(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators #5 - Senator Richard Green Lugar (Republican Lord of Indiana)

Senator Lugar busted a move into office the same day as Orrin Hatch, making them co-senior Republicans in the Senate. Lugar was a simple-minded boy from the midwest, proven by the fact he became an Eagle Scout, which is mad dorkerous, even for the 1950s. He was involved in his family’s farm, and they made farm machinery (that operation run by Dick’s bro), which I’m sure was a big hustle back then as agriculture hadn’t completely bottomed out like it has now, and after some time fucking around in Indianapolis politics, he hit the big-time by being elected Senator by all the dumbass hicks of Indiana, who loved nothing more than the idea of a public school educated farmboy representing them nationally. Lugar’s brother actually was connected all along to the military-industrial complex, with the farm machinery business as a cover, and used these connections – and financial donations – to help get Richard into office. (An interesting sidenote, it was in the late 1960s that Lugar’s brother was involved in discreet genetic engineering projects at Northwestern University that he “accidentally” ingested a genetic steroid compound meant to strengthen your hereditary chromosones, and his wife became pregnant with Lawrence Lugar Jr., aka Lex, as in the prominent professional wrestler from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s.)
Nowadays, with his simplified Gomer Pyle style, Senator Lugar is considered the pre-eminent source within the Republican machine for helping coach young candidates who have basically been wealthy assholes from gated communities and private schoolings their whole life into people that can utilize key catchphrases and mental triggers put in place by the mass media machine to get themselves into Washington’s Congressional Country Club. Part of the reason Lugar holds his position so solidly, and for so long, is the loyalty the younger members behind him feel towards Dick for learning them how to properly tomfool all the uneducated, broke ass white people who, at least symbolically through the public use of “voting” machines, have to endorse Country Club membership.

St. Pauli Girl

AFFORDABILITY: St. Pauli Girl is a beer that I've never had the desire to buy because it seemed stupid to me, but in a desire to buy one of those mid-range fake good good beers other than Yuengling, which has been my longtime standby in such matters, I went with the St. Pauli Girl, being it was $5.49. They had Magic Hat Not Quite Pale Ale six-packs for $5.29, but I wasn't quite ready after previous painful experiences to jump back in drunken bed with Magic Hat, so it was either St. Pauli Girl or Moosehead, also at $5.49. Moosehead seems like something I'd get during hockey season, and today the day I drink and I write this is NFL conference championships day, and St. Pauli Girl, though not American, be acting like it's from Germany, and it's in a green bottle, so it made me think that maybe it's a shitty version of Beck's, which I can handle that. Better than being a shitty version of Budweiser. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Honestly, I do not respect the St. Pauli Girl beer at all, because it has a stupid name. My only recollection of it is it being the only beer I ever saw my maternal grandfather ever drink, going to the beach one year, even though he was allegedly a huge interstate hobo drunkard before he settled down to a family. St. Pauli Girl just seems like a stupid beer, in name, in look, in everything. But I will admit that yesterday afternoon, as I sucked back an entire six-pack, it put me on a tilt. Perhaps this is because I haven't been gorging myself with food as much lately, or perhaps it was a perfect storm of football-watching, beer-pounding activity, but I was feeling alright. And luckily, I was home with no one around but my wife and kids, so nobody could go, "Hahaha, you're drinking St. Pauli Girl!" Although my wife did make fun of it, which is probably why I drank them so quickly, because I was a little embarrassed. Maybe that’s the St. Pauli Girl plan to get you drunk, make you so ashamed of the bottling and name that you suck it down as quickly as possible. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The St. Pauli Girl label is one of the greatest stupid labels of forever. I have documented on this blog before how much I wish there was more historic porn, preferably with historically accurate body types too, as opposed to just pretending to be in Rome with new era fake breast no vagina hair ass women. And what is up with dudes shaving themselves bare in porn now too? Why are we so afraid of body hair? Anyways, that style of outfit the St. Pauli Girl is kicking it in, with the lace up blouse, always a sexy white, with buxom breasts just waiting to bust out, plus the additional accouterments, it's nice. But the one drawback to the St. Pauli Girl label is how cartoony it is. I guess it would be worse if it was a real girl, because it would probably be the aforementioned type of false breastitudes bought not grown. Or grown unnaturally due to too much growth hormone in dairy-producing bovines. You drinka the cow milk unnaturally pumped up and then you becoma unnaturally growed too fast. I have to be careful not to feed my pigs any pork because apparently the same soft brain tissue patterns they find in mad cow disease is what they find in cannibal brains. I don’t want my pigs to have soft brain tissues due to cannibalism and then get all crazy and attack me or have polluted meat. Man, this world has gotten way off kilter. Why can’t you just have food and beer? Why all the chemicalization and complication of everything? I feel like getting drunk now because of such thoughts, except I am trapped inside a long-sleeve shirt with buttons. I can’t wear short sleeves because it might expose my tattoos which would be a glimpse into my true personality, then the charade I am living might blow up back into the poverty and chronic unemployment I was born to be part of. Fuck. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: When I write at night at my kitchen table where it's too cold because the woodstove is in the next room, I don't keep the internet hooked up because the buzzing attraction of the internets will waste my whole night with a whole passel of nothingness. So I can't look up who or what entity owns St. Pauli Girl, and I'd like to just pretend a buxom real life chick who's now like 55 owns it, but I know better. If my grandpa drank it the only time I saw him drink a beer, and he's dead, and his house has passed through hands a couple times, and now my youngest sister will move into the house soon enough, which means I can go to my old hometown and watch UFC at the Buffalo Wild Wings she works at, get drunk as fuck, and sleep it off on her couch, and catch a ride back to my beat up truck the next day. Too bad UFC doesn't have super awesome tournament PPVs anymore. Nonetheless, I know St. Pauli Girl is in all likelihood owned by suits and ties with one of their tentacles reaching in the pocket of the Tri-Lateral Commission. 0 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The St. Pauli girl is like playing a bunch of Mario-based video games... it’s something that you may enjoy and could probably do for hours upon hours every week of your life, but come on man, there’s no pride in that. I mean I guess a lot of motherfuckers have no shame (or self-esteem... funny how it could mean either) and would rock the Super Mario Brothers Wii all night long at age 42 or something, but I’ve got parameters of manhood I can’t bust up in such manners. St. Pauli Girl falls outside of those parameters as well, as it just seems like a corny ass beer that maybe a crew of corny ass old men might successfully rock without looking like chumps while they play canasta for a nickel a point in the park on a Sunday afternoon, but for the most part it’s straight chumpenstein style. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators #4 - Senator Orrin Grant Hatch (Republican Earl of Utah)

