Random Ten

Because people were literally breaking down my door demanding further installments. Really: literally. They smashed an enormous hole in my door. It was a bad scene.

01. Ceili Moss, “Hot Asphalt”
I have trouble Understanding the lyrics, but it’s super-infectious. 8/10

02. Echo and the Bunnymen, “My White Devil”
Don’t say it’s life! On the barrier! I don’t know what it means, but I’ve always enjoyed this one. 8/10

03. ABBA, “The Day Before You Came”
Um, yeah. An ABBA song without a chorus. Whose brilliant idea was that? 4/10

04. Joe Strummer, “It’s a Rockin’ World”
From some sort of South Park CD, bizarrely enough. But it is indeed rockin.’ 8/10

05. Pulp, “Disco 2000”
I don’t suppose this requires much comment. 8/10

06. The Skels, “The Rain Came Pissin’ Down”
I can’t say I have a great deal of respect for this band, artistically speaking, but yeah, they have some pretty fun songs, and this is one. 8/10

07. Echo and the Bunnymen, “Nocturnal Me”
This is in the top-tier of Bunnymen songs. The gypsy-esque beat is really great. 9/10

08. Manic Street Preachers, “Mr. Carbohydrate”
This is the one that goes, “They call me a boring fuckhead/Say I might as well work in a bank. You have to love that. 7/10

09. Blood or Whiskey, “Chloe”
Lyrics on the crass side, but not bad. 6/10

10.Suede, “The Two of Us”
Breathtaking. 10/10

Giant squids are rad.

Fo'real.

p.s. How ya like them apples, Delay?

Eschatology #1

NOTE: I wrote this, apparently. Then I never published it, for obvious reasons. But now I am! Because what the hell. It's not as though there aren't plenty of OTHER embarrassing old posts here.
-04/07/10

Last night my fortune cookie said:
Repent, sinners. The end is nigh.

The lamb lies down with the lion,
Or so I've heard,
But it's hard to see with the violent orange clouds rolling by.

I can't sleep for the sound of metal grinding against metal.
Stumbling out the screen door,
I can't see the forest.
The trees are gone.

The dim streets refract endlessly,
Hip-deep in discolored fog.
The ghost of air-raid sirens hangs in the air.

The teevee doesn't work.
It goes from white to white to white.

She appears, beslippered,
Yawning, hair askew,
And asks what's happening.
We've reached out credit limit, I tell her.
God is foreclosing.
So you're not going to work?
There is no work.
Oh. Want to make love?
There is no love.
Oh come off it.

Later drifting in and out of the world
I find that sleep and waking have equalized,
Like lukewarm water.
If I lose consciousness
Will I ever wake up?
Will I know the difference?

Siberia

I believe I said I'd comment on the new Echo and the Bunnymen album, so:

It's not hard to see why people are hailing this as the ultimate Return To Form: sonically, it's more similar to their eighties work than any of their other reunion albums. Or specifically, their self-titled fifth album. Which is all well and good, but...man, you gotta have the tunes. The songs *may* be better on average than those on Flowers (though not Evergreen), but there's just nothing that really stands out. "Mildly pleasant" isn't really much of a recommendation for a song. At least Flowers had a few standouts that gave the album a reason to exist. But this one...meh. What's the point? Shrug.

No comment on the Freudian aspects at play here.

With a name like that, the project was probably doomed from the start.

Cryptic words

The other night, I awoke in the wee hours of the morning having been having some sort of dream. And there was this insistent phrase stuck in my mind. So I stumbled out of bed, jotted it down on a piece of scrap-paper, and went back to sleep. When I awoke up, any and all details of this dream were gone; I didn't even remember having written anything down until I happened to see the note. I had written:

"A pathology of cream-filled hatred"

Any insights on what this may signify are appreciated.

Chick Tract amusement

Oh boy, a new one. Nothing all THAT thrilling; you pretty much know where THIS is going to end up from the sixth panel. But seriously, Jack my man, don't you think the whole "help help I'm being oppressed" thing is just getting a LITTLE silly? Tell you what, dude: show me ONE example--just ONE--of a public school where kids "can't say 'Thanksgiving'"--and I will immediately convert to your particular brand of religious psychosis. And anyway, shouldn't Christmas be "our most honored day?" Isn't this slightly blasphemous?

Things I like: the kid with the "Don't trust anyone over 13" t-shirt. The fact that Jesus looks like some sort of bog monster. "We're dead meat." "All parties cancelled due to fire."

And...that's about it.

Take them out to Chez Dead Rhino?

A special message to a certain someone

Blur's best album is The Great Escape, by quite some margin. "Stereotypes," "Best Days," "Topman," "The Universal," "He Thought of Cars"--the list goes on. Affecting, cerebral, epic. No particular offense to Oasis (just this once), but they only WISH they could make a record this good.

OH yes! I threw down the SHIT out of that gauntlet! Feel free to use it as an example of bad public relations :-p

Commercials we hate: a continuing series

I say "continuing," but it's quite probable that all old entries in the series are either on my old website, were on my old website until it went screwy, or else I actually wrote about them in my journal, rather than putting them up for public consumption. But never mind that.

Today's example is this completely awful dairy queen commercial for some new milkshakish drink where this woman's being wracked with paroxysms of grief because her cat, "Muffin," just died. She is also holding a mostly-empty cup that had contained the new drink. So her boyfriend(?) then shows up to comfort her, and she throws her arms around him.

And Mr. Boyfriend starts with the there there, don't cry thing, but all the time what he's REALLY concentrating on is trying to surreptitiously get his mouth around the straw of her drink.

I think we can all agree: what a complete fucking asshole. I hope she dumps him in the most painful, humiliating way possible. And then, while he's reeling from that, I hope he's violently castrated in a freak leaf blower accident. And then...oh, never mind. I reckon that'll be enough to get him to start seriously pondering issues of karmic retribution. Attention, Dairy Queen: this does not fill be with the urge to purchase your products. Rather, it makes me want to repeatedly punch you in the face.

Yes, I've lost pets before, and yes, it hurts like a bitch. But I don't think you would even need to have experienced this to realize what a dickface Mr. BF is being in this ad: just a minimal degree of empathic capability. I suspect that you are either so strung out on cocaine that you've lost this capability, or you're just naturally so stunted that you really can't even begin to understand the problem here. That view is supported by the woman's dialogue: "He was so cute," she sobs. "He was so cute?" Seriously, man: this is not a reaction that a normal human being would have to the loss of a beloved cat. And if I have to explain why, you're probably too emotionally crippled to understand. How much did this writer get paid?

For all you fools who thought that gay marriage wouldn't lead to ghosts marrying lizards...

Classy.

Weary and tired

Don't expect any substantial updates for awhile. This new semester is throwing me for a loop. I will try to grace you with the occasional screenshot, however. I had a confused dream where I was very upset because I had accidentally erased all of them. Fortunately, there was no element of truth to this, meaning more value for you, the customer. Urgh.