The best things in life are free
Feb 28, 06
so my brother chaperoned a school trip (he teaches high school math) and went to spain, france, monaco, and italy for the past 2 weeks. he paid about $200 for the whole thing (fucker!), but he sent me some hilariously fucked up pictures that he took. take a look:
and my personal favorite:
i've decided that i'm going to sneak myself into his luggage (like that arab dude who tried to mail himself to egypt or something). it's worth a shot.
godspeed!
a few photos from this weekend
1. even though EVERYONE in brooklyn is somehow a "writer", it's still strikes me as silly that you can pick up one of these on the curb in front of someone's townhouse.
2. who you gonna call? in this case, it's not the GHOSTBUSTERS (sorry dan aykroyd and bill murray), but the brooklyn animal control units?!
3. on saturday, karen and i went to brunch with our friend mauricio in the lower east side at schiller's liquor bar. shit, $3 orange juice...oh well, it was still really good.
4. on sunday, my lovely girlfriend karen ate a falafel with hummus at the village delight cafe in the west village (i had a coffee) before we went and played ping pong (nay, TABLE TENNIS) at fat cat's billiards on christopher street and 7th ave.
all in all a good couple of days.
godspeed!
the day people start realizing that punk rock is not style or music, but substance of mind and lifestyle choices, "punk" will officially die. it's that simple. if you think about it, the minute a movement is given a "name", it starts to die.
the revolution has been televised, branded, sold to millions and shat out. the end.
godspeed!
hey gang,
so, i've got 2 songs stuck way the fuck in my head...and for some reason, i'd like to share the joy/pain with you. enjoy.
1. yeah yeah yeahs - gold lion
real player OR windows media
2. the national - mr. november
download now!
anyways, more later on.
godspeed!
so, karen and i are watching the olympics (figure skating..don't ask) and i figured, what the hell...let's do it up. now, i already know what's going to happen (so does karen), because we're both hilariously addicted to reading the new york times, so obviously we've both stumbled onto the results already. but, we're olympics whores and watch we will.
today, in my news:
rap producer, nay, rap bully/mogul suge knight is back in the news. this time, apparently, he's filing a lawsuit against a FUCKING DRUG DEALER for allegedly extorting money from knight as a federal informant. i feel like listening to snow's "informer" right now, but i'll spare my inner ears from explosion. okay, here's the thing: the guy that suge is suing is IN PRISON IN SAN QUENTIN and has been for a lot of time. leave him alone. afraid someone might find out that you organized the hits on biggie and tupac?
need a good reason to NEVER FUCKING EAT AGAIN?
like me, i'm sure all of you are DYING to find out more about the recent (sort of) post i made about rainer maria's new record coming out in april catastrophe keeps us together. if you want to listen to the first single, go here now. i'm so fucking excited. really.
wanna find out what's going on inside of the mind of the luckiest trailer-trash husband ever? allhiphop.com recently interviewed kevin federline a.k.a. father of 3? 4?, ah who knows...about his upcoming ALBUM. okay, is it me, or are the WRONG PEOPLE signing deals? check out this snippet from the interview:
from allhiphop.com
AllHipHop.com: Let’s talk about the album. Being that your life is always in the public eye, how personal will the album be?
Kevin Federline: It gets pretty personal, you know. I talk about certain situations from when I was younger. I talk quite a bit about the media and how I feel about it. The album’s pretty personal to me. There’s a lot of dance records on there, but the stuff aside from the dance records is giving people a chance to really know who I am and what I went through.
AllHipHop.com: What’s your favorite track on the album?
Kevin Federline: Wow. I’ve got a track on the album called “Down South,” and that’s probably my favorite track right now. It’s real gritty like that Bonecrusher [shouts] “I ain’t neva scared!!!” Really, really, really gritty like that.
read more. please don't take him as seriously as he takes himself. it could get dangerous.
damon albarn is back at work...without the animations...read it here
does anyone really FUCKING CARE anymore about this story?
that's all for now. i'm going to bed...but first, i get to figure out why one of the figure skaters is performing alongside an instrumental version of madonna's "like a prayer".
godspeed!
for those of you into the "scene"-ness of emo-punk and post-hardcore (and i'd like to just add that these so-called labeling and sub-genre'ing of popular music is completely responsible for the demise of FM radio freedom...i'll explain later on in this post), you'll be happy to read an interview posted this past wednesday with victory records' head-honcho and otherwise jack-of-all-niceties tony brummel (i say this because i met mr. brummel, briefly, while attending a show in peoria, il for such "about-to-blow-up" bands as the forecast, jimmy eat world, showoff, the bruises, and the amazing kill-o-watts. you may not recognize any but one of the bands, but i assure you, google them all, download/buy/borrow whatever you find and enjoy the "young sounds of america" circa 1998.
i've co-opted the tag of motown records to describe the landscape of college rock in the late nineties for one reason. because that truly was the last time i can remember a time since then when the kids all over were excited about something that didn't ask them to do anything but listen (like motown did in the 60's and early 70's).
