More like "Ernest Goes to DEATH Camp," am I right?
I was a strange child.
But I'll get to that in a minute, because I have to provide a little background here. There was this dude back in the day. His name was Josef Mengele. And for those who only had a high school history class or don't watch The History Channel on the regular, that guy sucked. Like seriously. As the chief Nazi mad scientist of the holocaust, this guy was pretty much the worst guy ever. How bad? Well, he's the inspiration and sole subject matter for the most evil song Slayer ever did, for starters. Think about that, while I say it again: This dude inspired the most evil song Slayer ever wrote. Do you even realize the kind of ground that covers?
And this is a song about real shit that really happened. That dude was basically the most evil dude in a time and place that was pretty much a giant sea of evil dudes. Like a great white shark in a Pacific Ocean of assholes. Terrible.
But I didn't come here to express the daring and unpopular opinion that Josef Mengele was not a good man; I'm here to share something from my childhood. There was this movie that came out when I was seven that was one of the greatest films ever to be made: Ernest Goes to Camp, starring misunderstood genius Jim Varney as the title character. And in it, there's this scene, which I couldn't find a clip of specifically, but someone threw the whole movie on YouTube, and the moment in question is right at the beginning of part two here:
If you don't feel like watching or are on dial-up internet welfare or something, I'll explain: Ernest has to get vaccinated, and covers for his fear of needles by talking up what a bad motherfucker he is. When he gets stuck, though, he freaks out and starts screaming out wild confessions, specifically, "I did it! I took the Lindbergh baby! I am Josef Mengele! OOOWWWWWWW!"
But you see, as a small child, I knew this scene was funny, but I had no idea as to what was really going on. I knew nothing of the Lindbergh baby, and I damn sure didn't know about Nazi war crimes. Shit, I was seven; all I knew was G.I. Joe and the Transformers. (and speaking of war crimes and G.I. Joe, the U.S. basically banned flamethrowers for being hideously evil in like 1978, yet the G.I. Joe team had like three or four differentflamethrowin' dudes all the way up into the 1990s. Makes you wonder if Cobra was right all along.) As far as I knew, Ernest, having just been stuck with a needle, was freaking out and screaming wild, meaningless crap, that might as well have been gibberish to my young ears. And for some reason, the second half of the quote really stuck with me as a hilarious thing, and like most little kids who don't know any better, I repeated it a lot. Like this one little dude who saw a Ninja Turtles cartoon where someone said something about "big league gear," and kept repeating "this is 'biggly' gear!" all day long, except what I said was said with better pronunciation and was working on a completely different level altogether.
What I'm trying to say here is that in the late 1980s, at the Hill apartments in Cleveland, Mississippi, it was really not all that uncommon to see a bunch of little kids standing around, and have the oldest and largest of the group suddenly yell "I AM JOSEF MENGELE! AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!"
Looking back, I have to wonder how many adult minds I completely blew with that.
Song interpretation is a funny thing; regardless of what the song is really about, people are gonna hear what they wanna hear in the lyrics. I remember this one time when I was back in high school, when the real computer teacher had retired, the new computer teacher followed up her utter cluelessness about computers (she actually took the time to tell a third-year class learning Visual Basic that "the monitor looks like a TV, but it really isn't) with getting pregnant and missing the last couple semesters. After all of this went down, all six or so of us in what should have been the highest computer class in the school just ended up in the career counselor's office, listening the the radio, playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and making the text-to-speech program say random Megadeth and Misfits lyrics. So one day, this one other girl is in there (possibly for actual career counseling; I can't really remember) and that one Tracy Chapman song that was big in the late 90s comes on, and she says she really liked that one song she did back in the day, apparently entitled "Drunk." After some probing, the career counselor lady finally figured out that she was actually talking about "Fast Car." You see, even skimming over the lyrics, it's apparent that "Fast Car" is a song about someone who hooks up with a dude who happens to own a fast car in the hopes of escaping her shitty life, only to end up in a second, also shitty life. Yet to this person whose name escapes me, the single line "speed so fast felt like I was drunk" was enough to convince her that not only was it a song about drinking and presumably partying hard, but that the actual title of the song was "Drunk." Seriously, that one word was all it took.
Believe it or not, the song on this single isn't actually about the undying love of American Freedom.
