In honor of the warmer weather, I've compiled a list of the songs that most remind me of spring. These songs were meant to be played loud on a car stereo in 70 degree weather, or heard through the car window of someone parked at a 7-11 on a spring day. This list is heavily weighted towards 60's pop and 70's r&b, which are the two most springlike genres to my ears.

“A Beautiful Morning,” and “A Girl Like You,“ Rascals.
“Gold Soundz,” Pavement.
“I Wanna Be With You” and “Go All the Way,” Raspberries.
“I Do Love You,” Billy Stewart.
“American Girl,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“Tell Her She’s Lovely,” El Chicano.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows,” Beach Boys. (The rest of Pet Sounds is a late fall album, too melancholy to be springtime music. But "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows" strike that perfect balance between sweet pop ecstacy and an underlying hint of sadness and dread.)
“Sparky’s Dream,” Teenage Fanclub.
“My Cherie Amour,” Stevie Wonder.
“Could It Be I’m Falling in Love,” Spinners.
“Back of a Car,” Big Star.
“Box Full of Letters,” Wilco.
“She Bangs the Drums,” Stone Roses.
“Lovely Day,” Bill Withers.
“Tangerine,” Led Zeppelin.

A list of lesser known urban legends. Please, spread them around to your coworkers and associates. Let a hundred fraudulent memes bloom.

- The proceeds from the sales of those flower seeds they used to advertise in comic books went to fund neo-Marxist rebel insurgencies in Latin America.

- "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was originally called "My Big Fat Canadian Wedding." They had to change the name after Alan Thicke backed out at the last moment.

- Everyone knows the side effects of Coke, but most people don’t know that consumption of RC Cola has been directly linked to the increased likelihood of purchasing Molly Hatchet tapes and “If It Smells Like Fish, Eat It” can coolers.

- “Grit” was discontinued when their reporters got too close to the truth about the Kennedy assassination coverup.

- This one guy I knew once? Well, a friend of his totally got all wasted on Robitussin and tequila, and ran into this old lady’s car, right? And it turned out that she, like, owned the company that made Robitussin, or something, and the company paid him all this money to keep it a secret, ‘cause drinking lots of Robitussin totally fucks you up. Swear to God, man.

- If you dial the keyboard riff from Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” on a telephone, you’ll be connected to Henry Kissinger’s private phone line.

- The Newlywed Game urban legend is actually true. But they never showed Bob Eubanks' seven minute rant directed at the "filthy sodomite whore."

Recently, I bought a copy of the two episodes of Next!, the unaired Bob Odenkirk sketch comedy pilot for Fox. (By recently, I mean January. I'm a little stuck for things to write about at the moment, so sue me.) It's a fairly funny show, although obviously not even close to the quality of Mr. Show. It was vaguely reminiscent of a faster paced Ben Stiller Show, heavy on pop culture parodies rather than the absurdist sketches that Mr. Show (and Python) relied upon.

Highlights included a R&B singer (played by Jerry Minor) singing a ballad to the American flag (then getting caught in bed with the Panamanian flag), a reverse parody of "Inside the Actor's Studio" with Fred Armisen as a condescending German interviewer who insults his guests, and a progressively more ridiculous series of ads for drugs with severe side effects. The format was a little awkward - the sketches are broken up into three or four segments that repeat throughout the show, which hurts the comedic rhythm of some of the scenes. Both episodes also have a Weekend Update-esque fake newscast that doesn't really work. But it was a lot funnier than any sketch comedy out there right now (with the notable exception of "Chappelle's Show"), and it's a shame that Odenkirk didn't get a chance to fully develop the show.

Oh, I guess it's Easter or something, so I should post something about that. I don't get any time off of work for Easter and I'm not religious, so it doesn't mean anything to me. Plus, Easter candy sucks. Those Cadbury eggs are just too sickly sweet, and I'm convinced that marshmallow Peeps are one of those things that people don't really like but eat just because they're expected to for the holidays, like eggnog or cranberry sauce. Peeps are one step above circus peanuts on the candy food chain.

So there you go, a refutation of a religious holiday based on candy quality and my own personal whims. Next week - why Passover is overrated, and a four part diatribe on why Ramayan Week bites it hard.

