So I read that Don Adams died today, which is too bad. He did the voice of Inspector Gadget and was also Maxwell Smart on "Get Smart." Both shows were really cool, but being a kid in the 80s, I loved Inspector Gadget. I wish they still showed it somewhere, I’d watch it. Unfortunately the movie with Matthew Broderick was lame. "Get Smart" was a good show too, I loved the opening sequence where he went through all the doors and all the puns and goofiness. I remember watching it on Nick at Nite back in the day. The Yahoo article says he served in the Marines in Gualdalcanal and as a drill instructor, which is pretty wild, since he looked like a small dude and he had that nasally voice. IMDB has a bit more on him and there are a few videos and things on Amazon and Ebay too.

so I'm going to Williamsburg (VA, not Brooklyn) tomorrow. Here are some news articles I've been liking recently.

Yahoo has an interesting one about how hurricanes get their names.

Stereogum has a discussion about people who used to be in bands who now have real jobs.

the AP has an interesting piece about Congressional earmarks, which are programs that nobody asked for or recommended, but that congressmen put through anyway - i.e. pork. What struck me was that Alaska has the third highest amount of transportation earmarks, mostly for roads and bridges, which is ridiculous. It's not like these bridges link Manhattan to Brooklyn or France to England, it's linking some sparsely populated places to some other sparsely populated places. The Knik Arm bridge is the most ridiculous, they're spending $250 million on it this year alone, for a two mile bridge across a fjord. I guess they can sell a few more seals or ice cubes or something when they finish it. How stupid.

And the Post has a good article about local officials in Mississippi and Louisiana trying to get equipment for their cities - sometimes making them break into lots and take tractors out, because FEMA things take forever to arrive.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/krwashbureau/20050920/ts_krwashbureau/_wea_katrina_congress_1

99 bottles of Borf on the wall

borfobottles
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

So here's an old Borf thing in Shaw, there are 99 bottles of beer painted on the wall. Pretty cool.

In other news, I forgot to wear a belt to work yesterday, which was kind of embarassing. i didn't notice until I was waiting for the elevator to go to my office. So i did the "pull the shirt out a bit and put it over the belt area" thing, which hid it pretty well. I think belts are kind of dumb anyway though, it's not like my pants are going to fall off. Sort of a pointless article of clothing. Maybe I should get one of the belt buckles with the LCD screen, I can wear it to work and have it say "WORK RULES" or "I LOVE MAPS" or something.

so i was thinking about bands "selling out" recently and why it annoys me. The Rolling Stones, in particular, piss me off lately. They have to be extremely rich already, but they've been in some stupid commercials lately with these insurance people saying how cool it is to be at a Rolling Stones concert. I think that automatically makes your band lame, if your concerts are praised in insurance commercials. I'm sure they got paid a ton to do it too. And they're probably going to tour soon and charge $80 a ticket.

Then there was the whole Verve thing, where the Rolling Stones sued the band the Verve for using a very short and nearly impossible to notice sample of an orchestral version of a Stones song - not even the band themselves playing. The sample was in "Bittersweet Symphony," which was a huge hit for the Verve, and the Stones won all past and future royalties on the song, which they then licensed in lots of commercials - something I'm pretty sure the Verve had refused to do. So the Rolling Stones basically made a ton of money on a song they never wrote or performed and rubbed it in the Verve's faces. The Verve, who had been hailed as the one of the best bands of the late 90s, broke up not long after. It's not like they stole an entire song or were making fun of the Rolling Stones or anything - the sample was like six notes on a violin, nothing obviously by the Stones or really impressive musically or anything. I saw an interview on MTV or something with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards about the whole deal and they were furious that the Verve had dared do that. What a bunch of dicks. They're obviously just out to line their own pockets however they can.