But while an interpretation that plays that fast and loose with the actual meaning isn't normal, overall, most people don't know shit about what the songs they love mean. All it took was the line, "some folks are born, made to wave the flag, ohh, they're red, white, and blue," to turn Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" into a big "yay America, let's go blow up someone a different color than us" song. But ifyou pay attention to, oh, any other line from the song, it's pretty clear the guy who wrote it (John Creedence [citation needed]) was singing about how it's hard to be a big flag-waver when you don't have the money or political stroke to keep yourself and your kids from being the ones splattered across Cambodia. Same thing happened with Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," where it went to so far as to be used for Reagan-based political rallies, when it's one of the bigger "man, fuck this government" songs to come out in the days before popular music got to start using f-words. "Every Step You Take" by The Police gets a lot of play at weddings and is generally thought of as some hugely romantic song about a dude who loves his lady so much that his fool heart aches with every step she takes. In reality, the dude in the songs is totally stalking someone, has probably never directly spoken to this woman, and his plans for her probably don't involve marriage so much as they involve imprisoning her in a pit in his basement and eventually using her to make himself a woman-suit. "Bohemian Rhapsody," if you look at it literally, is a sad song about a poor boy from a poor family who's just killed a man, and his life has just begun, but now he's gone and thrown it it all away. Looking at it another way, it's a completely gut-wrenchingly sad allegory for Freddie Mercury coming to terms with knowing that he's dying of AIDS. But you take that song, throw it over some footage of Wayne and Garth headbanging in the Mirth Mobile, and you've got a BY GOD GOOD TIME PARTY SONG, YEAH. People play "Freebird" at funerals, and act like it's some sad song about movin' on to the next world or whatever, but if you actually pay attention to the words, it's something a lot scummier. The song ends up pretty much being Ronnie Van Zant's way of telling someone, "girl, I love you and all, but I'd really rather go on being a huge rock star, traveling the world, and having sex with people who aren't you, and you're not gonna change that - It's not you; it's me."
"...Aaaand this biiiiiird you caaannoott chaaaaaaaange"
...Which brings us to the subject at hand, which had completely flown right over my head for decades, (I'm such an old, old man) until my special ladyfriend Sarah pointed out some real-ass shit in a song that had sounded completely innocent to me (and I'm guessing most of Earth) for the whole time before that. The song is "Keep on Loving You" by REO Speedwagon, and as I hope will soon be clear to you, REO Speedwagon is grim as hell. I'm sure you've heard the song before, because it's pretty well inescapable, but just in case, here's the video, so you can follow me better on this thing:
And yeah, the way the singer dude (Radagast Eldridge Omar Speedwagon [citation needed]) came off in the opening and closing parts of the video was pretty goddamn insane, but it's got nothing on what's in the actual song. But the crazy googly eyes the guys had the whole time should be an indicator of the kind of things that sick bastard is capable of. And seriously, I know the way people think about this song, and I have to tell you that it's completely, horribly wrong. "Oh, he loves her so much that he's going to keep on loving her, and it's the only thing he wants to do, and oh my god, LET'S GET MARRIED RIGHT NOW." Bullshit. Now let's look at why this is the way it is, one lyric at a time:
You should have seen By the look in my eyes baby There was something missin'
- Something was missing in his eyes, possibly any traces of remorse, rationality, or a soul, if the psycho-glare he had going on in the video was any indicator:
“Believe me, if I started murdering people… there'd be none of you left!”
You should have known By the tone in my voice maybe But you didn't listen
- Right here, shit is already getting real. Because not even paying attention to what sort of tone the dude's voice may or may not have had, "but you didn't listen," has probably appeared in more villain speeches than any other line, except for maybe screaming "The fools! I'll destroy them all!" or telling the protagonist "We're a lot alike, you and I." Nothing good can ever happen following a line like, "...but you didn't listen."
B-Side: "Follow My Heart (TO YOUR DOOOOOM)"
You played dead But you never bled Instead you lay still in the grass All coiled up and hissin'
Oh shit. I know, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, like maybe the played dead/never bled part meaning she wouldn't return his calls or whatever, but when you look at the big picture, the song as a whole, it's pretty clear what's going on here. He done strangled that bitch. The "coiled up and hissin'" part can easily be explained as an hallucination, especially once the rest of the song comes to light.
And though I know All about those men Still I don't remember Cause it was us baby Way before them And we're still together
Here, we get more of an insight of what led to this tragic event, and Mr. Speedwagon's pathology is becoming a bit clearer. Take all those lines, mentally remove them from a song format, (but if possible, keep those "threatening-sounding for an 80s pop song" underlying guitars in mind) and instead imagine them being spoken, and not just spoken, but spoken by Mr. Crazy Eyes from the video. This is starting to look less and less like being in a relationship with an unfaithful woman that you're still in love with and a whole helluva lot more like an imaginary stalker relationship, where the stalker keeps seeing all these other dudes going into the stalkee's house, and it JUST MAKES HIM SO CRAZY. It's right there in the going-all-over-the-place crazy that's shown in saying he knows something, but doesn't remember it, right after he just said that he knew about it, indicating some sort of memory. Jesus, even that sentence sounds crazy. I think the sort of "love" we're dealing with is less of the "oh baby I love you so much that we'll be together forever and if we get shipwrecked, I'll keep the driftwood afloat even if it means freezing to death, because goddammit I love you SO MUCH" kind of love as it is the "maybe if I shoot the President, Jodie Foster will finally go out with me" kind of love. In fact, I bet if the song didn't just degrade into repeating the chorus a hundred times from here, the way pop songs are prone to do, he'd start going off on some serious monumental crazy in the resulting final verses.
