Mmmmmmm...oily discharge.......

Like a vast percentage of Americans, I’m a bit overweight. Not morbidly obese, but I’m a burly lad. And like most Americans I’m always intrigued whenever some new “miracle” diet pill surfaces, claiming to burn fat, boost the metabolism, stave off hunger, and give you energy to spare. The Holy Grail of Weight Loss.

Most of these drugs are 75% placebo effect and 25% caffeine, geared towards the typical lazy fatass American looking for instant gratification and success without effort, wanting to shed pounds without having to exercise or stop pouring lops of chocolate-covered lard down their gullets and can’t afford the more extreme costs of lipo, gastric bypass, and staples. Some of the drugs flat out scare me, like Xantrex-3. I took it once about 4 years ago for about 5 days, and it was a bad scene. I had the shakes like early-onset Parkinson’s and my heart rate rivaled that of a kitten on crack. Ain’t touched it since. Instead, I’ve been trying to be more active and sweat the pounds off. I’ve had a couple up & down moments but I’m about 50 pounds lighter than I was 2 years ago.

Anyways, there’s this new FDA-approved diet pill that supposedly blocks fat absorption, called Alli. It’s like 60 bucks a bottle, so it’s not exactly cheap. It reminds me of that crap called Olestra that was all in the news back in like 1998, some miracle cooking oil or some such that blocked fat from absorbing from the foods it was cooked in but also blocked vitamins & stuff from absorbing too. And without anywhere else for that fat to go, it gave you the shits.

Oddly enough, so does Alli. At least this drug tells you to eat better and exercise in addition to taking it, though. This is taken directly from the Alli webpage:
“What are treatment effects?
alli™ works by preventing the absorption of some of the fat you eat. The fat passes out of your body, so you may have bowel changes, known as treatment effects. You may get:
gas with oily spotting
loose stools
more frequent stools that may be hard to control
What to expect:
The excess fat that passes out of your body is not harmful. In fact, you may recognize it as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza. Eating a low-fat diet lowers the chance of these bowel changes. Limit fat intake in your meals to an average of 15 grams”.

Great…..so if I lean down to tie my shoes and shit my pants, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Again, as I have said numerous times before, the side effects of the wondrous concoctions are often worse than the conditions they treat. Explosive diarrhea and oily sharts are NOT cool.

Instead, do what I just started doing: cut back on the sodas and drink a gallon of water a day. That sounds like a lot, but if you’re actually sweating from exertion, four 1-quart bottles of ice-cold water go down rather nicely. The other day at work, it was 95° in Charleston with MUCH humidity, so that it felt about 103°. At my workstation in the dairy, it was about 110-120 wet sticky degrees, so I bust my ass and sweat a lot. That water is a necessity, to hydrate my system as well as flushing out toxins and various evils. Sodas full of sugar, HFCS, and sodium just cause you to retain water weight, stay fat, and stay thirsty.

When you burn more calories than you take in, the weight comes off. Being a sedentary slug drinking Starbucks and Mountain Dews all day hoping that fifty bucks worth of caffeinated laxatives will magically shrink your fat ass ain’t gonna cut it. I know from experience; I’m fighting the war too.

And next time you see a commercial showing all the supposed success stories of thong-wearing hottie grandmothers with silicone jugs and uber-buff dudes with 24-pack abs who used to look like Homer Simpson just last month, read the fine print. When they tell you they lost 350 pounds in 5 weeks, I guarantee the tiny words say RESULTS NOT TYPICAL. Every damned commercial now carries that disclaimer as a CYA move. Jenny Caig, NutriSystem, TrimSpa, Xantrex3, et al. All of ‘em do it. Joe Schmuck lucked out when he lost 75 pounds in 26 weeks (that’s 6 months, kids) but the average moke lost 20, maybe. Hell, with proper diet & exercise, 25 in six months isn’t all that big a stretch, without the pills.

Get off your cottage-cheeze asses, America. I can’t have my readers dying of strokes and coronaries before I get famous.

Trust me, Comrades....

“Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall…”

With those words, President Ronald Reagan inadvertently broke it off in America’s ass. At least with the Soviet Union as the Bad Guys, we knew what we were getting. Now? Everyone is enamored of the notion that the Russians are Good Guys and our bestest buddies.

