Additional ways to leave your lover (left out of the song due to time constraints):

- Say “it’s not you, it’s me,” Dee.

- Tell her you need your space, Trace.

- Run off with her sister, mister.

- Take I-70 till it reaches the 487 split, then get on Rosedale Parkway for seven miles, take exit 74, and turn right at the third stop sign, Ryan.

- Throw up at her dinner party, Marty.

- Ask to wear her underwear, Blair.

- Ask the priest to get an annullment, Trent

- Tell the caterer to cancel, Ansel.

- Just tell her you’re gay, Ray.

Attention television network executives: You need programming. Preferably programming based on a familiar theme, similar enough not to alienate audiences but with just enough differences to avoid provoking a intellectual property lawsuit. Well, here are some surefire programming ideas for the upcoming fall season:

Droogie Howser, MD - A young man is torn between his burgeoning medical career and his allegiance to an ultraviolent street gang.

Gary Gilmore’s Girls - A wacky clerical mishap causes a death row inmate to be granted custody of his teenage daughter. (Don’t miss the season finale, when Gary’s daughter faces losing her eyesight. Will Gary donate his eyes to her after the execution?)

Sex in the Suburbs - Four fashionable thirty-somethings hook up with single guys at the Home Depot, Target and TGI Friday’s.

My Sister Carrie - Sitcom adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel. To accurately replicate Dreiser’s expositionary style, each episode is six hours long.

Queer as Filk - A look at the personal lives of a group of gay science fiction convention regulars. As you might expect, not much sex, but plenty of Monty Python jokes and heated arguments about episodes of Babylon 5.

Monk - Mercurial jazz pianist by day, crime fighting detective at night, Monk must overcome his obsessive compulsive disorder and his inability to retain a cabaret card. Guest starring Juliette Binoche as the Baroness Panonnica de Koenigswarter.

New MP3 - "I'm Not There (1956)" by Bob Dylan. One of Dylan's greatest songs despite the fact that he never really finished writing it (as you can tell by the even-more-mumbly-than-usual parts during the verses where he's obviously fudging the words). Despite the fact that you really can't understand what he's saying and the song's lack of narrative sense, he somehow manages to evoke distance and regret and loss.

Snappy answers to stupid church slogans:

- No God, no peace. Know God, know peace. (Yeah, I’ve always wanted to live in a peaceful, intensely religious place - the West Bank, the Gaza Strip…)

- When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out alright. (My definition of “alright” wouldn’t include “spending three days surrounded by whale shit,” but that’s just me.)

- Free Trip to heaven. Details Inside! (Embrace the sweet release of death! Free Kool-Aid for the kids!) or (Free trip with purchase of any trip to heaven of equal or lesser value. Limit 3 per purchase. Offer not valid in Tennessee.)

- Searching for a new look? Have your faith lifted here! (Our lisping plastic surgeon will take years off of your appearance.)

- People are like tea bags -- you have to put them in hot water before you know how strong they are. (And like tea bags, you can’t do anything with them once their skin breaks and their insides spill all over the place.)

- Dusty Bibles lead to Dirty Lives (Free Bible cleaning clinic for our parishioners. Lemon Pledge available in bulk.)

- Fight truth decay -- study the Bible daily. (You can’t find scriptural justification for whatever halfassed theory you’ve come up with unless you read over the book every day.)

- It’s a child, not a choice.* (Only because “It’s a political football that we’ll use to club over the head of our opponents, not a choice” wouldn’t fit on the bumpersticker.)

*not technically on that site I linked to, but I fucking hate that slogan so much I had to include it

To steal a line from Bill Simmons, there's comedy, there's high comedy, and then there's the video for Donnie Iris' "Ah! Leah!" Oh, man. When I write my book on the cultural history of the 1980's (tentative title: The Eighties: What the Hell Was That, Anyway?), I'm going to devote at least a chapter to that video alone.

I went to see the Pernice Brothers last night at Iota in Arlington. Anything that gets me to disrupt my usual JD Salinger-esque social life is a special event, indeed, and they didn't disappoint.

