Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we rich folks so unethical?

Special extra crass for gold edition!


15) Final test of Skull and Bones initiation is to take candy from a baby.

14) Inherited an insatiable taste for precious metals at birth.

13) Moral compass doesn’t come standard in Rolls Royce.

12) Refuse to be common when it comes to decency.

11) Capitalism is spelled with two I’s, not a bunch of U’s.

10) Tend to fall from grace more quickly due to weight of golden parachute. 

9)  Consider it consensual when our naughty investors practically beg us to Ponzi their assets.

8) Colorblindness makes it impossible for us to see black and white, only green.

7) Would gladly have a conscience if they sold them at Tiffany’s.

6) Don’t consider it insider trading if it happens outside on the golf course.

5) Our health plans fully cover bleeding hearts.

4) What you call “cutting people off in traffic” we call “promoting the Bentley brand.”

3) Nice guys finish last and we graduated suma at Harvard Business School.

2) Got used to having people clean up our shit after we got the key to the executive washroom.

1) Laws are for people who can’t afford lawyers.

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

President Santorum. God help me, but part of me wants to see that happen. That has to be one of the signs of Armageddon, right? And lo will the horseman ride, and ye will know it is Him by the stench in the air and the frothy mix of thy most unholy expulsions and the oil of passion. And if by some stroke of dumbfuckery he actually gets the nomination, where would that put Romney in terms of worst Republican candidates of all time? How can you spend a gazillion dollars, have shoulders you could land a C-120 on, and have the kind of winning squishy centrist cracker platform that appeals to people who are conservative idiots but don’t want to appear like conservative idiots, and then struggle against Newt Gingrich and a guy who says Satan is giving America the shocker? That’s worse than losing to Eli Manning, twice.

1) “Staying Fat,” Bloc Party. Seriously, my fucking theme song. I gained ten pounds over the holidays, mostly because I am like Pac Man and must EAT OR DIE. So The Lovely Becky and I decided to go on the lo-carb South Beach Diet, which has worked wonders for me in the past. The problem is the first two weeks are completely carb-free. They suck like the precious rock candy I would step over the still-warm body of my mother to shove in my piehole, which I can’t even call a piehole anymore. In typical fashion, we also started our diet by pigging out like we could smell the Santorum Administration riding in and wanted to eat as much pizza, wings, and sweets as possible before the Rapture. Although I guess if gluttony is a sin, that probably means that bakers, confectioners, and Culvers will be left behind. That’s a tribulation I can live with.

2) “Paint It Black,” The Rolling Stones. This always reminds me of high school. Sophomore year we studied poetry in English. Our teacher pulled the move of letting us bring in songs to analyze. This one girl brought in “Paint It Black,” and her explanation of it actually confused me to the point where I have no clue what this song means. I brought in “Witch Hunt” by Rush, which is a song about how bringing Rush songs to your English class will not get you laid.

3) “Lived in Bars,” Cat Power. I would like this song better now if it was called “Lived in Bars of Chocolate.” Seriously awesome, even sans chocolate.

4) “Bad Connection,” Yaz. AKA one of the songs other than “Don’t Go” or “Only You” on Upstairs at Eric’s. Could only find a live version, which made me ask, "There are live versions of Yaz songs?"

5) “Leaf House,” Animal Collective. If you can beat off while walking a tightrope, juggling a monkey with your free hand, and reciting Proust from memory, while I will give you props for creativity and difficulty, I still don’t want to watch you beat off.

6) “I Am the Walrus (Live),” Oasis. Of course, after slagging off Animal Collective, this cover of the classic Beatles tune comes on and I start bopping my head, even though I know all of the Animal Collective spirit of the original gets Blueshammered by the Fighting Gallaghers. Plus they wank the shit out of this at the end. So what do I know? Tangent: TLB has turned Libby completely against Rush. Libby will offer, unprovoked, a hearty “I HATE RUSH” on occasion. However, when I was singing to her before bed the other night, she asked, “Can you sing me more Beatles songs?” I immediately relayed this to infamous Beatles-hater TLB like I had just won my O.J. prize.

7) “Heart Skipped a Beat,” The xx. This would have definitely been on a mixtape from me. I would have laid on my bed, listening to it on headphones, hoping she was listening to it at the same time, and that even though she made me feel like the drums after the guitar solo on “Tom Sawyer,” I know that would really annoy her to put that on a mixtape, so would she please accept this instead?

8) “Burn Hollywood Burn,” Public Enemy. Twenty-two years later and White People Solve Racism is still what gets nominated for Academy Awards. Then again, Flavor Flav didn’t exactly help the cause.

9) “Don’t Look Back,” Boston. Except for “Foreplay/Long Time,” I can’t listen to them. This is coming from someone who wore a hole in my Boston tapes. Amazing video, lying somewhere between concert footage from Almost Famous and Blue Oyster Cult trying to give the Bruce Dickinson the cowbell levels he demands.

10) “High and Unhinged,” Les Savy Fav. Love, love, love. Fantastic couplets delivered by a guy who looks like Zach Galifikanis’s balding brother.

11) “Complete Control,” The Clash. Favorite Clash song of all time. What more is there to say? And what better way to end the list? Bonus: Maybe the Clashiest video of all time. 

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What are we giving up for Lent?

10) Putting the VA in “vagina”

9) Mistaking hope for change

8) Filling up the tank

7) Fantasizing about our teachers

6) Not sounding like a Dick

5) Listening to a bunch of white guys whose only move is The Perp Walk preach about rhythm methods

4) Not randomly punching people in the face because we gave up smoking

3) Probing for holes along our nation’s border

2) First Lady Callista

1) Lent

Top Ten Tuesdays: What are we doing for Valentine's Day?

Special extended love you long time edition!

14) Handing our true love a Valentine made out of the restraining order.

13) Asking the representative at 1-800-FLOWERS if they have same-day shipping on baskets of actual broken hearts.

12) Deregulating all of Callista’s activities during alone time even when we use our safe word, “Alinksy.”

11) Grabbing the Hitatchi Magic Wand and an electronic cigarette.

10) Opening a bottle of wine, playing some Carly Simon, getting our sewing needle, spreading out the surveillance photos, and going to town on the voodoo doll.

9) Treating our significant other like the pool boy/au pair.

8) Showing off our extensive collection of half-eaten Valentine’s Day candy on a special episode of Hoarders.

7) Trying out that K-Y stuff before getting kicked out of Target.

6) Going to a restaurant by ourselves, pretending to take a call that our date was killed, and getting a free meal and/or pity sex.

5) Including some sweetheart candies along with the bottle of lotion before lowering the bucket into the well.

4) Sending our spouse a very romantic text message.

3) Throwing steamed milk on every happy couple we serve at Starbucks while yelling, “Now you know what true love really feels like!”

2) Getting Boehner’d without birth control.

1) Wait, it’s Valentine’s Day? Fuck!

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

This weekend is the shittiest weekend of the year: the first weekend after the end of football season. I feel a sports void only football can fill. As much as I like the NBA, college basketball, and baseball, football by far has the best ease-of-following to entertainment ratio. Baseball is like trying to keep up with a soap that you could only possibly watch all the time if you were unemployed. You miss a week and come back and there’s some dipshit from Triple-A starting because the starter landed on the 60-day disabled list when he accidentally got grapefruit juice in his eye. With basketball, while it’s fun to watch, you can pretty much coast until playoff/tournament time before you really have to pay attention. With football, I can watch a game on Sunday and maybe Monday, read a little on the Web on Tuesday, and I feel like I could step in as a guest house for Partdon the Interruption. “Tony, I am positive Peyton Manning will never throw again. In fact, I have it on good authority from the Internet that he can’t even feel his penis when he masturbates. How is he going to grip a football?”

Onto the tunes:

1) “Bad Reputation,” Thin Lizzy. Speaking of Mannings, you can pretty much use Eli Manning and the Giants's last two Super Bowls to explain what the hell happened to the econmy. In 2007-08, the last great football dynasty was on its way to unprecedented success, a 17-0 season that needed just one win over Manning the Lesser to achieve the best football season in NFL history. It was led by the most prolific offense in history, with a coach who wasn’t above cheating to get results and a pretty boy QB who traded supermodel girlfriends like cheesecake futures. Instead, the rails came off bus before anyone knew what happened. Tom Brady was outplayed by Eli Manning, a player who the series The League once referred to as “that goddamned mouthbreating dummy.”

After that happened, the NFL was complete chaos. Nothing made any sense anymore. Teams won without being able to run or play defense. The Arizona Cardinals made the Super Bowl, a sure sign of the collapse of civilization. The formerly robust Patriots couldn’t win a playoff game, let alone a Super Bowl. And the most buzzed about quarterback in the league was better at genuflecting and avoiding non-marital coitus than throwing a screen pass without skipping the ball off the turf.

In the meantime, Eli Manning took a beating despite his success. No one really believed in him. Even this year, as his numbers were crazy—he threw for the sixth-highest season total in history—he was like the Dow. Sure, he was up, but it seemed like only the 1% of fantasy football players who owned him were benefiting while the other 99% of us were missing the games because we ditched cable to save money. He wins again, and still everyone thinks not only that it’s a fluke, like Anthony Michael Hall having sex at the end of Sixteen Candles, but that we’re never going to get back to the era of great, reliable dynasties and that we should be thankful things don’t suck more. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Eli Manning, America’s quarterback.

