Joe's pissed again, find out why

Hi, and welcome to What's Joe Bitchin About Now? This is sort of my version of a blog, just a collection of rants, complaints, reviews, thoughts and random musings best read while having trouble falling asleep.

The Hot Chick of the Week is on hiatus pending more Hot Chicks wanting to get on here, in the meantime
Go here to see the the previous weeks Hot Chicks.

Also for you Hot Chicks fans,
I have posted some of my best photos (well, the non-naked ones anyway) to my MySpace page. Come on, go there, be on my friends list. Wont you be my neighbor?

If YOU are a hot chick and want to be hot chick of the week, contact me and we'll set up a photo shoot.

Bizarre search term of the moment

Here's something I bet ya didn't know. When you put a search into Google or any other search engine, not only does it keep track of the terms, it tells any site you visit what the search terms were that got you there. So, every day I get a report telling me what people were looking for when they found this site. I'll update this as new and better searches show up in the report.This was an actual search someone conducted that somehow got them onto the Valves website,
I swear I'm not making these up.
And the winner is?

huge gazongas granny cartoon video

Goodbye to a legend

This week marked the deaths of two people who have been institutions in their respective fields for decades. One of whom you've now heard about almost endlessly since his death was announced, the other, not so much.
First was Tim Russert. At this point, I have seen and heard endless eulogies for this guy and while I sympathize for his family and friends at this time, I'm getting incredibly sick and tired of listening to what an amazing newsman he was and how he was this incredible interviewer. Let's have some perspective here, shall we? If he was the amazing interviewer that everyone claims, then where was he in the lead up to this debacle we are in now? Where were the questions to Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest of the lying bastards who put us in this mess? Where was he during the Valerie Plame investigation, where he was an integral part? He has said straight out that he considered all conversations with people in power "off the record". Sorry, that's notjournalism and it's far from heroic conduct. Perhaps if he had done his job the way he should have, there might be 4500 american soldiers alive today, not to mention tens or even hundreds of thousands of iraqi civilians. I'm sorry that he's dead, I'm not unsympathetic, but I'm just really tired of hearing the countless attempts to whitewash history and to raise him into this lofty perch of journalistic sainthood. He was either gullible or another administration stenographer, just like so many others in the modern media who don't seem to feel that it's their job to question authority, just regurgitate what they are told and wave the flag.
The greater loss is someone many of you may never have heard of. Stan Winston was an artist and engineer who was responsible for many, if not most of the mechanical creature effects seen in movies for the last 30 years. If you have seen the robotic skeleton of the Terminator, the creatures from Aliens, Predator, The Thing, Edward Scissorhands, A.I., and perhaps most memorably, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, then you have seen his work. And that's only a small part of what he did. He started back in the late 70s along with John Dykstra, Joe Johnston, Dennis Muren, and Ben Burtt among others were beginning the new wave of special effects that began with movies like Star Wars, Close Encounters, Star Trek the motion picture etc. At that time, there were no dedicated effects houses, each studio had it's own in house departments. This relatively small group of people began a revolution in the way visual and mechanical effects were to be done and those ways continue today. Stan Winston's specialty was in creating creatures, monsters, mechanical puppets of incredible detail and intricacy. Pop in a DVD of Jurassic Park sometime. It's well known that this was one of the first films to use extensive computer graphics, but while most people assume that the majority of the dinosaurs in that movie were computer generated, the truth is, most were mechanical, created by Winston and his crew. Watch that movie again and see if you can tell what shots are CG and which ones use his puppets. It's not as easy as you might think, and many shots feature both at the same time.
I certainly have nothing against computer graphics, I do computer graphics for a living, though not on the scale that they use in movies. But when I was a kid watching these movies, a big part of the experience for me was in watching spaceships that I knew were beautifully hand made models move across the screen and incredibly detailed creatures moving around. I would have loved to have been a part of those early days of Industrial Light and Magic, when they were still building space ship models using bits and pieces of submarine kits for details. Stan Winston is gone and eventually all of these guys who were the pioneers in that kind of mechanical and film based special effects will be gone and here will be no more wonder about "How did they do that?". We'll all know how they did that, someone sat down at a computer and moved some numbers around. When that happens, some of the magic of movies will be gone and that will be a shame. RIP Mr. Winston, thanks for giving my imagination a work out all these years.

Count All The Votes (umm, except those and those... and those... and, ah... those...)

Next time you hear Hillary Clinton or one of her rabid supporters talk about wanting to make sure ALL THE VOTES ARE COUNTED, think about this; When they say all the votes, they are talking about all the popular votes except for;

Alaska
Colorado
Hawaii
Idaho
Iowa
Kansas
Maine
Minnesota
Nebraska
Nevada
North Dakota
Texas (Caucus only)
Washington
Wyoming

and ANY popular votes for Obama in Michigan

So, by all means count all the popular vote, just remember that if you actually do that with ALL the states, she still loses. So, next time you hear her talk about how she's winning the popular vote, remember this and next time you hear heror her surrogates scream about fairness and how they just HAVE to count ALL of Florida and Michigan, remember that she was absolutely on board with NOT counting them back when the decision was made and Harold Ickies, her pit bull on the rules committee who so loudly complained about how horrible it was that all those people wouldn't count was one of the people who voted to make sure they didn't count at the beginning of the process.
At the beginning of this, I didn't care if it was Obama or Clinton who won, just as long as it wasn't McCain, but watching her and her supporters over the last coule of months has really made me glad she didn't win. We have gone through 8 years of "We're winning and if we're not winning I will stick my fingers in my ears and go Bla la la la la until someone tells me we're winning again and I refuse to give up no matter the circumstances because winning is the only thing that matters" and that hasn't worked out so well, has it? We don't need another person like that running this country.

Stupid Ads part IIIV

What is with the ad for free credit report.com with the stupid kid singing about how h couldn't get the cool car he wanted because he didn't know his credit score? Exactly how would knowing his credit score resulted in his getting a better car? Do you get bonus points with the finance agency if you can tell them your credit sucks before they find out themselves? If your credit sucks, it sucks, getting a free credit report isn't going to prevent that, so you'd still be driving off the lot in a used subcompact and being laughed at by hot chicks even if you got a free credit report every single week for a year in advance.

I never noticed it before, but Barbie Doll sounds just like Barbitol, the first barbiturate drug. Coincedence?

New entrant in the worlds worst commercial jingle department: The new radio ad for carzforkids. Good god, who wrote this thing? It starts with some kid singing along to a horrible backing track that is so simple minded that it makes the songs Mr. Rogers used to sing sound like Stockhausen. Then to make it even worse, it's repeated with some guy singing it who sounds like a cross between some shaky voiced folk singer from 1914 and a really nervous contestant in a first time karaoke talent show. To maximize the pain level they of course sing it once more with both the kid and mr. shaky voice. Few jingles have made me lunge for the tuning knob faster in history. Good work guys, you win worst advertising jingle possibly in history.

Mind Boggling Stupidity

Dunkin Donuts has recently averted a full on right wing nutjob riot by removing an ad featuring the bubbly, perky, incredibly annoying and murder inducing "celebrity" Rachel Ray. Why were the loons upset? Because she was wearing a scarf. That's right, a scarf. This scarf to be exact:

They claim that this scarf somehow was identical to or resembled a kaffiyeh, the head covering worn in the middle east. most recognizably by Yasser Arafat. You heard right, Dunkin Donuts was forced to remove an ad because these complete morons saw a paisley scarf and made the Evel Knievel like jump that because they saw some vague resemblance to a type of head covering worn in the middle east for thousands of years, that somehow Rachel Ray was trying to secretly show her support for islamic jihad, because we all know that no one likes their iced coffee more than aspiring suicide bombers.
What's really depressing about this story isn't that the lunatics could look at a scarf and see a symbol of fundamentalist terrorism, or that they know so little about the middle east in general that they assume that anyone who wears a kaffiyeh is a wild eyed member of al quaeda one step away from strapping on some dynamite and taking out a used camel lot, I expect that kind of stupidity from those people. No, the depressing thing is that Dunkin Donuts was actually frightened by these brain cell deprived whackjobs into removing the ad. If it were me, I would have removed the ad because it features rachel ray, another in a long string of completely talentless individuals who somehow managed to out-perky the other 500 smiling happy-zombies at the "Let's find america's next bubbly mouthpiece" auditions, but to really remove your advertising to appease people with the IQ of a paddleball shows a complete lack of any sort of backbone. This kind of thing only encourages these idiots, and they will badger and complain to anyone who doesn't kowtow to their moronic worldview and shape their every move so as not to risk angering the pasty faced mouthbreathers who spend their day eating cheetos and searching google for something to get outraged about. Better watch out Dunkies, I mean, if you squint and look at a weird angle and really use your imagination, I mean, doesn't a donut sort of look like a suicide bombers dynamite vest? Stick a barbie doll in there and it becomes obvious, surely donuts are evil symbols of terrorism everywhere. Aren't bagels, you know.. ummm. jewish? Aren't you selling new flatbread sandwiches? I'm pretty sure they eat stuff like that in Iran!! You must all be terrorist sympathizers if you eat flat bread, real american's would eat peanut butter and jelly on wonder bread!
I dream of the day when common sense takes over and people like michelle malkin and her right wing rage junkies will be marginalized and put in a nice soft room where they can't harm anyone but themselves, but it's not likely to happen in my lifetime. This is the same country where 16% of the high school science teachers think the earth is less than 10,000 years old, so I'm not holding my breath,