I would assume being he is from Utah and been a politician from there forever, that Orrin Hatch is some sort of Mormon. My wife was raised a Mormon so she hates Mormonism. Doesn’t really matter anyways because all she’d do is have to take care of me in Heaven and I’m not Mormon, so I’m not sure if she would have to go Hell with me, regardless of her righteousness, or go to Heaven and be assigned to another man of better soul purity. Nonetheless, Orrin Hatch has been one of the Mans from Utah since he was sworn in January 3, 1977, as part of the first new Senatorial class after America’s bi-centennial celebration. Hatch’s back story, like many of these ultra-rich white guys, is one of a working class upbringing. He was the first in his family to go to college, and while in law school in Pittsburgh, he worked all sorts of menial labor jobs, at least it looks on his resume. I have had people who have “worked” construction with me many times, and their work and my work were very different things, yet it would look exactly the same if we both had wikipedia pages.
I personally have never been to Utah, and most of what I know about outside of the televisions and interwebs is this redneck dude I lived next door to in Richmond who had a beautifully long short and long haircut, the proudest peacock of an alpha male you’d ever meet, and he spent some time out there in Bryce Canyon as part of some juvenile delinquency rehab program of some sort. So to me, Utah is all about bong hits and watching Jerry Springer while a redneck girl with a supremely fat ass in the greatest of good ways bitches at everybody because all we do is sit around and get high and watch TV. Brain association. So until I ever ride a Greyhound out there, it will always be Danelle – the Aunt Sarah’s waitress with the cute bulldog face that probably weights 225 nowadays. If Orrin Hatch has such wonderful leadership qualities, I’d like to see him handle the furiousness of Danelle. But Republican Overlord Mormonator or not, I’m sure he would agree with me that back in 1994, Danelle had a fat ol’ ass that you just wanted to grab, but her redneck boyfriend would kick your ass. Maybe. He might not care if you were “bowl buddies”, which was a sacred bond to him, much like the bond Orrin Hatch develops with his compadres at Bohemian Grove cross-dressing getaways. Senator Hatch is fairly infamous amongst circles of the Washington elite for his notorious perversions, which historically is common amongst Mormons. In fact, his notoriety for crossing party lines to create legislative bonds with Democrats from New England (notably Sen. Leahy of Vermont and the former and now dead Sen. Kennedy of Massachusetts) is because of how he frequents high-priced homosexual rings in that part of the country, where it’s more tolerated, and where he’s less recognizeable.

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators #3 - Senator Patrick Joseph Leahy (Democratic Duke of Vermont)

Leahy took office on January 3, 1975, when I was almost 2-years-old, and I am old enough to not understand youth culture at all and to condemn it as stupid because it’s incomparable to back in my day. If I am old, and I was not even 2 when Leahy became Senator, then he’s old as fuck. The odd thing about Leahy that I did not expect is that he is the only Democratic Senator ever from Vermont, ever. Not only that, but he’s one of only three Democrat-flavored men who have ever represented Vermont in Congress since the Civil War. This is shocking to me because when I think of Vermont, I think of well-off hippie types, liberal NPR listeners, and public skinny dipping at a family lake somewhere near Glover, maybe called Crystal Lake. Hard to remember because I was stoned most of my three days in Vermont, and falling in love with a hairy hippie chick from Rhode Island with a unibrow. When you are constantly high and cuddle underneath a scrap of tarp with a female in the ditch alongside the road for safety and warmth, you tend to manufacture emotions in your brain.
In recent years, Leahy is probably most notable for being the dude that Dick Cheney told to go fuck himself, and was one of the few Senators voting against re-authorizing the stupid Patriot Act, where Patriot means you let the gubmint know everything you do motherfucker. Leahy and Orrin Hatch (next on the list) are homeboys who co-author shit all the time, including some bullshit anti-pirating nonsense allegedly meant to protect copyright infringement but more likely meant to keep the stacks of gold coins on the desks of entertainment execs from not stacking as fast as they always have. Oddly enough, Leahy is also a fan of The Grateful Dead, which is a very vanilla “counterculture” thing for a famous politician to proclaim nowadays, and very unshocking to me, though regular people may be all like, “Wow, isn’t that neato?” For me, I’d be like “wow” if some dude got elected from Montana or something and was like, “Yeah, I’m a huge fucking Hank Williams III fan. I used to rock G.G. Allin’s acoustic shit too, but his rock stuff was too hit-or-miss, like Hank the 3rd. In fact, one of my first acts as Senator is going to be to convince him to stop doing the stupid punk shit and concentrate on the drug-fueled somber outlaw country, because this world doesn’t need more stupid suburban kids in black clothes with self-screenprinted patches staple-gunned to a leather jacket so much as it needs angry, hazy-headed, militant rednecks. How else are we gonna beat the Arabs? I mean seriously. All this sterilized Toby Keith Wal-Mart Supercenter television monitor overload of commercial patriotism is bullshit. Let’s keep it real.” Yeah, I’d like that guy, until he got busted reading The Turner Diaries on the Senate floor as a filibuster.
But back to the intricate tentacles of the beast, I have never quite figured out why Leahy was an anthrax target, although I would expect it might have something to do with him and Cheney being at odds in other matters. Leahy was probably a stubborn man who wouldn’t go along with the back room game plans, so they had to perform a little very public mock execution, showing the potential for just such a thing, to get him back in line, at least partially. That whole anthrax affair is another thing that was all over the news and now is just a faint memory, with a Maryland scientist taking the fall for it. I don’t know, it seems odd to me anthrax would be that easy to get without someone knowing. The immensity of bureaucratic procedures, for those who have not worked inside the belly of the beast before, is an all-encompassing and supremely stifling thing, like the worst southern humidity times three thousand. It smothers everything, and makes it hard to believe one solitary guy could pull off such a thing by mailing anthrax he jacked from within the bureaucratic beast, because no private entities keep that shit around unless commissioned by one branch or another of the Department of Defense anyways.

March Madness Dorkery Intro

Beginning next Monday, I will start doing these really dorky mathematical nerd college basketball related lists on the blog, like a bunch of them that will be interesting to very few people, and really serve no purpose on this earth other than to enable me to waste a bunch of time with some trifling bullshit. But I’m trying to hold true to the purpose of this blog, which is to just throw the dumb shit I like out there, and whether anyone who may or may not read this blog enjoys it or not, I can’t worry about that. It gets hard as you become aware of an audience because you play for that audience as opposed to playing for yourself (or you edit yourself so as to not offend someone or reveal something too personal or whatever... unfortunately for those close to me, I’m not really ever ashamed of anything, and my stupidest moments make me proud of just how stupid I can be, if that makes any sense). But with the gradual decline of the Washington Redskins, and the incline of the VCU Rams college basketball team in recent years, I’ve started to indulge in the college basketball fandom pretty heavily, more so than probably since my early 20s when I would lift weights and watch ESPN every night of the week in the wintertime.
Let’s be honest... something happened with American dudes in the 80s, whether it be fluoridated water or immunizations creating mild autism in us all or rapid-fire TV images causing ADHD in everybody, but we became far more obsessive with minor things. Back then, as a kid, I had thousands of baseball cards, and I’d sort them all out into one particular way, look at the stacks, and then sort it all out again in a different sort of way, continuously. I’m sure my parents were like “what the fuck is wrong with this kid?”
So basically, although it would seem like I’m a word nerd, I’m actually a numbers nerd too (well-equipped with multi-nerd abilities). In fact, a lot of the fiction writing I do is built in numbered layers like a house frame, then drywall, then finishing the drywall, then final painting. It’s mad nonsense, and if this was still the 1910s, I would’ve long ago been committed, but luckily our government can’t afford mental health joints anymore. Last year or the year before, I did the Sporting 14 lists each day of the NCAA tournament for the guys playing that day who had scored the most points. This was interesting because there was a combination of being a solid player as well as staying in school that got guys onto the lists. Well, I decided like a fucking fool to apply that to all sorts of stupid conference tournaments this year, creating two lists per conference. The first one will be the 14 guys who scored the most points in their conference tournaments the past four years, and the second is guys playing in this year’s conference tournament who have scored the most in them previously. The first list will be fun because I’m gonna look up all these fuckers and see where they are now. Not that many guys make it to the NBA, and there’s this elaborate and retarded multi-league system that spreads throughout Europe and Israel and even South America that all these prominent college players go to. It may not be so interesting for a major conference like the Big East where all the former stars are in the NBA, but for a mid-major conference, that shit can be some long-distance bouncing around, even in the span of a couple years out of college. As for the returning players lists, that’ll give a head’s up for who to watch in that conference tournament, who’ll be making a probable impact. I’m sure mad basketball dorks will stumble upon this blog during their March Madness frenzy of a local variety.
What I’m trying to lay out here is this will be a continous thing for the next month until the end of the NCAA tournament, and if you are not a basketball fan, it will probably bore you to death. And if you a basketball fan it will probably bore you to death. But most of what I do is just a long drawn-out launching pad for me to say retarded things, which I’m sure I will. I’m not really able to control that; it’s just how I am. I think I feel like a dork for everything I do, so I try to make up for it by wise-cracking some bullshit nonsense all the time. But whatever it is, it is what it is, and it shall be here starting on Monday, so I wanted you to know what’s going on. (Although I guess if I do this purely for myself I’m just telling my own self that, and wouldn’t I already know this by now? Man, fuck a brave new world.)

