Them: This guy’s married to a Spanish model who’s been on the cover of Maxim.
Me: Hmm. Okay.
Them: When Pizza Hut brings this guy a large pizza they don’t bother giving him a plate.
Me: 😳😳😳😳✊✊✊✊ #respect
Saturday, October 30, 2021
Friday, October 29, 2021
Spooky Halloween Reading So Far
PREVIOUS ENTRIES
The Crucible: B sorry - throughout the entire dramatic, climatic scene I couldn't help but read it as a comedy piece, and I just couldn't shake it. Miller did a great job of effortlessly conveying many of the character's traits, which is a great thing when reading a play.
The Exorcist A yeah, when you hafta draw the curtains in the room because you're scared af, it's probably a good horror book (and better than the movie!).
Frankenstein A++ I love this book. And I simply cannot put into words the fact that more than any book I've ever read, this is nothing like I imagined it would be. I guess I'd been sold the cartoonish monster of the films, but this was a heart-wrenching tale of a living being who craved human contact and friendship so much that it destroyed him. Also: is it too depressing to realize that the one literary character you most relate to is in fact Frankenstein's monster? 😳😬
Freaky! Plus, KISS Is a Terrible Band
Stumbled upon this little factoid just now:
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “don't you have a freaky-deaky story about this very moment?"
Sigh. Yes I do, faithful readers, YES I do:
When I was a kid, the country store down the road sold KISS bubblegum cards, which I’d snatch up anytime I got a quarter. I can still picture myself walking down the road after buying a pack and flipping one of the cards over to read that ABC was airing “KISS and the Phantom of the Park”…ON THAT VERY NIGHT!!! Of course, even at age 7 as I was watching I was like “boy…this is terrible…unwatchable even…what’s Neil Diamond doing here?”
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “don't you have yet ANOTHER freaky-deaky story similar to that one?"
Sigh. Yes I do, faithful readers, YES I do:
...when I was a kid and was reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the narrator announced the date, which was the very day I was reading the book (for some reason I think it was June 22...I could be wrong, but that's stuck in my head).
Indeed, Mr. Lawrence, INdeed!
Zinger!
For decades now Jimmy Page - no stranger to (rightfully) being accused of ripping other artists off - has allowed a myth that he played the scintillating lead on The Kinks' classic All Day and All of the Night to go on, which has infuriated Kinks fans like me. Why won't he just fucking publicly announce that no, it was OF COURSE Dave Davies that played it and not him!??
And now I see this fabulous quote from Ray Davies on the matter, circa 1981:
“We had to record that song at 10 o’clock in the morning,” Davies continued, “because we had a gig that night. It was done in three hours. Page was doing a session in the other studio, and he came in to hear Dave’s solo, and he laughed, and he snickered. And now he says that he played it! So I think he’s an asshole, and he can put all the curses he wants on me because I know I’m right, and he’s wrong.”
My bold - not only does Davies call Page out on his bullshit, not only does he flat-out call him an asshole, but he references the badly-kept secret of Page believing in the Occult, doing weird witchcraft shit which included little girls.
Good one Ray!
And fuck you Jimmy Page!
Requests. I Have Them.
The problem with watching any movie about The Salem Witch Trials is about 40% of the movie is gonna girls rolling on the floor, shrieking like banshees. Cant we just acknowledge thus will happen, and then skip having to sit there and actually listen? Maybe as soon as it starts, a cartoon mouse pops onscreen and announces "hey folks, the next 11 minutes is girls shrieking, got it? Can you wrap your head around that? Good, then we'll skip it and move on!"
"DAMMIT Goody Smith you know she's allergic to ranch dressing!"
Thursday, October 28, 2021
Bookman!
Jerry Seinfeld on the toughest scene he ever to get through on Seinfeld. It's definitely a Top 10 for me!🤣
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
OFAH du Jour
This is an almost perfect clip: we get to see Del Boy fall flat on his face when "speaking French", and Uncle Albert looks like a dummy for thinking he can speak German just because he served on five warships that sank (two during peacetime). 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Tomorrow
(Will save the suspense of "did I find that croissant in Paris?" for tomorrow, faithful readers)
Curb Your Enthusiasm Questions. I Have Them.