Let them be miserable too

So, they said that California has to allow gay marriage now too? Good for them. Unfortunately, as always happens when these things are announced, it will pull all the self righteous right wingers out of their particular mud puddle so they can puff out their chests and act all indignant. Of course, they will try to use morality and claim that it somehow damages the "sanctity of marriage" and all the usual crapola they spew. I especially like all the references to a "traditional marriage". These people always act as though the institution of marriage is something that somehow goes back in history to when the first male and female euglena crawled out of the primordial ooze and found an amoeba in a silly collar and hat and asked it to put the blessing of the lord on their holy union. Truth is, marriage as we know it today hasn't been around for too long. Marriage was originally more a way to transfer whatever the bride or bride's family owned to the groom's family. It was a simple legal contract, all the holy moses claptrap was added later. Even today there are parts of the world and even isolated parts of the united states where men do what amounts to selling their daughters as a way to make money, pay off debt, or incur favors from the powerful. There are men all over the world right now happily handing over their 10 year old girl to 30 year old men in exchange for whatever the going rate is in that area. In some places this comes right after the wonderful sacred tradition of carving up her genitals with a rusty knife just in case there might be the possibility that she might actually enjoy sex at some point instead of just being a convenient moist cave for the husband to plug into once in a while. Wonderful traditional values there kids. Speaking of kids, that's the other part of this eqution. Ho horrible to think that gay parents might want kids, oh lawdy lawdy! I guess it's only the gay parents who beat their kids up, leave them in the car while go buy lottery tickets and hang out in the bar. Hetero parents are all exactly like Ward and June Cleaver, right? (well, even Ward and June had issues, how many times did she try to hint around that there was "something wrong with the Beaver". He got his nickname in a vain attempt at her trying to find a subtle way to tell Ward that he was a little too quick in the sack). Kids are being put up for adoption, taken away from completely hetero, traditionally married idiots who use them as punching bags, drug mules, sex toys and worse. How often do you hear the people who demonstrate against gay marriage at state houses all over this country talk about any of these things?
Truth is, the reason these people don't want there to be gay marriage is because they think gay sex is icky. Well, they think man to man gay sex is icky, I think even they probably agree with most of us that two girls getting it on is pretty hot. On the other hand there are lesbian couples who resemble Madeleine Albright and Julia Child and I don't think any of us want to be imagining that. But that's really all this is about in a nutshell. About 30% of the people in this country either hate sex or are scared to death of it, and if they can't have fun with it, they don't think anyone else should either, especially if the people having the fun in the sack both have matching plumbing.
I'm not gay (though if I stay single for a few more years, I might just have to switch teams. I think there tend to be more chubby chasers amongst the gay male population than there are among the smoking hot female supermodel population. My loss). Anyway, for many years, I had an extremely close friend who is a lesbian, and if there's anything I learned from seeing her go through relationships is that it's no different for two women to love each other than for a straight couple. The only difference is in their desire to employ vaguely missile shaped buzzing implements on each other, but hey, who hasn't wanted to do that at some time in their life? She went through every stage of a relationship that everyone goes through, attraction, infatuation, love, deep love, jealousy, mistrust, handcuffs, cheating, screaming, pissed offedness and of course, finally, "I hate you get the fuck away from me asshole". Straight or gay, relationships are all the same. So, Let them get married and have families and contribute to a happy societal fabric. No one is forcing you to watch them at night and see what they are doing with the KY, so if it bothers you, try not to think about it, the same way they avoid thinking about our pasty flabby asses sitting on a couch watching everybody loves raymond. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

You Go Girl

Calling the sky blue

Just a quickie about what Barack Obama said about small town voters recently. What he said was "it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." My question is, what part of his analysis is wrong exactly? Sounds to me like he hit the nail on the head. What I find hilarious in a sad and depressing way is listening to Clinton and McCain along with all the bobbleheads in the media say how it makes Obama sound "elitist". Just for the record, Clinton and McCain are worth over 100 million dollars each, McCain is actually worth several hundred million dollars and currently owns and "lives in" 8 different houses. Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Bill O'Rielly and all these other talking heads are also worth at minimum several million dollars each.
Remember that the next time they try to fake outrage at Obama's elitism and try to pull the "He will just never understand what it's like for us po' folk who drink schlitz and go bowling" schtick. It's all BS.

I suck and I want you all to know it!!

I had some time to kill before band rehearsal last night so I thought I'd stop in to the local Guitar Center and maybe try out an amp or something. Upon walking in, I was immediately hit with a blast of feedback and noise that Pete Townsend would have found excessive and sent Jimi Hendrix diving for the earplugs. I don't know if it was a field trip from the Stupid School or what, but plunked down in front of every amp was a different 16 year old kid with a guitar plugged in and screeching away at full volume. There must have been at least 30 different kids, each trying his damndest to play some riff from Metallica or Poison or Guns and Roses and each failing more spectacularly then the last. To add his own personal touch of audio garbage to the mix, there was one kid on the only the only bass amp in the place (and what the fuck is that about??) grinding away on a Fender knock off with a pick and sawing away across all four strings at once. I saw his left hand moving around on the neck, but I really only heard one note the entire time he was doing it, and oh, did I mention he was doing this the entire time I was there? yeah, about half an hour or so at least. After a while, I got the impression that all these musically incompetent waifs somehow knew each other but it could be that they just all subscribed to the same theory of Suck. As I watched one pudgy little future "I wannabe a rock star but will instead end up doing oil changes at Speedy" do his best to do finger tapping on the neck of a Les Paul and manage to miss every single time, I was forced to think back to my own teen years and my own suckiness at that age. In doing so however I remembered a basic truth. While it's almost a certainty that I was just as craptastic a player at some point in my life, it's also true that I didn't go into giant music stores full of people and put my suck on display at full volume for 45 fucking minutes! Even now, lf I go to a music store to try something out, I will play just long enough to make a decision about whatever it is. I feel no need to put on a clinic for anyone unlucky enough to be nearby and I certainly am not going to blast at full volume while showing my awesome ability to copy a Geddy Lee lick without hitting myself accidentally with the neck and tripping on the cord. I can only imagine that each of these kids actually thinks that they are great and therefore it's incumbent upon them to prove to everyone around them how amazing they are. I was hoping to check out an amp while I was there but a salesman was not forthcoming. I found them sort of huddled together at the center of the store, and while it was sort of annoying, at the same time it was hard not to feel sympathy for them all. After all, I could leave whenever I wanted to. Were I to be stuck in that store listening to little Johnny try over and over again to perfect that intro to Enter the Sandman for a few hours, you might be reading about me in the papers the next day:
"Fat bitter bald man arrested in Music Store Massacre"

Things that make you go "Duh"