Back in 1989, what with all the perestroika and glasnost and general thawing of the Cold War, came the end of communism as The Holy Terror of the 20th Century. This was a Good Thing. Down came the Berlin Wall and Germany reunified. This was a Good Thing that I witnessed first hand at its earliest stages. The Warsaw Pact broke apart and Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania were again free to decide their own fates. The good people of Czechoslovakia parted ways amicably and became Slovakia & the Czech Republic. Sadly, the Yugoslavians broke up into a big nasty mess of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and a dozen other microrepublics all hating each other. But communism had failed and we all danced a merry jig.

However, we now had all these fledgling democracies teetering on shaky ground, rife with black markets, graft, corruption, and organized crime. This is was a Worrisome Thing. And then we had all these shady fuckers running around selling shoplifted Soviet weapons, from AK’s to tanks, MiG’s to manpack nukes. This was a Bad Thing.

But yet we still danced a merry jig, because at least they weren’t Communists.
They may have been unstable and dangerous, but they were unstable and dangerous “democracies”. The Czechs elected a novelist as their President, and the Poles, to no one’s surprise, elected everyone’s favorite shipyard electrician and union leader as president. Romania and Bulgaria had teething problems in starting their republics, too.

I’m still not 100% ready to trust the Russian government. It’s hard to trust people who grew up not liking us and in many cases still don’t like us, who have many many nuclear weapons to point at us, and many more that they claim to have destroyed but damned well didn’t. It’s a big country with lotsa places to hide little bombs.It's still sometimes hard to trust people I once trained to go to war against.

The current ranks of political apparatchiks and nomenklatura in Russia grew up knowing nothing but communism until the early 90’s, and you didn’t get to any decent managerial positions by thinking the Amerikanskis were comrades. (C’mon, despite changing governments you can’t expect to just replace EVERYONE who ran the administrations; that’s a lotta people to instantly replace with people who know how to run infrastructure). So you have all these hard-line, dyed-in-the-wool Reds who are about to be very unemployed and start humming Yankee Doodlevitch. It was under the Soviet systems that these guys developed their power bases. You can call it “democracy” all you want but I assure you that deep down the place (and military) is still being run at least somewhat like the Politburo did before Smilin’ Mike Gorbachev tore down that wall.

The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB, Committee for State Security) became the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB, Federal Security Service). Just because you change names doesn’t mean you changed missions, and why hire an ass of new people when you have perfectly well-trained employees already in-house? Though the FSB handles demoestic stuff like our FBI and the FIS (Foreign Intelligence Service, or formerly the KGB’s First Chief Directorate) is like our CIA and does the spying on us. The KGB gave us former Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, and now current Russian president Vladimir Putin. (Former heads of the KGB have run Moscow since November 12, 1982.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Putin smile, except for that rther awkward incident where he kissed that little boy on the abdomen. He just kinda looks at you with cold dead eyes as if contemplating where to dump your body. The dude scares me.

He makes backdoor deals with people who don’t like us, such as Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He still owns as ass of nukes. He’s said that if we put up a misile defense shield in Europe to defend our NATO allies against missile attacks from the Midle East, he’ll see that as aggression and start pointing nukes at us again. What a dick. And he says it lke they ever stopped ointing nukes at us in the first place. Please. Believe THAT and I’ll sell you some of Colonel Khadaffi’s Jheri Curl juice.

Good old Vlad comes over to visit last month to schmooze and make nice with noted genius Gee-Dubya Bush at Dad’s house in Maine, to eat lobstah, go fishing, and presumably work out some issues. More like “I’ll fly over, eat his food, drink his Scotch, chill on the ocean, feed him a line of govno and then go back to waiting for his term to end so I can kick the next poor bastard in the balls”.

His advance party of FSB/FIS agents were caught by a watchful clerk at the state liquor store in Portsmouth, NH trying to pass a phony $100.00 bill for two bottles of Scotch. Liquor store manager Mike Smith said the cashier used a special pen to mark the bill to test its authenticity. "It turned a color that it's not supposed to, and when he saw that, he grabbed the bill back and left," said Smith.

Portsmouth police received a call from the liquor store that the man and his friends were on foot, headed to the nearby Holiday Inn. (I’m intimately familiar with both locations. It’s a 2-minute stroll.) Police responded to the scene; a dispatch message on the police scanner said diplomatic immunity might be involved. But police said that diplomatic immunity was not invoked because police did not make any arrests. The media hushed it up pretty quickly.

