Music For A While

Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile:
Wond'ring how your pains were eas'd,
And disdaining to be pleas'd
Till Alecto free the dead
From their eternal bands,
Till the snakes drop from her head
And the whip from out her hands.
Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile.

Text by John Dryden.

Can you comprehend how great this is? Listen to a clip of the piece being performed here.

How Do You Say 'No Thanks' In German?

I just got an email from someone in the English department here that was a call for submissions about Krautrock for the October 2009 issue of Popular Music & Society. I'd really like to one day get an essay in an issue of such a great academic journal, but Krautrock just isn't my thing. So, if you have a great love of German rock music from the 60's and 70's, let me know, and I'll forward the email to you. Until then, Behalten Sie auf Schaukeln. (I hear that means 'keep on rocking.')

Duke's Creative Writing Classes Must Be Like UGA's "Basics of Basketball" Class

I'm stalling on finishing the final stanza of a poem I have due for tomorrow's writing class so I spent some time on the internet searching for the some great examples. I came across some poems by a relative unknown. Says his name is Jonathan Clay Redick. I say he should quit his day job.

Here is the wonderful collection of J.J.'s poems that SI.com selected to publish.

I can't wait to read the ones he wrote about that whole drunk driving thing.

The Georgia Peach

I just watched Tim Hudson of the Atlanta Braves on Paula Deen's cooking show. I think the pairing of baseball and good Southern food is a match that is well overdue. My favorite ball club and my favorite television cook together, making delicious ham with pineapple and brown sugar. Doesn't get better on a Sunday.

The Flee From Me

I'm not usually one to go crazy about poems from antiquity, but this first stanza of "The Flee From Me" from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503-1542) is pretty much perfect. Those first four lines, they punch like nothing else.

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Time to Take the Car Keys Away From Grandpa

I used to really like Andy Rooney. He seemed really wise and humorous in the way only old men can be. He knew a lot about linguistics. These days? Not so much. Andy Rooney has talked bad about the game of baseball. That alone is not so bad - plenty of people say bad things about baseball and it is warranted. If someone wants to make a case for the game losing some integrity, I will listen. If someone wants to talk about how foolish it is for the game to worship the past more than celebrate the present, or play pretend-ethics in a world that is pushing towards being meta-ethical, I'll listen. But Andy Rooney has crossed a line. He has said horrible things about baseball. Andy Rooney is not a baseball man. He cannot say these things. Read through the following from Rooney's column for the Stamford Times (huh?) and just make sure to notice a couple things. 1) Xenophobia? 2) Andy Rooney writes like a fifth grader. Fuck you, old man. Fuck you.

Andy Rooney — A no-hit game for me

Baseball has never been my game. I never liked it as a kid, probably because I could never throw a ball very well. My friends said I threw like a girl and that's enough to put any young boy off a game. As I've probably told you — after over 4,000 columns it's sometimes hard to remember what I've said before — my father took me to a Yankee game when I was about 10 years old and Joe DiMaggio struck out three times.

My disinterest in baseball as a kid has lasted all my life. I'm still not interested in the game. I don't watch it on television or follow it in the newspaper. I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today's baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me. They're apparently very good but they haven't caught my interest. I also think baseball needs some rules changes, too. For example, the player who starts the game as pitcher should have to play all nine innings without a substitution. A pitcher hardly ever plays more than a few innings and then the manager replaces him with someone who isn't as good. I think baseball managers dominate the games more than the players do and more than coaches do in other sports.

There are 30 major league baseball teams, but sometimes it seems as though the New York Yankees are the only team that ever wins the World Series. There have been 102 World Series since 1903. The Yankees have been in 39 of those and they've won 26. Five teams have never won a World Series. What in the world keeps baseball fans in those cities coming to games?