On the radio yesterday I heard a piece from a speech given by a former politician regarding tax cuts. There was nothing really new in the speech, but he phrased something in a way that I hadn't really thought about it before, but it was one of those things that make you go Hmmm... This person was discussing all the recent tax cuts for the extremely wealthy. Now, if you're not aware of this, you should be. Virtually every tax cut put through by the current administration has been aimed at the very rich. Not just a little rich, I mean the ultra top super duper rich. The people who either hang out with Dick Cheney or the people George Bush desperately wants to pretend he's like even though they laugh at him behind his back. A good example of this is the estate tax, or as the republican's like to say "boo" with, the DEATH TAX! Duhn duhn duuuuuuuhn!
Here's something I'm guessing you didn't know about the "death tax", it only applies to a person who plans to leave more than 2 million dollars. 3 million if it's a married couple. How many people do you know who will be leaving behind 3 million dollars? Now, maybe you still think that's an unfair tax, I don't, and we could argue about that, but that's not really the point. The point is, they administration and their ass kissers in congress and the media have almost certainly convinced most of you that this somehow applies to you, or someone you know. There are all kinds of Rush Limbaugh worshippers who are convinced that the "death tax" means that the government is going to come knocking demanding half of the "Plates of the States" collection that they plan to leave their daughter on the way out. "Oh my, we'll lose family farms and small business!!". This is nonsense of course, small business and family farms have their own loopholes and protections and lets face it, there aren't many individuals worth that much who are owning a "small business", since at some point a small business becomes big business. What it all comes down to is the lie that letting rich people "keep" their money, it will result in what Ronnie Reagan called "trickle down economics", the theory that you give all the tax cuts to the mega rich, they will buy things and that will result in jobs being created and eventually you'd get some of that tasty tasty money as it oozes down from on high. This theory was disproved pretty dramatically while reagan was still in office when, despite the myths you may hear these days, he was forced to raise taxes because of course, trickle down economics didn't work at all. Now they are trying to do the same again, only this time we have the added bonus of being at war at the same time. The results are about what anyone would realize if you spend more than 30 seconds really thinking about it, the deficit has gone to some level only astronomers can see and every single possible social program from education on down have been cut to shreds in ways that would make Freddy Krueger jealous. There are many different reasons why the whole trickle down thing is nonsense, but a couple of the larger problems are:
A big part of this theory assumes that, given a smaller tax burden, the richest among us will go out and spend spend spend. They will buy all sorts of interesting things, and this huge increase in buying will mean that jobs will have to be created in order to manufacture all this cool stuff that the rich are going to buy and that means we;lll all have cool jobs making yachts and espresso machines and flying cars, which means we'll then have money we can use to go out and buy more cheeseburgers so that the homeless guy living in the subway station will be able to get a job at Burger King and pick himself up out of poverty and become a right upstanding citizen. Oooh, it's so wonderful on so many levels, everything just magically fixes itself, isn't it wonderful? Except of course that it's complete nonsense. In that scenario, the only people likely to really make any money are the CEO's and upper management of the companies who have since shipped all their manufacturing to China and Indonesia. The people who will be making the leftovers are the women being worked for 14 hours a day in sweatshops in Malaysia. There's very little that the mega rich are likely to buy that is still made in this country, american corporations by and large are simply a lot of people with MBA's and their secretaries pocketing bonuses for finding new and better ways to lay off people here and build new factories in places where 30 cents an hour is big bucks.
The second part of this fallacy is the one that the speech I heard on the radio brought up. The man giving the speech had been a big city politician about 20 years ago who went on to become a national television celebrity and he's now pretty wealthy. Not oil company CEO wealthy, but still doing pretty well for himself. What he said was the simple truth, if a rich person wanted to buy something, they could do it now. They're rich, after all. if you are taking in 20 million dollars a year, chances are pretty good you already own whatever it is you'd like, or that if you don't, you're not sitting by the mailbox waiting for your income tax refund to go out and buy it. The sad thing is that if you are poor or middle class, making an extra grand a year is a big deal, but if you're the chairman of General Motors, another million give or take isn't going to change your spending habits too much. This whole concept that the mega rich would start blowing wads of cash on American made products if only the damn government would get off their backs and stop insisting on taking a piece of their latest 10 million dollar stock sale is ludicrous on it's face, and yet there it is. The conservative economic plan in all it's glory. There's really not much more to it than that. Let the rich get richer and somehow it will all work itself out. Remember that the next time you hear these idiots talk about the death tax and all the rest of this crap. They are not trying to help you or me, in their world we're peons, we exist to carry their golf clubs and wash their cars. That's all. These are people who honestly believe the middle class consists of people making $200,000.00 a year.
Oh, and the former politician and now talk show host that made me start thinking of all this? Jerry Springer...

That's Thinking Ahead

I've been hearing a lot recently that many of Hillary Clinton's supporters are saying they will vote for McCain if Obama is nominated, and that Obama's supporters are saying the same thing. They are willing to completely abandon any and all principles they supposedly possess and will vote to install in office the person most likely to continue policies that they are supposedly 100% against in a hissy fit of a tantrum that would make a 2 year old roll their eyes in disgust.All I have to say about this is, I don't care who you're voting for, but if you're willing to vote for someone who is the complete opposite of what you want and who is most likely to inflict everlasting damage on this country just because your team didn't win the game, then you're a fucking idiot. Nuff said...

Should I pile on an old man?

Sure, why not, when said old man is trying to get a job as leader of the free world. Not once, not twice, but at least three times last week, John McCain claimed Iran, a Shi'ite country, was busily training Al Quaeda, a fundamentalist Sunni organization. This has been underreported in most major news media and the few that have reported it have glossed past it, claiming it a simple mistake and a "senior moment". Assuming this were true, apparently it's not a big deal if the man with the ability to order nuclear strikes occasionally can't remember who exactly the enemy is. I don't believe it was a senior moment at all though, I think it was deliberate. A continuation of the bush cheney "Just keep saying it and soon no one will remember what the truth is" policy, and of course, it's working because the media fawns all over McCain to begin with and aren't much interested in reporting the truth anyway so long as they can keep some kind of story going. It's hard to even know which would be better news that the man who claims to have the most bestest foreign policy experience doesn't know the difference between sunni and shi'a or that he does know and doesn't care. As long as they're all roughly the same shade of brown and sitting on our oil, they are bomb fodder apparently. Iran training Al Quaeda would be like the Yankees training the Red Sox. Actually, that's even too close because at least the yankees and red sox play the same sport. It's more like the yankees training the Patriots. It's idiocy, and if any democrat had made such a slip up even once, it would have been put in a loop and been broadcast nonstop by everyone from rush limbaugh to This Old House. Speaking of Tape loops, do you think we heard enough of the reverend wright? I should say, do you think we've heard enough of the same 15 second clip? Because that's all I heard really. Was it idiotic? Sure, but what I'd like to know is, where are the equivalent clips from the people endorsing McCain? For example, here's John Hagee, who McCain was recently on stage with, proudly getting an endorsement:

"All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are -- were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing."

and here's another one by mr hagee that has a familiar ring:

"As a nation, America is under the curse of God."

Hmmm, funny that not being repeated endlessly on Fox news. ok, how about Pat Robertson? Here are a few of his greatest hits:

"Lord, give us righteous judges who will not try to legislate and dominate this society. Take control, Lord! We ask for additional vacancies on the court."

Hmmm, praying for God to take a few judges out so they can be replaced by ideologues? ok, maybe that's not worthy of infinite repeat, how about:

"I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those [gay pride] flags in God's face if I were you. This is not a message of hate -- this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs. It'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor."

Those damn gays and their meteor and hurricane inducing parades, anything else? Sure there is, how about:

"[T]he feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

But Pat, if the lesbians don't practice witchcraft? How can they ever get better at it?

I could really go on and on with this. The point is, the mainstream media won't. Reverend Wright said some crazy things, so naturally that means Obama must agree with all of it or he would never have gone back to the church he has belonged to for 20 years. But Saint McCain can shrug off all the right wing crazy that gets spouted almost daily because he's really just a cute old man who's more like a crazy lovable uncle and we should all just cut him some slack, and after all, he can hardly be held responsible for agreeing with the positions of the nutjobs with whom he shakes hands and accepts endorsements from. That's just crazy!

What good is experience if you're still an idiot?

Watching the news this morning... John McCain has won the republican primary in New Hampshire. Now, I'm not a republican, and I've never voted for one and I certainly wouldn't vote for one this year, but I have to wonder what goes through people's minds when they cast a ballot. I've seen any number of people on the news this morning saying they voted for McCain because of his amazing foreign policy experience, his incredible independence and honesty, his uncanny ability to do what's right, but mostly this idea that he, more than anyone else, is the right person to lead us out of all the problems we're having, handle the "Global War on Terror®" (which still makes about as much sense as a Global War on Cheerfulness. You can't wage war on an emotion, but I digress). What none of these people seems capable of understanding is that, for all his incredible experience, awesome understanding of foreign policy, etc etc etc, he has, more than any other candidate, embraced and agreed with every single thing the current nimrod in chief has done and has gone out of his way to say that he plans to keep it going exactly as is! Seriously people, are you that stupid? You really think things are going so well that we need to put the person most likely to keep it going in office? How brilliant can you be when you're on the record as saying if you knew then what you know now, you'd still have done it exactly the same way? Really? So McCain would also have invaded a country that had not attacked us, wasn't planning to attack us, had zero to do with 9/11, was KNOWN to have no WMD's despite the bullshit thrown out? (and yes, it was KNOWN, ask Hans Blix or Scott Ritter, the people who were in Iraq doing the inspections before Bush forced them out. What's that? You say Iraq forced the inspectors to leave? Sorry, wrong answer. Despite what Rush and O'Reilly and all those asshats have told you, Iraq was in full compliance with the UN resolution and the inspectors were doing their jobs until the US government forced them to leave). Would also have disbanded the Iraqi army? Would also have failed to protect anything in the country after the invasion except fot the Oil ministry? would have hired a private army from Blackwater? Would have decimated the constitution of this country in the name of secrurity? I mean, the list goes on, but I have yet to hear him distance himself from any of it. Attacking Iraq after 9/11 is exactly the same as if we had invaded Canada after were were attacked at Pearl harbor. And Mr McCain would have done exactly the same thing? This idiot isn't fit to be a security guard at Wal Mart, let alone president. After all the incredible damage done to this country over the past six years, I simply can't imagine how anyone could vote for another republican for dog catcher, much less anything else, but to deliberately pick the guy MOST likely to continue our descent into Roman Empire style collapse is simply incomprehensible to me. If he wins, kiss it goodbye folks, kiss it all goodbye. I'm not telling anyone to vote for a democrat, I'm not telling anyone to vote for anyone else. This isn't about that, it's about the concept that anyone could really be that blinded or swayed by propaganda as to think that keeping things going the way they are is somehow a great thing. You hate to think that your fellow citizens are really that completely delusional, but there it is...