If you're going to lie about your age to trick or treat, why would you say you're 13? Isn't 13 way too old to still be trick or treating? 🤔🤷♂️
Old Motherfuckahs
I'm not saying it puts me into John Tyler territory,* but for some reason I was just thinking that I have a grandmother who was born in 1902. I mean, jeez. If I make it to 90 (sausage fingers crossed), that means her birth and my death will have spanned 150 years. No contest compared to Tyler and his grandson spanning 231 years, but still.
Here's a picture of my grandmother, behind Brothatime!! who is of course staring down the camera with those familiar cold, dead eyes. 😜
*One of Tyler's grandsons has died in the last year, so there's one left.
Finally!
A hopefully-definitive Brian Wilson doc is on the way:
Directed by Brent Wilson (no relation), the film offers a comprehensive look at Wilson’s musical accomplishments, personal tribulations, and cultural impact. The trailer teases testimonials from everyone from Elton John and Bruce Springsteen to Linda Perry, the Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins, and Nick Jonas. But the crux of the film is a series of interviews Wilson did with former Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Jason Fine.
I'm excited, although I am really fucking done with docs rolling the same musicians out to have them gush unabashedly. I get it - they're big fans themselves, and if you're doing a documentary and can get Dave Grohl to show up and gush, you do it. But one of the (many) great things about the recent Velvet Underground doc is they didn't do this. I already KNOW Brian Wilson is a musical genius, do I really need to hear another 15 people say it? I'd much rather spend the time inside Wilson's brain,with him walking us through his arrangements etc. But hey, I'm bitching and moaning but will watch it 100 times, so. Hopefully I'm wrong and the amount of gushing is little.
Da Rooseveltz
There are people who pronounce it "ROE-sevelt", and the are people who pronounce it "RUE-sevelt."
Me? I am ROE-sevelt people, thank you very much.
(ALSO: get thee over to PBS now to watch the Ken Burns doc on the Roosevelts - while of course we all know the bluster of Teddy, the political jujitsu stuff on FDR was fascinating.)
"$5 for one hour, mister. No missing on the mouth."
State du Moi
Because I’m old as hell I hafta get out of bed every 5 minutes to take a
whiz, but there is a perverse delight in standing on the cold tile as
long as possible, feeling the cold sink into my body almost to the point of panic, knowing that in a matter of seconds I’ll be back in
bed under my warm, cozy covers.
Halloween's Razor's Edge
Ah yes, over at Salon we have the first of our annual "look out for razor blades in apples when trick or treating" urban legend bullshit:
Every year, as soon as the weather begins to take on an autumnal chill, the warnings begin: Beware of tainted trick-or-treat candy. The method of purported contamination varies — broken glass, cyanide, drugs, injectable poison, splintered needles — as do the motivations behind why someone would distribute such candy, but parents are cautioned every Halloween to check their children's trick-or-treat buckets.
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you roll your beautiful eyes at this nonsense 14 years ago?"
Sigh. Yes I did, faithful reader, YES I did:
Does anyone know anyone who knows anyone who actually got the 'ol razor in the apple? Seems like if anyone pulled that on a kid he'd get busted - seriously, if some asshole tried to pass an apple off on you during trick or treating, you'd fucking remember who it was, no? And what kid came home, dumped out his bag of candy on the table and immediately reached over the piles of Snickers and candy corn to shove an APPLE into his mouth? Who's this Poindexter? I would think you'd eventually SEE a razor since by the time you had gorged on your loot the damn thing woulda rotted away. "Oh look, there's a razor in this apple."
Something I Know For Sure.
Surely there has been someone working remotely during the pandemic who, while sharing their screen on a work call, revealed that their Internet browser has 127 bullshit open tabs and their calendar is jam-packed with bullshit meetings so everybody at the company thinks "man, that Jerry sure is busting his ass for us!"