The figures they keep giving us on broadcasts of baseball games are batting statistics, the amount being paid the players, the number of fans in the stands. There are other statistics I'd like to hear more often. When a player comes up to bat, they can tell me what his batting average is but I'd also like to know how many times he's struck out. Tell me how many different teams he's played with. Which player on either team has made the most errors? What's the average IQ of a baseball team compared with the IQ of a professional football team?

It seems like a major mystery that baseball has never caught on in other countries the way it has here. There are baseball leagues in several countries but their citizens' interest is mostly in soccer [football as they call it]. Cricket is popular in some countries, but it makes hopscotch seem exciting.

It's easier to understand why our football game isn't played in other countries. Football is complicated. It takes a lot of practice and it's expensive. All players need for a soccer game is a ball and a pair of shorts and shoes. It's harder for a bunch of kids to get together Saturday morning and go to a vacant lot to play football than to play either soccer or baseball.

Some of the best times of my life were playing football, and some of the best friends I made were fellow football players in high school and college. You're more dependent on teammates in football than in baseball and a bonding takes place.

In a football game, you're dependent on the players on either side of you. In a baseball game, you're pretty much on your own. Basketball is a better team sport to me than baseball, but size means too much in basketball. I never got taller than 5-foot-9 and didn't make the basketball team in school. I ended up as the backstroker on the swimming team. I was a good swimmer but hated doing laps for practice. The water was always cold and after half an hour in the chlorinated pool my eyes were red and my skin wrinkled. It took the fun out of swimming.

Considering the fact that who wins or loses any game makes no difference whatsoever in our lives, it's interesting how important a game can seem to us sometimes. The greatest sports loss of my life was a high school football game. We were undefeated and the game was the last of the season. It ended in a scoreless tie and we were crushed by what seemed like the worst defeat of our lives.

Write to Andy Rooney at Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207, or via email at aarooney5@yahoo.com

Coloradical! Vinny Castilla Day! Sufjan!

My favorite site on the net at the moment might just be The Dugout. There is a link to it to the right under the blogroll. The Dugout is basically imagined AIM conversations between pro baseball players and the occasional civilian that pops into the chatroom. All the players and managers have the same type of screen names you thought were really cool and creative in middle school that you still use. Yesterday, I found a great post on The Dugout from a while ago called Vinny Castilla Day. It features Castilla in his Rockies days, as well as the best satire of Sufjan Stevens I've ever seen. Go laugh your ass of.

oh my gohhh-eee-yohhhd

Slaughter Rule

The Texas Rangers beat the Baltimore Orioles 30 to 3 today. No one has scored that many runs in over one hundred years. 11o to be exact. Think about that. Someone seems to hit 500 home runs every couple years. Someone seems to hit 300 wins every handful of years (and don't let anyone tell you it won't happen again). A guy comes along who hits 700 home runs every few decades. But it takes more than a century for a team to score 30 runs in a single game.

In high school at South Stokes, I remember playing some pretty awful teams - we beat East Wilkes 30-2 one time, and that was a five inning game thanks to the slaughter rule. The poor Baltimore organization have to endure all nine innings of this one. What's worse, the two teams had to turn around and play the back end of a double header after finishing. There is no way Baltimore can have any bullpen left. Perhaps we'll see some position players coming in to throw knuckleballs to the Rangers. I would love to see it.

The Weakerthans -- Reunion Tour

The Weakerthans have been around for ten years. Ten years is a long time, especially for a band that deals in such emotional terms - a man can only sing about being sad for so long before he becomes a caricature of his former self. Reinvention, however slight, is necessary.

The strange part of it is, The Weakerthans' existence only starts mattering when you hit high school. For some people, The Weakerthans have been around for a decade. For some, it is four years. This is not up for the band to decide. Just whenever some kid gets lonely and listens to Left & Leaving for the first time.

I am no longer in high school. Accordingly, there is a lot of music I obsessed over during those years that hasn't aged so well. Some of it hasn't gotten worse at all - because now that I look back, it was just bad to begin with. Often those first records from a few years ago were followed up with lesser and lesser works that have tainted the artists' legacy. When I heard The Weakerthans were coming out with a new album now seven years after L&L, I had all the reasons to expect mediocrity. Usually, once people hit about 35, they can't be the same genius creator any more. Pinker says that in How the Mind Works. No one should be ashamed. It just happens.

