PP: Part Twenty Seven

I am not a molester of children, but if I were, I would almost definitely drive this van. The white van is played out anyways for abducting children, especially after that D.C. Sniper bullshit.

The last time I went past the junk car used car lot in Gold Hill, this was the one at the end of the line of new fucked cars the dude must have acquired. You probably can’t really see from an errantly scanned Polaroid, but there’s a line of equally impressive forty-plus rustmobiles in the background, above his left shoulder. Also of note is the piece of twine hanging from behind the bumper up front. I must have worked on this car at some point. My wife’s car (a ‘97 Subaru Legacy Outback) has some weird problem with the solenoid terminal connection where it stops working for no reason, so I’ve actually changed the female connector like five times in the past four months. It’s to the point I keep a pair of pliers, more female connectors, and electrical tape in her car, because we can jiggle it a few times but then it’ll just stop and I’ll have to change it, and for some reason it’ll work again. I cannot figure out the logic behind this, but it’s true. Also, her ball bearings have been clicking pretty bad, and the cover to the boot has been cracked ever since we had it replaced years ago, and I stopped by the local gas station/service shop to try and get them to shoot some grease up in the thing, but they were like, “Hahaha, you’re just wasting time. You’re gonna need to spend four hundred dollars blah blah blah I’m a cocksucking yankee in a southern town blah blah blah I’d love to rip you off,” so I bolted to the Federated Auto Parts, got myself a four dollar can of grease, came home, and fingered that bitch full of grease. I use skin irritants all the time as a housepainter (I had aluminum roof paint splatter into my eyes yesterday as a matter of fact, and it’s really hard to put thinner in your eyeballs), but this grease, with the prerequisite warning I didn’t heed, was no shit, because I could feel the nerve endings on my fingers getting wonky after a couple of minutes. So I went ahead and washed my hands with soap for once. Usually I just wash them with lavendar oil. No wait, that’s what I masturbate with. A great lubricant, and leaves you smelling floral afterwards, rather than all powdery like baby oil does or sweaty like spit will.

This former VDOT dump truck from years gone past sits directly across from the military school which is technically a high school, and lays claim to having created more NFL players than any other high school in America, except really it’s a military school and blue chip recruits who are too stupid to get straight into college after regular people high school will go there for a year to play on the exclusive football team and do shady things to get their academics right to start making money as a Division I football player. Some dude whose kid I coached in soccer a few years back, he’s a crazy Christian who thinks women should be subservient, but he also sells good free range chickens at the farmer’s market and will even bring us chicken feet to make chicken stock with when we ask, we saw him at the county fair the other night, and I guess he works there now, so his only son can go for free and is on the wrestling team at the middle school level. That’s a great opportunity for a kid raised by fundamental wacko Christian people always trying to testify at your ass in a sly manner. I wonder how many professional wrestlers Fork Union Military Academy has produced? Actually, my buddy Clever Star was forced to go to FUMA (like many delinquent rich kids in Virginia are, to shape up or get out for good) and I’m fairly certain Darren Drozdov went there around the same time. He played for the Broncos, then played for the WWF, then was paralyzed and now he’s probably one of those weird wheelchair dudes with goatees and lots of leg tattoos and band stickers all over their wheelchair buying 12-packs of Tecate cans and PBR bottles at the grocery store.

It’s funny I just talked about the one Christian people whose kid I coached, because the same year there was another Christian kid I coached, and her parents are even ca-razier, and they live on a hill behind the used car old man where this car came from. They have a corner of their hill that faces route 20 as you come into Scottsville, and they used to have creepy plywood signs about supporting Bush or Jesus or both that were written in their children’s drippy handpainted styles, and it was kinda bothersome. Well, they didn’t do it for a long time, but tonight I saw they had a “VOTE MCCAIN” piece of plywood up. Weird thing is, their oldest daughter is already driving and she seems like a friendly, motivated, smart young lady, who always is excited to talk to my wife. But you never know with those types, because they might be befriending you to drop some Jesus on your ass when you least expecticate it. I want a plywood sign that says “VOTE FOR THE BLACK GUY” because I know that would be fun in my area. I have also always wanted to have a bumper sticker that says, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote.” Also, after seeing a few too many of those “Freedom isn’t free” bumper stickers, I want to make one that says, “Freedom isn’t free, nor is it dumb, isn’t that weird when you can take two words with definitive meanings and put them together and it makes something completely different? AMERICA!” That would obviously have to be an oversized bumper sticker.

Legend Lager

AFFORDABILITY: As I have been accumulating larger sized cappable bottles for homebrewing purposes, Legend bottles have showed themselves the best. Their lager is the cheapest of their fancy man's swill, still just under three dollars a thick-bottled double deuce, which is cheap by my now standards, but the memories in my mind scream, "You fucking fancy assed fuckface." An ashamed 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: It's a good tasting swill that lays the groundwork for super destruction. I'm not sure how many of these I'd have to drink to get there, but it seems to give my stomach those initial feelings of butterflies like I was about three weeks away from getting an unexplainable hard-on watching my 27-year-old science teacher bend over to pick up her chalk in fifth grade. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The center shield of some goofy Euro-looking label has a unicorn with a golden mane breaking free from chains. That would conceivably make it awesomer than fuck, except they wrap that in the standard Legend label of piss yellow background and stupid old english letters. An almost-had-it 2 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: They are mastered by themselves, and have a spot in Richmond where you can eat samwiches and drink their shit. It is a part of the industrial wasteland of southside Richmond, like four blocks over from where you might get robbed. Such a fine walking of fancy assed and impenetrable terminal poverty is a tough one to walk, but they do it. 5 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: It's okay, but for some reason Legend beers make me think of this stupid hippie chick I used to live with in the Fan district when I was in college. We had a neighbor who had no voice, I'm not sure what was up, but for some reason his vocal chords were plucked out, and he had a Tim Kaine for city council placard in his yard, which I blocked with my shitty '75 AMC Matador which didn't work, and I had to push it around into a u-turn whenever they cleaned the streets, hoping they cleaned the other side first so I only had to move it once. That car did many a u-turn while never starting, and Tim Kaine is now a superbly upward mobile Democrat in Virginia politics. That hippie bitch is somewhere in Washington state I think. I am happy as fuck in the country with three wild assed cool daughters and an old lady who never stifles nor staples me. And Legend is in my belly again, reminding me of some stupid shit. 3 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 STARS!

Homemade Song of the Week: "True Loungers"

This was off the first Prolo full-length CD, Return of the Loungers, which was basically some shit we threw together in 3 days in the camper behind my house. That means there were a couple of stream-of-consciousness talkings and freestyles that probably shouldn't see the light of day today, but are on a stupid self-done CD. Still, we had a few great ass tracks on it too, including this one. The internet and rap fans will hate this, but amongst self-circulating drug and alcohol abusing underclass types of southside Virginia, this song has been a popular one. And it explains the whole concept of being a lounger, kind of, but not really.
Shit man, it's a nice ass Charlie Daniels Band sample with some laid back ass country boy rhymes. It's very unrobotic and really fucking stupid of me to put inside the internets, but here I go - LINK FIXED.

MNZ: Blue Ridge Country August 2008

This was sitting by the checkout at the local chain book store, and in my hungover delusions, I was tricked by product placement into buying it one day, thinking I’d get some awesome pictures for my beerbox projects of log cabins or some shit. Mostly it was stupid, high class-minded bullshit about the Blue Ridge mountains, but it did mention some friends of our’s wilderness skills school for children. My oldest kid knows how to build lean-tos and carries a knife when she goes in the woods, and has a homemade bamboo cup and hand-carved spoon she’s made. If only she knew how to gut a deer, then we could start filling our freezer with more roadkill than we already do. A lot of times, when I find freshly struck deer, I’m on the way to work and can’t stop to dress next month’s dinner. It’s sad to think about how out of wack our priorities have become. I’m rushing off to pay some stupid fucking cellphone bill, when really I should just eat the fucking wasted doe on the side of the road and call it straight for the day.
Haha, we don't eat that much roadkill. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find freshly struck animals quick enough, and how difficult it is to hit deer along the road when you're really trying.

