The World At Large

Don't hang on. Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.

Yeah, I'm quoting "Dust in the Wind," but it's fitting on a number of levels, one of which is representative of my classically venomous yet vaguely poetic self; a little quality that I've made all my own. In any case, generally speaking, nothing lasts forever, barring the above exceptions made by Kansas, and the current presidential administration is trying its damnedest to prove even them wrong.

I used to like the song "Dust in the Wind" until one day I sat down with my guitar, started playing it, and somewhere along the line, completely without noticing what hellworthy sin I was committing, I started playing "Silent Lucidity" by Queensryche, a song I've never liked, and it pretty much wrecked "Dust in the Wind" for me. One song's similarity ends up destroying the masterpiece, sort of like how "She Will Be Loved" makes me hate everything that Maroon 5 has ever done ... and will ever do. Okay, it's a bad example, because there's no masterpiece, there, but I just like taking jabs at Maroon 5.

Speaking of dust in the wind, Sunday was the fifteenth anniversary of the Plainfield tornado, which destroyed Plainfield high school, my geometry teacher's house, and the local video store, blowing the porno section on to my high school's football field. No, seriously, one of my friends recovered a copy of Splendor in the Ass from the forty-yard line. Yes, it's funny because it's true. Also true is the fact that my high school's homecoming game was against Plainfield, and the unofficial slogan was apparently, "Blow 'em away, they're used to it." Cruel and heartless, certainly, but there is nothing on this earth more cruel and heartless than a motivated teenage student body. The other big one that year was noting how the name of the town was so very apropos, as Plainfield had been reduced to being a plain field.

And, if your sense of humor is anywhere near as dark as my own, it's funny... because it's true.

Little something I failed to mention in my last post: I met Wizzo at work earlier in the week. While this may sound to the uninitiated like a repeat of the Urinator Incident from a showing of Speed 2 at my first movie theater, Wizzo was actually the resident magician on the Bozo Show. Now, this is a big event for me, seeing how the Bozo Show inspired one of the great and famous fuck-ups of my life, when I single-handedly managed to cause the end of my relationship with one of my girlfriends because I was inspired to call her Bozo Bucket Number Six. I relayed to Wizzo the story of how I happened to do such a thing and he immediately responded that it was a stupid move on my part. A few minutes later, he said it was clever, though, and the girl should give me another chance.

So there you have it. I have a celebrity endorsing me.

EDIT: Okay, so while screwing around on my guitar and listening to Nina Gordon (who is currently putting together a new album with Bob Rock), I came up with another couple of songs that are exactly the same: "18 & Life" by Skid Row can segue directly into "Listen To Your Heart" by Roxette (as Nina Gordon did at the end of her live recording of "18 & Life"), but even that can go directly into "Because the Night", whether you're listening to the original Patti Smith version or the 10,000 Maniacs version, though I might add that it's a Springsteen song through and through, regardless. In any case, I never really liked the Skid Row song or pretty much anything by Roxette, but if it's played by Nina Gordon, then it's gotta be good.

Why? Because chicks with guitars drive me wild.

Double-EDIT: Might I also add that the chord progression for "18 & Life" and the other songs is exactly the same as the progression for "Tonight and the Rest of My Life", possibly explaining why it seemed so easy for Nina Gordon to play it. Of course, then again, this is Nina Gordon we're talking about, so just see the above comment about chicks with guitars and you'll see why it is that I find it impossible for her to do anything wrong.


AIM: therbmcc71

Float On

So I'm trying to decide right now whether to get Hot Fuss by The Killers or Good News for People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse. I'm leaning toward the latter, because it's a lot more eclectic and won't remind me in twenty years of that group that sounded like a less-pussified, dance-remix friendly version of Maroon 5.

Bought Angel Season Five on DVD the other day and noticed that I'd seen the first three episodes and about the last five, and absolutely nothing in between. This is not quite as bad as the fact that I completely missed the third and fourth seasons of the show, along with the entire sixth season of Buffy. Yes, I'm a dedicated fan.

I've been playing copious amounts of World of Warcraft, which really keeps me from noticing my lack of a social life. In any case, the Alliance blows, and they're all a bunch of wannabe-Lord of the Rings knockoffs, with names like Frohdoh and Legggolas and Gimmleee. Strangely enough, I haven't seen a knockoff of Arwen yet, but that's probably because Liv Tyler pretty much managed to destroy Arwen more thoroughly than any Ringwraith could have ever done. The Horde is where it's at, yo. Oh, and might I add that the Elf Slappers guild is a bunch of fucking tools.