"You know what a love letter is? It's a bullet from a fucking gun, fucker! You receive a love letter from me, you're fucked forever!"
And I meant every word I said When I said that I love you I meant that I love you forever
And I'm gonna keep on lovin' you Cause it's the only thing I wanna do I don't wanna sleep I just wanna keep on lovin' you
At this point, we've already established that Mr. Speedwagon has already stalked and killed someone in this song, but I'm not sure what to make of the chorus. The first pre-chorus part is easy enough, I suppose. Like maybe once he figured out that she still wasn't going to love him, even after he expressed his feelings to her via heavy breathing-based phone calls and mysteriously dying pets, he'd up the ante a bit and express his love with piano wire instead. But the chorus itself doesn't make quite so much sense. I mean, what's the point in still loving someone after you've garroted them? If it was the only thing you wanted to do, why not just let them live and give it another chance? Because I mean, if all you want to do is... love someone... after you've killed them... instead of sleeping... Because... I mean... How can... Aw, fuuuuuuuuuuuck, man.
I know I'm about a week late this one, but when I had my website-updatin' mojo working last week, the whole thing with the socks-with-sandals crowd gathering en masse to watch doctors, lawyers, and business executives jack off their flutes was more time-sensitive. Anyway, they had this big rock festival thingy going on, and the big attraction was the "THE BIG FOUR" were playing a show together for the first time ever. And seeing as out of the maybe seven people who read my crap, there has to be at least two or three with no clue of such things, I'll explain. Back in the eighties, heavy metal was blowing up all over, and somewhere underneath the wall-to-wall glam rock coverage, thrash metal was pretty much the king. And amongst these bands, a "big four" emerged, meaning four bands that everyone generally agreed were head and shoulders above everyone else, and these four bands were Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax. (But since this is the internet, I'm assuming there's someone in a black metal t-shirt with an unreadable band logo reading this right now and thinking, "no, it's Kreator, Sodom, Destruction, and Tankard, fag!") And somehow, despite the obviousness of the whole thing (and despite Metallica not getting too far up their own asses to tour with anyone not in heavy MTV rotation until sometime in the late 90s) such a thing as all four getting together at once had never happened before.
And well, when the big shocking finale of getting all four bands onstage to play Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?" happened, (That was that YouTube video that you didn't watch up there.) it wasn't perfect, but I suppose it could have gone much worse. There was only one person who really embarrassed himself, and the logisitcs of having six guitar players, three bass players, three singers, three drummers, and Lars Ulrich never went as haywire as something like that is usually supposed to. But let's take a look at what happened, with my stupid little observations on a band-by-band basis:
Metallica then and now: Robert Trujillo sure looked different 27 years ago.
Metallica - The stars of the show, by virtue of having sold as many records as the other Big Three combined, maybe even with a zero on the end of the other bands' total, despite not putting out a decent album since 1991. And when everyone took the stage, they had wo of the best metal drummers ever, plus that thoroughly competent dude Dave has playing for him in Megadeth now, and they STILL insisted that Lars had to be the guy sitting behind the only real kit. Just damn. It boggles my mind to think of how good Metallica would have been back in the day if they had ever bothered to hire a professional drummer, and when given a chance to see what it might have been like, they just make the other three dudes pound on snare drums like a bunch of damn apes. Meanwhile, that turd Lars will just just slowly go "BOOM, TSS, BOOM, TSS" to his heart's content, even when the rest of the band is going a million miles an hour. Also in regard to the rhythm section, recurring theme of the night was how odd it seemed to have a big nostalgia reunion with so many newer (and usually way younger) members in some of these bands, but I figure Robert Trujillo fit in nicely, since Suicidal Tendencies probably would have at least been in the Big Fifteen, if such a thing existed. On that note, they need to put together a Big Thirty show someday, so my boys Sacred Reich can be on a DVD sold at Target. Lastly, it seems so odd to me that even though his band has sucked balls for like fifteen years and we all now know that he's a twelve-stepping, midlife crisis-riddled Republican, James Hetfield still comes off as the coolest guy in the room, no matter where he is. It's like some sort of superpower. Also, he's starting to sound really Canadian lately. Possibly related? Must investigate further.