Friday Love/Hate

I hate Virginia state car inspection laws, mostly because I'm always on the outside looking in on that one. I've been riding my truck with a sticker that expired in October of last year for a while now, but I was underemployed for a long ass hour and a half there at the end of last year, plus we got a couple of snowstorms that put me off the road (since my simple-assed rear wheel drive 4-cylinder truck ain't worth a damn in bad conditions). A major issue for not having renewed my inspection is I hit a deer a while back which bent up my front end real smartly, blowing out driver's side headlight, driver's side fender, hood, front grille, and being I am a born broke ass, I just ordered Estonian replacement parts from inside the internet rather than get someone to do it for me, which I wouldn't have been able to afford no ways. My repair method involved sacrificing the windshield wiper fluid system completely, and smashing on metal parts with a small-sized sledgehammer until it was close enough to be close enough. I think the main problem with getting a new inspection is the fact my headlights are like a cross-eyed dude, with the driver's side one pointing way too high since it rests on a stabilizing bar that I smashed back into close enough shape, which I guess may not technically be close enough.
Anyways, I started working a real, steady job in January, and where it's situated at is right by a State Police cop shop, and I passed this same trooper a number of times one week. Finally one day, outside our complex, he was on motorcycle cop duty, and he pulled a quick U-turn to pull me over. Dude was completely chill though, approached the car asking if I knew why I was pulled over, which I got that question right, and we talked about what had actually been wrong with my car, why it wasn't inspected yet since I got it fixed up again, etc etc. He let me go, saying somebody will eventually give me a ticket, which is always the case isn't it?
Fast forward to last week, as I hit the dumpster in Lake Monticello, which had nothing I felt like trying to scavenge, and I'm coming home, and at this entrance to an undeveloped subdivision but with a nice paved road already, sits this state trooper I've dealt with before. In fact, years ago, he gave me a ticket for this very offense in a different car of mine, so it was the same thing just different. He was one of like five state troopers that lived nearby, but the only active one I still think is around. I know this because he lives in a shitty little house at a key intersection on my ride home from Scottsville, and I always see his troopermobile parked there. His ugly wife also had a kid last year because there were balloons on the mailbox. (His wife is not necessarily ugly; I am just being mean; though it would not surprise me at all if she was.) Anyways, the most important factor in my ongoing relationship with this guy is last summer, my wife had traded some herbalist witchcraft sessions with some nice local peoples for a chicken tractor, which was about 20 foot long or so, and rather than take apart to bring home and run the risk of never getting it back together again, I strapped it into my truck in a very odd and precarious looking manner, although it was strapped down solidly. You could hang from the back end and it wouldn't budge. But if you were to look at it, it looked like some hillbilly nonsense bullshit. In fact, the nice peoples we got it from, apparently as an explanation for such a ridiculous looking stunt, I said, "Country livin'," and it became a catch phrase. Yeah, I be simple like that man Van Zant spoke about.
Well, I am driving home, and hit the stop sign across from said state troop's home. He is in the front yard, in plain clothes, and another state trooper car is there with a fully dressed and perhaps on-duty state trooper in the backyard doing something or other. The state trooper I deal with, in plain clothes and thus off-duty, looks at me and my truck and the contraption barely inside it amazed. I mean he is like, "What the fuck?" so badly he is looking around in all directions to see if anybody else is seeing this. I find this amusing, so decide to wave to him as I drive past, because you just have to in that position, especially when the guy's given you tickets before. The immediate drawback to such an action is I had to drive faster on the way home with my precarious load because I was afraid the trooper was gonna get his on-duty buddy to chase after me when he came back around the house from wasting taxpayer's money. The long-term drawback was I knew that this dude, at some point, was gonna pass me on the back roads near my home and pull me over for whatever bullshit he could. (And what the fuck is up with so many cops living along my local back roads? Back roads are supposed to be a demilitarized zone for cops that you can drive drunk along and not worry about the all-seeing eyeball of the pyramid cyclops in its local form.) Well, that's exactly what happened that day last week.
Homeboy pulls me over, and comes to the window, no small talk, just straight up "I'm officer Blah Blah Fuckface of the Virginia State Police. I need to see your license and registration." He takes it, says my inspection is expired, and then immediately goes back to his car to fill out the ticket. No talk, no what's going on, nothing. Then brings me back my ticket, and I lay the whole unemployed just started working deal on him, and I can see he's like, "Hey, this is a real guy," for a minute, but then he goes, "Well, it looks like you're trying to get it taken care of... at least it sounds that way," as if there's always the chance I'm lying (which I guess, technically, I was, but still). That just made me hate this guy even more. So now I can pre-pay and be docked $85 or so, or go to court and hope they throw the shit out since it'll be straight by then (because I wait till I get a ticket in such situation), but then they passed a new law last year saying you have to pay court costs anyways, which are probably ridiculous, so I'm out either way.
It sucks in America that our well-behaved ignorant people end up being cops, so the front line on law enforcement are these majority white guys without a lot of deductive ability who are very straight-laced. So they automatically don't trust anyone they pull over because they suspect you are always up to something, thus they don't really serve and protect the citizens so much as the rulebooks, and they become blind to the actual people who are just lying smarmy assholes who can't be trusted. The laws, however, are straight up and well defined and won't turn on them. (This is not to suggest all cops are shitheads, because I know some good cops, and I'm sure they get promoted quickly because the cop universe is like, "Oh shit, we got a guy who can actually put two and two together without a calculator and a tutor here.")
And the whole fucking thing starts with the fact the state of Virginia feels the need to protect people from themselves by driving cars they shouldn't drive. In fact, the stupid shithead cop's reasoning for me to fix my shit is if I had an accident, the other person could sue me, saying my truck shouldn't have been on the road. And they convince lenient garages that used to hand out inspection stickers because it's a bullshit process they are forced to follow for a $10 waste of their business time that they can't be so lenient because if someone has a wreck, then their surviving family members could sue the garage. So basically we have this giant system based on instilling the fear in people that they might get sued, enforced by ignorant assholes, with the rules set down by lawyer who do all the frivolous litigating in the first place. And what it all boils down to, this nationwide bullshit, on a local level, is my piece of shit truck, although a solid vehicle yet rough-looking as hell, can't be driven by me without the stress of getting pulled over even though the truck is a perfectly fine marvel of modern mechanics, both manufactured and my own backyard improvisational skills. This should be a credit to the American spirit, but instead I'm a fucking outlaw. No wonder the 21st century will be the end of American dominance.

I love doing love second instead of hate. The internet is full of hate, and even when people love on something, they become so myopic in their love that they mock newer people for not loving it so deeply and academically or ridiculously or whatever, and thus it goes right back to hate. The internet is for haters. I think it’s because it’s electronic chatter shooting at your brain, the 0s and 1s all mixing together and it crosses our emotions up and we just lash out, except we’ve stifled our physically violent genes for decades now, so we lash out with our smarminess instead, and become fatter and pastier and more self-important than ever before, about even more obscure things. But don’t worry fatty, I love your self-important ass, with all my heart and soul. I am here for you, and in turn, your little anonymous clicks on my cybertracking devices boost my ego, because I know pasty fat assholes in such far-off places as Roanoke, Worcester, West Mifflin, Little Rock, and Reykjavik are out there with me.

