Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10! 

I just gave this blog mouth to mouth and it Frenched me.

1) “Divine Intervention,” Matthew Sweet. I’ve been away from blogging in part because I’ve been pounding away on something else (that’s what she said!). I am working pretty diligently at my dream of becoming a novelist, although my book would benefit greatly from vampires, zombies, suburban S&M, or being a completely fictional memoir about my crippling addiction to Viagra (A Million Little Boners). However, while I am writing the kind of book that may only sell dozens of legally purchased copies in today’s publishing market, my secret wish is that it gets me on The Daily Show and/or The Colbert Report. I honestly think if, just before Jon Stewart interviewed me, he shook my hand, I would seriously consider getting my hand amputated, stuffed, and mounted next to a picture of the handshake. But then if I later got invited onto Colbert, I’d have to shake hands with my hook. I’m not sure if that would increase my chances of getting on the show.

2) “Roll Away Your Stone,” Mumford & Sons. I’ve had a little bit of my M&S fill. They are good, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like I do about The Black Keys—pleasant band who become big when there are so many more deserving candidates. This sometimes feels like Coldplay covering The Pogues, and it is a testament to The Pogues that even hearing Coldplay covering “The Sunny Side of the Street” would still have a strong awesome quotient. They are a classic band I don’t mind hearing but never decide to play.

3) “The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts,” Minutemen. Okay, seriouspants rant: The title pretty much sums up my feelings about the post-Sandy Hook debate, because we’re not going to change enough to change the fucked up gun culture of this country.

I have never been so saddened by a tragedy as this one, because it involved such innocent victims falling to the clusterfuck stupidity of our country. It was so easy for a sick individual to kill two dozen people. Why? Because he had no trouble obtaining his weapons from his mother, who was a “gun enthusiast.” Not anymore, I’ll bet. That’s harsh, but at the same time, if she didn’t feel the need to own multiple military-grade firearms, maybe her fuckhole son would have just hung himself or stabbed her or done something that didn’t involve killing 20 first-graders because he couldn’t have shot his way into the school and committed his massacre in two minutes thanks to his trusty high-capacity Bushmaster assault rifle. I think if we could audit every “law-abiding citizen” who owns a gun and see how they store their firearms, we’d collectively shit our pants and mandate fingerprint locks on every weapon if we didn’t actually ban them outright.

So now we're going to have a debate and maybe we’ll take assault rifles off the market and reduce clip sizes, but that won’t do shit. People will still get killed in workplaces and malls and schools, there will just be more handguns used and more reloading. And then the fucktarded gun rights idiots will say, See, we told you. And they’ll suggest that if only the director of human resources/kindergarten teacher/Hot Topic clerk had been armed, they could have prevented the tragedy. Ignoring of course the possibility of psychotic workers/students/Orange Julius patrons from wrestling a gun away from the law abiding citizen carrying it, eliminating that pesky background check. But hey, what can you do, it’s in the Constitution, holmes. That shit’s, like, permanent.

The irony is that the Second Amendment is supposed to protect us from tyranny, and yet how much tyranny has it subjected us to? What other part of the Constitution has that much blood on it? Instead, gun sales reach a record high after Sandy Hook. Instead, gun owners are jizzing over a story about a guy who says, because he pulled his gun, the Oregon mall shooter decided to kill himself, when no one can answer that except the guy who ate a bullet. (A lot of conservative sites say that story proves that guns prevent crime. Shit, I wish they were that lenient about the fossil record or climatology studies.) They will say that guns help deter criminals every day, without considering the converse that guns enable criminals every day. The same people who don’t trust teachers to discuss a pee-pee entering a hoo-hah or that we have a lot in common with monkeys want those people to be ready to drop hot lead at a moment’s notice. We have to make hard decisions about whether we give old people money or poor kids health care, but fuck if we can do anything about all these goddamned guns laying around, because if we do, only criminals will have them, because look at the rampant gun crime in the rest of the industrialized world. No, we’d better take the same approach that East Africa does, because that’s worked out so well.

I don’t have the answers, I don’t have a solution, and I’m not even necessarily against banning guns. But we’re not going to have a real conversation on putting limits and safeguards on gun ownership, because America! Freedom! Flag!

4) “Hateful,” The Clash. Am I bugging you? I didn’t mean to bug you. Joe Strummer, play the blues. 

5) “Vaccine,” Ladyhawke. I really hate a sophomore slump from a band whose debut I loved. I am like an anti-hata who will try to convince myself it needs a few listens, that it’s a “grower,” because I want that first album experience again. Sadly, this was really a Mehdyhawke album.

6) “The Wind Cries Mary,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I hate business jargon. I have to use it because I work for a business, so I have to say shit like FYI and talk offline and PowerPoint. Sometimes when we have meetings and actually come up with action points, we label some as just do its. a saying made popular by the philosopher Nike. I hate that one most of all; however, the biggest just do it of all that we’re just starting to do is legalize pot. How can we be called the Land of the Free when you are not able to listen to a classic Jimi Hendrix song the way its creator intended? Now that may become a reality in a select few states. Praise the Lord and pass the Funyuns.

7) “That’s Entertainment,” Morrissey. This cover of The Jam classic was beautifully recorded in Mopely Digital.

8) “Encore,” Jay-Z. I bought the new NBA 2k13 game. I normally play a season mode, but I didn’t want to be reminded that Derrick Rose is out for MONTHS with a knee injury every time I played a game to escape the fact that Derrick Rose is out for MONTHS with a knee injury (not to mention having bad pink jersey flashbacks). So I decided to play the career mode where you make yourself as an NBA player, get drafted, try to get better, acquire an entourage, pull a groin in the champagne room, and so on. The game cleverly gets around announcing your name by allowing you to choose from a big list of nicknames that get announced instead. I picked “The Beast,” and it is so satisfying to see my little doppelganger being called that every time I make a J from the top of the key. I wish I could have those announcers calling me The Beast when I crack a good dick joke or open a difficult jar for TLB.

Anyway, the 2k13 game was executive produced by Jay-Z, and if I had known rapping could have lead to producing videogames, I’d have grabbed the mic when I was a teenager. Although there’s not a lot that rhymes with “hobbit” or “mithril.”

9) “Country Road,” Toots & the Maytals. Translates remarkably well from twang to jah.

10) “Cuts Like a Knife,” Bryan Adams. I like this. There, I said it. It’s complete cheese, not even like a block of cheese, but that red wine cheese food that comes in the plastic jar and is to hard to dip crackers in without breaking them in half. But I don’t care, and I can’t hear any mocking over my nah-nah-nahs at the end of the song. Bryan Adams also cannot hear them from atop the mountain of money where he lives.

11) “Coming Up,” Paul McCartney. TLB and I watched SNL last week with Macca as the musical guest. The two surprising things to me: I laughed really hard at a sketch and I loved seeing McCartney play with 2/3 of Nirvana plus Pat Smear. TLB didn’t quite revel in the latter performance the way I did and was not exactly unrestrained in her evaluation of his current or former musical ability. I prepared for a verbal salvo back at my lovely wife, but decided I would fight no more forever. Our Beatles feud was silly and worse for me, cockblocking. So I told her that I would no longer give her crap for her contrary about The Beatles being ZOMGFUCKINAMAZING! I believed we could coexist peacefully. The Middle East could learn a lot from us. 

Happy Holidays, whether that involves a fat man in a suit, a baby in a manger, going to empty movie theaters, or feats of strength around a pole!