A lot of my friends have IPods. Sometimes when you’re hanging out with somebody who has an IPod they set their IPod to shuffle. This can work against them because sometimes it plays songs that they find personally embarrassing to have on their IPod. Or a car full of people will begin to make fun of them for whatever cropped up on shuffle.  Hell, sometimes it’s not even a song they really even like all that much.  It’s just something they’ve heard so often they added it so they could get that song out of their head when it crops up.  Maybe it’s a need like heroin addiction.  You hear a song you heard too much and even if you don’t enjoy it anymore, sometimes the only fix is hearing it again.  Or maybe not.  The only things I know about heroin addiction are from Billy Burrough’s books, the movie Trainspotting, and Slash’s autobiography.

But in some ways, that’s not a whole lot different than the embarrassing and irritating play lists all of us have running through our brains. I have songs crop up all the time that I cannot explain the presence of in my brain, but they’re still there and don’t seem to be going anywhere. I don’t have an IPod. But here’s some examples of what my brain shuffles into rotation:

In 1990, children’s musician Raffi dropped an environmentally themed album called “Evergreen Everblue” and my elementary school music teacher shat her pants over it big time, bub. We listened to this album at school, sang songs from it all the time, and eventually even did some sort of recital of it for PTA parents or somesuch nonsense.To this day though, I cannot erase the songs “Evergreen Everblue” and “Clean Rain” from my head. They pop up at annoying times and I’ll find myself mumbling “Clean rain, crystal clean rain…” and then remembering where that came from. Equally annoying on the Raffi radar is the song “Baby Beluga”, while not from that album, which was hammered into my head by the same music teacher. Remember 1994? Deep Blue Something, a band from Denton, Texas, put out an album that was released on another label a year later and then scored a radio hit. Like everyone else in America, I had not heard the hit song on this record until it was hammered down my throat by every radio station in Omaha, NE, MTV, and VH1. The record, of course, was “Home” and the song was that delightfully annoying tune called “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. The damn song still pops up in my head. I’m sure that if I have an aneurysm a flash of this song will trigger it. I will probably die on a bathroom floor of sudden irritation from hearing this goddamn song again. Thank Satan that Deep Blue Something were never bigger than one hit wonders. Just imagine the state of the world we’d be in if they’d been as big as, say, the Goo Goo Dolls. I don’t want to even think about it. Speaking of crappy rock music from 1995, next up on our embarrassing playlist of shame is a song from Del Amitri’s 1995 album “Twisted” that should be taken out behind a barn and shot to death: “Roll to Me”. This goddamn song has stuck with me, yet the only reason I can tell you the band name right now is because I google searched the lyrics “look around your world pretty baby is it everything you’d hoped it’d be the wrong guy the wrong situation the right time to roll to me” which my brain can more readily recall than High School Algebra, something I might even venture to say I enjoyed more than said song (and I was a straight “D” math student, friends). I think it’s all owed to the remarkable enunciation of the song lyrics. The band, I have learned from wikipedia reading, are from Scotland and I don’t think you can hear a trace of it in this song. There’s not a bit of brogue to be heard at all. I’ve already complained about “The Sound of Music” in this blog. I don’t feel the need to rehash my hatred for that musical. Beyond that musical abortion of film history, I also have a disliking for the movie/musical/soundtrack of Roger’s and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma”. My Grandparents lived in a town called Bartlesville, Oklahoma which by all rights, definitions, and purposes is a shithole. I don’t have kind words to say about Oklahoma. I hate Oklahoma. The musical Oklahoma? No better. Every music teacher I ever had either got wet or hard for this musical. Maybe both. I don’t get it. If I’m going to be subjected to a western musical, I’ll take “Paint Your Wagon” any day what with it’s boozing & whoring & Lee Marvin & Clint Eastwood singing. I’m getting off subject though. I hate Oklahoma because I heard it a lot as a kid. My grandparents loved it & by proxy my mother, a native Oklahoman, also loved it. By the time I was in High School and working tech crew for the theater, I didn’t have to even pay attention to the play to know what was going on during our scene changes. I already knew the story. I already didn’t like it very much. And goddamnit, I will go through life with recurring choruses of “The Surrey With the Fringe On the Top”, “People Will Say We’re In Love”, and “I Cain’t Say No” still popping up. Gods fuck! Argh! Nooooooooo! Fuck Gordon Lightfoot. There’s that Frogs song “I’ve Got Drugs (Out of the Mist)” that has the side lyrics of “I pissed on Gordon Lightfoot twice” and I just about cried laughing the first time I ever heard that. I was subjected to lots of Gordon Lightfoot as a child. He was kind of folksy, kind of old-timey, and he sang songs about boat wrecks (”The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”), slave ladies (”Cotton Ginny”), trains (”Circle of Steel”, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” & “Steel Rail Blues”), and always sung in this deep, thick mountain man-ish voice that will haunt my dreams until the day I die. He was a favorite musical artist of my father’s and pretty much any song on this greatest hits compilation “Gord’s Gold” pops into my head now and again. I mean, I grew up on this shit, guys. I may have forgotten most of the words but I can probably still kick out of a few bars of each and have the songs stuck in my head the rest of the week. It’s criminal. Oh my god…Dumbledore? Why is Dumbledore on this list? Well, I tend to talk about a single song from this album a lot, and it’s certainly one of those songs that if you’ve heard the actual song and heard me talk about it on my own, would probably wonder if I was talking about the same song you were listening to. The song is “MacArthur Park” and I think it’s a wonderful song that could only be improved upon if, say, William Shatner covered it.And it stays in my head.MacArthur Park is a wonderful piece of history though. Backed by a lush, almost TV studio sounding orchestra, full of splash cymbals and horns, Richard Harris sings us a song about how somebody left a cake out in the rain. Yes, that’s right, a cake. “Someone left a cake out in the rain, I don’t know if I can take it, it took so long to bake it, I’ll never have that recipe again” Harris sings to us in the voice of a man deeply missing something. And he is. A cake. To the rain. This is the song I want played at my funeral, folks. At the very least, when that play list is over, I won’t mind this tune popping up.