PP: Part Twenty Six

I am a sucker for old schoolbuses being reclaimed by nature. That old style curved edge bus rusting back down to dirt while vines start to grasp it... again, if I was a man of better financial status affording me ridiculous leisure time, I’d probably cultivate gardens like this as opposed to fancy hedges. Like on my estate, I’d say, “You should see my maze,” and you’d think of aerial photos of hedgerows forming celtic patterns, but then we’d get out there and it’d be like 125 schoolbuses grown over with poison ivy, but with pea gravel walkways. And I’d have every bus full of a different kind of toy I never could get as a broke ass kid with my broke ass parents, just sitting there going to waste. A schoolbus full of Legos over here, one full of Ghostbusters lunchboxes there, G.I. Joes in that one... shit, there’d probably a few G.I. Joe-filled schoolbuses. All I ever had was those little plastic things with the bases that were all green, but you could also get brown ones for a different army, or if you were lucky the drug store had a blue set of Germans every now and then the same time you’re stupid broke ass young mom had an extra 79 cents. Man, times have changed. There’s not even a symbol for cents on my computer. No wonder Americans are so fucking fat and lazy and perfectly deserving of the shitty leaders we always get.

When I started this Polaroid project, I set up the rule that I was only allowed one picture per vehicle. Most of the time, I have been fine with that rule, because I’m just a dude who likes to take archaic format snapshots of old shitty cars, not some guy trying to get “that perfect shot” from every angle imaginable. But I have to admit, after having passed this Jesus Saves bus at the Pentecostal church outside of Dillwyn a bunch of times, I was disappointed with how this particular image turned out. The southside Virginia white people church with a literal conversion van (err... bus) with graffiti “JESUS SAVES” plus Romans 10:13 in script on the front needs to be properly preserved inside the internets. I’ve wondered if they had some kid who was city art college delinquent who found the lord after a bad bout of ecstasy abuse to do it, or it was a local kid who just was stoked to have a giant thing to paint on, or if they had to hire someone to do it? They’ve come a long way from handling snakes.

Farmville Christmas Parade, last year. Slick Chevrolet crosses the cobblestone and retard dude who’s just shorn his dreadlocks clicks clumsily at his obsolete Polaroid camera. No one is concerned.

This is from over by Mike Gee’s house too, and I liked it because you see the orange paint motif, but it’s always fresh and shiny. This is an old ass orange paint job, faded and rusted as fuck. I would park this car on my front porch if my wife would let me, and also if we didn’t already have a chest freezer, two dressers we found in alleys, an old cast iron woodstove, and seven wooden chairs on it already.

MNZ: Swindle No. 17

There was a halfway interesting doohickey on overly customized big rigs, plus a feature on Nollywood, which had been a running meme in my mind, but Shepard Fairey (the publisher of this joint, on it’s goofy soy ink recycled pages) is such a huge fucking dumbass that instead of feeling more informed about things I might like, I just end up hating them more, due to associating them with him. I heard some jive ass interview he did on the NPRs about that Obama propaganda-looking poster he did, and he was all talking like he thought they wouldn’t want his help being he was a guerrilla street artist. Like they gave a fuck. He was a gallery artist who wanted to donate his stupid shit to their campaign, and nothing more; but there he was chit-chatting up Terry Gross (everyone on NPR is Terry Gross to me, except Carl Cassell, because he sounds like a grumpy old drunk who hit some 1000 to 1 horse one day and became “rich”), acting like he was synonymous with violent felons. Fuck Shepard Fairey and fuck his Swindle magazine. It tricked me one last time with full-color pictuers of the tractor half of tractor and trailers, but I should’ve just set aside this nine dollars to buy some old Overdrives off from out the ebays.

MNZ: Waxpoetics No. 29

I still have this peach crate-ized beside the toilet, because I haven’t read the 30,000 words on Herbie Hancock or Spoonie Gee yet, but I dug the Pete Rock interview a lot (as well as the piece on obscure soulman cum Jesus fan Lee Fields). It’s felt to me like people have gotten far too serious about the hip hop producer in recent years, getting all ga-ga over instrumentals and treating people like J. Dilla and Madlib like they’re Coltrane and Miles or some shit. Which is not to say they’re not great musically-minded individuals, but a guy like Madlib comes across to me more like a Ry Cooder, always dabbling in new shit, always trying to find a high, and making a bunch of music that’s good background sounds, but not really something you’re gonna claim as one of your five favorite albums of all-time. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. But I think in the backlash from the era when music critic people didn’t consider hip hop a bonafide form of music, people overly value the creative genius of hip hop beatmakers nowadays. I mean, sure Polow da Don made some banging tracks, but really all he’s doing is what any shitty German synth player from 1984 would do, but with some extra 808 kicks thrown in. Still, the Pete Rock interview in here made me happy, because for me, I think that era from like ‘87 through around ‘93 or ‘94 was the penultimate time period (thus far) for hip hop sounds. But what does I know; I ain’ts nothing but a lowly whiteboy. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no dope beats.
Also, as an aside, for those who used to fuck around with dumpin.net, “T.R.O.Y.” was number two on the all-time hot hip hop jamz list we never finished writing about. When we had that happen, it didn’t have the same “moment of brilliance” meme that’s been attached to it ever since, which I find odd. Did we start that? Or was it bound to happen anyways? Now, being contrarians, I bet both Mike Dikk and me would feel like tools to have it number two, but that’s where it fell when our crack staff of crackheads put it together. But don’t tell anybody, in case we do finish writing those blurbs one day.

Guinness Extra Stout

AFFORDABILITY: Guinness is expensive, but I needed the big bottles and freecycle ain't coming up with shit. 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I don't know... I'm not completely convinced you can get drunk off of Guinness. Almost every time in my life I've gotten fucked up involving Guinness, it was a good back drop laying the groundwork for smoking a couple of bowls, which kicked in the super destruction like a pair of feet nicknamed Morton and Gibson. You can't high marks as a destroyable beer working a complementary angle. 2 out of 5 though.
LABEL AESTHETIC: I got two of these the other week and the labels were upside down. I didn't even notice, but my wife asked if I did it (she used to always flip beer labels when the bottle would sweat when people wasn't looking), but I didn't. Then I bought a couple more this week and those labels, at a completely different store about four counties away from the other store had the same upside down labels. That means they're doing it on purpose, which is gay as fuck. Unless it's not on purpose and I can sell one of you chumps a bottle of this inside the ebays for $20 a pint plus six. 1 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I'm sure Guinness is a big British company, but it's built upon alcoholic products, so I can't fault them for that, regardless of how many 1/32nd Irish metrosexuals in America swear by their products. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I associated Guinness with two things. Firstly, a gay friend of mine in Richmond, who as he's gotten older is all snide and seems to hate to see you even when he's glad, all snarling and angry and snarky about everything and everybody. The second is my bro-in-law's first wedding where his financees family put us up, and her folks were doctors and rich and all that, but they're youngest son was about to go to college and be a fuck up, so mostly I sat on leather couches, drank Guinness, and watched pro basketball with him. We would've played mad video games too if it wasn't for stuck up fuckers not wanting to go that route. Fucking rich people. They're house was like a big wooden study, like some old British dude on an episode of Masterpiece Theatre would rock, but they had a TV and shit in there, and leather couches, and that was the TV room. Still, both memories are harshed with negativity. 2 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 &1/5 STARS!

MNZ: Trains July 2008

I didn’t really get anything new out of this issue of Trains, but it did cause me to do some google searching for scenic passenger trains, and I found out about Cass Scenic Railroad State Park in West Virginia, where for a relatively affordable price, you can rent a fucking caboose cabin that they pull up to the top of a mountain on a scenic ride, unhitch you and let you camp for the night, then pick you up the next day. And that’s a state park. I don’t care what y’all say or think about West Virginia - it’s one of the best states in America, and it’s proven it to me time and again. Sure it has ignorant mountain holler motherfuckers apt to mad dog glare at you when you drive through town. But once they get to know you (or someone will vouch for you), they’ll share pretty much any alcohol, hard drugs, or rags soaked in freon with you that they have. I’m gonna do that caboose trip thing for like three days sometime this fall, either with the family in responsible tempered mode, or by myself, getting fucked up as shit on top of some reclusive mountain top. At age 35, I can think of no better place to do quantities of hallucinogens in a ridiculously internally-focused mode than inside a powerless caboose on top of the middle of nowhere, West Virginia.

