Weekend

Worst idea in human history ever, bar none

Forget all the bath salt drugs and loose nukes, it's that goddam Key Lime Pie Flavored Gum that should be keeping you awake at night. A friend was finishing her last piece of this awful stuff last night and I just wanted to cry for her and, indeed, for humankind.

I have not tasted it, but I just bet it tastes like the vomit-a-like concoction called a cement mixer. Remember this? Bailey's and lime juice and you shake your head it curdles and everyone snickers and you have fire extinguisher foam stuck to your teeth?

YUK!

Idea:

Gonna write a song called "She Shook Me Cold II" because there is not a better title around than "She Shook Me Cold," is there?

"They took his ears, ma!"

Fremen for equality

Maybe this was a huge hit,

I have no idea. There are 5M views:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPQlxHWseml

Anyway, old VV Brown should be this biggest star going, because she's adorable!

And when did this start?

Winter weather is back, of course, after there being none for a decade or so...but something I don't remember seeing back in the old days (ask me about our neighbor taking his jeep to Liberal Foods for milk and supplies during the Blizzard of '77...no, ask me!) is this phenom of drivers lifting their wiper blades to an odd, outbound position so they don't freeze in place:

Oh, sure, maybe back in olden times, the blades weren't even designed to do this. But what worries (?) me is that this trend is just more cable TV runoff - like, one person saw it on Mythbusters or some other wundershow and then everyone decided that THEY TOO were so important that they can't be bothered to scrape and defrost like normal Americans!

Conspiracy!

I'm not sure this message will even reach you (they may be on to me!), but yesterday on a local thoroughfare I saw one-a-them wide load trucks towing a jet:

The messed up part is that serial number is the same as the jet that Curley used to fly in the Harlem Globetrotters!

Another superpower

Another superpower that someone might acquire but which would be of no use: when you are waiting for someone, you sort of look like them.

Speaking of basketball: The BEEF Method

Waterman turned me on to this free-throw rubric back in '89:

Balance

Eye

Elbow

Followthrough

Try it to-nite!

I mean, I'm obviously a TOTAL FAILURE

How could I have failed to get THIS for the Bride for Valentime's Times? HOW??

You will never be as good a boyfriend/spouse as GABE

Look at these li'l figures that Gabe had made for Li'l Cait for Valentine's Day!

I assume that these Japanese style figurines are common knowledge among youth, like manga or krumping or Silent Hill.

Adorbs!

Fancy party

The guys in the warehouse save the odd pictures that come back in boxes of equipement and in old desks and the like. They are tacked up on a bulletin board.

This one made me slightly (more) nuts: I NEED to know what they are listening to here. I'm thinking maybe Queensryche, but that's not really "party music." White Lion? Late 80's Heart?

Thoughts?

Overheard:

"She found out her boyfriend was a scam today..."

NEW THING! Tumblrs I won't be starting

Everyone you have ever known is a millionaire now thanks to tumblr, or so I hear. And yet I soldier on, on the moss-behung Soviet-era Blogger. Bah!

Here. Take this idea and run with it. Just don't spend all your new-found booty in a week on ostrich-skin suits and platinum kayaks. And try to help people.

WHERE IS BUSY BEE?

I mean, we all know that Busy Bee is in the room with them until they go to the contestant staging area. So where did it go? It's not like it's ever resolved.

See, then people can photoshop BB into the Egypt uprising, in the garage with Ruby and Oswald, or even into that picture of Paris Hilton and Fred Durst where Fred is wearing the Hatful of Hollow shirt. Whatever! Meme-o-riffic!

You are going to be SO RICH!

Have I fooled myself?

Maybe all the seemingly hundreds of bottles of hot sauce in the fridge...maybe I'm really just a SALT freak?

I mean, let's hope not.

Abstract anguish

No, the Radiohead kvetching must continue, alas.

Check out the song lengths on the eight (!) tracks on this steaming pile:

7:22
6:48
6:34
5:20
7:07
6:54
6:57
7:27

Toe-tappers all, surely!

I really don't think I am strong enough.

No.

Cobwebs cleared

Good lord, first day in a week I feel like myself. Plus I shaved.





PLUS, I just blasted my head clean open with New Day Rising for the first time in fifteen years.

Maybe now is the time to do my dream project of adapting classsic sci-fi novels into "song suites" in the style of various 80's punk godz:

HUSKER DUNE

Will YOU be this dignified when they take you out?