I dreamed last night of a big house on a beach.  I’m not sure if I lived in the house or was just visiting but the dream started out with me and hundreds of kittens alone in the house.  I’m not sure if I was supposed to be some sort of crazy cat person or just a caretaker for them.  But for a long time I was just feeding and petting cats.

Then, quite, suddenly all these little puppies showed up.  They looked like bulldogs except their mouths did not open in an up-and-down fashion like every other puppy I’ve ever encountered.  Their mouths opened sideways sort of halving their heads and revealing their teeth.  It was also in this fashion that they started biting the kittens.  I had to fight them off with a shovel.  I kept screaming “Bad dogs! Bad dogs!” and whacking them on the rump/head/whatever with the shovel head.

The dream changed slightly and suddenly there was a party going on.  Somebody handed me a joint and helped remove dogs from kittens for awhile.  There was a keg of beer.  Eventually all the freak dogs were locked in a room in the basement.  The dream mellowed for awhile.

Then someone went into the basement and opened the door to see the freak puppies.  The freak puppies mauled them and it turned out that anybody they bit turned into zombies.  Zombies attacked the party.  Kittens and people scurried from the beach house.

There was no Hollywood ending.  I just woke up.

The first trip I ever took to Yellowstone National Park was in the summer of 1989. I was nearly 8 and had finished the first grade. Yellowstone National Park was a celebrated location for my parents. It had been the site of their honeymoon in 1977 and we made several treks there when I was growing up. My parents have been back in recent years as well.

I haven’t been camping in a long time. As much as I enjoy the outdoors and all, camping just hasn’t been my thing as an adult. I don’t really long for mountain hiking, shitting in the woods, forests, coleman stoves, sleeping on the ground, athlete’s foot from public showers, etc. I got enough of that growing up.

But I’m not here to talk about my dislike of camping. No, I had a story in mind and that story is from my first visit to Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1989.

In the summer of 1988 Yellowstone National Park had a big wild fire. It was all over the news. A good portion of the park burned and according to THIS Wikipedia page about said fire, it was the largest one in the history of the park. How this news was taken at home was like a national day of mourning for my parents. My little sister and I were were subjected to slide show after slide show of what the park had looked like only 11 years earlier.

Our visit, one year after this fire, showed us forests full of burned tree carcasses, missing grass, missing plants, and a general desolation I’ve never quite seen anywhere else. We stayed in the Norris Campground, which was not severely damaged in the fires.

