So I’m really going to live up to my name in this post. I was watching this clip of the Shout Out Louds and had one of those Homer Simpson moments where you inadvertently catch yourself making food-lustful groaning noises and droaning, “Mmmm…donuts” with a warm stream of drool running down the side of your chin. But as I woke from my reverie, casually wiping my face with the back of my hand (classy, I know), I found myself a bit angry and indignant.

Is this not America? Are we not the fattest nation in the world? Why the hell don’t we have something like this? The Swedish have fica, the British have afternoon tea, so America should have its equivalent. I don’t know about everyone else, but this would work very well for me considering I need to feed approximately every two hours or so anyway. We should make the late day snack a legit American tradition for three reasons:

1. I hate having to make-up excuses just so I can have a damn cookie.
2. We all need the pick me up to get through the home stretch of the work day.
3. I’d like to be officially validated in my vice. At least I could be fat and happy and not fat and guilt-ridden. Besides, in spite of our better judgment, we all do it anyway. Truth. We are just that self-indulgent and greedy (I may be projecting…just a little).

Oh and incidentally, our neighbor to the south, Mexico, has become the second fattest nation in the world. How convenient. Haha. Fat kids of the world can unite with geographical convenience!

Enter Shikari have a great idea – make Naked Van Jumping the newest Olympic sport. This is so freaky, because I seriously had this weird-ass dream last night that I was at the Winter Olympics (don’t ask me why it wasn’t the upcoming Summer games, maybe I time traveled) and there were all of these new, fucked-up events like (I kid you not):

• Guard the Stanley Cup – a group of 3 guys in singlets try to protect a bucket with the Stanley Cup inside from huge, hulking marauders.
• Downhill Ball Dodge – You run down a hill and people fire dodgeballs out of cannons at you. I didn’t stay in the dream long enough to see how you could actually win, to me it just looked like an excuse to shoot balls at people at ridiculously high speeds.
• Sneak Attack – Now this was the oddest and definitely most fucked up. For whatever reason, you were encouraged to sneak attack an opposing team whenever you could – while they were relaxing, watching TV, praying, or just fucking asleep! And you needed proof of serious injury to get points. I guess I became part of Team USA because in my dream I smacked a Japanese guy over the back with a hockey stick and gave him a welt to the cheers of the crowd.

Man, is my mind fucked up or what? Anyway, getting back to Naked Van Jumping, I think we might still have time to petition Beijing to add it to the Summer Games roster. I know that being such a conservative, tradition-based Communist country, they might at first be a little resistant to the idea of stark naked men and women being flung precariously between automobiles being driven at dangerously high speeds. Some might even go as far as calling it a “Goddamn Death Trap.” But I say you gotta live a little, and this is exactly what China needs to spice things up and make people forget about all those human rights atrocities they committed in Tibet and Darfur.

Seriously, do you think monks would be setting themselves on fire in protest if China allowed naked van jumping? Fuck no, they’d buy a couple used vans and start training immediately. If you’re going to seriously maim yourself, you might as well do it in the spirit of competition.

Dunno if you caught indie rock princess Feist on the Colbert Report last night, but here’s video of the interview which our lawyer will probably tell me to take down in about, oh, 2 hours or so:

Fast forward to 1:40 into the clip, when Colbert asks Feist what an “indie rocker” is. Mother fucker, that’s our question! That no good Daily Show castoff totally ripped us off! Don’t answer it, Leslie! Don’t answer a query so brazenly ripped from the Uncensored Interview playbook. Stephen Colbert, YOU are now officially on notice:

Shout Out Louds bring up a good point: you don’t really have to know how to play an instrument anymore to make, well I won’t say good, but popular music. Look at the crap that’s selling right now: Daughtry, Nickelback, Miley Cyrus, Fall Out Boy – not exactly musical maestros if you ask me. Watching them butcher their respective instruments is like watching an angry bulldog try to eat a Sloppy Joe. Yeah, good luck getting that image out of your head the rest of the day.