Best cliches I use on a regular basis:
- Their early stuff was better.
- Yeah, you’ve got to read the foreign papers to find out what’s really going on in this country.
- I can't stand most Hollywood movies. They're all too predictable and unoriginal.
- (tie) Existence is a cold, pitiless void, with the sole redeeming factor being our individual mortality / You should really try the pie here.
- No, I don't mind staying late to work. (editor's note: this is a lie)
- It’s not you, it’s me.
- I can't feel anything below my knees.
- Chain restaurants are homogenous and bland. Locally owned restaurants are always better.
- Bush is a dickhead.
- We live as we dream, alone.

As I mentioned last time, I’ve been forcibly exposed to hours and hours of Christian contemporary music at my current workplace. As a result, I’ve noticed a few general trends in this genre that most people are fortunate enough to avoid.

- As many other people have noted, most Christian pop songs are just secular pop songs with God in the place of a man/woman as the object of the singer’s affections. I’ll spare you an 800 word essay on the parallel between the idealized and unreal form of love in secular pop songs and the idealized and unreal worship of an imaginary god.

- The gospel/soul influence has been completely removed, and what you have left is an incredibly shined, buffed, white musical experience. Even modern adult contemporary isn’t quite as stultifyingly dull as this stuff. It’s more than a little strange to me. C’mon, even Ned Flanders did the Bump once, are you telling me that this is really what uber-Christians want to hear all of the time? And why try to lose the influence of gospel music, which is one of the all time great cultural contributions of organized religion? Has gospel really been that sullied by its influence on blues and rock and roll?

- Lots of recycled melodies. I’ve heard songs that knock off “Candle in the Wind,” “Dance with Me” by Orleans, and “Somewhere” from West Side Story, just to name a few. Mostly major key, semi-up tempo, “uplifting” music.

- Children often die young in Christian pop songs. (I guess this is Sudden Emotional Manipulation Syndrome, the same tragic ailment that felled Bobby Goldsboro’s wife in “Honey” and the narrator in “Seasons in the Sun,” among others.)

- While I’m obviously not the target market here, I still wonder why this stuff has to be so dull and tedious. I’m sure there are great songs to be written about spiritualism and internal religious conflict and all of that. CCM is a nonstop rah-rah everything is great go Jesus kind of experience that’s ultimately not very revealing or moving in any sort of way. Instead of this, Christian stations should start playing 60’s free jazz - Coltrane’s later stuff, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, etc. - which is a lot more moving and successful in expressing spiritual uplift. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’m currently working at a client that is owned and operated by a fundamentalist Christian. There’s God propaganda all over the place, nothing but Christian music on the office sound system, and the guy can’t go two sentences without mentioning Jesus. Since this is quickly driving me insane, I’m going to devote two entries to God and Christianity and whatnot.

I’m an apatheist. I don’t believe in God, but I don’t really think about religion at all. The appeal of religion completely escapes me, since I’m one of those sorta-existentialist types who actually finds some comfort in the fact that nothing really matters and life is finite and inconsequential and we’re all just dust in the wind, man, that’s all we are. Generally, though, I don’t really care about someone’s religion one way or the other, as long as they’re not trying to destroy the church/state barrier. But when I have to hear about it again and again, it makes me want to carve a pentagram in my forehead and vomit pig’s blood from my mouth just to persuade the religionist to write me off as a lost cause and leave me alone. Same thing with politics (the more exposure to right wingery I get, the more left wing my opinions become) and telemarketing (I once spent three weeks living in a shotgun shack just to spite someone who called to try to get me to switch to MCI). I'm not averse to changing my mind (but not about religion, or long distance phone service), but you have to give me space and make me believe, right or wrong, that I'm the one who's making the final decision.

So, to sum up: God - indifferent. Arguing - bad. Unwavering focus on one topic - bad. Respecting my right to not be annoyed - good. Dan Quayle - still gaining acceptance. Coming up in part two of God Week - a look into the soft, seamy underbelly of Christian contemporary music.

Three things that rule etc. blah:

1. Not having to work Saturdays for the rest of 2003. My favorite thing to do in life is sleep in on weekend mornings, now I have twice the weekly somnambulary pleasure. I have a lot of nights of 5-6 hours of sleep from the past 3 1/2 months to make up for.

