The Hits Just Keep On Coming...

I'm stuck here at work waiting for the shooting crew to get back to the office so I can help load in, and I've been trying to get some writing done in my downtime. I have music going from my iTunes pretty much all day, but at night when there's no distractions I try to pick stuff that's extra awesome. Plus, when there's a zillion people here during the day, I normally try not to be obnoxious and blast Citizens Arrest.

So at first I popped on Judge-Bringin' It Down, because...fuck that, there should never need to be an explanation or justification for listening to Judge.
After that, I was in a solid late 80's NYHC mood, so I put on Leeway-Born To Expire.
After that, I kind of zoned out writing and just let iTunes keep going, and it went right into Left For Dead-Splitting Heads, which got me embarrassingly amped up. I'm going to attribute that to coinciding with all the coffee kicking in.
And after Left For Dead comes Lemonheads, of course. Hate Your Friends is the first record on my computer, and while their later stuff is good and all, HYF is probably in my top 50 records of all time, with "Rabbit" being in my top 50 songs, easy.
There's no point to this post other than to revel in how nicely my accidental playlist worked out, and maybe there's some imaginary person reading this who hasn't checked out one of those four records, and they will after this. Not that any of them are exactly buried gems, but still.

Manny Being Manny Being A Surprisingly Sane Person
or
Morons Being Morons With No Perspective

So yesterday Manny Ramirez was quoted in the Boston Globe as saying:

"We're just going to go have fun and play the game," he said. "That's it. If we go play hard and the thing doesn't come like it's supposed to come, we'll move on. We'll come next year. Why should we panic? We've got a great team. If it doesn't happen, good. We'll come next year and try to do it again.

"We're confident every day. It doesn't matter how things go for you. We're not going to give up. We're just going to go and play the game, like I've said, and move on. If it doesn't happen, so who cares? There's always next year. It's not like the end of the world or something."

That's the full quote. But if you listen to sports radio/watch sports commentary on tv/read sports blogs, all you'll hear about is the last two sentences. "If it doesn't happen, so who cares? There's always next year. It's not like the end of the world or something."

Not only is this all of a sudden the number one story in the sports world, people are LOSING THEIR MINDS over it. Talking about how Derek Jeter would never say that, how Manny only cares about himself and not about his team and its fans, how it's another example of modern athletes being no good money grubbing jerks, and on, and on.

That reaction, to me, is the real story. It magnifies and highlights how completely, pathetically out of touch people are. Because when it comes down to it, he's 100% right. And I'm not a huge Manny supporter by any means. I'm also the furthest thing from a jock-basher, or the type of person to look down my nose at peoples devotion to sports. I spend a ridiculous amount of time every day reading about and watching/listening to sports, not to mention all the hours agonizing over upcoming games to decide who to bet on and who to put in on my various fantasy teams. But if I step back for a second, it's all just a pastime, a distraction, something entertaining to help me get through the day. Sure, I get bent out of shape when my teams lose, and overexcited when they win. But if I were to list out my priorities in life, the win/loss record of a team of professional strangers is pretty far from the top.

I think sports are totally awesome, and I'm generally wary of people who have absolutely zero interest in sports (as they might be some kind of pod-people body snatchers), but, and I mean this in the least condescending way possible, I have a life. You know, my own life, that goes on regardless of what happens on the field/court/rink/croquet lawn.

I can promise you Derek Jeter isn't still sitting shiva in the Yankee clubhouse, single tear after single tear rolling down his cheek. And I doubt Posada has locked himself in his room listening to his Bauhaus records while cutting himself. "A drop of blood for every loss..."
And especially motherfuck sportscasters who condemn Manny for a) being honest and b) having a balanced head about the whole thing. Bunch of loser wannabe athletes that couldn't hack it so they bitch about meaningless shit like this. To people like me...who tune in every day...and who would kill to be paid to bitch about sports...

I'm not trying to say I'm above all this, but it's so lame that when a ballplayer finally really says what's up, everyone crucifies him for it.
Get a fucking life, yeesh.

Oh and go Tribe.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NORM!!!!

Motherfuck Edge Day, today is National Norm Day.

There really aren't words for what a great day this is. Norm turns 44, and the world continues to enjoy the gift of laughter, and prison rape jokes.

Steve and I put a birthday present in the mail to him this afternoon, consisting of a card and a handful of scratch off tickets. If he hits the "win for life" thing, hopefully he'll appreciate it enough to attach himself to "Slumpbuster", the movie Steve and I are writing. Or just blow it on more gambling, whatever.

A handful of Norm links since I'm kind of lazy today.

This audio clip is pretty recent, and Artie's right, it's awesome how Norm always seems annoyed and surprised that anyone tries to talk to him about anything showbiz related, despite the fact that it's his, you know, job.
Audio Interview from the Stern Show

The next link is probably the best single place for downloads, every single episode of both The Norm Show and A Minute With Stan Hooper, as well as miscellaneous stuff. You can only download three things a day, apparently, but if you just search YouTube you can find all the episodes of The Norm Show, albeit chopped into 10 min segments.

Norm Media

Two Fan Pages, the first is written by the Fat Chick in THIS picture, and while it's kind of informative, she writes like a Jr. High yearbook editor (read: not well) and thats kind of annoying after awhile. The second is slightly less retarded sounding, but not as updated either.

Number One
Number Two

And go down a few posts and watch the clips I put up from his appearance on The View a couple years ago, if you haven't already.

(Oh and something's fucked up with blogger where it won't let me post pictures. Once that gets fixed I'll have a bunch of sweet ones to throw in.)

Celebrate!

Knock knock...

The teamster captain on the show I'm currently working on is probably one of the sweetest dudes I've ever met. He's in his seventies now, but he was one of the top boxers in the country years ago before a stray punch ruined his one eye. He remains one of the most effortlessly funny people I've ever met though, due in large part to the fact that he's got an even sleazier sense of humor than I do, and he's much more apt to display it in the middle of the office, regardless of the age, gender, or sexual orientation of anyone around.

Before I started here he came into the office one day and somehow got into a story of how a girl he dated when he was younger wanted him to bring home some kind of "toy." So he stopped at the butchers shop and got a "big fuckin salami", and after having some trouble getting a condom on it ("you ever try gettin a scumbag on a fuckin salami???") he went to town on her with it, and apparently she LOVED it. I say apparently because he decided to get down on the ground and act the scene out for everyone in the office, playing the role of his ladyfriend. This is a seventy year old man, lying on his back, kicking his legs around in the air and doing his best impression of a woman getting railed with a giant salami and absolutely loving it.

He later lost her to the one and only Peter Bogdonovich, which was especially hard because "I loved that girl! I kissed her asshole! That's fuckin love!" To this day, if you say the word "Bogdonovich" within a hundred yards of him, it's over. We got the intern to start talking about how he'd worked on some Peter Bogdonovich movie, and from the back of the office, no short distance thats also obstructed by various smaller offices we hear "PETER BOGDONOVICH?? THAT SONOFABITCH STOLE MY GIRL!" There's dozens of other awesome stories, including accidentally getting industrial strength cleaner with acid in it on his dick, and announcing the fact over the radio on set, but I couldn't possibly do them all justice.

The reason I started writing all this was that after telling me how a young teamster he knows is "balling" a well known actress ("he's laying some pipe there boy, let me tell you. He gets his oil changed REGULAR") and how Jim Brown speaks much less masculinely than one might think ("not sayin he's a fag or nothin, just sayin") he was on his way to the elevator when he stopped and yelled back:

"Hey-- what part of Popeye never gets rusty?"
"I dunno, what?"
"THE PART HE PUTS IN OLIVE OIL!"

Best dude.

Andy Samberg: batting 1000.

I didn't see Hot Rod, but heard it was pretty good from fairly reliable sources, and I haven't actually watched Saturday Night Live in forever, but all the digital shorts I've seen so far have been pretty awesome. Well the most famous one, the Lazy Sunday one, kind of blows, but that's only when put up against the ridiculous amount of hype it picked up, and most of it was from people who probably like shitty comedy anyway. There's a new one up on the good old internet now, or at least new to me. If it's old news, write me about it saying what a big fat jerk I am and we can have a nice exchange where I think of new ways to suggest you stick your head up your ass.