So I came into my first listen of The Weakerthans new album, Reunion Tour with lowered expectations. And a few songs in, there was nothing to make me think otherwise. John K. Samson is still writing tight songs - you can tell that if all his songs were stripped down to bare bones, these would be indistinguishable from what we all love about the last two records. "Civil Twilight," the opener, is lyrically solid, with the same character traits that Samson specializes in. But the track really suffers from some tired instrument work. Drums do nothing special. The synth lines are almost at center stage, and they are not memorable even after multiple listens. Most of all, the guitars are nondescript and their tones are bordering on cheesy. "Hymn of the Medical Oddity" features clumsy counterpoint in the guitar line and more boring synth work. It ends up being one of the weaker songs on the album. "Relative Surplus Value" is a rocker that follows suit - not bad, not good. Middle of the road pretty much sums it up. The first three song would have been fine as b-sides to the first two records, but the opener is the only one that might even deserve to be on a full length, and in a perfect world it wouldn't be an opener.

But then "Tournament of Hearts" comes up. I was really ready to write Reunion Tour off before this one came on, but I like it. Samson's lyrics work on the subject of the isolation in the middle of a crowd - the man at the end of the bar. And I think it might be a song about the sport of curling too. The fifth song on the record is a return for the cat named Virtute from the previous record, but the song a return to the first three - not bad, not good, not really much of anything. In "Virtute the Cat Explains her Departure," the end could be effective, but the guitars don't really do anything. There is no build. This Virtute song will differ from the previous one on Reconstruction Site in that it will not be the talked about song on the album. If anyone does end up discussing it, it will be because it doesn't deliver.

Any album that is boring five songs in is generally boring from there out. Front loading is a much better idea than putting the best stuff on the back end. But the band then throws a curve into the mix with the sixth song, "Elegy for Gump Worsley." The song, a spoken word passage about the former pro hockey goalie that passed in January 2007, is more like a song from the Books, with spoken word, banjo, acoustic loops, horns, and a lack of drums. The final line, "If anyone asks/the inscription should read/my face was my mask." works well. The song is actually really good. And then, it leads straight into the record's best song.

"Sun in an Empty Room" is the title of both the seventh song on Reunion Tour and a 1963 painting by artist Edward Hopper. I would like to be able to talk extensively about this painting, but I don't know shit about art because Art History wasn't one of the AP courses offered at my high school. However, my high school did possess The Weakerthans, as most probably have in the past few years. Samson does a great job of representing a true emptiness of both self and surrounding in the lyrics. The final chorus of 'Take eight minutes and divide/sun in an empty room/by ninety million lonely lives/sun in an empty room/watch the shadow cross the floor/sun in an empty room/we don't live here any more/sun in an empty room' hits home. This isn't just a sad song. It is a lonely one. I really hope the Hopper painting gets put somewhere in the album art just for good measure. The pairing of two medias is something that should happen more often.

"Night Windows" is a classic L&L-esque song with imaginative percussion as well as guitar lines. Check out the line 'The full moon makes our faces shine/like over ironed polyester.' The more I listen to it, I feel like this song would have made a great opener and is definitely front of album material. "Bigfoot" brings in high-plucked guitar with horns and is reminiscent of DCFC's opener for The Photo Album. After that, the title track finally brings in some synth parts that fare better than the ones from earlier in the album. Multiple drum tracks and higher-level instrumentation help this one bring to mind the phenomenal production on Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The final song on the album, "Utilities," brings in swirling electronics, horns and woodwinds with the usual Weakerthans instruments to open up into a country-tinged waltz with Samson singing 'make me something somebody can use.' The song is great ender to the second half of the album that finishes so strongly in comparison to the first half.