James Hetfield only has a midlife crisis. Kerry King IS a midlife crisis.
Second - Slayer, The Big Four member who managed to hang on to most of their metal scene credibility longer than any of the other bands, and hasn't put out a decent record since 1990. And well, um... So... Where were these guys? Dave Lombardo was the only band member to take part in the big finale, and Tom Araya came out for the curtain call, but that was it. According to internet heresay, Jeff Hanneman just didn't do it, because he isn't into making a spectacle of himself or whatever, which sort of flies in the face of being in a huge heavy metal band that puts out a CD called God Hates Us All, but whatever. If I had to guess why Kerry King didn't come out there, it's because he's way too into that "true metal till death, motherfucker" image, and couldn't be seen in the same place as a band like Metallica. Which, once again, flies in the face of him being that dude from the late 90s, bouncing around the stage in huge pants like a lost member of Limp Bizkit. On the other hand, I've heard that both King and Araya might have stayed away from the thing due to both of them having personal issues with Dave Mustaine. Which makes sense, seeing as he's always been a huge, giant asshole.
I just found out that Dave Mustaine used to be in Metallica. No, seriously, this is new information that has just now come to light. I know, right?
Megadeth - Dave Mustaine's solo act, recently joined by former Megadeth bass player David Ellefson, who haven't put out a decent album since... Um, September last year. But they had sucked since about the mid-nineties, and even broke up at one point, so nyeah. It's crazy as hell seeing both Megadaves back together now, after Ellefson was trying to sue Mustaine's pants literally off a few years ago. I guess Big Dave's new-found Jesus powers got everything smoothed out with Dave Junior in time for the Rust in Peace 20th anniversary tour. It's just too bad he couldn't have made the phone calls and promises of huge cash prizes necessary to get Marty Friedman to stop playing music for Japanese pedophiles and to get Nick Menza to take a few months off from the styrofoam peanut factory, or whatever the hell he's doing now. And speaking of bizarre reunions of relationsships once sundered by alcoholism and assholery, Dave Mustaine and James Hetfield actually hugged. I don't even know if I can make a joke about that. That's not supposed to happen. It's like seeing Superman taking Lex Luthor out to a titty bar or something. Maybe all that 2012 crap isn't bullshit, and this is the first sign of the End Times.
WE RIIIDE! WITH DEATH! TOOOONIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGHHTTTT!
And finally, Anthrax, the only Big Four band to ever fall on hard times, despite never really putting out a bad album. Thing is, I'm pretty sure no one will actually manufacture or distribute their stuff anymore, so their last decent one was from 2003. And all there is to say is that you fuckers out there have been wanting Joey Belladonna back in the band since 1992, and you really ought to be careful with wishes like that. That dude looked less like a capable frontman than he did some old dude who wandered onstage and stole a microphone, possibly by shooting magic laser beams out of his big, ridiculous 1986 bracelet... things. According to Joey Belladonna, the song "Am I Evil" actually contains the following two lyrical snippets:
TAKE A DOW NOW I DON'T SEE YOUR FACE A BLASTING ON OUR BOWELS I'LL HIDE IN DISGRACE
A TAKE NO CHANCES COME WITH ME SPLIT YOU DOG GO BOOM HELP YOU SET YOU FREE
Jesus H. Christ, are you telling me that not only has this guy never heard what's become one of Metallica's biggest songs, but also that no one bothered to hand this dude a lyric sheet? And as far as the actual vocal performance, I'm probably the last human on Earth who gets really excited when hearing of an impending Anthrax record release. But after hearing this and realizing that half of the new CD was originally written for that Phil Anselmo impersonator who was in the band last year, I just don't know, man. I mean, I know, Anthrax has made no secret that they've been wanting that guy back in the band for a long, long time now, and the last 15 years of completely snakebit dealings with record labels and band members have pretty much reduced Anthrax to the Bill Dauterive of the Big Four, but goddammit, they should have known better than to let Lenore back into the band. Or something.
(And if you're keeping score, Metallica is the Hank Hill, Megadeth is the Dale Gribble, and Slayer is the Jeff Boomhauer in this whole King of the Hill analogy.)