Mind, prepare to be boggled

The Big Dig is done. The largest civil works project in the history of the United States is finished. It took over a decade, thousands of workers, engineers, planners, designers... but now it's done. It was supposed to cost 14 billion dollars, but went over by 12 billion, close to 100% over budget. The scope of this project can't be minimized. Every time i went to Boston for almost as long as I can remember, you would have to go through or around some kind of detour because they were building something, and for a while every time I went there, you would have to follow a different route to get to the same place because the roads kept changing. So anyway, what's mind boggling about this? Nothing. What's mind boggling is that the entire cost, including overruns, legal costs, employing thousands, and building an entire infrastructure over a period of over a decade is less than we are currently spending on the Iraq war every 2 months. That's TWO Months. Imagine what could have been done with that money if it had stayed here and was actually put to some kind of good use, instead of being used to fund a handful of megalomaniac's private jerk off war fantasy. But even now, I know people who would smirk at that and say something like "Better use? Like what, universal health care?" snicker snicker, as if that were something horrible. There is an entire huge segment of the population who would grow bitter and resentful at the notion of spending that amount of money on things like education, infrastructure repair, alternative energy research, health care, pretty much anything that would be a direct help for citizens of this country, yet gleefully send it overseas in the form of planes, bombs, ships, and soldiers. As long as it's capable of killing ferriners en masse, they're all for it. I hold out hope that somehow we can collectively come to our senses someday, but it's a small hope and fading quickly. It's pretty stunning to see what has happened here over the last 7 years. Regardless of what you think about what we're doing in the world, just keep that figure in your mind. The entire Big Dig, every two months, and as of right now, we have no way out. That's a new big dig every two months for years to come, possibly decades. Is that really what we want to be doing?

Brandie Update

For anyone who voted for Brandie and wanted to know what happened, she didn't win. That's not unexpected, but I have to say the way she lost was pretty sleazy. It's pretty clear that the people running the contest knew who they wanted to win and did everything they could to make it happen. One girl was getting more votes than anyone else by a factor of about 1000. She was literally getting upwards of 300 votes a second, every hour of every day. So they sent around an e-mail to all the models saying that there was cheating going on (no, really?) and that the cheaters would be disqualified and the winner would instead be chosen by "judges". So, of course, the winner was announced about a month later, and who was it? Yes, Miss "Million votes more than anyone else". There is zero chance she wasn't cheating, she had more votes than there were hits to the page. So did they disqualify her? Obviously not. I don't think Brandie would have won anyway, for one thing, they picked easily the least flattering photo of her they could (though it was her fault for sending it in with the rest. Important safety tip, never send a photo to a contest if you don't want it used) but it still would have been nice if the contest hadn't been rigged from the start.

This is Teri

Teri is the Viola player in Route .44. They are now selling this T-shirt along with their CD and some other stuff on their website. I thought I'd mention it, and also point out that I took this photo, isn't it pretty?

The Menagerie

I went to see The Menagerie last night in a local theater. For those of you not in the know, or those of you with a life, The Menagerie is an episode of the original Star Trek. Well, actually it's two episodes. It was being shown in a theater for two nights only as a way to celebrate (aka advertise) the release of the new remastered Star Trek TOS DVDs. Once again, for those of you who aren't Trekkies, or Trekkers or fat, basement dwelling, junk food scarfing lowlifes and don't keep up with these things, the original Star Trek has been undergoing a face lift for the past year or so. In order to be able to release them on HD DVD, it was decided that they needed to be cleaned up and made to look better, and so they went and got the original prints from 1966 and put them in a computer, cleaned off all the dirt, tweaked the color, and just for the hell of it, replaced most of the special effects shots with brand new ones. I've been generally in favor of this. I've been a Trek fan all my life (well, technically, it first aired when I was 2, so maybe not ALL of my life). I can remember watching it when I was a kid. It was on some UHF station that barely came in on our TV and so for years, all my Trek watching was through a blizzard of snow. I was probably in my teens or even older before I ever saw Star Trek on a clear TV screen. As with a lot of kids, I fell in love with the Enterprise. When you look around at old TV shows and you see what was the general "spaceship" design theory at the time, it's still amazing to me that Matt Jeffries and Robert Justman were able to come up with something so original, elegant, and iconic as that design. Years later, when they released "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", a lot of people complained about the long scene at the beginning where Scotty takes Kirk on an external tour of the ship, lingering for minute after minute on close ups of the shuttle bay doors or the deflector dish. Not me though, I was in heaven. I love the Enterprise. I still think it's the most amazing piece of sci-fi design I've ever seen. So, I was looking forward to seeing the old, original ship, remastered and on a giant screen in all it's glory, and I have to say it didn't disappoint. There's talk that in the new movie being made, that they will be redesigning the enterprise in some way, to make it more "modern". I hope not. With the exception of the relatively minor changes made to it for the first couple of movies, every attempt at a new enterprise since then has been a disaster. The next generation? Easily the ugliest of ALL the designs, with that ridiculously huge saucer, little flat sausage stub engines. I remember the first time I saw that thing, being amazed that they could have designed something that hideous on purpose. Absolutely disgusting. There was the Enterprise B, shown in Generations, again with a big bulky saucer, ugly engines that look like misplaced subway cars and this colossal "thing" that joins the saucer to the rest of the ship. Have any of the people who designed these things ever even seen the original show? Finally, they almost redeemed themselves with the Enterprise E, as shown in First Contact. It at least has some style, some grace and a feeling of size and power that the other new ships lacked. But it still just wasn't right. Nothing yet has matched the original as a ship, and as sculpture. So anyway, there it was last night, plastered across a 20 foot screen and it looked amazing. I don't see why they feel the need to redesign it at all. It's simple, it's functional, and it's beautiful. If it aint broke, don't fix it. It's the friggin Enterprise for christ's sake, leave it alone!

So, as to the show itself, well, what can be said about The Menagerie. It was never the best episode anyway, it was basically a way to take the original unaired footage of the failed pilot and make something that could be put on TV. Susan Oliver looked great, especially during the green orion slave girl dance (banned in the South when it was first aired). It's always interesting to see the difference in Spock from that pilot to the series, and I noticed for the first time that Leonard Nimoy is really limping badly for some shots. The main thing was that it was BIG, and it was clear. Clearer than I could have ever imagined it could be when I was a kid peering through the snow on channel 38 or whatever it was. The only negatives were that the entire thing seemed too dark, as if the projector wasn't turned up high enough, and that if you looked close, you could see the pixels. This was a digital projection, the first I've seen. It won't be long before all movie theaters will be this way. No film to load, basically just pop in a HD DVD and go. The job they did cleaning up the original episode was astonishing. There was no dirt, no little flecks or hair or scratches, it was absolutely clean. The images themselves seemed a bit soft, but suspect that the original negatives are probably getting worn and it may even have been that way when they were new, given the level of technology in the cameras they were using. Overall I had a good time. It makes me feel once again how great it would be to see more old shows and especially old movies in a theater again. I hope that now that digital projection is getting more common, the studios will realize how easy it would be to do that. Theaters could have a different old movie every week. Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I know there are lots of movies I'd happily go see again if I could. If I had the money to do it, I'd buy my own little theater, digital projector and do it myself. Never mind second run, like the Elm Draught House, how about a theater showing nothing but classic movies? The technology is there to make it easy, come on somebody, get out there and make it happen.

This is a project being done by some friend's of mine. At some point I may also get involved with doing some photography for them. Check it out.

Whose Home?

Burger King has these new "Homestyle" sandwiches out, and one of the "ingredients" is "Homestyle Sauce". What exactly is Homestyle Sauce? Whose home? I can't find anyplace where they actually define what homestyle is or what's in this stuff. If it were homestyle the way my mother makes things, it would probably be some mix of baked beans, spaghettios and cake frosting. Or is it more of a "home" in an institutional sense? Like the Home for Little Wanderers? Maybe the Home for Retired Basket Weavers? It could be from something like the Home for Recalcitrant Puppy Abusers. I can see why they would shorten that to just Homestyle. It still doesn't tell me what's in it though. It sort of implies that everyone's home had some kind of common homemade sauce that they poured over everything, but all I know of anyone pouring on a hamburger is maybe ketchup. A few more adventurous souls might put on A-1 or barbecue sauce but I don't see many people saying "Hold off on cooking those burgers until I have a chance to whip up a batch of my favorite burger sauce."

