Borf back in the news

newborf
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

so my pal sent me an article on Borf, apparently he went to a court appearance the other day. He sounds like an idiot though, he was in the courtroom with paint on his shoes, hands, and clothes, and after the hearing, they found a new Borf tag outside the courthouse. I mean, I assume he thinks he's cool and thumbing his nose at "the man," but this, and his various dumb political screeds, makes it seem like he thinks he's too cool for school. I wish he would stick to writing funny stuff and drawing giant faces and BORFs on the side of buildings.

so my coworker told me about this awhile ago, pretty funny stuff. apparently Michael Vick, the Falcons quarterback, used to have sex with this woman in Atlanta and she got herpes. She sued him over it and he went to the doctor to see if he had it (or maybe for treatment), but he didn't want anybody to find out, so he used an alias - Ron Mexico. Pretty weird alias. So this was all over various blogs and news articles and such, and there's a Ron Mexico name generator, which is pretty funny. I am either "Sam Ontario" or "Boy El Salvador," depening on if you use Andrew or Drew. Some guys used the create your own jersey feature at the Falcons website to put "Mexico" on Falcons jerseys, but the team soon banned that name. The Smoking Gun has the info and the lawsuit itself, which is pretty funny to read, and there's a funny article from the Swarthmore student paper about it. Also, this site has some shirts for sale, and various links to other pieces about it. It's old news, but still amusing.

so it's time for ye olde concert list.

Mon Nov 28- Kiss Me Deadly $8 w/The Spoils Of NW & Five Four @ DC9. My roommate is in Five Four! they are shoegazery!

FRI DEC 2- BLISS DANCE NIGHT w/ special guest appearance by ANNIE (sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Embassy) $10 mainstage 9:30 @ Black Cat. I bet it'll be mobbed, but might be fun.

SUN DEC 4- FIVE FOUR, MARA LEVI $5 backstage 9:00 @ Black Cat. My roommate again!

TUES DEC 6- AMERICAN ANALOG SET, CHRIS BROKAW, MEREDITH BRAGG & THE TERMINALS $10 mainstage 8:30 @ Black Cat. I like the American Analog Set. They are super mellow.

Sat Dec 10- Greenland $8 w/The Hard Tomorrows, The Aplhabetical Order & The Rachel Nevadas @ DC9. Greenland is a good local band.

SAT JAN 7- SUPERSYSTEM, FRENCH TOAST, RIS PAUL RIC $9 mainstage 9:30 @ Black Cat. Supersystem used to be called El Guapo. pretty cool dancy rock stuff from DC.

That's it! Not too many concerts coming up.

so I saw this crazy TV show the other day on the Cartoon Network, it was called "Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo." That's 7 bo's, if you were counting. The show is completely off the wall, there's this guy with a yellow ball on his head who fights using his nosehair, which flies out of his nose and hits people. He was fighting this guy whose head was made of ice cream, and he had this pal, a spiky orange thing, and at one point the orange guy jumped into the yellow ball, and was turned into an ice cream cone too. There was some singing and crazy Japanese text on the screen, and general bizarreness. It was pretty enjoyable. Check it out, here's a page on the Cartoon Network website.

so I heard my first Christmas song of the year today, "Feliz Navidad" at the deli. i actually kind of like that one, but i wonder what the obsession is, that people play christmas music all the time. i'm sure soon i'll see some posters at the bus stops advertising the radio station that switches to all christmas music. like, in case you forget what season it is. if you want to elongate the season, that is, since we're still about a month away. i guess soon enough we'll see Valentine's Day shit in the stores. oh well, i guess they got to sell us stuff all the time, holiday or not.

in other news, this looks like a pretty cool movie

World's Ugliest Dog dies

uglydog
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

so my pal Erin alerted me to the fact that the Sam, the World's Ugliest Dog died. The photo above is from his website, which appears to be down. Probably too much traffic. Anyway, I think the best part of the CNN article is that the woman who owned Sam's boyfriend broke up with her because the dog repulsed him. That's funny. My coworker said the dog looks like a demon - I think that's a pretty fair description.

so one of my coworkers sent this to me the other day, I thought it was pretty funny.