NFL: Preseason Preview Bottom Quadrant

#25: HOUSTON TEXANS
PERTINENT DATA: 8-8 last year; 60 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Chester Pitts; there is no real team history outside of ugly ass uniforms and a shitty choice of team nickname, so the big fat black dude who has started every game in team history wins this one by default.
TEAM HOSS: N.D. Kalu; he was a Redskin early on out of college, but never stuck. I always liked him though - a lanky defensive with good third defensive end skills, to spell starters of higher pay range. Twelve years later, he's still playing in the NFLs for the stupid Texans. I'm fairly certain his real first name is Ndekwe, but either because that's too African or too hard for ignorant ass football players to remember, he started going by N.D. Sometimes, I think about telling people I'm R.A. instead of Raven, but rap dork fans on the internet would think I'm biting white rapper style, and real life people who need something other than Raven to say usually go with Roo-roo, or Ruben in hispanic-heavy locales.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: David Carr; I am sure he's probably a back-up somewhere in the league right now, but man, what a suck ass. Remember that bullshit where he shaved his head for some bullshit? That was a great draft year for quarterbacks, led by Carr and stupid Christ-ass Patrick Ramsey.
TEAM ASS: Matt Turk; when Turk was the Redskins punter, I sorta enjoyed his off-kilter personality, out of whack for most punters. But then he just became a douche, breaking his wrist playing basketball or some faggy fratboy bullshit like that. And athletes have stupid enough injuries as it is, but when you're job in the footballs is to drop an oblong pigskin against your swinging leg, don't fuck that up. So fuck Matt Turk. He's no Reggie Roby.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Matt Schaub; living near UVA, it's easy to automatically dismiss all UVA hype as bullshit, and assume Schaub is destined for failure, much like Aaron Brooks and Don "the Magic Man" Majkowski before him. But I think Schaub might actually be good. In college, he was no blue-chip superstar, but more of a guy who worked hard and carved his mark, much like he did as a promising back-up in Atlanta. Still, the Texans are banking on not having a shitty QB again, and Schaub was fucked-up a good part of last year in his first year in the driver's seat.
SENIOR PLAYER: Both Chester Pitts and Fred Weary were offensive linemen taken in Houston's first ever draft, and kicker Kris Brown was signed as a free agent that same offseason, from the Steelers, where he had previously mostly sucked, missing key kicks, but somehow in the obscurity of Houston's expansion team, he has carved a long career out of stupid kicking.
THE RUDY: Team Rudys are gonna end up being long snappers half the time, and the Texans are no exception to that rule, with Bryan Pittman entering his seventh year in the NFL, and all he does is hike the ball for punts and field goals, clocking crazy ass ducats.
FORMER HURRICANE: Wide receiver Andre Johnson, who had a breakout season, fulfilling his promise partially last year, but really he needs to loop a couple seasons like that together to be a legit superstar. Still, if the Texans offense can fire up enough to make noise in the AFC South, he could start getting mentioned in the same paragraph of sportsfag blogs as guys like T.O. and Steve Smith.
VIRGINIA BOY: Well, I'm gonna try to not repeat dudes for teams, and the obvious choice would be Schaub, but in an effort to diversify I will say rookie linebacker Xavier Adibi. That dude was a ball hawking linebacker in college at Virginia Tech, almost like a safety/linebacker hybrid. It will be interesting to see how that shakes out in the pros... well, not really. I don't give a fuck if it shakes out, but he's a black dude named Xavier and he was a turnover retriever in college like a motherfucker. He'd be perfect for the XFL were it still a thing.
WILD SAMOAN: In lieu of actual Samoans, I have to pick defensive tackle Amobi Okoye, who was some sort of super genius who graduated college at age 19. I remember the Washington Post was so sure the Redskins were gonna pick him that they were already running those local paper features hyping you up to drink the Kool-Aid about how he was a brilliant big man who was gonna change the game at DT. Then the Skins drafted Laron Landry, who was basically just like Sean Taylor, which they already had. I guess it all worked out when Taylor got shot and killed though.
THE ICKY: Back-up quarterback Sage Rosenfels.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Linebacker Morlon Greenwood, who very easily could have made his fortune operating boomtown oil derricks and hobnobbing with President Bush's grandpa at the country club over a house specialty drink of gin, tonic, and the blood of pre-teen virgin black children. Haha, I'm just joking. Everybody knows black children have sex as pre-teens.
FANTASY JERSEY: One of those alternate butt ass red Texans jerseys, a #91 but personalized with OKONKWO instead of Okoye, because whenever that other football Okoye (Christian Okoye - a funny name) played, I always thought of Okonkwo instead, being an english major who liked the African bullshit I had to read, and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is probably considered the African literature classic (although I most liked Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard, but probably because I'm a degenerate), and the main character is Okonkwo. But it also makes me think of Nintendo's Tecmo Baseball where the Philadelphia team's best hitter was named Okonkwo, but in that game if you beamed people and they charged the mound, they were ejected. So you could just beam Okonkwo every time and at most he'd got two at bats before he charged the mound and got ejected. If you could do that in real baseball, Manny Ramirez's importance would be minimized like a motherfucker.

#26: ST. LOUIS RAMS
PERTINENT DATA: 3-13 last year; 75 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Jim Everett; simply because he slapped up Jim Rome. I have, for the first time in a year or two, popped it onto Rome's radio show the past couple weeks a couple of times, and what the fuck? Are there that many retarded fratboys (and I don't mean retarded like "man, they think way differently than me" so much as retarded in the "not completely mentally efficient" way) out there that his show is successful? It's like wacky AM radio sound snippets combined with a non-drinking, non-smoking, goateed fuckface full of self-righteousness host. I just wish Jim Everett had stealthily beaten throat cancer into Jim Rome back then (which I guess he might've and it just hasn't set in yet).
TEAM HOSS: Is Steven Jackson back on the team yet? I'm gonna go with Leonard Little, because drinking and driving is over-stigmatized, especially when you're a happy-go-lucky, drunken, southern black guy who can sack quarterbacks and stop the run. I know plenty of happy-go-lucky, drunken, southern black guy, many with way more DUIs than Leonard Little, and this pick is for them, although to be honest, most of them don't have internets.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: As much as I never liked Eric Dickerson, his sideline stammerings during football broadcasts made him more loveable. There has never been nothing loveable about Kurt Warner, regardless of the arena league grocery bagger stories. Fuck him and his god. Go back to Arenica.
TEAM ASS: For lack of anybody better, I'm just gonna pick Torry Holt since he looks like Sam Cassell's alien hybrid sent here to infiltrate America by secretly polluting all our professional sports athletes with microchips that will eventually cause them to enslave the rest of us for the inevitable soul harvest.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Wow. Super genius Al Saunders landed here, and will have to battle the ghosts of his alternate super genius Mike Martz. Personally, I think the Al Saunders brand of super genius lacks the ego restrictions of a Mike Martz, but doesn't it also lack the Super Bowl rings?
SENIOR PLAYER: Behemoth Orlando Pace was a first round draft pick in 1997 for the Rams.
THE RUDY: Linebacker Quinton Culberson made the team as an undrafted rookie last year, and ended up the season as the starter.
FORMER HURRICANE: Third string quarterback Brock Berlin; I didn't think Hurricane quarterbacks actually played in the NFL since Testaverde retired.
VIRGINIA BOY: #2 overall pick Chris Long, from UVA, is a fucking monster. Having followed UVA football last year, I can tell you it was amazing, because there were like two, maybe three games, that Chris Long directly won. And he's a defensive lineman. He seems to continually improve, and honestly, I expect he will completely overshadow his father's NFL career within the next half a decade. The dude is a fucking monster. Plus, him and Leonard Little hanging out would make for a good reality TV show.
WILD SAMOAN: Linebacker Pisa Tinoisamoa, who is so Samoan he has it inside his last name. Also played college ball at Hawaii, like all good Samoans should, because USC alum are fucking sellouts.
THE ICKY: If ever there was a name for an underground white rapper who does the pseudo-intellectual/petty criminal gimmick, it would be Richie Incognito, starting center for the Rams.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: The weakening dollar helped cause Joe Klopfenstein to sell his mass market brewery to German investors. Now that Russia is power playing with European Union oil supplies and those faggot Euros need our guns, let's see who wants Klopfenstein to grease political palms though. I wager two parcels of pounds he gets some of his brewery stock back cheap, know what I mean?
FANTASY JERSEY: I'd get an old school blue #32, ala Eric Dickerson, but I'd get DICKINSON put on the back, for Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, but also just to see if motherfuckers even noticed.