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators #2 - Senator Daniel Ken Inouye (Democratic Lord of Hawaii)

Daniel Inouye has been the number one Senator from Hawaii since January 3, 1963. And before that, he was their Congressman since August 21, 1959, which was when they got statehood, meaning that Inouye has been a representative of that state since the very day the American flag had a 50th star stitched into the dark blue field. Being a natural paranoid, certain things about this cause red flags to fly up in the back of my brain washed heavily by conspiracy literature and 5% Islam rap lyrics. First off, you think of Hawaii and Japanese dudes (Inouye is second generation Japanese-American) and you automatically think of Pearl Harbor. Inouye, as the story goes, was a volunteer medic during the Pearl Harber attacks. He also served extensively during World War II (for America, in case you’re more paranoid than me). But there’s the whole “did they know Pearl Harbor was coming” angle to that matter, and if Inouye was prominently involved (not that prominent, but involved in his own back story heavily at least), and he became the first Representative and now has been their Senator since forever by World political standards, what’s going on there? I mean, anybody with half a joint’s worth of reading of Adam Weishaupt literature or William B. Cooper knows that our government is run more like The Godfather than the Constitution, using back door secret groups. Where does Inouye fit into all of this? This will probably be the most disconcerting part of me doing these two stupid lists is, my conspiracy knowledge has been lacking in recent years, mostly because I had been working on a project at one point to make a conspiracy of the day calendar, and all these weird fucking things kept showing up that disturbed the hell out of me, and I had to push it away. There’s obviously more going on than we publicly know, but when you start to see the depth of the interwoven tentacles, it’s best to just let it go and get on with your life and have a good one as much as you are allowed to and not use your brain to question so much as to pleasure yourself.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - February '10

Shall we do the February month of my birth J.J. Krupert countdown of songs from my stupid little tiny and obsolete ipod which makes me so happy because it is a survival of the fittest playlist machine and I will be sad when I accidentally finally step on it? Sure, why not...
#1: "Time Of The Preacher" by Willie Nelson - When I was a young one and my dad would wake up magically without a hangover at like 7 in the morning on Sunday and start pumping LPs throughout the house, I'd be like, "Man, when I grow up, I'm gonna hate stupid country music." Yet here I am, a full grown man with full blown problems finding solace in Willie's soothing ass voice. Holmes is a national treasure, far more so than a lot of the bullshit people put on TV and act like I should care about.
#2: "Just Us Kids" by James McMurtry - McMurtry is a thing that's not exactly anything I'd brag about loving on, yet I don't hate on a handful of his songs at all, so they survive within the danger zone of my J.J. Krupert limit. To make it analagous to real life survival evolution, this song wouldn't be the fastest cheetah or the strongest lion, but it wouldn't be the gimp, so it would hobble along for a long time and live a full life, without note, but without tragedy, and that would be it. This is a true working class song, not just in content, but in the fact it meanders along the back roads of my stupid gaypod, never really making itself noticed (meaning I've never played it twice in a row if it comes on, like I obsessively compulsively do for some shit, like a pre-teen girl listening to Taylor Swift), but it doesn't call attention to itself to get deleted either. I'll probably delete it now though since I had to write about it.
#3: "Come A Long Way" by Michelle Shocked - You could almost say the exact same thing for this Michelle Shocked song. I really used to like Michelle Shocked, but I don't know, I think she hit the expiration date inside my soul.
#4: "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" by Ol' Dirty Bastard - Man, my middle kid who gave my J.J. Krupert gaypod it's name, she knew the beginning to "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" at age 3, walking around with her little toddler tumble speak, going "gimme the mic so I can bust it up" and all. You know, I always loved "Brooklyn Zoo" off the ODB album as the best fucking thing ever, and it still is. But the fact of the matter is I'm a dude with three kids and a wife and pigs and chickens and dogs and cats and a job and bills and regular ass things going on and I just can't justify bumping "Brooklyn Zoo" for the rest of my immediate world to hear when I'm home. I'm not trying to raise wild ass kids; I want good ass things for them, not the chaos that they're gonna have to genetically fight already. But "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" is pretty kid-friendly for the most part, so far as I care to pay attention. Sure, the backwards shit is probably subliminal messages on how to smoke crack through a cardboard tube with some Juicy Fruit wrappers as a filter, but fuck it. What I don't know only makes me blinder, and arbeit macht frei bro, arbeit macht frei.
#5: "Short Circuit" by Daft Punk - I will not even front. The first time I had a Daft Punk song on these lists it was because my daughter made me do it even though I hate Daft Punk. And for the most part I still do. But we were listening to this song on her ipod one night on the 45 minute drive home from ballet class, and I dug the fuck out of it, making her play it over and over the whole ride home. There's something so goofy and roller skating rink electronic about it. I imagine 1984 gangbangers listening to this song and freestyling like Damon Wayans in the beginning of Colors while they ride around in somebody's uncle's car. It actually made me listen to more Daft Punk, and I can safely say that I hate everything they do except for this song so far in my aural experiences. I guess this is kind of their "Hall of Mirrors" by Kraftwerk, which is the only song by them I actually enjoy. I'm a hard white man to please.
#6: "Us" by Brother Ali - I didn't think anything would contend with "Uncle Sam Goddamn" as my go-to Brother Ali song, and honestly his last CD was overwhelmingly underwhelming, being I momentarily put this dude on a pedestal as the possible savior of hip hop that I always do with guys who make a couple fucking ridiculously great tracks amidst the sea of endless derivative bullshit that hip hop has become. Yet I play the fuck out of this song, and love it immensely, and whereas "Uncle Sam Goddamn" can get on your nerves if it's a beautiful day and you just want to drink some beers and feel good to your heart, not get all pissed off about how fucked the world is, this song straight up feels good as shit.
#7: "High Cost Of Living" by Jamey Johnson - Radio country has become so terminally sterilized that when even a halfway raw song like this one comes out, it turns heads. Relative to today's standards, Jamey Johnson seems like some outlaw shit, and I can enjoy it in minor amounts, this song more than most on his CDs. But if you were to stack it up against actual outlaw musics, this still sounds sterilized and pre-fab, which is more a condemnation of the Nashville system for making music where a guy can be a chronic fuck-up with some real life shit to lay down, but they wash it and tinker with it and put a new hat on it and laminate it with a glossy sheen and if we as people who want to listen to music are lucky, there's still a little touch of realness and raw feeling to it. That would be "High Cost of Loving" by Jamey Johnson. Were I to ever win nine lotteries in a row and be worth billions, I would start an anti-Nashville country music town, probably somewhere in north Georgia or western North Carolina, and hopefully guys like Jamey Johnson or Chris Knight could put their life-is-shitty stories to some grimy ass music and not have it all polished up like an episode of American Idol. Country music is no longer "country" music so much as cul-de-sac music. Who am I kidding? Music is just fucked all the way around, because everybody is still thinking about money, and there's nobody actually spending money on music like they used to, so basically the music industry is a bunch of naive people happily investing their soul into lottery tickets where there is no lottery purse anymore, when they could just be like, "Fuck this" from the beginning and get down to doing what they want to do to make their immediate friends and the drunks in the bar they play every Wednesday night the happiest.
#8: "Nature Of The Threat" by Ras Kass - There should be more historical rap like this song, to teach our children all the things opposite to the things they are taught in public school systems. When you can give a history lesson like Ras Kass does in this, no footnotes or citations are needed. It just has to be true, every gory little detail. Also, I did not know that Julius Caesar was considered "every woman's husband and every man's wife."
#9: "Smoke And Wine (slowed & warped version)" by Hank Williams III - The second experimental CD of Hank the 3rd's Straight to Hell was thrown together as a bonus and not really endorsed by his stupid record label at all. I find this odd, because I wish there was a genre of music like this, not a lumped together bonus CD that they didn't even break the tracks up on. It's truly amazing (and a testament to the ridiculous consumerism of America) that the record industry could make as much money as it did over the decades being as clueless and out of touch as it is. Then again, the current model of "repeat on free radio until sheeple think it's great" - although faltering - still seems to hold sway. Dr. Pavlov was right.
#10: "Willin'" by Little Feat - This is my favorite all-time Little Feat song of forever, and I can often be heard singing it loudly like a stupid hillbilly while carrying 5-gallon buckets of dumpster doven vegetables out to my big fat pigs almost ready for slaughter as soon as they eat enough whole corn to sweeten theyselves up just so. "I've been warped by the rain, driven by the snow, I'm drunk and dirty, but don't you know... I'm still."
#11: "Napoleon" by Ani DiFranco - Every month another stupid Ani DiFranco song makes the list and I think I will purge my gaypod of all signs of Ani, but then I have the tracks all on the home computer screen in front of me, and I like them all in one way or another and don't delete them. She has sunk her creepy little alternative lesbo greyhound riding power acoustic guitar playing tentacles deep into my cerebellum.
#12: "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" by Metallica - The only good Metallica is the old Metallica. I saw them live last fall and had backstage chillouts and all that, and it certainly seemed to me that Lars Ulrich is as big a dumbass as you would expect. Why the fuck is a drummer jumping up and running to the edge of the stage between songs and shit? Sit there and beat on things, soccerfag. Also of note is they clear the backstage halls of everybody - opening bands, roadies, guests, everybody - so that they don't have to make eye contact with anyone as they enter the arena from their dressing room, probably after some zen pilates and shit. Actually, we were chilling with our friends' band in their dressing room, and Kirk Hammett and that Robert Trujillo new bassists from Suicidal Tendencies dude poked their heads in and were completely chill, and actually you could see a longing in their eyes like they just wanted to chill out and drink beers and be cool, down-to-earth ass bitches. I only saw Hetfield and Ulrich onstage, and from that live experience combined with the background reports not to mention that Some Kind of Monster documentary, it is obvious they are the weakest links in the category of lounger. I would go so far to say as this band's history was probably a public battle for control of James Hetfield's soul by Lars Ulrich and the forces of sell-outtitude against Cliff Burton and the forces of hey dude let's do what we love to do and enjoy the rideness. Kirk Hammett seems like he just loves to play guitar so fuck all the other nonsense. Dave Mustaine, I would imagine, was kicked out because he very early on recognized Lars Ulrich's inherent soullessness. After Cliff Burton died, they put out a good album, a borderline one, and then a bunch of shit. The effects of Cliff Burton on Hetfield's soul have long been drained, and there is nothing there but Lars to fill that void now. It is sad.
#13: "Sacalo Sacalo" by Los Diablos Rojos - Another banging ass Peruvian track from The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias of Peru album. Much like Ani DiFranco, every month I think I will delete this stuff, but it's part of a large batch of my J.J. Krupert trackography that is no longer on my computer because an external hard drive got suicided by the government one night while I slept upstairs, so I'd have to steal it all again, which is a hassle and a half. So I never delete this stuff, because honestly, it's fun shit, like music is s'posed to be.