Oh and my roommate Zach is somehow loosely-boyz with the dude from Maroon 5, who's in this video. He got to hang out backstage at a Maroon 5 concert (I know, I didn't realize they were still a band either) and get fucked up on champagne and whatnot. That's where the story ends, but I'm sure he ended up trying to have some kind of relations with one of the band members, only to be denied. While Zach was crying into his white wine spritzer, one of the roadies came by and picked up the pieces. If you know what I mean. I'm sure Zach will deny that but he'll be all "NOOOOOOO..." and not just "No", which is a dead give away. And if he gets too sassy about it, my other roommate Steve and I will bully him back into his room with the boxing gloves we're buying for exactly that purpose.

I guess I could have just said "awsum new video lolz" but somehow the above paragraph makes me feel like this post was slightly more valid. One.

Well now I know what it's really like to be a Mets fan.

Not that I was short on excuses to drink heavily already, here's another. Historic collapse, Glavine somehow transforming himself into a human tee for the Marlins to hit off of, and a team I forgot even existed (The Colorado Rockies? Seriously?) at least having a shot of getting in, with the Mets sitting home with their thumbs alternating between their collective mouths and asses. The only good that can come of this is hopefully Lastings Milledge is inspired to put out another album, full of examples of why the Phillies are all homosexuals in none-too-subtle terms.

On top of the Mets eating shit, I went 4-9 in both my NFL pools and got blown out in the head-to-head fantasy league. And, shockingly, after opening the pre-season with a win, the Bruins dropped all of the rest of their last 5 games, giving me further hope for new lows in awful seasons. But Cam was named VP, so at least that much went right.

To cheer myself up, I re-watched the following clips of Norm on The View. Highlight include "I'd have sex with YOU while you're awake!" I don't know if theres ever been someone I'm this dangerously close to wanting to abduct and force into my body through some kind of unproven scientific method involving skin stretching and full body transplanting. Cause, you know, he's funny.

Part 1





Part 2


Lastly, I've more or less given up on doing my comics blog as a freestanding thing. Trying to review every stupid comic I read every week, on top of the dozens of other little projects I make for myself, was just getting to be too much. Not in the sense that it's such a massive undertaking, but that if I'm going to cut something out in order to actually accomplish the others, this is going to be it. I'm not totally abandoning it, but instead of every issue every week, I'll just do a write up if I read something exceptionally awesome or exceptionally shitty, and I'll just post it here, rather than on a separate blog.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, the old posts from my comics blog are located HERE.

My only advice for the day is this: listen to "Pissed Jeans-Boring Girls", and realize how awesome a song can be with just one riff over and over again.

Man, I love abusing the postal system.

At my work we buy rolls upon rolls of stamps every week. Nobody cares if you use a handful for personal mail, and they just sit in a drawer a few feet from where I sit. So I've started mailing things that really don't need to be mailed. All of the bill for my apartment are in my roomates names (along with the lease, score) so every month I have to shell out my share. Now instead of having to go to the bank and get cash to place in their grubby paws, I write them checks and mail them from work. The added bonuses being that when they hassle me about it I can get all indignant and yell "THE CHECKS IN THE MAIL! TAKE IT UP WITH THE POST OFFICE AND STOP GRATING MY SACK!" Then I like to slam a door or two for no reason. Well actually, I haven't done that yet because I just started this system, but I'm looking forward to doing it the next time the opportunity arises. The second awesome part is that I can address the envelopes with comical return addresses. My cable bill money was sent to Steve, from "Sawyer Williams: The Moon." And Zach should receive my rent check in a few days courtesy of LeatherDaddy magazine.

This might seem really juvenile and stupid to you, but that's because you're a big dumb jerk. You probably don't even take advantage of the hilarious possibilities afforded to you by the "memo" section on the front of a check. I'm really tempted to make one of my friends look like a big scumbag Klansman by filling out the memo section "white sheets, scissors, wooden crosses, gasoline." But so far I've stuck to just making the memo a variation on the same homo erotic themes. Sometimes I also like to draw little hearts down there.

I hope this has inspired the rest of you to take hold of life and live it to it's fullest.

"Why I Hate the Yankees, or: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating and Update"

Before I get into the topic of why the Yankees can eat my asshole, a few bits of what qualify as "news" in my little blogging world.

-I started writing for my friend Mark's site, Exploder 98. There are some other contributors, Mark writes a bunch, and it appears to be a decent place to stop on the internet. I "review", in a loose sense of the word, things I do, buy, and drink. At some point I'll start blogging over there too. Lord knows the content is just overflowing here.
-Finally put up all the pictures from the trip Kyle, Greg and I took to Panama. Those are over on my photo blog.
-Comics blog is semi-updated.
-All the back issues of Brickshitter are now permanently hosted thanks to Mark, so I won't have to remember to re-up the YSI links, which I hardly ever remembered to do in the first place.
-Speaking of Brickshitter, Number 6 will be out in a few weeks with the final Hardcore Superbattle, and interview with For Science from New Jersey, and the usual horseshit.

So exciting!

As I was saying, the Yankees blow. Bear with me here.

I grew up playing hockey year round, and being that I don't come from an especially sports-centric family, hockey was the only professional sport I followed at all. As I got older and got more into other sports, I found myself in a weird position where I had to choose a team to root for. It seems most sports fans are fans since birth, or at least since before the age where there's any particular rhyme or reason to allegiances. When you're little you're a fan of a team for usually one of three reasons:
1) Your Dad/older brother/Grandfather/some male relative is a fan. I know its 2007 and all, and everyone saw Rookie of the Year where Henry peels off the label on his glove to find out it's his mom's glove after all, and she's in the stands and is all "thats right honey. Now throw that bullshit underhanded limpwristed floater of a pitch and strike that comically villainous fatass out." So yeah, in theory, that could be the case, but lets be real. Your Dad liked the Jets, you like the Jets. End of story.
2) The team in question is your hometown team. This sometimes ties into reason #1, where your Dad grew up somewhere and moved by the time you came around, but he's still pulling for his old team. This is especially the case when he moves from somewhere sweet, like New York or Cleveland, to somewhere totally sucky like Florida. So maybe your folks made some poorly advised investments in a Gator Ranch and now you live in Florida, but you still root for the Tribe because to both live in Florida AND be a Marlins fan would make you human garbage. Unless you're this guy, who's an inspiration to us all.
3) Whatever team has won the most recently is your favorite because little kids can't handle liking a suck team, and it's awesome to like the best team even if every other kid in school likes them too. This accounts for 95% of Bulls fans my age not from Chicago.
4) You have some sort of bizarre little kid logic behind it. This often involves colors, mascots, logos...you know, the kind of reasons girls like sports teams.

The only pro team I've followed for more or less my entire life is the Boston Bruins. That choice was a combination of reasons #1 and #4. My babysitter at the time was the son of one of my mom's co-workers. My brother and I both loved having him as a babysitter because he'd play street hockey with us all day and let us do questionably dangerous things like play games that consisted of throwing two by fours at each other, that crappy girl babysitters would never let you do. He also played high school hockey, which to my six year old mind might as well have been the NHL. So he was essentially the coolest dude in the world as far as I was concerned, and while he wasn't a relative, he qualifies for the reason #1. The second part, the #4 part, was that I didn't know a Bruin was a bear, and thought it was some kind of a monster. In fairness the bear patches on the shoulders of the jersey's look at least as much like a monster as they do a bear, at least if you're a little kid.

As I got older and decided I wanted a baseball team to follow, I was in the strange position I mentioned at the beginning of this trainwreck. Almost all my friends in Albany were Yankees fans, and the Yankees were in the middle of winning a thousand world series in a row. I was way too old to be some frontrunning asshole, and the Yankees of the last fifteen years have been such a bunch of stuffed shirt clean cut douchebags that I couldn't get behind them even if they hadn't won in years.