I hate jazz. There, I said it. I hate jazz, hate it to death, and I hate the people who listen to it. I hate every second of non-musical "hey guys, look at how many notes we can play in sequence" wankery it results in, and I hate the people who tell me that I'm supposed to "appreciate" that crap. More than anything, though, I hate the endless parade of uppity white people and resulting near-uselessness of a decent-sized chunk of Robinson Street that's going to happen when the annual Jazz in June debacle hits this town tonight. (The first night might already be over by the time I finish typing, but eh, details.) It's a true nightmare, the worst time of the year to live in this town, (or any of the other places that do it around this time of year, probably due to them thinking that alliteration is so clever and people being too unoriginal to do it in January or July) and a bigger celebration of unchecked whiteness than anything the Ku Klux Klan has cooked up so far. I mean, just look at this dude they've got playing on the first night, allegedly featuring the blues:
"Bring me a little water, Sylvie. In a factory-sealed plastic bottle. Thanks."
Now, I'll be honest. I don't know this dude right here from Adam, and for all I know, he can probably play the shit out of a guitar or whatever, but that ain't no blues man. He looks less like a dude who should be playing the blues professionally than he does the leather jacket-wearing kid from out of town who shows up as a new student at Bayside High to give Zack Morris a hard time, before it finally gets revealed that he was a geek at his old school, and the whole leather jacket tough-guy thing was just an act. That, or the coolest guy in the room at an all-gay German techno rave. But either way, that motherfucker ain't never had the blues. But you can rest assured that come Thursday night, a crowd full of people in golf shirts and tennis visors will pause from exchanging business cards long enough to stop and marvel at just what an "authentic blues experience" they're having, as they sip the wine they brought from home with the actual goddamn wineglasses they brought from home - I am being serious here, and they actually do that.Witnesses have confirmed this. But that's just the way things go at an event like this.
The Man, discussing the latest Miles Davis compilation with his peers.
You see, way, way back in the old days, jazz wasn't so bad. I mean, it was still pretty bad, but it wasn't the bullshit "look at how cultured I am" form of music, where people mainly just have the records around the house to be seen. I mean, let's face it - No one - NO ONE - ever listens to jazz in a room by themselves. Jazz is something that people can only listen to if they have someone around to witness the fact that they're listening to jazz. You see, Jazz People are insanely artificial people who are physically incapable of doing anything that's not grossly pretentious, and that's why when you go to a Jazz Person's house, you always get greeted with something like, "Oh, hello there. I was just relaxing to some rare recordings of John Coltrane. Would you like to step out on the balcony and smoke a clove cigarette while the Earl Grey steeps in the kettle?" Meanwhile, you'll never go to the house of one of your other, more "street-level" friends and get something like, "Oh, do come in. Gus and I were just perusing the latest GWAR compact disc. Would you like to step out on the porch and smoke some Kool menthols while we wait for the ice cubes to harden for the grape drink?" You'll never hear that shit, because Good People don't do that shit.
But before I got sidetracked, I was going to say that jazz wasn't always worthless crap it is now. It was an actual honest-to-god form of music, born from when the folks we dragged over here to pick our cotton got their hands on some European musical instruments and decided that The Man's music was a bunch of crap. Eventually, it led to pretty much every form of music alive today, but somewhere on the way there, jazz happened. And this whole vibrant culture popped up around it, and what with him not being vibrant at all, The Man hated it. To be involved with jazz in any form was a shameful and disreputable thing, only for street people and winos, and the Man's fear of this whole thing actually even helped lead to today's marijuana laws, because The Man figured if he could stamp that shit right out if he just started busting the people involved for those funny cigarettes they were smoking. But you see, somewhere along the line, something changed. Something changed, and the vibrant, freeballing jazz culture turned into a stuffy, stuck-up game of pseudo-intellectualism and "look how many more records I have than you do" dick-waving, and a form of music that sucked - but was at least creative and original - turned into one that just simply sucked with no substance to it at all. And what was it that happened? Same thing that happens to every form of music. White people stopped being scared of it.
Moments before some white people evicted him from his house and took his trumpet.
Somewhere along the line, The Man decided that jazz really wasn't so bad, took that shit, snatched it right up, called it his own, and then promptly fucked it all up until it was unrecognizable. Shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone, I suppose. The way I figure it, it's the same thing we did with the blues, (remember the dude from a couple paragraphs ago?) rock 'n roll, most of the major monotheistic religions, the vast majority of the North American continent, and the act of calling people "dog." Don't ask me why; I guess taking darker people's shit and eventually screwing it all up is just in our DNA somehow. I mean, we've been trying really hard on rap for about twenty years so far, too, and while we haven't completely taken it as our own yet, you must admit, we already have managed to completely cut its balls off.
"Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'ma blast / Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz"
But anyway, here we are in modern times, where jazz has become the single most absolutely white thing on the planet, pretending to be loved and adored by the absolute worst white people on the planet. Jazz People, who will be crawling all over this place soon. (In a shopping center parking lot, a few doors down from a Starbucks, appropriately enough) If you don't know how to spot Jazz People, it's easy. They're the people with entirely European ancestry whose homes are covered in a borderline-racist mishmash of vaguely Asian, vaguely African, and vaguely Native American decor. Jazz People are like that; they try really hard to be all "multicultural," and as far as it usually ever gets is pretending that the Dave Matthews Band is "world music" and accidentally driving through the black section of town once or twice, with their doors locked and their teeth chattering the whole time. Jazz People are the people who sit behind you in groups of five or more at the restaurant, and you can tell they're there, because every single person at the table laughs this forced, mirthless laugh at eerily, mechanically regular intervals, squinting their eyes, thrusting their faces forward, and baring all their teeth while doing so, in essence making the only face that Kate Plus Eight ever makes.
JAZZ FACE.
Young Jazz People all work at Starbucks. They also all have four-year degrees in something like sociology, English, communications, or philosophy. They all drive a Prius that they can't afford, because they all work at Starbucks. They spend most of their time driving around in their Prius, which they can't afford, wondering why someone with a degree in sociology, English, communications, or philosophy can only find work at a Starbucks. Jazz People drink Pabst Blue Ribbon to feel kinship with the working man, when the working man only drinks it because he's broke. Jazz people don't "like" music; they "appreciate" music. Jazz people claim to "appreciate" all forms of music, and hold their "diverse" music collections up as a shining example of this, but pretty much anything they have that's not just regular old pop music (and sometimes this even includes jazz) is almost always just a small handful of "greatest hits" compilations. Jazz people pretend to know what snooty indie rock reviewers are talking about when they mention "angular guitars," when the people who coined the term still probably haven't figured it out themselves. If you claim to not like jazz, Jazz People will you that you're not listening to it the right way, (which I always figured was with my ears, but who knows, really) and that you have to "listen to the notes that he ISN'T playing," as though that means anything at all. But you know what? I AM listening to the notes that he isn't playing. Because the notes that the asshole tootling away on the flute isn't playing just so happen to be the exact same notes that Judas Priest IS playing.
LEAVING A TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION THAT'S SECOND TO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE
So Jazz in June starts tonight, and you all have fun with that, Jazz People. Have fun with your bottled water, your boxed wine, and your stupid beret that you only wear once a year. Have fun using your iPhone to update your Facebook status with how much you're loving the show, secretly wishing you had planned ahead like the guy a few feet away who straight-up brought a folding table, a chair, and his iPad to do the same. Have fun with the mosquitoes, and have fun being bitten by them for three hours, because you had to be seen by your Jazz Friends at an outdoor show in 90-degree heat, while you probably could have just waited a few days and seen the same people perform for a five dollar cover charge somewhere up in the city. Also, have fun with the inevitable mountain of smash-ups and fender-benders that will inevitably result when minivans, SUVs, and wine coolers all converge in a small space.
As a developmentally-stunted man-boy and huge goddamn dork who never fully gave up the pursuit of the accumulation of little cardboard pieces with pictures of football-men on them, I have little room to talk when someone blows some money on something silly. But after the events of the last week or so, I found someone who makes me not feel like a damned moron for once spending twenty dollars on a fancy rookie card of four foot tall special teams player Garrett Wolfe.
But it's an Exquisite Collection Patch/auto RC! *snorts, pushes up glasses*
In this backwards and terrible age of packs of cards that can cost anywhere up to $500 apiece and people who will actually pay that much for them, all ceilings of sanity have been shattered, now that someone has paid the tidy sum of $16,403 for a one-of-a-kind card of Major League Baseball's latest golden boy rookie pitcher, Stephen Strasburg. That is not a typo, and I totally didn't mean to type $1,640.03 or anything like that. Someone actually paid over sixteen thousand for a baseball card - with no autographs, pieces of memorabilia, or any of the other bells and whistles that define the trading card business these days - of a player who's still never thrown a pitch in a regular season baseball game. And it's not so much a case of "why would you pay that much for a stupid baseball card?" as it is a case of "why would you buy that baseball card if you had SIXTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS of free money laying around?" So, just in case someone invents a time machine any time soon, I'm here to help, and I'm going to help by suggesting to that dude ten way-better things he could have had with that kind of money:
Yeah, an actual Washburn P4 Princess custom-made for the dude from Extreme. And yeah, I mean, on one hand, he did bear some responsibility for that godawful "More Than Words" song you probably had drilled into your head in 1991 or whenever it was. But on the other hand, this very guitar might have been used to play the HOT LIXX that Dave Beethoven gets falsely credited for, about 2:16 into this scene from History's Greatest Movie:
THAT COULD BE YOU. Well, probably not, but if you had a full length mirror and the Bill & Ted soundtrack CD, (and you'd still have over a grand of your $16,403 left, so that's totally doable) you could pretend like whoa.