Brilliant! 🤗
An Instagram Story of Regret
Satan's order! So clever!
Then I saw I'd actually posted this:
"Stan"?!?!? ACK! So I scrambled to change it back to Satan...
...before realizing this:
Aaaaaand in the end I decided "Stan" woulda been funnier in the first place.
DAMMIT!
2017 Halloween Office Party Memories
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
MORE Xmastime Vindication!!!
Years ago, I rather brilliantly wrote this about getting kids to read:
But as policy, while of course I'd rather have an adult reading Crime and Punishment than Twilight, I'd rather have them reading Twilight than watching The Real Housewives of The Hunger Games or some shit. As my Children's Lit professor at
The Harvard on the Appomattox said about children, if they'll read a
fucking cereal box let them read a cereal box.
And now I see this snappy little tidbit from a famous Sports Illustrated article...
Sweet often let students read what they wanted, believing it was better for a kid to pore over 2,000 words about rebuilding motors in Popular Mechanics than to pretend to have studied 2,000 in The Odyssey.
... about a high school baseball coach who in 1971 took a team to the state finals and ... (checks notes)...lost. 🤷♂️
Still means I'm right, dammit!
PS - it's actually a nice story, an almost-Hoosiers one featuring a whacky coach with the current Atlanta Braves' manager playing a bit part.
There are Geniuses in This World...
...and then there is this singular genius:
“You can pay around $150 for unlimited, year-round access to Six Flags, which includes parking and two meals a day,” he tells me. “If you time it right, you could eat both lunch and dinner there every day.”
Maybe that sounds outlandish, but after just seven years of daily meals at the theme park, Dylan paid down his student loans, got married and bought a house.
It all started on the first day of his internship in 2014, when Dylan
noticed the rollicking coasters of Six Flags Magic Mountain from the
windows of his new office. Fresh out of college and something of a
coaster-fanatic already, Dylan was perusing the options for Six Flags’
annual pass when he stumbled upon what might be the deal of his lifetime
— for a one-time fee of $150, he could eat two meals a day, every day
at the park for an entire year. Since his office was just a five-minute
drive away, it was a no-brainer.
1. This is the guy who should be running the country
2. I hope after this article, Six Flags doesn't decide to try to screw him over
I'm Going to Hell
Monday, October 25, 2021
SPOOKY!
Two people whose Wikipedia pages I looked at within the last hour share the same birthday as me. 😬
Official Announcement
Okay I'm officially discrediting my own list here because I somehow didn't even think of current shows Ted Lasso, What We Do In the Shadows and Only Murders in the Building. Dafuck, moi?
I know this guy's disappointed in me.
21st-Century TV
HERE'S A NEW LIST of the Top 100 TV series of the 21st century. You may officially ignore that list, as I will give you my Top 25 instead (in no order):
Mad Men
The Crown
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Veep
Friday Night Lights
Downton Abbey
The Office (US)
Schitt's Creek
Peep Show
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Extras
The Green Green Grass
Black Books
The IT Crowd
Gavin and Stacey
Peep Show
The Inbetweeners
The Wrong Man(s)
Count Arthur Strong
Vicious
Friday Night Dinner
Moone Boy
Derry Girls
Cuckoo
Staged
I guess The Sopranos and The West Wing both starting in 1999 kept them off the list, even tho 90% of each was in this century.
Marley & Me
Xmastime longtime buddy/nemesis Marley has shared his ranking of the songs on Revolver:
She Said She Said
Eleanor Rigby
For No One
Taxman
Tomorrow Never Knows
And Your Bird Can Sing
Love You Too
Here There Everywhere
Dr. Robert
Got to Get You Into My Life
I Want to Tell You
I’m Only Sleeping
Good Day Sunshine
Yellow Submarine
Aaaaaaaaand here's mine:
For No One
Eleanor Rigby
Tomorrow Never Knows
And Your Bird Can Sing
Dr. Robert
She Said She Said
Love You Too
I’m Only Sleeping
Good Day Sunshine
Got to Get You Into My Life
Here There Everywhere
Taxman
I Want to Tell You
Yellow Submarine
Aaaaaaaaaaaand here's Marley looking at mine:
It's Toast!