So I became a Mets fan. And I'm obviously not going to pretend like I've suffered through ups and downs with them, because since I've followed the Mets they've been either really good or at least pretty alright to decent.

So here's where the title comes in. This year, for the first time in my brief life as a Mets fan, not only were the Mets pretty awesome, but the Yankees were sucking not one but many cocks. I made a half dozen or so $20 bets with friends of mine that the Mets would finish with a better regular season record than the Yankees, and I was so confident that I would have made a dozen more. Every commentator and sportswriter were declaring the Yankees dead in the water, so bad they wouldn't even make the wild card. The mets were riding high, close to a double digit lead atop the NL East. Everything was SO RIGHT.

But then, the Yankees decided to be the Yankees, and the Mets decided to be the Mets. Now the Yankees have the AL Wild Card on lock and are only a game and a half behind the Sox. The Mets however, are teetering on the brink of not only losing the NL East title, but missing the playoffs all together. And I'm going to have to listen to smug fucking Kyle and his stupid fucking Yankees as they probably win the World series, and the Mets will somehow get raped by a gang of wild dogs when they have to make an emergency landing in the desert. It's not the fact that the Yankees are playing near flawless baseball that bothers me. It's not even that the Mets are huffing hard. It's that both things are happening at the SAME TIME in what was supposed to be the Mets year. If you got served a shit sandwich for lunch every day for weeks on end, it would suck but you'd get used to it. But to one morning come in and see the lunchlady preparing a four course gourmet feast, with a big banner that said "JUST FOR YOU!" over it, and to think about it all morning, and get all excited...and then to get not only a shit sandwich but a COLD shit sandwich...man, that blows. And that's what's happening to Mets fans this year.

John Lovitz 4 Prez

Jon Lovitz already an awesome dude based solely on how fucking hilarious he is. Even if you were to erase his entire career and judge him based solely on The Critic, he'd be great. Actually, scratch that, even if he had never done anything but the one sketch on SNL where he plays the game show contestant who keeps getting answers wrong on purpose so he gets a worse and worse wedgie, he would STILL be great.

But the other day he did something that moved him from just plain great into the running for BEST DUDE EVER status. Apparently he was out somewhere and Andy Dick just came up to him and said "I'm putting the Phil Hartman hex on you; you're the next to die." Maybe Andy's jizz/meth slurpee had a little too much taurine in it and he was all hyped up, but short of that I seriously can't imagine what made him think that would be a good idea. I mean I don't know what prompts Andy Dick to do the majority of the things he's done in the last decade, but this just seems like such an obviously bad idea. It's not a secret that Lovitz and Hartman were pretty good friends, and I'd imagine even the local news on Planet Jackoffizoid where Andy lives these days must have picked that up.

But I don't think anyone could have predicted just HOW bad of an idea it was. When it first happened, I guess Lovitz was just kind of shocked or surprised or whatever. Then when he ran into Dick again, he expected an apology, which he didn't get. So then he "picked Andy up by the head and smashed him into the bar four or five times, and blood started pouring out of [Andy's] nose."

So Dick made the mistake that we all probably made, not realizing that not only is Jon Lovitz HI-LARIOUS, he's also HARD AZ NAILZ.

Okay, so smashing someone's face into a bar isn't really hard as nails, but considering most celebrity fights resemble THIS , it's pretty fucking sweet. And it's not like Jon Lovitz is some action star that takes all sorts of ass-kicking classes for his various roles. This is just a dude who wasn't having it anymore, and busted that fucker up. Good for you Jon Lovitz. Smash some face.

"With age comes wisdom."

I think there's a saying that's along those lines. Or maybe it's "the wisdom of age." Regardless, the general understanding is that you get smarter as you get older. And while for the most part that's been true in my life, sometimes I think the trajectory gets knocked off course a little bit. I guess you could also chalk said departures up to lapses in judgement as well. But in the past weeks I've managed to surprise myself not once but three times by doing things that most people figure out not to do well before the age of twenty five. Usually around say, twelve. I'll work my way through them in descending order of stupidity from "you're SURE you made it out of grade school?" to "tell you what, let me have those matches back."

The first being blowing up my toilet last week. And I don't mean in the "duuuuude, I just took the burliest dump EVER, I blew that shit UP" way. I mean in the more literal sense. To preface the situation: for those of you out there who are dirty commies/don't have calendars, last Wednesday was the 4th of July. Being a red blooded 'merican who really enjoys drinking, bar-b-que'ing, fireworks and any and all out-of-doors activities, it's a holiday I look forward to each year. With the exception of Christmas it's probably my favorite one.

This year however, was not one of my best. In fact, I'd say it was probably my worst. That's assuming I didn't have any particularly horrible 4th's in the first couple years of my life that were so traumatic that I've blocked them from my memory. Due to a variety of factors including my work schedule, inabilty to travel, weather and how long it took to get anywhere that day, I ended up doing exactly one of the handful of things I'd planned on doing. By the end of the night, my roomate/confidant/writing partner/belly-chain enthusiast Steve and I had given up on going up to our friend Trevor's for the fireworks, and ended up watching "Accepted" in our livingroom. Afterwards, I wanted to at least go sit on the roof and shoot off some of the sack of fireworks I had leftover from a trip to Cleveland a month or so ago. Despite his many positive qualities that make Steve the joy that he is, one of his downsides is that he's a pussy. By that I mean, he's afraid of heights/doesn't like fireworks that much, and he refused to climb the fire escape to our roof with me and light off fireworks. So I ended up on the roof by myself in the drizzling rain shooting roman candles and bottle rockets down into the street.

Now, as anyone who knows me well can tell you, there are few things I love more in the world than fireworks. Specifically the kind that you can shoot off yourself. The big shows are nice to watch and all, but I prefer the more up close and personal kind. A large part of that enjoyment comes from lighting them off with/at other people. One of my single favorite things in life is a good fireworks-fight, and that's one of the many standard 4th of July activities that I missed out on this year. Which also contributed to it being a kind of crappy year.

Point being, as much as I love fireworks, sitting on your roof in the rain by yourself is a pretty lonely time, no matter the activity. Around the same time that I started to get good and wet, my lighter started to shit the bed, so I headed inside. Still pretty bummed on the days events, or lack thereof, I went for a last ditch effort to cheer myself up. Amongst my various fireworks were a few packs of little black cat style firecrackers with waterproof wicks. Now, I've had black cats go off in my hand, in my pocket, down my shirt, pretty much everywhere they could go off save for between the ole' cheeks. (Yet.) So I assumed, like any other rational person would, that these things aren't exactly halfsticks. Being that the only body of water in my apartment was my toilet, I tossed one in the bowl, watched it sizzle, then PLOOP, nice little water spout.

Say what you will about me, but it really perked me up. Frankly I take pride in the fact that it's the little things in life that keep my spirits soaring. A sunny day, a crisp apple right off the tree, the smell of fresh cut grass, blowing shit up in a toilet...

The problem arose on the third try. After the pleasing geyser, there was a distinct cracking sound, and the lower half of the toilet bowl separated from the upper. The water that was left ended up on the floor, and that was pretty much the end of the toilet. I already knew this wasn't going to make me too popular with my roomates, and it probably didn't help matters that when Steve came in to see what I was talking about I started laughing again.

As an aside, we have two toilets, so it's not like I was causing anyone to have to go hobo-style and shit in a bag and throw it out the window. And yeah, blowing up the toilet was a stupid thing to do, but it's one of those things that no matter how rationally you can realize and understand that it was a bad idea, it doesn't stop it from being funny. I tried to propose the idea of not fixing the broken toilet so we'd have one toilet to make in and another to blow things up in. That resolution was voted down two to one. (I bet you can guess which to no-fun-niks voted "nay.")

The next morning I was waiting for the train to go into work after hockey, and I noticed that all the support beams in the subway station were now a much brighter red and had "wet paint" signs on them. Before I could even stop to think twice, I was just like "Really? For sure?" and stuck my hand on one of them. And believe it or not, the signs weren't kidding, it was wet paint. So I had a nice bright red palm to take to work.

