southpaw grammar

The story of the Carbolic Smoke Ball.

2009-02-17T20:59:00.006-05:00

Link: The Strange Case of Miss E.C. Carlill versus the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.

(Image at left from The History Of Advertising Trust Posters and Fine Art Prints.)

One of my favorite cases yet (and apparently a very, very, very common favorite, which kinda takes the fun out of it), it also contains the most awesome citation I've ever seen, from Lord Justice Bowen:

. . . as, I think, some learned judge in one of the cases has said.

I can't find this particular format in the Bluebook but I totally want to use it.

I can see clearly now: Starbucks really is evil

2008-10-04T20:44:00.003-05:00

Step aside, Slayer. Straight from the depthiest depths of Hell comes this putrid easy-listening nightmare from some band called the Holly Cole Trio, a crew of odious ultra-produced airbrushed smug saccharine trimmed-just-so-5-o'clock-shadow sapsters who were apparently sent here on a mission from Satan to make me stab my ears out.

Not since Joan Osborne wrinkled her nose in the "One of Us" video have I mentally vomited so hard at a song. I've heard it at Starbucks twice now.

I have provided the video for you below. You can watch it if you like or you could have someone waterboard you for a few weeks straight. And pay special attention to the soaring crap crescendo part at around 3:04.

I think there's got to be some connection to the vile Paula Cole, who had one of my favorite sacrifice-grammar-for-rhyming (well, semi-rhyming) moments ever:

So open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I

I still marvel at that. "For I." Yeah.

Fabulously uninteresting, anticlimactic accounts of my run-ins with somewhat famous people.

2008-05-05T23:21:00.005-05:00

Quentin Tarantino. Was at the Angelica Theatre in New York in 1998 or so watching some crap movie. Went to the bathroom, and there was Quentin Tarantino. So I'm at one urinal, he's at the one two down from me on the right. I didn't say anything at that point, of course, because even before this foot tapping/wide stance thing, heterosexuals generally avoided any acknowledgment of each other whatsoever whilst doing their business. We walk over to wash our hands, and I still don't say anything. But then we have to go to the same towel dispenser, and I jump on it.

Me: "Mr. Tarantino--are you watching a movie here?"
QT: "Yeah, I'm watching [some old Italian horror movie]."
Me: "Oh. Well, I won't bother you, I guess you need to get back to the movie."
QT: "Hey, thanks."

Liv Tyler. In college, probably 1994, one Friday afternoon I was going down to Wilmington to see my crony Neil. I checked the mailbox on the way out the driveway and there was a Rolling Stone magazine with Liv Tyler and Steven Tyler on the cover. (Look, don't hold this Rolling Stone subscription against me. I had not yet realized how insufferable it was. I didn't renew, if that helps.) Didn't really know who she was at the time, but thought she was pretty hot. Took the magazine with me. I read the article and discovered that Miss Tyler was filming Empire Records in--nunt-uh!--Wilmington, NC, film capital of the Cape Fear region.

When I got to Neil's, I showed him, and we marveled for a while over the (im)possibilities. Late that night, we went to Jimbo's Breakfast and Lunch House for some tofu and kale (but ended up getting omelets, grits, sausage and waffles). Halfway through our meal, this cute girl walked in with what I now realize was an "entourage." It took a minute, but I figured out that this was Liv Tyler, right here at Jimbo's. Neil and I immediately started giggling and chattering like a couple of schoolgirls, planning how in the hell we were going to talk to her. The Plan we settled on went like this: on our way out, we'd go over to her table and make up something awkward and stupid on the fly. To wit:

Me: Uh--hello. I think I got a magazine in the mail today with you on the cover.
Liv: Oh really? Which one?
Me: It was Rolling Stone.
Liv: Oh, yeah.
Me: I read the article, actually, and I kinda thought they weren't very nice towards you in it.
Liv: Really?
Me: I don't know. OK, well nice to meet you, bye.
Liv: Bye!
Neil: Bye.

Barry Sobel. This one is actually kinda interesting due to the Minor Star Was Trying To Get With Me I Think storyline.

When I was probably 21, my fraternity (yes I was in one but I can explain) had a rush event at Charlie Goodnight's in Raleigh. Barry Sobel was the headliner. After his mediocre show, we were in the parking lot getting ready to leave and he came out. No pun intended. We all started talking to him, and it ended up that he was going to hang out with us, which made us very excited, as we were mainly dorks, and I think we mistakenly believed he had a legitimate connection to the Beastie Boys. I won the "who's he going to ride with?" raffle and we got in my maroon Chevy Beretta and headed off to the pool hall Pantana Bob's on Hillsborough Street.

Suffice it to say that Barry made some implications on the drive that he did not restrict his availability only to females. I drove fast. When we got to the place, I quickly located Aaron White at a pool table and introduced him to Barry. Aaron is totally straight, but he also was kinda credulous and eager, so I knew he'd love him some Minor Star. It worked great--they played pool, I got away, I heard the next day that they and some other folks hung out real late. (Nothing like that.)

I'm tired of typing. Maybe later on I'll tell my Sandra Bernhard, Sundays, Throwing Muses, Mojave 3, Belly, Stereolab, and Camera Obscura non-stories.

College kid acts a fool, gets tasered.

2007-09-18T16:17:00.002-05:00

It's really sad, but I've seen some folks defend this little provocateur with references to our Founding Fathers' resistance against the British. Um, I'm pretty sure our Founding Fathers weren't cheesy attention-whore frat guys spewing inanities at a campus Q&A session.

Note that this is a University of Florida student who likes to make a big scene and videotape it (his name's Andrew Meyer--see his self-promotional website here if you want to be reminded of how college kids like to think they're more clever and important than they are)

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - A university student with a history of taping his own practical jokes was Tasered by campus police and arrested after loudly and repeatedly trying to ask U.S. Sen. John Kerry questions during a campus forum.

From a news story here (my emphasis added).

Some commercials that really get on my lay-uss nurve.

2007-09-10T21:44:00.003-05:00

1. The one for the Viva paper towels where the Mom and her little devil's spawn boy are spraying each other in the kitchen. This one.

Oh, it's all just so delightful! Wouldn't want to actually scold this idiot child for shaking up the soft drink and having it spray all over creation. No, surprise, she's not mad at all! She sprays him back! Then he sprays her some more! And who cares about the glopping sticky orange drink which will shortly be attracting trillions of ants from all over the county? This kid will be exploding seagulls with Alka Seltzer within a few months, well on his way to felony vandalism and, eventually, Neo-Nazism.

