So his gray hair is older than I am

Recently I've been getting even more spam than usual. Today, on a lark, I decided to read one of them, and BOY HOWDY am I glad I did. After a bit about selling me some European stock (I think), the end of the email contained a quantity of text having nothing to do with stock and little to do with anything else. The text is oddly moving, in addition to being flat-out hilarious. The sentences read like something out of a Don DeLillo novel or a Radiohead liner note. Here's one example:

I was driving home in rush hour traffic, on the highway,in the rain, in the left lane.
In summary - everything. Here are some ideas to break through writer's block. Here are some ideas to break through writer's block.
Man she was a tyrant.
So his gray hair is older than I am.
He likes to make like the mailbags are answered by us collectively, but anyone who knows us quickly realizes that the replies are way too nice to come from me or Steve.
Greg Mankiw spotted an article about the Pigou club in the New York Times.
What is the GMAT and how can you prepare for.
Here are some ideas to break through writer's block.
Those guys were definitely our biggest fans and talked the site up more than we did.
: Pas de nouvelles, bonne nouvelle ? We used to make fun of her old-maid status. Trapper got his own special Christmas message from a herd of Elk that crept into his living room and baked a bunch of pies while he was tucked away, dreaming of sugar plums. So his gray hair is older than I am.
In summary - everything.
Greg Mankiw spotted an article about the Pigou club in the New York Times.
The ride is excellent. Alpha zebra foxtrot decca!
Humanity is not ready for FT to have an army of judo chop robots.
As more and more search engine algorithms evolve into complex, human-centric logics, they seek content that is relevant to the search conducted by the surfer. So, because I am too busy impressing the Texas sweethearts with my strut, there are no new reviews this week.
: Pas de nouvelles, bonne nouvelle ?
Actually, we will still be doing FT reviews but we will just not be showing them to you.
Maybe then the squirrels will stop bothering me.

I can't put into words why I love this so much; I can only hope someone else appreciates it half as much as I do. Maybe then the squirrels will stop bothering me.

let's talk about bums

One distinct memory I retained from my visit to the west coast a few years ago was the abundance of bums, relative to the east coast. Sure, Atlanta, D.C., and NY have their vagabonds, but their number pales in comparison to the hordes of panhandlers populating the Pacific coast. My visit to Seattle earlier this month reinvigorated this perception. I suppose it's just good business for bums to hang out in areas populated with young liberals.

Probably because of all the competition, many west coast vagrants have turned panhandling into something of an art form. To accomplish this is itself something of an art, because if their schtick becomes too involved, then suddenly they're performing a service rather than just asking for free shit. And then they're not bums, no matter how bad they smell. In this vein, here are my 3 favorite bum-related stories from Seattle:

(1) One woman asked us if we would give her some of our money. We lied and said we didn't have any on us. Undeterred, she brazenly asked, "you got a debit card?" Rather than bury ourselves in another lie, we kept walking.

(2) The next day, a dude near the fish market took the opposite tack. He rolled up and asked if we had any money (to give him, presumably). Again, we lied and told him we didn't. Instantly, he said, "oh okay, that's cool" and walked away. I can't imagine this technique helps him earn anything, but it sure was refreshing.

(3) Our last night in the city, a Sunday, a friend and I were trolling downtown Seattle for bars. I guess we were near the financial district or something, because nothing seemed to be open on a Sunday night. We stood on a street corner and quietly discussed our dwindling options. As we stood there, a bum approached from the block above us, and immediately started telling us where some bars were: "well you've got [Bar X] down the street, [Lounge Y] a block over on [Jerk Street], and [The Z Hole] down the hill on [Bullshit Ave]". Or something like that. The weird thing was, there's no way he could have heard what we were talking about before he started helping us. It really sticks in my craw that he merely assumed two twentysomethings in downtown Seattle at 11:00 on a Sunday night were looking for a bar. Stupid bums.

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There aren't so many bums in New York these days. Rudy Giuliani is famously responsible for this, although I'm not sure exactly how. Apparently he just kicked them out and sent them to Jersey or something. But here's what confuses me: if he did this, how come there are still a few bums scattered around the city? Were they friends of the mayor? Did they call in a favor? Maybe he held some kind of Bum Olympics and instead of a gold medal the winners got to stay in New York. I can't imagine the ones that are still here are here because Giuliani's anti-bum patrol couldn't find them- they sleep on First Avenue for pete's sake.

Also while I was in Seattle, the earbuds for my iPod stopped working. Upon returning to NYC, I was about to throw them away when I realized that headphones/earbuds are an awesome bum deterrent. Now when I go to work, I always have my earbuds in my ears, even though I'm not actually listening to anything. Rethink, Reuse, Recycle- that's my motto!

My Most Ambitious Project Yet

Reason #2 Why Elvis Costello is Lots Cooler Than You'll Ever Be

Earlier on the same North American tour where he refitted the lyrics to "Less Than Zero", Elvis found himself, with his new touring band The Attractions, in New York City. The Sex Pistols were supposed to be playing Saturday Night Live that weekend, but some shady influences prevailed upon NBC to yank their performance. NBC instead booked Elvis Costello & The Attractions as a last minute replacement.