My parents had found out about some ranger led activities and signed me up for a scavenger hunt with a woman who went by the name of Ranger Caroline. They did this to get me out of the campsite for an afternoon. Ranger Caroline was very good with children and the entire hunt was an adventure. She talked knowingly of Coyotes, Bears, Buffalo, Moose, Elk, and other creatures.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. This wasn’t actually a scavenger hunt. I was the only kid who went on this adventure with Ranger Caroline. My mom dropped me off at Ranger Caroline’s ranger station, we waited to see if some other kids would show up, none did, and Ranger Caroline gave me some baggies, a plastic sack, and some rubber gloves.

Again, this was not a scavenger hunt. This was a scat hunt.

Ranger Caroline and I walked through some different hiking trails examining and collecting animal feces. We didn’t pick up anything that was wet and runny or anything- the samples we collected were fairly sturdy and had been on the ground long enough to dry up- but we did spend the afternoon in rubber gloves picking up and bagging animal shit while Ranger Caroline explained to me how to identify different animal’s feces by shape and size. I learned the difference between deer pellets and moose droppings. I learned what bear shit looks like. I saw the little mountains that only Bison can poop out. Too many years have passed to be able to tell you which kinds of doo doo we bagged and collected, but we had a pretty interesting spread.

Fast forward to the end of the activity. Ranger Caroline and I go back to the Ranger Station at the campground, dispose of our gloves, wash our hands, and then she walked me back to my family’s campsite.

My parents had a Coleman pop up camper. When returned to the camp site, they were both sitting inside of it at the small table playing cards or something.  They asked if I’d found anything interesting and I immediately started pulling out bagged samples from the Scat hunt grab bag that Ranger Caroline had helped me prepare.

Some kids bring their parents flowers. I brought mine a bag full of shit.

I was quite surprised to learn what a love-in the McCain campaign has been running. Just check these out:

McCain and Bush.

McCain and Obama.

McCain and Lieberman.

McCain and Bush part deux.

McCain on Kissinger.

Rudy Giuliani plays with himself while Governor Schwarzenegger embraces McCain.

Now Rudy gets his.

Yet another embrace of Bush. Notice the wardrobe changes between the pictures.

While not a politician, here’s a 95 Year Old Grandmother joining the McCain Love-In.

Aw yeah. And here’s the wifey.

Oh my god.

And last but not least, the nut grab.

5:16 PM UPDATE: MORE HUGS

It seems like every form of media I go through these days the term foodie pops up in one way or another. This is not a bad thing at all. I have nothing but respect for foodies. Some of my best friends are foodies. I have a lot of love and respect for anyone who can can cook and kick ass at doing so. Some of my friends are the most amazing chefs I know. They know about the most amazing sorts of delicacies and fineries that I cannot even remember the names of and what to pair these things with.

My ignorance of the wide world of food is a little embarrassing at times. For example, just a little over a week ago I learned there was such a thing as gourmet salami. I had no idea. I thought Oscar Meyer held the patent. If you were to leave me in a cheese aisle alone at Whole Foods or Spec’s or where ever and expect me to pick something out you’d probably come back ten minutes later and find me staring at cheeses trying to figure out what many of them were.

I ate TV dinners five time a week for a year once. When I moved into my apartment in Austin, I stocked up on canned chili, hot dogs, and lunch meat for a week, only to come home and find that I’d purchased canned chili that required a can opener and was forced to pry the lids off the first couple of cans with my Sears’ Robo Grip until I made a trip to CVS and bought an actual can opener.

None of this background information is to say that I don’t enjoy good food. Most of it is to just point out that on my own I am a hapless boob in the kitchen and maybe even a little bit helpless. Because of this, I eat a lot of microwavable food. While I get to enjoy fine dining with my friends, I spend a lot of my own time in the kitchen behaving largely as a Neanderthal.

I am a philistine. That said, I want you to take a moment and read the following sequence of words out loud to yourself: Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries.

All right. Now go ahead and take a deep breath. Clear your mind. Now go ahead and read those words outloud one more time: Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries.I suppose there are a lot of potential reactions to a product named Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries, starting with “that’s an incredibly long and confusing name for something you can cook in a microwave”, followed by “what the fuck, dude?”, and finally ending with “are you sure you really want to stick those in your mouth?”. These are all reasonable reactions to have. I will not begrudge you your reaction.