Click on it to make it bigger.

so I was looking at a website with the names of DC neighborhoods, and I got to thinking about the names. I decided to go through and write what I thought the name sounded like - not what I know about the place, but just what the name itself sounded like. So here are the results. Feel free to post your own ideas about the names if you so desire. I posted some of my favorites here, the full list is on this page.

Arboretum – sounds ghetto. Arboretum is an old word and is kind of unattractive, which makes me think the hood is the same way.
Cardoza – like a small Texas town. So small they only have 6 man football.
Cleveland Park – I know it’s nice, but sounds kind of crappy. Who names something for Grover Cleveland?
Eastland Gardens – sounds very ghetto. “Gardens” also sounds bad. Like a low income burb developed in 1900, and now it’s worse, or maybe a big housing project. I’ve never heard of this place before.
Lower Central Northeast – this is a name of a neighborhood? How stupid.
Park View – ghetto (“view” is bad to me too. If it were nice, you wouldn’t have a view of the park, you’d be in the park, right? Though Parkside sounds ghetto also.)
Pinehurst Circle – very ghetto. I’ve never heard of this place
Pleasant Plains – ghetto too. If you have to tell somebody it’s pleasant, it’s probably not.
Skyland – what? This is a stupid name. sounds like shitty little 60s houses
Southwest Employment Area – you’ve got to be kidding me. You can’t come up with a name for this place? It must be a wasteland if the only thing remarkable about it is that people are employed there.
Stronghold – this is really a neighborhood? Man, I don’t want to live anywhere near there. It sounds terrrrrible.
Swampoodle – this is awesome. I love this neighborhood name. It’s the area around Union Station
The Palisades – oh, very shi-shi. “The” sounds nice and Palisades. fancy pants mcgees live here.
Truxton Circle – sounds like crap
Washington Mall – sounds dumb. Really though, if you lived in the Washington Mall part of Chicago or something, I would think that is a stupid name for a neighborhood

so I went to a Capitals hockey game the other day, it was fun stuff. It was pretty boring for awhile as the Caps went down 0-2, but they tied it up and eventually won in the overtime shootout, which was pretty cool to see. I'd heard a lot about the Caps rookie Alexander Ovechkin, but man, he is really amazing. Our seats were really high up in the arena, and a bunch of times we'd see a guy fly past defenders to get a shot off but couldn't tell who it was, and every time that guy turned around, it was Ovechkin. He scored the game tying goal with about 15 seconds left in the 3rd, going alone against 3 defenders, he just skated around them all and beat the goalie, it was amazing. Then to top it off, he won the game in the OT shootout. And besides the goals, he made a ton of nice moves dodging defenders and making passes, my friend and I were both really impressed. It's not often an athlete makes you me "whoa!" numerous times a game. Aside from JR Pinnock I guess.

Here's the AP article about the game we saw.

so i heard this song "My Humps" the other day - this has got to be the stupidest song ever written. It's worse than "Who Let the Dogs Out" and "Disco Duck." If I were hooking up with a girl and she told me to touch her lumps, I'd probably think she had cancer or was a camel - neither of which I really go for. "Lovely lady lumps?" Come on. I don't understand all these songs like this and "My Goodies" coming out now, using stupid kiddie language to talk about sex. What's next, "My Melons?" "Big Bubble Boobies?" "Put Your Pee Pee in my Na Na?" I think there should be a ban on songs about the female anatomy, those bases have been covered. Little pun there.

Here's the lyrics on what appears to be a popup-free page.

so I've been hearing about all the various scandals in the Bush administration, and today was watching a Nightline interview with two Iraqi detainees, and I honestly can't understand why it doesn't seem like people are mad about any of this. There's been the scandals with Tom Delay, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Safavian (the Office of Management and Budget guy who was arrested), Bill Frist, the terrible handling of Hurricane Katria, the secret prisons, gas prices, it just goes on and on. And all of this has happened in the last few months. And today I saw an interview with two Iraqi detainees on Nightline of all the things they went through. And yet it seems like nothing is happening. I feel like if Watergate happened right now, no one would care. Somebody down the chain would get blamed, there'd be some kind of investigation, maybe an idictment, which seems to mean nothing now, and that's it. It seems like the President would have to be caught red-handed killing somebody, or smoking crack, or punching a baby or something for anything to happen to him. I don't know if it's apathy or some kind of masterful Republican spin, or maybe just a sheer volume of bad news that turns people off, but nothing is happening. He's like the Teflon Don, or the Duck President - everything just rolls off of him like water off a duck's back. I mean, I guess there's not much that can really occur besides impeachment or jail time for the various "evil doers," but I can't fathom what's going on.

