well it's gotta be better than abstinence only sex-ed...

did you know that planned parenthood once put out a mini-comic featuring Spider-Man battling a villain who tried to encourage kids to have unprotected sex so that his alien race could harvest the babies?

it's almost as cool as the time Spidey prevented a gang-rape with cupcakes!

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

i was really sad to hear that the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman passed away today at 89. Bergman made some phenomenal films, including two of my favorites--The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both made in 1957.) Also, he was good for inspiring some other great directors, including Woody Allen, who has a great diatribe about Bergman in Annie Hall (1977.)

hopefully, in the sweet hereafter, he's giving Death a run for his money in a game of chess.

my arch-nemesis

if you own a cat, why do you let it wander the neighborhood and puke and shit on someone else's porch? isn't the idea of owning a pet that it hangs out with you, on YOUR property and leaves me the hell alone?

why come back?

well i figured i need some web presence for my radio show, and i like to shoot my mouth off. so i went all lame ass on everyone and started a myspace account for the show and tried to add my favorite bands as friends. then i decided to ressurect my lame-ass blog that no one reads anyway.

i like listening to crickets.

boo hoo, me

so i am sad that this week is the san diego comic con and here i am , stuck in ohio, with a 20 month old and a mortgage.

sometimes it sucks balls to be an adult.

yeah, i'm back

so i got busy. and i didn't have anything interesting to say (did i ever?)

ACTION NEWS!

gotta love when those reporting the news become the story

this attitude of "you saw it first on channel 8" is getting ridiculous. but this sort of journalistic pornography definitely sells.

since when are we at war with Mexico?

so, if he hadn't done so before, the president has totally lost it.

there are reports that Bush is going to give a speech tonight and announce that he is sending troops to the US-Mexican border to secure it.

apparently those racist assholes, the Minutemen, aren't getting the job done, or building fences fast enough, etc.

and why does Bush always pick the middle of sweeps to have these speeches? does he really want to piss off everyone who caught the first part of the Gray's Anatomy season finale (my wife is one of those people, but she's part of the 70% who disapprove of the job the President is doing)

it won't matter to me...hopefully i will be watching Lebron James make Rasheed Wallace look like an asshole... (Ias if 'Sheed didn't do a good enough job of that himself.)

i'm sure this guy's mom is proud

okay, so someone with way too much time on his hands is suing the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim for denying him a tote bag that was given to women over 18 last year as part of a Mother's Day promotion.

now that this is making national news, i'm sure this guy's mom is glad she gave birth to the miserable bastard.

and we're back...

okay, so April was a wash. and part of May. but i feel like running my mouth again, so here we go.

mother of the year!

one nice thing about celebrity...when you fuck up, it's hard to avoid being exposed for it.

take yesterday's news, Britney Spears. first she gets shit for driving around without having her kid in a car seat (a big no no) and then her nanny goes and drops the kid on his head!

maybe sculptor Daniel Edwards should have picked a better model for his pro-life statue...that kid will be dead within six months at this rate.

(and if anyone would like to see the side of that statue that didn't make the rounds, you know, the one with the head crowning, utter a small prayer and click here. not for the faint of heart or stomach.)

little miracles (or not)

so have you heard the one about the sleazy couple who pretended to have sextuplets so they could get people to give them handouts?

GRAIN VALLEY, Mo. - The library books on multiple births crowded the couple's coffee table. The bedroom-turned-nursery awaited the arrival of six newborns.

But in the end, authorities say Sarah and Kris Everson never had the sextuplets as claimed. All they had was what appears to be a big lie.

The couple's dramatic story had holes in it from the start — from their mysterious withholding of information for more than a month to the unanimous response of area hospitals that they hadn't helped deliver the newborns.

On Tuesday, authorities said the mystery had been solved — the entire tale was deemed a hoax aimed at tapping the generosity of others to pay the couple's mounting bills.

of course, these con artists are totally misunderstood:

Reached by phone late Tuesday, Sarah Everson offered no explanation. "I'm not talking to anybody right now," she said, "because nobody gets it."

hmmm....made up a bullshit lie to prey upon people's generosity...

...nope. sounds pretty straightforward to me.

the funny things people say when they are on drugs

my wife was prescribed percoset after her surgery last week. after we got home and she had taken her medication and was still a little woozy from the surgery, she asked me:

"do you think Mickey Mouse is a pussy because he doesn't wear a shirt and has buttons on his pants?"

how do you answer that question?

where ya been?

okay, so it's been a while. my wife was having surgery last week and with the Cleveland Indians getting off to a 6-1 start, there's been little time for blogging.

i love to write, but i'd rather hang out with my wife and son, if you don't mind.

see you later asshole!

so the news has come down that self-serving, corrupt, politician and overall prick Tom Delay is resigning from his house seat and not seeking re-election:

DeLay said he is stepping down because he wanted the race in his Houston-area district to focus on the issues people care about -- "not a campaign focused solely as a referendum on me."