2) “Fade to Black,” Metallica. A song about suicide for those non-sports fans who just waded through 500 words about football. The irony of this song is that these days Metallica does make me want to kill myself, at least the part of myself that once said, “I really like their new direction”  when the black album came out.

3) “Muzzle of Bees,” Wilco. I really hate to say this, but I like the idea of Wilco better than Wilco’s music. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the only album of theirs I really love. Jeff Tweedy is really creative, they have a lot of soul, etc., but at the end of the day I’d rather hear Uncle Tupelo or the first Son Volt album.

4) “Six Months in a Leaky Boat,” Tim Finn, Bic Runga, and Dave Dobbyn. A great live version of the Split Enz classic that's sadly not on the YouTubes, but here's Tim and Neil Finn. I really want to go to New Zealand before I die, but I’m fucking terrified of the flight. I do okay when it’s just a few hours in the air, but I can’t sleep on planes, and after 20-some hours in the air I guarantee I’d be seeing a gremlin Tebowing out on the wing. God help me if I had been born 100 years ago and adrift in a leaky boat. I’d be the panicky idiot who gets eaten by the first week at sea. OH HEAVENS, IS THAT A SHARK? Nevermind, it was just some kelp. I do apologize for the false alarm. Say, why are you sprinkling sat on my leg?

5) “Have You Fed the Fish Today,” Badly Drawn Boy. That’s what would happen when the scraps of me were thrown overvboard. I love singing this song even though I really have no idea what it means. Is it about taking responsibility every day? What if I just buy one of those self-feeders for the aquarium and check back in a week? Does that mean I’m a bad fish parent, like giving my kid a box of Cookie Crisp and a half-gallon of milk and telling her daddy needs to sleep for a couple more hours?

6) “Pass the Mic,” Beastie Boys. This song is 20 years old. How is that possible? Jesus Christ, at this rate I won’t make it to theatrical release of The Hobbit, let alone New Zealand.

7) “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” The Smiths. My daughter falls into this category. Libby is off the charts in terms of height. A cashier recently thought she was seven. She’s three-and-a-half. Part of me is loving the basketball domination potential of this growth. I’d love to see her be unstoppable in the paint and back her way into a full-ride scholarship. But I also don’t want her to be freak tall either. That’s a rough road for girls. So I’m hoping Division 1 shooting guard or small forward size.

8) “Boys Don’t Cry,” The Cure. Still, it will be hard for me not to live vicariously through Libby if she winds up being good at basketball, because I have always wished I was good at the game. Instead I have been a terrible hoops player my whole life. My friend Tom reminded me of an event from junior high that illustrates the gap between this ambition and ability. We used to play basketball at recess (when we weren’t playing D&D). At the time, I lived in the DC area and Patrick Ewing was playing ball at Georgetown. One day, for reasons unknown, I decided to charge the net to see if I could dunk. I sprinted toward the hoop (sans ball), yelled “EWING” and jumped as high as I could. Instead of the rim, I got both hands about halfway up the net. Now, our playground was just a parking lot, and the hoops were positioned by the parking blocks that bordered the lot. I swung on the net until I was almost horizontal. I then let go. I fell and the small of my back hit the parking block. I still don’t know how I wasn’t paralyzed, and every time Tom brings this up, he says he thought I was paralyzed because of the thud I made when I landed. Anyway, it will take a lot for me not to pushing Libby to dunk, because I’d still risk a shattered backbone if I thought I could jam that rock home.

9) “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” The Darkness. They randomly showed up in a Super Bowl commercial, and I laughed that they must be paying their rehab bills, but lo and behold, they are back with a new album. I was completely sucked into this song when it came out, using irony as a thin camouflage for what is my occasionally horrible taste in music. I’m not making that mistake twice. What’s that? Am I air guitaring this right now? Why would you ask such a silly question, of course…wait, I can’t type during the solo.

10) “SWLABR,” Cream. Clapton gets all the press, and of course he’s amazing. I, however, dig Cream for Ginger Baker, both because he played the drums so well and because he often did so while wearing a cape.

11) “The Humpty Dance,” Digital Underground. Great hip-hop track? Or greatest hip-hop track? Either way, even an unabashed Darkness love like myself loves shaking my booty to this.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Friday: How are we spreading Santorum?

10) Beginning with some master debating to prime our caucusing.

9) Getting our base really excited by talking about creating a frothy mix of church and state.

8) Acknowledging that watching a black guy have his way with our beloved country is driving us sooo crazy.

7) Explaining that any stains on our Congressional record were the result of ramming home our lengthy legislative agenda.

6) Showing our hardcore credentials by getting our knees and thanking God for showering us with His copious blessings. 

5) Promising that we will work tirelessly to hand jobs to any hard-working American who wants one.

4) Finishing ahead in a crucial three-way primary while the frontrunners beat off attacks from each other.

3) Having donors throw money at us after showing our rising polls.

2) Allowing only men into our fox holes. 

1) Starting slow so that we could peak and come from behind simultaneously with the election in November.

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

I got a text from my youngest brother, Snake Anthony, this week. “I’m about to platinum Skyrim. Fuck my life.”

Skyrim is the videogame/digital heroin that has gripped once upstanding men such as my brother. It has gripped me, too. In fact I haven’t played in two days and I’m feeling slightly twitchy, like I need my dungeon crawling fix.

The platinum part refers to the diabolical practice of granting achievements in videogames. When the Xbox 360 came out, it introduced the practice of giving the player points for accomplishing certain objectives in games. Some are easy, like score a touchdown in Madden. Some are hard, like score a 99-yard touchdown in Madden. Each game has a fixed number of achievements you can get. Each one also has a little name, often cutesy or punny. For instance, if you get 20 headshots in a first-person shooter, you get a 50-point “Dude, That Was My Skull!” award. (Note: not a real achievement, but should be.)

I thought this was the dumbest thing ever when I first heard about it. What do you get with achievements? Nothing, save bragging rights from other nerds. Not only can you not use achievements to do something useful, like get laid, the act of getting them will take the place of doing something useful, like making yourself more attractive by not holding a controller in your hand and screaming “Munch on those nuts, little squirrel!” to the 12-year-old you’re playing in Call of Duty.

But then I got a 360 and got my first achievement. When you get one, it makes a little noise and pops up. Sometimes achievements are secret, and you don’t even know that jumping on the princess’s head to make her sneeze out mushrooms that turn to gold coins was actually rewarded. I was looked like a bass in a fishing game (which nets you a five-point "You Da Gorton’s Man" achievement).

The Playstation 3 took this one step further by handing out little bronze, silver, gold, and platinum trophies. You get a platinum trophy for a game when you achieve all the others. Now when confronted with the gnawing accusation that you were wasting your life playing games, you could open a virtual trophy case and say, “Oh, really? Who’s laughing now, dad? Oh, and can I live here for another six months?”

As a fellow Skyrim player, I have seen the list of achievements. Getting the mystic platinum trophy is not something one acquires easily. Dare I say it would take less time to take a ring of power to Mordor and catch a ride home from a giant eagle, with time for a stop in Rivendell for a three-day bender with a pair of wood nymphs and a dwarf of undetermined gender. But how long exactly?

A couple days later, I had my answer. “Platinum. Done. Fack. 120 hours.”

That’s a lot of work to feel both secretly proud and very publicly ashamed. You could watch the entire series of The Wire twice in that time. They should at least give people like my brother a t-shirt that says, “I platinumined Skyrim” on the front and “Who wants to fucking touch me?” on the back. Either that or total consciousness on your deathbed. A little something, you know, for the effort.

Tunes…

1) “Long Distance Runaround,” Yes. I really hope that Newt Gingrich stays in the race. The GOP nomination process will become as boring and limp as a Mormon key party the minute Romney gets the nod (which is inevitable), and Ron Paul is like most SNL skits, a great premise that becomes repetitious and tiresome after the first 30 seconds. Santorum will only become interesting if he gets caught speading Santorum of the couch of some Nevada bathhouse. The race needs Newt, because while the prospect of a Gingrich administration is both ridiculous and appalling, watching him delude himself into thinking he’ll be president is fascinating. Of course, that would require him keeping a vow.

2) “Cult of Personality,” Living Color. Nice follow up, iTunes. You are becoming more genius by the day. This is easily in my top five of favorite guitar solos of all time. I think this was in Guitar Hero III and it the solo was such a blur of colors is was like going through the Star Gate in 2001. (Side note: freakiest goddamned "music" ever in a movie.) The Vernon Reid of plastic toy guitars I am not. Note: Live performance from Arsenio! God bless the Internet.

3) “Standing in the Shower…Thinking,” Jane’s Addiction. I wish I could work in the shower all day long, because there is no better place I think. It would require solving quite a few problems: hot water, environmental waste, electrocution, and modesty issues when videoconferencing, to name a few. But I could probably write my novel in a month if I could find a way to do it in the shower. And, from the TMI file, The Lovely Becky hates getting ready when I am in the shower because I take scalding showers, which steams up the bathroom and makes things like makeup application difficult (for her, I have no problems putting my makeup on). Take a water temperature needed to repel a group of Normans storming your castle walls and lower it by 3-5 degrees and that's what I like. If there is water in hell I may wind up feeling both refreshed and productive.