#27: BALTIMORE RAVENS
PERTINENT DATA: 5-11 last year; 75 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: I was torn. I wanted to overrule Tony Siragusa as the big oaf white dude because of his sideline nonsense on CBS telecasts, but the only real alternative I could think of was Trent Dilfer for being the most unloved Super Bowl winning quarterback ever, but he's on ESPN this year, and seemingly full of import, much like a Joe Theismann v.2.0, so I guess I'll stick with Siragusa.
TEAM HOSS: Ed Reed is a menacing bastard, with the heartless contempt of a linebacker, but the interceptional abilities of a former high school player relegated to defense with a fragile ego.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: I am breaking my rule of picking former players just to pick Brian Billick. That guy was the most self-important piece of shit ever. I knew a tool ass dude who was part of the Ravens media team at one point, and he told me some stories about Billick that made me cringe. I don't remember any of them, but I know it made me solidify in mindstone my opinion that Brian Billick is a first class piece of shit.
TEAM ASS: Ray Lewis; stop your fucking dancing, you old gorilla-jawed accomplice. His pre-game dance wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't so out-of-date. I know he's worked hard to rehabilitate his image, but he might want to work in a private meeting or two with Luke Campbell's dancers to learn some new steps.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Ozzie Newsome - general manager extraordinaire; even if Joe Flacco ends up sucking, Ozzie Newsome is such a straight up dude that he'll get love. Although, I guess if they ran Brian Billick off, he's probably next if the Ravens continue to be shitbags.
SENIOR PLAYER: Kicker Matt Stover was with the Baltimore Ravens back when they moved from Cleveland, who didn't have a team for a while, then got an expansion team with the old name of the Browns that they retained. Do you remember all that shit happening? Yeah, it was a while ago. Matt Stover played on the original Browns.
THE RUDY: Starting linebacker Bart Scott, who started to make a big name for himself last year, was an undrafted kid out of college at Southern Illinois, which I think crazy ass Bryan Cox went to as well.
FORMER HURRICANE: Well, since I've already mentioned Hurricane notables Ray Lewis and Ed Reed, let's go with Willis McGahee, who somehow got himself drafted with a half-broken leg from that one game, did good enough to get traded in high profile fashion, and just had his knee scoped or some nonsense, but it's not supposed to be serious. I don't know... dude missed his first year of football because his knee was fucked, and then just had it scoped. "Scope" is a serious term from where I rest my head.
VIRGINIA BOY: Rookie wide receiver Justin Harper, who never lived up to his potential in college at Virginia Tech, but is somehow magically expected to do it all of sudden when he's an overpaid fuckface in the NFL. Granted, he was a 7th round pick, which might make him the Marques Colston of this year.
WILD SAMOAN: Defensive end Haloti Ngata; a 340 pound end, not nose tackle, just doesn't seem right. But he's pretty fast to be so fucking huge, and also likely to have a heart attack by age 40.
THE ICKY: In the time I've done the funny name bullshit, I never would've expected to pick somebody over Samari Rolle, since he sounds like a piece of sushi, but I'm going to right here, with wide receiver/kick returner Yamon Figurs, which sounds like how you'd describe being rich in the West Indies ("Man, fuck that wrecked Carrerra... I got yamon figurs; let's go get some 14-year-old sluts.").
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Prescott Burgess, an outside linebacker, also built a minor fortune from Chesapeake Bay harvests of crab, oysters, and assorted flavors of fish. Pollution, namely farm run-off, has carved that industry down to next-to-nothing, but hopefully the fake reef projects, from which they used the old concrete of Memorial Stadium, can help build it all back up. Think globally but eat locally. (Haha, they had some "don't pollute" ad on local TV stations here in Virginia, about not polluting so that you didn't kill all the crabs, so that you could eat them later. I like that line of thinking.)
FANTASY JERSEY: I'd roll with a black #20 REED jersey, with no qualms.

#28: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS
PERTINENT DATA: 5-11 last year; 80 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: I pretty much hate all 49ers, as they are my most evil team just behind the Cowboys, so I guess I pick Bill Romanowski because he does drugs and hates black people yet blames others for these problems, much like a lot of my friends from back home.
TEAM HOSS: When I had my little composition book out and was making these lists, I put down Patrick Willis, who's a starting linebacker, but I have no rememberance of why I chose him. I guess he won by default.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Jerry Rice cannot be confined to enough wheelchairs to make me happy.
TEAM ASS: Alex Smith, who along with Aaron Rodgers, is hoping to unseat the Patrick Ramsey/David Carr draft as the most stupidest for starting quarterbacks.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Bill Walsh is dead (or so they tell us), but this team will always live in his shadow. Mostly, they will be trying to relive the glory years for the next two decades, and it's not until all those guys are dead and gone and the team can move on to whatever football is at that point, will they move beyond it. Unless Mike Martz institutes a professional version of the A-11 offense this year.
SENIOR PLAYER: Both back-up linebacker Jeff Ulbrich and long snapper Brian Jennings were drafted by the 49ers in 2000. Technically, Ulbrich was drafted first though.
THE RUDY: I was so set to put former starting linebacker Brandon Moore - an undrafted Oklahoma Sooner - that I didn't even write down a second name. But he got released and like nine teams were battling to sign him and I don't feel like looking up anybody else, being any other undrafted college kids they have on their team came from other teams originally. Stupid fucking 49ers.
FORMER HURRICANE: Frank Gore, the man; leading rusher (by yards) and receiver (by receptions) two years in a row.
VIRGINIA BOY: Back-up/longshot linebacker Dennis Haley, signed off the Baltimore Ravens practice squad, where he sat for two years.
WILD SAMOAN: Starting defensive end (at 325 pounds) Isaac Sopoaga, who beats out projected starting guard Chilo Rachal because Sopoaga played at Hawaii while Rachal played at USC. Also, Chilo Rachal seems like a name of questionable ethnicity.
THE ICKY: Linebacker Tully Banta-Cain, with a wrestler's first name, and a hyphenated last name that sounds like pain medication.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: J.T. O'Sullivan helped institute the Bay Area shipping infrastructure, building vast wealth overseeing Asian imports arriving at the western half of America once cheap Chinese labor (haha, yellow slaves) built the railroad coast to coast. He also apparently might be the 49ers starting quarterback this year.
FANTASY JERSEY: Red 49ers home jersey Joe Montana jersey, which I'd wear to go suck dicks.