2. This bootleg of the late standup comedian Bill Hicks berating a crowd in Chicago. (Try Track 19 for the piece de le resistance.) The fact that he sounds so sincere that his voice cracks in the middle of his "kill everybody, Hitler had the right idea" rant kills me every time.

3. Devils up 2-0 on the Bruins. It's hard to get excited about a first round series against a mediocre team like the Bruins - if the Devils win, they're supposed to win; if they don't, it's a horrific choke. But it's a promising sign that Brodeur seems to be at the top of his game again and the power play is finally showing some signs of life. I'd feel more confident if another player (ie, Patrik Elias) stepped up offensively, though.

I watched the PBS documentary on "Strange Fruit," the 1930's anti-lynching song most famously done by Billie Holiday. A fascinating look at one of the great cultural achievements of the 20th century in any art form. While the documentary somewhat overstated the social significance of “Strange Fruit” (ie, I doubt many people’s minds were changed about lynching from the song itself), it captured some of the reasons why the song is still resonant seven decades later.

"Political" songs tend to fail because music is an inherently emotionally fueled medium. You can't exactly use a song to explain in a logical sense why someone should rally in support of a particular cause. (The failed U2 single “Relieve Third World Debt (Because Struggling Third World Countries Need the Money for Infrastructure and Education)” is a case in point.) So political songs have to rely on stirring up an emotional response. Generally, this approach devolves into glib, mindless sloganeering and finger pointing. (See: 50’s lefty folk music, Rage Against the Machine, “God Bless the U.S.A.”) “Strange Fruit” is successful because it conjures up a simple yet chilling image and allows the listener to draw their own conclusions.

What really makes "Strange Fruit" memorable to me, though, is the original performance by Billie Holiday. While the song itself is well-constructed melodically and grotesquely evocative lyrically, every subsequent version lacks the visceral punch and overwhelming sense of mourning, dread and anger that Holiday delivers. Even the Nina Simone version, which is scarifying in its own way, doesn't quite capture that same atmosphere. It’s the combination of the musical backing, an ominous minor key low-fi dirge, and Holiday’s bitter and pained delivery. And the way she delivers the line “here is a strange and bitter crop” at the song’s conclusion is breathtaking - like a collective howl of release after a hundred years of silence. I’ve listened to this song probably a hundred times, and it still gives me chills each time.

The heated cartoon debate over at Peoplesforum has inspired me to create this, the Official Guide of What to Think About Old Cartoons:

Warner Brothers - It does not get better than Bugs Bunny. I could fill a dozen blog entries with classic shorts: the Barber of Seville, the opera episode, the hillbilly hoedown, the gremlins, etc. etc. I prefer the early, psychotic Daffy Duck to the later, failed conman Daffy Duck, but both had their moments. The Wile E. Coyote shorts took a limited premise and creatively kept it going for a long time, which is a damn hard thing to do. I'm not much for Sylvester and Tweety, mainly because I hate that damn smug little bird, although the Hitchcock parody was genius. Pepe LePew sucked.

Jay Ward - poor animation, yes, but incredibly clever and inventive. "Rocky and Bullwinkle" is one of those rare series that works on a kids' level and an adults' level. Even now, I'm still amazed by the amount of sophisticated comedy (mixed with groaningly-obvious-yet-still-funny wordplay) that's in these shows.

Disney - some of the old shorts aren't bad. "Fantasia" is a justifiable classic. I prefer the Carl Barks comics to the cartoons, though.

Tex Avery - While I respect the guy for creating Daffy Duck and Droopy, his own stuff was way, way overrated. Same gags over and over again. Yeah, yeah, it's a horny wolf leering at a curvaceous woman. I get it.

MGM - The early Tom and Jerrys are great - honestly, I prefer them over Sylvester and Tweety. And Droopy was a great character. Otherwise, not much here.

Universal - Woody Woodpecker is a serious contender with Tweety for Most Obnoxious Cartoon Bird of All Time. Just let them both get sucked into a jet intake, already.