4) “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” Van Halen. It is appalling that they have gotten back together. It’s bad enough to Mick Jagger shaking his moneymaker, but the idea of old David Lee Roth talking about reaching down between his legs and easing the seat back is unappealing when his car seat probably has one of those beaded back rests to help his sciatica. And God help the first five rows if he breaks out the chaps.

5) “Pandy Fackler,” Ween. I don’t get them and honestly I don’t want to. I was sort of fascinated by Ween for a bit because they were so goddamned weird that I made the mistake of thinking they must be good. But sometimes weird is just weird, and they give off too much of a creepy uncle vibe. Yeah, he can play the shit out of his guitar and he’s really smart, but you don’t want to get stuck with him waiting for the isolated upstairs bathroom at your aunt’s house. I do, however, love that some hipster ad agency guy thought it would be a swell idea to hire them to write a jungle for Pizza Hut (their best song because it’s their shortest).

6) “I’m Eighteen,” Alice Cooper. I was too stupid and horny to be confused at 18. I knew I was going to college and that I wanted to have sex. Even when my medical study plans evaporated after my first chemistry midterm, I still knew I was going to get a degree and that I still wanted to have sex (with drinking standing by as a helper monkey/platonic friend if the latter didn’t work out). There was always another class/test/paper/party/bar/visit from TLB to keep me focused and/or content. Even in my 20s, I was just happy to be working and living in New York and then Chicago. No, my version would be called, “I’m Thirsty-Six,” and go I’m looking at these reports while sittin’ in my cube/the boss is calling me and IT’s blocked YouTube/I’m getting’ pounded and I’m all out of lube/I’m thirty-six and I don’t like it! Of course, now I get to work at home wearing whatever combination of sweats/jeans/hot pants I desire and can crank Alice Cooper when it shows up, so I’m good.

7) “Blister in the Sun,” Violent Femmes. Now here’s some Friday music. Funny college anecdote: My dorm roommate and I used to play this album a lot. We were going down to the mailboxes and he was humming this song. There was one other guy getting his mail, and as the three of us retrieved our letters and were leaving, we heard this guy starting to him “Blister in the Sun.” That’s some old school earworming, before you could just slap a YouTube thingy on The Facebook. I always think of that whenever I hear this song now. Unrelated: EPIC MULLET IN THE VIDEO. There is so much party in the back of the bassists hair I feel like I need a rehab stint at Supercuts just from looking at it.

8) “Destination Ursa Major,” Superdrag. A lost gem from the 1990s. Major labels have killed many a good band, but I have tended to enjoy indie power pop bands that got to take their songwriting talents to big studios. As much as I love this crackle and hiss of early Guided by Voices, I am a big fan of the stomp that they achieved on their two major releases.

9) “Go With the Flow,” Queens of the Stone Age. I got a whole new appreciation for drummers when I tried to play this on Rock Band. The first time I played this, I was winded, and this was even before I was in my current post-parent creampuff state, back in my Branimal salad days. It’s three minutes, and I thought I can do anything for three minutes (insert TLB joke here). But I couldn’t keep up and had to stop. How does Neil Peart do this shit for three hours? Alas, I can’t play it now because I done broke my Rock Band drum pedal, and there appears to a shortage of replacements—spare pedals are selling for $90 online by guys who are all about the money instead of the music, man! The invisible hand of the free market once again punching me in the nuts.

10) “You Know I’m No Good,” Amy Winehouse. I love the Tanqueray couplet she pulls off. It’s too bad she died, because regardless of how fucked up she was, she was talented and I think she could have made some great music about getting back from the edge of the abyss. At the same time, because my brain knows it’s no good, when someone like Amy Winehouse dies, I imagine Abe Vigoda sitting back in his easy chair and marking another vertical line in a notebook that tallies how many people he’s outlived. You want the secret to immortality? Find out what he eats and make a pill out of it.

11) “Portions for Foxes,” Rilo Kiley. It’s interesting to get a woman’s perspective on things. Jenny Lewis sings that “the talking leads to touching, and the touching leads to sex, and then there is no mystery left.” Whereas if a guy was singing this, he’d sing “the talkin’ leads to touchin’, and the touchin’ leads to sex, and…what do you mean and, that’s it, that’s the trick.” We apparently have differing opinions on what constitutes the prestige.

Seriously, though, how are men in charge? I think women could walk around with a little pen like they use in Men in Black, only instead of flashing some kind of amnesia light, it flashes boobs. Some guy is blathering on about his fantasy team or how he’s going to squeeze an extra five horsepower out of the Mustang or how feminism has been the undoing of America and, boom-boom. When he comes back to reality and asks what happened, you tell him he was just about to take the garbage out or cook dinner for the kids or withdraw from the race. Problem solved. You're welcome, women of America.

Have a great weekend.

Ahem, Pinko

Random 11coming later, but here is a little entertainment for now.

Here's the context for the title of this week's 11. No, really, it's a real link!

It is amazing how the Rickrolling gag never gets old for me. It’s the perfect Internet trap. You can’t tell it’s coming. Even if you suspect it, you won’t know for sure unless you click. Wile E. Coyote would marvel at the super geniusness of it. 

It reminds me of another personal meme that never gets old for me: making Z-related nicknames for my brother Tickle’s friend, Z, aka Pancake Z. Just this afternoon, Z commented about how he had predicted in August that Peyton Manning’s career in Indy would be over and that the Colts would suck bad enough to draft Stanford QB Andrew Luck as his replacement. “Just call me NostraZamus,” he wrote, to which I replied, “The propheZ has cum true!” (Side note: we always, always, always write “come” that way in our e-mails. I am seriously worried that some day I will slip and spell it that way in a work e-mail.) I could make Z-puns all day. In fact, whenever we see anything that has a Z on it, we take pictures of it and text Z or post it on his Facebook page. If I could find a way to make money off of that, I’d gladly wok 80 hours a week.

Z was also a topic of converZation (seriously, it’s hard to stop once I start) this week. See, Z currently does not have TV service at his house. This is partly for economic reasons, partly because Z wanted to see what it was like, and I think partly because Z thinks this will make him smarter as he does read more without TV. However, Z is an avid spots fan, which means he is left to the devices of sports radio. Sports radio makes you stupid. You could be a physicist on the verge of proving string theory and one hour of listening to Jake in Joliet tell you what’s wrong with the Bears will render you mentally incapable of working at a McDonalds. They have done lab tests where overexposure to Mike and Mike in the Morning caused lab rats to become obese, inert, and start wearing Zubaz pants in public (true story). The other thing is that listening to sports on the radio sucks. We had a poker game at Z’s over Christmas and listened to the Bulls game and it blew transistors. So this week I asked him if he was going to have a Super Bowl radio party. I just imagine us sitting in a circle around the old Philco, drinking beers and eating snacks. It would be amaZing.

Okay, tunes….

1) “Soma,” The Strokes. I could have used soma this week to help me sleep through Libby’s late night partying (Warning: this is going to be one of those blogs in this post. Lots of kid stuff on my mind.) The worst night saw her not actually getting to sleep until 10 pm, then waking up four fucking times, including a 2:30 am wakeup where she was singing in her room. Of course, she woke up for good about 45 minutes earlier than usual and was as awake as if she’d just had her blood replaced with 5-Hour Energy.

2) “Hateful,” The Clash. The other rough thing was that Libby was sick in a gastrointestinal sense this week, so much that we had to switch back to diapers during the daytime for a couple of days. Our potty training had been going very well, so much so that it’s been probably 2-3 months since I last had to deal with anything more than a wet diaper. In the interim, I think I repressed all the bad changing memories, because I was in full GAH!!!! mode when I had to face the peril again. It was like getting lulled into a false sense of security when the Cold War ended, only to wake up and find a hardline Soviet Government back in power. Awful.

3) “Man in a Suitcase,” The Police. I have always been fond of this song because, considering I’ve had something around 787 mailing addresses in my 41 years, I’ve always felt rather itinerant. Until now. We bought our current house with the idea that it could be ours until they take us out feet first. Part of me feels relieved, the idea that the next time I move, I literally won’t have to lift a finger (unless via rigor mortis). The other part makes me feel like I just converted to Scientology and it’s not taking. So wait, I’ve got this Thetan living inside me? Is that why I’m 30 pounds overweight? 

4) “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” Green Day. As much as I loved American Idiot, it feels much more dated than it actually is. The Bush Administration feels like a million years ago to me. Maybe that’s another example of repressing memories of dirty diapers.

5) “Song 2” Blur. I could play this every Friday while making Z puns for two solid minutes.

6) “Overkill,” Men at Work. Over this years, this quietly became one of my favorite songs of the 80s. I was all vegemited and what not by their first album, but this song and “It’s a Mistake” from the Cargo follow-up are the ones that stuck with me over the years. Plus it sounds of the 80s without being completely trapped in the 80s. Essential.

7) “House Of Balloons – Glass Table Girls,” The Weeknd. I am so white that I need a Siouxsie and the Banshees sample to lead me into a perfectly groovalishish bit of hippity-hoppity R&B. I only wish I was in a Vegas club at four in the morning, bobbing my head along while drinking a Stoli gimlet bought with the house money after having one of those craps table runs where people come over to bet on your rolls.