Widmer Hefeweizen

AFFORDABILITY: The Widmer Hefeweizen is not the cheapest beer on the market, and the fact that it’s name sounds like a perverse sexual move a balding old bear homosexual dude would do to me after knocking me out with some animal tranquilizer in my drink, I don’t like it, not even slightly. The sides of my thighs get bruised just thinking about it. 0 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I was playing the Super Mario Wii while drinking these motherfuckers, so I was too preoccupied with conquering castles to truly get the full, straight to the gullet effect of the Widmer Heffalumples. But, judging from how slowly I felt like drinking, even after boosting up with multiple extra lives, I would say the Heffalumples is lacking in the superior taste bud stimulation necessary to get your proper back road drunk driving swerve on the budget cuts second gen asphalts. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: STOP THE PRESSES! I had a couple Widmer Hefeweizens last weekend out because it was the only good beer on tap really other than stupid Starr Hill Jomo Lager, and they brought it to me in the big ol’ pint glass with an orange slice in it and it was such an aesthetically pleasing color and tasted great with the orange in it and I enjoyed it so thoroughly that it made me think perhaps I gave it a raw deal the first time, or didn’t just drink it right. Nonetheless, I shall arbitrarily pump up their remaining categories to atone for this change in my heart’s attitude towards the Widmer Hefeweizen. But to be honest, their label is not that bad to me, as it looks like an outer space alien’s soccer jersey. Or futbol jersey. (Side note: it is okay to take notes constantly about everything at my new job because it makes it look like I care, so I do. Yesterday we were getting some sales pitch from some dude who I think might’ve been a Brazilian scientist about a machine we were gonna buy and he said, “I’m not a radioactivity guy, to be honest.” I wrote it down right away because that seemed a funny thing to hear someone say to you in your life, and no one thought it odd I wrote it down because they probably thought I was taking relevant notes for later when usually I’m just doodling out stupid shit to put into words elsewhere at later time when not confined by circumstances.) 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I'm not even gonna look it up because I'm sure it's in actuality owned by Anheuser Busch and the grandson of a Nazi scientist smuggled to Brazil by the U.S. government, and he's the reason Becks bought Budweiser, and now they also smuggle South American sex slaves into high end European brothels because the regular clientele have gotten kinda sick of all the Russian girls. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: So what is it, the holiday beer left in my fridge that I hated upon, or the on-tap pint I boughted with a slice of orange that I loved? Shit or perfection? Very easy, braddah, it's both. Yin and yang man, everything is 69ing with itself to achieve that perfect balance, the snake in the grass eating his own tail. They used to carve that shit into cave walls before they even knew people could make magazines out of it. Everything is good and bad. You can get really affordable mountain bikes for your kid at the new Wal-Mart Supercenter and people at Whole Foods are scrunchfaced assholes. But you can get organical foods for cheap at white people grocery stores, but cheaper American grown ground beef at the ghetto supermarket. Balance and chaos. Which means this beer's short term interaction in my life, hitting both ends of things, at different times, free in my fridge while I was unemployed (and it sucked) and at a premium price at the stupid restaurant in Scottsville with an orange in it making me feel frou-frou as fuck (and it ruled), it is perfect. So 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators #1 - Senator Robert Carlyle Byrd (Democratic Duke of West Virginia)

Robert Byrd has been a Senator from West Virginia since January 3, 1959. You know what the #1 song in American pop culture music charts was on that day? The stupid fucking “Chipmunks Song”. That’s been some corny ass shit for decades, yet it was the number one song in America the day Robert Byrd was sworn into office. Homeboy is probably most famous for discovering his natural leadership qualities by joining the Ku Klux Klan in his early 20s, where he wrestled the mainly ceremonial title of Exalted Cyclops from a crew of seven other competitors in the KKK tradition of mud grappling. (A little known fact, this is actually the origin of the format of the original Ultimate Fighting Championships back in the 1990s.) Recognizing his potential to force his opinions on the rest of us through public office, he dedicated himself to a life of politicking, becoming a Democratic Senator back in the days when being a Democrat from the South meant you hated black folks and probably would’ve really enjoyed Rush Limbaugh had they had mind-numbing AM radio like they do now. He’s stayed a Democrat, and there are those inside the interwebs who would have you believe he’s dragged the party down, but come on. He’s just an old white dude, like most of the rest. It’s more about working relationships in our Congress than it is about any actual ideologies. The whole concept of politics is to give up a little of what you don’t really care about that much to get a little bit of what you do care about. Back scratching for mutual benefit, and when all the back scratchers come from the highest wealth levels (not tax brackets though, because many who are earning the most money did not inherit the most money, thus you can create this false indignity of the wealthy that’s actually just those finally breaking through being pissed they are getting taxed so hard just as they start clocking their generational grip), then they are going to itch at the things important to them.
The funny thing to me about Robert Byrd is how he’s an old as fuck rich white guy from West Virginia who used to be in the Klan, and has said things like this, to show how far race relations have come in his own personal experiences, “There are white niggers. I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time, if you want to use that word. We just need to work together to make our country a better country.” He said that in an interview in 2001, not 1966. This goes to the whole mistaken belief that one is open-minded if they don’t separate Americans by race but instead by their lot in life. Who do you think he was talking about when he said “white niggers”? The liberal elite, or people with broken chest freezers in their front yard? And when the term “nigger” is revamped to not just mean black people but to mean trashy people, is that really open-minded? Or is that who the fuck should be making decisions for all of us, the old money, the new money, and all us niggers combined?