And yes, I know this should have gone with the previous post on stupid ads, I forgot about this one, so sue me...

More Stupid Ads

As we have all learned by now, I hate stupid or lame ads. Seems to me that if you've got the dough to put an ad on TV, you should spend a few minutes actually thinking about what you're doing and try to make something that doesn't just make people want to gouge their eyeballs out every time it comes on (or maybe drilling through your eardrums would be more efficacious,, since radio ads can be just as horrible). Here are a few that are irritating me at the moment:

• A bunch of people running around an office screaming that some chick has a knife. The boss walks over and asks why she has this knife that's panicking everyone and she calmly looks up from her lunch and says "I'm eating KFC, it's real food, which requires a fork, and a knife". So, why does this ad bother me? Because I've scanned KFC's menu a few times and I can tell you that THERE ISN'T ONE GODDAMN THING ON IT THAT REQUIRES A KNIFE TO EAT. What exactly is she cutting? The mashed potatoes? the corn? Does she use it to scrape the skin off the chicken? Then the snide remark that "real food" requires a knife? So is she saying that KFC's potato wedges aren't real food? The Macaroni and cheese? If that's really true, then they are pretty much shooting themselves in the foot here, since, once again, THERE ISN'T ONE GODDAMN THING THEY MAKE THAT REQUIRES A KNIFE TO EAT. The added bonus of her saying this with a tone of voice that suggests that everyone who isn't using a knife to eat their mashed potatoes is somehow a fucking moron isn't helping their cause. I notice I haven't seen this ad as much recently, possibly because someone at the KFC office sat down one day with a knife in his hand and thought to himself "Hey, Wait a sec..."

• What the fuck is with Bob's Furniture and the singing fat guy? Apparently some employee of Bob's won karaoke night at the bar and Bob decided that he'd build an entire ad campaign around this guy singing these absolutely horrendous songs all about how cheap their furniture is with music that would have sounded dated in 1956. The guy's voice is excruciating, and the fact that they often pair his voice with this horrid stop motion photography that makes it look like it's the couches and bureaus singing doesn't help, or even worse, the little animated Bob running around. Regular bob's ads are pretty sucky, with his whiny voice and his sidekick, this shrill blonde chick who is still bitter at having lost out on her audition to good morning america to Katie Couric. Every time one of these things comes on, I thank the powers that be that I'm not looking for furniture, because it saves me from heading to bob's with a pitch fork and torch on principle. Bob, the fat guy can't sing. The fact that he often makes these songs whre he sings not only a lead vocal but often has backing vocals that he also sings, sometimes with several parts, just multiplies the pain. Perhaps the fat guy is Bob's brother in law and having him sing gets his wife to allow him a bit of peace for a few minutes a day would explain the incessant use of this no talent singing migraine, otherwise there's just no excuse.

• To the guy who owns Ragsdale Chevrolet, buddy listen, buying a cowboy hat and wearing a buckle the size of the main turbine on a 747 doesn't make you a cowboy. To be a cowboy means you need to go out west where they have these big herds of large, somewhat docile herbivores called cows and actually be involved in raising them, keeping track of them, and moving them from place to place. Ragsdale Chevrolet has been around this area for years and years and you're the son of the owner, so unless you're the illegitimate love child that he accidentally pumped out when he banged that ranch hand in Texas, you're not a cowboy. You're some kid from Spencer who got caught up in the line dancing craze of the 1980s after hearing one too many Billy Ray Cyrus songs while you were drunk off your ass and for some reason you seem to think that everyone else around here still finds the whole "cowboy chic" thing interesting or original. It's not, and you look like a kid dressed up for Halloween. And it it weren't enough that you actually walk around like that, you've actually built your ad campaigns around it? "Buy from a cowboy"? Which cowboy would that be, cuz it sure as fuck aint you. Look, wear boots and a hat and fucking spurs if you'd like, whatever gets you off, but that snickering and muffled giggles you hear as you walk through the service area aren't an illusion, and for the rest of us out here in TV land, it's just an embarrassment. You could grow your hair down to your ass and hold a guitar and pretend you're a rock star, or put on a spacesuit and say "Buy from an astronaut" and it would have as much authenticity, so do us all a favor and put on a normal suit, or even regular street clothes and leave the cowboy shit for when you and the misses are playing "Custer shows the indian maiden his Bighorn". You'd be doing us all a favor, seriously.

• On the plus side, I have to admit that I find myself actually liking the song that the fruit guys sing in the fruit of the loom ad for the blue underwear. "I had a dream that my whole world was blue" or whatever he's saying. You know the one, they are walking in slow motion, and everything aroud them is going backwards. That music has a cool retro vibe that reminds me of something from the early 70s. I don't care if it's about underwear goddamn it, it's a good tune.

Sorry Sorry Sorry

Yes, I know it's been a while since I've written anything here. Truth is, I've been really busy, I've done a bunch of photo shoots over the last month and a half, incuding a wedding. For me, taking the pictures is only the first step in a process, and that process can take some time. After the shoot itself, I go through every picture, decide which to keep and which are crap, and then go through all the keeps with a fine tooth comb, removing anything I don't like, adjusting color, contrast, etc. This can take quite a while, sometimes more than a half an hour per image. If I decide to go further and create a fantasy image, like a fairy or something similar, it can take several hours. In any case, I've gone through well over a few thousand images in the last 5 weeks or so and it has taken all my spare time.

So, by way of apology, here are a couple of shots from my most recent shoot. I think it was worth the time.
Special thanks to Leesa and Mia

There are more pictures from this shoot and a bunch of others on my Myspace page. Check it out.
http://www.myspace.com/iphotographbabes

Our Future Ladies and Gentlemen:

Ooow, The Stupid!! It Burns!!!

You can never have enough fascists, Mmmm good!

It goes without saying that I won't be voting republican next year, but I think even some republicans have to be a little amazed at how the primaries are shaping up on that side. So far, the two top contenders are a pro choice, pro gun control blue state city mayor and the former governor of the most liberal state in the country who is also a Mormon. What do they have in common? About the only thing I can see is that they are both empty suits willing to say or do absolutely anything to get a vote (which makes them equal to every other politician in the world) and what appears to be an almost fanatical devotion to the pope, I mean an almost fanatical desire to be the most strident fascist asshole. After all that's happened, you wouldn't think the majority of republican voters would be thinking "Boy, that George Bush sure has done a great job, who can I vote for that's just like he is but with just that extra touch of insanity and has got what it takes to stop all this hemming and hawing and get down to the serious business of finally making the US into the fabulous police state we all know it can be". As far as I can tell, the only thing Giuliani has going for him is that he happened to be the mayor in New York on 9/11. He didn't do anything else. he certainly did nothing to prevent it, and he actually made the situation worse by going against the advice of every single person who knew better and putting his emergency response office IN the World Trade Center after it was attacked the first time. He gets a few points for not sitting and doing nothing for 10 minutes after the attack happened and then flying aimlessly around the country for a few hours, but beyond that all he really did was head into the area after the event, make a few speeches and then go watch the World Series. Listening to him now, you'd think he single handedly flew to Afghanistan and captured Osama Bin Laden with nothing but a spear gun and a bar of soap and that if anyone but him is elected president, the muslim hordes will form a human bridge between Iran and the California coast and swarm here blowing up everything and converting everyone in their path. Romney, on the other hand, is like a walking Ken doll criss crossing the country making sure that he's absolutely, resolutely, in favor of whatever YOU are in favor of at that particular moment in time. His campaign has made a pretty big deal about his winning a straw poll in Iowa, and it sounds pretty impressive until you realize that he spent about $600.00 for every vote he got. No one else running even bothered to try. He can't be elected anyway, southern republicans are the most racist people this side of the International Date Line, and there jes aint no way they's gonna put one of them there Moeman's in office, it jes aint rite. I find it strange in the least though that so far what has driven the entire republican election cycle has been the candidates willingness to try to scare the hell out of everybody. 9/11 sucked. I think we can all agree on that. But it was also the act of a small group of people who in many ways got lucky. These people weren't special forces, they were able to take flying lessons, get into this country, and get on those planes without being detected mostly because Mr Bush and his lackeys decided that being on vacation and clearing brush was more important that doing something about warnings they were given. For these people to keep holding this up as if it were some incredible huge international plot being staged by criminal masterminds as if the country were being held hostage by Doctor Evil is ludicrous. I also find it amazing that 6 years later, the people who planned the event are still roaming around free and alive while we're stuck in the quicksand of a country that didn't attack us in the first place. It would be as if Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor and our immediate response was to go and bomb Lithuania. Let's face facts. There is no War On Terror®, because you can't have a war against a tactic. it's like saying there's a war on bad taste in movies. Instead, what we have is exactly what George Orwell had nightmares about. An excuse to wage a perpetual war against an always changing target. Terrorism is a way for small groups of assholes to fight larger groups, but you will never end terrorism any more than you will stop the networks from making cheesy sitcoms where fat ugly guys like Jim Belushi get gorgeous hot wives, Every time you cancel one, another one will pop up, and yet they will cancel a great show like Arrested Development.. assholes... Sorry, I digress. The point is, the primary motivator here is money, oil, and power. Do you really think anyone in our government gave two tiddly winks how many people saddam hussein killed? Hell, we've probably already killed more than that just since we attacked. The War on Terrorism© gives the people in power the opportunity to sell weapons, grab oil, and remain in power so they can sell more weapons and grab more oil. That's all it is. Read the article linked to below for some examples of this. There's as much chance of a giant muslim attack on this country as there is for a giant eskimo attack here. Will there be bombings here? Probably. More attacks in this country? Most likely, but is what we are doing going to stop it? Absolutely not, and is almost certainly making things worse, not better. So, my republican friends, vote for Rudy, or vote for Mitt. If either of them win, we move one step closer to becoming Airstrip One (and if you don't know what that means, read 1984). But, before you pull that lever, step back and really think about whether or not you really want another 4 years of this. The Democrats are nothing spectacular either, but at least with one of them, we can HOPE that something will change, and at this point, that's good enough for me.

