Friday, February 15, 2013

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10! 

OMG, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!

Sorry, that was what ran through my head when I saw the footage of the meteor that hit Russia. I think comets have been called the Finger of God, but this fucking thing looked like the middle finger of Cthulu. I half expected to see giant walkers emerging and incinerating everyone in sight save for Tom Cruise (thanks for adding insult to injury, assholes).

However, because this happened in Russia, a place with #realproblems rather than #whitepeopleproblems, the populace seemed to react much more calmly than we would have. The first video Gawker posted showed a guy driving along when the sky EXPLODES, and he’s all meeti ori bork bork! or whatever he was saying in his Ruskie Fuskie language. Maybe that’s one of the side effects of having your cranial fluid be 97% Stoli. Or maybe, being Russian, he’s not going to get terribly agitated unless he sees a column of advancing Panzers, agricultural collectivization, or an unattended pallet of blue jeans. Because if this happened in, say, Los Angeles, I’m pretty sure the LAPD would have immediately started shooting minorities on the off chance they had become irradiated space zombies.

1) “Backwater,” Meat Puppets. God apparently hates Siberia almost as much as dinosaurs and uppity archangels who think they know everything. I’m surprised Republicans didn’t issue a press release declaring this a divine endorsement of America.

2) “The Long and Winding Road,” The Beatles. My least favorite Beatles song of the “good” Beatles songs. I feel like this should play at the end of a Bond movie where he drops flowers on the graves of his nemesis Dr. I.M. DeBagge and the sultry femme fatale Gina Spott at the end of Silent But Deadly, before turning and walking away with the bikini-clad German double-agent Uma Schtupewe to cash in the chips he won playing baccarat by the pool.

3) “Metropolis,” The Church. The best one-liner I saw regarding the Pope stepping down was a caption that read, “Pulls out early, like a good Catholic.” Seriously, how sad was it to be funny before the Internet. Imagine at the beginning of the Depression, you take a picture of the president and put the caption, “Nothing sucks like a Hoover,” and all you could do was share it with the other hobos in the boxcar. Sad. Also, you wouldn't be able to find the hard-to-find MTV Unplugged version of this song within two clicks of your fingers.

4) “Starrider,” Foreigner. You know you’re in for a big fat bag of musical suck within three notes. It gets even worse when the goddammed harpsichord emerges out of nowhere like a flare up of classical herpes. There would be less progressive cheese if you made figurines of every single member of Yes out of blocks of Velveta.

5) “Foreplay/Long Time,” Boston. The space intro perfectly conveys the cosmic splendor that is Sib Hashian’s hair, before Tom Scholz’s mullet warps in from the nexus of all party and serious business and sets his guitar phasers to “facemelt.”

6) “Acrobat,” U2. Libby is taking gymnastics, and God help her, she’s already taller than Mary Lou Reton. We just had to retire her size six clothes because she’s too tall for them, and she won’t turn five until June. The good news is that she’s also taking tae kwan do, and she’s got reach on the other kids in her class. When she sweeps a leg, it’s going to stay swept. 

7) “The Sound of Settling,” Death Cab for Cutie. Now that we are squarely in the era of divorce in our lives, any marriage dissolution among friends and acquaintances tends to trigger a discussion of how much it would suck if we found ourselves “back out there.” We would be especially screwed because we got married around the age of 12 (approximately), so neither of us has any clue what you do on a grown-up date. I could probably handle dinner okay, assuming my date likes dick jokes (I’d pre-screen on OK Cupid), but then I’d be like “So, how does a movie and some under-the-bra action sound? Wait, where are you going? Does this mean I can eat your dessert?” A house cat parachuting into the African savanna would have a better chance of survival than I would.

8) “Out of the Silent Planet,” King’s X. I want to get out the part about King's X being a seriously underrated band with a special shout out for finding a perfect guitar sound between clean and crunchy, and take a moment to express a real white people problem: iTunes 11 is awful. This is a dumb thing to rant about, but given that I work at home and I have music on probably 75% of the time I’m working, I use iTunes all the time. One thing I always loved while doing the Random 11 was setting iTunes to cover view, because the album covers would flip like you were looking at a real album collection instead of collection of JPEGs in varying degrees of pixilation. Yes, I am easily amused. Well, not only did that go away, but my library doesn’t even follow the shuffle now, only the tiny little status bar shows what’s being played. Maybe there’s a way to change it, but the M.C. Escher-designed menus all lead to a button that says "Suck it" in an admittedly glamorous sans serif font. Even the side scrolling bar doesn’t show up when you open iTunes, you have to minimize it, then maximize it, something that confused me for hours until I used the Internet to find the solution. (Disclaimer: I’m Polish and will swear my undying fealty if you can change a lightbulb.) Then I get mad at myself for getting mad over such stupid stuff when there are real problems like DEADLY METEORITES HEADING RIGHT TOWARD US, but then I see ABBA being displayed when Warren Zevon is playing and the cycle of rage begins anew. I will not last long when civilization collapses.