8) “Ok Pal,” M83. A good tom-tom fill makes an electronic drum beat. Unless you just want to get oom-sah-oom-sah’d to death, you need something to break up the repetition a little. This has those great boomy, reverbed 80s fills that pack some thunder without getting in the way of the beat. Seriously, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming would be regarded as a seminal album of the 80s if it had been recorded 30(!) years ago.

9) “The Bends,” Radiohead. The big benefit of working home by myself is that I can Turn. This UP. Side note: I don't think I've ever seen a clip from Later With Jools Holland that doesn't kill.

So another parenting thing on my mind this week is the vibe other parents sometimes give off when you say you only have one kid, especially when you are my age and it’s looking like you will have an only child. The vibe is that you have it easy, maybe even that you’re not a real parent. Isn’t so easy to have just one? Well, allow me to retort. This week, when my baby had the bends, I had to stay home from school with her. And when you are locked in a house all day with a solitary three-year-old, you are the canoe and they are the river. You’re only going where they want you to go. There are no siblings to play with, no other children to occupy their time by coloring/playing dress-up/seeing what happens when you put the cats in the dishwasher. I was the sole source of entertainment. Sure, Libby can sometimes settle in to lay with her toys, but I get maybe 20-30 minutes tops before she demands that I entertain her. DANCE FOR MY AMUSEMENT, FAT MAN! I can maybe buy a little more time if she’s watching a movie, especially one she hasn’t seen before (this one’s called Pulp Fiction, you’ll love it!). But then I feel like a completely irresponsible dickbag, which ruins whatever reprieve I was trying to get. So after a day home with her, I feel like I did four sets at a resort in the Catskills. One can only get on all fours and pretend to be the Daddy Puppy for so long before getting distracted. After all, dogs have short attention spans.

10) “Run to Your Grave,” The Mae Shi. Not that I’m suggesting that it’s easier to have more than one kid. God no, you people are fucked. There were four in my family and it is amazing that our mother is both alive and still speaking to us. My youngest brother Snake Anthony and I were not too bad, both staying out of trouble and hiding our indiscretions fairly well. My brother Tickle was another story. He tended to get into more spectacular scrapes, such as getting into a car accident with the only other car in an otherwise empty parking lot (true story). My sister E, when she wasn’t getting caught, would be so overwhelmed with pride at not getting caught that she would then tell my parents how she didn’t get caught. You could give her $40 million on the condition that she couldn’t tell anyone she just got $40 million and the deal would be voided before she could sign the nondisclosure agreement. Unrelated: I really love this song.

11) “The Bleeding Heart Show,” The New Pornographers. Who can’t use a little more hey-lahs in their weekend?

May you have the weekend of your dreamZ.

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

This month marks five years of the Random 11, a feature I started after I got an iPod for Christmas in 2006. I’ve written 168,000 words since then, with a few of those not even connected to dick jokes.

Yesterday was also the first day of the season that I needed my winter boots. I’m honestly starting to become very Republican on this global warming thing. Just round up all those swimming polar bears, open a few new zoos, and turn on the ice maker. Extinction solved and I can still wear shorts on New Year’s.

1) “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” The Rolling Stones. This would perfect for a Cialis commercial. Boomer couple goes to a Stones concert and is right in the front row. The voice-over guy talks about how you want to be ready when the mood strikes while Mick sings the song. Then after 45 seconds of medical disclaimers, the song climaxes, and before the husband can hustle his wife to the back seat of the Lexus, Mick reaches out, pulls the wife onstage Courtney Cox-style, and takes her backstage, throwing one last wink as the voice-over guy says, “Keep the rock rolling with Cialis.”

2) “Punk Rock Girls,” The Queers. The Lovely Becky and I have talked about Libby as a teenager and how we would react to Libs dyeing her hair. TLB came up with a great solution: Libby can dye her hair any color she wants, but she’ll get a surprise when her mom shows up with her hair the same color. However, piercings will be right out because I’m not becoming a pin cushion to make a point.

3) “My Delirium,” Ladyhawke. I have been tired all week because I am a dumb ass. Why am I a dumb ass? Because my fatigue stems from playing videogames late at night instead of sleeping like a responsible adult. Because I try to be a responsible adult and not play videogames around my toddler-age daughter, I wait until she’s asleep. Unfortunately, I have been playing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which is a crack rock shaped in the form of a 20-sided die. Oh, I’ll just play for an hour or two, I say to myself, with the delusion of an alcoholic hitting happy hour for the appetizers. Four hours later I’m woozy, incoherent, and not wearing pants. This is why I never played World of Warcraft, because I’d be like one of those Korean gamers who dies after forgetting to eat. (I made the mistake of starting Skyrim while Libby was awake, just to check it out. How bad could it be at the beginning, I thought. Of course, the game opens with a beheading and a dragon killing everything in sight. What’s got two thumbs and is father-of-the-year material? This guy.)

Bonus fun material: An absolutely killer bit about videogames from comic Dara O’Briain. He destroyed me with laughter when he started talking about Metal Gear Solid.

4) “Gideon (Live),” My Morning Jacket. Probably makes my All-Crescendo List.

5) “Nothing,” Stabbing Westward. I don’t know if Trent Reznor ever got royalties from these guys, but he should have. Also, the title of the album is Ungod, which is Latin for We are trying too hard to be edgy.

6) “Time for Me to Fly,” REO Speedwagon. My company used to have a yearly conference in Vail, Colorado. I got to attend the last year we held it, and while I certainly worked, the experience was bookended by two of the drunkest nights out with coworkers I have ever had. The first night there (the day before the event started), and after being warned that drinking in high altitudes can exacerbate the effects of alcohol if you’re not used to it, I had an evening where I started drinking 7-and7s, switched to Maker’s on the rocks because I wasn’t getting drunk fast enough, then switchied back to the 7-and-7s because the Maker’s was making me blind (along with the nicotine blitz I was getting from the smart decision to smoke). Thank God I didn’t need to start the next day until 11.

When the event ended, we went to a bar where this one guy was a musician in residence. He had a big fat book of covers you could request, and in my drunken happy state (it had been a great week and we were celebrating a successful event) I requested this song and sang along with it. I would have popped a lighter in the air if I had one at the time. I feel a bit of shame because this is a sappy, sappy, sappy song, even if in deep dark places I don’t talk about at cocktail parties, I really do love it.

7) “Snowblind,” Black Sabbath. I don’t think Ozzy’s talking about winter drifts in January. For all the perils of today’s society, I am glad cocaine was no longer chic by the time I reached an age where I might have been tempted to try it. Because there’s no way if I was 20 in 1977 that I wasn’t doing a couple of lines before heading to a Foghat concert. That’s why I stick to booze—I tend to get too sleepy by the time I would do any real damage. The last thing I need is to get hooked on something that would have me playing Skyrim for 56 straight hours.

8) “Ray,” Aimee Mann. Amazingly not on the YoutTube. Year ago TLB—a giant Aimee Mann fan—was discussing with me why she liked Aimee Mann so much, and she launched into this discussion of Mann’s rhyming couplets and how she is so creative in how she structures her rhymes and will often string together a several quick lines of rhymes. I said, “She sings real pretty.” Guess which one of us is the professor. This song is real pretty, too.

9) “Rock N Roll,” Led Zeppelin. The other day, my mind wandered into this weird daydream where Alex Lifeson of Rush personally thanked me for sending him a copy of my award-winning novel (as well as commenting how funny I was on The Colbert Report), and then asked me, being a giant Rush fan, what kind of setlist they should play on their next tour (I wish to Cookie Jesus I was making this up). In mid-daydream, I actually stopped to give this some thought before replying to imaginary Lifeson that they would absolutely slay everyone in attendance if they opened with a cover of this. Which, all psychiatric concerns from how I reached this conclusion aside, would indeed melt the faces of every Rush fan in attendance. Or at least the ones who were not seated in the imaginary front row like I was. And no, Geddy did not pull me onto the stage Courtney-Cox style.

10) “Late Night Conversation,” Josh Rouse (decent cover version). One of the downsides of having a large collection of music on my computer (far too much for my 80 gig iPod to hold anymore) is that I don’t always get to listen to a lot of it. Which is a big reason why I love doing this post each week—sometimes something comes up and I go, “Oh, that’s good, I should get it,” before remembering that I have it. Incidentally, after Skyrim, late-night conversations with TLB are the next largest source of sleep deprivation. It’s literally like the lights go off and we start shooting the breeze (and no, that’s not a euphemism). So my two biggest sources of not getting enough sleep are running around an imaginary fantasy world and talking to my wife while in bed. It’s a damn good thing I’m married because I would have no fucking clue how to woo a woman these days.

11) “Wonderwall,” Oasis. I know Von hates this, as does TLB, but I love it. It has that universality that I think great singles have, where it can appeal to a lot of people who normally wouldn’t agree on anything. For instance, let’s say that I was talking with Beyonce, who also was complimenting me on my appearance on The Colbert Report. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when this song started playing, we both said, “I love this song.” And then we’d laugh and say, “Jinx, by me a Coke,” and then Jay-Z would have his guy Pain-Luv dangle me from the penthouse balcony. That’s good songwriting.

Bonus: “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” Guided By Voices. A new classic sounding GbV song from the classic GbV lineup. Worth watching this performance from Letterman to see, as one YouTube commenter put it, “the sinkable Greg Demos.”

Have a great weekend.

