(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #7 - Dilate by Ani Difranco

Can't just pick LPs for myself, though I'd honestly love to own this on wax, but it would make my wife and at least the oldest kid stoked too. I listen to far more Ani Difranco than you'd probably expect from a 230 pound alcohol-fueled overeducated piece of white trash from southside Virginia, but I come by it honest. The first era of exposure to Ani Difranco music was when I was first dating my wife a long time back in Richmond, when we were both pretty different people. I was a lost ass dude crashing on couches, or in closets, or on linoleum floors, or wherever really, finishing up my last semester of college, and getting fucked up on the regular. I dug my wife, and she dug me, but I was in the type of place where no matter how much I dug somebody, a couple percocets and a 12-pack of PBR would sidetrack me to like another city or some shit. I was cheating on her, and cheating on the girl I was cheating on her with, and cheating everything I could, straight up con man for the only time I've been that in my life, at least that proudly. I guess I've always been a con man because most folks tend to think a lot higher of me than I know myself to be. But at that point, I was wide open, and you could've just replayed the hook to "Self Destruction" by KRS One and friends real faintly in the background all the time, because it would've made sense. I wouldn't have heard it though.
Anyways, a date for me and my wife back then usually entailed getting an 18-pack of Budweiser in cans and pointing one of our vehicles out of that fucking cesspool of Richmond, usually either east on Route 5 or head down 60 into Goochland and into Cumberland County, where my dad grew up. We'd find side roads to get off on, looking for logging trails to just kick it and drink beer and chill out without the glare of the neon city lights tinging our soul with a thick electronic BZZZZZZZZZZ all the goddamned time. Probably that's why we ended up together years after even my cheating ways, because it was in those momentary escapes we could see what was really underneath all the grit and grime of being young and lost in a goddamned shithole of a city. Well, there would be times where these outskirt excursions would come after me fucking things up in one way or another, being taken care of like a baby after going black after too much of this or that, or disappearing for a few days, and our night time country date would be thick with tension, so I'd pound the 18-pack with a super-majority to overcompensate, causing me to pass in and out on the ride back to the BZZZZZZZZZZ. These times, the wife, who was just a chick I kinda loved but couldn't stay true to, she'd be pumping the Ani Difranco, singing in her way that she sings that I steal hear all the time and can hear in our kids when they let it loose, and the songs made perfect sense. I was a complete piece of shit, and I knew it, but you don't want to admit it. If I admitted it outright, she might've stopped enabling me like she did. And as I passed in and out, I'd look over and see her face in the green glow of her Jeep Cherokee's stereo lights, singing loud, beautiful, driving through the country, and it was some real shit to see, especially when in the midst of a bunch of constant fake ass shucking, jiving, conning, conniving, drinking, driving, and barely aliving. I'm thankful that I didn't tear it all asunder so badly that we didn't end up together, out here in the country now for good, not just on a drunken trip for a few hours, and we've got the kids and chickens and pigs and junk cars and buildings and artwork and dreams and life we used to talk about wanting to have. Richmond was a dark ass place, and laughed at all that talk back then. Well fuck you Richmond, and your untouchable face.

Cuvee Du 8eme

AFFORDABILITY: This was mailed to me by my broken legged homeboy Ten Dollar David, so it was free, but it was only one bottle, and I had to drink it, and my time is worth something. Isn’t it? 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: There was only one in the package, and it was tiny, and French. I drank it and it left me feeling unfulfilled and wishing for more. But it magically appeared inside my PO Box, so I guess that counts for something. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Looks like the label was printed on white linen paper like you would've used for your resume back in 1999, before 9/11 changed everything and you started emailing your resume to HR@youfuckfaceyoullbestuckinconstructiontilyoudie.com and you worried more about fonts than the type of paper. But then what if they didn’t have your perfect font? Do you include the font so they can look at your resume in all its glory? Of course not; that’s pretentious as fuck of you, and who the hell is gonna unzip and plug in a font for somebody’s random resume, especially when it’s a fat lady at the human resources office looking at it and she’s thinking more about if she can eat one of those donuts in the break room and not trigger her diabeetus by lunch time. The very uppermost left-sided thing on the label says, “be smart, say it in French: ((Q-V-DUE-WHEATY-M))”. That’s what it says. This is the stupidest fucking beer ever. If we lived ten years in the future, this beer would include a font file when you downloaded it so that you could properly see just how clever its label really was. 0 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Cuvee Du 8eme is made by a Switzerland company but written with some French bullshit and imported by Connecticut people. Do the Switzerlese speak francais? I do not know. Whoever makes it does so with a nice looking bottle, so they have a flair for style. Yet the label looks like somebody printed it on their computer, so they cut corners in cost, and still charge the astronomical realm of prices, I’m sure. They are confused people obviously, which is understandable. European culture is so entrenched and so old that the cellular memories probably cross wires internally, not to mention the thousands and thousands of years of history and the pollutants and buried environmental scars from all that. Somewhere a couple sediments down, the Plague is still kicking it over there. Still though, I cannot give a beermaker credit because of the poor upbringing they might have had that left them confused and needing therapy. There comes a time when a beermaker should be old enough to know better. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: How could a gift from an old friend be so disappointing? I think I was reading about this beer on the internet at some point and people were all like talking about the year or some bullshit like that. I don’t understand. I don’t care about beer, good or bad, to become a historian. I like to drink things that make my brain wonky, and I like them to have interesting tastes, which is funny since beer, good or bad, is an acquired taste. Cuvee Du 8eme will never cross my lips again. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4/5 STAR!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #10: "Dancing in the Moonlight (It's Caught Me in the Spotlight)" by Thin Lizzy

I have in the past been known to accuse Thin Lizzy of immense overratedness, and my wife one time summed them up a little too perfectly to overcome, as sounding like Elton John and REO Speedwagon got drunk together. So as a whole, I do not necessarily enjoy Thin Lizzy. But there are times in my life where it is just starting to be fall with a slight nip in the air but you can keep the car window down and it is raining like a motherfucker, night has fallen, and you still have to drive two more hours to get to the couch you are going to sleep on, so you pull over at some shit ass convenience store in the middle of nowhere because you are riding back roads to hopefully minimize the reach of the long yet easily confused arm of the law, and buy yourself a couple of double deuces of Budweiser, or Bud Light, since that and Bud Light Lime and Coors Light are pretty much your only four choices at shit ass middle of nowhere convenience stores, and it is during stints of life like that where Thin Lizzy is the most perfect and glorious music that can be heard. Basically, if the world was full of degenerates who were openly degenerated, Thin Lizzy is music from that world, for the easy listening set, like John Denver music for a post-Apocalyptic world that somehow managed to piece back together an entire civilization.
Like this song... this is a stupid fucking song if you let yourself just notice it fresh. But somehow the weird warpedness of Thin Lizzy, again... only under proper mental conditions, makes it somehow a great thing, even though it seems like it would be some stupid hippie bullshit. It is not.
Thin Lizzy really is one of the most confusing musical acts of the rock variety to have ever existed. I would say most people who outright say they are the greatest shit are saying so because they think they are supposed to, but most thinking music fuckfaces vary wildly in their own personal opinion on Thin Lizzy, from year to year. And it is because of this, they survive on the fringes of music.
STEAL "Dancing in the Moonlight (It's Got Me in the Spotlight)"
NEXT UP: Road dog memory makers!