(7s) Longest Serving U.S. Senators Intro

My man Tommy Jefferson said a long time ago in a galaxy right about here (actually five miles from where I sit, although I’m talking of his fancy mountaintop home, not our galaxy, because I’m actually in that too and it’d be strange if I wasn’t but only five miles outside of it), “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And we as Americans are trained to hold bullshit back-story like that close to our heart by way of our brains and act like we have some amazing, ever-changing, free-flowing freedom machine. Yet in practice, we limit ourselves to two slices of the same upper crust white bread, both very adamant about how different they are from the dude that looks just like them behind the other podium on the TV talks. And we limit ourselves with our attitude that whoever is already there is okay, new is not good, so guys become career politicians, living for decades in Washington, D.C., trendy neighborhoods, lavishly, to the point that the home state they represent is more a property claim than an actual home. It’s pretty ridiculous.
Well, in the spirit of this ridiculousness, I figured I’d do a list of the seven guys in both chambers of Congress who have been sitting in office the longest, to get a flavor for just how unchanging we really are as a country, even though we act like we have a revolution every four years. Changing the brand name of the same old tired product is not a “revolution” by definition, though if you redefine (or rebrand) “revolution” to accommodate such non-change, then it allows people to better understand revolutionary new detergents and a revolution in the taste of Pepsi even though it’s the same diabeetus-inducing corn syrup that it’s been since the ‘60s.
I will start with the Senate, since it’s the more prestigious chamber, being only 100 mostly white guys than the 365 mostly white guys of the House of Representatives. The Senate is often times a springboard towards Presidential campaigning, and that used to mean you vacated your seat to do so, but starting with John Kerry’s campaign in ’04, as well as McCain in ’08, not to mention Lloyd Bentsen not dropping his seat when he was on the Presidential ticket as Vice-Homeboy, they don’t even do that anymore. Why give up the cushiony lifetime public appointment for a 50/50 chance at the best pension on Earth? Keep your second best pension on Earth growing and take a shot at the upgrade without losing your solid thing already. These fucking guys...
Anyways, tomorrow will start the list of the seven longest serving current U.S. Senators, and hopefully you dumbasses will stop electing all of them. But I know you won’t. Of the 100 Senators currently in office, I would bet at least 20 of them are still in office on the day I die. Hell, I talk too much shit in these write-ups, they might cancer me and all of them might still be in office.

Full Moon Winter Ale

AFFORDABILITY: This year New Years was an actual blue moon full moon (meaning the second in one Anglican Calendar month), so the ol' lady was pretty stoked about having to buy the Full Moon Winter Ale by Blue Moon Brewing for our New Year's bloodstream thinner. And there was some sort of bargain on them as well, again, like I always say, relatively speaking. I think my ongoing poverty, which it looks like I should be able to escape from in the next four months, has tinged my brain, to where I feel guilty spending $12 on a 12-pack (the dollar per beer ratio is all sorts of non-agreeable with 16-year-old case of Milwaukee's Best Raven), which I should, being I haven't made a couple credit cards payments in a row at two different accounts. But fuck it man, I have been non-working, broke, and when you have that fleeting money, doesn't a man deserve something to ease his mind? And if a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee (my old favorite) is pretty easy to drink down to maybe two or three left, but give my brain the super destructor superfly snuka splash cobra clutch interior headlock the next day, why wouldn't I choose a better beer that goes down slower, inebriates thicker, and doesn't ache me the next day? You tell me. Nonetheless, after all that justifying and lawyer ball, I guess it really wasn't affordable at all. Fuck. 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Oh man, me and the ol’ lady drank so much of this, by the 12-pack boxes, for a few weeks there during the holidays, same time we had a big snowstorm, and it dulled my senses very nicely in abundance. Nothing to write home about, not that I ever write home anyways; usually, I just email my mom asking for money. But next winter, if it comes back around, which it will, I shall bring it into my home once again. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Full Moon Blue Moon Double Moon Winter Ale is a chill ass bottle label, with, you guessed it, a full moon. With the double full moons in December, plus the two feet of stupid fucking snow, it kept us on chill mode for far too long, especially when combined with chronic self-unemployment. The label is mostly just blues and whites, straight up listening to Enya music curled up in the fetal position thinking about the warmest blanket you had as a 5-year-old type shit. You don't have to go to those basic three religious propaganda colors of red, black, and white like Shepard Fairey brainwashing people into loving Obama and buying the new Pepsi logo, as some nice light blue and black and white has the same Mass Com 101 emotional effect, but even more new agey and soothing. If it was legal to buy prescription drugs wide out in the open, I would expect codeine Kool-Aid to kick it with a label like this, just with maybe a little more blur around the periphery. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: My wife has enjoyed the Blue Moon beers immensely in our years together. In fact we bought a 12-pack of their spring ale last weekend for our first night without the kids in the house since our youngest was born two years ago. Imagine how saddened I was to see that it's just a fake microbrew label owned by Coors. I am cry. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Hard to get behind the Blue Moon, even with their bootiful labels, when I know it's just some Adolph Coors bullshit. It's like Mr. Coors let his wife decorate the downstairs main bathroom, so it's all stylish and seems cool, but then the rest of the house is a giant full security bullshit supersized McMansion. Seriously, that was a sad discovery. My man Benji B. did electricalicians work at their super-plant outside of Waynesboro and just hearing the sheer immensity of it all makes me not like it. I guess all of them be that way, but still. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 3/5 STARS!