But I want to flip things right now and discuss something that doesn’t get as nearly as much attention as it’s earned: Good Musicians That Make Bad Music. I’m talking about virtuosos, prodigies, people who actually know how to play their instruments, and play them well, but can’t write a good song for shit:

• Les Claypool – Probably one of the greatest (and fastest) bass players of all time. Also, one of the worst vocalists and songwriters of all time. For further clarification see: Primus.
• Dragonforce – Amazing instrumentalists. Heart thumping double bass drum mastery, smart keyboards, and holy-fucking-shit-lightning-quick guitar shredding. Too bad their songs are all about swords, flaming dragons, and wizardry. Listening to a Dragonforce album is about as heterosexual as going out to eat with your brother and sharing one milkshake with two straws.
• Slash – Yes, he was in Guns N Roses and Velvet Revolver, and, along with Eddie Van Halen, is one of the most prolific and influential guitarists of the modern rock era, but all of that doesn’t atone for Slash’s Snake Pit

There’s a few things I really love about this sickly intimate Jason Isbell interview that just went up on Uncensored Interview

• I shot it, and I’m a glutton for my own work
• It takes place inside the cluttered confines of Jason’s own touring van
• The enrapturing way Jason tells a story. It makes you feel guilty if you miss a syllable, even when he’s talking about some chick peeing in a fountain.

In other news, today is my birthday, and of course it fucking rains. I really wish my birthday landed on a Jewish Holiday, because it never rains on fucking Passover, or Purim, or Yom Kippur. Seriously, look at the weather charts over the past 5 years and try to find a Jewish holiday where it rained. You can’t, because it just doesn’t. Whether it’s dastardly clever planning by the Jews, or proof that they indeed are the Chosen People is still up for debate. But damn, can’t I get a teensy little fucking bit of sunshine on the 27th anniversary of my coming into the world?

Shark Thought Of The Day

I bet the caveman who discovered fire was a real prick. He’d peek into other caves when it was really cold out and say stuff like “Hey, whatcha got going there? A roaring fire, huh? Keeping you nice and warm? Boy, I’m glad I discovered that.” I bet after a while, another caveman got really fed up with his shit and invented the knife.

The first thing I do after waking up almost every day is put on some underwear, tell the hooker to leave, haggle over the price but eventually give in, fire up the old the iMac, and check out the videos that Uncensored Interview sends me to potentially include in that day’s blog. This School of Language clip was the first video that I clicked on this morning:

You know how I know that despite the gorgeous, summer-like weather outside, today is going to be a bad day? Because the first song I heard today was Lenny Kravitz’ “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” It’s like getting a phone call first thing in the morning that your dad is in a coma. Except in that case, there’s reason to be optimistic that your dad might wake up. There’s no reason to have any optimism once that riff gets stuck in your head for the rest of the day. I could be witnessing the birth of my firstborn child and it would still make me feel just completely dead inside. You could be in the middle of making love to a beautiful woman, and all of a sudden you’ll hear that riff in your head and go completely limp. Hell, it might even sterilize you.

Ugh. Doooo-do-do-do-do-dooo-do. There it goes again. Fuck it Lenny, get out of my head! Seriously, is there a worse, or at least comparably bad song to wake up to than Are You Gonna Go My Way? A few come to mind, but I don’t think they can overtake AYGGMW in terms of sheer annoyance and frustration:

Worst Songs To Wake Up To

• Limp Bizkit – Nookie
• Creed – Pretty Much Any Song By Creed
• Lenny Kravitz – Again

(Congratulations Lenny on being a 2 time Shark-honoree)

• Rick Derringer feat. Hulk Hogan – Real American
  

Although in Hulk’s defense, he was like an 11 time WWF champion, and he did do my personal voicemail greeting when I met him, so he’s allowed to slide on having this one horribly catchy, annoying song. BUT JUST THIS ONE. It still doesn’t excuse him from His Solo Album (I swear to god this is real – I own an autographed copy).