Hanna Barbera - The early Jetsons are actually pretty funny. The Flintstones aren't funny once you hit 11. Scooby Doo is good for cheap laughs when you're a stoned teenager, but you wouldn't actually want to sit down and watch it again at this point. Otherwise, Hanna Barbera was a total crap factory.

Terrytoons - Heckle and Jeckle? Mighty Mouse? At least Terrytoons helped thousands of general managers at low rent, poorly rated UHF TV stations keep their jobs by providing them with cheap afternoon kid fodder.

Still somewhat sick, tired, cranky, busy and writer's blocked. Back to regular but sporadic updates about things only interesting to me in a bit.

In the meantime, what the hell happened to Google today? I tried googling a few things and I got something like 500,000 hits, most of them only containing one of the words I searched for and a whole lot of useless crap. It gave me unpleasant Altavista flashbacks. One of my favorite hobbies is googling random words and phrases and looking at the incredibly random results. Please don't tell me that I'm going to have to find something more productive to do with my time.

I'm sick - sore throat, sinuses and the rest. Normally, I am a placid, easygoing sort, except for the occasional online rant/whine. But when I get sick, I turn into the most miserable, bitchy whiner anyone ever had to endure. I've literally said things like "god, this illness will NEVER end" and "kill me, just kill me" over a damn sinus infection. But I still dragged myself to work today, partly because I have deadlines to meet and partly because I already blew one of my sick days last week. I deserve a medal for this sacrifice.

All right, enough complaining. Let's slap on a fake smile and list three things that rule at this particular moment -

1. Syracuse going to the national championship game, thus ensuring that I finished in 6th place in the office pool. Just out of the money, but a respectable showing considering I didn’t watch a game of college basketball this year. (Thanks, Dayton and Mississippi State, for unceremoniously choking in the first round to ruin my chance to finish in the money.)

2. Emusic.com. Finally decided to pony up the money for this, and there’s a lot more cool stuff here than I had initially realized. Lots of good late-90’s indie rock that I wouldn’t pay full price for but is nice to have nevertheless, Daniel Johnston’s complete discography, a handful of classic 70’s/80’s post-punk (finally got Suicide’s first album and a bunch of post-Brix Fall stuff), and best of all, the complete Shanachie/Yazoo catalog. Prewar blues overload, baby. Best of all, I’ll probably get everything I need in three months, so it’ll only cost me $45 total. Well worth it. (C'mon, Emusic, pull a Dr. Pepper and comp me for my three month membership in exchange for this endorsement. This blog reaches a valuable accidentally-stumbled-here-through-a-random-Google-search demographic.)

3. The website for “A Mighty Wind.” Really looking forward to this one, looks like they nailed a lot of the details of 60's folk music and the clips are promising. I just hope the movie includes the Folksmen’s version of “Start Me Up.”

More two sentence album reviews:

- Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Hearts of Oak. Pleasant "indie" (whatever the hell that vague and unsubstantial term means) rock. Nothing groundbreaking or surprising, just solid songs decently performed. (I have to admit that, while this is good, it's not a great commentary on the state of la musica de la rock if this is the vanguard of the movement.)

- Rilo Kiley, The Execution of All Things. Pleasant "indie" rock. Nothing groundbreaking or surprising, just solid songs decently performed. I wonder if my opinion of this record is colored by my nostalgic childhood memories of Brooklyn Bridge, though.

- White Stripes, Elephant. I'm kind of underwhelmed thus far. I liked White Blood Cells and all, but it wasn't the I-have-seen-the-future-of-rock-and-roll type of album that people hyped it to be, just a solid reworking of the Stooges/MC5 late-60's Detroit vibe. This is even less inspired. It's always a bad sign when the best song on an album is a cover ("I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself"). Anyway, the White Stripes clearly aren't the next great life-altering thing or what have you, but it's disappointing to hear them go south so quick.

- Rocket from the Tombs, The Day the Earth Met The.... Holy hell, these guys should've been a great band. It's a damn shame that they didn't get to record a real album, but the stuff that was left behind here is pretty damn impressive in its own right. "Amphetamine" deserves to be ranked up there with "Desolation Row" and "Marquee Moon" in the pantheon of Great Epic Rock Songs. The versions of "Ain't it Fun" and "Life Stinks" smoke the versions by the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, respectively - there was a darkness and malevolence in the performances of David Thomas and Peter Laughner here that they never really recaptured in later performances. While you can't help but wonder what would've happened if they hadn't imploded, this is amazing stuff to hear nevertheless.