(7s) Fred Durst List Intro

I have always had a confidence that fame would someday surround my stupid name, and around a decade ago, it was a major goal of mine to use that fame for good. Namely, this would encompass taking up a couple of charitable causes to make poor ass kids from shitburg towns maybe grow up with a little more self confidence, or at least a stronger sense of identity other than, "Damn, we fucked." But also, I would want to smash empty alcohol bottles, preferably large ones, over the head of Fred Durst, as he was, at the time I came up with this life goal, riding the brief wave of popularity that the bad white rapper/crappy rock band cross-genre was experiencing. Fred Durst seemed to me to be the antithesis to everything that made sense inside my brain, and it was bothersome that people would even momentarily like him. Of course, one should never be shocked at how stupid the things the masses enjoy are, but also, a guy like that was bound to fall back down anyways. After that hideous remake of a Marvin Gaye song, not to mention just too many public displays of how clueless he really was, he faded into the woodwork. I do remember at one point he was given some token executive A&R position at Interscope, so I don't know if he parlayed his youthful success into the Hollywood Jew career track, which, not to push tired stereotypes, to be fair is followed just as often by non-Jews, including regular white people and black people and Latina women in pant suits very commonly nowadays.
Nonetheless, I've still always wanted to bust Fred Durst upside his head with an empty wine jug, regardless of whether he's famous or not anymore. But over the years, inside my brains, I've kept a running list of people comparably deserving, according to my own highly biases judgements, of a busted up head. The list you will read over the coming days will be seven such folks, some of whom have surpassed Fred Durst in filling me with vitriolic infrared vision, and others who haven't come close but deserve mentioning, mostly so I can fill out an entire list of seven. Honestly, combining famous people who suck and real life people I hold unnecessarily long grudges against, I'd probably be hard pressed to come up with an actual seven people to bust upside the head with a bottle, with thought, but for creative purposes, let's just pretend.
Don't get me wrong though. If you gave me 7 bottles and a bust a head free card with each one, and we put them in an old vegetable box in the back of my truck, I'd be done busting them up by the end of the month, without problem. Day to day affairs always create bustable heads, but to actually premeditate such a violent outburst, it's hard to justify so easily. But nonetheless, I made a list.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #11: "Ladies Night (live)" by Helder O Rei Do Kuduro

Let me just say up front that I can’t recommend the After the End of the World blog over in the link list on the sidebar enough. That dude has turned me onto a lot of music I never would’ve even given a chance otherwise, including this song, which though I have no aural proof to know so, makes me assume that kuduro music is the greatest shit to have sex with strange women to in seedy hotels where the owner speaks bad Portuguese.
Kuduro music is a type of dance music that blew the fuck up in Angola, which I didn’t know shit about. In fact, here is your short C.I.A. World Book-style Bio on Angola by Raven Mack’s brain: It is somewhere in Africa, not the totally wonderful western part nor the fucked up central part but kind of up towards the northeast part, just kinda centered, like maybe near that cluster of The Sudan and Kenya, just not so Muslim. It is one of the last communist countries on earth, and it has the most awesome fucking flag on earth as well, a gangsta as fuck red and black deal with a hammer and sickle except instead of sickle it’s a half of a cogwheel, and instead of a hammer it’s a machete. They also hosted the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament this past year, where the Togo team got shot the fuck up by Angolan rebels, which means there are people rebelling against the Angolan communist government, probably brainwashed by Radio Free Africa or some shit against their own traditions and into Wal-Mart Supercenters, not realizing Wal-Mart has old people in blue vests with a smiley face flag, not awesome machetes and cogwheels and all. That’s Angola.
But apparently, it was also a Portuguese colony, which means kuduro music has jumped the Atlantic over to Brazil (another former Portuguese colony) and holds some dance club sway in Portugal itself. It’s really interesting, all this time later, how the colonial rulers still benefit from the cultural tomfoolery of their former subjugates.
Okay, this song... Helder O Rei Do Kuduro, which means Helder the King of Kuduro. After listening to this song, I have no doubt about it. It’s crazy yell singing slow down then amp it up energy that sounds perfect to do amphetamine hallucinogens in a dingy third world country club to, who gives a fuck if you might get robbed on the way home but maybe you’ll just party all night because it’s safer in the daylight than at night anyways but then again you’re never truly safe so fuck it, let’s go rub up on that light brown woman with the beautifully big ass over there and see if she wants to get drunk with me and make abortions. I cannot begin to hype you the fuck up on this song enough.
I think I’ve said this about thirty-nine times on this blog, but it really bums me out that the so-called World Music scene is so stiflingly and stoned down to that boring fucking Putamayo style of homogenized foreigner music that’s perfect for selling organic vegetables to at Whole Foods, but not really the vibe or speed of the real rest of the World, at least not the parts that still have some of their soul left intact. This sounds like music you play on your djembe and then smash it into bits after you’re done and fuck the first animal that crosses your path afterwards, not get all soulful with your drum like it’s a goddamned bible or some shit.
So yeah, this song is the shit, bros.
STEAL "Ladies Night (live)"
NEXT UP: Music to drive drunk by!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #6 - Pentagram by Pentagram

Pentagram is a weird ass 1970s/1980s metal band from northern Virginia led by some wack ass dude who still looks like it's 1979 to this day, and over time they have become a cult figure within the metal community, for being an obscure American Black Sabbath on drugs. Their first album was re-released under the title Relentless, but I do not want any re-released bullshit. I want the original flavors, in all it's unmastered gloriousness.
First time I heard this was after going to North Carolina to see a bonafide authentic Mexican lucha libre show, where they did the Mexican national anthem and all the illegal immigrants in attendance did that weird Battlestar Galactica arm across their body thing that made me realize we are doomed in our fight against the Mexicans, and I ended up crashing at my boy Boomer's house. He was playing the first Pentagram LP, the first time I had been turned onto them.
They are awesome as fuck. If you don't know that, that's fine. I understand. This is the internet, which is for entertainment not learning, so you can learn about them whenever you feel the time. Personally, it is fucking hot in this house and I am not going to put the air conditioners in until my wife absolutely makes me because the freon weakens your will, and when combined with the cellular phone waves in the air and the fluoride in our toothpaste, it makes me die. So I am going outside to pump some Pentagram through the dumpster 1970s speaker sitting on a milk crate with a tarp over top in my back yard, coming from the camper, and jam the fuck out. “Some say I’m an advocate of lucifer... some say I’m a child of god.” No fucking doubt, bro, no fucking doubt.

Paulaner Salvator Double Bock

AFFORDABILITY: We had just homebrewed up some new beer, and were going to be bottling it, so big homebrew-agreeable bottles were on my mind. But when you are at the white people grocery store where they sell the fancy beers, that type of purchase can make your chest and lungs work funny style, $5 a bottle, sometimes more if it's that crazy Belgian shit with the cork and wire twisted around to keep it from popping bottles even without the Birdman's involvement. But the Paulaner Salvator was sitting there, very modestly, like a silent monk kicking the grand funk, at like $2.50 per bottle. That ain't too bad for some high alcohol content style beer in a bottle shaped like it's gonna pull an AAARRGGGGH out of your soul, especially if additionally unlocked by some old Hawkwind. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: The Paulaner Salvator with its accelerated destruction mode, even with only two 22 ounce or so bottles, gave my brain the freedom of irresponsible thought processes that it so desires. I felt the monkiness (and that doesn't mean I went to Catholic churches as a dumbass kid). 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Looks to be a monk and a gentleman of much finery both smiling mischeviously over a frothing silver pitcher of beer, yet the label patterns it to look like a woodgrain. It looks like they might be going to have sex with each other eventually, although at the same time, at one point I guess only monks made awesome beer, so it might just be some rich dude coming to get himself a pitcher of the good shit from the dudes who wear brown robes with rope belts. Monks always have the nice rope belts with the knots and thick golden rope that look like fancy lady drapes. The monk guy on the label looks a little like the crusty principal asshole from Head of the Class, but he also has an old man's mohawk, with hair on both sides and a Mr. T top. I have never in my life seen anybody bald in such a way. There is also, in both the main label and the little top of the bottle wrap, a round shield with a younger looking monk all bronzed Grecian style sporting the pointy long beard of a Mountain Dew drinking dirtbike trickster, and I have to assume that's the younger image of the same old dude about to have sex with the fancy gentleman in the main label. It's good to reminisce on our more purified youthful days. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Paulaner Salvator is owned by monks, good honest monks who do the Lord's work, not molest kids or hate gays or people who kill unborn babies or worship magic Muhammads that fly off into space without a safety helmet on like a spiritual Scud missile. I am sitting in the dark tonight writing by lamplight after spending two beers worth of time standing on my magic stump by the pig pen, soaking up the stars and night time and trying not to get freaked out by the strange energy surrounding me the past couple days, so I can’t look at the bottle to see what company actually is behind it all. Sometimes you just have to believe. Not everything can be proven or backed by science (a religion itself... trust me, I’m on the inside of it now and see it everyday). Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? I bet out of the seven million people lolling through their internet-wasted days about those Miracles, most of them don’t know how magnets work. They don’t care to know. It just is. The monks need to start making hallucinogenics too, methinks. 7 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The Paulaner Salvator Double Bock was a most pleasant experience, and it helped me stifle the terible nightmares of my pigs eating me, which have become more graphic and intense. Lately, I've had to piss really bad, but I am in high school, except high school is all fucked up and dilapidated like we need Joe Clark to come swing a bat at the kids as well as the county budgeteers. So all the bathrooms are like these big open bathrooms that are nasty as fuck and stained by diseased shit and the only thing separating the stalls are flaps of tin siding kind of stuffed into position. And I don't have any shoes on. And I'm trying to find a good one to piss in, looking and looking, bumping into the kid from 10th grade health class who went to prison for robbing a gas station and once pulled an Uzi on a weed smoking partner of mine, who I just saw inside the Facebooks, the Uzi prison guy not the weed smoker, though he's on there too. Apparently the one is no longer in prison and the other no longer smokes weed. But anyways, I am looking for a semi-clean and discreet stall and finally I find a normal one and open the door and my pigs come diving out, biting at my face, and I wake up. So the Double Bock was tight for shutting that down for a night. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 4/5 STARS!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April '10 #12: "Straight to Hell" by The Clash

