driver gig for waving coat hangers around while driving the bus and delivering monologues about how abortion would not be a problem if the genders would just fuck among their own.
"I'm a bisexual," Jim Mc_______ announced.
"Oh," I said. "I guess that does double your chances."
"Yeah," he said. "You know, I don't get people who are exclusively straight or gay. I mean, they're all just hung up on genitals."
"But that's where all the nerve endings are," I said.
That got rid of him.
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