It’s pretty hard not to get caught up in the whole Democratic nomination fiasco that’s basically handing the November election over to John McCain. Both Clinton and Obama talk a lot about health care, but as I was pessimistically ranting to my girlfriend last night, I don’t think either candidate, nor Rambo McCain, will be able to develop and institute a universal health care system, at least not with a Congress so split down party lines right now. As someone who hasn’t had health insurance since I left my last job back in February, I recently sought information on obtaining coverage through COBRA, which… well I’ll let Virginia Coalition tell you why that was a BAD idea:

I wish these guys were exaggerating how much COBRA costs, but they’re really not. The letter I got in the mail from my old employer offered me medical coverage under my old “decent” United Healthcare plan through COBRA for a mere $675 a month! $675!!! That’s almost how much I pay in rent! I had better be getting sick roughly 3 times a month, or at least developing Diabetes or cancer to justify paying that shit.

As I said before, I don’t think any of the candidates in this year’s election will deliver when it comes to health care, and that really pisses me off. We the people deserve better than this. Better treatment, better choices, better candidates. That’s why I’m calling for the United States government to scrap the woefully outdated two-party election system that decides our next leader and institute the fairest, most democratic system ever developed by mankind –

A 64 Person NCAA-Style Fight-To-The-Death Presidential Tournament

Click on thumbnail for the full tournament bracket

No more of this convoluted primary-caucus-Super Delegate bullshit. Here’s how the new system works – Each state (yes, even West Virginia) votes to elect one representative to compete in the tournament. That’s 50 competitors right there. The 14 remaining slots go to the following:

• Washington D.C. – It’s our nation’s capital and all.
• Some Puerto Rican Guy – To represent Puerto Rico. Note: Does not have to actually be Puerto Rican, just Spanish. No one will know anyway.
• A Kodiak Bear – Shake things up a little. Imagine if he wins, it would be pandemonium. Plus, who else is possibly going to stand a chance against…
• Chuck Norris – Because Chuck Norris fucking said so.
• The WWE Champion – Politics are filled with as much, if not more bullshit than professional wrestling, so it’d be a perfect match.
• The NCAA Champs – Ok, so they’re not technically A candidate so much as 12 or 15 candidates, but it’s time the winner of the NCAA tournament got something better than a fucking trophy.
• Miss America – So she’s got the beauty but no brains. So what? Bush has neither. Plus, do you think Iran would dare bomb a pair of tits like that?
• American Idol Winner – More Americans vote each week for their Idol than they do the President, so this makes perfect sense.
• Carl Weathers – Gains automatic entry based on the fact that he’s the only member of the original Predator trio (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura) not in politics.
• Youtube Winner – You’d think this would be a slot reserved for the person who uploads a Youtube video detailing the best and brightest plan for digging America out of the doldrums. WRONG. This slot goes to the biggest asshole on Youtube, as voted on by his peers. I’m talking about a guy who uploads a video of him beating his children, or cheating on his wife with her sister, or stealing money from the poor. A real jerkoff is what this country just might need.
• Andrew W.K. – The most positive man in America, and quite frankly, my personal hero. Will teach America how to “Party Hard.” Also, how to save money on laundry bills by wearing the same t-shirt and jeans for 5 straight years.
• John Basedow – Those abs. Those abs.
• The Pope – Was such a hit in his recent visit to NYC, we’ve brought him back by popular demand, whether he likes it or not. Can fight each match in the Popemobile too. Which will come in handy when he’s facing…
• Jet Li – International martial arts superstar takes on the Pope to finally answer the age old question – who’s more powerful, Jesus or Bruce Lee.

Each match lasts until one opponent either submits, goes into a coma, or just flat out dies. There’s no time limits, no ties, and no runoffs. Two men (or women, or in this case, bears) enter, one man (woman or bear) leaves. When there are only two competitors remaining, we then let the country vote for which one should be our next President in the most Democratic and trusted way – a show of hands. Then they fight to the death anyway. If the person (or bear) who emerges victorious is also the winner of the general vote, then they become President. If they don’t win the general election, we start all over again with a whole new tournament. Now you might be asking, why make them fight in the first place? Why not let the people’s vote choose the winner? Because you can’t give the people too much power. They’re human, they’re prone to making mistakes. Why not leave everything up to a combination of choice and fate?

My money’s on The Bear.