Dec 24

And I’m not just talking about this made-for-blogs (not this blog, I mean real blogs) number right here. As a side note, when I first saw the headline and link that read “Mexican beauty queen, 7 men arrested,” I was certainly not anticipating reading about a drug cartel. I had only hours earlier watched Clerks 2, so I naturally assumed that this beauty queen and the dudes with her were somehow involved in a traveling donkey show. Are all donkey shows of the traveling variety? I don’t think it would make sense to keep them in one spot. Honestly, how quickly does that market become saturated, in more ways than one? And how quickly will the fuzz get on that, in more ways than I care to count?

Back to the point of this post. Now, I rarely read this blog. It’s one of those not wanting anything to do with a club that would have you as a member. I don’t want to look up the quote. And there’s more proof about me being a shitty blogger, in no more ways than one.

Tonight was different. I browsed the DGS offerings, if for nothing else than to distract myself from the writing I was supposed to be doing for work, and to bask in a little schadenfreude. That’s my new favorite word, by the way. In my browsing, I came across Marcelo’s little stitch-up on Wild n’ Out and Lil’ John. I know I’m missing some apostrophes in there, but hey, don’t they know there’s a recession on? I can’t go throwing those things out there all willy-nilly. I’m not here to defend my TV-watching habits. I partook in more than my share of “starring Nick Cannon” offerings. Drumline marathon on VH1? Awrite awrite. My concerns concern the comments Marcelo so ungraciously (unconcernedly?) threw out concerning Food Network personalities. Yes, Paula Dean is quite loathsome, y’all. But, the “bobble-head Italian food chick” you speak of, dear Marcelo, I do hope you aren’t referring one Ms. Giada De Laurentis, meow. Not only is she gorgeous and talented (in more ways than one), she runs a mean cooking show. How do you thumb your nose at Everyday Italian, Behind the Bash, Giada’s Weekend Getaways, Giada in Paradise and Giada at Home? What have you ever done with your life that’s so great? Where’s your line-up of hit cooking shows? Where’s your mouth so big that it looks like that monster that almost ate the Millenium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back?

giada4

Look what you did, Marcelo. You made her try to eat her own finger. Apparently, she’s a bleeder. But, seriously, what crazy asshole authorized this photo shoot?

giada1

I believe the following is actually an artist’s rendering of Giada crushing Nick Cannon’s arrhythmic and untalented, yet wholly entertaining, heart.

giada2

And I know below this post it urges you to subscribe to the RSS feed. I can’t change that. Don’t sign up. It’s only a ticket to disappointment when we don’t post for weeks on end (during Nick Cannon marathons), and then even more biting disappointment when our posts show up in your feeder of choice and aren’t worth the bytes they’re printed on.

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Dec 13

While I’m not crafty enough to figure out what any original samples actually are, some enterprising internet citizen has uploaded this video of most (all?) of Kanye West’s songs matched up with the original tracks.  It’s pretty damn impressive, and however you feel about Kanye, he does do some pretty cool shit with some of these samples.

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Nov 15

There comes a time in every man’s life when he looks across the crowd at a packed casino bar with a shitty cover band playing “I will survive” and sees John Adams wearing a neck brace, sitting on a stool in the corner of the room, gazing menacingly around the room.

At that moment, I knew I had to post on this sweet blog. It was a watershed moment, a seminal moment, a moment when I realized “shit, if John Adams lived in the 21st century and for some reason wore a neck brace, he’d look like an angry assassin who had just sprained his neck while being foiled in his latest attempt at sniping whomever John Cusack was supposed to kill in Grosse Pointe Blank.”

Anyways, for some reason it inspired me to post this little snippet that I’ve been sitting on for a while…

I stopped at the Sheetz gas station on my way home from work this evening for the bare essentials (the simple bear necessities) — fierce grape gatorade, orange-strawberry gatorade, trashbags, windshield wiper fluid.

The purchases were unrelated, mostly.

I was standing in line, trying to act very cool and casual while listening to my ipod. (You may be thinking, hey, here’s the tenuous music connection. Wrong, sucker. It was a Bloomberg economics podcast I downloaded that morning. Who’s the nerd now?)