So we have the Russian intelligence apparatus passing phony American bills all over the place (don’t feed me any bullshit that they were given a fake Benjamin at the Piscataqua Savings Bank on Pleasant Street. They make these bills to finance their operations overseas at our expense) and we have another former KGB head pointing nukes at us and making buddy-buddy with assclowns who hate us. But the American Sheeple think he’s our friend.

Not cool.

Have a Coke & a smile & STFU

You know you’re bored when it’s 3:45 AM and you’re watching that fuck-awful Hey Paula on Bravo. As if Paula Abdul wasn’t annoying enough on American Idol, some imbecile gave her a reality show. No, scratch that. They gave her a cryality show.

All she does is rant, cry, throw tantrums, and suffer meltdowns. One second she’s lucid, and then the slightest hint of adversity causes her to suffer a complete loss of composure and induces another crying jag. If you thought she had the potential to be a basket case before, this show seals the deal.

Her “staff” of flunkies need therapy as badly as she does; hell, I needed therapy after watching 15 minutes of this crap. How they can work for her and not swill tumblers of warm vodka is beyond me. I actually saw some of her lackey laughing at her behind her back as she suffered the 7th or 8th meltdown of the episode.

It’s further proof that the American Sheeple will watch anything. I’m waiting for a show devoted to watching blowflies eat fresh dogshit on Turd TV. After 30 minutes of her whimpering I wanted to punch her in the throat and was begging to watch the blowflies.

The Secrets of Harry Potter VII Revealed!!!!!!

Through many means various, nefarious, hilarious, spurious, and somewhat dubious, I was able to trade nuggets of raw yellow cake uranium (which I’d gotten in trade for several dozen bricks of uncut black-tar heroin) to a shifty, lisping French Communist named Poussaint for several bootleg copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

So…here be spoilers!!!!!


Turns out McGonagall and Filch murdered Dumbeldore and blamed it on Voldemort to keep the news quiet that Dumbeldore was about to be arrested as the leader of a child-porn ring. Scotland Yard, working in conjunction with inquisitors from Azkaban intercepted naked pictures of Draco Malfoy being sent by owl to a Catholic priest in Boston who is the clandestine president of NAMBLA.

Hagrid gives up magic, and shacks up with Sir Elton John.

Ron finally shags Hermoine after they get piss-drunk on absinthe stolen from Snape’s potions. They film it and upload in on YouTube, calling it “Hogwart’s Pie”. The best line in the clip was “This one time, at Magic Camp, I stuck a Nimbus 2000 up me bum…”

Neville Longbottom joins the Army and is assigned as Prince Harry’s bodyguard in Afghanistan, trading one Harry for another. He uses his magic to find and capture Osama Bin Laden, and after receiving a knighthood from the Queen, Neville is up to his eyelids in hot women.

Sirius Black finds his lost twin brother XM Black, and together they form a satellite-based magic school with Professor Howard Stern.

The Sorting Hat at Hogwarts is revealed to be Don Rickles.

And then there’s Harry… Harry Potter defeats Voldemort, graduates Hogwarts as valedictorian, and receives a full scholarship to Oxford where he intends to study art history. He gets engaged to Cho Chung after knocking her up, and is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for ridding the world of Evil. While attending a seminar in Paris, Potter is killed by a suicide bomber who mistakenly ran into the wrong banquet hall, thinking it was the Michael Moore/Al Gore Global Warming lunch next door. Single mom Cho Chung becomes depressed and develops a nasty meth habit, making ends meet by being a contestant on Flavor of Love 8 on VH-1. Young Baby Potter is taken away by Social Services and eventually is adopted by a couple in rural eastern Kentucky who name him Cletus and use his magic to cheat on their taxes and make moonshine.

Now go buy the book and read it, you loser....stop looking for cheats on the internet.

The post-Erasure concert report

I know it’s a week late but it was a busy week….

Well, I survived my weekend trip to Orlando to see Erasure and catch up with my friend John. I’ve known John for nearly 24 years now, and while we don’t get to see each other very often, when we do get together, we pick right back up where we left off just like we saw each other yesterday. The added fun of the trip was that it wasn’t just me & Crys making the trip, but my buddy Chris and his girlfriend Victoria made the trip with us, and it was a blast all the way around. I’ve also known Chris for almost 24 years, and to see the show with my oldest friends in the world made it even better.