The last thing happened the following day. A couple buildings on my street are under construction or being renovated, so there's a big dumpster parked down the block. Someone threw out a mattress that's just been leaning up against it for awhile now. It had rained on the fourth, pretty hard at times, and as I walked by it, I thought to myself "boy, I bet that old wet mattress that's had time to bake in the sun smells TERRIBLE." And again, before I really thought about it, I stuck my nose in for a big whiff. And yup, it smelled fucking disgusting. Jamming-a-hooker's-hoo-hah-with-a-dead-rat-on-a-stick-disgusting.

Again, that was probably something I could have assumed without double checking, much like the wet paint. But for whatever reason my initial instinct is just to check it out for myself. As someone I just met suggested when hearing all this, I guess I'm just curious.

Oh and the toilets fixed, so I won't get to find out what happens when you stick a bunch of firecrackers inside a tube of toothpaste and put it in the toilet. But whatever happens, I bet it's awesome.

Terry Crews may be the most underrated comedic actor of the last forty years. That's something of an arbitrary number, because I don't feel like sitting here and putting together any kind of accurate timeline where I can say, "oh, well, in 1967 there was a little known comic by the name of Sonny Jim who, despite countless years and miles logged touring the comedy circuit never got the recognition he deserved." I like the way "in the last forty years" sounds, so I'm going to go with that.

As I was saying, Terry Crews: he's never had a starring role, and beyond that he's pretty one dimensional. He's pretty much always cast as the "big scary black guy who _____" in any given movie. And to be fair, while Terry might have the range of a younger, buffer, blacker, Hoffman, the casting industry is a pretty raw job where you're constantly trying to weave between a million shitty actors and thousands of stressed out AD's who just want the role filled and don't have time to sit around watching the larval actors try to emerge from the cocoon of typecasting as a versatile butterfly of a thousand faces. Basically you need to get an actor, any actor, into the part so you can move on to the next one.

I hope everyone enjoyed that butterfly metaphor, because it took me a solid thirty seconds to remember the word "larval", and being that time is money, that shit wasn't free. Though in the interest of full disclosure, I'm writing this on a northbound train around noon and working my way through another tallboy, so my time isn't exactly priceless at the moment.

At some point I'm going to follow this blithering back to Terry Crews, but thinking about casting agents reminded me of when casting sent over a few dozen actresses to audition for the role of "Hooker #1" for a pilot that was shooting out of the production office for the other TV show I work on. Normally when we have auditions in the office it blows for me because I have to take time out of my busy schedule of trying to find punker videos on YouTube to direct a bunch of dumbass actors to the bathroom, kitchen, etc etc. But THIS day was awesome because the office was full of a ton of struggling lady actors, or "actresses" for the feminists out there, who came it dressed up like hookers. Which, to my mind, is even better than an office full of actual hookers, because this way I don't have to watch my wallet every thirty seconds, or get fired for ALLEGEDLY making time in the bathroom with said hookers.

But moving on, it's not to say that I, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't believe Terry is capable of a career turning performance as a "big scary black guy who's also a lovable retarded guy" ala Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. He just hasn't gotten that break yet. But honestly, you know what? Good for him. In a way I find it really obnoxious when actors bitch about getting typecast into a certain role, and complain about not being able to fully explore their potential or whatever other horseshit they're lead to believe they have by softhanded agents. Yeah, you have to go to work for twenty years and play variations on the same part over and over and over again, but that beats the shit out of going to work for thirty years doing LITERALLY the same thing every day, especially when that same thing is something that you hate and get paid jack shit to do, like most of the rest of the world.

I don't mean to say I begrudge actors who are able to break out of a certain role, and who are able to land all sorts of new and exciting parts. Good for them, if that helps make them happier, that rules. But there are worse things in the world than playing "farty guy" in National Lampoon straight to DVD movies for the rest of your life.

And this is where it finally gets back to Terry Crews. He's basically the same guy in every movie, but he has absolutely PERFECTED that role. The pinnacle of his acting achievements is White Girls. The Wayans Brothers written/directed/produced film features Crews at his absolute best. Were I to put together a comedy time capsule for the ages, it would have to include two scenes from White Girls. The first being when he sings Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" and the second being when he's on ecstasy at the dance club and is rave dancing shirtless with glowsticks and a whistle. Fuck. I defy you to watch either of those scenes without dying. And if you don't, you're a shitty asshole with a shitty asshole sense of humor.

When it comes down to it I have unending respect and admiration for Crews and the fact that he has no bullshit actor-y delusions of grandeur. When it comes down to it, he knows that he's a big scary buff black dude who has GREAT comedic timing, and if he takes his shirt off and raves out with a whistle and it makes the people laugh, that's all there is to it. It's all summed up in a bit from Raw, substituting "them", being smarmy pretentious jerkoffs everywhere, for "Bill" in the original bit.

"Do the people laugh when you [do] that shit? " "Yeah." "The tell [them] I said have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up."

And the two clips from White Chicks that I mentioned earlier are below. The second, the one at the club, is funnier in context, but it's still pretty hilarious even if you haven't seen the movie.

There was a point in my life that I'd be too embarassed to admit what I'm about to admit. Back in my youth, I was way too concerned about losing punker cred if it were to come out that I wasn't exceptionally well versed in the entire catalog of all the bands a serious punker is supposed to be aware of. Partially because when I was a little shithead and first getting into hardcore the internet was still in it's fledgling stages, and for those of us with AOL and a dialup connection, which, in the mid 90's, was most everyone except super geeks, the internet was primarily useful only for experimenting with cybersex and patiently awaiting the reveal of a nipple as you tried to download the free samples off the playboy site. Come to think of it, cybersex, or "cybering", as the kids called it at the time, is something else that I probably would have been too embarassed to admit to at one point. But you know what, if you were like 13 and talking dirty to strangers who may or may not be hot chicks was a new and exciting thing and you didn't AT LEAST check it out, there's something wrong with you.

The point is, it wasn't like it is now where you can get any record ever made in about three mintues of searching. So instead of hearing every awesome record under the sun, I heard a handful which I fell in love with and can pretty much recite word for word to this day (see: Bad Brains-s/t).

A band that I'd heard when I was younger, but only in snippets due to never owning any of their stuff, was Poison Idea. At some point I got a copy of "Feel the Darkness" on CD, and that ended up getting regular rotation for awhile. I don't think anyone is going to try and debate the merits of that record, or at least not anyone with halfway decent taste. But as great as it is, it's a very different record than "Pick Your King", which, in a typically roundabout fashion, is the reason for this post, and the admission which was alluded to earlier.

Here it is: I never REALLY go into "Pick Your King" until the last few months. Yeah, of course I'd heard the record before, and it's not like I disliked it in the slightest, but for whatever reason it never just kicked me in the stomach until recently. I'm now at the point most kids hit at 17 where I just can't stop listening to it. It's such a perfect record I'm honestly dumbfounded that I haven't tried to whittle a larger hole into it and just take it to bed with me. Not a single throwaway song, and it doesn't let up from start to finish.

I'm not going to go on and on about how great it is because a) pretty much everyone knows that already and b) that's not the point of this. The point is, it's totally sweet finally getting to the age where I give less and less of a flying fuck what anyone thinks of me, least of all a bunch of little asshole punkers who want to call me a poseur because I just got into PYK at 25. One of the few things I'm looking forward to about getting older is that the older I get the less of a fuck I give about other people, and it's going to be awesome when I'm 50 and stop bothering with hassles like "pants" just to appease other people.

Hardcore rules, ok?

Zines, Zines, always more Zines.

That's actually rarely the case. Most of the time these days, zines are few and far between. While they're inarguably becoming more and more antiquated every day, there's something to be said (and has been, ad nauseum) for the qualities of a paper zine that still make them worthwhile. Thanks to my current job I've been able to finally do Brickshitter on the regular, and I've been trading with people more frequently too. Matt Radiobeat has been banging out Beat Sheet just as quickly, if not more so, and I just got the For the Worse/Concrete Facelift tour diary issue in the mail. I also picked up Ride the Fury Fanzine #1, a new zine out of NJ that my friend Pat puts out. More on both of those in a second, but getting new zines in general is always a highlight of doing a zine, so anyone who's doing anything zine-ish these days, please send me a copy, I'll send back all my garbage and more. Lucky you. Hardcore zines rule, ok?