And so this post is not a total downer, here's compfused.com, a treasure trove of funny, crazy, and amazing videos.

so I read today that the government of Kazakhstan is mad about Ali G's character Borat. I think the Borat bits are hilarious, he's supposed to be a TV host from Kazakhstan who comes to the US interviewing people and saying ridiculous stuff about his native land in bad English. My favorite bit was one where he went to a line dancing club somewhere in the South, and people were teaching him to line dance, and he decided to teach them a traditional Kazakh dance, "beat the gypsy." The official Borat page is funny too - and apparently they're making a movie too.

so I think this is the funniest thing I've seen in awhile. I think the unicycle one is the best, but I wonder if it's photoshopped. It's from Toothpaste for Dinner, a website by a guy who makes t-shirts and writes funny comics. His name is Drew as well, and he has a really similar sense of humor - I even thought of the "my other shirt has a joke on it" shirt too, without seeing his version. Maybe we were separated at birth, or are clones, like in The Boys from Brazil, a book I read the other day about cloning Nazis, it was good. Sometimes there was too much detail, and it sort of seemed like it was written to be a movie, but it was enjoyable. And it was made into a movie anyway, which nominated for 3 Oscars and starred Lawrence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and Steve Guttenberg. Pretty weird combination.

so GW men's basketball plays Augusta State, a Division II team, tomorrow in an exhibition game, I'm looking forward to it. George Washington, my alma mater, is ranked 21 in the AP poll and various other polls have the Colonials as high as 11th, with a couple people saying they're sleepers for the Final Four. Pretty high praise. I'm looking forward to see how everybody has improved and how the new guys are, I've heard a lot of good things. Pops Mensah-Bonsu (who had a great profile in the Post recently) and Mike Hall decided not to enter the NBA Draft and are back for their senior seasons, along with solid do-everything forwrad Omar Williams. Someone once described Omar as "a Noah's Ark player" meaning that he'll get you two of everything. More like 4 or 6 of everything, though. JR Pinnock (now going by his first name, Danilo) played for the Panamanian national team over the summer and did very well, and supposedly has a better outside shot. Most of our guards are back, except for graduated starter TJ Thompson, our best outside shooter. We do have sophomore Maureece Rice, who broke Wilt Chamberlain's Philadelphia scoring record in high school, starting PG Carl Elliott, who set the Smith Center record for assists in a game, as well as valuable back-ups Dokun Akingbade and Alex Kireev. The freshmen, Noel Wilmore, Robert Diggs, and Montrell McDonald are supposed to be good - I'm looking forward especially to Wilmore, who is supposed to be a great outside shooter. GW also got Regis Koundjia, a former top 25 recruit, who transferred from LSU. He didn't have great numbers there, but is supposed to be a great athlete and defender. Anyway, things are looking up. The Hatchet, GW's student paper, has a good preview.

Here's more links:
an article about the game at GWSports.com
GWHoops.com, the main message board for GW
GWSuperfan.com, the site of a super fan, with lots of stats and photos of his tricked out GW colored car, the Superfanmobile
Augusta State's Athletics page, without much on GW

so the bizarre antics of Jonathan Rees, the Ward 3 Council candidate, continue. A DCist.com post about the Rees saga has 93 comments, most of which are by Rees or his stooges, and go from pretty weird to completely bizarro. Other people posting comments cite various internet sources saying Rees has anywhere from zero to 3 kids, and then supposedly one of the kids, Anita, started posting. Eventually "she" starts calling DCist writers "pencil dick" and such, it's pretty strange. And "Anita" only starts posting after Jonathan brags he got tickets to the mayoral debate and his opponent Sam Brooks didn't, but somebody points out that if he had tickets, we would already be half an hour late for the debate, as the comment came at 7 pm. However, "Anita" is obviously Jonathan, because the posts read exactly the same. Unfortunately, the comments are now locked on that thread, but it's a hilarious and crazy read. The man is obviously off his rocker. That, or Sam Brooks has some very funny and devious dudes working for him. I'm pretty sure it's the first option though.