#29: DETROIT LIONS
PERTINENT DATA: 7-9 last year; 80 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: No doubt about it, Barry Sanders. Had I a son who watched did the footballs with me, I'd be all like, "Back in my day, Barry Sanders fucked dudes up, running circles around fuckers," while smoking a peach blunt full of blueberry weed with the boy.
TEAM HOSS: I know Matt Millen drafted like nine shitty high profile wide receivers in a row, but Calvin Johnson is gonna be the man if they ever end up having a QB to throw to him.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Again I'm breaking my "only players" rule, but this time because I can't really think of any Lions I hate. They've always been a team I passively tolerate at worst or actively root for so long as the Redskins aren't involved. But I'm picking Wayne Fontes because, as much as he was that loveable loser, he rode Barry Sanders coattails, and never did shit with it. He's like a more quotable Norv Turner.
TEAM ASS: Stupid Jon Kitna with his Eskimo last name and Bible studies bullshit. Openly devout Christ-kissers should not be allowed to be prominent players on football teams, although they are easily tolerated as coaches, because usually Christians have learned to abandon their retarded fundamentalism by the time their old fuckers.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Oh Matt Millen, who would've known that one clip of you falling on your face coming off the field, then taking a bow for the laughing crowd when you were a player, would be a euphemism for your entire general managerial career. Does he have proof of how the Ford and Chevrolet families are holding back alternative energy vehicles until they've squeezed every dime they can out of fat Americans or something? Wasn't it like three years ago fans were marching around the stadium in protest? I think they've given up by now and Millen will just steer this team into the complete abyss. Too bad there's not a second and third tier NFL and they have relegation, so that Detroit would be in the C-league by now, in the same division as Rochester, the Quad Cities, and Columbus, Ohio.
SENIOR PLAYER: Kicker Jason Hanson has been a Detroit Lion since the draft in 1992. I was in my freshman year of college back then, just starting to date a crazy ass big-tittied Italian chick with brain damage that she would partially transmute to me through sexual trickery for another year and a half.
THE RUDY: Tight end Casey Fitzsimmons, sixth year undrafted dude out of small-time Carroll College, though it is rumored this training camp may be his last (meaning he might be gone if you don't read this for a couple of weeks).
FORMER HURRICANE: Lacking a Hurricane, we go for the next best thing in linebacker Ernie Sims, from Florida State, which like Miami is a top-notch college program with questionable ethics in a severe downward spiral.
VIRGINIA BOY: Linebacker Paris Lenon was undrafted out of small ass University of Richmond, but fought his way into the NFL doing that special teams bullshit, and now, seven years later, has clawed his way into the starting line-up, albeit for a shitty ass team.
WILD SAMOAN: Starting guard Edwin Mulitalo is a ten-year vet, but young buck DE Ikaika Alama-Francis has a hyphenated last name and played at Hawaii.
THE ICKY: Tackle Gosder Cherilus, who I think was an evil benefactor in some sort of Dickensian knock-off.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Artose Pinner helped bankroll Henry Ford's model Gs through Ls.
FANTASY JERSEY: Alternate black Lions jersey #20 SANDERS.

#30: KANSAS CITY CHIEFS
PERTINENT DATA: 4-12 last year; 100 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Derrick Thomas, as the free roaming linebacker/defensive lineman hybrid who crushed QBs, was ahead of his time.
TEAM HOSS: Glenn Dorsey will be a far more marketable, amusing, and well-rounded monster than Jared Allen. Plus he's #72, which is like the penultimate defensive end number there is.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: I hate Joe Montana so much, he's my least favorite Kansas City Chief ever.
TEAM ASS: Larry Johnson did a lot of bitching and whining when Dick Vermeil was coach and Priest Holmes was ahead of him on the depth chart, and now that he's been the starter, he's been able to flash a couple of Rocafella diamond hand gestures at the crowd here and there, but for the most part, he's been like any other great Penn State running back - an overhyped disappointment. I mean, he's no Ki-jana Carter, but that doesn't make him great or anything.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: I loved Herm Edwards when he was in New York, because he talked wacky, like you would expect a guy that looks like him to do. In Kansas City, I think he's more buried in midwest obscurity and can't be the quote machine he used to be, but Herm is instituting a rebuilding process out there, and it will be his retarded mulatto "for the Gipper" style player-friendly motivational techniques that will decide which direction they move long-term.
SENIOR PLAYER: Tight end Tony Gonzalez, first round draft pick from 1997.
THE RUDY: Potential starting center Rudy Niswanger came undrafted out of LSU in 2006.
FORMER HURRICANE: Lacking a former Hurricane, I chose defensive end Alfonso Boone, since he's one of the few NFL players, much less starters, who came from the junior college ranks, which means his academic prowess is on par with your average Miami Hurricane.
VIRGINIA BOY: Two potential rookie starters from my home state in former UVA tackle Branden Albert and former Virginia Tech cornerback Brandon Flowers. I remember Flowers more than Albert, but also, neither one is shit compared to Macho Harris, Virginia Tech cornerback who will be fucking up shit starting next year.
WILD SAMOAN: Defensive end Tamba Hali.
THE ICKY: Brodie Croyle is a goofy ass name. Sounds like either the nemesis to a skater kid in an '80s movie, or a brokeback mountain-derivative character.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: I don't know what industries be making Kansas City a booming metropolis back in the olden days, but pretend I do and stuff Tyler Thigpen's name in there.
FANTASY JERSEY: A #81 VANOVER for Tamarick Vanover, who was Dante Hall in KC before Dante Hall was, but then Vanover fucked up and went to prison for cocaine distribution. But why fault an NFL man for diversifying his momentary wealth? Average NFL career is only like seven years according to the constantly referenced meme I always hear.

#31: MIAMI DOLPHINS
PERTINENT DATA: 1-15 last year; 100 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: Larry Csonka, who is the all-time leading rusher for white guys. John Riggins is ahead of him, but he's half-Cherokee. Also did color commentary for the original American Gladiators.
TEAM HOSS: I think Joey Porter may be the only disgruntled veteran that Bill Parcells hasn't run off, probably because Porter is very Bryan Cox-like in his mouthy competence. I mean, Porter's not as good as he was as a Steeler, especially after getting shot in the ass (with bullets, not HGH), but he's Joey Porter, and that adds swagger to a team. Much more so than vanilla ass Jason Taylor and Zach Thomas did. I imagine those guys were great at causing chess games to break out inside the locker room. Or canasta.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: Dan Marino, with his Isotonered, non-Super Bowl going, boring pre-game bantering ass.
TEAM ASS: Taylor and Thomas were easily the recipients of this award, but Parcells ran them off, so, by default, Ted Ginn gets the award, for being an overhyped, undertalented fuckface from Ohio State. I hate Ohio State. They're not even the best football program in their own state (that being the Mount Union Purple Raiders), and they act like they're fucking USC or Miami or some shit.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: Parcells; he will either make chicken salad from chicken shit again, or he will flip out ala Pat Riley and declare himself coach, or he will have a heart attack. Really, any of the above will be entertaining.
SENIOR PLAYER: Well, even though he's enjoyed a stint in Canada and a couple of suspensions, Ricky Williams has technically been on the Dolphins roster since 2002.
THE RUDY: Linebacker Edmond Miles made the team last year with special teams specialism, and might even get into regular rotation this year on running plays.
FORMER HURRICANE: Starting right tackle Vernon Carey, who must be king of the South Beach strip clubs, having played college ball there and moved straight to multi-million dollar pro contracts without having to relocate.
VIRGINIA BOY: Rookie defensive lineman Kendall Langford came from small-time, all-black Hampton University (which has been turning out the pros the past couple of years). He's a shade under 290 pounds but can run a 4.7 40-yard dash.
WILD SAMOAN: The Dolphins have two Polynesian punishers in their second year out of the University of Hawaii - starting center Samson Satele and starting fullback Reagan Mauia. I give the edge to Mauia, because he's named after Ronald Reagan, and because he's famous for running through walls, literally.
THE ICKY: Linebacker Boomer Grigsby sounds like a swell cat to kick it with.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: Even with the addition of Chad Pennington, I still have to say middle linebacker Channing Crowder sounds like the type of guy who'd be a 33rd degree Freemason, orally molesting children at a Bohemian Grove ceremony.
FANTASY JERSEY: An aqua-blue #32 WILLIAMS, because I'll support Ricky forever and a day. Once he's gone, we'll all miss him.