- Radio 4, Gotham!. Radio 4 is so derivative of the Gang of Four, one wonders if they'll start a touring production a la Beatlemania. ("That's Entertainment!" maybe?) But despite the unoriginality, they still manage to kick out some convincing leftist white guy funk here. Docked a point for the really stupid, simpering lyrics. "I really sorry but we've got to start resisting / It's no request, we really are insisting on this now"? Way to stick it to the Man convincingly there, guys. Fuck the Police! (although individually, I'm sure they're wonderful people) Smash the State! (if it's OK with everyone else)

As we all know, U.S. companies stand to reap significant benefits in the rebuilding of Iraq. Sure, oil companies and defense contractors will benefit the most, but here are some other companies who will also belly up to the trough:

- McDonald’s - new, affordable McSubsistence sandwich (consisting of a couple of leaves of lettuce and the middle bun from a Big Mac) will be targeted to growing Iraqi “starving and desperate” demographic

- Ronco - preparing to launch a new line of products to be advertised on late night Iraqi TV: Rubble-B-Gone, EZ Prosthetic Limbs and a food processor powered by depleted uranium shells

- Chef Boyardee - will unload 500,000 cans of Pac-Man pasta that have been sitting in a warehouse in Passaic, New Jersey since 1986

- Mail order bride services - a whole new poor, crumbling country full of women looking for a green card to peddle to lonely, socially inept American males

An abbreviated list of things that frightened me as a child:
- being nuked by the Soviets (‘cause you know that Somerset County, Maryland would have been the first to go if WWIII started)
- the video for the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger”
- lightning and tornadoes
- “Green Eyed Lady” by Sugarloaf
- Halloween
- any dark rooms in our house
- being abducted in a mall
- Lou Ferrigno (both as the Incredible Hulk and as Bruce Banner)
- Satanic cults that would abduct children and ritually sacrifice them (thanks to the fundamentalist Christian school I went to as a kid for scaring me with things like that)

Fun with Hotmail:

One of the reasons I stubbornly cling to my hotmail account is for all the wacky, fun spam you receive. So I thought I'd share a few of my favorite spam subject titles in a little segment we like to call Fun with Hotmail. (italicized comments mine)

a small penis shows through the pants (Just screams sexy, don't it? You're lookin' small and flaccid today, baby!)

first fukc (Shoddy spelling or an unnecessary attempt at self-censorship?)

an orgasm is just the beginning (Uh, you sent this to a guy, so that's not really true.)

Monkey Business (I clicked the link here. It's nude photos of Gary Hart.)

Sheep Love Videos (It's either bestiality pr0n or a statement of fact about the viewing habits of sheep. Sheep love videos, but prefer DVDs for the added features. And don't get them started on having to buy Godfather III in the Godfather series box set.)

S-H-O-C-K AND A-W-E.. lnwtmrv qlmsgulc bv oil (You know a phrase has officially been overused when you start seeing it in spam e-mails. And dig the subtle jab at the oil companies at the end. What's next - "EXPAND YOUR PENIS BY THREE INCHES AND FREE MUMIA"?)

WUWT, part the second:

- The outrage in some quarters that Avril Lavigne didn't know who David Bowie was or any of the '77 era punk bands or whatever. Why should she? She's not in the same tradition as those guys - she's not making any pretenses about "authenticity" besides a few pseudo-punk marketing gestures that anyone over the age of 15 should be able to spot. Besides that, the whole idea behind this canonization of 60's/70's rock is kind of ridiculous. I like a lot of that stuff, of course, but the idea that you must listen to something or be thought of as ignorant is rather stifling. Do we really want the last 50 years of music and pop culture boiled down to a must-read
(or -view, or -listen) list of 100 things? Honestly, one of the things I love most about pop culture is the fact that it's okay to like what you like without the sort of intellectual defense that you often have to mount in "serious" culture. It would be a shame if that self-seriousness found its way into pop music appreciation.