I love Matt Berry and have been loving the fact that the folks over at Vulture have been loving him too, so I'm once again happy to see another article on his greatness today:
By 2012, Berry was well known enough in the U.K. to briefly appear in the London Olympics’ closing ceremonies and to sell a TV series called Toast of London to Channel 4. (He shot a six-episode spinoff this year called Toast of Tinseltown, which takes the show to Los Angeles.) He stars as Steven Toast, an actor who longs for national recognition, cannot understand why he’s not rich and famous, gets mired in petty rivalries, eventually burns down the Globe Theatre, and supports his faltering career with, yes, voice-over work.
Here's to Clem Fandango!
Sunday, October 24, 2021
Saturday, October 23, 2021
I Am So Depressed
After waiting for a year, the second season of Ted Lasso came and went.
The first season of Only Murders in the Building came and went.
And now I realize we're only one episode from finishing the season of What We Do in the Shadows. ðŸ˜
State du Moi
Took me being alive 17,988 days to finally come upon the greatest business name of all time.
Dafuck du Jour
…who… who the hell shares bath water, particularly with a stranger??!!? Was this a thing at haunted houses in late-era 1950s America? #thehauntingofhillhouse
Friday, October 22, 2021
OMITB
Maybe the most pleasant surprise in Only Murders in the Building, though, is that it turns out to be more than just a pleasant, diverting mystery-comedy. In the beginning of the season, that’s the expectation the series set, and I was okay with that. A light, amusing series with twists and turns is a perfectly fine thing to be. But by the end, I realized that, while still a fun mystery-comedy, Only Murders was ultimately about how vital it is for adults to break past the generational gaps that divide them, especially in a place like New York City, where it’s possible to feel deeply lonely despite the crushing mass of humanity.
Every episode was great. They absolutely stuck the landing. I miss it already and can't wait for the next season. Get the to Hulu NOW and binge, people!
BS du Jour
Eater lists the 6 worst restaurant kinds of chairs but the fact that they include a diner booth means this list is immediately discredited.
These fuckers agree with me!
CYE
If you include the original hour-long special that started the whole thing, Curb Your Enthusiasm now officially spans 4 decades. 🤔
My first mention came all the way back in 2009, with me....bitching about it:
How come 35 years ago they used to be able to crank out 25 episodes of All in the Family, take the summer off, and then crank out another 25 once Fall started; yet we hafta wait like 2 fucking years to get another 8-10 episodes of fucking Curb Your Enthusiasm? Wtf? I love CYE, but I mean come the fuck on; the shit IS a bit formulaic. You write one or two of these, you should be able to crank these fuckers out. And CYE ain't no goddam All in the Family to begin with.Ridiculous.
Sorry, Lar!
Viva la Susie!
Like everybody else I am all aflutter about the return of Curb Your Enthusiasm this Sunday, and The Ringer blows up the brilliance that is killer Susie:
If you can’t spot the Susie at your dinner table, you may be the Susie. But for the rest of us, there’s an escapist appeal to watching a human so unafraid of straight-up marinating in anger, so comfortable luxuriating within a dispute—whether that dispute is about liquored-up 7-year-olds; potentially murderous surprise parties; oyster shuckers; cheating realtors; or the “ugly section” at a restaurant. “I just know, anecdotally, how many women have come up to me and told me, you know, how great that is for them to see, how much they love it, how it’s great that I’m screaming and yelling at my husband,” Essman says, laughing. “So I’m breaking up marriages all across America.” (No word on whether any of these potential divorcees have slung threats about thumbtacks.) There is a barometric nature to Susie’s outbursts: They are so electric, so thunderous, that often they actually clear the air.