Had your cup of Really Pissed Off yet?

Read this and you will be

Short Attention Span Theater

Last weekend I didn't have much to do, so I thought I'd go to the local thee-A-tor and see a movin picture show. I haven't seen Transformers yet, and I thought it would be a good way to spend a few hours. Transformers just came out ab out a month ago, so imagine my surprise when I found out it's only playing once a day... at night. It hasn't been that long since they built the 30 screen super-mega-giganta-plex not far from here. All those screens and they are not showing a movie that's been out for less than a month. So, what is playing on them all? Another movie, one that just came out this week. So, rather than give anyone a choice, they've somehow decided it's smarter to show the same movie on all 50 screens at once. This is idiotic on so many levels. I realize people like to see new movies, but is it really necessary to have it on so many screens that the same show starts every 6 minutes? This brings me to another bitch about movie theaters. Why do they never show old movies? Every year, bands dating back to the 1950s go out and play hits that were in the top 40 before I was born, and people happily pay to see it. Has it not occurred to the movie industry that people might be willing to pay to see their favorite classic movies in a theater? A few years back, the original Star Wars was rereleased to the big screen and it became the second biggest selling movie that year. I'd think this would make the suits in movieland sit up and take notice. Maybe it's just me, but I would pay to see Star Wars in a theater again. The entire first trilogy in fact. And Close Encounters, Alien, a whole list I can think of. I'll bet there would be an even bigger market for the real old time classics. Gone with the Wind? Casablanca? The Wizard of Oz? Abbott and Costello? Yes, you can buy all these on DVD (and I have most of them) but it's not the same as going to a place with a 40 foot screen, 2000 watts of surround sound and the rest of the theater experience. I can buy all the Pink Floyd albums there are too, but I'd still pay a hell of a lot to see them live again. I keep reading about the movie business and how it's losing money, but they stick "blockbusters" on every screen in the theater for a week, then the next week another "blockbuster" comes out and last week's movie gets moved to purgatory. You have all the screens, all those seats, how bout a little choice? How bout some classics? I want to be able to go out on a saturday afternoon and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark on a big screen. How about it?

You won't see this on CBS

For a fake news show, the Daily Show somehow manages to put together information better than every "real" news show on television. Have you ever seen this explained as clearly anywhere else?

Highway Masturbation

No, not that. I live right near I-290, and they are re-surfacing the part near my home right now. So what? So, this is something like the 5th time they've done this in the last ten years. They also just replaced all the lights, lights that by the way were working fine and dandy. I swear they do this just for something to do. There was nothing wrong with the road before. The entire roadway isn't that old, I can remember them building it. How much money is wasted every year by these people doing highway projects that just aren't necessary? In the meantime, you look at a place like Kelly Square, voted worst intersection in Massachusetts, and think, why the hell don't they spend a few bucks redesigning and rebuilding that? I'm guessing it has something to do with I-290 going through Suburbia while Kelly Square's best known tenant is the Hotel Vernon.

Speaking of wasting money

How much do you figure a State Police car costs? It starts out as a car that's 40 grand or so and then has about 10k worth of additional crap including more lights than Edaville Railroad at Christmas, and this is for each car. So, can someone explain to me why State cops get to take those cars home when they are not on duty? I see them all the time, parked in driveways, just sitting there. I know a State cop (nice guy, btw) but I've never asked him why he has a State police car in his garage when he's not working. Maybe I should. So, is each car somehow personalized? Do they each have custom fitted seats or something? Is there some reason why a cop working the opposite shift can't use it? Or does each cop get his own? This makes no sense. I don't think Bus drivers get to take their buses home, fed Ex drivers don't get to put their Fed Ex truck in the driveway overnight. This means that at any given time, there must be hundreds, if not thousands of very expensive police cars sitting in peoples driveways doing nothing. Am I really the only person to notice this and wonder what the deal is?

Van Who-len?
So, Van Halen is supposedly going to do a reunion tour, eh? Well, maybe it's just the bass player in me talking but without Michael Anthony playing bass, it's just not a reunion. So suck it Ed and Dave, I give the whole thing about 2 weeks before they hate each other again and call the whole thing off anyway.

Sucky Sereal

Let me just be the first on record to report that new Chocolate Chex sucks almighty ass. I don't think I've ever tasted anything in my life that tastes less like chocolate. Beef tastes more like chocolate than this, Beets taste more like chocolate, I could have put a bowl of purina puppy chow in the bowl and poured tomato juice on it and it would have tasted more like chocolate.
I'm just sayin...

J'oh!

Priorities

So far I've seen endless coverage of the bridge that collapsed in Minnesota. I'm not really complaining about that, I'd rather they do wall to wall coverage of something like that than of Paris Hilton's latest hangnail, but there's been at least one thing I haven't heard yet. This bridge has been listed as being in bad shape for about 20 years. There are hundreds of bridges in this country listed as being in worse shape that people drive over every day. Conservatives have done a great job over the last 40 years or so of painting the government as the enemy. Of being incapable of doing anything positive in any way (Except of course for the military. That's NEVER big enough and can do absolutely no wrong). They've painted it as a huge bumbling bureaucracy that should having nothing but scorn and contempt thrown at it and done everything possible to starve it of money by giving tax cuts to multi-millionaires so they can make it small enough to "drown in the bathtub" as one of the leading rightwing nutjobs Grover Norquist has said. Well Grover, you're getting your wish. The government is failing. The infrastructure of this country is going to hell thanks to people like him. So, when you see images on TV of this bridge that's younger than I am sitting at the bottom of the Mississippi river and you wonder, how can something like that happen, remember that the price of replacing that bridge (not repairing, replacing) would have been something like less than a quarter of the bill we pay every 24 hours in Iraq. We have no problem going over there and blowing billions and soon to be trillions of dollars, but if someone in this country wants to replace something as basic as a bridge or a tunnel or other critical infrastructure, well, that's the damn government trying to waste your precious tax dollars and screw them, goddamit!! I only hope that someday it's Grover Norquist who finds his ass being crushed under a falling bridge someplace. Then he and the government can drown together.

Thunderstruck

I love thunderstorms. When I was a kid, whenever there was a thunderstorm, my mother, sister and I would join our upstairs neighbor out on the front porch of the three decker we lived in and watch the lighting and the rain and listen to the thunder. It's one of my clearest childhood memories (and since this was when I lived in Worcester, I was no older than 5-6 at the time). I've always been glad my mother did this, because it left me without fear of lighting and thunder my entire life. There is something calming to me about thunderstorms. Every time there's a hot, humid day, I hope for that cool breeze in the late afternoon that could signal an approaching storm and I'm disappointed if it doesn't materialize. I hate when you get a thunderstorm warning on TV and then watch as the bright red splotches on the radar somehow miss our town.
We had a hell of a storm here a couple of nights ago, the best thunderstorm I can remember in a while. Almost nonstop lightning. rain in buckets. I did what I usually do during a storm like that, I went out and sat on the porch and took it all in. Watching to see the bolts of lighting, counting down to see how far the lighting actually was (I don't even remember the formula, something like 5 miles for every second).
As I watched the storm go by, I was struck (no pun intended) by the cars driving by, everyone going about what they always do. The idea of lightning is so bizarre in a way and it's sort of fascinating that's it's so taken for granted. If someone were to pluck you off this planet and stick you somewhere else and then say "You will soon be in a place where miles long streams of white hot 50,000 volt electricity will be slamming into the ground all around you, randomly hitting the trees, the rocks, the fields, starting fires and probably killing most anything living it touches" I think most people would be pretty freaked out. But lighting comes and goes and is pretty much ignored except by the people who cower in the closet and the people like me who view it as a huge fireworks display.
For me it's a reminder that this planet has been here for billions of years and that it will be here for billions more, and whether humans are on it or not makes no difference. The lighting will continue to strike the same way it did before there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere for anything resembling terrestrial life to exist and it will still be striking when humans have either succeeded at their apparent goal of eventual self immolation or have evolved into something unrecognizable like the Morlocks. The universe goes on, and I find myself counting the seconds till the thunder and just relaxing.