I came back upon this song completely by chance, as I had been playing old 45 singles in the kitchen and my oldest kid (11 years) was way into “Should I Stay or Should I Go”. So I downloaded the entire Combat Rock CD, since she also was in some 4H llama club last year, and her llama she trained to do shows was named Casbah, and I told her then where the name was probably from and she was like, “Yeah, whatever,” but then it came full circle. So Combat Rock The Clash entered our household music playing, with the only other The Clash in the house being London Calling, which I put on my wife’s Ipod years ago because it was listed as one of the greatest records of all-time in some stupid magazine listmania thing at some point (maybe Rolling Stone) and I very specifically remember a Penthouse letter from back in the day from my dad’s stash of porns that referenced how great an album that was for fucking as some dude fucked his sister’s best friend on a beach after a wedding with her first black penis to get out of a cop ticket with an amputee midget, which he never thought he’d be writing about, for the first time. I do not love London Calling but it serves a purpose when I’m in the right frame of mind.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, I was initially gonna roll out with the “The Clash is overrated as fuck and only assholes like them” angle, but toned it down because I know people who have dogs named Strummer or children named Strummer or tattoos of Joe Strummer on their crotch regions, so I’ll be civil here and just say The Clash do not impress nor speak to me like they do others. But let’s be honest, I’m a small town whiteboy who has always felt doomed even though I feel destined for fame, so the adult contemporary punk rock sounds has never made sense to me. In fact, most of what has always been considered punk rock has confused me. Being that shithead shithole small town piece of trash, like the epitome of punk rock is The Sloppy Seconds - a big fat shredding guitarist and a ugly mulleted lead singer yelling about “I’m So Fucked Up!” (which is a great song by the way, I should find that shit so it can be on the list one month eventually).
However, in playing this CD out loud in the kitchen, I came back upon this song, which I previously only remember being the track that I figured inspired a really shitty western movie I once watched starring Deborah Harry. I had forgotten it was a bonafide The Clash song, and a good one at that. What triggered this memory was the new musics, as M.I.A.’s mega-hit “Paper Planes” is a reworking of a couple of loops from “Straight to Hell”. This of course had me playing them back to back while the kids cut out the lights and had a dance party in the kitchen, to over-analyze the tweakings and remixings that the new derivative song did to the original sound. Oddly enough, it sounds stupider. Bass for bass’ sake, which buries the really strange rolling drums effect of the original The Clash version.
This led me to playing this song a lot, but also my daughter with her Ipod has run up the count on this song to get it on the list. She was also playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” incessantly for like two hours one Saturday afternoon, and I asked her why. She said it was to make me write about it. I told her that it didn’t do it for every song in our shared Itunes, but only ones that were actually on my gaypod shuffle. This bummed her out. So apparently, next month I have agreed to include that song on my gaypod so that I have to write about it. I asked my daughter why she wanted me to write about the song for my blog which she can’t read anyways and will probably never see, and she said, “It makes me happy.” And then my second kid piped up about wanting me to put Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” on my gaypod too so I could write about that, and I just kinda ducked out the conversation at that point.
STEAL "Straight to Hell"
NEXT UP: Crazy African bullshit!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #5 - Long Haired Lounger/Dread Headed Stranger by Prolo

At one point during the Solaris Earth Pipeline experiment, the Psyopsogist was gonna sink some money into printing some sort of S.E.P. 12-inch, except it wasn't gonna be a real record, just a collection of songs, and I'm sure if he paid for it, he'd want to do the album art, which means it would've been some space age spaciness done with a low amount of creativity that he probably saw on some obscure movie or some shit at some point. And that would be what I have for myself on vinyl had that happened.
Luckily it didn't happen, and I would always prefer an actual CD you make be what you press up on vinyl instead of some music version of a vanity chapbook. Our last bullshit, 45s on 33, wouldn't embarrass me if we had that done on vinyl (you can still google "Solaris Earth Pipeline" and the sharebee link for that CD comes up... I don't know if any of them still work or if sharebee will put computer AIDS inside your laptop, but it is there... do what you must with that knowledge).
But if I could have one full-length piece of music I did with the few different projects I've been involved in over the years on vinyl, it would be this CD, mostly because so much of who I am is deeply layered in this one. You meet me in real life, and I'm not some wacked out polysyllabic know-it-all asshole like I sometimes came across as in the S.E.P. stuff. I'm just a simple-assed dude with bad genetics who has been educated beyond his intelligence. Or I'm a really intelligent regular ol' piece of shit who was born to lose. But both those sides play into that album.
Really, all in all, there's only one song, even a few years later, that I'd take off, and usually I hate anything I do two months after I done did it. Plus, I started writing sangin' lyrics around this time, and with Brown's multi-track bluegrass harmonizing from another level he does, some of these songs are fucking classic. Like shit that if I heard and wasn't involved at all, I'd be like, "Holy fuck, this is awesome. Why isn't there seventeen more things like this in the world? What's wrong with this world?" Mostly though, this was a CD I did that I know the same type of hopeless degenerate/endless romantic/trapped in a small town but with dreams of being a road dog people could dig on.
Now Boogie Brown's got a kid, and I've got three, and we live three hours apart, and have the fucking endless unloungery of this modern world trying to stifle us. But I'm glad to say we've been starting to get some new shit together. Hopefully we'll have some more of this shit ready by summertime. But it's gonna be hard to top the awesomeness of the Long Haired Lounger/Dread Headed Stranger CD.

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #4 - Space Ritual by Hawkwind

For some reason now that it’s gotten warm out and I drink beer like beer, I have hit a stoner rock phase. Tonight, right before bedtime, the two-year-old was rock-n-roll dancing with me naked (I was still wearing clothes), which consists of holding my hands and doing crazy bounces and jumps, to Kyuss. I said, “Hold up,” and went over and cut the stereo up louder, and she just giggled crazily and bounced higher. Having kids is the bestest thing you can do to make the world not be so goddamned sterile and fucking white. Anyways, the thing about the whole stoner rock genre, which credits itself springing from Black Sabbath basically, is that there used to be that whole British Space Rock genre that dabbled in this darkness, but Sabbath took the furthest. Uriah Heep has some wacky shit. And of course Hawkwind, when dialed in appropriately, is the fucking best shit there ever was. It’s really a shame they lived long enough to suck it up. I think they’re still touring, as old men acid casualties. But this live album, which I don’t even rightfully know if it was an album at any point, is the fucking shit. I am so bored with doing rap music now that I usually just want to do retarded shit like make ten songs of long two to three minute Hawkwind loops and pitch shift lyrics about spaceships made of granite.