Damn, man, it's a Rolex. If you don't already know why that would be better than some trumped-up baseball card, no amount of internet-reading will convince you. Look, a Rolex has been a symbol of power and wealth used for decades to win the respect and envy of your peers and the affection of your lady-peers. If you flash a Rolex at someone, they immediately get all "damn, you're moving up in the world," and doors open to a whole new world of executive washrooms, exclusive nightclubs, invitations to the Church of Scientology, and a multi-million dollar book deal after your crippling cocaine addiction destroys everything the Rolex got you, and you claw your way back to respectability, through the power of Jesus Christ. (Or L. Ron Hubbard, depending on which Choose Your Own Adventure path you chose earlier in life) If you flash a $16, 000 baseball card at someone, the best-case scenario is that your friends and family become deeply worried about your mental and financial well-being and put you on an episode of Intervention. Meanwhile, the worst-case scenario is that someone just bonks you over the head and takes the card. And it's harder to do that with a Rolex, because it's clasped to your wrist. Clasped with quality.
It's a real-ass RIAA platinum award given presumably to one of Suge Knight's terrified lackeys for helping to sell so many copies of Doggystyle, Murder Was the Case, The Chronic, and the Above the Rim soundtrack. Granted, the Above the Rim CD is pretty much just wasting space that could have been used for a platinum Tupac CD, but that might have pushed it over the $16,403 limit. But it's still got three of the biggest damn rap records ever represented, instantly giving you way more street cred than a bling-blingy baseball card of some white boy ever could have given you. And even if you're one of those "oh, I like all kinds of music... EXCEPT RAP" snobs, you can still melt it down, sell the platinum, and sleep well, knowing that you've destroyed an important part of hip hop history.
One-of-a-kind or not, there's only so much mileage you can get out of a shiny baseball card when it comes to impressing people. To get the full effect from it, someone would either have to have an intimate knowledge of the modern baseball card collecting hobby (unlikely) or would just have to be a huge baseball fan. (even less likely) Sure, it looks neat, it's one-of-a-kind, and it got some decent mileage as an internet story, but upon being shown that card you just spent sixteen thousand on, the average person would just either humor you with a polite (yet noticeably uncomfortable) "oh, that's neat," or spend fifteen minutes chastising you about how many starving kids that money could have fed. Let's face it, that Strasburg Superfractor isn't gonna knock anyone's socks off. It lacks... Zazz. But if you took the same person, told them, "check out what I just spent sixteen thousand PayPal dollars on," and then showed them this fucking thing, they'd immediately know where all that money went. If you're gonna nerd out, go big or go home.
An actual screen print handmade by (and hand signed) by an artist that was such a big deal that they made movies about people he hung out with. Granted it's not the thing with the soup cans or whatever, but it still should be enough to become the envy of all your snooty-assed friends that you secretly hate so much. They'll update their stupid Facebook status and be all "Just relaxing, enjoying a glass of [insert name of expensive wine from hip, local winery that tastes like someone pissed in some Mad Dog 20/20] and spinning an LP of [insert name of jazz musician that they don't actually listen to, because no one ever listens to jazz without a witness (More on that later, I fucking assure you)]." And you can reply with something like "Sounds great. I'm just kicking back too, drinking warm tap water next to my GODDAMN WARHOL." Then, the other person won't reply with anything, because they'll be so jealous that they will literally swell up and die. Of course, if you're not into all that high-falutin' art nonsense, you could just spend the same amount on this fine piece of art instead: 5. A 427 Year old copy of The Bible.
Instead of worshiping cardboard-and-foil idols, why not just GET RIGHT WITH GOD, SINNER. And there aren't many better ways to get on The Big Man's good side than to spend the price of a mobile home on the goodest goddamn book of them all. And seeing as it's from way, way back in the day, you'll probably have a way better edition, from back before 427 years of careful editing gave us the Holy Bible we have today. So you'll get a lot of the parts deemed too intense and inappropriate for modern audiences, like the part where Jesus Christ punches a bear in the face to save the house of orphans, or all those parts that P.C. politics have forced them to cut out in the last few years about O.J. Simpson and Chris Benoit. This is the rawest edition of the Good Book that you can get for less than twenty thousand, probably, and if you spend your sixteen grand on anything else, you're probably going straight to hell. That should be pretty decent motivation to get this instead. Also, the worming in the blank lower margins is just insignificant.