Beat Sheet Vol. 5: For the Worse/Concrete Facelift World Tour Diary

Matt roadied for the above four day world tour, and recounts the weekend's events in this issue. Most tour diaries are either so bland and matter of fact ("Show was cool, some kids moshed. Ate pizza after, watched movies. Van ride was long. Repeat.") or made up entirely of longwinded inside jokes ("So then Bobby Stagedive was like 'ALFALFA SPROUTS, COCKSUCKERS!' and everyone was all 'LOL' and then we all went to that one place that Stevie said was awesome, but it was only awesome becuz he got this girls digits there and then f-banged her in the van that one time.") This zine, happily, is neither. There's a good balance between the funny shit that went on and plenty of show/bands talk as well. Really entertaining, perfect length for a straight through read with no filler. And on a strictly aesthetic level, this is the best looking issue Matt has done by far. He'll have the whole thing up for a download in PDF form on his blog sometime soon, so check that out, or email him (radiobeat@gmail.com) for a copy.

Ride the Fury Fanzine #1

RTF is a Jersey based zine that, at least so far, focuses mostly on said area. RTF#1 is a short fullsize zine with a Dustheads interview, record reviews, two short columns and a list of tips on how to go about booking DIY shows. Pat and Jeff split the writing pretty much down the middle, so there's two perspectives that are different enough to stand apart but not so far divergent to give the thing a schizo tone. The interview is a little on the short side, but otherwise no complaints, and as the Dustheads are arguably the best band going right now, no such thing as too much exposure. (Side note: Tall Tales I and II are both out now on Don Giovanni records, I is almost out of print, so get both asap.) In addition to the interview there are reviews of new records from the Ergs, Mother Night Hellhole, Kill Your Idols, and Pellinore, a column about the last last Kill Your Idols show, and one about the whole "coatrack" issue.

Both columns are concise and straight to the point, the only issue I (personally) have is with the coatracks one. And you know what, as I typed the following few sentences, I started thinking about the column and remembered that what I'm arguing against isn't what the column was saying at all. The whole "not enough girls in hardcore" thing always sets me off though, so I ended up on a fairly unrelated tangent, at least as far as said column is concerned. But this is my blog, and I'm a pretty self indulgent guy, so I'm leaving it in. But for the record, the column is actually saying that there are plenty of girls in DA SCENE and that people just need to look around more, at least in jersey. Basically. So here's the aforementioned blathering: Partially because I'm a sexist, but partially because I don't believe in coddling people, I have zero desire to go out of my way to make hardcore more welcoming to girls, or to give them a pat on the back for showing up and singing along. I also don't go around looking for other "under represented" groups and say like "hey, black guy, you know what you might like? Punk rock! And we don't have too many of you folks, so you should come up the quotient. Awesome. Oh and if you have any friends who are gays or asians that would be GREAT. High five!" Hardcore is something that primarily appeals to guys, and, for whatever reasons, white guys. While I obviously have no problem with it if girls and every other race under the sun wants to come to shows, (except Italians, just don't trust em) I don't think there's any need to adjust things to cater to people. I don't expect the knitting classes at the Y to start including tailgating and fireworks just to make sure I feel welcome.

Yeah, so at one point, I was still talking about Ride the Fury. This is also the first zine Pat and Jeff have done, and while it shows with some of the layout aspects**, it's still an enjoyable read, and hopefully we'll be seeing more in the future.

(**About that layout...something it took me literally years of doing crappy zines to learn is to limit the handwritten parts to an absolute minimum. I know how it is, last minute stuff that you forgot, but try to use it very sparingly.)

Get ahold of Pat (gerity@rider.edu or http://myspace.com/xpatgerityx) or Jeff (atlf27@comcast.net or http://myspace.com/jeffguerriero) for a copy.

And, my last little plug, Brickshitter #3-5 are still available for mailorder, send your mailing address to grossnation@gmail.com, and #6 will be out in a few weeks. And all the back issues, #1-5 are up for download as PDF's on the myspace (if the links are dead, check back in a few days, I have to refresh them every so often.

dog cum.

Brickshitter Fanzine #5 is Out Now!!!

Issue #5 features interviews with Black SS from Syracuse, and Nate Wilson/Gloom Records. It also has the third round of hardcore superbattles, this one focusing on Boston. And of course, another installment of Dude-eronomy from Mike Dikk and Jay Pud, a Steve Fontamozzarella column about the ladies, Twiztid Chris's column, and some other nonsense.

As always, send your mailing address to grossnation@gmail.com for a free copy in the mail, and it will be up along with all the other back issues on the myspace for download as a pdf in the next few days.

I've also made major steps in the advancement of the zine when I purchased a giant extendo-stapler, so the issues are no longer just folded together. It's a wild twenty first century world out there, and I'm diving in headfirst. Hoo-rah.

make sure to check out all the bands/people/stuff in this issue, as well as other things the contributors do:

Black SS
Gloom Records
Gloom/Nate on Myspace
Nate's Punk/Metal Blog
Dumpin' (Mike Dikk's Music Blog)
EWA (Music, Movies, Random Shit Blog feat. Mike Dikk, Tommyrot from Black SS, more)
Pictures of Idiots
My Comics Blog
Brickshitter Fanzine on Myspace


In other zine news, I got issues 1 and 2 of "Treble High, Talent Low", a new zine out of Glens Falls, NY, and issue 4.5 of "Beat Sheet", a newsletter style zine from the Boston-ish area in the mail this week.

TREBLE HIGH, TALENT LOW:

Treble High is a really well put together zine, though it may just be impressive to me because my layouts are either exceptionally sparse or look like they were used to paper a racoon breeding pen. The first issue has the first half of a 9 Shocks interview, an interview w/ Not Very Nice Zine/Tape label, some columns, some poetry (that's happily not pretentious, obnoxious, or poorly constructed) and a comic-y sort of thing. The second issue has the rest of that 9 Shocks interview as well as interviews w/ The Jury from Albany and Gross National Product from Florida, as well as more columns and so forth.

I think what I like most about Treble High is that while I'm not terribly interested in the zine's politics, nor do I particularly agree with them, Brandon and his contributors write about them in such a manner that it's readable, neither preachy nor boring. Although having been in a band that's covered Vile on multiple occasions, and another "band" that's done an entire Vile cover set, I can't say I'm really behind the whole last page rallying cry in issue #2. But it's refreshing to read a zine that still manages to be enjoyable even though most of the subject matter isn't exactly up my alley.

All around great zine, and really well put together, especially considering Brandon is in 10th grade or something like that. Certainly miles beyond my first zine. If he has any copies left, definitely try and get ahold of one. Write him at: brandon_gaffney@yahoo.com.

BEAT SHEET:

Beat Sheet is a newsletter type zine that Matt Radio Beat puts together every so often. They seem to come out around every month, sometimes more frequently so. Short and sweet, with show reviews, record reviews, food reviews, pictures and general musings, thrown together in an appropriately haphazard cut and paste style. An always entertaining read on the goings on of hardcore in the general New England area and beyond, and it comes out regularly enough that the record reviews and recommendations are actually relevant and current. I think he still has the most recent issue and possibly the one before it, so write and grab a copy while you can. Radiobeat@gmail.com

It's been said to death, but there really is something rewarding about doing paper zines, and even more so checking out other peoples zines. Sure, a large percentage of them are horrible, but it's still worth checking out new ones and tracking down old ones, at least as far as I'm concerned. Speaking of which, if anyone has the first three issues of Town Of Hardcore, get in touch.

And of course, anyone doing a zine right now, I'd love to trade. I might make fun of it later, but you'll have plenty of ammo to return fire if need be. Write to grossnation@gmail.com to set up trades, because I'm moving in the next few weeks and don't know what my mailing address will be yet.