#32: ATLANTA FALCONS
PERTINENT DATA: 4-12 last year; 150 to 1 odds to win the Super Bowl this year.
ALL-TIME GREAT: I have the words "White Shoes Johnson" tattooed about eight inches from my dick, so without a doubt, Billy "White Shoes" Johnson is my favorite. Not that I want him around my dick in real life or anything; I just like how randomly strange those words are self-tattooed in scrawly upside down letters.
TEAM HOSS: Michael Turner should, by all means, be the fucking man.
ALL-TIME SUCK ASS: I'm gonna go with Jamal Anderson (the former RB, not the current DE), because he disappeared completely from the earth rather suddenly, but before he did, I saw some bullshit thing where he had human breast milk frozen in his freezer as his secret device for awesomeness. Dude, I'm all for breastfeeding, where kids are okay to breastfeed up to like age four (no doubt, I believe that). But grown men should not have breast milk in their freezers for their own use, especially if it's a black dude and milk from a white woman's breast.
TEAM ASS: As long as Joey Harrington's on the roster, he's got the award. That guys is like a hard-working version of Ryan Leaf, in that he came from a Pacific Northwestern Pac-10 school and really sucks at the pro QB-ing. But Harrington keeps scrapping together jobs at lesser teams whereas Ryan Leaf had the presence of mind to go ahead and shift gears into selling insurance for a living.
TEAM TRENDSETTER: It's still Michael Vick. He's still listed on their official roster on NFL.com and I guess he's staying in shape by playing against Burt Reynolds in prison, so until he comes back out and all that hoo-ha is resolved, he is their future.
SENIOR PLAYER: Linebacker Keith Brooking was a first round draft pick out of Georgia Tech in 1998, which means he's lived around Atlanta forever. I wonder where he weights in on the T.I./Shawty Lo beef? Personally, I side with Shawty Lo, but that's partially because I've always held a grudge against T.I. for dissing Lil Flip so strongly. T.I. never made a song as awesome as "Sunny Dayz". There really should be a whole genre of happy-go-lucky, ghettotastic good times tunes like that, preferably screwed, but not necessarily chopped.
THE RUDY: Punter Michael Koenen, undrafted four years ago out of Western Washington.
FORMER HURRICANE: Rookie free agent Glenn Sharpe, who is still on the roster as I type this, but a longshot to remain there until the start of the regular season.
VIRGINIA BOY: Back-up fullback Jason Snelling (from UVA) is the best after the post-
Vick purging of Virginia Tech secondary members. (Both Jimmy Williams and DeAngelo Hall are gone, and were proud wearers of FREE MICHAEL VICK airbrushed t-shirts.)
WILD SAMOAN: Starting guard Kynan Forney played at Hawaii and sounds like he might be Samoan. If not, my apologies to his ethnicities, and thoughts and prayers to his innocence.
THE ICKY: Ovie Mughelli might be the best name in football right now.
INDUSTRIAL OVERLORD: If Montavious Stanley didn't use illegal slave labor to grease the wheels of agricultural industry in the decades after the Emancipation Proclamation was proclamated, then I don't have questionable bumps on my dick.
FANTASY JERSEY: I'd get an old school #81 "White Shoes" Johnson deal, but personalize it to say WHITE BOY. Or try to sneak a #7 MEXICO through the NFL no fun league personalization filters.

Lion Stout

AFFORDABILITY: I will just disclose from jump that I have gotten into homebrewing lately, and also quit drinking for about two months the end of last year, so I have this weird change in drinking where I drink good beers and not to get all obliterated (although I do get half-right regularly). Also, being I am homebrewing, I need big pop top bottles for putting my own beers into after they've fermented under the staircase in 6-gallon buckets long enough, so I tend to buy shit like this Lion Stout, which was only listed in milliliters, but I think it's a 22 ounce bottle, that cost like $2.50. In my newfound hippie chick beer-drinking mind frame, I'd put that at a 4 out of 5 ranking, even though I could've conceivably gotten two forties of Miller High Life for the same price. I am admitting my shortcomings.
DESTROYABILITY: 8% alcohol content, and it doesn't taste like it like most high alcohol content brands. It does not taste like ass, and two of them are a good priming of my night for a couple of Yuenglings from the back of the fridge to sit around, half-sloshed, and think about making screwed and chopped mixes of early '90s NYC rap jams with the Ableton bootleg I've not yet actually installed on my computer because I can't figure out which one to dedicate to it. 3 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Floating lion head majestically looking to the left, although I like to imagine the rest of the unseen pic is a lion body hitting Kim Kardashian from behind, paws ripping up her back. The bottom line of the L in Lion is also a golden lion tail. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: It just says like four times it's bottled and brewed by some shit in Sri Lanka, which means it's brewed by 7-year-olds. It's imported by some shit called Elite Brands from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and it has a quote on the back from Michael Jackson, the famed beer critic (who is all up in my homebrewing books), complete with a picture so you know it's not the main Michael Jackson. Although I think a beer brewed by children with an unpictured endorsement from a Michael Jackson would go over good with the hipster set once they graduate from their PBR phase (if they ever do). 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: A solid beer. I enjoyed it and if I ever become the type of dude who owns white tigers on leashes in my yard, I'm gonna drink this shit on the regular. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 3/5 STARS!

August O.C.D. #2: diecast cars

This is probably even gayer than the state glasses, but somehow I got stuck on buying stupid diecast cars (1/64 variety, or regular Hot Wheels/Matchbox size) because I have a shelf in the camper I do my stupid nonsense inside of that 27 cars could stretch across. I initially was gonna leave it at 27, but I got up to like 35, and some good ones got left out, so I figured I'd make a shelf to display 100 total. But that seems mad homo, so I was gonna do two rows of 27 and just toss the losers from that 54 car roster into the sandbox for the kids to play with. But then I found rolls of velcro (both parts) in my truck and starting sticking them to parts of the camper on the inside. Now I don't technically own this camper, so the fact I've graffitoed up a bunch of the doors and started taping cars to the ceiling is probably not good, at least whenever the old gypsy lady comes back for this thing, which is already pinned in by two piles of trash, and I broke the door off so it kind of leans against the thing too. Whatever.
Anyways, in my searching, I went from normal Hot Wheels to those stupid $3 or $4 specialty cars (Johnny Lightning be bringing the best shit), which is espensfical as fuck. And I can't sign off on the fact I've done this, and am currently not searching (but that's mostly because I've kinda figured out that shit runs on seasons like real cars and there ain't nothing to buy right now I haven't already seen), but one good thing came out of it all. When I was a kid around six, we were about to move into a new house my grandpa has built for us, and our old house was a piece of shit cinderblock house full of mice and snakes and just sucked. It has a big old tub sealed in on the front side but there were two holes on the back side because it was a clawhammer deal that they tiled in on the frontside. I had me a General Lee that I was playing with in the tub, running from a cop car I had, and wouldn't you know, General Lee got out of my soaped up hands doing a spin through the curves of the tub and went slap behind the tub in one of them holes. Moms used a yard stick like crazy, but couldn't fish it out, and it was gone. We moved. I never had a stupid General Lee car again until about a month ago. That motherfucker is velcro'd sideways on a trailer vent right above my head right now. If I could embed that horn sound in this post, I'd do it, but I'd have to google it to figure it out, and it probably wouldn't load up right anyways. That's why the Dukes of Hazzard was great - they did their stunts for real (well not the actors, but real stuntmen did it), not no CGI faggotry. If you're gonna wreck a car, wreck it; if you're gonna blow up a building, blow it up; if you're gonna shoot the head off a chicken, shoot the head off a chicken. That's what I say.

MNZ: Juxtapoz July 2008

"Some people will say my work is the same as before because it is always about the girls. But they don't know how to look at it." That is a quote from Miss Van in an interview herein about her work, and I have always not dug that vapid anime/nightmare slut chick style of Miss Van's work, but beyond that, the above quote is exactly what I hate about supposed street art and Juxtapoz-style artists. When something moves into that realm where the doers feel you have to immerse yourself completely and deeply enough to properly understand what's going on, then fuck that noise. Good shit is good shit, and is easily recognizable. I mean, you have to have an open mind to new shit to see new good shit, but once you move to this “Haters don’t understand what I’m doing” mentality, you have become close-minded yourself, to where you only accept the opinions of those who think exactly like you do. It’s fucking retarded, whether you’re Fred Phelps or some Zen Buddhist Prius-driver in the Whole Foods parking lot with three Obama ‘08 stickers on your bumper. I think too often just because we know that people very different than us are fucking stupid, we forget that we are fucking stupid too.