Why no signy?

OK, so our guestbook has been online now for several months. According to our statistics, it's the most visited page on this website, and yet almost no one signs it. I'd like to know why. Come on kids, are you telling me none of you can think of anything to write? Just say hi! Tell us if you've seen us, did we suck? were we good? Where was it? How did you find this site? Looking for porn? Were you dissapointed that there isn't any? Should I add some? Who's the cutest Valve? Do you like the songs we have on the music page? Why not? What do you mean? Well, who asked you? Look, just sign the stupid thing. Yes, I know you have to enter a little code to do it, wow, tough gig, entering a few letters. I had to put that there so the whole guestbook wouldn't be filled with spam and weird autobot crap, that's all.
Seriously, I want to know. Is there something about the guestbook that makes it hard to use or what? We get a decent amouont of traffic here, but almost no one takes the 10 seconds required just to say they were here and say hello, so come on people, show us da luv. Otherwise I'm going to take it away. We just can't have nice things here.

Congratulations to Ashley

Ashley, the spunky blond ponytailed waitress from The Yard in Manchester NH has just won my brand new "Hottest Waitress" award, for being the hottest waitress in any club we've ever played in. Congratulations Ashley, you win a free photo shoot with me any time you want one. Contact me here and we'll set it up.

A Steve LeCLaire guest rant
What crap is on your mirror ??

There’s all kinds of crap to personalize your driving space these days. All of it illegal by definition. Recently I’ve seen Stewie in a diaper, a naked Homer Simpson, Yoda, Darth Skywalker or whoever flying the Aluminum Falcon, a Hibiscus lei from Muffy’s latest spring break vacation, Mardi Gras beads, you name it. A big pickup truck with a Dale Earnhardt #8, baby!! Tell me that doesn’t induce speeding and bouts of road rage from someone with a Bobby Labonte #43 Cheerios logo on his mirror.
Did you know it’s actually illegal to hang anything in your car that blocks your field of vision? I understand you can’t even legally hang those little air freshener thingies from your car’s rear view mirror. You know the ones that look like a pine tree, and smell like Jasmine, Cinnamon or Vanilla? It will impair the driver’s field of vision. So what I want to do is, design an air freshener that looks like a handicapped placard. No one will ever know! Then my car will smell good, and I’ll be able to park in all the good spots as a bonus.
And what’s with handicapped placards anyway? Here we have the DMV telling a dude who’s driving ability is already impaired - that he should further impair his driving by hanging a big blue and white sign in front of his face, - and that it’s OK! But I can’t hang my little pine tree. Damn….
How about fuzzy dice? Shouldn’t those actually be considered a safety item? They are soft and plushy, better than air bags I’d imagine, if you got the really big ones. I bet quite a few pair of fuzzy dice kept the Betty Lou’s of the 50’s from smashing their pretty little faces into the windshield of Johnny’s hot rod while crashing at dead man’s curve. Nope, not allowable now according to the DMV.
Graduation tassels? I see those all the time. Some car insurance companies give “good student discounts” but you can’t hang that graduation tassel that you earned by giving the best fourteen or fifteen years of your childhood. Those are only cool for the 1st summer anyway. Then it’s like, “Come on dude, give it up. You still don’t have a job yet?” A 30 year old bald guy, still sporting a graduation tassel from his mirror is not cool. Sorry. Wedding day garters are a no-no too. Those are probably more of a mental distraction than a visual one, on oh so many levels. I think it’s funny when you see the really BIG garters, rather than the ones we guys could wear around our wrists. Too bad for you Bubba!
The talisman that I really don’t get is the woman’s panties hanging ever so delicately from the rear view mirror. What exactly is the car owner trying to say here? It may be merely an extension of the garter thing, but I’m not so sure. On one level, panties are saying “I’ve scored. I’ve deflowered. I’m a MAN now! See me display my testosterone laden hunting trophy! Unnnghhh! “ On another level, it’s saying “My wife/girlfriend/sister/daughter is a total skank and is driving our other car without any panties. Right now.
Best one I’ve seen yet wasn’t actually hanging inside the vehicle, but from the trailer hitch of a big, huge, overdressed hot rod custom pickup truck. The owner had taken two tennis balls and put them inside a heavy pair of flesh colored nylons, and tied this apparatus to the trailer hitch. One ball sat slightly and suggestively lower than the other, and the resulting wrinkles and folds in the material were extremely life like, albeit slightly larger than life size. They swung there in the breeze of the highway. I came up behind this pickup rumbling along in the right lane, and laughed when I saw the “balls”. I signaled, and went around the truck to pass, as well as to see who might be driving. I half expected to find an overweight redneck in a sleeveless shirt like Larry The Cable Guy. However, I was surprised to see a petite little blonde woman behind the wheel. Alone. She caught me looking, and grinned a knowing smile. Now that’s a statement.

Editors note: I lost my High School tassle when someone broke into my first car and stole my rear view mirror. They took nothing else, just the mirror.

Worth every cent

Any time you read an article about the music business these days, it's usually a complaint by them about how everyone is downloading music and no one buys CDs anymore. They have a whole list of reasons for this, that people are dishonest, that they don't understand how amazingly expensive it is to produce a good CD, that they have to make up for all the sleazebags illegally downloading stuff etc. I have another possibility that they usually overlook, how about greed? How is it that I can buy a major motion picture, along with 6 hours of documentaries, commentary tracks, multiple discs etc. for 12 bucks, but if I want to pick up a new copy of Dark Side of the Moon,an album originally released in 1973, I have to cough up close to twenty? Do these companies not realize that people see this discrepancy? I just ordered "The Critic" on DVD a couple of days ago. It cost me about 30 bucks for it. Now, when I say I ordered The Critic, I don't mean I ordered an episode of it, or even a season of it. I ordered the entire series, for 30 bucks. I recently got the entire Invader Zim series for about the same amount. That's close to 12 hours of programming for the cost of one copy of the White Album. Ironically, you can usually buy a multi disc special DVD of a band you like for less than the cost of one or two DVDs. Rush 30 has 3 DVDs of live performances and all kinds of extra stuff. It costs 35 dollars. To get the rough equivalent on DVD you would need to buy maybe 5 or 6 CDs at a cost of between 13 and 18 bucks each. Most of my best CDs were stolen several years ago, and as much as I want to replace them, it just irks me to think I have to pay an amount so ludicrously inflated to do it. Ironically, it's often the same companies selling both CDs and DVDs, and I find it hard to believe it costs 4 times more to make a CD of an album that's existed since Nixon was president than it does to create a DVD of a movie that was out 6 months ago. So, do I download songs? Damn straight I do. The funny thing is, I really would buy CDs if they cost what they are actually worth. I'm an audiophile at heart, and CDs do sound better than an MP3, especially since most MP3s you find online aren't encoded very well, but if I head to Best Buy with my 20 bucks and I have a choice between replacing "Toys in the Attic" for 17.95, and getting a great but dated album that I've already owned on vinyl and CD at least once and that comes with absolutely nothing that it didn't have with it in 1974 or buying the 2 DVD special edition of Alien with 4 hours of special features, well, which really makes more sense in the long run? I can buy Alien and then go home and download pretty much everything from Toys in the Attic and in the end, all I'm missing is the Album cover art, which they had pretty much destroyed when the made the CD cover anyway. So, I have no sympathy for record companies crying about how no one buys CDs any more. You want me to buy a CD? Make it worth the money or make it cheaper, it's really that simple.