NBC told Elvis to perform "Less Than Zero". When their time came, the band played a few bars of the song, then abruptly switched to an unreleased song called "Radio, Radio", an angry tune protesting the commercialization of Big Radio (Elvis was quite ahead of his time in this respect. This was before Rush covered some of the same ground and eons before the (recent) Sony Payola scandal). Anyway, the video of his performance can be seen below.



Let's face it: even if you tripped over a guitar and accidentally wrote two awesome songs, you still wouldn't have done that to NBC. The performance resulted in Elvis getting banned from SNL for 12 years. Happily, though, Lorne Michaels eventually mellowed out, permitting Elvis and The Beastie Boys to recreate the incident (with Elvis interrupting The BBs' "Sabotage") for the 25th anniversary special in 2000.

And while I'm at it, I should mention that the Dallas version of "Less Than Zero" was actually performed at a show in Canada, not in Dallas. The worst thing about telling other people's stories is that it's incredibly easy to be called out for fudging the details...

Update

However sadly I may have failed, I have so far tried to make every one of my meager blog entries interesting in some way or another. All that ends now.

As part of my ongoing project to keep updating Certain Blogs without actually adding any substantive content, I've decided to display, in the right margin, the title and author of whatever book I'm currently reading. In doing so, my hopes are twofold:

(1) Perhaps one of my readers (now approaching double digits!) will recognize and have something insightful or snarky to say about whatever I'm reading, and will feel comfortable doing so. (This just occurs to me: I'm too dumb to program any sort of separate comment section for the current book thing. So go ahead, imaginary reader, and attach any book-related comments to whatever asisine blog entry about fast food or bodily functions I happen to have posted most recently.)

(2) Hopefully the knowledge that, on any given day, as many as 3 people might know what I'm reading will motivate me to read more books. It'd be awfully embarrassing if Debbie Does Dallas (Now a Major Motion Picture!) languished on my webpage for more than a couple of days.

That is all.

An actual blog

So I've been without a computer or internet access for a couple of weeks. Sorry. I should have computer access, but a lot less free time, now that I've started work.

Anyway, I'd like to begin a continuing series about Elvis Costello and why he's so goddamn cool. I know I just called Tom Waits the coolest god damned man on planet Earth, and I'm not ready to take that away from him, so Elvis will have to be satisfied with the title of My Personal Hero. So.

Reason #1 Why Elvis Costello is Lots Cooler Than You'll Ever Be

In the late 1970s, on the success of his debut album "My Aim is True", Elvis toured the United States. These days, this album is best known for the song "Alison", but the single that first gained him notoriety was "Less Than Zero", the first of his many erudite, long-winded political rants. While traveling to a show in Dallas, Elvis decided to rewrite the lyrics to be about the JFK assassination, simply because he's lots cooler than you'll ever be. I'm notoriously bad at interpreting lyrics (I, like Homer Simpson, assumed "You Light Up My Life" was about a man), but so far as I can tell, Elvis imagines that the true target of the assassination was one of JFK's bodyguards, whose wife was cheating on him. Among the lyrics:

Jenny takes her clothes off in succession,
While her husband rides a bumper in the President's procession.
She sees him on the screen as she looks up from giving head.
When he's had enough of that her lover throws her on the bed
to teach her she's alive and suddenly he's dead.

and

A pistol was still smoking, a man lay on the floor.
Mr. Oswald thought he had an understanding with the law.
She's got rubies on her fingers, Jenny turns and looks away.
Her mind upon a basement out of the USA.
She says, "Let's talk about the future now we've put the past away."

(Regarding the first couplet of the second exerpt, it warrants mentioning that Elvis is British, so he has that weird way of making "law" rhyme with "floor". Just so you know.)

And just for the hell of it, here are some facts about Elvis Costello that, while not quite evidence that he's better than you, are nevertheless fun and/or interesting:

- Elvis's backing band for his first album was Clover, which later added a lead singer and changed its name to Huey Lewis and The News.
- The Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero was named after the Costello song, although the stories have little in common besides some good old moral bankruptcy. Ellis later wrote American Psycho, which you probably didn't read. But you sure did like the movie.

Blogworthy:

I recently had a fantasy that I was an ad man. I earn immeasurable fame and improve thousands of lives through the creation of a public service announcement warning against the dangers of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The campaign centers around the slogan "Preggers can't be users."

In my fantasy, I'm pitching the idea to a conference room of stuffed suits when an eager but wet-behind-the-ears intern suggests using "boozers" instead of "users". Calmly but firmly, I explain to him that the alliteration created by "boozers" would make the slogan more difficult to say, which would lessen the campaign's overall impact, which would in turn save fewer children from the sad effects of FAS. I ask him if he's prepared to shoulder that kind of emotional burden so early in his still-promising career, and he tells me that he is not.

No one really appreciates how much work it takes to be a successful fake advertising executive.