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #3 - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams

This is a most critically accepted CD offering from Lucinda Williams, the highlight of a magazine dork review guy's musical darling, and that turns me off. Plus, this is considered a classic of the "I like the idea of country music but hate those ignorant fuckers that actually listen to country music radio" alt.country genre. (You judgemental fuckers, how come ignorance is from social conditioning when non-white, but when it's white people, for some reason it's their own fault? I bet you don't want them dating your daughter either, you fucking assholes.) But the thing is, there's real shit in here, deeply embedded, deeper than your regular fucker with a guitar and a dollar store composition book to jot down lyrical ideas can even begin to scratch at. There's a certain fuckedness to it all; it's very downtrodden and sinking into some things. But there's also a pride about it all, that yeah this is bad, but I can fix it and it's better than the alternative. That basically is the white trash mindframe. And I don't pretend to be an expert or an authority or nothing; I am just who I am. I grew up how I did, and today my dumb ass was wearing a button down shirt tucked into some dumb ass khakis (from Goodwill, naturally) and walked into a goddamned soul-forsaken Whole Foods to buy two stupid fucking things, which of course cost almost $13. So it's not like I'm sitting around drinking beer and making bets on who's gonna win a fight between my down's syndrome cousin and simple minded son who sleeps with pigs in the afternoon for fun, which is nice, because it keeps the pigs calmer and more accessible. But I know real shit because I've stepped in enough real shit and was sprouted from real shit. And this album is some real shit, alt.country cul-de-sac PBR-drinker approved or not.
Thing is, none of the rural half-wild hopeless motherfuckers out there really like country music that comes on the radio. I've passed this CD along to a few people, and everybody who's heard it is like, "Man, who the fuck is this? I've never heard her on the radio." Again, people's ignorance is not completely their own fault all the time. Partially it is, yeah, that's true, but you can't blame people for not knowing something they've never been showed.
So yeah, one time I went into the indy dork record store a block off the downtown mall in Charlottesville, and there was a brand new copy of this in LP format, shrinkwrapped purity, and I was gonna get it, but new vinyl costs $15 (at that point), which is a hard pill to swallow, especially when I ended up digging through his used crates and finding six or seven go-go 12-inches for a dollar apiece, plus I bought a third extra just-in-case copy of The South's Gonna Do It by the Charlie Daniels Band. That right there is DJ/hip hop culture mixing with country music more than anything else in my life, the fact that I will buy any copy of that or Red Headed Stranger, just because. I think I have nine albums just of those two records. And some people don't even own nine albums total. I am the harbinger of retroactive stylages.

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #2 - Master Of Puppets by Metallica

I has the Kill 'Em All and I has the Ride The Lightning, and I had at one point thought that would be the only Metallica LPs I needed, using my reverse most recent is the best Metallica methodology. Except Master Of Puppets is more awesome than I've liked to admit, mostly because at my first job the shitty boss's son who slept in the warehouse drove a really nice truck and would always talk about Master Of Puppets. Assholes ruin a lot of things in this life for regular people, and this was such a situation. But I am man enough to admit it was a mistake. I cannot let asshole offspring of modern day wage slave overlords ruin the goodness of the for real goodness. "Master... master..."
I have a camper I hang out in when it's warm, and it has four turntables of assorted styles, and I keep milk crates full of albums out there, and there's a lamp I got at the thrift store that when you turn it and click it once the regular light comes on and a second time makes a red glass bottom base of the lamp come on with the white bulb and a third click leaves just the red glass light at the bottom, all opium smoke shop style. What I am saying is this all makes for the perfect environment for a fully grown man to get high as fuck and listen to a record like Master Of Puppets and trip out on things that he forgot he probably tripped out on 20 years ago. I am old, and yet still half-retarded.

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April ’10 #13: "Ghetto Red Hot" by Supercat

Oh man, I do not remember the time perfectly because I am a man not a digital calendar, but there was a point where in the hazy violent humidity of early to mid 1990s Richmond, Virginia, this was The Fucking Song you would hear coming through tinted windowed Jeeps like mobile sub-woofers bomping down Broad Street. Those were the days, a stupid fucking small town hick transplanted to VCU before they regentrified that whole area within six blocks of campus, where I'd walk or ride my shitty 10-speed down Broad Street to the Willie's with the Chinese shoe store next door at whatever corner that is, I think maybe 5th Street, but not sure because to this day I still only see it as "where Willie's was". I went through that area a month ago, taking my daughter to the CAA basketball tourney at the Richmond Coliseum, and that corner where the Chinese shoe store (sold regular ghetto fabulous shoes, run by a Chinaman; not selling Chinese shoes, without toespace for women) has a Subway now. That was weird. We rode up Broad Street, heading west, and I told her about how it was, got mad because it looked like Aladdin's was closed, plus they don't take debit cards anyways, and explained what a kefta kabob sandwich was. We rode up Laurel, past the VCU campus, and she was like, "Hahaha, they're all college students, looking very college studentey" and we went all the way into Oregon Hill, over to the house she was born in back in 1999. I was hoping Mamma Zu's was open, but it was Sunday so I knew it wasn't. Plus they got mad rich white bitches hoping to eat there, and I was just gonna try to bum my way into a free hook-up from the owner, who may not even be there anymore for all I know.
I do not know what happened to Supercat. I think I read in my brain's internet one time that he shot somebody in New York City back when raggamuffin artists (as they were called back then, but sounds like something they'd print on pins for people who work at a national chain bagel store) actually had business in NYC, but why did he disappear? He was the fucking supreme shit. It was the remix for his "Dolly My Baby" that introduced Biggie to the world (as well as that other dude with the weird hanging drawl that was like a dude from Harlem pretending to be from Georgia like a urban black dude 1994 Hee Haw skit). Now, Jamaican dudes making music are stuck in Jamaica and never get featured on American rap songs. But at the same time, which situation is going to end better... having some second-rate strippers in love with American money dancing in a youtube video for exposure, or having some fat-assed women shake their ass in front of a tin building? I do not endorse poverty, but I've been a broke ass bitch a number of times in my life, and the best thing about poverty is it frees up a lot of time for fucking. That's basically what dancehall means to me.
STEAL "Ghetto Red Hot"
TOMORROW: Punk rock for the unpunk!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #1 - Straight To Hell by Hank Williams III

