Why did I take this test at 8:30 on a Sunday morning? Well, I blame society. And Michele. Mostly Michele. Plus, I can only watch bananaphone so many times, ya know.
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In which the author attempts to avoid work as long as possible and remind his loyal minions of his upcoming birthday…
Home from work today, I’m trying to get a bunch of junk together for a yard sale we’re having… um… today. So, we’re behind schedule. Bite me.
The house we bought in 1997 had its garage converted into a large bedroom/laundry/bath with its own outside entrance. There’s even a separate refrigerator in there. And it’s right off the kitchen. It would make a pretty cool mother-in-law apartment, actually. I could live there. Just sneak into the kitchen for food and never have to interact with the family again. Brilliant!
Well, it would be except for the fact that we piled every ounce of crap in there that could possibly fit.
It started off as our master bedroom, because that was the only place our king size water bed would fit. But apparently a garage still knows it’s a garage even when you disguise it as a bedroom, because it started to gather junk from day one. When we decided to fix up the place a couple of years ago, we planned on having a yard sale. So, we shoved all the yard sale stuff in there, too. (The yard sale never happened.) Then, we needed a place to put all Dad’s instruments and amps and junk when he died–not to mention my own guitars and crap. And, finally, the garage evicted us completely when the waterbed heater died, making it impossible to sleep on without fear of frostbite.
Some friends of ours gave us a new bed a couple of weeks ago, so at last we’re cleaning out the place. V has spent two weeks doing laundry, getting all the old clothes ready for sale or to take to Goodwill. You can actually see the floor! All I have to do is tear apart the waterbed and find a way to get rid of the old refrigerator.
Of course, I can’t do any of that until I’ve spent an appropriate amount of time sitting on my butt in front of the PC drinking coffee. (It’s the law.)
While doing my blogger duty, I ran across a cool site called Welcome To The Retro Future. It’s a collection of articles from the past about the future. You know, like “in the year 2525…” (God, I hate that song.) One of the articles is about Telstar, the satellite and the song.
“Telstar” was from 1962.
I just finished a song swap with some fellow Lounge Lizards where we were supposed to come up with a CD of songs from our birth year. I got stuck with that suckiest of years: 1962.
1962 was in that no-man’s land between the cutting edge of rock-n-roll and the Beatle Era. Elvis was reduced to putting out one single with a couple of cute ditties (“Good Luck Charm”/”Return to Sender”). Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis… all gone from the charts. Ray Charles had the great “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. But the Beach Boys hadn’t really gotten started yet. Neither had Motown. Love Me Do was the only Beatle song available in 1962, as it came out in England in October. But it wasn’t until January 1963 that the tidal wave got cranked up.
I was born in the middle of a rock-n-roll desert.
All of this is, of course, to remind you that with this upcoming birthday, I will be THE ANSWER. (Anyone who doesn’t get that needs to step to the back of the Heart of Gold and wait for something improbable to happen. Like me making sense.) So, you have but a short amount of time to shower me with prezzies. And I don’t want a drizzle, people. I need a shower! Wait. That didn’t sound right…
I suppose I’ve wasted enough time drinking coffee and making strange double-entendres. I gotta go drain the ole waterbed.
Wait… um… yeah…
Posted in Life, the Universe and Everything
11 Comments
Hit the Road Jack
CNN.com – Ray Charles dies at 73 – Jun 10, 2004
Yikes! Another major icon dies. Another one who’s name started with “R”…
If these things come in threes, Rodney Dangerfield, Reggie Jackson, and Ricardo Montalban better take their vitamins this week.
Posted in Tunes
7 Comments
The Terminal
I love summer, because it’s much easier to get to the free previews when the kids are out of school. And free previews are the best way to see some movies. Take Tom Hank’s latest film, The Terminal, for instance. It’s a sweet little comedy about a guy stuck in an airport. There’s nothing offensive about it at all. It doesn’t suck. But I’m glad I didn’t pay for a ticket.