2. The Beano commercial with the cool animation where the deal is that the woman in the office gets flatulent when she eats her morning muffin (which is human-sized and has a human face), so she has to give it up, but then she takes Beano, which somehow leads to her meeting the muffin in the company breakroom to have relations with it? Thanks, I've been waiting for someone to put together farting, bran muffins, and having sex with food.

3. The Subaru commercial with the sappiest-voiced pleasantly stubbly good-looking Joe in history and the uplifting faux folk music tawnbout how awesome their auto plant is for the environment. "It's more than an auto plant--it's a role model for the environment." Who the hell wrote this? That means that, to the ENVIRONMENT OF THE EARTH, this SUBARU PLANT is "a person who serves as a model in a particular behavioral or social role for another person to emulate." Never mind the inappropriate anthropomorphism--they're saying THE PLANET EARTH looks to THIS SUBARU PLANT for guidance.

The long version of the commercial, no lie, says, "You'll see deer... rabbits... blue herons.... (self-congratulatory smirk) Some people call it a little piece of heaven. We call it the Subaru plant here in Indiana."

4. Those Charles Schwab realistic cartoon commercials where the middle-aged folks are whining melodramatically about how mean their broker is to them.

Now, though it doesn't really fit here, because it was obviously not produced by a real ad agency, but by John Orcutt's pet monkey, I'mull link this one commercial from John Orcutt, an attorney in Raleigh, that could well be the worst local commercial ever made ever in history. My sister called me one day and told me about it, and now she's got it on Youtube. Behold:

Man vs Not-So-Wild: Bear Grylls is a pretty-boy poseur, just as I suspected.

2007-07-30T21:58:00.002-05:00

Oprah should have a reunion show of the scamsters who get her stamp of approval. (There was not a photograph available of Bear with a shirt on.)

This morning at work I got a Schadenfreudetastic bit of news from a co-worker. She and I had talked last week about how her (elementary school aged) son and I are in agreement regarding the Survivorman versus Man vs Wild debate--namely that Survivorman whups Man vs Wild--and she told me today that there's a bit of controversy about Bear Grylls, the too-eagerly-urine-drinking gratuitously-naked-getting Target Home version of Les Stroud.

Seems Bear is not exactly roughing it (info culled from The Daily Mail and The Hollywood Reporter):

• He stayed in a motel when the show portrayed him as out in the wild overnight.
• When he was all scared of getting attacked by this wild bear, it was actually a guy in a BEAR SUIT.
• He didn't kill that snake and eat it; he found it, already dead. On the SIDE OF THE ROAD.
• He didn't actually eat badger; it was a STEAK placed in a badger skin.
• He didn't parachute into a tree and have to struggle to get out; he was pulled UP into the tree in a safety harness to make it look like he'd landed in it.

And of course, his camera crew is always there, which was my first complaint within 2 minutes of seeing the show. Les Stroud, Survivorman, brings a camera and a tripod and sets it up to film himself throughout his deal, so he's truly alone. That's a big difference--there's a reason solitary confinement is the punishment most feared by prisoners.

I put Bear's fame clock at about 14 minutes, 51 seconds.

My sister had a baby.

2007-05-19T21:28:00.002-05:00

It's honestly one of the best things that's ever happened in my life.

They put a parking lot on a piece of land
Where the supermarket used to stand.
Before that they put up a bowling alley
On the site that used to be the local pally.
That's where the big bands used to come and play.
My sister went there on a Saturday.

Come dancing,
All her boyfriends used to come and call.
Why not come dancing, it's only natural.

Another Saturday, another date.
She would be ready but she'd always make them wait.
In the hallway, in anticipation,
He didn't know the night would end up in frustration.
He'd end up blowing all his wages for the week
All for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek.

Come dancing,
That's how they did it when I was just a kid,
And when they said come dancing,
My sister always did.

My sister should have come in a midnight,
And my mum would always sit up and wait.
It always ended up in a big row
When my sister used to get home late.

Out of my window I can see them in the moonlight,
Two silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate.

The day they knocked down the pally
My sister stood and cried.
The day they knocked down the pally
Part of my childhood died, just died.

Now I'm grown up and playing in a band,
And there's a car park where the pally used to stand.
My sister's married and she lives on an estate.
Her daughters go out, now it's her turn to wait.
She knows they get away with things she never could,
But if I asked her I wonder if she would,

Come dancing,
Come on sister, have yourself a ball.
Don't be afraid to come dancing,
It's only natural.

Come dancing,
Just like the pally on a Saturday.
And all her friends will come dancing
Where the big bands used to play.

A Guest Blog From Neil.

2007-03-26T21:08:00.000-05:00

Neil is apparently getting right damn sick of my ignoring this blog. You know, I want you all to know that I'm not ignoring it. I think about this damn blog all the time, every day. But I've gotten myself all twisted up where I can't quite write on it. Idiotic perfectionism. Everything I start to write just bores the HELL out of me.

So let me introduce Neil to you. Neil is going to be in my wedding in a month. Neil and I weren't friends in second grade, as I wouldn't draw him a hippopotamus, but we became best friends in seventh grade, the hippopotamus portrait requirement having been waived. That's him, there, to the left, in like 1989. I think he got that shirt at Peebles, but maybe it was Leggett. So without further ado:

Bluebird of Discontent

by Neil.

February 24 this year was a bluebird day on Lake Gaston.

I went home last weekend to my parents’ house. Sunday morning I slept in.

A bluebird had been perching and watching himself in the rearview mirror of my mama’s back-up mail-car and had profusely defecated on both doors and rearview mirrors. To make things worse he had hovered close in front of the mirror and spread it around with his wings. That’s what my daddy told me after he called me to the front door to show me what was going on. It looked pretty bad from the house but up close I realized the bird had a serious problem. But it was funny anyway and funnier when Daddy told me he had already washed the car four times in the last two weeks.

They had decided to hide the car from the bluebird by parking it behind the barn but he found it. I thought that was a good idea because the back-up mail-car looks worse than the regular mail-car, even before the bluebird. So they moved it back to the front of the house where the bird didn’t have as far to go, I guess. The car is blue. I’m not sure yet if that adds to the story.

Until I got into my own car, a truck, I thought it was odd that the bluebird only seemed interested in that one car when there are plenty of cars to choose from at my parents’ house (most of them have at least one rearview mirror). Turns out there was nothing special about the blue car. He had found himself in my rearview mirror, too, which took all the existing humor out of the situation and added some new.