Pandora the music website is a great idea, but a problem with it is it's all musically scientific and lacks a respect for the spirit. In my personal life, I feel there is no form of music that needs to be multiplied that Hank Williams III's Straight To Hell LP, especially the strange cokehead country whiteboy meets codeine-drinking screwed and chopped styles of the second CD. It is, to borrow a played out phrase, the shit. I have often looked for other music like this, but it all falls short or goes in a different direction. Wayne Hancock, while cool I guess, is too far on the “like Hank Williams Sr.” tip for my tastes; it makes me think of college city girls with tattoos who are on the roller derby team and have a vintage kitchen table with sparkly top. Those Poor Bastards, who originally wrote “Pills I Took”, are like a happy dirge you play for your own one-man suicide party. Stuff that calls itself “outlaw country” is usually outlaw filtered through the profitability factor of the Nashville sound system, so that a guy like Jamey Johnson or Chris Knight, as pure of heart as they may be, still sound like they might rip off their honest eyes like that old mini-series V and are really just fucking lizards making money for record companies in subversive ways. And stuff that calls itself “alternative country” is usually, from my experience, the idea of honest country music filtered through a series of cul-de-sacs. It’s not necessarily a dishonest form of music; it just don’t know.
I am from a shithole place where hopelessness reigns supreme. I am a chronic fuck-up with bad tattoos, stupid scars, and lifeline on my palm that’s got a few bridges out that I’m gonna have to pull some General Lee jumps to make it to 60, much less 70. Shit man, let me just give you a straight real example... I took my riding mower to get fixed last year at the shop that my dad worked at for nearly 30 years, because I figured I could trust them. My drive belt kept slipping from where I hit a loose piece of tether cable in the field where I used to stake my goats up, and I just bent the pulleys and all back into close enough shape, which worked for a year or two, but it needed fixing. So I took it to that shop, hoping for the hook-up, and the crooked-walking guy who worked with my drunken dad for a decade said he’d hook it up. I had money in the bank to get it done. Except that guy, Lee, was the one who had to do it to make it happen right, and he had a tendency to not show up to work for weeks on end. So it took them a few months to fix my goddamned riding mower, and by that time my own chronic under-employment had left me broke, so I couldn’t pay the $175 to get it back. So I fixed my push mower on my own and power walked my way through 2.5 acres four times last year, in random patches that made my yard look like it was way into De La Soul’s first album. One day, the small engine shop lady called me and I told her I didn’t have no money, could they hold it for me, and she said yeah, which I knew meant they’d charge me for holding it. Fast forward to nowadays. Now understand this was a family business that I’m part of the family of, and it’s a family related name (my grandmother’s maiden name actually) that’s on the business sign outside, yet nobody there is connected to that. Except one cousin, who is back home cleaning up from heroin and opiate painkillers and too much realness at too quick a pace. But he’s solid earth. I call him up to get my mower back and he says he’ll make it happen, but come tomorrow. So I do. And my great uncle is there, who used to own the store, and was the nemesis to my dad’s drunken employment for those decades in the back room of the store, where the repair work was done, where I used to scoot around on this weird sliding seat thing all the time when I was as young as I can remember. I talk to great uncle for a while, who’s over 80 now, and still complains about every goddamned thing on earth like he always did. (This guy actually used to give me old copies of Popular Mechanics, because he wanted me to be an engineer because I was smart. Not laughing, just saying, that’s the history.) Nine months sober from heroin cousin hooked me up on the bill, gave me a couple files to sharpen my chainsaw chain, and we loaded it up on the back of my bruised and battered truck, and then leaned along the bed rails to bullshit away an hour. Another dude I grew up with who works there was chilling, and we should’ve went to get a beer or four, but my truck had an expired inspection sticker, so passing cops were sci-fi flick floating eyeballs waiting to report back to the overlords and ruin my life. And he has offspring and offspring partners to answer at as well. So we just got in our assorted vehicles that aren’t like the ones we wrecked or the ones we used to have last summer, that we got given to us or pieced together to keep running or were allowed to borrow for the time being, and we took our turns down the road in different directions. But we all came from that same place.
That’s why that Hank the Third shit, most especially the Straight To Hell, speaks so goddamned loudly at me. There hasn’t been music from that same place in forever. And there’s a lot of motherfuckers like us out here.

Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout

AFFORDABILITY: In all my years, I don’t remember to be drinking upon a Sammy Smith Oatmeal Stout, probably because oatmeal is some bourgoisie ass shit to me. I grew up broke, with WIC checks and screaming baby sisters who had health problems, so we ate Cream of Wheat mostly, or whatever the generic brand of that was. Man WIC checks are annoying. Even today, when food stamps are so streamlined and like a debit card you can flow with, you actually have pieces of paper with a WIC check and you have to sign like nine of them for your groceries at the store and the person working the register doesn’t know how to do it and then you have to trade your half-gallon of milk in for four pints of milk and all sorts of retarded ass shit. But I’m sure in my life I’ve drank the Oatmeal Stout, especially considering how many hippie-ish girls I’ve been in long-term relationships with. And the Sammy Smith big bottles were on sale at the Kroger, who is my friend when it comes to beer at times. Shit, they were rolling with the $12 12-packs of Stella Artois there for like a month. If beer could be cheaper, I could be richer. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Oatmeal cookies are kinda gross to me, and I’d prefer not to choose them but I do enjoy them if they are sprung on me unexpectedly. My favorite cookie is the fat and soft peanut butter cookie made so well by Mennonite types using massive amounts of butter-flavored Crisco. The only thing that has ever tempted me in the past five years to turn towards a Christian god are these peanut butter cookies and seeing young teenager Mennonites hanging together at the demolition derby at the Rockingham County Fair. That was beautiful. Actually there was a young woman with crazy eyes who also seemed to be Mennonite (she was hanging with them) one time at a parade I took my daughter to. Man, I hope I don’t accidentally have a Mennonite fetish. An oatmeal beer luckily does not taste heavily of oatmeal but why the hell bother if not. And why use oatmeal? I hope there’s something ancient and pagan about it but I would expect it’s just some wacky alterna-beer bullshit that does something lame to a regular man like myself like it “dries up the fermenting process and gives it more of a wild hops taste” although really I wanted to write something stupider but could only think of wild hops, which actually would be cool, except wild hops don’t work like regular hops so you can’t really brew successfully with them and plus they’ll overtake all your other shit because they so wild. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It’s a nice label, like all Sammy Smith labels be going about theyselves. The gold wrapper around the top of the bottle is a classy touch, like you’re drinking some fancy assed $250 a bottle champagne or something, when it’s only beer. I will forever be a beer drinker because that’s my caste in life. We just got given by my bro-in-law a bunch of wine, some of it some seriously expensive wine, and I can get into that stuff, but it’s just not in my bloodstream like beer is. I mean that in both a family tree genetical type way as well as a literal day-to-day interpretation. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Samuel Smith is not a company but an overlord, a cruel yet mindful overlord who knows that industrial overlords cannot get over by the spiked whip alone. I am not sure what other beers they make other than exporting their fancy big bottles of white people beer to America for old men who have bushy mustaches and an ability to talk for far too long about deli meats, as well as for hippie girls both new to adulthood and far enough down their path in life to already have an etsy page for their homemade dresses. But I am not down with overlords, having underclass stamps on all my white blood cells. This is why I give blood as often as I can, because I am doing my part to bring down society from within, literally. The only problem is, and this is not a well-known fact, the upper crust elite type of people, they have private blood bank things set up for if they need blood, kind of like how normal people find out if somebody's kidney matches them, except it's more about the socio-economic match. But that's not really shocking. If they don't want their kids to possibly mix blood with the loser lower classes by making children together, you should expect they don't want an automatic injection of poverty and shiftlessness and ickery shot into their bodies. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Samuel Smith is like one of those open brick fireplaces with a mantle kicking mad dental work and some sort of faux finish that looks like it’s 390 years old when actually some blonde haired lady in a late model BMW spent two afternoons at $40 an hour doing it... it feels good, but isn’t very practical. Or useful. For one Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, I could’ve had three tall cans and two fried egg sandwiches, although I would’ve had to snag a couple mayonnaise packets from the deli counter probably. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - April ’10 Intro

I have decided to roll out the J.J. Krupert in a different manner starting this month, with a daily post of the songs that make up my stupid countdown of shit that I be playing semi-obsessively, complete with a stealing link for you to taste test the crap. Now two things about this I am uncomfortable with. First off, the internet is all about stealing music, and I have no problem with that. But this is not, nor will it ever be, some stupid fucking music blog. There are only actually about seven good music blogs left inside the internet, if that, as most of it is a compilation of links and demands to thank motherfuckers for the illegal download or share links back to the blog if you jack the upload link. That's a fairly pathetic attempt at ego boost through internet traffic, and I'm not gonna roll with that. I'm also not gonna put up one of those fake ass "The links on this page are for reviewing purposes only and you should remember to support the artists!" or that standard bullshit legal disclaimer that most music stealing blogs have. I love music, and you should too. This is shit I love. If you do not see fit to support the artist, fine. You live by that. And actually you probably support them more by going to see them live and buying a fucking t-shirt at the merch table. Plus some of the shit I will talk upon is obscure outdated nonsense from far-off lands, so you couldn't support it with money if you wanted to. Hell, you probably support that type of stuff by stealing it through my link to a song more than you could any other way. Spread the disease.
I also feel like a punk ass for switching up the format from one long ass post into 14 smaller posts, because it's not the overload of nonsense that I like to put my fake name behind. It makes me feel like I'm trying to drive up hits to pretend I'm internet famous and can con companies into giving me money for banner ads or some bullshit. But I'm not. To be completely honest, I just wanted an excuse to put up wacky pictures more often, usually pictures that I stole from other wacky websites, to make the thing more visually pleasing to me, and more of a clusterfuck of nonsense. I am all about clusterfucks of nonsense.
So with that intro, we shall start the J.J. Krupert Countdown of the Most Played Songs That I've Not Yet Talked About Under The J.J. Krupert Tag On My Tiny Shuffle Ipod Survival Of The Fittest Machine For The Month Of April, this time of day every day, for the next two weeks, bro. Feel free to comment. Also as a completely unrelated sidenote, there is a PO Box to the right there that is my bonafide actual PO Box that exists in real life like ugly people and Ikea stores and barbed wire tattoos on the girlfriends of dudes who wanted to be a Marine but didn't get in so now they lift a lot of weights. I have started a bonafide real life in the print thing that will come out every month or two, limited release each time, and every month the cumulative top three dudes who have sent shit to my PO Box will get a care package including whatever zine I've done. As it stands right now, I know RussMac in Georgia would be at the top of that list the end of this month, then probably Jersey Jared, and finally Ten Dollar David in Richmond, but that dude Joel I think from Williamsburg or some shit probably would deserve consideration too, but at the end of each month, the top three people who have mailed shit to my PO Box who are the strongest in my mind will get a package that might be nothing much or might be a shitty box full of nothing much more than nothing much. But there is that as well.
Damn... and I wanted to stop after that "I am all about clusterfucks of nonsense" but I had to go and ruin it with my usual verbal interpretation of that philosophy.
TOMORROW: Old school flavors of Richmond remembrances on warm Friday afternoons!