Been reading a book about old King Leopold (a dick!) and his horrific hijinx in the Congo...anyway, his sister Carlota (nee Charlotte, but modified to fit her enforced Mexico-ruling status) and brother-in-law Maximilian were installed as regal figureheads in Mexico by Napoleon III in the 1860's (and Christ, is this sentence ever a mess!). The Mexican nationals rightly called bullshit on all this and in 1867 Maximilian the First officially became Maximilian the Last as they put him up to a firing squad.

But the tough part is that he gave all the gatos on the firing squad each a solid gold coin, pointed at his heart and issued a salutatory "Aim well, muchachos!"

When the Pitchfork forces come to get me for having the temerity to slight Oxford's finest, as in the last post, will I have the class to do the same? Will I?*

PLUS, in keeping with the follicular follies around here today, check the fresh face-fuzz on Max:

*maybe when they shoot, with my dying breath I will say: "Um...I dunno. 5.4?"

Hey! More shit Radiohead!

Like you, I was shocked - shocked! - to find out that new Radiohead single "Lotus Flower" was a snarling guitar beast, cut from the same cloth as The Bends album track "Bones"!

Wait - it's not? It's more ambient swooshing with yet more Thom sounding like he's dreaming of being unable to reach his athsma inhaler that's fallen down a grate [on one listen]? AWESOME!

Why do people care about these guys? It's sad.

I will give Mr Yorke points for bringing back tightly cuffed jeans...:

..thus emulating the greatest rock CD liner book notes inner sleeve pic EVER:

Overheard:

"...supposably..."

Pandering obscurity

Misread a charge and there is yet another possible LP title!

The John Waters mustache is what really sells this look!

Beardy

Also, grew the most beard I've ever had. Sort of a Peter Hook '85. Will shave it off by end of week, because it's stupid.

Whilst out getting orange Gatorade

during the Illness, I happened past where the local university was knocking down a car dealership to make room for more sleeping quarters for mouthbreathing Adderall (sp?) addicts:

Which brings another point: if you see cute girls in this neighborhood, they will have out of state plates. Fact! But who are these parents who let their college kids take the Lexus to college with them? One of the Lexuses. Probably. If I were to monetize this site for even a day, would these wealthy people give me all their money?

Still, all was not lost

I mean, we did watch Dude, Where's My Car?

Back from the brink

Was ridiculously sick last Wednesday night, which seems a lifetime ago. Still feel a mite puny. The poor Bride caught the crud as well.

At one point on Thursday, when the weather was apparently glorious, the room lit up like the inside of the shattered fuselage in the movie of Catch-22.

Here, look:

"NICKELBACKMANIA" NATIONAL TOUR CANCELLED AS SHOW'S "CHAD" ARRESTED IN D_____

Meanwhile, at the sports bar of the near dead

I think Don picked up his illness from the nursing unit where Fran resides, where, just last week, the whole shebang was under quarantine conditions because of raging bug that hopped from one greatest generationer to the next.

These fairly well-off elderly sit in the afternoons in wheelchairs watching Ellen on the big screens in the hallways, before being toted in for supper. I need to remember to have my camera on my phone ready at all times, because I could have won a Pulitzer had I taken a shot I saw Monday. Eudora Welty's shrunken sister asleep in front of the sound-turned-down-but-cc-enabled TV as something called Lady Antebellum (what a name! Why not "we miss having slaves bad band.com"?) played and had its lyrics beaming (this is what was on the screen):

rust red minivan, she's got chocolate on her face, got little hands and she
waves...

Firstly, "has little hands," asshole.

Second, I get so tired.

Oh, Don

Poor Don has been sick all week. BUT that does not have anything to do with the fact that he has big trouble taking his meds correctly. I have suggested that I come with a rifle and hold it to his head three times a day so that he "remembers," but we both know this is a bit impractical. And, hell, he remembers to eat about half the time, so taking pills really IS a lot to ask.

Anyway, this was a mindblower, and I must share. I expect a lot of "oh, poor Don" from all you anonymous lurkers, but tough - I'm over there six days a week, so it's not like you need to call Adult Protective Services on my (pale, shapely) ass. Also, any thoughts of timers or noisemakers are useless because 1) nerve deafness precludes his hearing any high-pitched beeps and 2) he will ignore them anyway.

SO: he has a pill case with his morning and evening pills in it. He only screws up/misses a dose maybe once or twice a week. However, he needs to take an anti-dizziness pill (meclizine) and a blood pressure pill (coreg) in the middle of the day. Dizziness is his biggest gripe. So I lay these two out every Thursday on a little round tray, all paired up and in a flower-clock of seven days, thusly:

Monday (and keep in mind: pills are laid out on Thursday evening so Friday, Saturday, Sunday...six pills should be gone) I come in the kitchen and glance and see this:

Squirrels came through maybe? Jesus! Also, the ovoid pill, dead center, isn't even one that gets laid out on the tray but something from the pill case. So I then picture half his meds just falling from his old-ass maw like ciabatta crumbs. If you are a drug person, go over with a dog to sniff around the carpet and you won't have to score for a month.