The show was at the Hard Rock Café at Universal Studios. Knowing full well that the crowds would get THICK around showtime from our experience of seeing them at the House of Blues in Orlando in 2005, we got there hella early. Plus, it was a standing-room-only type general admission, and first-come, first-serve. We were eating dinner before 5PM and the show started at 8PM, so yeah, we weren’t gonna take any chances on getting a shitty view of the stage. Dinner was at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, about as touristy as you can get in a place that was packed ass to elbow with tourists. By no means am I a fan of Buffet’s music (especially played at a volume level that was louder than the concert was later on) but damn that was some realllly good food. That was the first $10.00 burger I’d ever eaten that was actually worth the tenner. I sorta felt a bit raped at having spent $4.75 on a bottle of mediocre American pilsner (Landshark is the name. Think Corona without the pissy aftertaste) but hey, you can’t always find a Sam Adams everywhere.

We got to the Hard Rock at perhaps 6:00, and there was already a tiny knot of people milling about; the Die Hards. These are my kind of people. These are the people who have listened for 15-20 years, know all the words, really get into the show, and are generally super-friendly. I inserted myself into a discussion on favorite albums while we waited, and as a few more people started to show, we met two couples who would end up being our new best friends. Melissa and Melia live in the Fort Meyers area, and Tony and Bailey live right outside Orlando. After 45 minutes I felt like I’d known all four for years. This meant that everyone around me at the show was guaranteed to be cool people, and that it was gonna be a great show.

Doors opened at 7:00 and after the obligatory near-strip-search at the door by the Venue Gestapo, we hustled our asses to the stage, where we planted ourselves firmly at FRONT ROW CENTER. Hot holy shit. This was a dream come true for Crys, and I was obviously stoked too. We were literally 5 feet from Andy Bell.

The opening act was a band I’d never heard of but who made a great impression on me. Scissors For Lefty are a San Francisco band of two sets of brothers who have a bright future ahead of them. It’s dancy rock that reminded me of The Killers with just a hint of The Clash thrown in. It’s been a long time since I’d seen a band who looked like they were having that much fun playing a show, especially guitarist Robby Garza, who had a grin on his face the entire set. Bassist Steve Garza swung his bass around like a modern-day Mick Jones. Vocalist Bryan Garza hopped down in front of us during one song & kissed Crys’ hand. The entire band, including Peter Krimmel (synths/guitars) and James Krimmel (drums) hung out after the show for pictures and autographs. Completely class act, these fellas. Do yourself a favor and check them out.

Gawd, what can I say about Erasure’s set? It was incredible. The sound was great. Skeptics and critics would say that since 90% of the instrumentation is pre-programmed by synth-meister Vince Clarke that of course the sound is great, but it’s Andy who makes the show. His vocals are completely spot-on and sounds almost exactly like the studio albums. The setlist was a genius blend of new material from the album “Light at the End of the World”, and classic Erasure hits from the span of their 22-year career. Early in the show, Andy reached down and touched Bailey’s hand, and I thought he was gonna faint from the excitement. A few songs later, Bailey and Melissa fought briefly over Andy’s sweat-towel until Andy tossed a second one down to them. I kinda wanted one too…..but Andy did smile at us several times and waved at us all through the show.

The only downer at all in the concert was the girl next to John. Somehow she didn’t quite get the fact that the show is pre-sequenced and the setlist can’t be changed midway through to accommodate a screamed request. This is why she kept screaming “DARLEEEEEEEEEEEENE!!!! I’M DARLENE!!!!” after every song, letting us all know that her name was Darlene and that she wanted Andy to sing the song of the same name from the new album. After the fourth song, I wanted John to punch her in the throat. By song 7 I was about to do it myself. By song ten, Andy was looking down at her like he wanted to smash her in the face with the mike-stand. By song 12, she had incurred the wrath of he entire front row, straight & gay alike all united in wanting to stuff a sweat-towel in her yap. The funniest part of the show was at the very end when during an impromptu acapella chorus by the crowd to the final encore song “Stop!” Andy missed his cue when the music started again. He laughed, Vince laughed, the backing singers laughed, and we all thought it was priceless.

About ¾ of the way through the show, I looked to my left and right, and realized just how good I felt. I was surrounded by the people I’m closest to in the world, and some really great new friends, and listening to some of my favorite music, with a completely unobstructed view of the band a few feet away. Everyone around me was having such a good time. It was one of those snapshot moments that you want to hold onto forever.