Spaten Optimator

AFFORDABILITY: Ahh... the Whole Foods in Short Pump, where they are so adamant about their fake suburban cityscapes that you can’t even cut over in front of the parking deck from Trader Joe’s to Whole Foods anymore, and you have to go all around ten different buildings, with giant brick intersections that nobody is actually walking on because who the fuck wants to live in a completely fabricated world like that? You know beer at Whole Foods ain’t cheap... shit, nothing is cheap at Whole Foods. I went one time late last year to get something for my wife, and the Whole Foods in Short Pump was completely empty of dairy and cooled produce. Their refrigeration system had broken down and it was all wasted. I got a big kick out of that. Sad thing is, I’m sure they pass that cost off onto me anyways (or already have), and it doesn’t matter to them. The store manager is probably like, “Fuck, we’re screwed this month,” but the regional manager knows that though that refrigeration system failure eats into their operating costs, they’re still making fists full of money in stupid fucking Short Pump. Anyways, when in Whole Foods, my beer buying mode is to scan for what’s on sale, hope it’s something I like, and then piece anything else together from there, staring at $8.50, which is their low end, and working up until my desire falls off the end of the cliff like that yodeling game on The Price is Right, of which Ric Flair should be the host and not Drew Carey. Don’t America’s unemployed deserve someone more exciting than boring ass Drew Carey? And there’s a ton of unemployed folks right now, with no cable, sitting around watching CBS all day long, waiting for the afternoon to go from The Price is Right showcase showdown to Wayne Brady and the new Let’s Make a Deal. Anyways, this trip to the Whole Foods, I grabbed a stray six-pack of Harpoon’s Winter Warmer they had left somehow, contemplated some gay ass Bison Honey Basil beer that my wife would’ve loved, but it was $10 for a four-pack, and then kept looking around. I saw this Spaten Optimator and knew I had to get it, simply because it was only $9 (low for Whole Foods) and the name sounded gangsta as fuck. Gangsta as fuck always wins in a soulless shithole like Short Pump’s shiny Whole Foods Market, to try and convince myself I’m not completely dead yet. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Man, when it comes to super destroying me, the Spaten Optimator was the most super destructive new beer I have ingested in a long ass while. I think it's like 8.2% alcohol or somewhere along those lines, and it has a nice thick touch of chocolate, and it dropkicked me. The night I drank it, I was on full tilt; and the next day at work, it was one of those struggles where you'd look at the clock and figure up the rest of the day's obligations to the minute, and then do it again seven minutes later. When I first saw the name "Spaten Optimator", I was in my head like, "Damn, that sounds like some Evil Cyborg Dale Earnhardt Von Raschke bullshit," and it did not fail to live up to that, as it put the Iron Claw on my damn cerebellum from the inside out. I like when my blood vessels and brain work together to fuck me up. 9 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Spaten Optimator has a simple and scary label motif, nice solid colors and a pair of matching symbols that look like robotic spatulas. It is ominous yet not creepy, and invites you on in, like any good weird German thing would do, because you don't get to all the weird extremes they do by scaring people away at the gate. Because of this, I am afraid to drink Spaten Optimator regularly, one for the dropkick from inside it gave my brain, but secondly because it could be a trick. You can't trust German bullshit, ever since under Hitler they were in cahoots with the grey aliens to start using organic cyborg technology on earth. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I had done a bunch of wikipedia-ing on shit a while back, so this is working from hazy memory at best, but the Spaten company is from like the 1300s or some crazy shit, and they just had some new buyout or some shit... I don't know, I could look it up again if I really cared to be an informative and factual part of the internet, but the internet has far too much of that shit getting all pretentious and pretending it's making the world a better place by telling you 7000 things about an obscure beer that you'll most likely never even see in a beer store in your actual real life. So fuck it. I remember them being an old ass company in lineage, going back to the days of alchemy, but then corporate bullshit was going on, so most likely somebody just owns a claim to that older than old school old world lineage without any actual bloodline or sweatline connected to it. (Sweatline is a word I just made up because sometimes when there's a family business that's really awesome at a specialized fringe service, the dude only has one son and two other employees, and his son is a fuck-up and sleeps behind the boxes in the warehouse and looks at porn all day on the internet while of the other employees of roughly the same age has a hunger for perfection and a desire to learn the fringe service very deeply, so the old-timer owner knows that for his fringe service to have a better chance at survival, he has to pass his wealth of knowledge onto the non-blood guy, who will put his sweat into the thing at hand, and the owner must hope that his own son will eventually grow the fuck up. Then they all have to hope the old-timer doesn't die before the non-blood dude is bought into the company so that the son doesn't just run off the guy who actually knows what he's doing after the old dude dies, and then the fringe service gets run into the ground and disappears. And then they put a Wal-Mart there. Or a Target. Don't fool yourself, they're the same thing.) 4 out of 5 though, on the off chance my memory is hazy and there's some 23rd generation Kraut behind it all.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: My uncle Ray was a biker back in the day, and has lived a pretty hectic life, although a full and good one. He had kidney failure or liver failure or something failure like 90% and they said he only had like 3 months if he was lucky to live. That was a few years ago. At one point, his wife and him lived with two other couples, all related this way or that way, and one couple got kicked out, so the one dude from that couple comes back with a shotgun, kills the other guy, and hits my uncle with a shotgun blast from a few feet away to the point it melted his hand into his hip. They took it off and he lost two regular fingers and his thumb, so they took one of this big toes and made it his thumb on that hand (opposable thumbs being a classic touch to the Human Domination Effect, along with our warped minds), so he has a pinkie finger, a ring finger, knubs, and a toe on that hand. I so thoroughly enjoyed the Spaten Optimator beer that I give it two thumbs up, plus someone else’s thumb, and my Uncle Ray’s big toe thumb, all up. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 4/5 STARS!

Friday Love/Hate

I love music. I love words. I love my wife, and I love her nice round ass (not to objectify her, because it's far more than that that I get down with). I love "Thank Yuh Jah" by Vybz Kartel, and I love the fact my truck is stuck in the driveway for two weeks straight. I love talking to the Egyptian dude I work with about the World Cup and I love the fact there was strange European beers in a box for me at the post office yesterday. I love the laundromat and the fact I still have the high score on the Ms. Pac Man after three years even though I broke the joystick to make it stay so. I love the fact I didn't really do that but I mix lies with truth when I write and you read it and don't know what is real and what is not real and have to assume different parts of it in your own brain. I love the fact you think you know what I look like or how I am even though you don't know me or how I am. I love the fact that unlike most internet fuckfaces, I wouldn't let down your bullshit preconceptions. I love life and I love bad tattoos that come from moments loving life. I love dropping the kids off at my mom's house this weekend and getting 30 hours with my wife and me alone. I love really sweet diabeetus inducing coffee and I love when the dumpsters behind the Food Lions have boxes of pre-packaged cole slaw and Italian salad and romaine hearts and I don't even have to go digging for shit for my pigs. I love the fact I have pigs and chickens and they all respond to me unlike they do for other people. I love Jay Electronica lyrics and Creedence Clearwater Revival loops. I love soul food restaurants that don't serve barbecued tofu and I love chicken. I love my live chickens and how chill they are and catching them and walking around with them and I love eating chicken. It used to be fried chicken from country stores, but now it's roasted chicken from my kitchen oven that leans sideways left from the termite damage years ago that went away but never got replaced because let's be honest, it all happens again, over and over. I love it all.

I hate when I sleep late because sleep is the cousin of death which is a normal known thing I say to try and be clever, but honestly, I do better with lack of sleep wake up early than I do with sleep in. Even after being up till 3 in the morning drinking beer and pecking on a cheap ass computer keyboard, it's better to just start cold kicking it with the 6 o'clock electronic cock-a-doodle-doo and getting to it, splash cold water on the eyeball holders, put some processed mint into my mouth, pick out clothes that don't smell as much like yesterday as the rest of them, and get on out and let my day be a shine and not a drain. I also hate motherfuckers that don't maximize their minutes. How many do you get? Like jellybeans in the jar, good luck guessing bitch. I hope your mama don't grab you by the arm while you're still trying to count 'em.