I have seen something like that before, only it was a mockingbird and it was trying to get in the kitchen window. Like with the bluebird, it was early spring and he was looking for a mate and a safe place to build a nest when his hunt led him to a reflective surface where he thought he saw an interested female. It must be confusing to a bird looking for a mate to see one mirroring his flight but existing in another realm he can’t get into. In both cases the bird had become obsessed to the point it depressed me, if not eventually the bird, too. I assumed each of them was male; they look pretty much like the females and the behavior seems sadly masculine. I may be projecting because I can relate to obsessing over trying to get at something that doesn’t exist.

Later, driving home, it occurred to me that we had pushed science about as far as it could take us. Or at least we had capitalized on everything we already know. I saw on television that they were looking for new compounds in sea sponges that might help treat cancer. Several scientists, including a married couple, went a little more than 660 feet deep to collect uncollected sponges and they were very excited to see one variety no one had ever described before. They showed the robot arm reaching out and plucking a bright red tobacco-leaf-looking thing and slipping it into a jar of deep-sea water. Good for them. Then I thought about how plentiful bass can be at times and how I now take pictures with my cell phone, the same one I get irritated with because I get no reception in most of the places I fish. I don’t even like to talk on the phone when I’m fishing.

The fish prefer it when there are literal clouds overhead and when it’s clear they get under something to hide, like a log or a boat dock. We call that a “bluebird day.” I like it when it’s cloudy out, too, because the sun hurts my eyes. Unless I remember my sunglasses, and then I usually get hot and sunburned.

Was the bluebird ironic? I don’t know if he really was depressed or not. I can’t be sure they even have emotions. He definitely appeared to be longing for something, though.

It's beginning to look a lot like a Frightening Dancing Elfy Kevin Christmas.

2006-12-07T17:20:00.000-05:00

You'll have dreams about this. And not good ones. I'm sorry. Click the picture at your own peril.

Wilford Brimley: The Beetis

2006-12-02T18:00:00.002-05:00

I know, hello and welcome to 10 months ago, but I don't care because this video from some person calling him/herself "morningrise" has made my life. And it'll make yours too if you, like me, are so far removed from the cutting edge of cool web videos that you get your news flashes about same from freaking VH1.

Claude just threw a big wrench in my preferred theory of dreams.

2006-11-22T16:36:00.000-05:00

Claude dreams about the stuff he loves

Claude, the black pug, that is.

Claude dreams a lot. Every time that mug--I mean pug--falls asleep, in no time he's twitching and growling and yipping right there in his sleep, clearly dreaming to beat the band. And he sleeps a lot, so he dreams a lot.

So we all know that the whole idea of dreaming is insane. I mean, sleeping itself is weird--yeah, why don't I put myself in a little coma for say 8 hours a day--but at least it seems to make some sense: you need to put yourself in a standby mode to heal up, reset, recharge. (Actually, that isn't quite right--your body does those physiological things rather well without your brain being unconscious and leaving you as utterly defenseless as you are when you sleep, and in fact there's extremely strong evidence that you sleep primarily in order to dream.)

But these outlandish stories your brain whips up when you sleep--ain nobody figured that one out to anybody's total satisfaction. Let's look at it straight on, as I'm sure we've all done before: while I'm sleeping, my brain's going to make up absurd stories and trick me into thinking they're real. I mean, we're enlightened, rational human beings here, making important decisions and running companies and countries and operating particle accelerators and using giant space-based telescopes to peer across the universe and billions of years back in time and what have you. And still ever night our brains (well, most of our brains) make up these crazy tricking stories about, I don't know, practicing tennis in a batting cage and accidentally hitting my face off with the racket and rushing to put it on ice so I can get it reattached later.

So the theory that I'd heard that just really really seemed to nail it closer than anything else was this: dreams are when your brain takes the information it's gotten recently, files it in the appropriate places, and uses it to update the "programs" your brain runs to make it through "real life." As it's filing and updating these reams of images and information, it "lights up" both very recent memories and old weird ones. It seems to stick them into some kind of story because we try to make structural sense of everything that's going on around us. (See this neat little article that talks about this theory and dreams in general.)

Which brings me back to Claude.

When I saw Claude dreaming last night, I thought, what's all this stuff that dog needs to process? I mean, really, it's not like his day-to-day experiences are that incredibly varied. He just doesn't have that much to file and update. His programming is not that complex (trust me on this). Why does he need to dream so much, and so vigorously? Does this mean it has a purpose beyond filing and updating programming? If so, what is it?

I think The Queen is a good film.

2006-11-15T19:51:00.000-05:00

No she's not

Jana and I saw it the other night, and I, as always, was skeptical. Mainly figured it might turn out to be the standard Everything Traditional Is Like Totally Oppressive And Sucks theme that gets libertines everywhere to wet their pants. I mean, it's not like I'm a big supporter of the British monarchy--far from it, really, just can't see how it can be good for a democracy--but it's so interminably boring to watch yet another "OMG wuz up w/ dum ruels!!1" movie.

Plus I'd read that it focused on the relationship between the Queen and then-fledgling Prime Minister Tony Blair during the time around Princess Diana's death, so I thought it would take a bunch of shots at Blair for becoming supportive of George W. Bush in the war on terrorism, especially since he was the Great Left Hope for anti-Thatcherites. And of course the royal family is eminently lampoonable. All in all, it looked like a perfect opportunity for some enlightened film people to put the Queen and Blair up on a stage and mock the shit out of them for being part of the mean hideous hegemonic Judeo-Christian imperialist puritanical corporatist West.

But it turned out not to be that. I swear, it actually was an deeply touching but seemingly fair look at the royal family, Blair, Diana, the British public, and even the press, sorta. It didn't demonize anyone, no Good Guy or Bad Guy caricatures. Really, every character was shown both flawed and virtuous. And that's a hard thing to do and still make an interesting movie. I mean, just "here's how it went down, here are the subtle dichotomous struggles of each party involved, do what you will with it" is not what you usually see.

Plus Helen Mirren, I mean, come on.

I just went 15-0 in the Raleigh Scrabble tournament. I don't know how to be modest about this.

2006-10-27T20:16:00.000-05:00

Wait, what'd you call me?

It's kind of a weird situation, though, if you think about it. Most of the populace would consider bragging about one's Scrabble prowess to be less a display of arrogance and more a display of, I don't know, pathetic-ness.

(I'm glad my last name isn't Pujols. I'm such a juvenile moron that I can NOT hear "Pujols" and not laugh a little inside. Sorry, World Series is on in the background. Pujols! Oh yeah, and Putin! It's funny!)