MNZ: The New Yorker June 9 & 16, 2008

New Yorker's boring for the most part, as usual, but they had a nice explanation of the T-Pain vocoder thing and how it works. Apparently, the oil industry gave us the Auto Tunes vocoder phenomenon, by accident. I always thought it was going back to Roger Troutman and Zapp, but apparently this shit didn't even exist, at least in this form, until the '90s, and first got used by Cher. I feel bad for T-Pain though, because motherfuckers ran that shit through the grinder, which will make him sound even more played out next time he has an album out.
I guess the New Yorker did some flamboyant stupid covers that got all sorts of media coverage, but the internet's like 1000 times faster than me, so everyone's probably already figured all that shit, refigured out, over-analyzed, and moved on. Which means in about four weeks, I'll find a copy in the milk crates at the library.

PP: Part Twenty Five

I am a sucker for lime green cars, even if the lime green came from fifteen cans of Wal-Mart spraypaint. This lounger sat back off the road down someone’s driveway two roads over my house, and I actually rode by like four times before I was confident no one was home so I could snap a Polaroid without someone wondering what the fuck I was up to, with my artfaggy ways. Of course, if I just went up to these places and was like, “Yo, I like your fucked-up old cars, can I take some pictures?” they’d probably be more than happy to let me. So I just make it worse by being all self-conscious. But what can I say? I have father issues where I think every redneck dude assumes I’m a pussy because I think about more than just shots of Jim Beam or shooting deers. But I’m also genetically inclined to think like my dad did, so at the same time I want to fight anyone who might think I’m a pussy, even if they don’t think it for real. It’s a strange path to walk.

This used car lot is an old junker hot spot not too far from where my man Mike Gee lives at. I have looked at this picture high before one night, and I can’t figure out if it is all de-trimmed to get painted, but then something else happened, or someone fucked up another twin car’s front end and snaked all the trim off of this one. I would assume in that case, they’d need the lights too, but maybe they put in those goofy blue-ish ones the little crewcut fuckfaces in souped up Civics like. We saw some retardedly customized import today and my wife was all like, “Haha, look at those stupid fuckers,” but then he passed us on the bypass and his license plate was “CARPE VIA” which my wife was impressed with, saying, “I didn’t expect someone with a stupid car like that to have a Latin-based play on words to say ‘seize the road’.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was probably just something he saw in Faster and More Furious: Tokyo Drift.

This was outside Eastside Speedway in Waynesboro, my local dirt track. Sometimes, for no reason, cars are left outside the gates for months on end. This was one of them. I assume it’s cars that die at the track and people just leave them, so the track drags it out front as a warning that you better not bring another car and try to race it till you drag your old shit away. I also appreciate this vehicle because I am a connoisseur of homemade camouflage paint jobs. Were I man of better finances, affording me more leisurely pursuits, I would probably be about four months deep into renting one of those bigger Cruise America.com RVs, riding around rural back roads, compiling pictures of such rides for a big full-color oversized book of vehicles with self-done camouflage. That shit’s so much more aesthetically pleasing than seeing some fu manchu little-dicked repressed homo in his big diesel F250 with some sort of trademarked camouflage pattern that he paid a lot of money to have someone do stylized all over it. I think one of them is called Real Tracker, but I used to get old hunting catalogs from a black dude I worked with, and there’s a ton of them things. You’ve probably seen it: it’s that camouflage that’s not normal ragged military style but has actual leaves and shit like deer are smart enough to know the difference between good and shitty camouflage. I don’t hunt much anymore, but I figure if they can’t see blaze orange hats, I usually just like to be contrarian and go out in the woods in a blaze orange jumpsuit with a camouflage stocking ski mask on. The ladies at the country store get a little nervous when you roll in like that though, especially with a gun in your hand.

A cheaply pimped car, in the Best Buy parking lot, parked at the far end by the delivery truck. I would bet you dollars to quarters the driver of this car works installing stereos at the Best Buy, and will accidentally forget to charge you for the installation harness if you accidentally leave a blunt full of a shitty dimebag on the passenger seat prominently.