"Feelin' Alright" by the Jungle Brothers

{mediafire/rapidshare/sendspace/sharebee/yeahright/diabloblanco}
Ain't been gone so much as busy with the real life, which ain't gone at all but far more here than most 0s and 1s collections of words that cloud up your day like opium smoke and make it more tolerable. I am deep into employment, on a daily basis, ultimately helping the zombies protect the precious and tasty brains of the exploitable agricultural classes that get blowed up on the front lines of human bullshit. We are lucky I guess to live in a land where the zombies have many wheelbarrows of gold coins to stack up over such matters.
At the same time, life goes on. It's a hard act to juggle wearing a shirt that has buttons that go from my dick to my throat with leaning into hammered down dumpsters behind strip mall grocery stores. But I walk that fine line with a swaggered and stumbling pride. Life is nothing more than life, and it always sucks and is always awesome, and though my days can be clogged up with ulcer-inducing red tape constraints like a straight jacket that's not leather like a 1985 album cover to make it cool but straight up straight jacket that sucks and is made of cheap itchy yet thick canvas cloth that makes your elbow where it pokes out not feel real good and it's clamped tightly at your back beyond belief... the end to that "though..." long running phrase is fuck it man, I'm good. Life is what it is and I enjoy the experience of the things I experience. You should too. And if you don't, as your lawyer I advise you to fuck up your routine tomorrow, right now.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #7 - Blacula

What with all this vampire popularity, I’d hope something more would come from it than just flat-faced retarded looking dudes being considered sex symbols and pre-teens loving on books about having intimate relationships with the supernatural. (Best movie portrayed teenager intimate relationship with the supernatural was that chick in her bra and panties getting killed by the evil music green haze in Trick or Treat. I am far less threatened by green mists than I am by the living undead who move all speedy-wonky and have a relentless libido.)
The greatest vampire flick ever was Blacula, straight up. I know it gets lumped into the whole blaxploitation genre, which people will often look down upon as nothing more than stereotypes and nonsense. But Blacula takes the vampire Dracula bit, and flips it on some proud African 5% civilized man tip, creating a character who is too intelligent and too civilized to allow himself to fall victim to the supernatural disease that poisons his body. Ultimately, he sacrifices himself, because he would rather die a noble man than live (or unlive) as less than noble man. And I guess Blacula might be on DVD, because shit man, even The Emperor of the North Pole is on DVD now, but I haven’t come across it, without looking real hard, so goddammit, it’s on this list.
I am sure they at some point, someone, made lesser known blaxploitation supernatural flicks, like a black werewolf and black Frankenstein and so on. If they didn’t, then someone who knows Tracy Morgan should tell him about this idea for a Black Wolfman flick, and they give me a cheap hotel room for two weeks, unlimited alcohol, limited amphetamines, and probably some chubby porn, as well as three copies of Blacula, every movie starring Rudy Ray Moore or Fred Williamson made before 1981, both an instrumental and regular copy of The Geto Boys We Can’t Be Stopped CD, plenty of candles, a food stamp card with $150 on it, and a pair of Rottweiler puppies than answer to the names Corleone and Scarface, and I’ll have his script ready, and if he can get Will Ferrell to agree to play The Professor, then we won’t have to go straight to DVD.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #6 - Old ECW TV

I just watched some crappy documentary about ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling... I forget not everybody who reads this is an internet wrestling nerd), and it got me fired up to watch some of the old stuff from like '95 through '98. That was seriously the best wrestling show ever, chock full of bizarre nonsense, great feuds, plenty of insane highspots and senseless blood, and all put together pretty well considering it was done on a shoestring budget. When I first found a bar in Richmond that they played it on Tuesday nights back in the day, that was some good times, getting drunk, watching The Public Enemy make Mikey Whipwreck drink beer in the park to get ready for a ridiculously retarded yet awesome ladder match with The Sandman... and that's just one slice. So many slices. You could take a year's worth of the TV, edit out the replays of stuff from last week, and the commercials that played relentlessly, and that 52 hours of television per year could probably be squeezed a set of six or seven DVDs. But the WWE owns everything now, and rather than let us enjoy ourselves that way, they just pump out these pseudo-documentary collections of individual wrestlers that, from what I've seen, are kinda boring, and missing out on the type of bullshit that I enjoy. The WWE has never exactly had storylines be their strong suit, nor great matches that are senseless in some fashion. But whatever. I'm sure I could find some internet wrestling nerd who could burn this for me, but I want the sets that are edited down without all the replays and commercials and also so maybe Sabu or Terry Funk could make a little extra money, which of course is unrealistic on my part because it's not like wrestlers get paid well for mangling themselves. Which of course is why ECW was so great, because dudes got mad mangled, basically motivated by cult-like motivational talks.
Fuck man, I'd watch the fuck out The Sandman/Sabu ladder matches right now if I had it.

(7s) Should Be On DVD Easier #5 - The West Virginia Documentaries of Jacob Young

Jacob Young is the guy who introduced Jesco White aka The Dancin' Outlaw to the world at large. He also did an equally awesome documentary called The Wild and Wonderful World of Hasil Adkins. Honestly, I don't think either of those dudes would have had the cult popularity they had in the past 20 years if it wasn't for Jacob Young's documentaries (although The Dancin' Outlaw 2 is pretty terrible). Oddly enough, these DVDs are hard to come by, leaving me rigging my shitty Farmville pawn shop VCR into the hi-def super TV my bro-in-law got us last year, turning coaxial into RCA cables somehow, with homemade splitters held together by masking tape, and watching Jesco get all, "you best stop makin' them sloppy slimy eggs" inspirational in fully blown apart super pixelated effect. Fourth or fifth generation VCR dubs don't blow up well to the wide screens of today cyberhappy world. Man, I miss them days, hooking up two VCRs and making mix videos of retarded bullshit. Now it's all on Youtube, which is easy I guess, but there's something heartwarming about having some weird mongoloid punk rocker from Ohio mail you some weird offbrand blank VCR tape with Larry Williams giving directions that just typing "Larry Williams directions" into the youtubes doesn't give you. I know that sounds old manly of me, but shit man, it's true. I'm all for technology making our life easier in some aspects, like being able to take money out of the bank at night through their robot machines, or not having to stay up until 11:10 at night to see what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow morning and whether I have to get up 15 minutes early to warm up my lazy ass truck.
Anyways, Jacob Young also, before he did the Jesco White and Hasil Adkins things, made a short documentary called Appalachian Junkyard, about junkyards in West Virginia. I am a big fan of junkyards, love walking around them, especially the permanent family ones where they don't recycle stock, so once you find your make and model in a far corner down in the bottom where the old potato chip truck painted to say SLUTZ is at, you know it's there, and has most everything you need that you didn't already cannibalize off of it. Sadly, two summers ago, when scrap metal prices went sky high, a lot of old junkyards sold off their stock, thinning down the beautiful expanses of junk cars rural America once had. Even the Mahan junkyard down in Farmville sold off a bunch of their shit, from what I heard. That place was where my love of junkyards started, being a kid and tagging along with my dad to go look for shit, being a teenager and getting drunk in the treehouse and trying not to bust my ass coming back down the ladder steps. Tell you what though, that's a beautiful ass junkyard, with a full-sized muscle car buried in it, as well as Big Pug himself. In fact, oddly enough, there are two junkyards in Cumberland County, Virginia, where I went to funerals at. And I guess that's why the nonsense from the documentaries about Jesco White and Hasil Adkins spoke to me and still do. It's not so much a "haha, look at them, they crazy," thing, as it is I can relate to weird ass people like that. Southside Virginia got punked out by progress though, and them wild ass good ole boys all got replaced by short hair responsible Toby Keith fans. Fucking sad.
And where I live now, man, it's nothing but short hair responsible ass police-respecting Brad Paisley-loving assholes. It sucks. I want a rural world where the Jescos and Hasils can still flourish and people still fight chickens and they’ll never pave the roads and the cops don’t even respond to calls in certain parts of the county until the sun comes up. The road we’ve lived on for ten years has always been paved in our time here, but apparently only got paved like twenty years ago. Now it’s nothing but McHouses and well-to-do people cutting their grass four times a week, and our home insurance company just sent us a stupid letter saying we had to move the “unlicensed vehicles” from our property and the furniture off the front porch (I hope they don’t mean the freezer too, because that’s the best place for it) and unhook the extension cord running from the side window to the camper in the backyard. What the fuck kind of world do we live in? The fucking assholes have obviously won.