I think Jonathan Rees would be a great Halloween costume. And now that I think of it, his posts make about as much sense as the guy posting crazy ads around Logan Circle. Maybe they are one and the same:



That says "DO YOU NEED A PAINTER? Army Veteran Umbrellas $12.00"

Super Furry Animals and Caribou, 9:30 Club

superfurries
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

So I saw the Super Furry Animals and Caribou yesterday at the 930 Club, it was a pretty good show. Caribou (formerly Manitoba) opened, and were ok.

I liked them better when I saw them last year in Philly, and they showed the same videos, which was too bad. The lead guy, Dan, usually sang, played some keyboards you blow in (one with a tube, odd) and occasionally would be the second drummer. It was pretty impressive when Dan and the other drummer were playing at the same time, they were perfectly in sync. Their music is kind of unclassifiable, it's kind of noodley, ambient-ish, but also rocks, and sometimes when the bass would explode, it was pretty exhilarating. But usually it was just ok.

Super Furry Animals played a long set, about 2 hours I think, including their usual intermission where they put on one of the techno tracks they've done and go offstage for awhile. They came out wearing these battery powered electric light-up jumpsuits, which were pretty cool, but unfortunately hard to get on my crappy cameraphone. The show started with a funny video of them in the jumpsuits on a golf cart, then they ran onstage. The first half of the show was pretty mellow and slow, they played a lot of slower songs, many of which I didn't recognize. I was getting pretty sleepy. Then they played a really energizing version "Receptacle for the Respectable" right before the intermission, and after that it was all good stuff, I really enjoyed the second half. It was a lot of the faster songs, and a lot from "Rings Around the World." I realized after about the fourth song from that album that I would be perfectly happy hearing them play the whole album. The songs from that CD are really great in concert. I remember them playing "Receptacle for the Respectable," "Run! Christian Run!" "Juxtaposed with U," "Drawing Rings Around the World" from it, but unfortunately not "No Sympathy," which was amazing the time I saw them play that. It was so loud, the bass surprised me when it came it, it was like a massage.

They didn't play much from "Phantom Power" either, which is too bad, because that one is pretty good. The techno breakdowns sounded pretty great though, and they played "The Man Don't Give a Fuck," which I guess they always play in DC, since it's kind of about politics.

The video projections were cool as usual, including a new version of the old Lenin films they show during "The Man Don't Give a Fuck." And they had some funny antics, Gruff, the lead singer, picked up a bunch of celery and started eating it, then threw a lot into the crowd, which was amusing and strange. Later he came out with a Power Rangers helmet on (pictured below) and held the mic to the side of the helmet when the vocal track of him singing started, which was pretty funny. They also had some little spycams back stage before and after Caribou, and they had credits after the show, something I'd never seen before.


The Power Ranger helmet

so I wasn't really paying much attention to the DC City Council races for 2006, and then I noticed some weird posts on the Logan Circle list serve about Sam Brooks. They were kind of strangely written and didn't make a whole lot of sense. One of the posts said something about a Washington Blade article saying somebody posted a bunch of things under his name on various websites saying he was a white supremacist and wanted to outlaw homosexuality and stuff. His campaign denied that he made the posts, and his opponent, Jonathan Rees, said he was appaled too. Pretty weird stuff.

Here's one of the two posts from the Logan Circle group. It seems weird, because for one thing, the title, "BE CAREFUL FOR INTERNET POLITICAL CAMPAIGN FRAUD" doesn't really match the first part of the email. It seems like the title would be something about Sam Brooks not really living in Ward 3.