Happy Birthday Don Rickles!

I'm sure if I actually wished him a happy birthday to his face he'd spit on me and then insult me in such an acerbic manner as to make my head spin and set my loins so aflame they'd spontaneously combust. I should disclose that one of the reasons Sarah Silverman ranks so high in my top twenty is that the idea of her breaking my balls whilst balling me is about as close to heaven as it gets. You know how Jack Black was blinded by love or whatever in Shallow Hal? Well that's me, but with one liners. I'm actually concerned that if I were to hang out with Don Rickles long enough he'd eventually start looking more and more like a sexy broad, that one morning I'd wake up next to a 80 year old man. And contrary to popular belief, that's not my shortlist of life goals.

Don Rickles is the Moses of insult comics. He went up on the mountain and came back down with perfection. He isn't the first, he won't be the last, but he won't be topped. Triumph is the only one that's ever come close, and he's a fucking puppet.

He also just published his memoirs, which you can (and should) buy HERE.

And finally, I'll leave you with the comedic equivalent of a four day orgasm. Whatever that asian meditation sex thing Sting does is called, that's bullshit. This is the real deal. 81 years young, hopefully 81 more.

The Kunker War Bunker, a Historical Analysis.

In various posts on this blog and in some zines I've done I've made reference to the time I spent living with Greg and AJ at 41 Kunker Ave in Latham, more affectionately/accurately known as "The KWB" or "The Kunker War Bunker." I can't remember who came up with that name, I'm going to say it was either Greg or Kyle, but for awhile Greg listed his occupation as "General of the KWB." Which was pretty appropriate because that was during his long, drawn out unemployed phase, which was a dark and strange world that I got drawn into for awhile, bur more on that later. As a brief aside, it wasn't dark and strange because he wasn't working, but because of the hours he started to keep and the way he occupied that time.

But moving on, the time I spent living there and some of the times just hanging out before and after have added up to make up a large chunk of some of the best/most ridiculous moments of my life. Rather than just try and do a big entry about those times, or mention them sporadically throughout this thing, I decided to start putting together a timeline of sorts of the house in it's various stages and occupancies.

This first entry is just a very general history of the house predating my time there, as best I understand it. It's not exceptionally comical or interesting, but it helps to explain how Greg and AJ came to be the quasi-owners of an entire house.

When I met them, Greg and AJ were living up the street with their folks on Grandview. Kyle did a really good job of talking about the neighborhood and its inhabitants in his blog, so I won't go into that at all. But at the time, which was a little less than nine years ago, they lived up the street on Grandview and their Grandmother lived down the street at the future KWB. She was their maternal grandmother, and their Mom grew up in that house, and (I think?) their grandfather built the house primarily with his bare hands, which is pretty awesome. Somewhere around 5 or 6 years ago she moved up the street to Grandview and then passed away a few years later. The house was then semi-used until Greg came back from culinary school in pittsburgh and then working in Nashville, at which point he and AJ first occupied the house simultaneously. Being that the house had been in the family for generations it was well beyond paid off, and so it was a cheap and easy way to get Greg and AJ out of the house up the street, so it made sense all around. And essentially, this is where our story begins.

The next entry will be my first stay in the house, and it's birth as the KWB in a fire of fun and idiocy.

Brickshitter #4 is out.

Brickshitter Fanzine Issue #4 feat. Mother Night, harDCore superbattle, a mike dikk column about hype/sensi-male music, another steve fontamozzarella column about ladies, a kyle chard column about the state of hardcore merch, a Twiztid Chris column about the state of the union and a joe steinhardt financial advice column.

Free as always, send mailing address to: grossnation@gmail.com for a copy. I didn't make it to the post office this weekend due to a sever bout of inebriation, but the people who are waiting for issue 3, the second round of those are going out this week as well.

Issue 5 out in a few weeks w/ more of the same.

other Brickshitter news:
-we're on myspace, add us: http://myspace.com/brickshitterzine
-all the back issues are up for download in PDF format on the myspace. issue 4 will be up in a week or so.
-still in need of puke pictures. send any and all to grossnation@gmail.com

-check out the following things/contributors:

Mike Dikk/Dumpin'
Kyle Chard
Mother Night
Brickshitter on MySpace

Brickshitter Returns.

So Brickshitter Fanzine is back in action, issue 3 came out two weeks ago, 3.1 (the revised and nicer looking #3) and #4 will be out by this Saturday. There's a Myspace for it too, and all the old issues will be up in PDF format in a little bit. So add us, THANKS.

Brickshitter Fanzine

Fucking Blogger.

So no matter how much I mess with it and change the formatting, I can't get the font sizes to stay normal for the post below. If it weren't for all the links I'd just cut paste and do it all over again, but thats far too much hassle. It's kind of frustrating that an otherwise really easy to use thing has such a shit aspect to it. And I talked to people who actually know about website stuff who have the same problem, so it's not just me being a caveman.

Hopefully you can trudge through the size changes and still embrace the exhilirating and arousing content that lies beneath.

I feel like a bag of dicks.

I've been sick for the last four days, and between my head feeling like it weighs 30 pounds, everything tasting like medicine, and generally feeling like a 75 year old man, I've had a really hard time getting motivated to do anything. Just making it in to work Friday was enough of a chore.

That said, I'm going to keep this thing updated come hell or high water. I'm too mentally fuzzy to put anything exceptionally creative up, so this is going to be a brief list of things I'm excited about these days. As always, since I have impeccable taste in everything, you should check these things out too, because they're all pretty great, or will be. I'll try and include entertaining and helpful links wherever possible.

1. 300
This should be a pretty big no brainer. If I didn't already have a massive hard-on for pretty much anything Frank Miller does, the trailers alone would be enough to sell me on this. And pretty much everyone I know* is equally excited, so this won't be too eye-opening for anyone, unless you live underneath a rock. A rock WITHOUT an internet connection.
(*My friend Matt is actually actively opposed to this movie, and while I think he's crazy, his reasoning is actually pretty funny. "Like when I first saw the commercial I was so into the battle scenes. Then there would be like some sort of fairy floating around. And I was not into it. I think im going to smoke weed and watch Passion of the Christ instead.")





2. Mother Night/Hellhole/Staring Problem @ the Court Tavern

The court tavern is some bar on the outskirts of MY New Brunswick, which is generally limited to the areas between the park where we play football, the train station, 75/77 Louis, Easton Ave, and sometimes the Rutgers Dining hall as an outside boundary. I mention the paramaters of my NB because the first time I ever went to the Court Tavern it seemed like a far off and mystical voyage. And it's still farther than I usually stray, in the weird no-man's land between fancy-downtown and sleepy-mexican-town. As far as bars that have shows, it's pretty cool. More or less on par with downstairs Valentines, as far as a comparison for the Albany folk. But Valentines doesn't have Williams Brewed Hot Lager on tap.
More importantly, this show is going to rule. I'm not from New Jersey and it's not 1999 anymore, so I don't really care about Ensign. And I don't know who The Gaslight Anthem are, but Hellhole are quickly becoming one of my favorite bands, Mother Night always kills live, and I've been wanting to see Staring Problem for awhile. AND it's St. Patrick's day, which doesn't mean anything to me in the way of "Hoi Toi Toi, Proid of the Oyrish!", because I'm no fan of the Irish, despite being half myself. But it DOES mean something to me in the way of "you're allowed to drink in the street." So I'm sure by 2pm I'll be good and drunk, and if the weather's decent, there's nothing better than drinking outdoors and then doing something fun.

3. Farce of the Penguins
Most cinephiles and scholars of film agree that the greatest movie of the last 50 years, and possibly in movie history was a delightful dash of whimsy that sprang off the screen and into our hearts in the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Eight by the name of...Dirty Work. Bob Saget, who directed Dirty Work hasn't directed a feature film until now. And by feature film, I mean 80 minutes of stock nature footage with Penguins telling dick and fart jokes. Norm makes a brief appearance during a penguin orgy with the highlight line of the movie: "Hey, a foursome, can I join in? No? Can I just urinate on the four of you then?"