Spreading Santorum

I recently found out that Rick Santorum graduated from the same high school I did. Furthermore, I found out that, like I did, he only attended his senior year, because like my father, his father was a military man who was transferred to a new base before little Ricky's final year of high school. We were also both raised Catholic and we both stubbornly and sometime illogically stick to our core beliefs despite logic dictating that we should seriously revise said beliefs. Ergo:

Santorum: Gay sex is icky because my old vengeful God says so.

Me: The Cubs have hope because my new dreamy GM says so.

I'm reluctant to dig any deeper because further similarities will leave me feeling frothy and unclean.

Top Ten Wednesdays: How are we being misquoted by the media?

10) Meant to say that the welfare system suffers from the blahs, not, you know, what it sounds like what we said.

9) Were misquoted when we said our husband Marcus was gay for the French horn. He just loves watching guys blow into those things! What's wrong with that?

8) Actually said we need to keep those sticks from crossing our borders. Seriously, have you seen the brush near El Paso?

7) Forgot to include in America’s armor when we said our top foreign policy priorities would include looking out for the chinks.

6) Really said that minor teas should be banned from the food stamp programs. Lipton should be good enough for you people. Um, meaning tea drinkers who are on welfare.

5) When we said we would bomb Iran back to the Bronze Age, we actually meant Stone Age.

4) Left out under the collar when we said lesbian moms make us hot.

3) We were really making a favorable comment about the zoo-run media—we just love that new Cameron Crowe movie and wish Hollywood would make nothing but movies about wholesome families buying exotic animal preserves. Also, we love Israel, we're just not in love with Israel.

2) Was referring to cigarettes when we said all fags must burn.

1) Said we had to get rid of that nagger in the White House. Because of our extreme prejudice toward regulation and not, you know, those people. Meaning naggers.*

*I must give credit to South Park for this joke because that would be the white, er, right thing to do.

Friday Favoritist 11 of ‘11

Featuring special guest, Another 7 of '11 

Happy Mayapocalypse! Who’s ready to party like it’s 999 AD?

My brother Tickle stayed with me over the holidays, and he was lamenting a bit about a gift he received: $70 worth of iTunes gift cards. He had no idea what to buy, in part because he doesn’t like new music nearly as much as old music. (I helped him on both fronts by suggesting the new Black Keys and Physical Graffiti).

I do not have that problem, and I’m not sure if I’m thankful for it or cursed. You could give me a $700 iTunes gift card, and while I would be very grateful and sprint into the digital stacks with the zeal of a meth addict in a Walgreens, I guarantee I would hit a wall of regret at $699 because I would think of something else I would HAVE to have. (“I could really use that live Big Star reunion record!”)

I would say overall that’s a blessing. Music has been such a huge part of my life that I would hate for my musical interests to be perpetually stuck in the past. Sure, I will have soft spot for the songs I played when I had sex for the first time/drank for the first time/got high for the first time/rolled a 20-sided dice for the first time (hello, Rush!). But every year I find a bevy of new personal classics that get added to the Playlist of My Life (formerly known as the Mixtape of My Life).

This past year was no exception. The following are my favorite 11 songs of the year, plus an opening act of honorable mentions because I got to 18 and couldn’t bring myself to cut any more. These are not necessarily the “best” songs of the year, although I have a disturbing number of similarities to Pitchfork’s list. There are instead my favorites, songs I played the most, sang the most, and air-drummed the most.

Another 7 of '11

“Video Games,” Lana Del Rey. There are a couple of funny things about this year’s list. First, I am aware than my previous lists tend to be helmet parties (not to be confused with a Helmet party, although they have the same gender ratio). But I had five female artists make the cut this year, which is progress for me. I am slowly moving my male-female balance from D&D convention to Star Trek convention. Baby steps.

The other funny thing is that I have always been more music oriented than vocal oriented, which explains how I have been a Rush fan for more than 30 years. This year, though, I was drawn to a lot of songs with strong vocal performances. In fact, dare I say this year’s list is wank-free, with one possible exception in the #2 song. And this song by Lana Del Rey encapsulates the year. It wowed me the first time I heard it the same way Neko Case did. Lana Del Rey could sing about tax returns and I’d listen just to hear her sing “child-care tax credits.”

Although the song is called “Video Games” and her last name is the same as a popular science fiction publishing imprint, so I haven’t exactly escaped the shackles of male nerdom.

“The Thanksgiving Filter,” Drive-By Truckers. Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This song exemplifies what the Truckers do so well: provide such level of details that you feel like you’re having Thanksgiving with this unhappy family and hoping that singer Patterson Hood has saved you a few puffs off his joint so you can get through the holiday without beating someone with a drum stick. 

“You Can’t Say Kingston Doesn’t Love You,” Title Fight. Sometimes I just need a great two minutes of rocking (as The Lovely Becky will sadly verify).

“Shake It Out,” Florence + the Machine. Holy shit can she sing. That note she hits at 3:08 at the start of the final chorus gives me goose bumps every time I hear it. But more than that, I love that this song sounds big without sounding like some autotuned club mix monstrosity. It raises the roof without requiring you to raise your blood alcohol content to make it interesting.

“Down by the Water,” The Decemberists. When I got on Facebook, I did it because I had a high school reunion and was connecting with a lot of old friends. The funny thing is that I wound up not talking much with my closest HS friends, in part because I think we didn’t get over losing touch (admittedly, 90% my fault). Instead, I wound up interacting more with other non-BFF classmates who have become some of my best Facebook contacts, in part because we tend to have entertaining high school interactions—lots of jokes, puns, and entendres. In fact, I have a hard time dealing with Facebook when something serious happens to one of my FB friends, because the format feels so goddamned trite for anything beyond funny cat videos or dick jokes. The reason why I like this Decemberists song so much is because it’s like making a great FB connection with an old friend. It sounds just like I remember The Decemberists I knew and loved, and we’ve picked up right where we left off after we lost contact after The Crane Wife.

“Weekend,” Smith Westerns. I had the same reaction to this I had to The xx: how does a group of embryos make such killer music? Seriously, had I been more reckless and fertile in my youth, I could have fathered this entire band. And why are they smoking in the video, and carrying axes, and holding guns? WHERE ARE THE PARENTS? So, great song, but docked a few spots for making me feel old.

“Livin’ in the Jungle,” Black Joe Lewis and The Honeybears. I heard this for the first time in Vegas, when I went for my cousin Youngblood’s bachelor party. I didn’t write about that trip for a couple of reasons: one because, while entertaining, it didn’t really break any new Vegas blogging ground, and two, because there was actually a serious moment that I wanted to keep private, yet would feel dishonest if I wrote around it. 

However, there is one great story from that trip. My brothers Tickle and Snake Anthony joined Tickle’s friend Smoke and his buddy Bruce at a bar that opened out on the Vegas Strip. Bruce, not knowing the power of Tickle, bet my brother that he could not get 20 random pedestrians to come out from the Strip and into the bar to either shake his hand or hug him. The time limit: one hour. “One hour?” I laughed. “He’ll be done in 20 minutes.” Sure enough, Tickle went full Tickle and started calling out and waving people over. Sure enough they came and shook hands or hugged him. One guy came over and asked if he knew Tickle, because he looked familiar. “No, I’m just a random guy trying to win a bet,” Tickle said. “Oh,” said the man, “Well, this is my wife,” and just like that Tickle hit a two-fer. He got another guy who was wearing a T-shirt with Oscar the Grouch and the word TRASHED written across it to come over. It was such an awesome shirt that Smoke tried (unsuccessfully) to buy it for $50. The best was a group of older tourists who came over and asked us, “Are you Canadians?” We said no, and they said, “That’s funny, because you’re acting like Canadians.” Tickle wracked up seven hits in about ten minutes, at which point Bruce called off the bet. So this song makes the list because it makes me think of friendly, drunken, hugging Canadians, even if it is a booty-shaking bit of James Brown R&B.

Okay, onto the finalists….

11) “Helplessness Blues,” Fleet Foxes. Like Lana Del Rey, they could literally sing about anything as long as they do so in harmony. This makes me feel like I do when I drink Fiji Water after a hangover, especially if I get one of the liter bottles that’s extra cold from the back of the case. I am instantly rejuvenated and purified, and whatever mental toxins I have floating around get flushed out.

10) “Marked,” EMA. Of course, rock music is not all shiny happy people and sparkling clear water. It’s dirty, druggy, and deathly, and that’s what made me stop and take notice when I heard this song the first time. The screeches of the fret board are the sound of angels losing their wings, one horrible mistake at a time. But then she turns it around at the end and offers just enough hope to stave off musical suicide. The harshness of it makes it hard to enjoy, but I can’t think of another song that grabbed me quite like this one. 

9) “Birthday Cake,” Lucky Ghost. I’ve been on a gaming message board for years, long enough that I have gotten to know a number of the guys (100% helmet party). When the guy who is Lucky Ghost mentioned he had released an album as a free download, I did my virtual friend duty of downloading it and giving it what I figured would be one polite listen. What I didn’t expect was to play this album over and over this year. Could this really be from the same guy who whupped my ass in Madden? It’s a completely infectious mix of indie rock, crunchy 90s alternative, 80s synthpop, and in some places even some sprinkles of 70s prog—something that the title Sex Griddle would not suggest. This is the final track and a perfect coda to the album, a stirring cityscape of a love song that I almost always have to play again when I hear it. You can get the whole thing here for free.