Looking at it, Reunion Tour doesn't suffer from songwriting, just an awful job of sequencing. This album would have made the best EP we'd have ever seen if they had cut it down to a handful of songs, probably too good for just an EP. The record is good, but what is sad is it could have been much better. I'd love to see these songs live - I'm sure some of the songs on the front half would be much better afterwards. God, I feel like I'm 17 again.

more lovely and more temperate

The one and only place I've ever been published, Brave Little Poem of the Day, was not really daily to begin with, as it actually changed the featured poem every three days. I won't split hairs though - they were the first to deem anything I wrote worthy of acceptance, and I will always have a special place in my heart for their website. For that reason, it saddens me to see that BLPotD has gone on hiatus until January 2008. I hope that the nice people there get things back and running. I will probably sit a poem or two aside to send to them in case they do.

And in case you caught on from the title, I am knee deep in Shakespeare's sonnets right now. I hope no one is ever compared to a day like today - there was nothing pleasant about the brain-draining heat we are getting right now. Will's sonnets are making me work quite hard, and I feel better for it. Hooray for getting back to college. Hooray.

Tract

I just finished reading the debut issue of Tract, a magazine about the relationship between science and the arts that features the work of students from UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard. There is a spotlight on the photography of Eric J. Heller, a physicist at Harvard who somehow creates photographic images of the movement of electrons across real-life objects. The color photo "Banyan" is otherworldly. There is poetry from Megan Jordan, easily my favorite writer who went to school here last year, and Phillip McFee contributes two great fiction pieces. Both writers are affiliated with UNC. Caleb Goodrum writes an interesting piece about making a dobro-style instrument called "The Burro" for a UNC Physics & Music class.

I love science almost as much as I love creative writing, and seeing the two paired makes me so happy, especially when it is in such a well put together publication. Volume 1, number 1 (Spring 2007) has a black matte cover and features a stunning picture of cauliflower (from an article about fractals and the Romanesco cauliflower.) Science is one of the most difficult subjects to write about in a manner that doesn't resemble a service manual, and the majority of pieces in Tract 1.1 do a good job of making science sound a great deal more accessible. If you are on the Carolina campus, or the Harvard one too I presume, pick up a copy and read through it. I really enjoyed it.

A Pimp Hit her and Ever Since She's Got a Nervous Condition

Today, R. Kelly steps it up a bit with chapter 16. This one is more like the short chapters from 1-12, and it is much more entertaining that way. R should leave eight minute epics to other people. Even though there is a "see you, wouldn't want to be you" type of line in this one, I liked it. Good job R. Good job to Twan's 'Shrek lookin' ass' too.

Hymns for a Dark Horse

I've done my part in supporting local music today.

I went to Schoolkids Records today and got a real copy of Bowerbirds' Hymns for a Dark Horse, which will go onto be known as the best debut album of 2007. I would go further into this, but John Darnielle has a bit more clout than I do, and he has said all there is to be said about this album here at Last Plane to Jakarta. I opened the LP-style folding jacket up, and the sleeve insert that has all the lyrics and 'thank you' notes is hand numbered. You can see the little smudge. I like that. You can tell this album was a labor of love, being the first release for Burly Time Records, and I love the fact that this album is number 1207 in a first pressing of 1600. So, go buy this before it becomes a collector's item.

I also picked up tickets to two shows, The National on September 7th and Magnolia Electric and the Watson Twins on September 25th. I'm going to stand in front and challenge Jason Molina to a staring contest. He might have ridden with the ghost, but if old Mr. Songs: Ohia thinks he's a match for Mattpoin, he's in for a world of pain.

Twan Starts Smoking Trees and Acting Like a Fool

Looks like by chapter 15, R. Kelly decided actual rhymes and melodies in the vocals weren't all that important. Not even a reference to "I'm Rick James Bitch!" makes this one that great. Really, RK, really, you gotta do better than this.