Orlando Setlist:
Sunday Girl
Blue Savannah
Drama
I Could Fall In Love With You
Fly Away
Breathe
Storm In a Teacup
Chains of Love
Breath of Life
Love to Hate You
Sucker for Love
-----------------intermission and outfit changes-------------------------
A Little Respect
When a Lover Leaves You
Oh L'Amour
Golden Heart
Ship Of Fools
Chorus
How My Eyes Adore You
Sometimes
Glass Angel
--------------------
STOP!

Army Wives

One of my latest guilty pleasures is watching the TV show “Army Wives” on Lifetime. Yeah, yeah, I know; watching Lifetime is just cause for taking away my Man Credentials, but the show doesn’t really suck. It’s an engaging show.

Granted, it’s a pretty idealistic and not completely realistic portrayal of military spouses or even military life on the whole, but at least it tries. It’s generating interest in the situations and difficult hardships endured by military families, especially during wartime. The bulk of American society has no idea what military families go through, and to have a show that portrays them in a positive light is a good thing. It’s produced by the guy who brought us Gray’s Anatomy, so it’s got credibility.

It’s the story of a group of Army spouses who through various circumstances band together for mutual support and friendship at the fictional Fort Marshall, which is supposed to be located in Charleston, SC. The show is filmed all around Charleston, so every episode features locations that I recognize. The bar where character Roxy works is actually Big Deck Daddy’s, a biker bar on Rivers Avenue that has a huge front deck.. Most of the on-base locations are either filmed on the old closed Navy base or on Charleston Air Force Base. Be damned if the Sherwood’s house doesn’t look like my folks’ old place in Hunley Park military housing across from the Air Force base. The Army recruiting station in last week’s episode is actually an old storefront on East Montague near the Madra Rua Irish Pub.

The show, airing Sunday nights at 10PM on Lifetime, has been a huge success so far and has been picked up already for a second season. The downer is that they may stop filming here due to a squabble with the state government over wage incentives to hire locals. I hope they continue to film here; it makes it all the more fun to recognize locales and such when I’m not poking fun at the ill-fitting berets of the troops, but that’s to be expected from an old Army guy like myself.

Heretical Blasphemy

Once upon a time someone put pen to paper so to speak, and wrote a series of stories that was eventually published into a hugely popular book. The key figure in the story is a boy born and raised under unusual circumstances. His coming was foretold, and was highly anticipated by people who believed in him. He was destined for greatness and a difficult struggle to lead people against Evil. The boy was a learned scholar who had a devout following, and was able to perform great feats of magic and miracle. The boy was often troubled and misunderstood but grew into a wise and respected young adult with worshipful admirers.

The story of the young man with a greater destiny became one of the most popular tales in history and has been told the world over in dozens of languages. Movies have been made about the story. Depending upon the social customs and beliefs of various peoples, children have been both encouraged and dissuaded from reading the story of this boy. Many valuable lessons can be learned from the story, such as tolerance of others, kindness, love, sacrifice, gaining of wisdom, serving a higher calling, and the struggle of Good vs. Evil.

By now, you must be wondering who this controversial center character is. Who is this boy who rose from austerity to prominence? Many of you would say I’m referring to the story of Jesus Christ and the Holy Bible. And just as many would say I’m talking about Harry Potter. Both of you would be right, actually. It’s pretty easy to argue for either one to be the one of whom I speak. So, if there are so many similarities between the two central figures, why do so many people view the Potter books as some sort of evil entity full of devilry and witchcraft?

It’s harmless escapism, a delightfully fantastical yarn that not only entertains but also teaches its readers to be better people. Sorta like the Bible, but with a few more special effects. So, to be fair, if religious wingnuts in the state of Georgia want the Potter books banned from public school libraries because of potentially harmful material to kids, mayhaps the New Testament should be banned as well? After all, the main characters are pretty similar….The adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter can stay in Gwinnett County school libraries, despite a mother’s objections, a judge ruled.

Laura Mallory, who argued the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft, said she still wants the best-selling books removed and may take her case to federal court.

“I maybe need a whole new case from the ground up,” Mallory said. The woman, who said two of her four children attend public schools in the county, was not represented by an attorney at the hearing. The old maxim states that a person who is their own lawyer has a fool for a client, no?

The ruling by Superior Judge Ronnie Batchelor upheld a decision by the Georgia Board of Education, which had supported local school officials. County school board members have said the books are good tools to encourage children to read and to spark creativity and imagination.

At the hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

“I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again,” Mallory said. “I think we need him.”