Another example of what I think is a sell out are the Black Eyed Peas. They don't make me as mad as the Rolling Stones, but have been in so many commercials, magazine ads, etc, sometimes for the most tenuous reasons, that it's ridiculous. I feel like they're more of a spokesband than a real musical group now. Which is too bad, because their old stuff was pretty good, like Bridging the Gap, which was before they got the girl singer. I also think part of what annoys me about them being in so many commercials is that a lot of the commercials basically say that they're a cool group. If you have to be told that something is cool, then it's probably not. And since when is Best Buy or some car company the arbiter of cool? Plus commercials seem to decrease coolness exponentially - being in one commercial is not bad, but you rapidly get less cooler as you appear in more commercials. I thought Moby's Play cd was great, but after he licensed every song to commercials, it became not very cool. He's almost a joke now, and none of his CDs after that have sold very well. Even Snoop Dogg in commercials is getting old, it's almost rote - here's Snoop, he's dressed like a pimp, he says "izzle" a couple times, and our company is now cool.

But along the same lines, I wonder what else it is that makes me feel like a band sold out? I think what a band is selling is a big factor - Ikea wouldn't be too bad, but some chips or Pontiac cars would be pretty lame. Devo let the Swiffer mop thing use a version of "Whip It" in a commercial as "Swiff It," but apparently they said OK because it was such a bizarre idea, which I think is a good reason. Maybe how obscure the band plays a role too - for example, I think I heard an Iron and Wine cover of "Such Great Heights" by the Postal Service in a car commercial, which I thought was cool. But I heard a Postal Service song in another car commercial and thought it was lame. Iron and Wine are definitely more obscure, and I've heard the Postal Service a lot more often, so it seems like more of an attempt by them to get famous. But why don't I think that way about Iron and Wine? They were both in car commercials? It's odd. Maybe something about Iron and Wine makes them seem less corruptible or something.

And a corollary is that if the band is obscure and a little old, I think it's fine - like I just heard Civ's "Can't Wait One Minute More" in a Nissan or Toyota commercial - good for them! That was a minor hit maybe 10 years ago, I think it's cool they're getting paid for it again.

But if I ever make music and people want to use it in a commercial, I'll only consider it if it's a cool commercial that isn't on very much, and it's some product I like. Assuming that ever happens of course. I probably would need to music some kind of music first.

Stereogum has a thing about Paul McCartney in a commercial too.

Pickle Chips

picklechips
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

so I saw these the other day at the deli near work and I decided to pick them up. I like to try different kinds of chips. They were pretty tasty, and really do taste just like pickles, it was kind of uncanny. They weren't super strong flavored either, which was good, unlike some of the flavored chips. It was just like eating a chip, then eating a pickle. Maybe pickles are now obsolete. The only bad thing is that it didn't taste very much like dill, more like a vinegary pickle, which is too bad, because I really like dill. But they were tasty anyway, and I recommend them. It seems like there have been a lot of new kinds of chips recently - salt and pepper, sweet potato, lime, etc. My friend Tuck from Canada talks about pickle chips and also ketchup chips, which he claims are amazing. I haven't seen them though.

so a couple weeks ago I was walking to a bar with two of my friends and this big white limo was coming up the street towards us. We saw a girl was hanging halfway out the window, waving her arms. When the limo was about next to us, we saw she was extremely excited and yelled "Hey you guys!!!! Bow Wow's in here!!!" to us. Then we saw an arm come out of the other window and wave at us. It was pretty funny, that first she was so thrilled to be in a limo with Lil Bow Wow (who is now just called Bow Wow, since he's all grown up), and second that she would yell about it to us, three skinny mid-20s white dudes, probably not Bow Wow's chief fan base. So when we saw some of our other friends, we told them we saw Bow Wow's arm. I believe her that Bow Wow really was in the limo, because she seemed to be high school-aged and was obviously incredibly thrilled, thrilled enough to yell about it to some random dudes on the street, and I looked it up later to see if he played in the area, which he did. So that was pretty funny. We were talking about it later, how it must be strange to be 16 or whatever he is, to be rich and famous (among 16 year olds, at least) and have all these young girls crazy about you, then not having anything match that as you get older. I assume he won't be a famous rapper when he's 22 or 30. I mean, what happened to Krss Kross? They had the big album, then two lame gangsta albums and I have no idea what they're doing now. They have a webpage, but the stuff it's talking about happened in 1996 (I looked it up). And I found this article about that site - one of the pages says "Kris Kross loves bloggers," apparently because a bunch of bloggers found the site and wrote about it. What a bunch of losers, huh?