"Ramon Rivera" stewart20008@...
Date: Thu Nov 3, 2005 10:19 pm
Subject: BE CAREFUL FOR INTERNET POLITICAL CAMPAIGN FRAUD

BE CAREFUL FOR INTERNET POLITICAL CAMPAIGN FRAUD
----------------------------------------------------
Email the director of the DC OCF and demand that Sam Brooks come forward NOW and prove his bonafide residence in Ward 3!

Write > CECILY.COLLIER-MONTGOMERY@...

----------------------------------------------------
The DC Office of Campaign Finance is investigating Sam Brooks for fraud in his claims of having moved into Ward 3 for purposes of running for city council from our ward whereby many people went to his allege home and campaign headquarters only to find nobody ever there, neighbors who deny ever seeing him and otherwise nobody has been able to verify his claims where the former U.S. Attorney Wilma Lewis overseeing the DC Board of Elections & Ethics and Office of Campaign Finance has asked that this matter be investigated.

Mr. Brooks campaign website does not offer voters any address to his campaign headquarters, no telephone number to call or even an email address but a clear request for voters to send him money but no mechanism for a contributor to verify a contribution or any safeguard against overcharging.


NOTE: The OCF can verify this matter! Call 202-671-0550

Sam Brooks' website, here, is kind of generic, but I dunno, it doesn't make me think it's not legit. And anyway, Logan Circle is not in Ward 3, Ward 3 is the westernmost part of the city. Seems weird that somebody who lives in Logan Circle would be posting about another ward's election. The next email was even weirder:

Ramon Rivera" stewart20008@...
Date: Fri Nov 4, 2005 9:19 pm
Subject: JUST SAY NO TO SAM BROOKS A CRY BABY LIAR...! stewart20008
Offline Offline
Send Email Send Email
JUST SAY NO TO SAM BROOKS A CRY BABY LIAR...!


After reading Lou Chibarro's article today in "The Washington Blade" along with all the trash that I have seen the past few weeks on the internet as it concerns the attacks on all ward three candidates, I am convinced that Sam Brooks is behind the attacks on himself and did it so he could go running to the press and get free publicity.

Article > http://www.washblade.com/2005/11-4/news/localnews/ward3.cfm

If you have followed our ward race then you would see that you can turn nowhere in our ward without stumbling over campaign literature for Jonathon Rees.

If I was a candidate so far behind the eighth ball as Sam Brooks is, I too would probably employ the strategy of shooting myself in the foot and then contact the press and blame someone else so I can get a free story to bolster my non-existent campaign.

This story was so pathetic that I will vote for anyone other than Sam Brooks a big phony, cry baby!

Gloria Guiterrez

First off, it doesn't sound like something somebody would say, it seems too formal or something. Another weird thing, is that neither the email, the name on the post, and the signature match - stewart20008, Ramon Rivera, and Gloria Gutierrez, all of which are pretty generic-sounding names. It's really strange, it makes me think that maybe somebody is posting these trying to discredit Sam Brooks under fake names. The Blade article is pretty odd too.

The Post has a piece about it too

so this is kind of late, but I saw this video for this song "Do They Know It's Halloween?", a take-off on "Do They Know It's Christmas" and all that crap. It's pretty neat. It was put together by Vice magazine, which is a pretty hilarious (and free) magazine and is sung by lots of inide rock types, like Beck, some folks from Rilo Kiley, Jimmy from the Postal Service, and even a guy from Sloan (plus lots of other Canadians), which makes sense, because Vice was started in Canada.

Speaking of Halloween, I hate the stupid Fall Back coming off daylight savings time thing. It's so pointless. They do it right before Halloween, so all the kids have to go out in the dark and dodge cars. And it makes it darker and colder earlier, which sucks, I hate leaving work when it's already pitch black out. It makes me feel like I live in Alaska or something. And since the sun goes down "earlier" it probably increases people's heating costs. Maybe it's some kind of scam by energy companies, because the reason I've always heard, "it's for the farmers." Don't farmers have clocks? Hey dicks, try turning your alarm an hour earlier if you want to get up when it's still dark, let the rest of us walk around in the daylight.

In fact, Wikipedia's article says that daylight savings time (getting darker later) saves 10,000 barrels of oil a day and also reduced traffic accidents. So why not make it year round?