Directed by Stephen Spielberg and very loosely based on the true story of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, a man stuck at the Paris airport for over 15 years due to a diplomatic foul-up, the movie has Hanks stuck at JFK while his tiny Eastern European country goes through a civil war. He figures out ways to survive on Burger King and airline food (no small feat), runs afoul of the airport security chief (Stanley Tucci), and falls in love with a flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
It’s all very cute and lovable in a kinda “You’ve Got Sleepless in Seattle Mail Forest Gump” way. It has some laughs and some misty-eyed moments, but overall it lacks any kind of serious drive. In fact, Kumar Pallana as a little old Indian service worker, who is paranoid that Hanks’ character is a CIA spy, nearly steals the show.
I wish they had done more with the reason Hanks came to America in the first place. Without giving away anything, I think it would have been more fascinating to have seen him try to fight his way out of the airport and then through the unfamiliar streets of NYC in order to fulfill his father’s dying wish than to watch him twiddle his thumbs in an airport for two hours. “The Terminal” will make you give up a couple hours of your life. But what were you doing with them anyway?
Guess this is as good a time as any to unveil my new “Give up…” movie rating scale, eh? From best to worst:
Give up insulin! If you don’t see this movie, you’ll die anyway!
Give up crack for a week to buy a ticket!
Give up caffeine, so you can sit still for it.
Give up a couple hours of your life.
Give up counting sheep. Zzzzzzzzz.
Give up lunch (if you see it).
Posted in Blogcritics, The Big Screen
3 Comments
9:09
When looking for links to the Internet fads yesterday, I realized that the Web is such a large place that something could be “huge” for years and there would still be people that haven’t seen it. I know that I’m always running into “new” things that have been around for a while.
For example, Jean-Michel has been taking a picture of himself every day at 9:09 and posting it at his web site, 09h09.com, since September 2002. It’s extreme Picture Yourself!
How appropriate, then, that yesterday’s entry is a picture with the Picture Yourself Queen on her honeymoon in Paris.
Posted in Wouldya Lookit That!
2 Comments
I keel you!
If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Fifteen Minutes.
If you have, don’t drink a soda while you do.
Posted in Blogcritics, The Big Screen
2 Comments
All your badgers…
Whenever I am feeling stressed (and I can’t find the Doom Song), I turn to my old friends, the Badgers to make it all right.
You can never have enough badgers, I always say–except on the occasions when I say, “Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers.” But those are relatively rare. To prove the point, Grump found me a whole page of badger stuff. I am especially fond of Banana Phone, right now. And there’s even one for Monsieur Yates.
Yet, somehow, when The Wave Magazine came up with its list of The 10 Best Internet Fads, it was badger-less. Yes, you heard me. No badgers! What self-respecting list leaves off the badgers badgers badgers badgers badgers… ahem! Sorry about that.
It’s a travesty of justice! An incredible insult! Perhaps even a clerical error!
It’s bad enough they didn’t put All Your Base as number one, but I think their list is a bit limited. I mean, where’s Yatta? Weebl & Bob? Peanut Butter Jelly Time? Strongbad? Gollum Rap? The Insanity Test? Punk Kittens? Bilbo Baggins? Or MY FAVORITE VIDEO EVER?
Are there any others I’m not thinking of? Leave me a comment with your favorite stress-relieving insanity, and I promise not to make fun of your taste in humor. *snicker*
p.s. My wife doesn’t understand the Badgers. She will be left behind when the Rapture comes.
p.p.s. Grizzly Adams told me to make this post.
Posted in Strangeness
13 Comments
Fell in love with a girl
I think I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Modern Country Music Sucks. I know I sound like an old codger (“Back in my day…”), but I’d much rather listen to Merle Haggard than the watered-down, blow-dried Hag wannabes. And I much prefer Loretta Lynn to the made-for-tv-movie bimbo parade on CMT.
Apparently, Jack White feels the same way. He produced Loretta’s latest album, called Van Lear Rose, because he’s a huge fan.