8) “Holocene,” Bon Iver. A real challenge for Bon Iver would be to make an album I don’t love. For Emma, Forever Ago is a bona fide classic, and the Blood Bank EP has what I think is his best song in the title track. So even with autotune and drum machines and fucking with the cabin-in-the-woods formula, he managed to give me another album of everything I loved about those two offerings without just sounding like he just followed his past formula. I honestly don’t know how people can’t be moved by this.

7) “Barton Hollow,” The Civil Wars. Maybe it’s the influence of the band’s name, but this song makes me think of Cold Mountain, of a man and a woman separated not just by distance but tragedy and terror and trauma, walking hundreds of miles in the hopes of escaping into each other for five minutes. The other thing I love about this song is that I don’t mind the male singer’s voice. On a lot of male-female duets, I often want the dude to get the hell out of the way (cram your leather, Hendley, I’m here for Nicks’s lace). But The Civil Wars really complement each other and blend together perfectly. I could have easily picked a half dozen tracks from this album, but this is the one that jumps out at me the most.

6) “Pumped Up Kicks,” Foster the People. I know that some people are going to probably skewer me for this, and I admit I feel like a hipster cobag for liking this song. At the same time it was the catchiest fucking thing I heard this year and I was singing along about shooting kids by the second chorus. I suspect I’ll have an MGMT reaction to this down the road, an empty tequila bottle of nausea and regret, but damn if it isn’t fun getting down to the worm.

5) “Heart in Your Heartbreak,” The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I am going to just come out and admit it: I need a little emo in my life. I find that funny because I am at 25 years past the target demographic for stuff like this and, if I may be immodest for a minute, I have nothing to be sad about. (I apologize in advance to TLB for making her fall out of her chair.) I am happily married, I have a wonderful daughter, I am back in a city I love, and I make a decent living while working out of my house. The only thing I really regret is not having published a novel yet, but if I may again be immodest, I think that is going to change, possibly before the Favoritist of 2012 gets written. Yet I feel a need for some sadness in my life because there is a part of me that enjoys feeling a little miserable. So songs like this give me a little huff of heartbreak, packaged safely in an upbeat tempo and a doctor-approved four minutes.

4) “Get Away,” Yuck. Pure college rock gold. This sounds like it was recorded live at a left-of-the-dial station sometime around 1993, when the band was making its catchy-but-noisy indie-label debut, before signing a three-album deal with Geffen and multitracking out the rough edges. This a great song from a great album, and I only wish I could still fit into my button-fly Levis and Late Night With David Letterman t-shirt so I could fully immerse myself in the alternative rock universe Yuck came from. Plus, have you seen the drummer's hair?

3) “Midnight City” M83. Playing this after Yuck makes me feel like I’m traveling back in time, a fact heightened by the fact that the Chicago suburb where I live served as the location for every John Hughes film from the 1980s. (We live about a mile from the house Cameron kicked the Ferrari out of in Feris Bueller’s Day Off.) Even the sax outro feels like it stepped out of a fusion-powered DeLorean. However, the reason why I and so many other armchair critics have flocked to this song is that it just kills. It is perfectly constructed, from the sound of the synths to the Euro-ish vocals to the digital tom rolls of the drum machine, with the saxamaphone opening up the skys and taking us to retro heaven at the end. Simply put, this would have been a favorite in 1982, too.

2) “Rope,” Foo Fighters. No one makes rock albums anymore. They try, sure, but they either come out like Nickelback or like Queens of the Stone Age, which winks a bit too much to go to 11 for me. There’s a special blend of womp, melody, and swagger that rarely get blended together these days. So leave it to one of the few modern music stars who understands how to be a rock star, a gum-chewing, arena-playing front man who writes songs with choruses that should be coming out of Camaro speakers at high volume. He also just happened to make the best album of his Foo Fighters career, an album that has an analog sound even when coming out of my hard drive. This is my favorite song from that album, in no small part because there’s a bit of tricky 2000s Rush wank at the beginning, a thumpy riff that twists and shouts, “Are you ready to rock?” before delivering chorus that climbs to the top of Marshall Mountain. Nothing got a double-arms in the air Fuck yeah from me this year like “Rope,” except….

1) “Whirring,” The Joy Formidable. I was sure when I first heard “Rope” that was going to be the song at the top of this year’s list. Songs like that are why I am a life-long rock fan. But then this song randomly came across my ears one day, driving in my un-rocking Volvo station wagon, kid in the back and WXRT on the radio. It was big and heavy, but balanced with the light and sweet female vocal. I made a note to remember “Joy Formidable,” went home, and bought the album. To my pleasant surprise, I found that the album version was even better, with a jamming four minutes of swirling guitars and double-bass pedal beats tacked on. No sooner was the big fat finish finished, a peel of feedback fading into my speakers, then I hit repeat. So it turns out I was completely wrong, that they do make big fat rock albums, it's just that they are sometimes made by blond Welsh women who sing like the Cocteau Twins but rock like the Foo Fighters. It’s finding songs like “Whirring” that make me happy I love music more than nostalgia, that I still get a giddy high from digging through new releases hoping to find a new addition to the Playlist.

Have a great weekend and a great 2012! If the world does end, I hope you at least have your iPod handy when it does.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What last-minute campaign efforts are we making in Iowa?

10) Making it a hate crime to refer to any location as “Buttfuck, Iowa.”

9) Vowing to use the power of the White House to ensure Cedar Rapids wins Best Picture.

8) Offering a Thanksgiving 2012 tax credit for Americans who replace gravy with delicious ethanol.

7) Spreading Santorum flyers on every hog pen, cow pasture, and rest stop.

6) Relaxing labor laws so more young Iowans can reap the benefits of being children of the corn.

5) Reassuring voters that we will read the President’s Daily Brief as thoroughly as any newsletter bearing our name.

4) Slitting forearm open to prove to caucusing Iowans that Mitt Romney is not a robot.

3) Promising that every able-bodied male who votes for Michele Bachmann will receive a hug and have a Biblical passage whispered in their ear by Marcus.

2) Demonstrating our commitment to the free market by requiring all tipped cows to right themselves.

1) Convincing every caucus that our brand of conservatism is fresh, clean, pure, and mild.

The Ron Paul Holiday Newsletter

Hello, friends. Ron Paul here. I hope everyone is having a wonderful time preparing for Christmas or celebrating Chanukah, although if you are celebrating Chanukah, you should really consider converting to Christianity. I would hate to see such a prosperous, thrifty, shrewd people as the Jews spend eternity in endless hellfire because of their deicide of our Lord and Savior. Really, it’s just four Gospels, a few letters, and some pretty entertaining revelations, so why not?

Like all of you, I am dreaming of a White Christmas, and not in the meteorological sense, if you catch my drift. And by drift, I mean racial and religious overtones. Think of how much better this country would be if, after a long day of shopping for presents and gorging yourself on eggnog and sitting on Santa Claus’s lap, you could freely express the Christian sentiment of the holiday by saying, “Merry Christmas” to your fellow white Christians. You wouldn’t have to worry if someone would be offended because they were Jewish or if they were only saying “Merry Christmas” because they were debating whether to steal your presents. I’m not talking about the Jews in the latter example, of course. They would just buy your presents at a fraction of the price you paid. I’m talking about the blacks.

Now, friends, I know lately some have accused me of wanting to start a race war. That is hogwash. First, I abhor war, not so much for the killing as for the price tag and that you have to wear a uniform. No self-respecting Libertarian would pay for the experience of being told what to do, wear, and kill. I am also not a monster and don’t want to actually kill black Americans. I just want them to go away. You know how you may have a friend you used to like, but then you don’t like them, so you start to ignore them in the hopes they will take the hint and stop asking you to do things for them, like give them welfare or stop when they hail a cab? Most smart people would take the hint and maybe head to Liberia, but you know what they say about non-whites and smarts. So I instead think we should maybe give out welfare in the form of vouchers for plane tickets to Africa. I think that’s very generous and that while coach is no picnic, it beats being in the bowels of a ship for three months. Am I right?

Some of you may say, “Dr. Paul, some of the casual acquaintances that I say are my best friends are black. Wouldn’t it be wrong to deport them?” First, thank you for calling me Dr. Paul. Maybe if more rap songs advocated that kind of politeness and obeying local law enforcement officers, we wouldn’t even have to discuss this voucher business. Second, it is not wrong. Look, even some of my best friends are huge drains on the system, because they take and take without giving. Look at my very good friend Herman Cain, who is black. He was accused of sexual harassment because he wanted women to provide him with sexual gratification. Except for that one woman he groped, he jumped straight into his pleasure. That’s a very big government approach to getting off. Instead, he should have offered nipple or clitoral stimulation first, to set up an exchange for penile pleasure. That’s just good free market practice. Although, I want to make it clear, I do not advocate free love. Like many Libertarians, I believe in preserving my precious bodily fluids and not just giving them away for free. I expect a commitment to at least a clean house, three daily prepared meals, and anniversary fellatio. That’s the kind of romantic exchange we should demand from the invisible hand of the free market.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, the blacks. Would I be sad to see some of them go? Of course. Like many of you, I have great respect for Colin Powell, Greg Gumbel (although not that hate whitey brother of his), and Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But the truth is that we don’t need them now that we have Mexicans. They do everything we expect of blacks for a fraction of the price, from agriculture to making us feel superior. Even in two areas where blacks dominate disproportionately, sports and entertainment, we can still use Mexicans instead. Instead of Barry Bonds, we have Albert Pujols. Instead of Whitney Houston, Jennifer Lopez. Instead of Bill Cosby, George Lopez. And thanks to God’s glorious creations of Tim Tebow and Miley Cyrus, coupled with tremendous advances in cloning, we soon may be able to return sports and entertainment to their Caucasian roots, just like the Bible says. Then we’ll be able to build that 2,000-mile-long wall of fire along our Southern border that’s been on my Christmas list for thirty years

So, friends, as we celebrate this holiest of holidays (or should be celebrating, if you catch my drift, my Jewish friends), I wish you a very Merry White Christmas. And, in the spirit of giving, won’t you please consider donating to my campaign? After all, I am the only candidate fighting for the things you people believe in (as opposed to the things those people believe in). All I ask is that you not send federal greenbacks but make your donations in gold specie or through my new Internet service, PayPaul.