Due to my lack of social life, I really have nothing else for you today. So there.


AIM: therbmcc71

Fall To Pieces

While sitting at the bar tonight, there came about a conversation that led me to thinking about one of my ex-girlfriends.

Assume the following: I've gotten married and have had children. An outlandish notion in and of itself, but I'll put it this way: Given that, if my ex-girlfriend called me and said she wanted me back, I'd leave my wife and kids on Christmas morning for this girl. She's got sky-blue eyes that are flecked with the copper of a new penny and once accidentally dyed her hair purple, which I thought was outstanding. She's the benchmark against which all other benchmarks are measured; a theoretical limit, if you will, like absolute zero or the speed of light, where no matter what we do to try and get close to it in a laboratory, the scientists just laugh at the results and say, "Nope."

And she's smarter than I am by leaps and bounds, able to explain the difference between the Hindu gods Ganesha, Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu without stopping to ask why you're asking, listen to Bob Seger's greatest hits, and then follow that up with watching half a season of Buffy.

Unfortunately, she's got standards higher than my own, and so I'm shit outta luck.


AIM: therbmcc71

It Makes No Difference

I'm in a world of hurt right now from knocking down half of a twelve-ounce bag of Raisinets in a sitting. This is the result of there being no food in my house, barring about a half-pound of ground beef in the fridge, which I don't want to cook because I don't want to have to clean the pan after I'm done. Raisinets, on the other hand, are a decidedly low-preparation, low-mess kind of food, provided it's not ninety degrees or above in the room in which they are being stored or consumed. Therefore, I was tempted by their low-maintenance ways into eating half of the bag, and now I'm feeling queasy in a way that I haven't felt since I tried my first and last McGriddle.

Stuck on You wasn't that good and Ghost in the Shell was probably really fantastic, except I was too tired to read the subtitles while I was watching it (it's not dubbed), and so for all I know it's about a robotic dog named Moshi. I still haven't watched Confidence or A Mighty Wind, and won't be getting any new DVD's until I make it through those two. Hell, I still haven't watched The Life Aquatic.

Something I did watch, though: I happened upon a show on FX called It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which was in its second episode, in which one guy uses being pro-choice to get laid by his ultra-Christian girlfriend and another guy goes to an abortion rally to pick up chicks. Trust me, it's a hell of a lot funnier than I make it sound, and I deemed it to be the funniest half-hour I've ever seen on television. I mean, it started kind of slow, but the ending really paid off quite nicely. Here's the commercial for that episode in Windows Media format. It's on Thursday nights, and I highly recommend it to my readers who are not easily offended.

If you are easily offended, piss off, and you don't want to know what I was doing with your mother last night.

See, and now those people are gone. I like how that works, but I suppose I should have tried it at the top of the post, because now they've already reaped the benefit of learning not to over-eat Raisinets (and McGriddles, by association) and they're probably calling FX right now to cancel the show because I offended them after recommending the show, and therefore -in their troubled minds- the show offended them. At this point I realize that I should have touted Donny Deutsch and Bill O'Reilly, because getting those two jackholes off of the airwaves would be entirely too much of a blessing for me to handle.

I've actually got nothing right now, other than that uncertain feeling that moving from my chair to my bed would be too much for my stomach to handle. I'm unfortunately entirely too tired to go to out for food -real food, not Raisinets; or at least as real as food gets at 1:30 in the morning. Therefore, I'm going to start watching The Last Waltz, and eventually move on to bed. Which is where we get the title of today's post.

The road was our school; it gave us a sense of survival. It taught us all we know. There's not much that we can really take from the road. We've had our share. Or maybe it's just superstitious... You can press your luck. The road has taken a lot of the great ones: Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Janis, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis... It's a goddamn impossible way of life. No question about it.

AIM: therbmcc71

Escape

Last night I received an invitation to move out to California from one of my friends, who happens to be moving out there on Sunday. I think that I'm going to take him up on the offer just as soon as I can figure out what the hell I'm going to do there, but not before attending a wedding toward the end of September. Between that and sometime circa November is anyone's guess. I just have to be out of here by then, because I've no desire to stick around for another long December, least of all whatever specific personal hell will inevitably coincide with the holidays this year.