I'm Gonna Kill Both Ya'll Knucklehead Asses

Chapter 14 is up today on IFC's site. I gotta say, 14 is kinda weak. Sure there are some funny parts a bit after the four-minute mark, but R isn't hitting on much here. Makes me a lot less excited about the rest he has left to reveal. Just watch the part where Twan is rapping in the car and talking to the mystery g with gold teeth and Sam Jackson's facial hair.

The Everybodyfields -- Nothing Is Okay

1997 was a good year. Radiohead released OK Computer, Modest Mouse came out with The Lonesome Crowded West, Ben Folds Five with Whatever & Ever Amen, and The Mountain Goats put out Full Force Gailsburg. It is one of those years that you look back on ten years later and talk about how good that cluster of music was. The amazing thing is, just as we are now talking about those albums, 2007 is looking to be a banner year as well. Feist dropped what looks to be my album of the year. The National put out Boxer, which is so damn good. Minus the Bear put out a remix album and will drop Planet of Ice in one week. Joanna Newsom gave all her fans a gift in her live EP, Iron & Wine are set to release The Shepherd's Dog, even though everyone who wants to hear it already has, and David Karsten Daniels flew under the radar with Sharp Teeth, a phenomenal album. There were albums from Dan Deacon and Bjork. The Bowerbirds' Hymns for a Dark Horse was tagged by John Darnielle as possibly his favorite debut release EVER. There were solid releases from The Avett Brothers, Andrew Bird, and Against Me! 2007 is almost too good - stuff gets lost in the mix.

And throughout all of that, there has been one release that I've kept my eye on as much as any - and it will move less units than any of the records mentioned above. The Everybodyfields, that friendly looking pair you see advertised at the top of this blog, are set to release their third album, Nothing is Okay, on Ramseur Records on August 21st. The Everybodyfields are essentially Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews, two alt-country songwriters from Johnson City, Tennessee. Sam and Jill are accompanied by a revolving cast of supporting musicians and have never had the same line-up when I've seen them play. There may be fiddle, electric guitar, keyboards, pedal steel, or just the two main bandmembers. However, it rarely matters - these two are always spellbinding in a live setting and are often adored by an ever present group of superfans.

On their previous two albums, Half Way There: Electricity and the South (2004) and 2005's Plague of Dreams, The Everybodyfields has stuck to all-acoustic instrumentation, save for a hollow-bodied electric bass. In fact, the first two albums are just acoustic guitars, electric bass, dobro, and fiddle. These two albums are solid pieces of work that are held together by Sam and Jill's amazing harmonies. Both singers have 'long' southern voices, with Quinn's being rather pronounced and warbly, and their affinity for slow waltz tempos aids in giving their harmonies lots of space.

However, Nothing is Okay is a departure of sorts for The Everybodyfields. The gorgeous vocals are still present. So are Sam's trademark songs in three. The difference lies in the instrumentation on the recordings. By adding a full, electrified band to their studio sound, the band has effectively created depth to their recordings. Instruments like piano, drums, and a reverb-drenched slide guitar are in the forefront on songs like "Don't Turn Away" and "Aeroplane." The fuller sound suits the singers well. "Don't Turn Away" and "Everything Is Okay" are perfect examples of how a fuller band with more volume allows Sam and Jill respectively to push the vocals harder. When the song is toned down, guitar and piano play more complimentary roles like in Quinn's "Birthday" where the warm guitar fades out just in time for the two singers to harmonize wonderfully. "Aeroplane," the opening track, is musically more mature than previous efforts, and stands out because of it. Both the winding vocals and chords make it a great song.

Nothing is Okay doesn't hit any wrong notes, but some songs feel rather out of place in the tracking order. After many listens, it is evident that the album lacks a true opening statement. While "Aeroplane" is definitely the best track in the set, it isn't quite what one expects from in a lead track. On Plague of Dreams, "Magazine" had the upped tempo and bounce, as well as being in four, to lead the album. The only song on the new record that sounds magazine-esque is the final track, "Out On the Highway," and it lacks the instrumentation that characterizes the rest of the album. "Everything is Okay" could possibly work, but it needs to be tacked on to the back end of "Wasted Time" to create flow. "Be Miner" is really the only song that doesn't sound great on the album, with a strange feel to it that doesn't fit with the general Everybodyfields sound.