But that plan has a flaw, lady. You clamor for separation of church and state in one breath and then want to bring God into the schools? That’s the problem with you religious fruitcake fanatics, whether you be Christian, Muslim, or even those who worship sticks of butter; you want to shove YOUR beliefs down everyone’s throats while crushing any viewpoint that conflicts with your personal beliefs. Listen up, all you zealots and kooks: It’s a book, a work of fiction. Get over yourselves. I’ve heard some folks say the same thing about that little book that YOU hold so dear.

“The highest result of education is tolerance."
Helen Keller, (1880-1968)

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
Jesus (from the Bible, Matthew 22:39)

"I do not serve what you worship; nor do you serve what I worship. You have your own religion and I have mine."
The Koran

I want my eMpTyVee

I’m beating a dead horse here, I’m sure, but what happened to “Music Television”? Part of me wonders why artists even bother to make videos for their singles anymore( unless it’s to sell on DVD compilations) when the chances of the clip seeing serious airplay rotation are about the same as seeing Rosie O’Donnell in a thong doing a believable love scene with George Clooney.

As a teenager, I thought that music videos were a brilliant concept. In early 1984, in my freshman year, there were after-school video shows, and on the USA Network there were shows like Friday Night Videos and the Saturday night Nightflight all-video show. These were in addition to the fledgling MTV, which was barely 3 years old at the time and still played vids all day & night. For a not-quite-15 year old music fanatic like me, this was simply the coolest shit, indeed.

There was even an MTV for “old” people over 30 starting in 1985 called VH-1, also playing videos 24/7.

Life was good. Then something went HORRIBLY wrong.

Sometime in 1987 or so, MTV’s focus shifted, and Music Television started to become Miscellaneous Television by abandoning the all-video format and doing “shows”. Granted, not all of it was bad. Liquid Television gave exposure to avant-garde animators like Peter Chung, and for better or worse the American public was gifted with Beavis & Butthead and Ren & Stimpy. Then the 90’s saw the MTV Unplugged phenomenon, which was pretty cool for awhile. But for every novel concept there was a plethora of complete and utter GOBSHITE. Such drivel and dreck as Remote Control, The Grind, Made, Jackass, Road Rules, Next, Date My Mom, My Super Sweet Sixteen, and the worst offender of all, The Real World, which spawned the genre of reality TV. Bastards...

Even once-clever ideas like Cribs or Pimp My Ride have become trite, jaded mockeries of their original selves. Cribs was a chance to look inside the homes of celebrities and see how they lived. Now they struggle to find people to showcase, so now you get to see the third-string quarterback for the Houston Texans show off the obligatory fridge full of Cristal champagne and stating that the bedroom is “where awl da' magic happens” before showing off a bloated garage full of SUV’s and sports cars and a giant-screen TV home theater.

Pimp My Ride has gone from a really novel customization of broken-down cars for needy young adults to seeing just how much ridiculous and goofy-assed shit you can bolt onto a 400 dollar hooptie just for the sake of doing it.

VH-1 is no better. They play more videos than MTV by far, but after the obligatory 3-4 ours of music in the early morning, their litany of lame-assed shows starts up. Only they have fewer to choose from and thus repeat them ad nauseum, flogging the entire stable of dead horses in marathons of Celebrity Fat Camp, Surreal Life, the train wreckages of the Flavor of Love shows, Hoboken’s Next Top Model, and the I Love the 70/80/90’s shows. The “I Love…” shows are cute nostalgia the first time; after 25 viewings, not so much.

In 1996 MTV tried to get back to its music roots by launching M2 (later called MTV2), intended to show videos again, with a more eclectic and alternative mix, and now it’s all rap and rap-related shows when not playing repeats of other MTV shows. VH-1 finally launched VH-1 Classic to pander to old farts who remember videos, playing clips from the 70’s and 80’s, new clips from older artists, and occasionally dusting off the old alternative vids left in the vault from MTV’s “120 Minutes”, circa 1987.

There’s other choices out there if you dig around a bit. Fuse TV is a pseudo-music channel catering to the 17-year old text-messaging Emo crowd, but they’re a pale shadow of what they could be. I don’t get Much Music on my provider, so I miss out on Canada’s answer to MTV. Instead, I now watch a lot of IMF, the International Music Feed, which plays vids and interviews 24/7 from all over the world and from a lot of different genres. In the space of a typical hour you can see bands from Ireland, Italy, Ukraine, Finland, England, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, all singing in their native languages. I’ve been exposed to some cool stuff that I’d never see elsewhere, even if I don’t always understand the lyrics. But, good music and good songs are good no matter what the language.

