Soundtrack to a Blog Entry, Vol. 2

Earthquake Heart, The Dirtbombs

This has been a strange week. Two snowdays in a week is something I haven't had since high school, which at this point was at least six winters ago. It's not like the snowfall was apocalyptic or anything. Even Fairfield county had a couple of days off. If you take away their hardy farmer resolve, all they have left is racism. Poor Thurston.

Overkill, Colin Hay

My iPod continues to be the best thing that's ever happened to me, and this blog entry is in fact sponsored by the good people at Apple. I sure as fuck don't want to use your computers, but God damn do you make good appliances and whatnot.

I'm at a weird point where I still watch too much TV, see too many movies, and listen to too much music, but don't really feel the need to write about it. This makes maintaining The Blog quite the little challenge. I soldier on because what I fear the most is having no written legacy when I die (or alternately, have my hands chopped off).

Here Comes My Baby, Cat Stevens

Ring of Honor is officially a "go" for the 23rd. I am anticipating this show more than most for two reasons. One, it is one of Samoa Joe's final matches a full time performer with the company. TNA has recently pulled him from RoH, so this will be his last tour for the foreseeable future. In addition to that big event, my favorite professional wrestling promotion, Pro Wrestling NOAH (though WWE has been giving them a run for their money so far this year), is sending my favorite superheavyweight wrestler in the world, the awesome and chunky TAKESHI MORISHIMA. He will be in a "MAIN EVENT QUALITY MATCH" with TBA. Seeing as Samoa Joe and Homicide are booked, I have no idea who this so-called "main event quality" opponent is going to be, but if it's Morishima obliterating some jobber for ten minutes, that's fine too.

Closer, Joshua Radin

WSX Workrate Reports (or more likely, WSX EVERYTHING IS FANTASTIC Reports) are on their way. I've watched the second and third episode with Funky D, but haven't sat down alone and taken notes or anything, so I'm waiting until I do that. Yes, thank God I still enjoy writing about The Professional Wrestling. Once that's gone, I might as well throw in the towel. News is that episode 4 is TOO HOT FOR MTV, and they're either going to air it late at night or NOT AT ALL. It must involve piranhas. They certainly don't have a problem with explosions that could level a city block.

Lost Cause, Beck

I couldn't actually get anything on paper during this song. I was TRANSFIXED by its beauty. Let's try this again.

Talk Dirty to Me, Poison

That's more like it. I'm leaving for Europe in less than a month at this point. In fact, a month from today I will be in Germany, hopefully drinking some sort of German beer and thinking about banging out German bar maids. I am very excited. Not just for the potential bar maid banging. The entire trip, really. Germany, France, Italy. Useable. Mad useable. The useability of this excursion is off the chart. It cannot be measured. In units of useability, it broke the meter after reaching twoty-two DOUG~!s. That's how useable it is.

The Only Living Boy in New York, Simon & Garfunkel

Come to think of it, the only unuseable aspect of this trip is that it takes place at the beginning of the NCAA tournament. By the time I get back, it'll be down to the final four teams, I believe. This is most unacceptable. I need to find German, French, and Italian sports bars that are all about the collegiate hoops. Basketball is a global game. It's not like I'm trying to watch the Motor City Bowl in Japan or something.

Hold on Hope, Guided By Voices

Before I leave, I want to get together with people and get drunk in these United States. You know, for comparison's sake. Perhaps I'll try to get a movie night together for the first or second weekend in March. We can worry about that later. I haven't seen some people lately, though.

Are You Out There, Dar Williams

Like Franz: January 16th

Or Ashley: January 5th

Or Davekwon: January 30th

Or Lucas: January 20th

Or Adam: another January 5th

Or Lee Money: January 29th

Or Kehn: Whatever that day we saw the lamentable Borat was.

Still, it's been a while for some of these folks. I know everyone has busy lives and work schedules that are at cross purposes with one another, but I'm going to try harder to spend time with people.

Happy Go Lucky Me, Paul Evans

A fitting song to go out on, I think. I'll be writing you all again very soon. Have a good day and be good to each other.

No Appeal

Get it? It's the opposite of "Mass Appeal" and also a description of my blog.

This Barely Even Looks Like Seth Rogen, but... WANT TO SEE

That's an opening day ticket buy right there, folks.

Corporate Nightmare Looms

I just had a total GloboCorp moment at school. I was in the cafeteria getting some dinner, and I sat down in front of one of the monitors eternally playing MTV U! Anyway, MTV U gets its news feeds from ABC, so ABC News was doing a story about Barbaro being euthanized, but they were using footage from a race he was in that was televised on NBC. So that's me, watching footage of an NBC event, on an ABC news broadcast, on an MTV channel, which is owned by CBS. Then, of course, to complete the circle, the next ABC story was about a CBS news van that had been snowed in somewhere in Iowa or Illinois. One of those "I" states. Weird stuff.