4. "New" Cracked Magazine
Well, life is really just doing its best to give me lemons, wait for me to turn them into lemonade, then take away my lemonade and kick me in the crotch. This entry WAS going to be about how I randomly picked up an issue of Cracked for a train ride home, and spent the entire trip pissing off Zach and Steve by laughing uncontrollably. If you were ever 10 and not a dork, you read both Mad and Cracked. You always knew that Mad was the superior magazine, but there just weren't enough puns in a month, so you had to get Cracked too. It was always okay, but nothing amazing. This is an entirely new magazine, that was front to back hilarious. Everything from a first person piece by Socrates as he goes door to door under Meghans law* "Oh and by the way, I'm an excellent tutor. Ever hear of Plato? I taught him everything he knew, for free! Well, not exactly for free." to "New Years Resolutions vs. New Years Reality" (Resolution when offered a drink: "No thanks, I'm cutting back." Reality: "No thanks, I brought my own thermos of scotch.")
Yes, this entry WAS going to be about how great that was, and how I just became a subscriber. But when google searching for an image, I found out that after the relaunch in it's new format that just started in August, Cracked has folded. It's now entirely web based. So that pretty much ruined my day. And this blog entry. Fuck. Go to the website though, it's still really funny. But man, life is a evil, evil, bitch monster. With fangs.
*Socrates fucked boys. In case anyone somehow didn't know that.


5. Movie Trailers.
I honestly think that trailers are my favorite part of the moviegoing experience. Even if the movie I go to see ends up being awful, there's always at least one or two good trailers. And most of the time, after the trailers are over I want to see every single movie advertised. Even the movie with Stone Cold thats a blatant rip off of Series 7 and Battle Royale, but way dumber. So since I'm now in a bad mood about the whole Cracked going under thing, I'm going to end this by just linking my top 10 current trailers, in no particular order. Except #1 is #1.

1. Knocked Up
2. Aqua Teen
3. Mr. Woodcock
4. Live Free or Die Hard
5. Grindhouse

6. Dead Silence
7. Reign Over Me

8. Disturbia
9. Black Sheep
10. Shooter

I'm not saying these are the best movies coming out, or that they're even the ones I'm looking forward to the most. I could probably have done a list of 25 and still left off some sweet ones. I left off things like the Simpsons Movie and Spiderman 3 because everyone's going to see those anyway. There's no closure to this entry. Ta ta. (P.S- I can't figure out how to un-underline this last part. Which is just more sand in my craw. Fuck.)

This is going to be my addendum to Kyle's "Behind the Mall" blogs. While I didn't grow up in Latham or the neighborhood, I've spent a ton of time there for going on eight years. For part of my sophmore year and practically all of my junior and senior years I stayed at Greg and AJ's almost every weekend. This was in large part because of the fact that at that point I only had my conditional drivers licence, which in New York means you can't drive after 9pm until you turn 18, unless you take drivers ed (which is for queers.) Greg's parents didn't care when I drove, and since at that point I was one of the few of our friends who could drive at all, this made doing things a whole lot easier. Before I get too far off track with a story that will inevitably go nowhere, I'll just jump right into it. These are the characters/places/events I experienced as a hanger-on in the 'hood.

1. Bobby Ray.

I always knew him as Bobby Arnold, and out of everyone on this list, I've had the most interaction with him. When I first met Bobby, he was just this goofy little kid who told Greg how much he liked Greg's boxers. As he grew older, he turned into this quasi sketchy lump with a moustache. AJ and I have speculated that he probably can't deal with a razor on his own, so his mom must groom it for him (see Kyle's Blog for info on her). Now, this means that a grown woman thinks to herself "What would make my already haggard son look better? OF COURSE!! A thin, scraggly, greasy excuse for a moustahce!" I guess it's kind of arbitrary, since it's not like Bobby was going to be pulling babes in any event (except by the hair, possibly).

I spent a summer and winter break living at the Kunker War Bunker about 2 years ago. The house is laid out with a big livingroom downstairs attached to the kitchen through an archway, and then a bathroom and two bedrooms to the left (as you face the house). The second floor consists of an open livingroom and a separate master bedroom. This was pre-fire, while AJ still lived there too. I had the upstairs livingroom as my bedroom in the winter, and the downstairs front bedroom for the summer. I mention those locations only because the way the house is laid out is somewhat relevant when explaining my two most recent dealings with Bobby.

That winter break was a month and a half, and after a few halfassed attempts to get a job within walking distance of the house, I decided there was no point in trying to get a job for a few weeks anyway. Greg was unemployed at the time as well, and I can't remember if AJ was in school but he had a pretty loose schedule either way. This lead to Greg and I falling into a nocturnal sleep schedule, we'd usually wake up somewhere between 4 and 6 PM, get dressed, go hang out with whoever was around that night in Albany, come back home and bullshit around until around 7am, then finally crank it enough times to fall asleep as the sun was coming up. It would be a really depressing lifestyle if it carried on for more than a few months, but it was awesome for a short period of time. The only other useless detail that helps with this story is that there was no heat in my room and there was a hole in the window, so it was painfully cold, which lead to me sleeping underneath 7 blankets and a sleeping bag, completely covered and cocooned, head to toe.

One of my mornings/the rest of the worlds afternoon's, I was starting to wake up but pretty much still asleep when I heard a quiet rustling from above the blankets. I groggily pulled myself out of my nest and was fully awoken to the unpleasant sight of Bobby's face about 3 inches from mine. I jumped and almost fell out of bed, which spooked him and he ran off like some kind of frightened racoon or possum. Which honestly isn't too much of a stretch when it comes to how he carries himself in general. I pulled all the covers back over and hoped to fall back asleep and pretend it was some kind of bad dream. But a moment later, I hear footsteps coming up the stairs, and AJ walks up with Bobby in tow.

"Tell Sawyer what you said to me."
(Sneer and general smothered noises from Bobby.)
"Come on, tell him!"

After he looked around the room warily and muttered to himself some more, Bobby stared down at me.

"Yer...yer...yer a no good lazy bum JUST LIKE MY BROTHER!"

No matter how low my lifestyle had sunk at that point, there was no way I was going to lay around and be insulted by Bobby Arnold.

"BOBBY. Get the fuck OUT of here."

And with that, he scampered back down the down the stairs and out of the house.

The following summer I was back living at the KWB, but this time working at Safway Scaffolding with Kyle, and seeing daylight on a regular basis again, unlike the winter. I had gotten home from work and was dicking around in my room before heading out, and I heard AJ and Bobby talking in the other room. This was the first time I'd seen Bobby with his post "6 month Pie Eating contest" physique, so that was kind of a surprise. Though it really wasn't too shocking, seeing as I'd imagine his diet consists mostly of ho-ho's and cheez-its. I still don't understand why it shocked and unnerved Kyle as much as it did. He kind of plays it down in his blog, but he was in absolute disbelief when Greg and I first told him, and then after seeing Bobby with his own eyes, seriously contended for some time that Bobby might actually be wearing a fat suit. He's such a wierd dude sometimes.

So Bobby strolls into my room, and with some prodding from AJ, starts to brag about what a great rapper he is, and how he never loses a battle, and so forth. AJ suggest that Bobby battle me. Now, while this may come as a shock to some of you, I'm not the seasoned hip hopper that I might seem to be, and unless I'm amnesic and am forgetting a past life, have never actually "battled" anyone before. But I don't see any way I could have possibly turned this down. So I accepted Bobby's challenge, and said he could go first. He then told me he had to go "get ready" in the other room. He walked into Greg's bedroom, which was then across the hall from mine, and closed the door. From outside the door all AJ and I could hear was something between Bobby hyping himself up and lots of cursing.

After about a minute of this, he comes back out and immediately starts to serve me, as the kids say. If I could recount his freestyle verbatim, I would, but even if I had a dictaphone with me at the time, I doubt it would have been possible. But as memory serves, it went something like this: "Bitch motherfucker fuck you I'mma fuck shit bitch fuck you motherfuck bitch slut shit fucker fuck fuck fuck." Only it lasted almost two minutes. When he was done, I did the only thing I could do, and conceeded. I mean, he was on a whole new level of no-bullshit rapping that cut out all the flowery prose and got right down to the best part, the swearing.