The set list was heavy on the past two albums - all of Yours, Mine and Ours and all but one or two songs from The World Won't End, only a couple of songs from Joe Pernice's previous albums. The sound quality at the venue left a little to be desired at first, obliterating the harmonies that make "One Foot in the Grave" such a great song, but they improved vastly as time went on (the harmonies at the coda of "7:30" were almost perfect). The band themselves are much, much louder in person than they are on record, but it's a bright, nondistorted sort of clang that really fits Pernice's songs well.

Highlights for me were "7:30," "Baby in Two," which actually sounded better live with some searing guitar from Peyton Pinkerton, and the encore: Joe Pernice on solo acoustic with "Bum Leg," "Flaming Wreck," which they played the hell out of (the drummer actually broke a highhat at the end), a sublime cover of the Pretenders' "Talk of the Town" and the immortal Scud Mountain Boys' "Grudge Fuck." Great show, and I highly recommend seeing them if they come to a town near you.

New M to the P to the 3 - "Better Later than Never" by Colin Newman, off of the out of print and probably long forgotten 1988 album It Seems. Slicker than prime period Wire, but worth hearing, especially for the oddly hypnotic vocal interplay with Malka Spigel.

Best Songs About Sex With a Blow Up Doll
1. “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” Roxy Music
2. “Girl of My Dreams,” Bram Tchaikovsky
(Note: “Be My Girl - Sally” by the Police is not included in this list, because it sucks.)

Hair metal haiku:

Such a sweet surprise
Tastes so good, like homemade pie
My sweet cherry pie

Wanted dead, alive
Take my license, all that jive
Can’t drive 55

Daddy says she’s young
But she’s old enough for me
Only seventeen

I’ve made up my mind
I ain’t wastin’ no more time
Here I go again

Quiet mountain stream
Running through the forest hills
Talk dirty to me

McDonald's new breakfast abomination "McGriddles" are being advertised with the oddly self-deprecating slogan "Weird, but a good kind of weird." Here are some of the rejected advertising slogans:

- "McGriddles: Clinical Tests Have Proven Only a Two in Three Chance of Indigestion From This Product."

- "McGriddles: I Mean, You Could Try It, If You Wanted To. But I Wouldn't Recommend It."

- "McGriddles: What Do You Expect for a Buck Twenty Nine, Anyway?"

- "McGriddles: Because We're Quickly Running Out of Ideas."

- "McGriddles: Haven't You Always Wanted Something That Combines the Sweet Taste of Maple Syrup and the Hearty Taste of Breakfast Sausage? No? Sorry."

- "McGriddles: Hi, You Don't Know Me, But I'm a McDonald's Marketing Executive. It Would Really Help Me Out if You Bought a Few of These McGriddles. See, Sales Are Down and My Boss is Really Breathing Down My Neck. I Really Need a Home Run with this McGriddles Thing. I Know It's a Lame Idea. Just Buy a Couple and Feed Them to the Dogs. Thanks."

- "McGriddles: Dude, This is Some Seriously Fucked Up Shit, Right Here."

New MP3 - "Miss Teen Wordpower" by the New Pornographers. Personally, I'd pay good money to see a teen pageant based on verbal acuity, as long as Bill Safire is in no way involved.

Recordspiel:

- Pernice Brothers, Yours, Mine and Ours. Said it before, I'll say it again: Joe Pernice is America's best songwriter, and this album adds a few more jewels to the crown: dead perfect choruses on "The Weakest Shade of Blue" and "Baby in Two," the gorgeously desperate “How to Live Alone,” and the soaring harmonies at the end of “One Foot in the Grave.” Not quite as great as the Scud Mountain Boys' Massachusetts or the first halves of Big Tobacco or The World Won't End, but pop/rock doesn't get much better than this.

- New Pornographers, Electric Version. Power pop done right, with all the trimmings - ringing guitar work, catchy choruses and hooks aplenty. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel, but the New Pornographers take all of those pieces that you’ve heard before and meld them into something fresh and invigorating. My one complaint is that nothing really burrows into your brain the way other classics of the genre do - there isn’t a “Southern Girls” or “Starry Eyes” here - but it’s damn fine stuff nevertheless.