OK, Scrabble:

Tournament was held in Raleigh last weekend, October 20-22. 3 games Friday, 8 games Saturday, 4 games Sunday.
That's 15 games.
I won them all.
My new rating is 1679, which puts me at number three in North Carolina.
My highest game score was 536. Total point spread was +1650, an average winning margin of 110, against a very good field.
Highest single play was 167 for the phony OVERPINS* on a triple-triple. (Don't look down, the asterisk is just common Scrabble notation for "not a word.") I had EINORSV on my rack, and there was a P up in the triple line--could have played OVERSPIN, or just VERSION somewhere else, or ENVIRONS at another spot, but I was pretty well ahead and figured I'd take the risk. It didn't draw a challenge.
Played two other phony bingos that didn't get challenged: SEMIDONE* (missed DEMONISE, couldn't play MISDONE anywhere) and THERMIA*.
Best start to a game was in the 12th one--I opened with STIMIED for 74, which drew an understandable challenge from my opponent Bruce Shuman, a very funny and gracious guy, by the way. Turns out STIMIED is good, an alternate spelling for STYMIED, I figure. (I could have played MISEDIT but I missed it.) So it's my go again, and I draw DDILNRU--don't look like much, does it?--and played UNRIDDLE to the E in STIMIED for 70. Up 144 to 0 right there at the start.
Played SYNERGY against the very appropriately named Grace Schmidt, a play I was surprised to find, what with the two Ys and all.
Only other somewhat interesting bingos I can think of were REPENTERS from an R on the board, making POH and EX, for 94, UNCHOKE for 103 (which also drew an unsuccessful challenge from Bruce), and RICOTTAS, which I played because cheese is delicious.
My boys David Lee, Shawn Humble, and Rahn McKeown all did well in their divisions--David finished 3rd and Shawn and Rahn finished 1st.
Jana was a superstar again, showing up on Saturday and watching my last game (without letting me know she was there so as not to make me nervous) and then at the awards ceremony on Sunday with tiara, noisemakers and sparkly confetti in hand. Man I'm glad I'm marrying that girl.
Our awesome friends Kelli and Bob also came on Sunday with their awesome sons Dylan, Max and Kai, blowing the aforementioned noisemakers and throwing the aforementioned confetti.
My awesome parents surprised me on Sunday as well, also showing up during my last game without telling me they were there--man I've got considerate fianceé, family and friends--completing the biggest cheering section ever at a Scrabble tournament. It was an embarrassment of riches, I'll tell you.

Are you still reading? Man, you are such a dork.

Kevin's Tip Nimba 2 For Better Living.

2006-10-13T19:47:00.000-05:00

Here a minute ago I was thinking about how my back isn't really hurting anymore. Since last Satdy, I've had this insidious pain near my left scapula, kinda under it, but maybe closer up to my neck. Insidious because what if it's spinal meningitis? As I say, though, it's pretty much gone.

You can get this at the Staples I made up in my head

Which got me to thinking: wouldn't it be nice to have a button to push to instantly put you back into some pained state you were in at some point, so as to remind you of how nice it is not to be in said pained state no more? I mean, sure I'm glad my back is pretty much better, but I can tell that I don't fully appreciate how nice it is to have that pain gone. I went, "Self, try real hard to remember how much that hurt, how you had to weirdly move your whole torso to look to the left, how worrisome it was to face the fact that you're turning into that downstairs woman in Pet Sematary." But I couldn't remember. My Self was just kinda like, "Eh, well, sure, Self." (We all have like four selves, my friend Lee told me, as is shown in a sentence like "I [one] listened to myself [two] tell myself [three]...." OK, I can't think of how we get the fourth one, but I think he said four.)

I said this to Jana, and she said, "Holy Mary, would you SHUT UP?" Not really. She always humors me. She said, "That's weird--I was just thinking that a little while ago about my back hurting, how I wish I could remember how bad it felt." And so I thought it would make a good tip. Having a button that would do that.

But then I went all reductio ad absurdum on y'all ass--not really the right term at all, just wanted to say that--and realized a major problem with the Former State of Pain or Anguish button: what if you did it when you were really in a lot of pain, hoping to find that at least it's not as bad as this one time in the past, and you go back and it turns out that that past state wasn't as bad as your present state? And you keep trying and you find that your present state is the worst one ever! Man. That sounds like a Adam Sandler Trying To Be A Semi-Serious Actor movie.

Speaking of back pain, my main problem with chiropractors is not that I don't acknowledge that special attention needs to be paid to the back of the Homo Sapiens, because walking all upright like we do is murder on the spine, and it seems like we could get back to crawling or swinging from trees or something now that we've taken over the place and don't need to appear bigger than other animals by awkwardly balancing orthogonal to Earth's gravitational pull, but instead--my problem with chiropractors, we're back to now--that they always have cheesy pictures of themselves in their Yellow Pages ads. I'm really suspicious of any doctor that needs to show me his glamour shot first thing.

OK, here's the real tip, not that other crap.

When I was little, I would allow NO ONE to see my feet. My sister Kelly (pictured) has never seen them to this day

Wash your feet. Seriously. It's the best. My close friends know this about me, but you're not them, so read on.

In the morning, a lot of times it's just not necessary to take another freaking shower. Maybe you're going to work out that afternoon or something--you're really going to take a whole shower, go to work, work out, then take ANOTHER shower? Note that you have to dry off each time. (The shower is not the irritating part to me, it's the drying off. Good GOSH could I get bone dry already? I can't stand having the slightest hint of dampness left on my skin after a shower.)

"Kevin, we are totally with you, but what do we do?" you ask. "If we don't take a shower, when we put our shoes on, in no time our feet will be like all squishy with sweat. Every time we step, we'll feel like we have two little leather sewers strapped to our feet! Plus how they smell later when you take them off!"

Not to worry, my friends: all you have to do is WASH YOUR FEET IN LIEU OF TAKING A SHOWER. Ta-da! Wait, I already gave that away a few paragraphs ago. Anyway, it works. Do it like this:

Walk into the bathroom.
Have a special clean hotel bath mat/towel thingie that you keep especially for this purpose at the ready; lay it in front of the sink. For you to stand on, duh! (You could also just use a regular towel if you must but I can make no guarantees if you go this route.)
Lift one foot at a time up to the sink and wash it like you do your hands.
Dry off your feet thoroughly. No, some more. Kinda fan the towel at them to evaporate that last bit of water.
Viola! (I know. I like to say it wrong. Shannon.)