- Sports figures speaking out for the war. (I'm talking about David Robinson in that last article.) I'll make you a deal, right wingers of America - shut up the pro athletes and we'll put a muzzle on entertainers speaking out about politics. No backup catchers spewing rhetoric, no Barbra Streisand. I think this is one cause we can all rally behind.

- The new early 1950's nostalgia craze sweeping the country. Blacklists. Duck and Cover. Crypto-fascist nutcases with repressed sexual hangups in charge of the nation's law enforcement. I would provide more examples, but I have to go down to the frat house and swallow a few goldfish, then watch a rigged quiz show on the DuMont.

Wow. Writer's block is bad enough, but when you can't even come up with inane entries into a blog that no one reads, you know you've sunk to new depths. So some scattered thoughts while I try to come up with something (marginally) more cogent and interesting:

- The war. I'm against it, because I see nothing good that can come from the whole enterprise. (Yes, getting rid of Saddam is good, but we'll just install some weak pro-U.S. Shah type who'll be overthrown by militants after our national attention span moves to the next great evil.) I keep trying to find a positive spin (maybe it won't last too long, maybe the American Empire supporters in the White House will be thwarted, etc.) with no success. And the insufferable "you support this war or you're a baby murderer" line of propaganda is being pushed by the usual suspects on the right. At least I live in a somewhat more liberal part of the country now. If I still lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the sheer weight of all that flag-wavin' and God Bless the USA-singin' would probably send me into the welcoming embrace of Noam Chomsky.

- Music. Haven't bought or listened to much new stuff. Maybe it's just me, but this seems to be a particularly weak year for new music so far in the genres I like these days. Plus, I'm perennially six to eight months behind the times when it comes to music buying. In any case, there's so much good stuff from the last three decades alone that I'm unfamiliar with. I've listened to a lot of Stereolab and the Go-Betweens lately - critic's favorites that I had never really paid much attention to until recently. I've also been playing Morphine's "Cure for Pain" a lot - true, they only wrote one song, but it was a pretty good one, and they nailed that urban lowlife/boozehouse/depressive genre as well as anyone since Tom Waits' early albums.

- Books. Mostly reading up to take the CPA exam in May (which I will fail, and fail hard). Also reading William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which I'm appreciating more now than when I read it in college. There's something about forced reading (and, even worse, forced discussion) that always sucked the life out of reading for me. Now I don't have to worry about what line of bullshit I'm going to spew out for my next paper or class presentation, so I can just enjoy the material on its own merits.

I think it's time to officially declare that the rich comedy vein of having white people talk like black people has finally been tapped out. "Bringing Down the House" and "Heads of State" - both of which look horrible despite starring the likes of Steve Martin and Chris Rock - have officially killed this whole routine. Every hack comedy writer now thinks that getting old white people to say "fo shizzle my nizzle" or something is a sure recipe for Instant Laffs. So let's all pour a 40 on the curb for Herbert Kornfeld and move on with our lives. Here's some suggestions for new wacky affectations for the desperate comedian:

- 19th century Russian dauphins
- Bulgarians
- members of Styx cover bands
- process servers
- TV weathermen
- grizzled prospectors
- lawn furniture salesmen
- Mormons

Most of my co-workers live in Fairfax County, Virginia. For those of you not familiar with the DC metro area, Fairfax is the richest county in the area and one of the richest counties in the country. There’s a certain snobbery that most of these people have about Fairfax County, as if it were a perfect Valhalla with no crime and dirt and trash and everybody’s happy and perfect and so on. (Compared to the rest of the DC area, which is apparently a gigantic crack house.)

Sure, Fairfax County is clean and safe - but it’s also incredibly antiseptic and dull. It’s like a gigantic outdoor mall. It doesn’t feel lived in or have any sort of character. Give me suburban pseudo-cities like Bethesda or Alexandria, or the somewhat sleazy charm of PG or Montgomery County.

I was filling up my car in Beltsville the other day. I was surrounded on all sides by the staples of lower class suburbia - a porn shop, a liquor store, a run-down gas station/beer/sub shop, one of those late night cash-your-checks places. Some guy pulled up next to me and offered me a free stereo. If you live in a place as boring as Fairfax County, you miss out on wonderful experiences like that.