Sincerely,
Ron Paul

Please note: The views expressed by Ron Paul in The Ron Paul Holiday Newsletter may not actually be the views expressed by Ron Paul the presidential candidate. Ron Paul’s name on the masthead and his signature are by no means an endorsement of the ideas expressed here, unless those ideas would convince you to vote for Ron Paul, in which case he’s not saying he doesn’t support them. In fact, let’s just say that Ron Paul had absolutely nothing to do with this newsletter at all, except that he would really, really love it if you would contribute to his campaign.

Top Ten Thursdays: What's on our Christmas lists?

Special extended Grand Ol' Holiday Party edition!

12 TeabaggersTebowing

11-year-olds laboring

10 courthouse commandments

9 jailbird judges

8 whitewashed newsletters

7 hetero foxholes

6 Santorums spreading

5 gold standards

4 harassment settlements

3 foreign wars

2 ex-wife endorsements

And a white guy in the White House!

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

I had a fun lesson in parenting this week. The Lovely Becky and I are trying to get tougher about not letting Libby throw a fit when she doesn’t get her way. This actually does not happen very much, but it does occur and we figure we should nip this in the bud before leniency on having another candy cane at bedtime leads to her having a meth addiction by age fourteen (welcome to things that keep me up at night).

Libby is really good about going out in public. We are fortunate that she rarely loses her shit when other people are watching. It’s usually only in private that she pulls her Baby Joan Crawford act with us (NO COLD BOBBAS! [what we call her sippy cups of milk]). The other night we were going to go out to eat, but Libby started being crabby and arguing about putting her shoes on. We gave it a couple minutes and finally said that was it, no going out to eat. She got very upset and earned a time out, but we stuck with that threat. Eventually she settled down and all was right in the TLBrando household again.

The next night, we decided to go out to eat since we were also denied the night before. Everything was fine, but in the car Libby started getting crabby again. She has a specific Crabby Voice, a voice she can produce on cue if asked to tell people what her Crabby Voice sounds like. She started complaining about something completely random in that Little Golden Books Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness way toddlers have. After about twenty seconds, I cut her off and reminded her that it was not too late to turn the car around (hello, Dad, nice to hear your voice coming out of my mouth) and that we could cancel the night out the way we did the night before.

Immediately, Crabby Voice that had been more full of rage than a rat in a case changed into Nice Voice. No transition, no tears wiped, just a switch thrown and shenanigans gone. Tantrum? No, acting!

Good to learn before I get suckered into buying a pony.

1) “The Metro,” Berlin. At one point, this was one of the most underrated synthpop songs of the 1980s. It was lost in the critical shuffle due to the goofy novelty of “Sex (I’m A….)”  and the commercial payoff of a Tom Cruise sex (I’m not gay but my Thetan is) scene in Top Gun. But now I think due has been given and it is recognized as a great piece of Roland/drum machine/handclap pop. Which is good, because saying things are underrated has gotten very overrated.

2) “Surgical Focus,” Guided by Voices. I recently saw a picture on The Facebook of Drs. Hawkeye and Trapper of Hot-in-Toronto fame. Trapper was wearing a suave sport jacket and t-shirt, looking like he was starring in a reboot of Miami Vice. Hawkeye was clad, head to toe, in full country-and-western regalia: big hat, shirt with arrows and sparkly buttons, tight jeans, and cowboy boots, with a mustache that looked like it provided the wildest ride at Brokeback Mountain. This came after I recently saw a grizzled Hawkeye sporting a beard and insulated jean jacket like he stepped off the deck of Deadliest Catch. And these guys are neonatal doctors. Think about the next time you take your kids to your physician.

3) “Tiny Spark,” Brendan Benson. One of the other dudes in The Raconteurs, which is a bit like being one of the other guys in a scene with John Holmes. But Benson can whip out some great power pop.

4) “Up the Junction,” Squeeze. I am one of those people who rummages through the bargain CD bin at Best Buy, digging through musical chum like The Best of Mac Davis and After the Fire: “Der Commissar” and 9 Shitty Songs That Aren’t “Der Commissar” to get to a gem like Squeeze’s Singles 45’s and Under for four bucks. You just don’t get the same feeling of treasure hunting from iTunes or eMusic.

5) “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream,” My Morning Jacket. I don’t even recognize them anymore. To me, this almost sounds like a Flaming Lips song. That’s not necessarily a bad  thing, but there’s a fine line between experimenting and losing your identity musically.

6) “The Swish,” The Hold Steady. I started going to the gym (again) after about a four-ish month layoff (again), doing the hamster treadmill dance of thinking I’m running away from death. It’s not easy to make this couch exodus, so I have to distract myself from thinking I’m having a heart attack. I do that by not only playing music, but often fantasizing about being in the band playing the music. The Hold Steady are probably my biggest go-to elliptical machine rock fantasy band. I see myself playing lead guitar, looking Keef-cool while Craig Finn runs around looking like Elvis Costello after too many Jolt Colas. This is what I do to be “healthy.”

7) “Mother,” The Police. Might make the top 10 of songs I hate the most. Almost hypnotic in its awfulness. You know it’s bad when you’re saying, “Hey, could you just play the one about falling in love with the sex doll?”

8) “Let’s Go to Bed,” The Cure. Has anyone ever fantasized about having sex with Robert Smith? Even when he was young and thin and didn’t look like he was In Between Buffets? I know he’s been with the same woman forever, and I wonder if it’s because he found someone who said “yes” to the title of this song and he decided to lock that down for life. Then again, I met TLB while wearing a shirt with Robert Smith’s face on it, so maybe there is some sort of emophradesiac effect I am unaware of.

9) “When You Sleep,” My Bloody Valentine. Bloody overrated, but this is the one song that emerges from the warped drone of this album that doesn’t make me reach for the skip button.

10) “She,” Green Day. Maybe it’s because so many modern rock bands have pillaged the 80s for their sound, but classic alternative from the 1990s actually sounds older to me than, say, “The Metro.” Three dudes on guitar, bass, and drums playing catchy pop punk? No synths, no autotune, no irony? Might as well be Buddy Holly in stereo. I love it, though, even if I never would have expected Green Day to last long enough to make it to Broadway.

11) “Hey Joe,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience. So is it okay to feel groovy about a song where I guy shoots his straying girlfriend/wife and flees to Mexico? Because this is in my Holy Hendrix Trinity of “Manic Depression” and “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”. I would also totally support a female singer recording a version called “Hey Jo” about a woman going to shoot her man down, if that makes it any better.

Have a great weekend.

Top Ten Wednesdays: What else are we using predator drones for?

Special extra collateral damage edition!

13) Enforcing new federal Bovine Upright Larceny Law.

12) Delivering candygrams.

11) Making damn sure no one cheats in the carpool lane.

10) Showing Santa that there are consequences for putting us on the naughty list.

9) Providing additional surveillance and suppressive anti-personnel fire while stalking celebrities (ModelTMZ only).

8) Supporting additional “sanitation/improvised percussion removal” in nation’s financial districts.

7) Utilizing twin T-shirt cannons to fire XL-sized ordnance into the upper decks.

6) Ensuring that we won’t have to wait in line during the next iPhone launch (requires iHellfire app)

5) Guiding drones to our cubicles so we can do our jobs without the threat of soul-crushing ennui.

4) Getting optional tow package to pull our car home from the bar.

3) Adding panorama shots to our sex tapes.

2) Keeping those damn kids off our lawn once and for all.

1) (tie) Putting star on top of Christmas tree/Lighting the menorah.

Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we suspending our campaigns?

10) Taking a hands-off approach to running for president.

9) Going to prepare for 2016 by reading Wikipedia entry for every country on earth.

8) Plan to campaign for equal rights after losing job to equally unqualified white guy.

7) Unable to leave house after wife purchased electronic dog collar and invisible fence.

6) Decided to run for a position we were much more qualified for, president of Penn State.

5) Launching new chain of pizza parlors that let you put as much sausage as you want in your pie.

4) Wanted to return to more lucrative fondling opportunities in the private sector.

3) God whispered, “What, you thought I was serious?”

2) Not prepared for the media trying to find out things about us.

1) Didn’t actually look up meaning of suspended until we already made the announcement.

Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

The American people are not always the brightest of the bunch. We distract ourselves with minutiae, can be incredibly shortsighted, and often act like a bunch of fickle mush heads. I include myself in that collective “we,” as I spent more time than yesterday than I care to admit checking the status of the big toe of LeSean McCoy, the Philadelphia Eagles starting running back, because his ability to play for my pretend football team could make me a small amount of money and, more importantly, convey a windfall of nerd bragging rights. Yes, we are people of the land, the common clay of the West.

Yet even the most linguistically challenged American moran can smell bullshit when it’s being served up as an electoral appetizer. And no one has served up more bullshit than Herman Cain, a man who built his fortune throwing a bunch of cheap crap on dough and saying said dish could not be refused.

His entire campaign has been one smelly serving after another, from his knowledge of foreign policy to his economic plan to his ability to keep his hands to himself. What’s kind of unique about Cain is that his strategy for covering up each scandal is bury it under an even bigger dung heap of stupidity. The current affair conundrum is the perfect example. After getting accused for harassment and infidelity, a woman comes forward to say she and Cain have had an affair for thirteen years, and affair the conveniently ended just as Cain decided to become president.

Rather than denying it—a usually fruitless but expected tactic—or admitting it, the King Solomon of Bad Decisions decided to cut this turd in half and say he didn’t have a romantic relationship with the woman, but helped her out financially because they were friends. A creative out for sure, and one that could possibly have worked until his wife said she had no idea Cain was friends with this woman.

That is where Cain’s Tower of Bullshit Babel finally collapsed. Men will be friends with women. They will help their female friends. They may even be friends with women their wives don’t particularly like. But no straight man would secretly give money to another woman behind his wife’s back for more than a decade without some kind of slap and tickle going on. Maybe it’s not full-blown according-to-Hoyle carnality, but there’s going to at least be a soiled dress, a spoilt cigar, or an uncoiled dong.

This is what I don’t understand about candidates. They know that the press will uncover almost anything about their past. If you were running on a vegan platform, the New York Times would produce that hot dog you ate five years ago when you were really drunk and starving and the scent of steamed cow lips and assholes was overpowering. Bad touches, bad grammar, racial slurs, racist pastors, drunk driving, draft dodging, South American strolls, South American snorts, shady investments, shady associates, and especially extramarital excursions will all come out. I think Obama got elected primarily because he could string two sentences together and appears to have given his presidential pardon exclusively to his wife, an old-fashioned concept so revolutionary in modern politics it seems like meeting someone who churns their own butter.

If anything, this is where Gingrich probably has a big advantage. Everyone already knows what a hypocritical asshole he is, which eliminates the element of surprise.

Okay, now that I feel so great about our democracy, I’m ready for music.

1) “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” The Cure. Who better to lift one’s mood than Robert Smith, because you know there's at least one other person in this world more depressed than you?

2) “O My Soul,” Big Star. I don’t always listen to power pop, but when I do, I choose Big Star. Stay catchy, my friends. Seriously, there should be a talk like the Dos Equis Guy Day. Or better yet, Talk Like the Guy Talking About the Dos Equis Guy Day. I know that would be a capitulation to advertising invading creativity, but those commercials are funnier than 75 percent of the sitcoms on TV. I would come up with something for myself like, “He once K.O.’d a man with a punchline.”

3) “Looks That Kill,” Motley Crue. A song I love from a band I hate. They are the embodiment of everything stupid about 80s metal: faux Satanism, lyrics that made Winger look literary by comparison, the inability to discern between sexy and sexist, self-destructive behavior, monstrous egos, and a bewildering look that borrowed from the New York Dolls, S&M shops, American Indians, and The Road Warrior and/or the NFL. But holy hairspray, this song rocks my face off. No intro, no lead-in, they just kick the door in and start spraying riffs and drums.

4) “S.S. Fort Jams,” Fang Island. When I lived in Da U.P., I had NFL Sunday Ticket. It was ridiculously expensive, but we were in the Packers TV market, had little competition for our entertainment dollars (especially since moose wrestling was free), and our household would suffer a severe economic setback if I hung myself out of boredom. One of the things I loved was that, if you had the Ticket, you could watch compressed recaps of all of the NFL games. They literally cut out all of the commentary, commercials, and assorted grabass into about 25 minutes of pure gridiron goodness. That’s kind of what Fang Island does with prog. They squeeze out all the fruitiness into a concentrated few minutes of pure jamming. Plus they have a guitarist who plays in a star-covered wizard's cowl, which is almost as cool as an eye-covered wizard's cowl.

5) “Rag Mama Rag,” The Band. One of those songs you have to really stop and listen to in order to appreciate. There is so much stuff going on here and everything fits together perfectly, kind of like The Lovely Becky’s holiday cookies when they in their original, not pulverized form.

6) “Spoonman,” Soundgarden. Not only the sole rock song to feature a guy on lead spoon, but also the only song ever written about a guy playing spoons. It makes me wonder if he has a whole collection of spoons. “We wanted to give the song more of a baritone, so I went with my grandma’s silver serving spoons, with a little ladle overdubbed for effect.” It also seems like a song that would have been ripe for a Weird Al parody called “Kazooman.”

7) “Honky Tonk Woman,” The Rolling Stones. I suspect that 50 percent of my dislike for the Stones stems from the tongue logo, and the other half comes from Mick Jagger. I hate watching him perform; he moves around the stage like a duck with a live Roman candle up its ass. I like Keef, I like Charlie Watts, I like Ron Wood, and while Bill Wyman is a cradle robber, he has the decency to keep his mouth closed. But the logo and Jagger make me think of Mick licking every time I hear them.

8) “Crash,” Dave Matthews Band. Goonies hate. If they ever made a movie about Stuff White People Like, any DMB album could serve as the soundtrack. It takes a lot to make me think, “Boy, I really wish I was listening to Coldplay instead of this.”

9) “Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The really scary thing about Pepper Spraying Cop isn’t the act itself—history is full of authority figures abusing their authority. It’s when people like Megyn Kelly say that the abuse of that authority is perfectly acceptable. (I also don't trust people who replace a perfectly good vowel with a "y." What have you done with than "a"!) Because once you accept that a bunch of peaceful protesters can get blasted in the face with pepper spray, it’s not too great of a leap to think it’s okay for them to get tased, bashed, and eventually shot in the face, and before you know it a never-again moment like Kent State is back in fascist fashion.

10) “The Quest for the Wizard's Rod on Wank Mountain, Part LXIX: Into the Crypt of Phrygian Fartblasting,” Dream Theater. I would rather be pepper-sprayed than listen to this. At least that doesn’t last as long or sting as badly. Let’s try again.

10) “Favourite Food,” Tokyo Police Club. These guys are half the age of Cream Beaters and have already eclipsed them in songwriting ability. Speaking of youngsters, I went Christmas shopping at a store that rhymes with Pest Pie. I was looking for a gift for Libby, a Disney princess camera that she saw and begged us for. It was on sale, so, dutiful dad that I am, I went to the store and approached some blue-shirted Bieber to help me find it. He asked if it was for me, because that is such a clever and completely original joke. He couldn’t find it, and he proceeded to ask no fewer than four other Pest Pie employees, all dudes, if they knew where the princess camera was, and he started each query the same way, “Hey, [INSERT NAME OF SLACK-JAWED DRONE], you look like a pretty princess. Would you know where this camera is?” Four times. And better yet, his fine fellows asked me if it was for me. HA HA, IT IS FUNNY THAT A GROWN MAN WITH A WEDDING RING AND SOME GRAYING HAIR IS BUYING A PRINCESS CAMERA. IT MUST BE FOR HIS PERSONAL USE! I swore that the next guy who made the same stupid joke was going to get slashed across the jugular with the sharp shards of the princess camera packaging. Then, after listening to the same routine four times, I found the camera on my own. This is why people shop on Amazon.

11) “Roundabout,” Yes. The main fantasy football league I’m in involves ten guys. The most recent member is the oldest, Andy. He’s the cousin of one of the other guys and only a few years older than me, but for some reason one of the other guys started calling him Uncle Andy and the nickname stuck. He also at one point asked him, “Uncle Andy, what were the 60s like?” which set off a reaction of Uncle Andy is old jokes that have lasted about a year and a half.

These are not the same repetitive princess camera jokes; we put a lot of creativity into how old Uncle Andy is. For instance, his opponent this week named his team “1492” and wrote “In 1492, Uncle Andy sailed across the Ocean Blue.” Among other references, we have placed Uncle Andy at the Battle of Hastings, the first Thanksgiving, the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, the assassination of William McKinley, and the Great Depression, of which we asked for tips for surviving fiscal crisis that didn’t involve cooking and eating members of the Little Rascals.. We have asked him what the world was like before electricity, running water, female voting, and football. He has been accused of being senile, confused, sleepy, and of very untoward behavior toward flappers during the Roaring Twenties. As I was typing this, someone sent an e-mail mentioning that Uncle Andy used to race chariots when he was a teen.

At this year’s draft, I had my iPod and asked for requests. Uncle Andy asked for Yes and I put “Roundabout” on. Not sixty seconds in the selection was voted down and Uncle Andy banned from making any musical recommendations. For once, I found myself having to come to his defense, much in the way I would help someone across the street or open a jar of pickles for them.

Have a good weekend.