And ow nuts is this:
She was employed not as a series regular but as a day player, a setup that somehow lasted years: it wasn’t until Season 8 (!) in 2011 that Essman officially joined the main cast—at which point, Curb then went on a six-year hiatus. (Cue the tuba music.)
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Ugh. Frustrating.
Krysten Sinema has proven to be a worthless piece of shit as a Democrat, and now five military advisors have quit working for her:
“You have become one of the principal obstacles to progress, answering to big donors rather than your own people,” the veterans wrote in a letter that is to be featured in a new advertisement by Common Defense, a progressive veterans’ activist group that has targeted Ms. Sinema.
Selling yourself out to big $$$ is hardly unique for a politician. But Sinema has been uniquely frustrating in that she's the person who thinks that being a Democrat and then disagreeing with Democrats makes her look like the smartest person at the dinner party. She thinks she's still in high school. It's unbelievable how much better off the country would be if she and Joe Manchin weren't such complete wastes of human beings.
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
C & P
Crime and Punishment is one of my all-time favorite books, and there's an article today about WHY Dostoyevsky wrote the thing in the first place:
All of this, chaotically, courageously, goes into Crime and Punishment, which Dostoyevsky begins in September 1865 while half-starved and sleepless in a hotel in Wiesbaden, having lost all his money at the roulette table. It’s a novel of warrenlike buildings, sooty doors, small rooms that smell of mice and leather. Hallucinations nibble at the edge of reality. Drunken degenerates say limpid and beautiful things. Interior monologues become audible. Above all it’s a novel of subjectivity: the oppression of it, the turgid wrangle of it, the screaming loneliness of it. “Completely unneeded and unexpected details must leap out at every moment in the middle of the story,” wrote Dostoyevsky in his notebook. Raskolnikov’s motives, his redemption or lack thereof, the twists and turns of the plot—red herrings, in the end. Crime and Punishment is about your brain, your poor brain, being the seat of modern consciousness. It’s about how that actually, really, feels.
Amazing where utter genius can come from.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Welcome Back NBA
The NBA is back in action tonight and one thing you should know about me is nobody watches fewer NBA games and yet has more opinions about the NBA than me.
Monday, October 18, 2021
Tweet du Jour
Moi!
in America
Sorry Ma Update
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “aren't you and Peter Jesperson BFF?"
Sigh. YES, faithful readers, yes we are:
A coupla years ago I wrote an email to Peter Jesperson, the first manager of the Replacements and their discoverer (if that’s a word.) I forget what I wrote to him about. Prolly blathering/gushing, something stupid. He wrote back, obviously amused I had named my band after a Replacements song. So he writes me a nice email and then at the end includes a story about the song “Hayday” – that after the album Hootenanny had been completed, Paul came up with the song and made them reconstruct the mobile studio, going through all that trouble again, fighting with everybody to record it and finally recording the song. Then he officially declared the album finished.
Happy Birfday...
 |
| "Match point and then - oh Mike, your 6-foot sub is here, Big Guy!" |
My classic, one-for-the-history-books Mike & the Mad Dog post HERE.
Me meeting Dog on the phone as BFFs HERE.
Dog's dad calling into Mike's show the day after Dog left, which almost did the unthinkable: get Mike to almost show some emotion.
Ah, Look at All the Lonely People
George Martin had introduced me to the string-quartet idea through “Yesterday.” I’d resisted the idea at first, but when it worked I fell in love with it. So I ended up writing “Eleanor Rigby” with a string component in mind. When I took the song to George, I said that, for accompaniment, I wanted a series of E-minor chord stabs. In fact, the whole song is really only two chords: C major and E minor. In George’s version of things, he conflates my idea of the stabs and his own inspiration by Bernard Herrmann, who had written the music for the movie “Psycho.” George wanted to bring some of that drama into the arrangement. And, of course, there’s some kind of madcap connection between Eleanor Rigby, an elderly woman left high and dry, and the mummified mother in “Psycho.”