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After Intro

Look, I am a white guy who grew up right when CD technology (and profit margins) were phasing out vinyl, and also hip hop was blowing up to the point Colonel Sanders died and became a cartoon doing the backspin across the screen like a Press Your Luck whammy. So it is only expected that I would be obsessively compulsive and collect records like an autistic audiophile with triple disability checks to spend. (Speaking of which, has there been any study on why children of the ‘80s became so obsessive compulsive, and helped create all the stupid things we helped create? Were previous generations like this, just they didn’t have the internet to fully indulge themselves and their bizarre obsessions?)
In my adult life, it seems the more I have children, the less I buy records. At one point, inside the Secret Clubhouse message board, we used to do a thing called the $20 Record Challenge, where the rules were you had a simple $20 and you spent it on records all at one time in one record store. This gimmick allowed me to get clearance from the home office for more than a couple $20 binges in the basement of Plan 9 Carytown, or digging through the strange 7-inches in the back room of that weird ass record store in Ruckersville. Now, my records have been scattered amongst the compound. There’s stacks of 7-inch singles in the unfinished hallway cabinet. There are sideways stacks of albums in the front room, plus a ton of records in the camper behind the house. The odd diaspora is all the records used to be in the front room, but the best ones made it outside to the camper over the past two years, but then probably two milk crates worth of the best of the best made it back into the house for the kitchen record player or those times I hooked up the USB turntable inside, so my records are all over. That’s a long ways from when I used to have them separated into about five different genres, then alphabetized by artist. The best set-up was this big two shelf rack I had that held them all at that poine (which was about 1500, which I made my limit... if it went bigger than the racks, it was time to thin out the herd), and I would pick records out to play, and then when it’d get sag to the stacks, I’d push the records to the edges from the middle, and fill the bottom spaces with ones from the top, so essentially, my best records would be towards the middle of the top shelf. None of it was alphabetical, or even slightly organized, and there’d be clusters where I could recognize, “Oh yeah, that was when I was in a British space rock kick,” or “Man, I was playing the fuck out of shitty B-team Wu-Tang instrumentals there for a while.” Records are the greatest material possession I’ve ever unnecessarily accumulated. As much as people would tell you otherwise, they’ve never been made obsolete. Records are my friend.
This will be a list of records I wish I had. I’ve tried to limit it to records that actually exist on the earth, but I haven’t actually finished the list yet, so who the fuck knows? Most likely, knowing me and how I get bored with being serious about anything, I’ll probably make up some complete nonsensical rigamarole, say something retarded, and call it a wrap.

Shiner Bock

AFFORDABILITY: I think it was either "All Bock Beers Are On Sale" week a few weeks back, or I just got hung up on the word "bock" as I am known to do. I'm a word nerd, bro, so sometimes shit just flows into my brain and gets stuck there and I conjure it up into a thousand different sentence structures. But this Shiner Bock, which I initially believe to be some fake micro style of some megabrewery fermented from the blood of the poor, was on sale at some point. It wasn't that expensive, relatively speaking, but I just balanced my bank book today and realized my tax refund wealth is gone, and now I'm just another broke ass fucker who can't go out to dinner like the rest of the world. Or at least the rest of the American world. The rest of the world doesn't even eat dinner. They are either fasting for their vengeful Lord or have flies hanging out on their eyeballs. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Shiner Bock has a beautiful yellow label with a goat on the motherfucker, so it makes me drink faster, and thus kill enough brain cells fast enough to try not to slur the words when I am telling my wife I paid the Best Buy bill. I know the label aesthetic category comes up separately, but whatever man. This is my gimmick. 3 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: I do not know the correlation between bock and goat, but between the Yuengling Bock Beer label and this harvest gold yellow mountain goat head label, it is clearly a winning drunkard meme, tailor made for shitty t-shirts. Beer and goats are two things I can get down with, and ideally would like to have be a part of the periphery of my life for all of this one, and to be buried with me in my home-welded pyramid-shaped camper trailer after death. I know it will not though, because the dreams of the celebration of my death are bizarre and outlandish, and everybody tends to get bogged down in the confining nature of their personal emotions. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I vaguely remember looking up Shiner Bock and it's made by somebody in Texas that has a Shiner Fest, which conjures up old men in go-karts racing around town, getting drunk, and punching each other like bare knuckles fighters in dress pants from the Goodwill. At one point, me and my two oldest children were in Manchester, New Hampshire for the first time ever as my wife had a conference in Ruraltalia, New Hampshire, and we rolled into Manchester and it was some sort of holiday they don't celebrate in the South, like Old Yankee Day or Labor Day or something, and there had been a parade that we seriously had just missed, because old yankee dudes were loading their go-karts into trailers and the backs of giant ass pick-up trucks, and me and the kids were like, "Aww... we missed the parade." I would imagine the Shiner Fest of Shiner Bocks somewhere in Texas is pretty much the exact same thing, except with a different accent, and for breakfast they use sausage instead of ham in Texas because you need spices to make the shittier parts of the pig taste more good. I will say, at this point, even if Shiner Bock is actually owned by some multi-national corporation that destroys the ozone by shooting aborted fetuses of extinct eskimo tribes into space with hazardous waste duct taped to their bodies, that company at least still supports this stupid festival in somewhere of Texas. Although, to be honest, I may not have actually saw that briefly and might have just made it up in my dreams. Usually when I dream, I'm reading for some reason. Or having to piss really bad, but I'm back in high school, and every bathroom has no walls and the toilets are dirty as fuck and I'm barefoot but when I finally find one I can tip-toe my way to to start pissing, it starts to fill up and overflow because I have to piss so much. At this point, I usually realize I have to piss in real life and should wake up, but I also realize what if I wake up and it's like half an hour til the alarm clock is set to go off, which means I'll go piss, come back to bed, and not get back to sleep because I know the alarm's just gonna go off in a few minutes. So then I just decide to stay asleep and if my dream makes me piss the bed, whatever. At least I'll be well-rested. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Hey, I have no gripes. This whole bock beer that sprung up into my consciousness like an internet meme and then disappeared just as quickly, I have no problem with it. I am sure that often times I make up large parts of the world around me, either outright or at least in the way I see it filtered into through my brain. Shiner Bock is something that I would probably not go out of my way to purchase on my own all the time, but I might sometimes. And if I went somewhere where people who only have one party every seven years were hosting so they had a big cooler full of expensive beer and this was in it next to some Newcastles and Widmer Hefeweizens and Becks Darks and so on, I’d grab this with gusto yet mixed with nonchalance so as to not tip off other mysterious undercover drunkards as to how enjoyable it might be. That’s about the highest compliment a beer that is massively produced yet still too expensive for my weekly shopping habits could ever hope to receive. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 3/5 STARS!