The record teeters near falling into a take-turns for each singer record sequencing, and the front end trades some flow for doing so. The constant trade from Sam Quinn's waltzes to Jill Andrews' four-quarter ballads disrupts continuity. It is only once Andrews' "Wasted Time" is followed by the lovely and imaginative "Everything is Okay" that the album starts to flow seamlessly.

Even though it doesn't flow as much as I would like, Nothing is Okay is going to be one of the albums I remember ten years from now. In the day and a half I've had to listen to it, "Aeroplane" has already made it into the Top 25 Most Played Songs list on iTunes. This record is a major step forward for The Everybodyfields. The records are wonderful, and their live shows are a treat. I can't wait to see them at the end of September in Chapel Hill. The last time I saw them, everyone in the audience was handed a rose to throw on stage during the encore. It felt completely appropriate. Every time they open their mouths could be described as gorgeous. Go buy Nothing is Okay, and put it on repeat. Fall in love with the singer of your choice. Love them, and most of all, love their music. I do.

Crazier Than A Fish With Titties

Yes, just like a sausage-ass-head policeman, R. Kelly has made good on his promise of more chapters in Trapped in the Closet. The title of this post? From chapter 13, which can be found, along with chapter 12.5 - a recap, and an interactive character map on, get this, IFC's website.

After watching chapter 13 today, I'm a little worried - it didn't have that same classic feel as the first twelve, and kinda felt like an episode of MAD TV, but R delivers some lines that make up for it. Make sure to watch 12.5 as well, if just to hear him harmonize the word 'shit' many times.

Almost made a tear fall up out my eye.

Conch: Not Even the Most Popular Species of Edible Snail

I recently spent a week of vacation down past Wilmington on the North Carolina coast in a little town called Kure Beach, located on a little sandbar with the wonderful name of Pleasure Island (I shit you not, PLEASURE ISLAND). My family has been spending the summers there for the past 50 years, and it is truly one of my favorite places on the planet.

Last night was the final night of the vacation, and seven of us sat down to something called a Low Country Boil. The LCB is a one-pot meal that works in exactly the same way a Maryland Blue Crab boil works - bit metal pot, lots of seafood and a few ears of corn, and enough Old Bay to kill a small child. Our LCB contained shrimp, red potatoes, ears of corn (cut in half), clams, kielbasa, mussels, and a strange little thing called conch. The conch was free from the person working the market counter, which is good because it generally runs between $7 and $11 per pound. As noted in the title of this piece, the conch is a snail, but isn't even the most well known of edible snails - that goes to the little French ones called escargot. So really, conch is like the second-best maker of zippers behind YKK. Not exactly a good thing to be. From what I've found out, the only part of the conch that you actually eat is the mantle, the white meat part that the shell grows out of.

I know when someone talks about how some type of obscure meat from questionable sources that can be defined as 'delicacy' tastes, comparison comes to chicken, and I would have to agree that conch tastes like chicken - just that part of the chicken you would never dare to put in your mouth. Beak? Brain? Something along those lines. Conch taste just as much like chicken as frog, turtle, squirrel, and catfish do, which is to say, not really. I've tried them all, and I usually respond with something about the chicken you eat must be horrible, mutated chicken. Chicken doesn't feel like that. Conch reminds me of the bubble gum from baseball card packs. I know how bubble gum companies like to create crazy, zany flavor combos for kids to chew, so here is what flavor combination conch would be: chicken, dirty saltwater, and grouper. Butter doesn't help. Old Bay doesn't help, which is a sign. No amount of cocktail sauce or salt and pepper could save this stuff. Conch is bad news. Don't let the person at the seafood counter talk you into buying it, even at a discount price. If they offer to give you some for free, take it politely, then go and use it as bait for fishing. Sharks are probably the only animal that would eat conch meat. Very hungry sharks.

