Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

There Was Some Thing in the Air That Night, It Killed Us All

Episode 25: "Werner Herzog Presents Rob Zombie's Port of Call: The Thing: The Final Nightmare"


And here comes the liner notes (or here comes half of them):

First and foremost, apologies to Mr. Sef Joosten. We (I) mispronounced his name. It should be pronounced, in proper Germanic fashion, as "Yo-Sten." As a former scholar of German, Joe should have picked it up. Me, I studied French and Spanish, so I'm fucking blameless. Don't you even look at me.

Also, sorry, Keith Moon is in The Who, not in The Rolling Stones, which brings up a second point: I can't name a single person in The Who- oh wait, Roger Daltrey, right?-- other than the guy who looks like Derek Smalls as seen in The Simpsons.

Now there's a byzantine reference. You sort that out, 'cause I'm not going to.



The first thing we started talking about was how I got my swag (my steez, even) janked by some mother fucker. Not cool, at all. We also mentioned the Honda Accord. A fine car and not a coincidence that I mentioned it. I mention it because the 1987 Honda Accord was my first car and a fine car it was. Her she is, just look at her--


(By the way, this is the same lot where Joe saw that confidence artist/deadbeat that tried to hit up Joe successfully hit up that other guy. Also, this photo was taken by my friend Sam, who I think we mentioned in another episode. Maybe?)


Tangent:

That car went through two people before it ended up in my hands and other than the leaking sun roof (who was the asshole that decided to put sun roofs on cars?) and the lack of air conditioning and the lack of a CD player or working cassette player and that time the battery mysteriously started crapping out on me, it was a fine care. It had over half of a million miles on it and other than the occasional check up, it worked fine until it died somewhere in East LA when I was trying to drive back home to Long Beach.

I wouldn't find out until later, but my trans-axle apparently cracked in half and, for a piece of shit car like the one I drove, it was literally more money to fix my car than it was to turn it into scrap. My favorite part about this whole memory was that I was stuck off of the 710 somewhere at 11 at night, listening to the Love Line episode with Johnny Rotten as the guest. I parked my car in the middle of this neighborhood I have never been in before and, luckily, this guy was walking across the street, so, I ask him the question you would naturally ask anyone when you don't know where you are located.

"Excuse me, what's the cross street here?"

I got a look like I was speaking Martian. Now, I realize that I'm in East LA. English does not exactly fly fast and loose in that part of this county, but I didn't think the word asking where I was on Earth would hit a brick wall that quickly and that soundly. I'm not the kind of guy to try to force English on people who live in this country, but, seriously, dude, how the fuck do you not have the vocabulary to express to a person with a car that is spewing smoke what street you are near? I feel confident that if I moved to another country I would understand the word "where" or "street" or the idea that I lived in a place that has a name. Just saying.

Of course the punch line in all of this is that, naturally, I tried calling my folks to tell them "Hey, my car just croaked" only to get nothing in reply. This ties in with me having to call my mom about mystery charges on my credit card. It is like bleeding a stone sometimes and there is no better example than that night.

I called my home, no reply. I called my mom's cell, no reply. Then I remembered, they close the door to their room and my dad is almost deaf and my mom has ear plugs because my dad snores, thereby completely securing themselves from ever being called by a family member after 9:30 at night. It's a wonder they ever got the call that my sister's water broke (not that we headed out to the hospital or anything).

After calling AAA, I got my tow to my mechanic and a ride home to boot. I'd bitch about that, but, to be fair, my folks do cover my AAA.

Moving on.

The moment of ambiguous noise at 11:30~ is me half-choking on a chicken nugget.



And Escape From New York was made in 1981, continuing my roll of completely incorrect statements.

(This is where I would link something about Wilford Brimley and his famous "diabeetus" ads, but it is honestly harder to find the actual ad than it is to find roughly 700,000 parody videos. You've gone too far, internet.)

And now we get to Sid Ceasar V. Cesar Romero. More butchered names given up to the podcast god (who lives on top of a pile of Zunes and minidisc players).

I don't want to know this information, but for you people, anything.

Here's an explanation of Dog Fort, which is majestic. Thank you, Richard Dawkins for giving us the word "meme," because, Christ knows your run as an atheist fuckhole hasn't done anyone any good. Not to say that you shouldn't keep on talking shit on your fellow man for no fucking reason. People really like it when intelligent people act as bitter as possible for no apparent reason. Keep up the good work, shitwad.

With that said, if David Attenborough* wanted to talk shit on Christianity, I could take it. Or anything else.

Here's a link about Oprah's Oscar. I don't give a shit. I don't even give enough of shit to read the article or what she's received. Oh, and here's a reply from BET about us haters. It could be good, I don't know.

