1. Dead Child fucking killed it tonight.
2. Bob Costas did a good job of asking the president real questions during the latter’s ten minute stop by NBC studios. Bush, predictably, did his best “half drunk, second-best sales associate” schtick in response. His slide in to irrelevance dulls the pain a bit, but each mispronunciation of a major head of state’s name (in this case, Pertin, or Putin, for those keeping score at home) still feels like having your balls massaged by a cotton gin.
Some observations from Denton:
1. Best sign so far: “$2 minimum on all credit cards.” At Hooligan’s, a bar on the square, downtown.
2. A buddy and I had two Miller Lights each (16 oz.), plus an order of fried zucchini and an order of fried pickles…not exactly health food, but the total for all that was $18, with tax.
3. At Rubber Gloves, the Denton equivalent of the Casbah: $1.50 Leigenbock drafts (16 oz), $1.75 Lone Star/Schlitz/PBR, $2.75 well drinks (Beam is well whiskey).
If anyone still subscribes to this site’s RSS feed, it’s a testament to either your fandom or laziness: with the complete lack of new content for, oh, ever, I really deserve no readers at this point.
That said, my relocation to Denton has me in the blogging mood. weshotjr.com is quite good, but more focused on the Dallas scene, and Denton deserves dedicated bloggers. Hell, they probably already have them: I’m so green, I have no idea.
For the San Diegans that read this, I encourage you to stick it out for a couple weeks, and see if you don’t find that there’s still something for you here. For those in the metroplex that stumble across it, I encourage to you to take a look at some older posts and see what a garrulous prick I can be once I’m acclimated to the environment.
This news is a little old, but Be Your Own Pet broke up. I reviewed their record for Citybeat and, on second thought, I was far too generous. This band was not very good. They were not very lucky. And they are now not very…are.
1. The ’86 Dodgers performing “The Baseball Boogie.” No amount of cocaine, Gheri-juice overdose, or just plain bad sense can really explain this:
2. Kobe Bryant performing “K.O.B.E.” at the 1996 NBA All-Star Weekend. Pro: having the sense to feature a pre-crazy Tyra Banks. Con: rapping in Italian.
Gotta love Billboard. From Chartwatch:
For the second week in a row, Jack Johnson’s Sleep Through The Static and Michael Jackson’s Thriller 25 are the top two albums in the U.S. Or are they?
They are, if you look at the Top Comprehensive Albums chart compiled by Nielsen/SoundScan. Johnson is #1 for the week with sales of 105,000 copies, trailed by Jackson with 63,000 copies. (The gap between the two is wider than it was last week, when just 14,000 copies separated them.)
The reason for the omission, as I explained last week, is that Nielsen/SoundScan and Billboard exclude catalog titles-defined as albums that are 18 months old or older-from the main chart. (Continuously running “current” hits are exempted.)The idea is to make more room on the chart for new albums, which need every break they can get.
Really? I thought the idea was to save them from having to publicly acknowledge that the second best-selling album in America is over 20 years old and was recorded by someone widely assumed to be a child molester. I guess if they’re that proud of Jack Johnson, they really have no shame.
Advance praise for “Be Kind, Rewind” is effusive. Once again, Gondry is being hailed as among the most inventive filmmakers of his generation. Apparently, he gets his “inspiration” the same way I do: huffing paint and watching Nickelodeon re-runs. Hell, it’s worked for Ween all these years.
If you know the plot of “Be Kind, Rewind,” you know that it concerns Jack Black, Mos Def, and remaking famous movies with no budget and no studio. Here’s an excerpt from Nickelodeon’s Amanda Show (advance warning–that’s the most annoying link I’ve ever followed):
I report, you decide.
You ever spend a whole day wearing thermal underwear, Chuck Taylors, and fighting to get warm?
This sucks.
What can I say? The man is funny. I hope this movie is a return to Anchorman form. I think the 70s suit Will Ferrell.
I’ve been banking with Bank of America for about three months. I can say, at this point, that they are the worst bank I’ve ever dealt with. Being subjected to a kangaroo court in the Peruvian highlands would seem reasonable, logical, and a paragon of transparency compared to dealing with this bureaucratic nonsense.
Each month I’ve deposited my paycheck (a UC Regents paycheck, at a bank that’s less than a mile from UCSD’s campus). Each month, some issue has prevented said check from arriving in my account without three phone calls and several hours of my life wasted on what, in the 21st century, should be about the least complicated transaction in the world.
Today’s new fuck-up? Their teller, when depositing my check on Friday, wrote down the wrong number on the deposit slip. My money went straight into a black hole that took the bank manager 30 minutes to navigate this afternoon. Once navigated, the check still wasn’t deposited into my account. He told me to call back tomorrow. And, he told me to anticipate having to call again to have overdraft charges reversed.
I don’t make a lot of money. When the end of the month comes, I need my paycheck to cover modern conveniences like food and gas. It’s bad enough that their clerical error has me broke for a day, but it’s even worse that said error requires THREE PHONE CALLS AND A TRIP TO THE BRANCH for me to sort out. Weren’t they the ones that fucked this up? Aren’t they the ones that should be making some extra effort to retain me as a customer and rectify their mistake? This shit has robbed me of precious hours I could dedicate to talking shit on poseur metal bands (see below).
Even if the answer is yes, it doesn’t matter. As nice as the customer service people can be in person, they don’t have any real pride in their jobs. They don’t want to be there any more than I do. And that means that no matter how reasonable my anger or how apparent it is that the blame is theirs, they won’t do anything about it. There’s no sense of personal accountability. No pride. Just paychecking it. That’s the modern corporation: a collection of people who hate their jobs, structured so as to diffuse blame over as many people as possible until reasonable people (to the extent you think I’m reasonable) feel bad for telling a teller they are upset that they don’t have money to buy groceries.
I need to find a credit union.
Oh, and I need to start blogging the names and addresses of the people I meet at my local branch: that way, you can all remember to piss on their pant leg in the john if you ever cross paths with them: they’ll be at the bar in PB, secretly wishing they were dead.