Saranac Irish Stout

AFFORDABILITY: I does not remember where I got it, maybe the Harris Teeter in Crozet while wilding away the hours of my daughter’s ballet class, but it wasn’t that bad. Saranac tends to come in cheaper than most beers, which makes me suspect it’s owned by Coors. But I was still on my Russian Stout kick, and you can’t get thick dark beers like that in regular people America, so I went for what looked like it might be dark (it wore black on it’s label because black was how it felt inside) and cross-referenced that with how much I felt like enabling myself with stupid purchases of alcohol horror stories, and ended up going with this. In that sense, and in the spirit of capitalistic competition, it is a pure winner. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I have an unfinished giant hurricane-strength shelf system in the hallway, and it stays cold in the wintertime in our hallway because our upstairs has baseboard heat and our main house part has woodstove heat, but the hall just sits there, no sunshine, no heat, dank and coolish. So I stashed the Irish Stout in there on a shelf, and when I'd want one, I'd have to go in the hallway and get one. I noticed as I got further into the back part of the six-pack, the floor in the hallway had a little more slant to it. I put a marble on the floor but it rolled the wrong way of what my slant had expected. Fermented drinks. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It's at the bottom of the recycling bin at this point, but I remember it had one of those intertwining line designs that look like really stupid tattoos but really good garden layouts. I am into the idea of keyhole gardens where everything wraps around a bulbous design, although it has occurred to me that this is basically a cul-de-sac for plants. Luckily for me plants don't have cars and children and the need to go somewhere to buy shiny new plant things, so it'll probably work in the yard better than it does in the sprawling death of our modern society. I do remember drinking the Saranac and thinking they should do an acid label that was basically the same thing but really darker black and day-glo green, so that it looked like it vibrated if you were in the right mindstate. And companies have money to waste to make sure their labels do certain things in certain demographics, like make dicks hard or gay women happy or appeal to Asian men from age 23 to 37 and shit like that. So I'm sure they can make sure the day-glo green could glow under a black light. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: In my brain, which doesn’t necessarily always coordinate with reality, Saranac is some non-Babylonian Homeland of the UN New York state type shit. I could be wrong, but that’s what my brain thinks. And for as long as we’ve lived on this road, up the road towards town, there’s been another old farmhouse like our’s that this longhaired dude lives at. He had a beat-up pick-up truck, nice but wrecked, and then a Volvo sedan, and a basketball goal, and he would ride his 10-speed the 8 miles to the IGA to buy 12-packs of Miller High Life in the bottle, and he reminded me of my homeboy from growing up who lived down the road named Eric who loved Rush and dirt bikes. I’ve never really talked to this dude, though we do the “What’s up” finger waves in passing, but I’ve built him up as a lounger in my head, though I didn’t know dude. Some chick who was friends with my wife said she knew the dude and he had cheated on his wife and that’s why he lived alone or some shit, but that same chick had beef with someone else we knew, another melodramatic chick, and in a battle of the beefs between two melodramatic chicks, it’s best to remember they are both melodramatic, so be cool with both of them, because they can help not their natural craziness. Anyways, I bumped into that dude up the road at the store the other weekend when me and the baby were buying baking powder and bananas and more beer, so I introduced myself to the dude. He talked funny, like a northerner, and he seemed to lack work, which is no different than he has the whole time he’s lived here, so obviously he comes from money. So I assume he’s heir to the Saranac throne. It kinda bums me out, because I buy three or four dollars worth of lottery tickets every week, hoping to financially bankroll a leisurely lifestyle where I can concentrate on writing and rambling words into coherent statements instead of struggling upstream against the shitflow of my life all the goddamned time. Fucking Saranac ass dude, building a shed with scrap wood that he said he wanted to keep snakes and bugs out of. Who the fuck is worried about snakes and bugsin the goddamned country? The dude up the road, that’s who. The northerner Saranac Volvo sedan dude. He better not come round my house when I’m not around, trying to talk at my wife, or I’m gonna get all Billy Gibbons on his ass. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I don't know, it was a beer, with fake Irish themes, and I was anxious for warm weather so I could wear my alternate Celtics Paul Pierce jersey, black with a shamrock stitched on the front, that I got for $4 from a Goodwill in Shithole, Virginia. It is a beer that I will probably not ever buy again, and in fact, Saranac seems stupid to me. Even the word is annoying. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

Fat Weasel Ale

AFFORDABILITY: Fat Weasel Ale was part of the odd selection of pretend beers at Trader Joe's. Actually, I made my 11-year-old kid pick for me between the Fat Weasel and the Black Toad something or other. She chose Fat Weasel, and I can't fault her for that. The beer wasn't that expensive, plus we got a giant bottle of Grade B maple syrup, and I was super-stoked to see they actually had the crystallized non-sweetened ginger pieces again, because the baby (who is truthfully a toddler) has not been down with the lack of ginger. But what can you do when distributors change their system and stupid fake health food stores in fucking soul suck Short Pump can't get it no more? Nothing. You just wait and hope your consumer product provider decides it's worth their time to go back to providing you with your stupid fucking fix. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: It destroyed, with authority. It were a slam dunk of my bloodstream into giddy feelings of fake euphorics. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: There is a weasel in some sort of Hawaiian old person beach outfit, with a beer. And the label looks like a stamp. But the stamp can't mail anything except my sobriety the fuck away. It's no lazertits.com or anything, but it's okay I guess, especially considering I got it at the stupid Trader Joe's. 2 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: The Fat Weasel is brewed by a Steinhaus Brewing Company, some sort of squarehead operation based in New Ulm, Minnesota. I used to play the dirt track racing video game on my computer screen, but then the processor or something would get too hot whenever we played graphics intensive bullshit and crash out. Then it started doing it when I played bassy music through Itunes too much, like for more than four minutes (Yelawolf was killing it, literally), so I did some research and realized the hand-me-down computer I was handed me down upon had this as a standard problem. I looked up the internet solution to this problem, but the internet doesn’t solve as many problems as it causes, but using my super-scientific mind, I fixed the problem. I opened the computer and blew out all the dust, laid it back on the desk on its side so the airholes have full exposure, and then took an old oscillating fan and plugged it in and cut it on half-speed and leaned it against that bitch. Haven’t had one problem since then. In fact, Yelawolf’s “Box Chevy (Part 3)” is bumping right now, and that was what used to kill it kill it make the screen go black. And once it goes black, it don’t go back, until you let it cool down and do a scandisk on it right quick. Anyways, one of the tracks on the dirt track game was in New Ulm, Minnesota, and I’ve yet to test the video games with the new oscillating fan style with an actual game, so tonight might be the night. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The Fat Weasel was a high alcohol cheap ass fake beer from Trader Joe’s. I had to ride through Short Pump to get it, but luckily that soulless type of trip was enjoyable because me and my oldest daughter were coming home from watching the CAA college basketball men’s semifinals, and enjoying ourselves right nicely even though VCU had lost and now stupid Larry Sanders will probably go into the NBA. My daughter had asked me whether she should knit Larry Sanders a basketball bag, and I had to break it to her that you can never tell with famous people, and the thing you spent a lot of time and care into making, they make think is stupid and not keep or maybe even throw away. It made me proud my 11-year-old daughter loves basketball and can enjoy it, yet still be sweet enough to think of knitting a basketball bag for her favorite player. We are doing good with our children, but they will be doomed once they realize the rest of the world is a giant piece of shit. Oh well. All you can do is what you do. She helped me pick Fat Weasel over some other bullshit fake animal beer though, and I will always remember that. Until I forget. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 4/5 STARS!