And I hope you don't have the Quicktime 7 beta installed if you clicked on the link at the top of this post, because it doesn't work for some reason. But I assure you that it's worth the clicky-clicky.

In the meantime, I feel the overwhelming urge to go get McDonalds, despite the fact that I know that it will inevitably lead to McGurgles and their evil minion, McGas.


AIM: therbmcc71

Make It Rain

I have no idea how Tom Waits does it, but he did an entire album that sounds like Son House would have the morning after a night of drinking thirty shots of Jack Daniels, smoking an entire carton of Camel Wides, selling his soul to the devil, and waking up in a gutter. That said, Real Gone isn't necessarily a very good album. It might be for other artists, but I think most of us just want our regular Tom Waits back. Hell, if Francis Ford Coppola wants to make another movie and have Waits do the soundtrack, I'm all for it, because everybody loved the soundtrack to One From the Heart. Okay, everyone who saw the film, which is me and about five other people. Wait, four, because one of them died eight years ago.

Anyway. I was just watching this tremendously awful movie on the local UPN station; so awful, in fact, that I had to post about it after watching only fifteen minutes of it and declaring it to be a federal disaster area. Now, I knew it was going to be bad based solely on the fact that it stars Casper Van Dien, who has never been in a good movie. Oh, say what you will about Starship Troopers, but you know deep down in your heart that it wasn’t good. Sure, by comparison to Van Dien’s turn as Tarzan, it was a masterpiece, but that’s beside the point.

Now, this movie goes by the name Road Rage, but its title over at the IMDB is A Friday Night Date, which explains to you why they changed it to Road Rage at some point, despite the fact that the IMDB lists no fewer than three other movies with the title Road Rage. Unfortunately, this is not the one with Yasmine Bleeth, because that would have made it tremendously more entertaining, given its weak script. Okay, I’ll break down what I saw for you:

Imagine the Steven Spielberg classic TV-movie Duel with two people in the car instead of just Dennis Weaver, which means it actually has dialogue; the truck is now a big black Dodge pickup; Casper Van Dien runs the truck off the road, causing its driver to become angry and begin chasing them, and after some time passes, the girl in the car says, “It’s okay, it’s not your fault,” even though it was his fault, because the jackass didn’t look at the lane he was merging into, causing the truck driver to get pissed off and eventually cause a pileup the likes of which we haven’t seen since Final Destination 2, though not remotely as entertaining, although it did have a Miraculous Flying Cop Car, which seemed ripped right out of The Blues Brothers; that the cop car looked like a Datsun is beside the point. Yes, a Datsun.

Anyway, it’s one of those movies that was born bad. I mean, any time you have a script in which the line, “Hang on!” is used more than twice, it’s going to be a bad movie. It implies that there are retarded characters in the film who don’t know to hang on when it’s time (and that time is generally very clear) to hang on, unless they hear the magic line, “Hang on!” which is then followed by a sudden jerking of the wheel to the left or right, a cut to an exterior angle of the stunt driver and a dummy in a spinning car which eventually rights itself, closed out with a return to an interior shot of the car with the driver asking, “Are you okay?” Of course she’s okay, dipshit! There was a dummy in the spinning car!

I mean, if Russ Meyer was alive today and big boobs couldn’t just be bought for a couple-thousand dollars, this is the kind of bad action film he’d probably have made. I mean, his Bosomania series of films certainly couldn’t be termed as ‘action,’ but there was a fight scene at the end of Common-Law Cabin that had me on the edge of my seat, which ended in a (very obvious) dummy being hit by an out-of-control speedboat. It’s probably the best moment ever to take place in three feet of water, eclipsing even Bo Derek’s emergence from the water in Blake Edwards’ 10.

So, how can a movie be as bad as this one was? I mean, there’s no way that Casper Van Dien could possibly be responsible for all of it, and the answer lies with the director, Sidney J. Furie, director of such hits as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Iron Eagle II, and (my favorite) The Taking of Beverly Hills, starring Ken Wahl and Matt Frewer. I’m not entirely sure why there’s not a federal law preventing guys like this from coming within a hundred yards of unexposed celluloid.

AIM: therbmcc71