lovehatethings

Including the 10 Commandments of How Not to Piss Me Off, a Ten Minute Stream of Consciousness to the Cucumber Club, and the Longest Names of Things and other Long Things... get your minds out of the gutter.

I.

Thou shalt not try to convince me there is a God or gods or godesses or demons or devils or cosmic intelligences we surely don't understand. If you want to buy into all of that, go crazy, but leave my realist brain out of your cornfield.

II.

Thou shalt not try to convince me that Prince or the Artist Formerly Known as Sane is a musical god for two reasons. One is contained in commandment number one, and two is that the man, while clearly possessing talent, took a long walk off the pretentious pier long ago and convinced himself he was Aquaman in the process.

III.

Thou shalt not try to convince me that the chemicals in fast food are going to kill me someday. I live in a city that chuffs out more carcinogens a day into the air than you can imagine. I was weaned on the stuff. My body is a chemical factory. When I die, and my body decays in the ground, you may as well salt the earth because nothing is growing there again. And if you cremate me, anyone looking at the smokestack will think that Jerry Garcia's been elected pope.

IV.

Thou shalt not come to a COMPLETE STOP when making a right turn with no stop sign, no oncoming traffic, and no possible reason to slow down to a crawl other than the faint possibility your heart has stopped because you're sneezing from the dust gathered on your living corpse that moves too slow.

V.

Thou shalt not take a look at the Double Gulp Diet Coke I bought at 7-11 and say "How can you drink all of that?" Like anyone drinks! Okay you idiot? Starting with my mouth, ending with my bladder, wash, rinse, repeat! Got it?

VI.

Thou shalt not exclaim, for any earthly reason, "same difference". Other than being oxymoronic, it's just plain imbecilic save for one example: 10 minus 8, 5 minus 3, 2009 minus 2007 is the same difference.

VII.

Thou shalt not try to justify the ingestible viability of any gelatin made from reduced animal hoofs. Oh I know that during the great depression your ancestors may have lived off the stuff along with fatback and pork sausage, but that doesn't change the fact I'd rather eat a dolphin.

VIII.

Thou shalt not try to convince me there are secret conspiracies bent on overtaking the world. Get your head out of your ass and smell the soot and sulphur. There are plenty of completely visible organizations trying to take over the world that have great PR contracts to boot. The fact that anyone believes Britney Spears has talent or that A-Rod is anything but an asshole or that this entire Susan Boyle thing isn't a complete fabrication is definitive proof of that.

IX.

Thou shalt not claim to be good at television trivia without being able to sing at least 20 theme songs, word for word, from the 70s or earlier. You will be excused from one theme for each well-placed reference to the Wondertwins or Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets for all you unbelievers).

X.

Thou shalt not, through any circumstances, under pain of verbal tirade and relentless mocking through a series of pop culture subreferences, fly footloose and fancy-free with the definitive article "the" before things like: Walmart, Twitter, Windows, Google, or Kids Today.

XI.

Thou shalt not expect me to hold to any promises or parameters of only holding to lists of ten things when clearly it's permissible for me to take things to eleven.

XII.

Thou shalt not expect anything less than the unexpected grapefruit edsel waffle iron ukelele.

Sometimes stream of consciousness is the order of the day tripper from the heights of sanity to the bend around the Credence Clearwater Revival churchgoing folk never thought well of the young buck from Arkansas but soon found with a little bit of grooming he could become the astronaut we always thought he could be.

Signs pointed west, but signs will often do that when black is orange and orange is grape and there aren’t enough hostess potato chip bags in the world that could be simultaneously crinkled to quash the din of the baby crying in the booth across the restaurant.

Maybe if there was a time and a place the place could be venus and the time could be swiss and we’d chat gaily of the wandering secret agent who lost her memory amidst the culmination of a black box mission set down by the powers that be for the defence of the people by the people for the people made of people – soylent green.

So I ask you young psychotic blithering tattletale of the night – are you up to the call of the man in the pink suspenders and crying behind curtain number two the 86 year-old Monty Hall fan who sits in Beckett-like fashion waiting for a deal to be made and an appearance to be imminent and an autograph book to be signed somewhere between Bob Eubanks and Chuck Woollery.

I remember the days of wine and hosers when men were men and women were lite brite illusions on the battlefield of playtime when the vast ocean of meandering opened up its arms and said “Give it to me straight Doctor. I can take it,” without a second glance or thought or premonition about the forces at work or the elements at play.

Surely there must be semblance. Surely there must be coercion. Surely there must be a recipe that includes semi-sweet chocolate chips, because the semi-sweet chocolate chip lobby has been doing their work and putting out their 365 day tear-off calendars for the world to see and without their efforts the civilization would have faltered long ago and without their efforts the typhoons would have raged eternal and without their efforts the ghost of TS Eliot would have risen in April and decried the he was a pair of ragged claws on some beach-like region.

Oh sure, you may weep for the downtrodden with your tears made of copper and your heart made of glass and your Debbie Harry affections with consummate incredulity. You may weep for the death of the bison and the culmination of the cataclysm of the crisis of the caucus of the collapse of the cacophony of the Cucumber Club.

Oh Moose.

Oh Beaver.

Why have you forsaken us?

Abbreviation (Russian)

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT

Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.

Longest Baseball Throw

Glen Gorbous, a Canadian minor leaguer, who had a three year stint in the Majors from 1955 - 1957 still holds the record. In 1957, after a running start, the ball left his arm at an estimated 120 MPH and it flew and flew and flew. After all was said and done the baseball covered a total of 445 feet 10 inches before hitting the ground and breaking the old record by a whole nine inches.

Job Title 

"temporary part-time libraries North-West inter-library loan business unit administration assistant."

Song Title - Christine Lavin

Regretting what I said to you when you called me at 11:00 on Friday morning to tell me that 1:00 Friday afternoon you were gonna leave your office, go downstairs, hail a cab, to go out to the airport, to catch a plane, to go skiing in the Alps for two weeks. Not that I wanted to go with you; I wasn't able to leave town, I'm not a very good skier, I couldn't expect you to pay my way, but after going out with you for three years, I don't like surprises. (A musical apology)

...special mention goes to

"The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation." By Rednex 

Film Title

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D

...but it once was

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

Band Name

The Clouds That Fondle Jagged Crags And Raging Storms Conspire And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Album Title - Chumbawumba

The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother's hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don't just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to 'guard' any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it's over, then it's done, and the boy bands have won.

Archive.org is such a cool site for so many reasons. If you haven't explored it, you should check it out for audio, video, books, and any old website you might have thought was lost ten years ago.

I only used the Youtube link above because the embed from Archive.org was too high quality to stream efficiently. Check out the original site with the Prelinger Archives of How To Be A Teen in The 1950s.

The film above is supremely useless in that it raises a ton of questions for teenagers in the 1950s, yet gives little to no practical advice. Instead, the unending curves that are thrown at the morality and practicality of this impending relationships are probably meant to intimidate more than inspire. 58 years later... the language has changed, the settings have changed, yet many aspects of the archetype are timeless.

Some early guesses on the eventual impacts of Microsoft's new search engine "Bing" and Google's new social media/networking portal, Waves. I think Bing will be very "Cuil". I think Waves could a serial "killer".