- Cat Power, You Are Free. Solid songwriting, pretty in spots (particularly “Good Woman”), but the up tempo numbers desperately need a jolt of electricity. “He War,” specifically, is too restrained to be the searing, intense number it yearns to be. Chan Marshall is talented, but she really needs an actual band to support her instead of the minimalist backing she receives on most of You Are Free.

- DJ Shadow, The Private Press. The best album of 2002 from the 30 or so I listened to last year. (Hey, I have to pay for my CDs, or at least steal the MP3s from eMusic or elsewhere. So, Record Company Promotional Types, send me free stuff and I’ll review it on this site. Unless, of course, I get an idea for a Jayson Blair parody, or decide to convert this blog into a detailed description of what I eat every day and pictures of my parents’ cats.)

So, anyway, The Private Press is even better than Endtroducing… in my view - it’s one of those albums that creates its own world and draws you in on its own terms. How you feel about The Private Press will probably depend on how you feel about “Blood on the Motorway,” the album’s centerpiece. It’s a remarkable piece of work - Josh Davis takes various pieces of musical detritus that would be unremarkable on their own (a Journeyesque power ballad, dated 80’s synth lines, an understated piano line) and blends them into something that is evocative and oddly resonant.

Woo-hoo!

Granted, this one wasn't quite as sweet as 1995 (first time a team I rooted for ever won anything) or 2000 (vindication after several disappointing seasons), but it was pretty entertaining nevertheless. It had the feeling of the end of an era, though - the Devils barely got by a younger, faster team in the Senators and made the series against the Ducks much harder than it should've been. But if it's over, it was a great run, comparable to any team in NHL history not named the Montreal Canadiens. And since the other team I root for will never win anything ever, it's been really enjoyable to be on the right side of watching a dominant team for once.

The only regret I have is that Ken Daneyko didn't somehow find a way to score the game winner. I'll miss watching Daneyko - he was Central Casting's consumate hockey player: a toothless, sluggish skater who made a 20 year career from sheer toughness and guile.

New mp3 o' the week - "Wings" by the Fall, one of the b-sides on the "Kicker Conspiracy" single (also available on the Palace of Swords Reversed compilation). This is a prime example of why the Fall circa 1979-1982 was the best band ever, in my view - a classic Mark E. Smith tale about time travel, the U.S. Civil War and air travel, backed by one of the great riffs of all time hammered with authority by the underrated Craig Scanlon and Paul Hanley.

I'm not much for gender wars. Being male seems like a pretty sweet deal to me, a few disadvantages aside. But I've got to speak out against this new TV network for men. I mean, just look at the schedule - it's a vast wasteland of dating shows, Miami Vice reruns and retards destroying themselves in various "shocking" ways. And the original programming is even worse - this animated show with Pamela Anderson has to be the nadir of Stan Lee's career. This makes the Lifetime lineup of disease-of-the-week movies starring Meredith Baxter-Birney and/or Melissa Gilbert look great in comparison. So on behalf of the males of America, I ask TNN to change their name to something that doesn't reflect so poorly on us. Here are some suggestions:

- The FX Network’s Bastard Stepcousin

- Viacom’s L’il Tax Writeoff

- Kill Some Time Until Skinemax Starts Network

- Redstone’s Folly

- The Midlevel Entertainment Company Executive Graveyard

Regrets. I’ve had a few. Please bear with me while I use this forum to purge my soul and relive the great mistakes and missed opportunities of my life:

- I regret every food purchase I’ve ever made at a 7-11.

- I regret ever using the word “horny” outside the context of a Yosemite Sam impression.

- I regret not being in charge of producing the 1996-1997 New York Islanders highlight video, just so I could have called it “Salo and the 120 Days of Soderstrom.”

- I regret that I am neither fit nor famous, only because I want to label myself a "fitness celebrity."

- I regret all of my haircuts from birth to about a year ago. (And, honestly, I’m not too happy about the haircuts from a year ago to now, either.)

- I regret pretty much everything I’ve ever written in this blog. (Except for the Ed Gein joke a couple of weeks ago. That was pretty funny, if I do say so myself.)

- In a similar vein, I regret using so damn many parenthetical sentences. (I can’t seem to stop doing it. (And you knew I was going to go for the predictable joke here, right? (Sorry. This is really a cry for help.)))