I'm just going to put this as crudely and bluntly as possible, with apologies to anyone who comes to this site expecting family entertainment (heh), my mom, and anyone else's mom who may stumble upon this little blog entry: People get laid all the time because of their ownership (or even perceived ownership) of a Chevrolet Corvette. Someone is probably getting laid in a Corvette right this very second. No one has ever fucked on a pile of baseball cards. Ever. Do the math, son. Get the Corvette and strengthen your pimp hand, or get that Stephen Strasburg card and just strengthen... your hand.
Kind of cheating, since this is an auction for just one, but I figure if five more similar ones popped up, they'd sell for a similar amount. And if they never did pop up for that much, not only would you have a Babe Ruth autograph, but you'd also have like thirteen-something thousand dollars just sitting around for whatever. Man, just weigh that in your mind for a second. One guy comes up and tells you he wants to give you crazy-ass card of some rookie pitcher, and another guy comes up and offers you a Babe Ruth autograph and thirteen thousand dollars. If you chose the Strasburg card, you are either severely mentally handicapped, or you just hate the shit out of Babe Ruth. And money. And puppies. Jesus.
Okay, so just for the sake of argument, let's throw the idea out there that this ton on money you have has to spent on a baseball card. Fine. Let's weigh your options here: A: a Fancy rookie card that came out this year of a guy who's never thrown a major league pitch, might never be any good if he does ever throw a major league pitch, or could just end up banging his arm on a door frame really hard and never playing at all. Or B: A sixty-two year old rookie card (in what would be considered pretty damn good condition for a five year old card) of the most important baseball player of olden days to not potentially be an alcoholic Klansman, important to the point where he's considered more of an important part of American History rather than just Major League Baseball history, and is the only player to ever have his number retired by an entire goddamn pro sports league. Gee, I dunno.
Look, if you don't know who George Washington was, you're probably an enemy of freedom, and I hate you. If you don't hate freedom, and just either went to a shitty public school or some private/home school situation where they just taught you about why God hates Democrats all day, here's a little video to remind you:
An official goddamn document, hand-signed by a man who invented cocaine, had a brain for a heart, and fucked the shit out of bears. Stephen Strasburg has no achievements that even approach things like that, and I bet he'd even save the British children. Traitor.
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Or, failing all of these, maybe you could have just skipped the Superfractor card and just bid on one of the severalother "one of one" Stephen Strasburg cards from the exact same brand. (I'm pretty sure there's eleven, counting printing plates) Or just held out and waited till the autographed Superfractor card gets pulled, which could end up selling for way less than sixteen thousand, if it doesn't happen sometime soon. Just sayin'.
...Because I stepped on it and the screen doesn't work anymore. So to anyone out there meaning to contact me through audio-based or non-internet text-based means, go back to using the old prepaid ghetto phone number until I can get all this sorted out. Stupid phones. Stupid feet.
So you can expect this website/blog/thing to feature more photos of things like a public restroom toilet paper dispenser with "JESUS LIVES" carved into it
Soooo, pretty sure it's time to find a new server to host this website. A week ago, it was asking people for a password to enter, and now, I've lost FTP access, meaning I can't actually do anything to the website. What that means is that if this blog page wasn't hosted at Blogger, I'd have no way to affect what shows up at websurfnicaragua.com any more. Meanwhile, looking to Chamber Gates (the people to whom I've been sending thirty bucks every three months for this thing for the last few years) for some kind of support, I've learned that their website has not been updated since 2006. So either this happened to them four years ago and they never figured out how to fix it, or they just don't care one way or another. So, anybody got any suggestions on where I can take this thing?
Should have posted these back when they were relevant, but there were a lot of shiny objects nearby, and well, you know how that goes.
Anyway, with the economic downturn, Santa apparently had to take on a second job as a fireman, but then things took a turn for the better when he signed a free agent contract with the 1974 New England Patriots.
Meanwhile, in other countries, they have their own special versions of Santa. In Ireland, Seamus O'Claus comes to the homes of good little boys and girls bearing gifts of golden coins, and for the naughty children, he brings severe beatings from his shamrock-laden whoopass stick. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Kwanzaa Claus has become somewhat of an outcast, shunned by a population that has realized that Kwanzaa is just some American bullshit some dude came up with in the sixties, and filled with bitterness from the much more Christmassy Black Santa being way more popular than he is.
Anyway, I must say that all of this commercialism surrounding Christmas is horrible, we should get back to the roots of the holiday season, and we should all take this time to get right with God.
More like "Ernest Goes to DEATH Camp," am I right?
