Friday, January 18, 2013

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 11! 

God bless you, three-day weekend, especially for making said weekend occur on NFL Championship Weekend, the last set of games for actual football fans, before being surrounded by people double-dipping salsa while complaining about how long it takes to get to the commercials. I hope it will be Dreamboat Brady against Butt-Slappin’ Jim Harbaugh and the San Francisco 49ers in the big game, both because I would love to see the Pats lose another Super Bowl and also see Bill Belichick transform his hand into a blade that impales Harbaugh when he shakes the Belichick’s other hand a little too vigorously.

1) “Hey Ladies,” Beastie Boys. One beauty of Facebook is that I get to crash threads started by my teenage cousins. One of them posted a message asking her friends for music recommendations for her school’s turnabout dance. One enterprising young lad stole my punchline—2 Live Crew’s “Hey We Want Some Pussy”—but I suggested this as an alternative.

2) “Hammer to Fall,” Queen. I had lunch with The Lovely Becky today at a neighborhood place with great cocktails, so I decided to have a drink during lunch, a delicious Maker’s Mark Old Fashioned. After we ate, the waitress brought a desert menu, which featured a section called “Unique Scotches.” You couldn’t have gotten my attention faster if it said, “Free Motorboating” at a Christina Hendricks convention. One unique Scotch later, I felt as warm and feisty as the opening riff to this song.

3) “Untitled,” Interpol. I had to drive out to my actual office in Hawkeye territory this week, and on the way back, I played my “Best of the Aughts” mix on my iPod—the full 200-song mix that I later edited down. This song came up, and I realized that it was not only ten years old, but that I was having nostalgia for early 2000s music. I thought, Wow, this really takes me back to my thirties. That seemed all kinds of wrong. 

4) “Call the Doctor,” Sleater-Kinney. I in fact did see my doctor today. I have added a cholesterol-lowering drug to my high-blood-pressure medication (Wow, this song really takes me back to my thirties when I only took drugs that didn't require a prescription.) The blood pressure stuff is relatively cheap, subsidized by my insurance, but the cholesterol meds are $50 a month after insurance. I feel like my provider is telling me, Hey, we understand that there’s salt on everything, but we ain’t gonna pay for your bacon addiction, Porkins.

5) “The Bends,” Radiohead. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I gained about ten pounds. I was in a perfect storm of fat-assery—TLB cranking out huge quantities of cookies with meth-lab speed, every meal being served in a casing of fried cheese, and lots and lots of fermented holiday cheer. I stepped on the scale after Christmas and was almost at a weight that Louis C.K. used in his act to poke fun at himself of being a fat mess. That actually triggered enough motivation to start losing weight, stepping on the scale and hearing punchlines about how much dong I’d service for a case of Ding Dongs. So using WWLCKS (What Would Louis C.K. Say) works much better as my healthy eating motivation than WWMJMSMWHP (What Would Make Jillian Michaels Slap Me With Her Penis).

6) “Roxanne (live),” Sting. One of my favorite live performances ever, solo Sting on an electric guitar. So good I won’t cock it up with a dick joke.

7) “My Year in Lists,” Los Campesinos!. When (if) I’m 80, I wonder if I will still be list obsessed. I think in lists all the time now. Hell, I spent December trying to get the order of my favorite songs from 2012 in order. Will this ever go away? I guarantee my grandparents never did shit like sit around and list Top Five Abbot & Costello movies or Top Ten Blacklisted Writers You Would Sleep With. Will it fade with age, or will I be telling the orderlies Top Ten Movies About Old People Being Disappeared by Their Monstrous Children?

8) “An Ode to No One,” Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan opened a tea house at the end of my street. Why? Because he’s Billy Fuckin’ Corgan, has millions of dollars, and wants some green tea, motherfucker. Anyway, TLB does her writing there occasionally, and she’s seen BC twice. That made me we want to go there so I could bump into him and tell him how much I agreed with his feelings about Rush, and we’d bond, and then the next time Rush was in town, he’d be like, “I should go with Brando.” He’d of course have backstage passes, and I’d meet the Trinity, and then I could die. Really, it’s a flawless plan. Anyway, today I finally went there, and there was no Billy Corgan. There wasn’t even James Iha bussing tables. I felt robbed and feel like he should post office hours.

9) “Rats,” METZ. Sometimes I buy albums because I want to like them. METZ are loud, angry, and sound like PiL turned up to 11. That sounds like it should be a 7-10 split to my ears. Almost every time I do that, however, I never actually like the album. In fact, I enjoyed listening to Kidz Bop with Libby last night much more than the three minutes I spent listening to this.

10) “1963,” New Order. From Substance, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About My Heterosexuality and Love Synth Pop. I had the rock-lover’s reflexive hate of all things electronic, but Substance showed me that it was okay to not only like keyboards and drum machines, but also to elevate my hands from my sides to over my head while dancing.

11) “Sledgehammer,” Peter Gabriel. TLB and I were in the market for a new mattress, as the one we had began to sink in the middle—from all the action happening there! High five! I was online doing some research on different mattress types, and I came across a ranking site that had a bunch of criteria like Durability, Heat Absorbtion, Comfort, and so on. They had not one but multiple rankings for having sex on the various mattresses, including Allows Multiple Positions and Active Sex Friendly, because you definitely don’t want a mattress that’s Inactive Sex Friendly. I couldn’t tell you whether memory foam is a good comfort choice, but I can tell you it gets an A for Sexual Discretion, a majorly important rating when your children are one hallway width away from wondering what that squeaking is and walking into a lifetime of expensive therapy. However, I was really confused by one rating, Allows for Faster Climax, because who is climaxing faster? And if it is for him, does any heterosexual couple ever buy that mattress?

Due to that ambiguity, we had to research this ourselves, and now we have been banned from every American Mattress in America.

Have a good weekend! And here's a little something that football and non-football fans can enjoy

7 comments:

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

Psst: ( New Free Energy at the usual joint)

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Free Energy Isn't Free!!1!1!
~

Substance McGravitas said...

one rating, Allows for Faster Climax

I need no help in this area.

Brando said...

LOL. That should be an Olympic event.

Kathleen said...

Classic. The Billy Corgan part made me laugh the hardest, but it's all classic.

We also just bought a new mattress. we spent about an hour lying around on floor samples at Sears. It's kind of like wine or perfume. after the first few, you lose any ability to differentiate.

fish said...

If I ever left my wife, the bitterest battle wouldn't be over the kids, it would be over the Tempurpedic mattress.

Just sayin.

To give you an idea how wonderfully strange an internet community is, our local rock station is having a contest where you can win tickets and backstage passes to a Rush concert. I had a huge impulse to call and try to win them for Brando. Even after seeing him in that pink jersey.

Brando said...

That may be the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me, fish.