I was understandably exhausted after avoiding work for most of the time I spent at the office on Monday, and certainly all of the time I spent at various coffee shops outside of it. I spaced out, waiting for the cashier to handle this woman’s purchase of a $198 money order, paid in cash; ice cream for her kids, paid with a credit card; and $5 in gas, paid for with a different credit card.

It was then I saw a hooded figure in the doorway. Black hood, black mask. I tensed. Stephen Roach chairman and acting chief executive of Morgan Stanely, Asia, was talking about the the bailout plan on the podcast.

I dropped my fierce grape gatorade. The cap broke. It spilled. Tragedy. But, I was more worried about what my sleep-deprived mind thought was a ninja about to bust through to door. In one of those split-second slivers of time where your mind can make dozens of illogical leaps from synapse to synapse, I thought “which would better deflect a throwing star, wiper fluid or gatorade AM? The wiper fluid bottle is bigger, and the gatorade would probably make a better return volley than a shield, I figured.

I shifted my feet - left foot forward, right back slightly, putting myself in position to throw the gatorade, if the need should arise, or box with my dominant hand in the preferable cross position.

In walked the Muslim woman, wearing her black robe, hood and veil, and three little kids. No throwing stars, no gatorades in return. But it took me a moment to wipe the idioticly tense look from my face, and I got a disgusted look from the woman in return. It was all in the eyes.

So that’s the story about how I got fierce grape gatorade all over Sheetz. Also, I don’t mean to diminish the amount of bigotry and insensitivity in this country. But, couldn’t some of it be chalked up to misunderstandings like this one?

Misunderstood

PS - I was just making up annoying tags for this article and, through the auto complete feature, realized I had already used the “gatorade” and “lots of gatorade” tags. Sad, sad business.

PPS - How sweet is that “Gloria” song by Patti Smith? G-L-O-R-I-A. Woooo.

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Jul 31

That boom you just heard was this guy breaking the blogging barrier by finally posting to this musical love fest. I don’t know much about music that you don’t already know. I do, however, have lots of time to kill at work that I sometimes spend pondering mythical blog posts. Side note: I spent most of one work day earlier this week boring three holes through a golf ball using only a thumb tack and a pair of metal scissors. I also took a two hour lunch and made a few work calls.

Anyways, forget top 10 Radiohead playlists (though I do love Radiohead) and updates on bands you’ve never heard of. I’m bringing you U.S. Census Bureau-y goodness.

I stumbled across a statistic they keep based on decennial census data called the “geographic center of the U.S. population.” Basically, if you flattened the U.S., placed equally heavy weights where every person lives and got rid of all the other garbage (buildings, mountains, etc.), the geographic center is where you could perfectly balance the map.

Expanding on this with my very limited math prowess (hardly a prowess, or even basic understanding), I figured you could draw a line through that point in any direction and exactly half the population would be on one side and half on the other.

Naturally, the thought drifted to which side would win in different scenarios, and then to which side I would pick.

My question to you readers (Dave, Marcelo) in true Risk style, is how do you orient the line and which side do you pick in a fight?

I go diagonal from the upper left hand corner to lower right and take the Northeastern side. Com sa.

usline2 Dont Get Comfortable

(That’s me in the sweet Napoleon hat. Not to scale, except for my head.)

Rationale:

1. The Pacific Northwest is for pussies.

2. The Rockies, while scenic, really make logistics a nightmare.

3. Better transportation network in the Northeast.

4. Texas blows.

5. The Northeast holds the perfect combination of downtrodden working poor and rich intelligista to create the ultimate war machine.

6. Alaska, except for most of the Aleutian Islands, are mine. And Alaskans are bad ass.

Here’s how it looks on a map of the oldest Jewish congregations by state:

jewus Dont Get Comfortable

So, grab this map and do it yourself.

http://www.nightscaping.com/dealerselect1/select_images/usa_map.gif

My one musical ref, straight outta nicktpwn, on the ‘tunes: LCD Soundsystem, Someone Great

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Jul 22

Saw this over at Green Plastic Radiohead.  If you can manage to pare your favorite Radiohead songs down to 10 picks, some enterprising fan is going to be running something of a Radiohead March Madness.  Check it out: Radiohead Tournament

My picks:

  1. Reckoner
  2. Everything in it’s Right Place
  3. Pyramid Song
  4. Let Down
  5. 15 Steps
  6. The Bends
  7. Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)
  8. Lucky
  9. Morning Bell
  10. Dollars and Cents

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