Jana secretly took this of me a while back and reminded me to include it. "Reminded" in the "forced" sense

Now I guarandamntee you your feet will be fresh and delightful all day. Which will make your whole self feel fresh and delightful. That's the key! You'll forget you didn't take a shower. Sometimes I forget for weeks. But not to worry--your face breaking out in boils will remind you.

Oh yeah, to those of you Smarty McGoanTellMeAboutFootHygiene?s out there, don't even start with the "Why don't you do it standing in the bathtub? Wouldn't that be easier than putting your feet up in the sink?" Because I tried that and it doesn't work. The water like splashes all over your legs and stuff. And it's actually more awkward to try to bend over and wash your feet whilst standing in the slippery dangerous tub. And sitting on the side doesn't work either, because it's too cold on your arse.

Just do it like I said it, really. I want you to benefit from the wisdom of my years--nay, decade and a half--of experience.

Also, just remembered--God likes it. The End.

It's killing me: who's coming here from the 70 park avenue hotel in Manhattan? Also, Ceiling Cat.

2006-10-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

Please tell me. I mean this hotel is like $525 a night at a minimum. Even if you're just a guy at the Starbucks across the street stealing their wireless, let me know.

Also, Ceiling Cat is hilarious.

The fascinating hell of being a perfectionist.

2006-09-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

Spud's a bit of a perfectionist

Somehow, it's gotten so proclaiming oneself a "perfectionist" is taken to be bragging.

I don't think I'm going to uses the phrase "smacks of" ever again. Right then I was going to say "proclaiming oneself a 'perfectionist' smacks of arrogance" and thank God I didn't because it's really just so unbearably smarmy.

Now what happens, see, is that for the rest of my life I rail on anyone who uses "smacks of." That is what a joy I am. I decide that something I do I shouldn't do anymore, and immediately it becomes a universal sin. It's tied in to some kind of self-hatred. That's the beautiful irony of being hypercritical of others: when you shine a bigass light inward on it you see that what you're saying is, "If even someone as worthless as I am can realize that this sucks, then surely everyone else should be able to see it." So you don't use "smacks of" anymore, because I hate myself.

Another one is "methinks." I know no one says this in real life, only on message boards, but MAN how smarmy can you get? There's never any reason ever to use "methinks" besides to deliberately accentuate smarminess. "Methinks your claim of perfectionism smacks of arrogance."

Real quick--"Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses"? This just came on TV, a commercial for "Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses." Some computer animation cartoon, looks like a video game from like 1998. This was a Mattel intern's busy work project or something. "Something like Snow White, but not with dwarves, because that's kinda offensive, and also dwarves kinda creep me out, but something twelve. Twelve of something. Something pretty and not trolly or dwarfy. Like princesses. Yeah, there's your show, dancing princesses, dancing like in circles around Barbie and Barbie's dancing in like a pink something outside a castle in a courtyard. Program that, and can we have it by say the end of the week, thanks."

OK, perfectionism. Like I say, folks get a wee bit offended when you say you're a perfectionist. What it is is that people misunderstand what being a perfectionist really means. I think it's two things:

1) A lot of folks claiming to be perfectionists are not really admitting to a neurosis; they really are kinda bragging about how good they are at things. These people should be cheese grated to death.

2) When you do understand perfectionism and are thus actually confessing a problem when you say you're a perfectionist, people think you're the kind of person in number 1 and want to cheese grate you to death.

The deal with perfectionism, you know, is that it's a pretty debilitating fault. What you do is constantly think that everything you do has to be perfect, so you NEVER DO ANYTHING. Or at least anything hard. You do a lot of planning planning planning thinking thinking thinking mulling mulling mulling but that's about it. I've been thinking about this blog, for instance, since 1977, when I was four, but I couldn't actually start it till I was thirty-two. (I was really prescient about the eventual invention of the internet and the evolution from newsgroups to chat rooms and message boards to blogs.)

Every single little thing in the universe I think about doing becomes some moron struggle for perfection. Like when I get in the car in the morning, I go through usually about ten songs on my iPod looking for the one that fits my mood the most. Sometimes if after around ten songs I can't find one that fits just right, I consider listening to the BBC. "Let's see, is today a BBC day, or a music day? BBC day or music day? BBC day or music day? BBC day or music day? BBC day or music day? BBC day or music day? BBC day or music day?" If I decide BBC day, then I listen to the BBC, and then I have to listen for a few seconds to see if their story is poignant and if they're being particularly biased today, and then see how that feels, and then reconsider the music option. Or maybe I just feel like having a quiet ride. You can imagine how this agonizing translates into decisions on important stuff.

By the way, I'm sitting on the porch right now with my laptop, a cat, and a glass of water. I wrote that paragraph and took a drink of the water. Then I thought, should I set the water back where I had it, or should I put it on the other side? Where is it optimally convenient for me when I want to drink it again? And where is it least likely for the cat to drink it? (I put it back where I had it, I think that's best.)

Anyway, tonight I realized another major problem with being a perfectionist. Not only does it make every individual issue monumentally difficult, making it extremely difficult ever to get inspired to actually start something--whenever you do get inspired to actually start something, you get so over-inspired that you start thinking about all the many many things you could do. All the cool projects that daggone it you're going to just dive right in to. And you start making a list in your head, and you're real excited, and you can't wait.

But what to do first? What's the best thing to do right now? Which project is the perfect one to start tonight? Putting more CDs on my iPod, going through the mail, cutting my perfectly round custom aluminum Scrabble board into a more retro rounded rectangle '50s refrigerator shape, organizing the old cords and electronics drawer, or refinishing that one section of the hardwoods? And then you get overwhelmed. And so you sit down and start thinking about which one makes sense to do. And you sit there and think and then maybe turn on the TV to catch up on DVRed shows and before long you're not inspired anymore and you get depressed and go to bed.

This time, I'm actually OK, because one of the projects I was considering was writing a new post on this thing, and I forced my brain to shut up so I could just sit there and do it. It's not much, but it's something.

The Pixies could crap a better rock song than you can hear on Rock Star: Supernova.

2006-08-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

Wow, wow, wow, wow. Wow. Wow wow wow. LALALALALAboodulaboodulaboodula. Spit spit spit. I've just seen this abomination and I'm like chock full of fight or flight response. I really want to hit the show really hard right in the face. Or run real real fast and wave my arms all crazy and laugh weird so that it scares the neighborhood and kinda scares me even though I'm the one doing it.

Ace really means it

So the one guy does "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. I don't know, Nirvana has never been some huge deal for me. Kurt Cobain even said himself that they were just a Pixies cover band (to his immense credit). He did say that, right? I've told people that story about 25 times. Same with Thom Yorke saying he's just trying to imitate Jeff Buckley. They're some of my favorite things to say regarding music, so someone pls chk for me.