ANYWAY, back to mr. brummel, the people of Hits Daily Double interviewed him about his views about iTunes and here's a little snippet of what big t had to say
from hitsdailydouble.com
...I have and will never sign a deal with any company that tells me, “The deal is non-negotiable. Go to our site, download the Agreement, sign it and fax it to us. Everyone is paid the same amount (really…) and has the same terms. Regardless, we will not insert or include any Most Favored Nations language in the Agreement to back this up.
click here to read more.
as for the above-mentioned opinion on the end of FM radio freedom, i ask you one question: can you name me more than 5 stations in the contiguous united states of aristocracy (although it really is an oligarchy of conglomerated business owners and the last of the anglican "royalty" in this country who control things) that don't just claim to let disc jockeys have any say in playlisting for the station, they actuallly let them do it?
and don't give me any shit for saying this, but i take as a case-study the situation with k-rock...i mean FREE FM. once the beacon of "alternative music, culture and life", 92.3 WXRK in new york city has become talk-radio after losing the war of ratings over the past 3-4 years with the advent of satellite radio, jack-formatting, the commercial takeover of the airwaves by clearchannel and emmis as well as the beginnings of the modern-age of the iPod nation (copyright pending). to read more about the downfall of WXRK, click here
godspeed!
alert! alert! i sense tomorrow's newest fad brimming out of the good folks at amazon.com. in the vein of trivial pursuit, monopoly, guess who? and my personal favorite, win, lose or draw!, millions of kids of all ages (read: ages 10 & up) can now challenge each other to find out completely absurd things about the books that they love, hate or mispronounce (and there are a lot of those).
the beacon of light at the dark tunnel of internet commerce, amazon.com, has introduced 3 new features to each book that they sell. the features: books on related topics, concordance and text stats. here's the deal: books on related topics is just that, and it's not what this post is about. this post is about the other two features.
concordance is defined as "an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as 'of' and 'it.'" isn't that fucking cool!? i mean, now we can all play games like guess how many times james frey says the word "true" in his pseudo-memoir-ish text a million little pieces or is "sex" the most popular word in jenna jameson's book how to make love like a pornstar: a cautionary tale.
comparitively speaking, though, neither of these come close to text stats. this portion of amazon.com's brilliantly stupid "about this book" delineation has a number of interesting things to note. firstly, you can find out things like a certain book's readability, complexity, number of words, sentences & characters, as well as "fun" facts. you can also compare all of these things with other books. for instance, i searched for this book and found out that it has over 20,000 words per dollar spent on purchasing the book...and of those 20,000+ words per dollar, over 20% are considered to be "complex" words. dig on that.
is this really necessary or do the programmers at amazon not only have little means for sexual relations, they also have little means for enjoyment of anything aside from putting this sort of information where no one (aside from those stupid enough to blog about them) will bother to venture?
in the meantime, try it yourself. who knows, maybe it will get us somewhere that battleship never could.
now, i'm not one for the desecration of religious artifacts, culture, history, iconography, or literature, but is it really possible that a fucking cartoon is responsible for all the madness going on these days? i mean, i've seen the cartoons...and they're NOT FUNNY. not "funny" in the ha-ha sense or even funny in the intellectually stimulated "ooh" or "hmmm" sense. i grew up, like most of us, thinking cartoons needed to be remotely humorous to keep my attention for the nanosecond i gave to them. rocky & bullwinkle were the shit. jem...not so much. i liked looney tunes, but nothing with that fucking foghorn leghorne rooster bullshit made me laugh.
anyway, sorry for straying from my thought. in recent news, idealistically charged muslim protesters have done everything but rape danish women (at least, there haven't been any reports of it as of this article being published) to right the "wronging" they've been given by the aforementioned "not funny" muhammad-desecrating cartoons in the denmark newspapers from a few weeks back. and while i'm not the only person of slightly-sound mind and spirit to ring in on this matter, i do have something to add:
these so-called perpetrators are FROM DENMARK. take a look at the country. i can't even correctly pronounce 87.3% of it's cities, landmarks, or surnames...and even i don't think it's worth fucking with them over this cartoon. i know, i know, i'm not muslim...i'm jewish, so for some of my readers, that's an immediate disqualification from this conversation. but let's just take a brief look at denmark's cultural history and spotlight, shall we? hmmmm. what do you think?
by the way, i don't think it's even fair to make fun of muhammad anyway...he's a PROPHET according to muslim scriptures. and while the danish people (as seen above) are both lutherans, artsy, and philosophical, they don't stand a chance against a regime (militant muslim groups the world over) that know what mcgyver can do with a clotheshanger, some chewing gum and a snorkel. i mean, if richard dean anderson can maneuver his way out of the jungle with a pen and a few avocados, i think these guys are better than him; they ALREADY HAVE THE MEANS TO CARRY OUT WHATEVER THEIR "WILL" MAY BE.
so, i offer up a truce between both groups: take this as something each of you can laugh at, instead of a cartoon of muhammad with a bomb in his turban or adolf hitler in bed with anne frank.
take a look at my offering:
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