I first learned of Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries at roughly 3 AM on Sunday morning in the microwavable foods section of Walgreen’s in a blissful and euphoric state that can only be properly described as “three sheets to the wind”. I was stopping for Gatorade and munchies and had 20 or so minutes to kill until the bus would pick me up. I needed the Gatorade as part of a hangover prevention plan and was also in the market for something starchy. I had several hours worth of drinking and other degenerate behavior to compensate for before sleeping.

My memory is murky and therefore unreliable, but I’m fairly sure there was a golden halo riding a crest the box of Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries that I first spied. The golden halo was accompanied by harp music and a choir of Angelic voices. I was moved to tears. I held a hand to the glass of the refrigerator door in awe.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how it went down. I know no other way of explaining my sudden desire and impulse purchase of Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries. There are just entirely too many words that do not belong together in that product name. It’s like a weird ass buffet style Sesame Street “Can you guess which one is not like the others” game, only wrapped in plastic and shoved in a fridge at Walgreen’s for late night drunks.Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries cost roughly two dollars a box. I say “roughly” because at 3 AM on Sunday morning it hadn’t yet realized the importance in documenting this ridiculously named product. I had yet to strike me as absurdly funny.

“My o mia! That sure taste’a like’a pizza!” the front of the box states in bold green letters. The box is lying. Everything referenced in the name of this product vaguely contributes to the overall taste, but quite frankly it does so in the same way that taking a blender and making a slurry from the named ingredients would taste. I tried reading over the list of ingredients on the side of the box, but I gave up when I couldn’t recognize any of the listed chemical compounds. The sumbitch read like “War and Peace” anyway and was nearly twice as long. All I could glean from the side of the box was that, yes, animals were harmed in the making of this product, but I’ll be damned if I know which ones. There should be house committees and Senatorial hearings called into play to determine this information. And if I’ve gone sterile from eating them. Christ.

Bakersfield Biscuits Brand Dwight Yoakam’s Chicken Lickin’s Pizza Fries were not particularly memorable as far as questionable 3 AM food I have eaten goes. I would not even recommend them again, I have to say. But they did their job well and I was not hungover when I woke up at the crack of noon on Sunday afternoon and that was really all I was hoping for.

(more…)

Oh yeah. I forgot.

I had a weird dream last night.  I dreamed I was working in this bar that used to be in a fire station.  At least I think it was a fire station.  Everyone who worked there had a bunk above the bar and there was a fire pole we’d slide down to go to work.  My co-workers included Danny Devito, my friend Kevin in Omaha, several of my actual co-workers, and some people I haven’t seen in years.

Our assistant manager woke all of us up at 4 AM to deliver some heavy news: he’d bought the bar from the owner and was going to make some changes.  I don’t remember the particulars of the changes.  But he had a list of things he needed to do to make sure his family was adequately provided for.

The most memorable part came when Danny Devito stumbled in and wanted updated on what he’d missed in the meeting.  He was drunk and a lot taller than he should have been in my dream.  He didn’t like the new owner and turned in his two week’s notice.  That’s when I woke up.

From CNN.com:

Durham agreed to plead guilty to murder — but only if he could get a break from jail food. The judge agreed and granted Durham a feast of KFC chicken, Popeye’s chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, carrot cake and ice cream.

After Wednesday’s sentencing, Durham was to get the rest of the deal — calzones, lasagna, pizza and ice cream, his defense attorney confirmed. They will pay the tab.

There was an old Mexican lady in a wheelchair at the bus stop this morning. She was smoking a cigarette. I walked past her wheel chair to grab a copy of the Daily Texan from the newspaper box and saw these words in colorful letters on the back of the wheel chair: TITTY BINGO.

Naturally, I blinked and reexamined the words. I figured I’d made another Freudian slip. No sir. In bright colored letters akin to the Google logo I was staring at TITTY BINGO. That’s when I noticed a URL written below TITTY BINGO on the wheel chair : http://tittybingo.com.

Anyway, I just got to work and was facing this question all morning so far: can I actually look at http://tittybingo.com at work without getting fired? That was when I remembered I could just do a whois on the domain.

So it turns out that TITTY BINGO is a band. And while their website sucks, they don’t appear to be slacking too much on their line up. Willie Nelson’s brother is in the band. Sometimes the Red Headed Stranger himself is. They just have a terrible name.

And they sell wheelchairs as merch, apparently.

I suppose I could have asked the lady in the TITTY BINGO wheel chair what TITTY BINGO was, but quite frankly I was scared of getting flashed.