Somebody on a message board for an annual Kris Kross Day website, where you are supposed to wear your clothes backwards, says that Chris Smith (Daddy Mack, I have no idea which guy that is) is working on a solo album, but I can't find anything about it online. A Canadian website says he had an album a couple years ago as "M.A.C." There are a couple results on Amazon for a rapper called Mac, who was on No Limit, but I dunno if it's the same guy. This Mac is young though, and his albums got a lot of positive comments. My favorite review, however, is this one:

Not since Gambol Freer made a public renunciation of his obsolescent depilatory tactics in 1985 has the rap world seen anything like Mac's multi-thyrsoid panegyrics. Not that it matters very much, because such lubricious manticorical entities are about to become a dime a dozen, and getting there first won't count for much when all we'll want by then is a cool draught of C-major tonic! Did Mac (whose real name, by the way, is Stavros Mapplethorpe) ever stop to consider the ramifications of his rather glib brand of fatti maschii? Medoubts it highly. Plugging away at soft-core pulp is all he knows. And calling it "woolly bear" ain't gonna fool no one!

Hell, even Snoop could tell his momma a thing or two.

Peace out, y'all.

Weird. And according to this, Jermaine Dupri wrote all the songs on "Totally Krossed Out". Interesting. But as for where they are now, I dunno. Maybe I'll look for them.

so i was reading a lot of crappy news lately, like Bush's popularity level going up (??), Karl Rove getting put in charge of the rebuilding effort, bombings, and other various bad news stories, so I decided to type "good news" into Yahoo to see what happened. A lot of it was Christian stuff, but i did find a few news sources with "good" news, such as Happynews.com. Ironically, it's sort of sad- the fact that there is so much crappy stuff going on that there are a bunch of news sites with just good news. I mean, I guess that's always been the case, but still. Anyway, some of the articles on the site are sort of lame, and depend on what team you like, for example. But I did like the one about how Harvard wants its students to party more, and this one about a cricket player who can basically do whatever he wants in the town of Sheffield, England, because England won some cricket tournament. What a weird idea. I also thought the site's weather section was funny: "The weather sure is nice in Little Rock, AR today!"

And then I went to one of my favorite sites, Spamusement.com, which is always funny. It's a bunch of cartoons based on spam emails the writer gets. Good stuff.

so my pal Jess sent me this, it's a very funny video of dumb sex advice (not work safe due to bad language, unless you have headphones I guess.) My favorite part: "Women love danger. If they could, they'd date a fire."

And here's the explanation.

so there have been some kooky happenings at my alma mater, George Washington U recently. My friend sent me this item from the GW police blotter:

9/10 - New Hall - 11:15 p.m. - case closed

UPD responded to a room in the dorm after receiving a loud noise complaint. CLLC accompanied the officers to find a large number of students having a get-together. There were no violations of policy, but an inordinate amount of what appeared to be cake was served, according to a student close to the event.

Referred to Student Judicial Services (SJS)

And the other day, a girl bit a cop. Weird.

so my homie Edmundo had this in his blog, it's pretty hilarious and ridiculous. A note our president wrote to Condi Rice, saying he has to tinkle. Or maybe poop. It's pretty funny that the photographer got close enough to read it.

And my pal Rae has a very funny photo riddle thing on her blog, check it out.

Also, this dog is very ugly. It looks like a mummy from some Indiana Jones movie or something.