The weird thing about MTV U (when they're not playing news feeds from other networks) is that it's always muted in the cafeteria, so when I see a video that is visually interesting, I have no idea if the song is complete crap or not. Since I got my iPod I've just kind of imagined that the video is set to whatever song I'm listening to at the time.

I've recently (as in the past three or four days) become completely obsessed with a song called Dreaming of You by a band called The Coral. Now, I had no real knowledge of this band until I watched an episode of Scrubs and the song was featured there. So if I'm just incredibly late to the party, pardon me. Anyway, it's incredibly catchy, but the most interesting thing about the song is the juxtaposition (sorry, Jason) of the music, which sounds straight out of 1969, and the vocal styling, which is pure current-wave garage rock. So if you don't know the song, get ahold of it. It's a good one.

The point is, I committed the song to memory, and I got to thinking about lyrics, and one's ability to remember them. At this moment, I have 326 songs on my iPod, and I know the lyrics all the way through to at least 80% of them. What a colossal waste of brain power. It's not quite the Donal Logue in Comic Book Villains scenario where he gets all up in arms about how he could have been a brilliant mathematician if he invested the time he had spent on comic books to algebra. But still, it seems like I could put that space in my brain to some kind of use. Maybe it doesn't work that way. Who knows?

Week three of the RAWnaissance is scheduled for tonight, so we'll see how that goes.

Speaking of wrestling, I did not watch the Royal Rumble last night for the first time since 1998, which was my 15th birthday party. Ah, what a great night. Steve Austin won the Rumble, Shawn Michaels beat the Undertaker, and Lee put Jason in a legit ankle lock out of sheer annoyance. If I remember correctly, this was also the night that Davekwon used my screen name to ask people in chat rooms for nude pictures of Jonathan Taylor Thomas. That cut up. Anyway, I missed the Rumble, and I thought I would be more annoyed than I ended up being. So that's good. Thinking about Jason in an ankle lock still makes me chuckle.

Also speaking of wrestling, something I'm way more excited about than RAW came into my life this weekend. WSX. WRESTLING SOCIETY... X. Yep. The "X" stands for itself. Anyway, this is a new wrestling show (because God knows the market isn't saturated enough as it is) on MTV built around musical acts and fast paced matches. Here is a succinct recap of the first show.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open on Black Label Society about half way through a song. They finish out as our first match goes to the ring.

Jack Evans of Ring of Honor wrestles Matt Sydal, also of Ring of Honor. Matt Sydal has a reasonably attractive lass at ringside with him. Zack Wylde sits in on commentary with the announcers, Kriss Kloss and some other guy who is very nervous. Matt and Jack have a back and forth match with no rest holds, just MOVES. Jack wins with a flip off the top turnbuckle.

Commercial break, with a bumper previewing the tag teams set to debut on forthcoming shows, including "Keepin' It Gangsta" (along with a funny tag line that I'm sure Andrew will remember), the EMO tag team D.I.F.H (Doing It For Her. OH YES), a couple of speedy Japanese men, and two Hispanics. VERY AWESOME.

Back from commercial, and it's time for the first ever WSX Rumble! Ten men enter, two grab contracts that are suspended above the ring. Men are thrown through tables on the outside. Tables which EXPLODE. Also, Vampiro and X-Pac get the contracts, so they will fight next week for the WSX Championship. Zack Wylde calls the Rumble a "blitzkrieg of insanity" in the most matter of fact manner possible.

And then it's over! Thirty minutes, folks! That's a God damn wrestling show right there. I declare Andrew and myself the world's biggest fans and foremost experts on WSX, and we cannot wait for the new episode tomorrow night. ADD wrestling at it's finest.

Anyway, this is getting kind of long, so I'm going to cut it off here, as Rachel Stevens sings me into the night over the ear buds.

He Directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Too

I'm not going to break any new ground with this revelation, but here goes: your impression of a piece of music, film, or television show can change drastically based on the environment in which you watch it. It is with this in mind that I viewed the Renny Harlin (he of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Die Hard 2) opus Mindhunters for the second time.

This actually took place two weeks ago tonight, but I hadn't really given much thought to why I enjoyed it so much more the first time than the second. This is what I've determined, though.

1. I saw it in a theater the first time, with two very enthusiastic companions (Ashley and Davekwon).

2. I was aware that it was directed by Renny Harlin going in this time around. That's enough to diminish anyone's excitement.