2. Zach Arnold.

I only really have one story to share when it comes to Zach, but I think it gives a pretty good snapshot of the kid. Seven or eight years ago I was waiting in my car outside Greg's house to pick him up to go somewhere. I think Tony Fed was in the car too, but I can't really remember. After a moment or so, Zach moseys up to the car, leans on the doorframe and pokes his head in the window.
"Whatre you guuyshh doin?"
"Waiting for Greg. What're you doing."
"Shhhnnoootthhin."
In his one grubby little paw he was clutching some kind of container with a spout which he kept sucking on.
"Zach, what are you drinking?"
"Thissh? Ittssh a honey bear."

Yeah, he was drinking a big plastic container of honey, right out of the spout. Just strolling around town, suckin on his honey. I've been known to eat some bizarre things before, and I'm sure Kyle will say that a tortilla chip sandwhich is up there with this, but I'm sorry, it's not.

3. Steve Dunkin.

Two quick things relating to Steve. First, for a few years running, Greg would always try and talk a bunch of us into throwing a brick through the windshield of whatever shitty car Steve was working on at the time. We'd always kind of play along like we thought it was a great idea, and Greg would inevitably end up dissapointed when yet another night ended without any bricks going anywhere.

Towards the end of high school, Steve did a band with Joe Cammarere called "Dead To These Eyes." If I ever get really ambitious and dig up the demo and rip it, I'll be sure to post it here, but that isn't too likely. The only thing worth knowing about the band was that they wrote parts specifically so Steve could jump out from behind the drum kit to mosh for his own band. Then the other guitar player would throw down his guitar and join him. The most memorable of these moments was when they played some shit show at Winners, to about 20 people. I barely have a functioning memory, much less a photgraphic one, but I'm pretty sure there were jumpkicks off the stage involved. Now, Joe had enough sense not to take part in this stuff, but he still spent almost a year in a band with these clowns. Bravo, Joe.

Oh and Steve also got the outline for some kind of tribal tattoo on his back that just looked like a big tribal christmas tree. So that's pretty sweet too.

4. Mrs. Breninger

I've never actually met this woman, but Kyle left out a pretty important detail in his blog, namely that she apparently has giant tan boobs with sunspots on them, which he used to watch from his upstairs window. And I think there were some half baked schemes to go watch wrestling at Joey's house and somehow seduce Mrs. Breninger during the course of the evening.

5. Snake and the Snakepit.

I was going to write about this but I'm just going to use this opportunity to bug Kyle to do it instead, as I can't remember all the details and I wouldn't do the story justice.

So that's pretty much it, my far inferior yet slightly expanded add-on to Kyle's Behind The Mall blogs. It was worth writing if for no other reason that it got me to start working on a brief history of the Kunker War Bunker, from it's inception around 4 years ago to the present day.

And lastly, if you haven't already, go read the full version of all of this in Kyle's Blog. He's been updating pretty frequently and it gets better every day.

Back out of Retirement!

I rejoined the workforce Monday for the fourth season of Rescue Me. So far its less work than my last job, better hours, a shorter commute, and it pays better. I'll be working all the way until August, with a few hiatuses (read: vacations) in there, and then when August comes, I start collecting unemployment and HELLO MEXICO! That's right Greg Strait, YOUR tax dollars are going to pay for MY donkey show in Tijuana and cabana on the Mexican beach.

Life is good.

Netflix Reviews Part 3.

21. The Dead Kennedy's-The Early Years Live
Mix of live footage and random interview type clips. Highlights are tv spots/interviews from Jello's mayoral run. Not mindblowing, and pretty short, under an hour, but worth watching.

22. The Office-Season 2
Starting with the Dundies and ending with Casino Night, pretty untouchable. I don't want to talk about how wrapped up I've gotten in the Pam/Jim thing, and how much that ending killed/thrilled me. The current season (3) has been even more of a rollercoaster. Ah, love.
Oh, and it's fucking hilarious.

23. Surburbia
Not the Linklater one, which rules as well, but in a different way. Skinner is pretty great, and it's pretty much the archtype for any and all punk movies to come. "I hate cops to the max."

24. The Basketball Diaries
I'm probably the only guy my age who didn't see this within the first ten years it came out. The first half of the movie is all "man, being a little bastard is AWESOME!", and the second half is all "man, being a little bastard who gets into herion SUCKS!" Oh, but he became a writer, so it's a-okay. The cliff jumping part just made me wnt to go back to the Rexford Bridge. Really good movie, probably would have had a bigger impact on me if I saw it when I was 15 instead of 25. And by that I mean I would have gotten fucked up and stolen a car, then robbed a soda fountain. ON WEED.

25. The Propostion
Oh, so you think you're bad-ass, huh? You think you can kick ass and take names, huh? WELL NOT IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK MOTHEFUCKER. BANG! Grittiest movie since....True Grit? I don't know, I'm basing that strictly on the title. But jesus, this movie was so good. Ray Winstone is the fucking man, between this and Mr. French in the Departed, so underrated. John Hillcoat and Nick Cave are working together again, adapting a Cormac McCarthy book, can't remember which one. Suffice to say, it should be awesome.

26. The Wire-Season 1
Pretty much the only serious show I've ever really gotten into. And, because of that, I have nothing to say about that. Essentially it's every other cop/lawyer/crime/political show if all the shitty parts were replaced with pure, undiluted, awesome.

27. Scum
I put this on my queue after somehow mistaking it for this TV show "Made In Britain" where Tim Roth is a crazy teenage skinhead. This is a movie about British reform schools/juvenile detention center type thing. Ray Winstone is really young and still hard as nails as the new kid who comes in and takes over as the "Daddy" or basically the head badass kid. He leads a revolt after one kid kills himself, but it gets put down by THE FUCKING MAN. Meeting the leader of the black kids with the pipe for the fistfight though...ridiculous. Really fucked up/great/fucked up movie.

28. Bukowski- Born Into This
Documentary about Bukowski from childhood until the end of his life. Really well put together with lots of old footage of Buk himself mixed with current interviews of people who knew him ranging from his ex-wife and John Martin to Tom Waits and Sean Penn. I watched this after reading "Charles Bukowski- Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life" by Howard Sounes, which is one of the better Bukowski bio's out there, so it was awesome to see and hear all the people I'd already read about. It's no big secret that I've got a massive hard-on for Bukowski, so maybe I liked this more than the average person would, but if you have even a passing interest in him, it's definitely worth seeing. As a side note, I just saw "Factotum", which was also pretty awesome, despite the fact that Matt Dillon is way too good looking to be Buk. But yeah, check that out too.

29. Sympathy For Mr. Vengance
I can't remember where this falls in the trilogy. I THINK this is first, then Oldboy, then Lady Vengance, but I could be totally wrong. This started out really slow, and I was pretty let down until everything fell in motion and it got awesomely fucked up, just like Oldboy. The end isn't quite as "HOW COULD LIFE EVER EVER GET THIS FUCKED UP AND SHITTY" as Oldboy, but it's close. I can't begin to fathom what it's like living inside Chan-wook Park's head. Probably kind of like a japanese Hubert Selby, but with more murdering. Fuck.

30. Fletch Lives
So for some reason Netflix doesn't carry Fletch. I blame it all on Kevin Smith and his ill-fated plan to remake Fletch that shit the bed a few years ago. Bear with me- it's also near impossible to find Fletch on DVD for less than 20 bucks, and it's the most basic DVD, with no special features, and the shitty cardboard case. The only thing I can figure is that Universal was holding out to release a special edition to coincide with the remake that never happened. And I'm going to blame that for the fact that Fletch is STILL on my "saved" list. I'm pretty steamed about it, to be honest. Fletch Lives is readily availabe in affordable format AND on netflix, so it hasn't been a total wash. Great movie either way. "We call them Klookies."