Mama Mia!

I saw this commercial for Pizza Hut's newest novelty pizza, called the Sicilian Lasagna Pizza. Piqued by the name, I sat up and awaited the voice-over's explanation of how they had managed to merge lasagna and pizza into one discrete food item. But damn it all, they didn't. All they fucking did was throw some tomato sauce, cheese, and meat on some bread and name it after lasagna.

To its credit, I'll admit, it is rectangular. So maybe if you took your contacts out and held your nose, you could fool yourself into thinking someone had delivered you the world's shittiest lasagna.

And then, Christ, the other day I found a print ad in the Sunday paper. You know what slogan they decided on for the Sicilian Lasagna Pizza? "The pizza that eats like a meal!"

Holy Toledo!!! Pizza?? As a meal?! No one under the age of 172 thinks you can eat pizza as an entire meal! Pizza Hut better build a new wing onto corporate headquarters- you know, to house all those thank you cards.

Tom Waits Changes My Life For (At Least) The Third Time

I used to feel ashamed when someone would ask me if I'd heard of a band that I'd never heard of. I don't really know why. I think I just like knowing about things before other people, even though I rarely put in the effort to learn anything new.

But I don't feel like that anymore, thanks to Tom Waits. He was asked to write an article about his favorite albums. It's pretty long, and boring in parts, and I feel sure he didn't put a lot of thought into the list. But somewhere near the end, he wrote this:

14 Passion for Opera Aria (EMI Classics) 1994

I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I've never had spaghetti and meatballs - 'Oh My God, Oh My God!' - and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.

And the way I see it, if Tom Waits, the coolest god damned man on earth, isn't embarrassed about not having heard of something, then I shouldn't be either. And Jesus, what a good story. Thanks again, Mr. Waits.

Also, if anyone bothered reading the article, I wonder how good that Sinatra album really is. About scoring chicks, I mean. Perhaps my legions of faithful readers should give it a try, and later we can share zany stories of madcap sexual misadventure.

Or no?

Sunday Sets

Like pretty much everyone I know, I dread Sunday nights. You watch helplessly as the last dregs of your weekend slide down the drain, knowing the only reward for going to bed is five days of school, work, or feeling guilty about not going to school or working.

As a youngster, my favorite TV show was Our House (starring Wilford Brimley, that robust hero to diabetics, oatmeal eaters, and mustache growers the world over), which aired Sunday nights on NBC. What I remember most about those days was the growing uneasiness I would always feel as the show approached. On one hand, I wanted to know exactly what homespun life lesson the old codger would impart to his impetuous grandkids, but I also knew, staring desperately at the wall clock during every commercial break, that the show's encroaching end meant bedtime and five terrible days of elementary school. I was glad to have one last pleasurable experience before the school week beckoned, but the prevailing sense of dread, of helplessness as my future kept dragging me along, prevented me from really enjoying the show.

As time passed, as Mondays got more demanding, the feeling only got worse. And of course by college, all this dread/malaise/helplessness was compounded mightily by the hangover and nicotine-withdrawal that quickly became its own weekly ritual.

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I've been living in my cabin at the lake, by myself, for the last week or so. I'm staying here until I move to NYC in a month to be a blowhard corporate lawyer. Being here is pretty spectacular; the lake is gorgeous, I'm reading a lot, and the nights are so quiet and still. It's exactly where I want to be.

But the problem is, in spite of all that, every day kind of feels like a Sunday. The spectre of 15 hour days , mind-numbing work, and three measly weeks of vacation (if I'm lucky) makes it hard to enjoy the time I have left. Twenty years ago, Our House wasn't solid enough to withstand the future's relentless assault. I guess it was silly to think my cabin would perform any better.

crawlin' to the USA

A few lingering thoughts about Argentina, from which I returned a few days ago:

(1) The toothpaste sure is weird. The most promising variety I found at a corner store in Rosario was Red Berry flavor- some kind of cherry/strawberry/raspberry concoction. But my high hopes were quickly dashed. In addition to tasting horrible, its deep red hue left me wondering whether my gums have been bleeding more, less, or just as much.

(2) The music in Argentina was surprisingly tolerable. Predictably, radio was dominated by indistinguisable Spanish gibberish (great drinking game: drink every time someone says "corazón"). But the bars played a comforting mix of old and new American pop, by which I mean Nirvana and Gnarls Barkley, pretty much all the time. And TV, for whatever reason, demonstrated an admirable respect for semi-obscure rock. Certain channels would play music videos in between their regular broadcasts, and I caught songs by Belle and Sebastian ("Step Into My Office, Baby") and The Flaming Lips ("The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song"). Another Lips song ("It Overtakes Me/...") featured prominently in a commercial for stain remover.

That said, I suppose it's possible these songs were only selected because they appeal to young, wannabe hipster Gringos, for whom traveling entails sitting around watching TV as much as it does visiting museums, monuments, and mountain ranges. Dammit.

3) Now that I'm back, you can look forward to fewer tedious travelogues and more old-fashioned self-deprecation. I suck!