But this is not some throwaway record of a 70-year-old dying country queen! Holy shit, no! On my way to work this morning, I heard “Portland Oregon” on the Rollins College radio station, WPRK. It’s one of the best songs I’ve heard all year. Loretta wrote all of the songs on the album, and Jack produced it with the kind of simple, raw energy that I love in the White Stripes. It’s got all the honky tonkin’, cheatin’, drinkin’ and murderin’ of hardcore country combined with the we-don’t-need-no-stinking-keyboards attitude of a great Rolling Stones record.
Read this great interview they did together for the New York Times:
FRISKICS-WARREN What do you say to people who see your collaboration on this album as a publicity stunt?
LYNN Play the damn thing! It’s not a gimmick. I’ve got two more in mind, and Jack and I are going to do ’em together. When I’m on the road, I say to my fans, “How many of you know the White Stripes?” And they applaud. Country people know him.
WHITE A lot of people come to shows wearing Loretta Lynn T-shirts. The last generation, someone told me, is the first to like the same music as their parents.
I don’t have much hope that any of this album will get played on commercial radio. That’s why I listen to college stations.
Posted in Blogcritics, Tunes
4 Comments
Thank you, heroes of D-Day
I feel horrible that I ignored the remembrance of D-Day today.
I hate it when newscasters and pundits and politicians use “fate of the world” type phrases to describe everything. There have been relatively few instances in history when the true fate of anything as fundamental as freedom or democracy “hung in the balance.” And many of those–like Stanislav Petrov, who refused to start a nuclear war–are simply catastrophes that we never knew about, averted by unsung heroes just doing their job.
June 6, 1944, however, was truly one of those fateful moments.
If you take a globe and a black magic marker and color in all the countries of the world that had been conquered by the fascist regimes of the Axis Powers, there’d be a hell of a lot of black on this planet. The Allies had begun to reverse the tide, taking back Italy and getting into Rome on June 4, but to truly liberate Europe, they knew they would have to open up another front. They couldn’t take Germany by just marching up the Appenine Peninsula. On June 6, 1944, the forces of 12 countries–led by the United States, Great Britain and Canada–launched a massive assault on the French coastline in order to gain a foothold in Western Europe.
I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to have been sitting on one of those Higgins boats, knowing that when the ramp came down, I’d have to get out, wade (or swim) to the beach, cross the beach and attack up the dunes and cliffs of Normandy through the most extensive defenses ever set up in history–all while being shot at from every angle. 10,000 of them were wounded. 4,000 of them did not see another day.
Every one of the men who did that deserves more respect and admiration than we can ever give them.
The following is from The National D-Day Memorial site.
Posted in Wouldya Lookit That!
4 Comments
Long Distance Dedication
You may not believe in kharma or whatever, but man sometimes coincidence is just too much. The first song in my randomized playlist when I finally dragged my butt off the couch to the computer this afternoon was this:
The Ramones – Bonzo Goes to Bitburg
The more I am reminded of the legacy of Ronald Reagan by the endless tributes, the more I remember that he was the first politician I came to loathe. I’m sorry, but it was the Reagan Administration putting its blind determination to oppose the Soviets ahead of all logic that lead directly to 3,000 people being killed on September 11, 2001. Or are you still that naive to think that arming and training Osama bin Laden was a good idea?
You can call this speaking ill of the dead or unpatriotic or liberal lefty whacko whatever, but can you really argue the facts? I always try to see both sides of a debate, and I can only come up with a couple of counter-arguments:
“We were at war with godless Commies. We had to make them leave Afghanistan.”
Why? So the Taliban could take over? Smooth move that one.
“Well, we couldn’t have known they’d turn on us.”
Bull shit! We used the same “foreign terrorists” in Afghanistan that we now decry in Iraq. They’re the same damned group of Arab militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and Saudi Arabia that hop around from conflict to conflict in the Middle East. Either we overlooked their terrorist leanings or were criminally stupid. Or both.
Force me to relive the legacy of Ronald Reagan, if you must. But don’t gloss over the truth while you’re at it. Ronald Reagan did not tell Osama bin Laden to destroy the World Trade Center. But he handed him a loaded gun and pointed him there.
Posted in Rants 'n' Whines
12 Comments