He also marvels at the string of coincidences that delivered the world The Beatles:
To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all. Would John and I have met some other way, if Ivan and I hadn’t gone to that fête? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl. I’d seen John around—in the chip shop, on the bus, that sort of thing—and thought he looked quite cool, but would we have ever talked? I don’t know. As it happened, though, I had a school friend who knew John. And then I also happened to share a bus journey with George to school. All these small coincidences had to happen to make the Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they might lead.
NFWHATTHEHELL
Yesterday I was riffing with Paddy Mac re: why do we keep sending teams like the Jets to play in London, we should be hiding these teams not sending them around the world. And it turns out, the 30 games we've sent to London have been even worse than we think:
- There has never been a London game between two teams that went on to make the playoffs. Between 2007 and 2019, 12.3 percent of NFL games were played between two playoff-bound teams. Using that number, you’d expect about three or four of the 30 London games to fall into this category. Instead: zero.
Thoughts. I Have Them.
Sunday, October 17, 2021
CBGB
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you rock the doors off that place back in 1999?"
Sigh. YES, faithful readers, YES I DID:
Having grown up worshiping the place as a punk rock Mecca, ie where The Ramones began, of course I was thrilled to play at CB's back in 1999. It didn't matter to me that oh, approximately 9,000 bands played there every night. A few things I remember from that night:
1. Earlier in the day, the booker had called to ask what time we wanted to sound-check. This being the first time a band of my status (ie, slightly above a loaf of bread)(okay I'm lying, no higher than a loaf of bread) had even been afforded the luxury of one, I replied "Do we have to?", which seemed to startle the person on the other end.
2. The sound, it turns out, was fantastic. Far better than anything I'd experienced before or since. Of course, we had just played a show the previous week throughout which I never realized I hadn't turned my amp on, so.
3. During our set I started seeing a flash going off from the back. "Ohmygod," I thought, someone's taking our pictures!" This was 1999 of course, before iPhones, and I was pretty sure that the handful of friends I'd bribed/blackmailed/nagged/guilted into coming didn't bring cameras. I couldn't believe it, we were rocking so hard that total strangers were taking our pictures!!
4. It turned out to be my friends Rylo and The Gnat, who'd driven all the way up from Virginia to surprise me, knowing what playing at CBGB meant to myself, and them. As bummed as I was that it wasn't a new fan, I was even more thrilled by what they'd done.
5. After blowing the roof off of the place with what, if I'm being honest, was probably the single greatest set in club history, I was dragging my amp offstage when my roommate Larry, somewhat known for having a rather casual relationship with the concept of time, came walking up to fistbump me, asking "you ready to rock, dude?" To which I replied "dude, we just got done rocking. 7:30 means 7:30, bro."
6. We actually got PAID. $25. This was just before things went to "if you bring in 100 fans who each spend $300 on beer then yeah, you can play here" throughout the city. I can remember clear as a bell going there the next day, and the lady reached under the cash register and handed the $25 to me, clipped to a Xerox of that night's lineup. Of course I still have that copy. I can remember the next band practice when I ceremoniously handed everybody their $5 (I think Keith laughed it off and let me have his: thanks, K-Rot!), and I made some joke about "hoo boy, now it's gonna be all about lawyers and accountants, people!!"
Aaaaaaand here's that very Xerox I got. You're welcome, Earf!
Xmastime Book Review: Frankenstein
A++
I love this book. And I simply cannot put into words about the fact that more than any book I've ever read, this is nothing like I imagined it would be. I guess I'd been sold the cartoonish monster of the films, but this was a heart-wrenching tale of a living being who craved human contact and friendship so much that it destroyed him. READ. THIS. BOOK. NOW.
Also: is it too depressing to realize that the one literary character you most relate to is in fact Frankenstein's monster? 😳😬
Friday, October 15, 2021
There’s Over-Thinking Shit
…and then there’s “Alton Brown Making a Grilled Cheese” overthinking shit.
The Best of Frasier Crane
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