9) “A Legal Matter,” The Who. The amount of casual chauvinism in some of the music I like is disconcerting. I mean, if I’m queuing up some Winger, I know that the chorus I’m singing is at least one year removed from legally acceptable if still morally questionable attitudes toward women. You know what to expect from a guy named Kip. But then I’ll hear something like this from a paragon of rock godliness, a jaunty FU to an ex-wife and it’s little jarring. It was worse the other day when I heard Rod Stewart’s “Stay With Me,” which features an irresistible bit of dirty guitar boogie coupled with lyrics about him using an unattractive woman for sex due to a lack of any other serviceable option. So I guess the question is, as long as I know better, it’s still okay for me to sing, right? What if I do the dishes without being prompted?

10) “309,” Russian Circles. Ha, have to hand it to iTunes, it has a great sense of humor. Another thing about the meteor crash: could you imagine the conspiracy theories in this country if it happened here? It would be an alien vessel, a fallen angel, a test of a new UN Gay Ray that turns everyone homosexual so that humans die out and the trees win, God’s rebuttal to the State of the Union, a new marketing campaign to drum up purchases at Sunglasses Hut…anything but a meteor. And if we had advance notice, how many Americans would be on their lawns shooting at it? Because the only thing that can stop bad gravity with a giant space rock is a good guy with a gun.

11) “Wild Horses,” The Sundays. TLB made her famous “horse show” cookies, which are like chocolate chip cookies mixed with orgasm. They are huge and probably have enough calories per cookie to induce a heart attack if saw that number. She made some for her class and left “a few” for us. “A few” in the house with the man who is home all day and has no visible coworkers to shoulder some of the cookie consumption or at least threaten to brand him with a scarlet C on his chest if he was found in the supply room covered in cookie crumbs and shame. I ate four yesterday, and that was with me exercising John The Baptist levels of dietary restraint. We could just bake a batch for the CIA to use during interrogations and we would know every Al Qaeda plan by the second bite.

Have a great weekend!

13 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Ummmm.....FRIST!

P.S. I always liked the song more than the band.
~

Jennifer said...

TLB made her famous “horse show” cookies, which are like chocolate chip cookies mixed with orgasm. They are huge and probably have enough calories per cookie to induce a heart attack if saw that number.

Are they deadlier than Carol's??


Chocolate Chip Cookie (Carol's Cookies)
Serving Size: 6 oz. cookie, Calories: 1109, Fat: 57g, Carbs: 145g, Protein: 12g

Brando said...

No, Carol's are untouchable in the calorie department. But I'll bet 4 TLB cookies at once are comparable

Substance McGravitas said...

iTunes 11 is awful

This'll get you hits! iTunes SUCKS.

Substance McGravitas said...

Also Chelyabinsk is the dirtiest city in Russia.

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

iTunes 11 is awful

I haven't had the problems with it that you guys have had. Perhaps I am just listening to music improperly.

But, BACKWATER! Saw the Pups in a 300 person club on that tour. They made me feel like I was tripping, without any drugs involved. I mean, other than beer.

Brando said...

I initially didn't see all the fuss about the iTunes changes, but the more I use it, the more I miss 10. If all our portable music playing options were not Apple-based, I would consider something else.

Then again, I'm the guy who misses MusicMatch Jukebox, so WTF do I know?

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

well, the thing about Apple (as opposed to Big Redmond) is that occasionally when the user base whines enough, they will sometimes bring back elements of their UIs. There was a lot of that in the early days of OSX.

fish said...

if you double click on the little album cover at the top of the bar, it will open a large version of the cover art that will change as the album changes.

fish said...

TLB made her famous “horse show” cookies, which are like chocolate chip cookies mixed with orgasm.

They are a little salty for my taste.

Substance McGravitas said...

I initially didn't see all the fuss about the iTunes changes, but the more I use it, the more I miss 10.

There's a disk image of it on the Apple site, but going backwards with the library files is a touchy thing. I did it, but it's a pain.

Brando said...

if you double click on the little album cover at the top of the bar, it will open a large version of the cover art that will change as the album changes.

Yeah, but the library behind it doesn't change. What I liked about cover flow is that it changed the library view along with the cover art. It's basically mini player with album art, whereas I want to see the full musical destructive capability of my library at all times.

It's just the first time I have been irritated with an iTunes update. I normally don't get irritated by things like this because I'm still impressed I can play my entire music collection with one press of a button and without having to turn a cassette over to side two.

Brando said...

I also feel like the kind of asshole Louis CK makes fun of for even talking about this.