3. I already knew that LL Cool J wasn't going to die (though, to be fair, I think he's only ever died in one movie, and there are at least three in which he appears to die only to make a miraculous recovery by the end. And come to think of it, the one movie he died in, the fantastic night vision shot Rollerball, his death is off-screen, so he may very well have survived that too. I think he's just invincible.).

4. Jason wasn't in the mood to give it a chance, and mine and Dave's enthusiasm was not infectious enough to stem his tide of negativity.

For these reasons and more, I have to officially un-recommend Mindhunters. Ashley has all of the wacky movie channels and has probably seen it upwards of twenty times by this point, so she's more than welcome to contest me on this. Perhaps there's some sort of breakthrough on the sixth viewing.

Some The Streets song just came on my iPod and I have no idea how this has occurred. Oh, I see. It's like when the Mystery Whites appear on court at the end of Ohio State basketball games when they're up by twenty. Where do they come from? Fuckin' The Streets. According to the mighty and venerable Wikipedia, this song, Don't Mug Yourself is from the 2002 album Original Pirate Material. This particular single charted #21 in the U.K.

Jesus Christ. Now something I don't even recognize is on. How is this happening? Do I have iPod gnomes loading shitty music onto my poor nano? Or did I just haphazardly upload a soundtrack? I think that both are equally likely, frankly.

Regardless, time to get this bullshit off of here. Outtie 5000.

State of the RAW and other stuff

I believe that terming week 2 of the RAWnaissance anything less than a smashing success would ring quite false! With a hearty attendance of five in total and Young Lee Masheter coming next week, happy days are here again indeed. Jokes were told, future plans were entered into PDAs, mental notes were taken. Cheers to Keith for character development. This week he added a black leather glove to his "Keith Jackson: Problem Drinker" persona. What does it mean? Is it a sign that he's siding with the Wolfpac? Tune into Nitro to find out. Also, there was wrestling.

For those that didn't make it down to The Rumba Cafe on Saturday, first of all, for shame. Secondly, it was a very good night of Funkdefy in a very different environment. I wouldn't want to pay five bucks for record spinning every week, but four times a year (which seems to be the timetable currently) should work out quite well. Lucas, Chops, and myself came out to lend our support and scrill to Andrew's endeavor and I would venture to say that we were not disappointed!

Bam Bam Bigelow died the other day, and that was disappointing. It occurred to me when I didn't immediately rush to memorialize him on the blog that I'm becoming numb to these wrestling deaths. They're so frequent now, and all from the same age group and era, that it's pointless to try and keep up with it. Suffice it to say that as a huge fan of fat boy wrestlers, I liked Bam Bam Bigelow a lot.

I'm skipping the State of the Union tonight, but be sure to catch all the fallout on MSNBC with Olbermann and Matthews. Their other joint shows have been really entertaining.

Keith Jackson: Problem Drinker

It is with a heavy heart that I report on the first night of the Monday Night RAWnaissance. Despite only one person making the effort to appear, it was still most newsworthy. Promptly at 9 pm, without his best gal on his arm (he says she was too tired, I say she was too ASHAMED of him), young John Keith Jackson appeared at my house, having transported a glass of scotch on the rocks with him. Oh yes. Covered with a sheet of plastic wrap no less.

RAW was pretty okay too, so hey, more people show up next week. We can have an intervention if need be.

~!

It has really swept our lives, this magical symbol of excitement. When you have a band named after you, you're doing something right. Well done, tilde bang. Well done, Mr. Bryan Alvarez. Well done, DOUG~!

The Hype Begins And Ends Here

There. You now officially want to see 28 Weeks Later. Don't deny it. And as noted in the entry title, I'm done hyping. I don't really see what I could possibly say to entice you more than that picture. It's out in May. We'll posse up.

It's Like He Did it For Us

Good news for Triple H haters and potential RAW viewers for the upcoming NEW Monday Night era (beginning January 15th!), but bad news for those of us with SOULS, as Hunter looks to have torn his quad again. He gave Randy Orton a spinebuster, and his leg just gave out. The last time he suffered this injury, he was out for eight months, came back way too soon and never really got back to one hundred percent. Maybe being a dad will mellow him out or something, but the weirdest thing is that last night (January 7th) was the fifth anniversary of the night he returned from the first injury. SPOOKY. Anyway, here's Hunter getting felt up by Shawn while in intense pain or something.


"No, no. It's just the laying on of hands, Hunter. Chill out. I'm cool."

So anyway, could be interesting times ahead, depending on how long the big guy's on the sidelines for.