Guest Rant by Steve
JESUS’ DOG

Joe M’s latest editorial, “What is Heaven ?” got me to thinking. Did Jesus have a dog? I’ll bet he did. The Scriptures don’t say all that much about His early years, beyond all that fallderah at the manger. But anyone born around all those animals must have had a dog for a pet as a kid. Joe and Mary Christ were probably a bit below minimum wage as a family, but I’ll bet they could have sprung for a dog to keep little Jesus company while Joe was busy building houses and Mary was trying to explain that whole immaculate conception deal to the grandparents. I can just hear Mary one night yelling, “Oh for HIS SAKE Joe, get him a damn dog! What…, you want him hanging around the temple with all those old men for the rest of his life?!”
So Jesus probably had a dog. For the sake of argument, I’ll call him Phillip. (Unless it was female, in which case I’d call her Dorothy, but Jesus would never have had a bitch…) I wonder if Philip had magical powers too. Imagine playing stick with a dog that could walk on water. How cool would that be? Fetch, Phillip…Fetch! Across the Sea of Gallillee he’d go, rompity romp…without getting wet, wagging his holy little tail behind him. Hanging around the kiddie pool behind the manger must have been awesome too, when Phillip would walk across the top of it. Peter and Judas and all those neighborhood kids must have been damned impressed. Then again, I’ll bet Philip The Holy Dog just got in and splashed on hot days, because they all lived in the desert.
When Jesus turned water into wine, did Phillip turn his Alpo into a T-bone steak? Probably when nobody was around, or looking. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, I’ll bet little Phillip was right there wagging his tail and licking the old beggar’s leprosy sores. During that loaves and fishes incident, did Phillip conjure up a bunch of Milk Bones for all his doggie pals?
Jesus was no wimp. He was a carpenter without power tools. So, I imagine Phillip was a pretty impressive dog. No wimpy little Poodle or Chihuahua for Jesus, no sir! Some sort of Shepherd probably. Not a Pit Bull like that snotty Beelzebub kid who thought he was so tough.
Poor Phillip never got to stick his head out a car window and let his ears flap in the breeze like modern dogs enjoy. I’ll bet Pilate’s dog got to do that on the royal chariots though. The Christs couldn’t afford a chariot, and the family Ass didn’t run fast enough.
I wonder if Jesus’ dog was a leg humper. He could have worn the hair off Jesus’ leg; horny little bugger. I bet that didn’t go over too well around the marketplace. Poor Phillip. Did he sit around, licking himself, embarrassing the whole Christ family when the Three Wise Men came to visit? I hope Jesus never kicked him for doing what came natural.
There’s an old adage that says, “Outside of a dog , a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” My theory is that man created dog in His own image. That’s why we have Manfred The Wonder Dog, Peabody, Under Dog, Astro, and even Scooby Doo. We like our dogs in His image. Dogs do their best to help us save the world. And of course, God spelled backward…..

Holy Shih-Tzu!

Joe adds: If Christ really had a dog, I bet he could have used his Halo and had the world's first ever game of dog frisbee.

You Go Girl!

I played Black Sabbath at 78 speed man....
Oh yeah? And then what happened?
I saw God, man....

What is Heaven? Have you ever thought about that? Most people have, because most people have been told essentially since birth that if they are good boys and girls, they will go there after they die. But what is it? What's there? While the majority of religions on the planet profess some kind of Heaven after death, pretty much none of them ever go into any kind of details about what it actually is. It's just generally some vague blabber about paradise and perfection and angels and it's got pearly gates and lots of clouds and things. But what IS it? My guess is that if I were to go out and find 50 people at random who professed a belief in heaven, that I would get 50, possibly vaguely similar but fundamentally different descriptions of what they think it is.
Is it a place where you meet up with all your dead relatives? If so, for how far back? I mean, you might think, wow, it would be nice to see my dead parents again, but then of course, they wanted to see their dead parents, who wanted to see theirs and so on for countless thousands of generations, so how would that work? And that's not even counting brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. How old would they be? Is everyone in heaven like 30? is everyone the age they were when they died? If so, it must suck to die when you're one, or 96. Imagine being 96 for eternity. no fun for you. Then again, is there fun? What is considered fun in heaven? In the bible it seems like heaven mostly consists of worshipping god the whole time. If there's a god, well, I guess he might be worth some worship, but all the time? for eternity? Jesus! (Don't even get me started on the level of insecurity you must have to need such overwhelming constant praise and adoration)
What about living? Do you eat? If so, can you eat whatever you want? I mean, is there like cheeseburgers? Or is it like Manna or some kind of holy food? And if you do eat, do you shit? Are there heavenly toilets? And if there are, who cleans them? Do they clean automatically, or are there janitor angels? Maybe Hell is having to be the people who have to clean Heaven, you were an asshole when you died so you have to work in the heavenly laundry room for eternity. What about sleep? Staying awake for eternity seems like it would kind of suck, especially if that means you do nothing but the worshipping thing 24/7. Can you have a pet? Would I see my now deceased dogs there? or do they have a heaven of their own (Whenever our dogs shit on the floor, my mother would threaten them with doggy heaven, was she more right than she suspected?).
No sex I'd imagine. It's sort of frowned upon by holy types here already, I can't imagine there's a lot of boinking going on in heaven. Do you end up with the genitalia of a Barbie and Ken doll? This of course means the whole 72 virgins thing for the muslims becomes kind of a sick joke. "Good job with that whole martyring thing, here are your virgins. The bad news is, they stay that way, because there are no heavenly wangs". Course, if there is sex in heaven, then I would have to ask how the 72 virgins feel about being handed over to some guy who just blew himself up. Do they have a say in it, or is that hell for them? and let's face it, getting to screw 72 virgins would be cool for about a month or so, but what happens when they're not virgins anymore? Eternity is an awfully long time, at best you could maybe make 72 last for what, maybe 6 years? Once a month you have a cherry popping party (the ones already.. um.. spent, would probably not enjoy that party much) What then? And what about babies? Can you have babies once you're there or is everyone instantly sterile? if the rabid right wingers are right, then life begins at conception, but what if you're conceived and then stillborn, I guess if we go back to the whole "You stay whatever age you were when you died" hypothesis, then there must be a whole section in heaven reserved for fetuses that never quite made it. There would be like a whole wing of heavenly blastocysts and pharyngula. Imagine being a fertilized egg for all eternity! No Heavenly cook outs for you.
I heard some fundamentalist recently talking about how he couldn't wait to get to heaven and spend time four wheeling with his family.Can you go four wheeling in heaven? Do they make their own vehicles or are they somehow imported? Maybe after they go through a crusher at the junkyard they are lifted to heaven and rebuilt. What if your favorite thing in the entire world was fishing, are their lakes up there? What about the fish, are they already dead? Are you catching ghost fish or is there a separate fish heaven? Maybe you can get a pass to go to fish heaven and catch fish. That would be a pretty sucky heaven from the fishes point of view though.
Would I still be fat in heaven? What about bald? That would suck, because if it turns out there is sex in heaven, then I won't be getting any up there either. I've heard talk that you become some kind of glorified body, perfectly healthy in every way, does this mean that if I go there I'll look like Mitt Romney or Mel Gibson or George Cloony? or does it just mean I'm thinner but with the same dwarfishly small hands (and all that that implies)?
Is there entertainment? I would miss my favorite movies and TV shows. Or is it like Rome where people have to put on plays and amuse each other more directly. Speaking of Rome, what is the technology level like up there? You would have people mixing together from all throughout human history, so either everyone up there has been following along all this time and heavenly tech is just like it is now on Earth or maybe it's frozen in time somehow. In the Bible everything in heaven seems to pretty much reflect the way things were at that time, what with the sandals and robes and everyone talkng like Charlton Heston. Did they stay that way? That would be a bit odd. Are there other planets with life on them? Was it made by the same god? if so, do they get their own heaven or would we also be mixing with all kinds of aliens?
How do you get in? No one is without sin of course, and I suppose it's up to the heavenly equivalent of simon cowell to decide who gets in. I have this image of everyone throughout all of history watching your entire life on a huge screen, watching every single moment of your life (remember, we have eternity to do this, so even if it meant watching every second of everyone's life who ever existed, it would still only take a small fraction of eternity to get through them all) anyway, I see everyone you know watching every time you ever lied to them, cheated on them, fantasized about them (oh yeah, they can hear what you're thinking too) and pretty much having every single person ever created watching you masturbate every afternoon while you're watching Saved by the Bell. Wow, that would suck (It would probably suck more if you were doing it while watching something like Sesame Street or Family Affair), but hey, at least when they were done with you, you would get to watch all of them do it too. I bet you'd see some freaky shit.
On the other hand, maybe heaven is an idealized thing for each person, maybe it's whatever you wish it was. In my case, my idea of heaven would be the ability to move anywhere I wanted in time or space and watch dinosaurs and the formation of galaxies and see into the future and the past and explore planets on the far end of the universe, and of course, to come back once in a while to jam with some great musician's and get a lap dance from a hot chick (there's got to be hot chicks there or what's the point, and are you going to say there isn't a single girl anywhere who doesn't dream of giving lap dances for eternity? Well, ok maybe not. Back to the 72 virgins scenario.
I don't believe in heaven or hell. I think this is it. I wish more people thought like that, I think we would be less cavalier about throwing lives away on wars and pointless violence if everyone knew this was all you get. But if there is a heaven, frankly, the more I think about it, the less it seems like it would be a particularly nice place to spend eternity anyway. Lot's of bowing and scraping and glorifying and praising but not a lot of living. I wonder though, how many of the pat robertson's and jerry falwells of the world really have spent any time actually thinking about the implications of the stuff they dish out every week. I wonder how many people, who spend their entire lives in