I was also talking about the tenuous thread that connects folk to country to blues to rock to punk, which is something I could go on and on and on about and, frankly, I've done more than enough of that in this entry, already, but seriously, listen to Are You Experienced and listen to Live From Folsom Prison or Bringing it All Back Home and tell me that those albums don't sit at the crux of more than a few genres. Genre is a vague and ambiguous thing. That holds for movies. It's art, there aren't any hard and fast rules about these things.

Unless you're an asshole, I mean.

Here's one movie where Ian McShane plays a gay gangster. Again, not a terrible thing, but a terribly specific thing.

Oh, and Max von Sydow is awesome, even as a Nazi.



Maybe especially as a Nazi.

Haha. The Ian McShane movie with Sean Connery where they play "IRA members" is called The Terrorists. That's right. The movie where Ian McShane plays a terrorist is called exactly that. Also there doesn't seem to be any IRA terrorists in the film. There is something clearly wrong with my brain. And maybe Joe's brain.

Here's the clip of the awesome Ian McShane story--

(Enjoy, or fucking else.)


Ugh. This podcast just keeps on going, doesn't it?

Alright, fuck it. I'm 25 minutes in, but this thing doesn't need to go on any longer than it already has. We'll be doing a part II on this particular episode. Hope you enjoyed this so far!



Also, please, if you find the time, give us a review on iTunes. It's how people find us and it'd be swell if more people listened to us. I'm not blaming you for our lack of renown, but, it's pretty much your fault that we aren't better known or respected. Something to think about.

*Another person I've confused for far too long is Richard Attenborough and David Attenborough. At least they're both old, white, avuncular British men in this case.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

White Guys in "The Great Link Dump Robbery"

“[Mr. Bryant's and Kislingbury's podcast] . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson on White Guys, Square Glasses.

It's another big, fat link dump. Let's get started, shall we?

As for writing, here is a wonderful list of 15 words with no English equivalent. If you copy-edit my work (hi Joe!) prepare to be seeing these words again soon. We have a wonderful haunted house of a language and I see no reason not to drive it further towards the bizarreness that we deserve.

Semi-Follow-up: Here is the most thorough and insightful summary of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

(Side note: "GET BIN LADEN" would have been a cooler title, even if it would elevate Bin Laden by reminding us all of how much of a badass Michael Caine is).

Speaking of Get Carter, the man himself is included in the newest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Since about half of the story is entirely opaque to even the most college graduated of us, Jess Nevins and his dear Irish friend [name] have assembled an annotation of the book-- which is just one of many that Nevins has cobbled together.

Speaking of crime-- 40 years ago, a man by the name of DB Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted 200,000 dollars as a ransom, and parachuted out of the plane never to be seen again. He is at the center of the only unsolved plane hijacking case in American history. And, apparently, the FBI might have finally figured it out.

Ever wonder what happened to all of the places Patrick Bateman used to frequent? No? Well, want to find out anyways? No, huh? Well, fuck off, then.

You know what sounds good right about now? Some poached egg and grits.

I feel partially ripped off by life that I had only been introduced to grits this year. Oh sure, it's really kicked 2011 up into my top years of all time, but that comes at the cost of making all those other years look like beggars at the foot of a king.

You know who is awesome? Ansel Adams. You know what isn't awesome? Japanese internment camps. What do you get when you combine them? Something that is still fairly shitty, but, at the same time is an important document of one of the dumber chapters in American history.

Also, as a supplement to "The Longest Wind" supplement, here's a diary from a Japanese soldier on Guadalcanal. I haven't read it quite yet, but I didn't see the harm in linking it. I've been planning and writing an entry on the WWII episode we did, because I wanted to carry on and extend the arguments we (me, mostly) made on that show-- as well as some of the inaccuracies we (me, mostly) made regarding the Japanese and Germany and so forth. That's a long time away, though-- maybe when we do Part II?

You know who was a fun guy? Nixon.

No, wait, he was an asshole.

As I was saying, I was reading the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this week and I finally made it around to the prose section in the back. I usually save Alan Moore's back matter for a later date because, to be frank, they're denser than hell and the man is a far more skilled comic book writer than he is a novel writer. Thankfully the stories were short and weird enough to catch my attention and, in a rare fit of clarity, I actually recognized several references. Not only is Detective Munch complaining to Rawls about giant ants (which is a rad sentence on its own), but the space ants are basically space Muslims that worship a frozen man encased in ice.

Oh, and there are clangers. What the hell are clangers? Well, since you're probably American, you've probably never head of them until now.

Clangers are these little knitted piglets that live on the moon that speak in whistles. Yup.

The only reason I've ever heard of them is because of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, which only rarely ever lowered its bile lever to talk about the works of Oliver Postgate.

And here they are.

Don't you just want to hug one?

The point of all of this is that I recognized a reference to a 1970's British TV show for kids in a comic book about Voldemort and Mick Jagger fighting Sean Connery. It's a rare thing and I'm going to revel in it.

Ah, heck, here comes one more video--

Ten for Grandpa from Pie Face Pictures on Vimeo.



Now let's get the fuck out of here and get some waffles.