OK, Nirvana, not one of my absolute favorites, but a solid band. Now this guy on the show was doing the Nirvana cover and you would not BELIEVE this imbecile. Don't know his name, let's call him Angst On A Stick. He's all doing that chest patting thing that these days signifies uncontrollably intense fake sincerity, plus all the faces, the piece of crap sneer, and of course the Creed/Matchbox 20 or matchbox twenty or WHATEVER/Chris Monkeyface From American Idol The Pride Of This One Billboard In Greensboro voice. Kurt Cobain, if ONLY you were still alive and you had that shotgun and you were in the audience watching this guy vomit your song.

Again, Nirvana wasn't the best thing in the world, but they were not poseurs. Or Kurt Cobain at least was not a poseur. He was not faking angst. And that's the deal with rock music--it's supposed to be, at its root, rebellious, irreverent, and not a SMIDGEN put on or phony. It's supposed say fuck off to everything, I'm making this sound because I have to and I don't care.

(The merits of that semi-nihilistic attitude are eternally open to debate. Plus, it's weird for music to be used for such purportedly raw, fiercely nonconformist expression, since music pretty much universally adheres to certain chord structures and rhythms. "I'm RAGING, man, RAGING against the MACHINE! I'm SICK of this FASCIST world trying to BREAK ME! I'm going to RAGE, man! I'm going to RAGE, in 4/4 time with this little roughly rhyming poem thingy verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-repeat AND fade out.")

So you've got uber rock rebels Dave Navarro (who by the way is gayer than Freddie Mercury's mustache, and Carmen Electra is just a fake-tittied beard and you can tell him I said that because what is he going to do, fix my hair to death?) and Tommy Lee and Gilby Clarke (Guns 'n' Roses Mark II rhythm guitarist) and the weird looking bassist from Metallica I think. This crew of judges is supposed to pick a lead singer from a collection of Temptation-Island-reject cartoon versions of rock stars.

And YOU WOULD THINK that these supposed rockers would have a LITTLE sense of irony about the whole thing. Or a LITTLE shame. But no, and I mean seriously not the teeniest bit. Here's what Dave Navarro lisped after Angst On A Stick made a show tune of "Smells Like Teen Spirit":

"What I like about you--when the song that you're doing calls for angst, you have the angst and you put it into your performance." (Crowd goes YAAAAAAAY!)

And thus dies ANY iota of a rock legacy to which Jane's Addiction or the Red Hot Chili Peppers still laid claim. I mean, what's up focus group consumerist rock? "When the song calls for angst"? Yeah, I can see Cobain, "Well, the demographic we were targeting here calls for angst, so I'm going to do my angst face here, and also beat my chest earnestly."

This isn't American Rock Star with Simon Cowell. These guys are really supposed to be old serious rock legends. Tommy Lee's telling the guy, "I think it would be really good if you slammed down your guitar at some point." You don't destroy your guitar because it's good MARKETING! You destroy your guitar because you're up there and you're sick of everything including your guitar and your music and you have to destroy things!

I just can't believe this. I mean, I knew it was all a fraud, I knew Poison and Def Leppard and Motley Crue were not actually tough guys but band dorks who grew their hair out and put on makeup and feather clip thingies, I realized that when I was 14, but I didn't know HOW MUCH of a fraud it was. They are THE OPPOSITE of rock. They are worse than the Spice Girls, by far, because they pretended to really mean it. They tricked little Beavises and Buttheads the world over. They're worse than what Spinal Tap is parodying--at least Nigel actually believed his own mess, and wasn't just acting a part. (I think there are multiple layers of irony there but I'm not sure.)

Watch the show, really, loyal readers. Please, it's like the hardest cringing you'll ever do.

EDIT, 7:46PM EDT Wednesday: I've found out Angst On A Stick's real name, or real fake rock star name, rather: Magni. I'm naming the worst of them here, and linking to the slick overproduced so-totally-non-rock official site, in the hopes that some of their dunce fans will be Googling and wind up here tawbout about how aaahsome they are. Ryan Star (who ties with Magni for pathetic fake cheese rock crapdom) and Toby Rand (who also ties). May your personal hells be to magically acquire good musical taste and be forced to listen to your own recorded feces for eternity.

How Stuff Doesn't Work: Marshall Brain and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

2006-08-07T21:30:00.000-05:00

Have any of you seen this? On the illustrious Marshall Brain's brilliant site HowStuffWorks.com, I ran across "How Conspiracy Theories Work". Brain (yes, it's his real name) is a bit of an internet intellectual legend, so I looked forward to reading this one--but it turned out to be a little misleading. Brain eschews the classics--the faked moon landing, the JFK assassination, Taylor's victory on American Idol--and instead focuses pretty much exclusively on 9/11 conspiracy theories, which he describes as "strong and consistent." In fact, by the end of the article, to my huge surprise, it appears clear that his actual intent is less to talk about "how conspiracy theories work" and more to lend credibility to theories about controlled demolitions bringing down the towers, planned and covered up by the government.

Do you see 9/11 imagery here? It would all be too perfect--EEEE-vil mega-corporate Starbucks, Big Oil, and Dubya all getting together and commissioning a sardonic poster to commemorate their handiwork. Only thing is, it's not true. See Snopes debunking.

His list of, as he calls them, "facts" and "big things that anyone can see," which he presents as the seeds of the 9/11 conspiracy theories, is suspect. In these "facts" he includes obvious opinions about the President's reaction being "strange" and "odd" and questionable reports (from "www.wanttoknow.info," another 9/11 conspiracy theory site) of 10 jets quickly intercepting Payne Stewart's crashing plane (implying that fighter jets must have been told to stand down on 9/11), a report which conflicts with common sense, and with this report from Popular Mechanics, "9/11: Debunking The Myths":

"In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. With passengers and crew unconscious from cabin decompression, the plane lost radio contact but remained in transponder contact until it crashed. Even so, it took an F-16 1 hour and 22 minutes to reach the stricken jet."

Brain provides tons of links to "9/11 truth commission" type propaganda sites throughout and after the article apparently as legitimate sources. He provides ONE SINGLE link to a summary debunking article, that same Popular Mechanics one--and immediately follows it with several links to conspiracy theorists' angry responses to it. The links page at the end of his article is a smorgasbord of misleading 9/11 conspiracy theory sites--and clearly not just for amusing reference. Even has a piece of lunacy from Gore Vidal.