In the end, I just picked out all the conch and ate the other stuff. Our Low Country Boil was great, I haven't had shrimp that good in a long time. I say the next time you go to the coast where you can get great seafood, throw down big time with an LCB. Just avoid the conch.

Days of the Leak

Spin.com has a great article up concerning music leaks. It really is the first article I've seen that makes mention of zip file sites like You Send It, Megaupload, and Rapidshare, which I think are much more involved in leaks than anyone in the media realizes. Just go check out Radiohead fansite Ateaseweb if you don't believe me. Sure, more people probably use P2P sites, but I have a feeling that if you don't use OiNK, you're on something like Albumbase, which I really like. Once again, great writeup.

Left & Leaving

I head out of town this weekend and probably won't have an Internet connection. I'll make a post now and then if I can, but they whole point of the week is to relax. Not spend an hour finding the links I need to make a post. Since this may be my last post for quite some time, I'll dump some good links here for you to be entertained this week.

Islands - Return to the Sea - Why haven't you gotten this yet?

Purple Rain, Purple Rain. I really want to buy this.

All the Kids Looking Up to Me Can Suck My Dick. What you want Natalie? TO DRINK AND FIGHT! What you want Natalie? TO FUCK ALL NIGHT! Natalie Portman raps.

Look at all the colors.

When I went to see Of Montreal at Duke University, two guys in front of me wearing Family Guy t-shirts recited this entire thing. I couldn't watch it for quite some time. Now a year later, I can appreciate it again.



Worst album covers of all time. Name doesn't lie. Zip Zap Zam!

Let me know when you get this good a beer pong.

That is all for now. I hope everyone has a good week, and please leave comments if you like. I would love some discussion about these posts.

Digital My Ass.

I was pretty pumped 11 days ago when I bought a new 500 GB external drive for my laptop. I was thrilled by the ability to put all the music and photos I wanted to on the drive and not clutter up my computer. Well, 11 days after the purchase, I became aware that such hopes would not come to fruition.

My external drive crashed tonight after 11 days of normal use. I was nowhere near capacity on the thing. All the files I transferred to the Western Digital My Book were legit files - nothing corrupt.

So tonight I've been showering Western Digital's support team with candy. "Fuck You!" flavored candy. How have they responded? By sending me straight to their FAQ section of their website. I think I am going to send them to the Fuh-Q section of this website, once I make it. Don't buy Western Digital products. Money down the drain.

Arizona, How Could You?

Eight days ago on Just Call Me Juice, I responded to an article that Marco had posted about his picks for the rest of the MLB season. I said I thought the Braves would make the playoffs just because their schedule from then out was much lighter than that of the LA's and San Diego's. Then I said I wasn't going to bother tallying up Arizona's because I didn't think they had a chance.

Well, now Arizona is in first place in the NL West. Thanks guys. Equally embarrassing, Atlanta is 3.5 games out in the East and 1.5 in the wild card race. The Braves went on an awful slide after my prediction of them getting the wild card. I think the additions of Teixeira and Dotel were great, but may have been a bit late. So, thanks to Arizona, I look like an idiot. Bob Wickman is responsible for a little bit of that as well.

Also, I recently tried to search on Ebay for a Braves jersey that screamed, "I am a true lifelong fan of the Atlanta Braves." I had my sights set on Mark Lemke. Lemke was a favorite of mine as a kid, I always put my vote in for him on the All-Star ballot even though there were guys like Craig Biggio who were better second basemen. Well, a Lemke jersey runs at about $70 on Ebay, which is a bit more than I want to pay. I thought maybe if I found a Jeff Blauser or Steve Avery it might be cheaper, but no. I am really not too thrilled with having to pay $70 for the jersey like that.