Reason number twelve thousand one hundred and ninety three not to drink shitty beer: shitty marketing.
Also: No, putting a lime wedge in it to hide the skunk stench is not clever either, just buy decent beer in the first place.
Also, too: fuck your shitty "country" music. Fuck it right in the ear.
Bruce Schneier just concluded his seventh movie plot threat contest. Here's the start of the winner's plot:
The NSA, GCHQ et al actually don't have the ability to conduct the mass surveillance that we now believe they do. Edward Snowden was in fact groomed, without his knowledge, to become a whistleblower, and the leaked documents were elaborately falsified by the NSA and GCHQ.
...
This latest contest revolved around surveillance (Schneier is working with Snowden and St. Glenneth of Greenwald. Thankfully, Schneier does actually know what he's talking about and lacks the oh so delightful tendency to lie unabashedly). This latest one's OK, but not quite as funny as the second one from way back in 2007, which focused on the TSA. A simpler time:
...
"Maybe," said Wilkes, not ready to write it off as just a screener's error. The NTSB guys were always quick to find a bad decision, one human error, and explain the whole thing away. But Wilkes' job was to find the flaws in the systems, the procedures, the way to come up with prophylactic precautions. Maybe there was nothing more than a screener who didn't spot a grenade or a stick of dynamite, something so obvious that there was nothing to do but chalk up a hundred and eighty three dead lives to one madman and one very bad TSA employee.
But maybe not. That's when Wilkes spotted the first two of the butterflies. Bright yellow against the charred black of the burned wreckage, they seemed like the most incongruous things -- and as he thought this, another appeared.
...
Anyway, just some Friday Filler I guess. hadn't read his blog in a while, and didn't know if any of my vast, vast readership had seen it. So check it out, or not, whatever.
Here, have one of my favorite covers of Pink Floyd's "Dogs":
For some reason I just love this version. It's still true to the original, but has its own personality. The whole "set 2" of the Live Frogs album is a cover of the "Animals" album, and I love it.
Also, too: As additional filler, I guess it's time to dust off this gun control rant of mine from a couple years ago. I guess I should just put that as a constantly available link in the blog template, since we're just gonna get more and more of these fucked up mass killings until we're all finally staring at each other at some massive standoff or something. Fuck.
...this song has been running through my head ever since I watched the morning news:
I can't possibly imagine why that would be.
This is what happens when your wife goes out with her friends and you get to make ridiculous food for yourself:
Frito Pie.
That's Fritos®, a can of chili, Tillamook® cheddar, and pickled jalapeños.
And yes, that's a paper plate. It just seemed... appropriate, somehow.
Fucking. Delicious.
Tengrain over at Mock Paper Scissors posted the original video of Weepy McStagger, but I wanted to see what it looked like reversed:
Now I think it looks like he's saying "I think I did a pretty good job?" which is even more appropriate. And the look at the end is priceless. Alternate ideas of what he might be saying/thinking in this reverse universe are of course welcome.
The good Mr. Substance McGravitas made a face at me, so I decided to make a more colorful, likely seizure-inducing, version back at him:
Just got this e-mail:
At its November meeting, the State Board's Academic Strategies Committee approved OSU's proposal for the Ph.D. in Business Administration degree program. This program will be effective Fall Term 2014.
The program will offer two graduate options: Innovation/Commercialization and Accounting. The primary objective of this degree is to prepare its graduates for careers in research and teaching at research-oriented colleges and universities.
It's bad enough that campus is infested with a bunch of dudebros working on their MBAs, now they will be able to continue their studies even longer.
I wonder what their theses will look like? Hmm...
Maybe my vast commentariat can suggest some more. No fair cheating and looking at the actual topics Stanford's Ph.D. program has produced for ideas.
A lazy and undoubtedly non-reoccurring occasion where I reverse-sort my music library by number of plays and see what kind of shit I have laying around that I forgot about, and then make you listen to them:
Faith No More: Easy
Bobby Darin: More
Weezer: Undone
Monkey Wrench: It's Your Right. (an unfortunately shitty live recording is all I could find quickly)
William Clarke: Pawnshop Bound
Shellac: Watch Song
There! Plenty of variety for everybody to have something to hate.
5000 new freshmen just spent the last week moving into the dorms on campus. This is how I feel when trying to ride my bike around campus right now.
[something something getoffamylawn something]
I really need to stop reading TPM.
This "article" from TPM is a classic of anonymously-sourced insidery bullshit. Here, just take the first couple "lede grafs" (as the insidery journamalists like to say):The unlikeliest of alliances forged between two once-bitter rivals stands to upend the status quo of congressional gridlock and potentially resolve a bitter partisan chasm that has characterized the modern era of crisis governance.
Yes, President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are essentially working together against GOP leadership and the tea party to break the Senate out of its current situation and resolve major budget rifts that have plagued Washington for years.
Of course, if you actually read the rest of the shitty article, it's all just the typical beltway "oh, if only the two sides could just talk to each other and work out a compromise bipartisan agreement that just so happens to be exactly what conservatives want, we'd finally all get our magic tax-free rainbow sparkleponies!" Well that, and it turns out that all McCain actually cares about is the military, as usual.
But hey, it's almost August, just about time for a series of these shitty articles, D.C.'s equivalent of "Shark attacks on the rise!" and "OMG Weiners with wieners!"
Yay. I can hardly wait.
The title is a great lyric from the title track of the new punk/country album Mayberry by one of my all-time favorite local bands I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House.
Here, have a listen, if the links to this site work:
I Can Lick Any SOB In The House – Mayberry
I Can Lick Any SOB In The House – Bones
I Can Lick Any SOB In The House – King James
Or y'know, just buy the damn thing, it's only $5.99 on emusic or you can spend more for it at CD Baby if you don't have an emusic subscription.
They don't have any ute oobs up yet of songs from the new album, but here's an acoustic version of the referenced song they recorded at Couch by Couchwest:
Updated: Dammit, the song links are all dead now, go figure. Just preview the song at emusic. Fuckit, here are some conciliatory videos from older albums:
I see that M. Bouffant (and probably countless others) has beaten me to the punch, but I just don't care.
Oh well: today we celebrate that our lovely (for now) planet, tilted slightly on its axis, continues to rotate around the sun giving us Northern-hemispherians (suckit upsidedowners!) the delightful summer season, and the longest day of the year.
Alternately, you could think, "This sucks! It's hot! And now the days just get shorter again 'til December! Why doesn't Obama do something about the seasons? He's worse than Cheney McHitler!" But that would merely get you a well paying position at any of a wide variety of journamalistic organs, and we certainly wouldn't want that.
So anyway, yay, summer! Have some obscure versions of the classic "Summertime" -- I say "obscure" but I'm sure The Zombie has seen all these people live, even the ones that have been dead for 50 years. Regardless, I like how the song can be interpreted so many different ways and always be excellent.
(Side note: the band was originally "Friends Of Dean Martin" but then Dean Martin's estate sued them and they were forced to change it.)
Now I'm gonna go camping and drink a bunch of beer. Surprise.
Original song as played by R.L. Burnside:
A great modern version (2004) with R.L. in attendance just before his death:
Jr. Kimbrough doing "Done Got Old":
Heartless Bastards version:
You're welcome.