don't let Tom fool you though--he's less interested in the campaign and more on making sure he isn't someone's bitch in the federal pokey for the next twenty to twenty-five years.

couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

movie of the day: Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

when i was an English student at Bowling Green State University, i was never much for allegory. to me, allegory was too direct in its methods, leaving little to the imagination and revealing itself as the pontification it so often comes across as.

if there were such a thing as a neutral point of view, i would probably have a disdain for Good Night, and Good Luck, as it is an obvious allegory of contemporary media coverage, cast in the historical context of the McCarthy hearings during the mid-50s.

but i don't have a neutral point of view.

the fact of the matter is that with the Bush administration's attempts to cast everything in terms of black and white (if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists, etc.) Good Night, and Good Luck is an important allegory to consider. the McCarthy hearings destroyed people both figuratively and literally (the film covers the suicide of a Murrow associate, Don Hollenbeck, who killed himself after being crucified by a columnist for the Hearst syndicate of newspapers) and the obvious message here is that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

the parallels between the McCarthy hearings and the rhetoric of the Bush administration are frighteningly congruous. McCarthy, like his modern day counterparts, would always attempt to bring the argument back on itself, often engaging in ad hominem attacks on his critics because it was obvious that his arguments didn't hold water. McCarthy made a mistake in attacking Murrow, who was respected by the American public for his coverage of World War II.

the one element that we find that Good Night, and Good Luck has not parallelled is Murrow himself. Murrow's politics did not make him confront McCarthy's witch hunts, but instead he was compelled by a need to do what he felt was right. as he explains to Sig Mickelson early in the film, there is no such thing as a neutral view point, that all news is editorializing to some degree. the problem is that today we lack a newsperson of Murrow's character. no one will step up and question this administration and do what is right.

the most amazing element of the film is that director George Clooney made a conscious decision to only use Joe McCarthy's actual televised appearances and hearings instead of casting an actor to play McCarthy. this is, of course, the most effective method of showing the fervor and lunacy of McCarthy's witch hunt, and it seems that it may be just as easy to slip Bush, Cheney, McClellan, Rumsfeld, Rice and all of the other zealots in there without ruining a thing. and that's a frightening thought. Five Stars (out of Five)

Torquemada's textbook

it seems that the Office for Standards in Education in Britain is making Michael Palin's book Himalaya required reading for British high school students in their geography.

i can't think of a better choice really. Palin has been travelling the world for the last twenty plus years and making films and writing about it. he's definitely a subject matter expert (and funny as hell to boot.)

and this may be a boring post, but i just couldn't bring myself to talk about the Britney Spears giving "doggie-style" birth pro-life statue.

while we're talking about Mates of State...

...i'll be giving away two tickets to their Cleveland show on April 9th on this Sunday's Cream of Broccoli Radio Hour. i'll even tell you how we're going to do it--between 11 and noon, i'll be playing the song "Punchlines" of their new record Bring It Back. the first caller gets the tickets. don't worry--if you're a Mates of State fan, you'll know the song when you hear it.

essential record of the day: Mates of State--Bring It Back (2006)

i don't know how Mates of State keeps doing it.

when i heard their debut record, My Solo Project, for the first time back in 2001, i was amazed by their originality and energy. i immediately became addicted to the record and it remains one of my favorites.

the problem with a band that is basically a electric piano-drum combo is that there is always a possibility that the music will grow stale. i mean how many times can you flog a one-trick pony before you end up with a dead horse?

of course to say that Mates of State are a one-trick pony is to tragically underestimate them. Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel are accomplished musicians with a real penchant for coming up with catchy pop hooks. it is this consistency that allows Mates of State to transcend the apparent limitations of their choices of instrument.

that brings us to their latest record, Bring It Back. one would expect that after three full length LPs and an EP, Mates of State wouldn't have anything new to say. but once again they surprise us. not only do they deliver a successful record, but they may have delivered the best Mates of State record to date.

usually at this point i tell you what tracks stand out, but it is impossible with this record. all of the tracks stand out. the ideas and themes are so varied and yet are unified by Kori and Jason's steadfast allegiance to the keyboard and drums that they have become known for. It's when a band can accomplish this seemingly paradoxical state of variance and unity that the best records are often made.

and so it is with Mates of State. they have managed to keep going despite their self-imposed limitations and consistently produce great records. it just goes to show that the artist isn't limited by their tools, just by themselves. and Mates of State want the world.

right now, this is definitely THE record of 2006. Grade: A+

i think there is a special place in hell for this ABC exec

the good people at thesmokinggun.com have posted an internal memo from an ABC executive to local affiliates asking for them to be on the lookout for hard luck stories for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. in the memo, the casting director has a laundry list of afflictions a family might be suffering from that will make for really good television, including cancer, ALS (Lou Gerhig's disease) and Progeria (premature aging in a child, which the casting director describes as "the little old man disease") among others. she also excitedly is looking for a child suffering from CIPA (which is an insensitivity to pain) realizing that the potential pool is limited.

if you want to be sickened by the exploitation of these families for network profits, definitely check out the link above.