He left off the best link, one that has information that easily dispenses with every single bit of the 9/11 conspiracy theories: 9/11 Myths. It wasn't hard to find.

The whole point for this post is that I've always loved How Stuff Works, and it has always seemed really solid, but this is absolutely unreal. I've always ignored the 9/11 conspiracy theorists as the mentally ill people they are. I mean, it's one thing when certified imbeciles like Charlie Sheen and Cynthia McKinney spout this nonsense. But Marshall Brain? Is it a case of a brilliant guy with no common sense? Is it a symptom of our warped-ass public-school-indoctrinated society's penchant for trying to make everything equal, even opposing theories where one of the theories is crazy paranoid and bone stupid?

Or am I missing some big joke?

If you like pornography, you might not want to visit this site.

2006-07-31T11:04:00.000-05:00

one angry girl®'s Porn Myths. (Picture at left is a screen shot from her site.)

one angry girl® is a serious, devoted feminist who doesn't think much of Republicans or "family values," and her site wears her disdain for same on its e-sleeve, so it seems a bit weird for me to link her site here (and add it to my few favorite links on this page). She'd doubtless argue ferociously with me about many of my positions.

But even if we'd disagree about a lot, there's one thing we agree wholeheartedly on: there's a lot of stuff in our culture that's saying that pornography is OK, and it's extremely easy for us guys to rationalize taking a look at it, and it's becoming an epidemic--and the lies that keep it going need to be dispelled. And her site is a spectacular, brilliantly constructed and utter refutation of the lies that make folks think pornography is no big deal.

Take a long look at it. To me, it's revolutionary. It's that rare kind of site that is deeply affecting--and could, for some, go from affecting to life-changing.

It's breathtaking, when you think about it, that rationalizations for porn have worked so well to destroy the obvious common sense that it's perfectly vile and grounded in nothing but a world of pure horror.

101 Tips For Better Living. Give or take 95.

2006-06-26T19:00:00.000-05:00

I'm just so full of tips. Right now I have six. I'm going to start bussing y'all in the mouf with some of them.

Have A Short Voice Mail Greeting Because The Cell Phone Company Overexplaining Lady Is Trying To Screw Us All.

You have noticed this. You call somebody, and since nobody ever answers, it goes to their voice mail. The greeting says "Hello, this is Billy. I'm sorry I missed your call. Please leave me a message after the tone and I'll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you and have a blessed day." (That last part if you're calling an enthusiastic Christian.)

Now what happens? Not just a tone, I'll tell you that much. Now you get the Overexplaining Lady. She says some dumbass shit along the lines of "To record a message, please wait for the tone. When you are finished recording, press one for more options or simply hang up. To leave a callback number, press five."

First of all--we are getting MORE technologically advanced, not LESS. So we don't need MORE explanation of how to use an answering machine. Before cell phones, answering machines didn't have an Overexplaining Lady. They had your greeting and then a tone. And people generally figured it out. People everywhere. BOOP and then you start talking. It took a little while for some folks, but eventually we all got it.

So then cell phones come along and all of a sudden we've forgotten what BOOP means? We need the guy we're calling telling us to leave a message after the tone and then a lady telling us that too, plus some other crap? "Oh my gosh, what did he say? Leave a message when? After the tone or before the tone? What's the tone going to sound like? How will I know when to talk? Oh, here's a lady, thank God. AFTER the tone, OK."

Nimber 2--WHAT--IS--A--CALLBACK--NUMBER? Has ANYONE ever pressed five to leave this "callback number" thingie? Doesn't the number pretty much come through on the caller ID? Also, don't folks usually SAY their number in their message? How does anyone check for a "callback number" anyway? If someone left me a "callback number," I wouldn't be their friend anymore. I don't know what it is but I know it's stupid.

Numero C--yes, as a novelty, every once in a while somebody presses the "more options" thing when they're finished recording, and flags the message as "urgent." But it's like once ever in your life. Plus I'm really not going to pay any more attention to a message just because the lady says "This message is marked 'urgent.'" Ooh, they marked it urgent. Better listen hard.

You know what it is, right? And let me note right here that I'm not a big Big Business Conspiracy Guy. It's that during the time that the Overexplaining Lady is talking, my extremely valuable Cell Phone First Minute time is slipping away. If you'll notice, by the time your regular "Hey, this is Billy" greeting happens, and then Mrs. Soothingly Voiced To The Point Of Being Patronizing finishes talking, and then the pause, and then the BOOP, the call's at like 52 seconds. Then if you leave any message beyond "ThisisKevincallmebackbye," you're over a minute--and you've got a TWO minute call on your bill. Think how many of cell phone calls are just folks leaving a message. Turn a bunch of those should-be one-minute-ers into TWO-minute-ers, and suddenly you're talking about a bunch of people going over on minutes and paying a bunch of cash to cell phone companies.

So anyway, until the cell phone companies stop with this shit, what we should do is make our greetings real real short. The longest one ever should be "This is Kevin, please leave a message, thanks." Talking pretty fast. I haven't done mine yet but I'm going to.

That's my first tip. I'll do the other five ones later.

Also, I'm not going to apologize for not writing anything for so long, because what, do I have some huge audience that's all sad that I haven't written for a while? No, I have 30 people a day searching for one of those quotes off the Starbucks cups. So I think it would be kinda pretentious for me to apologize here. "Gosh, I'm so sorry, I know y'all are just sitting there hitting refresh refresh refresh waiting for me to write something, but I haven't thought of anything lately." Is that what you want? Of course not. You don't care.

How about I smack around The Interpols¹ some more?

2006-05-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

Another song off Turn On The Bright Lights has a lyric so HEINOUSLY OFFENSIVE that when I'm driving and I hear it I stop the car and get out and fall to my knees and lean back and put my arms in the air and ball up my fists and look to the heavens and say "WHYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!???" as the camera zooms out rapidly overhead. Also it's raining.

If I'm not driving, and I'm listening to Interpol whilst hanging by one arm from this metal thing in like a big windy ventilation shaft, then I go like this:

So the song is Leif Erikson, and what a stupid name for a song, since it has absolutely nothing to do with Vikings, and contrived absurdism be damned, and here's the lyric:

She feels that my sentimental side
Should be held with kids gloves

KIDS.

GLOVES.

Would somebody please go to his Myspace or whatever and tell him it's kid gloves, no S, you know, "gloves made from the skin of baby goat?" You know, super ultra delicate gloves that one might, I don't know, handle something super ultra delicately with? Not KIDS GLOVES, dumbass. Note: as is the case with everything he drones, he drones it so EARNESTLY. If you're going to be earnest as shit at least get the idiom right.