So, if you’re like me and you miss the good old days of real videos and not some rehashed gobbledygook bullshit, take heart. It’s still out there but you gotta dig deeper to find the nuggets of gold. Or, do what the real die-hards do: search out stuff on You Tube. Crap quality streaming of an old Smiths video beats watching Hulk Hogan raise his kids any day.

Twatzillas

Please tell me why I should give 2/3 of a rusty fuck about anything and anyone even remotely associated with MTV’s waste of airtime My Super Sweet Sixteen? A bunch of hideously spoiled, pampered, and over-privileged snotty bitches about to turn 16 get some sort of giant dream party thrown for them by rich dickhead parents (read: ENABLERS) and get showered with lavish gifts and tons of ass-kissing by bootlick lackeys who want to get invited to the supposed “party of the century”.

Most of us, if we got anything special at all, got pretty much the same thing on our 16th birthday: maybe a couple outfits, a CD (or a cassette if you’re old like me), maybe a twenty from Grandma, and a cake. These little bitches are getting all whored up in Versace evening gowns to have their black-tie galas at the swankiest hotel ballrooms, Mummy books some flavor-of-the-day rap star to play 3 songs, and they snivel and cry because Daddy didn’t buy the right color Lexus convertible.

These are the kind of prissy little twats who grow up to be the difficult, unpleasant, bitchy, selfish head-cases on Bridezillas, another show that makes me wanna reach for a large-caliber handgun. I’ve been married twice, been part of about 6 more weddings, and attended a good 30 or 40 more weddings in my lifetime. From experience, I know that there’s a slight modicum of stress involved in putting a wedding together and hoping everything comes together perfectly. However, the control-freak lunatics on this show are enough to turn any sane person off to weddings in particular and marriage as a whole.

One bride banned her own mother from the wedding because she didn’t like her outfit. Another considered becoming bulimic to fit into her dress. Another superficial cow ordered her young daughter not to smile in the wedding pictures because she was missing a couple front teeth, this after throwing a huge tantrum at the wedding rehearsal and got herself kicked out………of her own rehearsal. WTF?

One day soon, I’m gonna see some poor bastard groom being devoured by his grinning maniacal spouse, mantis-style. That, or some guy is gonna take one insult too many & mace her ass with pepper-spray. That I’d pay to see.

The Post-July 4th Update

Sure enough, kids, verily I predicted the July 4th tragedies that I read about in the news after the holiday week. I hate to say I told you so, but hey, I did. And I hate to make light of other people’s misfortunes, but this shit is simply inexcusable.

In Lubbock Texas, a 2-year old girl died from burns over 50% of her body after she poured gasoline on herself and was set ablaze by an ember from a sibling’s sparkler. Officials ruled the death an accident, but where the fuck were the ostensibly responsible adults who should have been supervising the kids and keeping toddlers from dousing themselves in gasoline? That’s not an accident; it’s tragic negligence.

In Portland, Oregon another toddler was hospitalized after she was burned by errant fireworks late. The 2-year-old girl's face, abdomen and legs were burned after fireworks struck her and ignited her pajamas. She was playing in her yard in the suburb of Medford at about 9:45 p.m. Wednesday when the fireworks struck her. Fireworks are illegal in Medford, by the way.

And in the Detroit suburb of Melvindale, Michigan, a powerful firework exploded in the face of a woman trying to set it off, killing her as her fiance and 8-year-old son watched. Danialle Barse, 27, was unfamiliar with the commercial-grade aerial firework she was using Monday night, said police.

Barse and another woman were trying to set off a 3-inch mortar bomb in the parking lot of the car wash where Barse worked when it went off as she had her head over it. One round hit her, while the other 25 mortars continued to explode in sequence, keeping rescuers at bay. No one at the car wash had permission for a fireworks display. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was investigating where the commercial-grade fireworks came from.

Three inches is approxmatey 76 millimeters. The grenade launcher I had mounted under my M-16 in the Army was 40 millimeters in caliber. Light mortars carried by Army airborne and Marine Corps infantry units are 60 millimeters. The main gun on most World War Two tanks was 75 millimeters. What in the hell are average Joe Blow citizens doing with a 76 millimeter, 25-round launcher in the suburbs? Getting killed, that’s what.