Yuengling Bock Beer

AFFORDABILITY: This was a brand of Yuengling that I had never before seen, and it was originally manufactured suggest retail priced at the high end of Yuenglings like they do here in Virginia for the Lord Chesterfield or Porter, a dollar more a six-pack than the regular shit, but for some reason it was on sale down to the other price, although at whatever store I saw this at, the regular price of Yuengling was higher than the regular price at most places I frequently frequent. But nonetheless, it was wacky Yuengling alternate jersey on a Monday night football game new flavor (probably seasonally related, being “bock” seems to be the running fake microbrew meme within big beer companies fake alterna-brands this spring part of the year of our fake lord 2010), and it was the same price as regular stupid Yuengling, so I just had to have it. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Bock beers seem to have goat motifs, which I do not compute. I thunk the bock meant springtime, which it is, because the snow has finally melted and it's been raining the past two days and the greens are starting to green up the hills and horizon. The central Virginia pimp parade of creeping phlox, purple redbuds and golden forsythias'll be pumping up the volume in the next week or two. But I'm not entirely sure on what makes goats a springtime thang, unless bock beer has some goatherder tradition. You'd think beer and goats would be something I'd be hip to, but the whole bock meme seems to be from recent years and not from forever. Nonetheless, having drunk a billion Yuenglings in my short lifetime, it was a pleasure to taste a different Yuengling. Well not really a pleasure, but I was like, "uhhhh... different" with my zombie ass consumer brain. So I drank all six. They worked. 3 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Honestly, the Yuengling Bock Beer is the best beer label I have ever seen in my whole stupid life. It is bold primary red, black, and white, like Shepard Fairey did it, just not so pretentious and gay and colostomy baggish. And it has a big gruffy goat drinking what I assume to be beer from a goblet, but not like all cartoonish and fancy. More like you left a glass full of beer sitting on the picnic table and a goat came up and started drinking it like how you would expect a goat to do that shit. And the label has some slightly questionable 1950s car ad font going on that was probably done by a gay graphic designer who thinks Mad Men is the best show ever, but still, this is the only beer label I've ever seen in my life that I would take the words off and have tattooed on my body, but only if the beer never becomes popular so strangers don't meet me and think, "Hahaha, what an asshole; he has a stupid Yuengling tattoo." 9 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I am sure I have mentioned this, probably many times, but at one point I ended up with my main man Boogie Brown at a dirt track somewhere west of Pittsburgh headed to Ohio and the fastest late model was sponsored by Yuengling proper, so if they can do that, then they are alright so far as I can remember. I know they're probably not the only beer that sponsors a race car, but while Budweiser and Miller Lite and MGD and shit like that sponsors million dollar Nascar bullshit where you can't touch each other, this was a Yuengling car at a bonafide dirt track, because it ain't racing if there ain't dirt in your beer. When I am declared by wealth and my own prophetic scriptures as Billionaire God of the Earthball, I am going to start a PR campaign to make people believe asphalt racing is barbaric pussy nature, and then we'll have giant dirt track circuits, except instead of spending three gazillion dollars on your own cars, everybody brings a car they built and has their sponsor bullshit on magnetic signs or vinyl or something, and you draw numbers and you end up racing someone else's car, but the driver's get points for being the best. That way we won't have this bullshit like we have now that is so fucking boring and painful and good lord even cough syrup with codeine lacing can't make it enjoyable for more than twenty minutes. 5 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Much like Kevin Spacek in The Usual Suspects, as soon as I realized this Yuengling Bock super awesome goat label beer was there, it was gone. This only makes me love it more, because I imagine the life we could’ve had together. The horseshoe games, the cookouts in the back yard with chill music blaring, the rides home from the racetrack in Waynesboro, the liquid lunches at the public park where I claim I was at a meeting across town. Oh weird Yuengling red, black, and white goathead beer, why the fuck were you a seasonal tease? Could you not have at least hung around long enough to enjoy the gorgeous purple/pink blossoms of the Virginia redbuds here in my springtime paradise? We could’ve been great together this afternoon. 6 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 5 & 2/5 STARS!

Dominion Ale

AFFORDABILITY: Dominion is a Virginia brewery and they make Virginia beers, although up in the vast cul-de-sacced wasteland of the northern Virginia clogged corridor that I usually try to avoid admitting exists, much less riding through. But you can find the Dominion 12-packs on special on the regular in my local area of the crooked globe, so we shall give them props on that front. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: The wonderful thing about Dominion Ale that is just like pretty much every beer that's ever been made is the more you drink of it, the drunker you become. I love verbs that can make you the past tense of themselves suddenly like "drink/drunk" does. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Dominion regular beers are all of quality labelhood and stylishness. To be honest, I can’t remember which one is which, and what might’ve been this one, but my hand has gripped itself around all of the non-seasonal ones enough to know it’s okay, it’ll be alright. My homeboy Dready Mike and me used to make the homebrews and on a number of times we drank the Dominion Ale while waiting for the wort to cool its ass down enough to toss the yeast. Homebrewers call that “pitching” the yeast, but in my short life’s experiences, I’ve found that most times people use the word “pitch” it makes them a pretentious asshole. “Pitching” yeast for making fancy pants home beer. The “pitch” for a soccer field. Shit man, even “pitching” horseshoes instead of throwing some shoes. It is no coincidence the fake devil of Bible lore carries a “pitch” fork. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I had what I was gonna say but I think I’ve already said it before. Hard to remember when you write a bunch of nonsense in strange clusters all at once and then for never. Dominion gives money to retarded children to fight Al Qaeda demons in Hellspace, with guns made of happy organic rose petals that turn crusty old shelf mushrooms into rainbows of positivity. But then again, they only do it for a tax write-off. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: They are located in Ashburn, Virginia, which is the same spot as the Washington Redskins, and being they have not blown up Dan Snyder with a fertilizer bomb yet must mean they are straight and narrow type small brewing cats. I can't fault them for their success, but they've never killed (or at least poisoned) Dan Snyder. I don't mind them, but every time I drink them, I am like, "Why don't they kill Dan Snyder?" 2 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 2/5 STARS!

S14: NCAA Tournament Top Returning Scorers - Championship Monday

Short and sweet today. Finally, done with this dumb shit.
#1: Jon Scheyer (Duke guard; 157 previous points in the tourney, 81 in this one) - Punk bitch message board rapper whiteboy.
#2: Kyle Singler (Duke forward; 148 previous points, 89 in this one) - Looks like meth-head MIT project.
#3: Nolan Smith (Duke guard; 129 previous points, 93 in this one) - Token.
#4: Shelvin Mack (Butler guard; 98 previous points, 80 in this one) - Only reason to watch tonight.
#5: Gordon Hayward (Butler forward; 95 previous points, 83 in this one) - Pinhead whiteboys don't go pro.
#6: Matt Howard (Butler guard; 72 previous points, 35 in this one) - Could be hurt.
#7: Willie Veasley (Butler forward; 60 previous points, 40 in this one) - Sold Cheech weed that wasn't weed.
#8: Lance Thomas (Duke forward; 54 previous points, 24 in this one) - Extra token.
#9: Brian Zoubek (Duke center; 47 previous points, 36 in this one) - Shittiest shithead to ever play basketball. Has passed Eric Montross on my all-time most hated list.
#10: Ronald Nored (Butler guard; 38 previous points, 34 in this one) - Some dude.
#11: Miles Plumlee (Duke forward; 22 previous points, all in this one) - Part of a clan of white Duke players that will expand by one more in two years.
#12: Avery Jukes (Butler forward; 21 previous points, 6 in this one) - Sounds like a rapper's name.
#13: Shawn Vanzant (Butler guard; 20 previous points, 15 in this one) - Mulatto Lynyrd Skynyrd offspring?
#14: Zach Hahn (Butler guard; 14 previous points, 12 in this one) - Justin Bieber.

S14: NCAA Tournament Top Returning Scorers - Final Four Saturday

No blurbing because I'm doing this 1984 style.
#1: Kalin Lucas (Michigan State guard; 153 previous points in the tourney, 29 in this one)
#2: Raymar Morgan (Michigan State forward; 152 previous points, 48 in this one)
#3: Durrell Summers (Michigan State guard; 149 previous points, 80 in this one)
#4: Jon Scheyer (Duke guard; 134 previous points, 58 in this one)
#5: Kyle Singler (Duke forward; 127 previous points, 68 in this one)
#6: Da'Sean Butler (West Virginia guard; 124 previous points, 69 in this one)
#7: Nolan Smith (Duke guard; 110 previous points, 74 in this one)
#8: Shelvin Mack (Butler guard; 84 previous points, 66 in this one)
#9: Dreymond Green (Michigan State forward; 83 previous points, 32 in this one)
#10: Chris Allen (Michigan State guard; 81 previous points, 14 in this one)
#11: Gordon Hayward (Butler forward; 76 previous points, 64 in this one)
#12: Devin Ebanks (West Virginia forward; 68 previous points, 54 in this one)
#13: Matt Howard (Butler guard; 68 previous points, 31 in this one)
#14: Kevin Jones (West Virginia forward; 62 previous points, 61 in this one)