I'm going to set my timer here to remind me to call every day at two (probably interrupting a nap) and say take the pills, because if I'm not the problem there is no solution. Etc.

Hmm...

Happy Valentine's Day, all!

Two Grammy thoughts

1. I don't care about Lady Gaga, although Chooch sent me some song of hers that was very good, once. Lemme look..."Speechless," that was it. Anyway, don't care about all her faux-crazy schtick, and yet...I think the arriving in an egg thing might be the best surrealist stunt since Duchamp. So there.

2. I really don't care about the Arcade Fire AT ALL; in fact, they blow. But the idiots who've never heard of them and are then shocked that Counting Crows aren't still around (or whatever divorced-mom/SUV dreck they care about) and think that their own innate ignorance is reality? THEY can fuck right off. Also: the Clientele should have won!

Oh, Christ - now stuff I ate...lame!

We went to the new Chinese/Japanese joint up the road Friday. The Bride crushed her tempura:

Saturday, we went to the Winds and by the grace of some mad diety they had HO-HO CAKE!

This is like a Hostess Ho-Ho made with real ingredients and it's sick. This was also a dessert offering we had at our wedding, and so, as you have committed my every post ever to memory, I am likely repeating myself.:

Viddied

1. The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia - recommended! You can't believe it. Or maybe you can, if you've ever spent more than fifteen minutes in D_____.

2. That video for Belle and Sebastian b-side "Suicide Girl." You know the one. You'll need to take a lot of fluids in, vitamins...

3. State of Grace - remember this 1990 Irish mob movie with Sean Penn and Gary Oldman? It's still good! Although I'm annoyed with Ennio Morricone, because the main theme is exactly like his main theme from Lolita. Maybe I will do one of those mashups with these two on top of each other, like that thing someone did with the two identical Nickelback songs. I'll make millions! MILLIONS!

Ago!

Would you believe Duke has a dog? Granted, you may not know who Duke is, but that's hardly my problem...

Ago (pronounced AH-go, although a dog called Ago [pronounced as it looks] would be shit-hot, yes)! Three years old! Cast away from the track where he used to be a race dog! Crazy, right?

Here he is meeting Gabe, mere seconds from the unavoidable frenzy caused by the aroma of fine quality meats that ceaselessly emanates from Mr Gardner:

Here is part of his family lineage, with forebears with names like "Byron," "Quince," "Old Salt" and "Mr Milquetoast.":

This good pup has a lifestyle many hundreds of times better than yours! Think of him often.

Frontier woman!

We made use of the nice weather for a few yesterday and cleared storm debris off the garden beds!

Here, the Bride can be seen working/looking like something from an Elle pictorial on the third coming of "pretty grunge."

"Ah'm flyin'!"

Picci, in full head-rub mode!

Lovecraft!

Still a free country (for NOW!/whoot!), so a bit ago I bought an HP Lovecraft compendium ("edited" by Pete Straub! ha!). When I was in high school, there was a certain coven of kids (koven of kids? coven of cids?) who all knew their Lovecraft books like they were Twilight novels. I never even picked one up, somehow. The Bride says when she worked at Barnes and Noble in high school that it was like a rite of passage and all the kids (barring her) read them all to pieces. This not having read any of this guy's stuff (until now) may be the first thing we've ever had in common!

But I digress! I have only read about six of these "tales," but I do indeed see why all the fuss. It's all fully suffused with amazing creepy dread, even though, this being before the tricked-out modernisms of a Stephen King (where a condom can turn into a pirahna without warning, etc), there tends to be a "walk right up to look the horror in the face but rely on euphemisms or generalities when you get there because these 1922 people just cannot deal with it" vibe. This may pass as I trudge on, chronologically.

But, God help me, when, in "Herbert West: Re-Animator," the cannibalistic brought-back-from-the-dead hated boss dude is captured and stuck in an asylum where he "bangs his head against a wall" for sixteen years...ugh, I really did pull the covers up closer to my wee chin.

Also happy that the nerdz have fully internet-embraced the zillions of possibilities for oeuvre-centric products and the like!:

Mind = blown for four dollars (plus shipping)

Kyle found this shirt on the electric web for four bucks and bought it because he knew it would freak me out. It did! Win - win.

Weekend

If they remake "The Shining" with cats

These are some very Kubrickian shots of our Margot:

Oh, shit! Laser eyes!