I'm not even going to get into the song's closing lines,

She says brief things
Her love's a pony
My love's subliminal

SHE SAYS BRIEF THINGS. HER LOVE'S A PONY.

And of course the song sounded all great until I listened a bit more closely and then confirmed what I thought I'd heard via the Information Superhighway.

Also, "Interzone" happens to be a song by Joy Division, you know. Just saying.

Oh, and I still like Interpol, in the sense that I keep right on listening to them and paying money to play them on the jukebox and putting them on mix CDs. It's sorta a love-mock relationship.

_______________

¹ I know. But it's a fun game. The Slowdives, The Pavements, The Velvet Undergrounds. Now you try!

More proof that the Interwebs and Wham! are bringing the world together.

2006-04-15T00:35:00.000-05:00

Somebody from Al Kuwayt, Kuwait got to my blog the other day by Googling

LYRIC OF I AM NEVER GONNA DANCE AGAIN GUILTY FROM WHAM

landing him on the Careless Whisper thing I wrote. Read it with an accent, it's even funnier.

You do realize that if there's no God, there's no morality.

2006-04-14T22:34:00.000-05:00

I mean, zip. Nothing. (I don't say "nada" with this, though I considered "zilch." But I already had a "z" word.)

Actually, what I'm talking about here is the existence of souls or any type of spirituality. Not "God," per se, for those of you who get your fists all balled up at the word "God."

If there are no souls, nothing but physicalism, and we're just a big ol' neato accident that was bound to spring up somewhere in this enormous, old universe (and that bitch is enormous and old, I'm tawbout ENORMOUS and OLD), then every assignment of value that we make is perfectly arbitrary. To place a value on "life," or "beauty," or "justice," or "pleasure," or "order," or "truth," is precisely nothing more than arbitrary, at best. All this value assignment is just a result of the self-preservation/replication programs running in the assemblies of particles that we call ourselves.

If it's all just assemblies of particles, including us, then stuff has no value--it just is. If it's all just assemblies of particles--no spiritual side, no souls--then in the same way that it's not wrong for a comet to be destroyed by the heat of a star, it's not wrong for the assembly of particles we called "Hitler" to destroy millions of other assemblies of particles (that happened to be assembled into what we call "people"). A guy torturing a puppy to death is just some particles interacting with some other particles.

I'm hoping that my man Brett Watson from Nutters.org will come round and let me know where this epiphany fits into the pantheon of philosophical thought. I hope I just used "pantheon" right.

(Ryan North apparently made the dinosaur illustration, an illustration which I plucked off the zombie discussion at http://consc.net/zombies.html, a site to which I was alerted by the recklessly prolific blogger Jamie Rieger.)

No. No, they're just screwing with me now. Or maybe I dreamed it.

2006-03-27T23:51:00.000-05:00

Look, it's the new Starbucks Seal! Don't give me that look, you know you giggled.

There is a new Starbucks quote cup. It makes Bill Brummel's insipid maxim seem downright sage by comparison. It is from the modern philosophe who, like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, has but a single word for a name: Seal. (Actually, little known fact--Aristotle's full name was Billy Aristotle. Not William, but Billy. Weird, huh?)

So check this quote out. But first keep in mind that there's a zillion dollar project going on here, with like committees of people meeting and "Creative Teams" and approval matrices and focus groups. Starbucks is probably paying some advertising consultant $400/person-hour to do this whole cup business. This is serious marketing here.

And I just want to go ahead and say--I don't hate Seal. I don't LOVE Seal, but I don't hate him. He's fine. In fact, I bought the CD single of "Crazy" from back in 1991 or whenever, because it reminded me of going into the dining hall at NC State in the morning and picking the delicious marshmellows out of the Lucky Charms bin. Is that right for "marshmellows"? It doesn't look right. Hang on.

Wow, it's "marshmallows." Do I have to say it like that too? "Marsh-MAAA-llows"? That's stupid. Nobody says it like that.

OK, the quote:
Let go your sorrow.
Let go your blues.
Coz I know tomorrow is yesterday's news.
Let go your sadness, give up the fight, follow your madness and take flight... take flight.
- Seal, musician.
There's some advertising agency that says, "Yeah, that's good, I like that one. No, leave the 'coz' in there. Kinda keeps it real, word?"

And my thing is that Starbucks, while consumerist and frighteningly ubiquitous, isn't really going for the dumb masses. It seems like they've always stayed kinda suburban snobbish, with all the "venti" and the CDs with Yo La Tengo and Rufus Wainwright and Gillian Welch. As much as you might hate this coffee company, it's not as mainstream as mainstream can get. It has a smidgen of taste, usually.

Except with these cups. HOW-- DID-- THEY-- PICK-- THIS-- ONE-- TRITE-- LYRIC? I mean, there are MOUNTAINS of trite lyrics out there. Is it because Seal has all that shit on his face? What? Maybe they don't have a big team on this. Maybe it more like they've got this one pathetic guy who just graduated from Seattle Community College ten minutes ago who runs this whole cup campaign and always forgets about the deadline until the absolute last minute. So he grabs the FIRST quote he finds on Google and sends it every week or whatever. Except this time, when he was so late he had to phone it in from his car, and he just recited whatever was coming out of the radio.

They'll let you submit ones of your own via their site. I'mull start submitting like a mofo. If it comes down to a vote, will y'all hold me down?

Dear Thom: Please stick to imitating Jeff Buckley. For the love of God. Sincerely, Me

2006-03-24T01:25:00.000-05:00

Newly self-appointed Arbiter of Environmental Credentials Among Western Heads of State. The natural next step up from "great singer"

Oh how I hate it when my favorite musicians get all earnest and political. I mean, write your songs, artfully express your political stuff or whatever you like through that, fine. But this kinda deal, where you try to jump into the fray and speak like experts or pundits, is just bone-crunchingly inane. I mean, stay out of it just to save yourself humiliation if for nothing else.

"I got so stressed out and so freaked out about it. Initially when it came up I tried to be pragmatic," Yorke told New Music Express magazine in an issue out Tuesday. "But Blair has no environmental credentials as far as I'm concerned."

This is what he said. Really. He really apparently said this. With a straight face, I'm assuming. Except for the eye, that was still crooked.

Maybe he and Morrissey can hang out and discuss world politics, using scholarly terms like "so freaked out" and "all getting weird." Or maybe they can talk about how rough they've had it there in Britain. I hear it's a police state there just like it is here.