S14: NBA Franchise Post-Season Power Rankings

Yeah, I did one of these for the NBA when they ended their season, but never posted shit or wrote out remarkings, but the USA team whooped up on the ching-chongs in Olympic fervor basketballetry this morning, so I figured I’d whip this out in honor of those Olympic uniforms with the weird psychedelic watermark background design on the USA uniforms, which I’m sure will spread like wildfire through college basketball much like the Kwanzaa zubaz trim did a decade ago.
#1: San Antonio Spurs (79 points) - Not surprising they ended up at the top of this list, using my retardematics, because they’ve been consistently present near the finals every year, albeit as the team with questionable heart (or the dirty team, depending on how they whomp the other teams that season). I think they should full-on that whole good guy image and start wearing throwback John Stockton shorts. But I would also guess with the way the NBA is micro-managed, all teams have to wear the big baggy deals now, which is funny because it seems like tons of players wear those spandexy biker shorts (or compression shorts, as homos who wear that shit will describe them) underneath their size XXXLs. They should just start rocking those instead, biker shorts and Under Armour tank tops.
#2: Detroit Pistons (64 points) - The Pistons have been pretty consistently present towards the end of the season out of the Eastern Conference as well, and all without a real bonafide superstar. I attribute this to Rasheed Wallace’s white spot, meaning he was touched by God. He is a chosen player, and it wasn’t until in Detroit was he mature enough to not rebel against this role.
#3: Los Angeles Lakers (59 points) - It’s hard to really be a Lakers fans (much like the New York Yankees in baseball) being they have so many millions of fair weather fans that, when the team does good, are quick to point out how they’ve been down with the team since the days of Kareem and Magic, even though three-quarters of those people were either Bulls fans or didn’t give a fuck about basketball in most of the decade and a half between Abdul-Jabbar and Kobe Bryant. Also, Kobe is kind of a fucking schmuck, and I thought that before the whole hurting a white girl with his monster black penis in Colorado thing. In fact, the worst thing about that whole scenario (other than the questionable antics on his part) was him throwing everybody else, especially Shaq, in the NBA under the bus for secret indiscretions. Apparantly Kobe’s international upbringing with seven languages to whine and complain in kept him sheltered from the philosophy of no snitching.
#4: Boston Celtics (34 points) - Right after they won this year, I found one of those fancy NBA jerseys with the stitched numbers and name for Paul Pierce, in black, with some stupid alternative shamrock logo on the front, at the Goodwill for three fucks. I’ve been rocking that thing too much. I’ve been afraid of the tank top accelerating my white trash wigger look too much, but since shaving my dreads off last Thanksgiving, my hair’s just now grown out to that wispy Euro-trash/budding metalhead length ala Adam Morrison, and the combo of an alternative high dollar basketball jersey (albeit by way of the Goodwill) and bad upper arms tattoos (some shop-bought, some homemade, but no “THUG LIFE” in scratchy India ink letters like a hardcore wigger would have) and the unkempt greasy hair is really a good look for me I think. It makes me wonder how those dudes keep that same Euro-trash/budding metalhead length hair though, because it has to grow longer, or get cut shorter. Seems really fucking fruity to me to actually go out and pay to have your hair cut to look like you haven’t cut it, but they must do that shit to keep it looking just like that, and I guess it shouldn’t surprise me people do that. Still, it makes me do that Redd Foxx hand gesture for gay people.
#5: Miami Heat (31 points) - Let the Dwayne Wade/Michael Beasley era begin. I give it three years before Dwayne Wade is traded to like Toronto or some shit. I have never been convinced Wade was a legitimate top tier NBA superstar (a lot like Gilbert Arenas), but he played the role well when Shaq was in town. I can’t see Beasley/Wade making it happen for the Heat on a major level, although if it does, you can bet Pat Riley will come out of retirement to “coach” them to a title and get another ring to try and keep up with Phil Jackson to keep his fragile ego stroked hard.
#6: Dallas Mavericks (21 points) - I would talk shit about the Mavs like I do everything else, but Mark Cuban seems like the one pro sports owner who probably actually reads really obscure blogs in his office (instead of getting blowjobs from buxom secretaries like old school rich dudes would do), and he might read it and buy my entire town and trade me to some shithole in Rhode Island for a box of football cards from the early ‘80s.
#7: Cleveland Cavaliers (18 points) - I feel for the Cavs as they have the pre-eminent superstar of Lebron James, who’s also a local boy, yet it still seems inevitable he’s either gonna go to the New York Knicks or Brooklyn Nets when his contract runs out. What more could they do for the guy? I guess so long as the Washington Wizards still are playoff contenders though, the Cavaliers will be able to have mild post-season success in the Eastern Conference.
#8: New Jersey Nets (18 points) - Jay-Z is partial owner and I guess I either read or dreamt or something that the ultimate goal is to move the Nets to Brooklyn as part of the revitalization of that area (aka making it so white people with money live there instead of broke ass minorities, who will all move to somewhere else and make that the new shithole). That’ll be fine by me, because all the New Jersey teams part of the greater NYC metropolitan area in most sports are just second fiddles to the NYC-proper teams anyways. Man, imagine how Giants and Jets crazy people are gonna get when they start playing in the actual city limits again? Jay-Z as visible owner of the Nets is funny to me, but he should watch himself. Look at how they’re doing Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit. Hip hop police, bro. Hip hop police.
#9: Phoenix Suns (15 points) - The Suns and Mavs have always been irreplaceable in my mind, which is even funnier when they end up playing each other. Shaq being a giant, useless weight for the Suns is as funny to me as Mark Cuban is as snide, little dork owner. For some reason, I am really annoyed by the Phoenix jerseys with airport code PHX in big letters, probably because I’ve never ridden on an airplane. It was a promise I made to myself years ago that the first time I went up in a plane, I would come down not in the plane, and I plan on holding to that. But also, it seems stupid to me. But I guess bright orange jerseys with airport abbreviations appeal to today’s text messaging generation more than bouncy basketballs with burning sun rays shooting off of it.
#10: Indiana Pacers (11 points) - Will Ferrell’s Semi-Pro was a pretty shitty movie, but it at least taught me that the Indiana Pacers were originally an ABA team. I probably had read that in a sports almanac of some sorts when I was a kid, but it was more fun learning it by watching a really good Saturday Night Live digital short when Outkast were musical guests stretched into a shitty movie than it was reading ESPN’s Sports Information Now! 1993 book.
#11: Utah Jazz (9 points) - It is surprising that ultra-conservative, ultra-white Utah has kept supporting a basketball team, even after the league moved to hip hop mode and Molester Stockton and Cowboy Malone hung up their sneaks. Yet it does. Every major sports team and the local media work the public, where the beatwriters only write positive stories, unless they are engineered by higher-ups in management to start writing dissent against particular players or coaches, so the Utah Jazz relationship with the Salt Lake City press must be on some hardcore 33rd degree Freemason level to have kept the team in good standings with the public-at-large. I’m not even talking about strip club-hopping, tatted-up NBA players either, as I’ve always understood it that Jerry Sloan is about the most drunken, belligerent bastard there is involved in the NBA. The fact he’s looked at as a hard-nosed but loveable Ward Cleaver is amazing. Props to Salt Lake City and the Brave New Basketball World it has created. I’m sure Deron Williams will lead you to a title one day, even if Molester Stockton/Cowboy Malone never could.
#12: Minnesota Timberwolves (6 points) - Not that many NBA teams made scores in my method, and this one must’ve been from years ago, but with Kevin Garnett gone, the Timberwolves should be completely irrelevant for the foreseeable future.
#13: Philadelphia 76ers (6 points) - These guys are irrelevant to me as well with no Allen Iverson, though I guess they have that black guy with the European sounding name who’s supposed to be this undiscovered talent about to blow up like the World Trade. But this is Philadelphia, and they always wanna act like they got the basketball team to beat, kinda like the Knicks, though to their credit, the 76ers are probably closer than the Knicks are right now, which isn’t really saying much.
#14: Sacramento Kings (4 points) - Peace out to Chris Webber. Your legacy is solid, bro. Heart of a Champion, with puppy dog eyeballs.

MNZ: Lindy's Pro Football 2008 Preview

Seems like this thing comes out a few weeks earlier every year. I remember it being around 4th of July to expect it, and I think I got beginning of June this year. I could thumb through this bullshit forever, which I do, to do my stupid NFL bullshit for the blog. Jason Campbell's on the cover of my locally marketed version. I hope he doesn't end up sucking. He talks a little funny to be smart enough to dominate the game and spread the ball amongst seven potential offensive threats.

Homemade Song of the Week: "Heart of Soul"

I would bet last week when I did a Prolo song first, PSY/OPS got all emo for a split second. He's the dude I mostly do music with, as Solaris Earth Pipeline, which is a stupid fucking name, but we made it up on the spot one night early on and are sort of stuck with it like some stupid slut's name tatted on your forearm sewing needle style. I can't afford laser surgery, so we are Solaris Earth Pipeline.
"Heart of Soul" is a very simple beat, reworking (or basically looping and spicing up) a Neil Young song. But it was one of the first (maybe even the first) beats PSY/OPS did once he started making beats for no real reason whatsoever. He called me over, and being I hadn't really done shit but maybe twice a year with Brown, I sat down and wrote that song at his house and we recorded it the first night, one take, just like that. It has circulated amongst some internerd circles and people have found the bent of it goofy (proud rural whiteboy/5 percenter mash-up philosophies can be highly mockable inside the internets), but it gave birth to us a duo making music, because that first time went so smoothly and easily. Now, he hardly hooks up beats because it's so fucking gay and I have nothing to write because I've already written everything in my head. I think we're gonna start doing concept albums based on independent movies from the early '90s though.
So here is "Heart of Soul" by Solaris Earth Pipeline, off our first self-released CD At War With Robots.

August O.C.D. #3: state drinking glasses

When we first moved in together, my wife had a slew of these little glasses from the ‘50s and ‘60s she’d gotten out of thrift store, back when Richmond had one of the best thrift store districts in southside, before the ebays fucked that all up for everybody, and they’ve been in our household ever since. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the past six months, I decided I wanted more of these, which led to internet research. Well, in the ebays, they go for like ten bucks a pop, but I learned they were mostly made by Hazel Atlas glass company (which I usually mistakenly call Hazel Atkins, on purpose), and if ebay is any indicator, they are popular amongst homos as wacky retro-fare. I was about to try and get some from inside the ebays, but buying shit off ebay is so easy and annoying - you just bid, get caught up in “having” to have something, spend way more money than you should, and then it just gets mailed to you with no work involved. Shopping in shitty thrift stores is so much more satisfying, digging your fingers through musty glasses set up on shelves by recovering crackheads for Christ. We took a family trip to North Carolina a month ago, looking for shit like this (as well as other articles of nonsense) in thrift and junk and antique stores in the Raleigh/Durham area, and found a couple of them. But this led to me poking through antique stores in my area, looking for more of them, at a reasonable rate (which doesn’t always exist at antique stores). Poking around antique stores is a hard thing because those places are gay as fuck, meaning if you see five dudes looking around at bullshit in one of those places, one of them is old, one of them is begrudgingly occupying his time while his wife looks at old farm cabinets, two of them are gay dudes, and the other one is a wild card, which is my way of pretending me being in antique stores is not gay, because truthfully the fifth one is gay too, just probably more repressed than the other two more openly gay guys shopping the antique store.
Anyways, I have found more of these, and we now have far too many to really be proud of. Mostly these glasses are a map of the state, with major cities (at that stage in time) marked with dots, plus little caricatures of industry or noteworthy landmarks, as well as useless information like state nickname or song or some such trivia. They come frosted in different flavors (which can be pimped like our blue frosted Kentucky one, or the oddly toxic-looking frosted orange D.C. one), or have the state maps painted in yellow or lime green or odd pink paint. We even found one that was like black with gold markings, but it was all faded and dinged up at one of those crackheads for christ thrift stores. However, I found a stand in one antique store that had another one like that, in perfect condition, like that, and the black with gold markings style is straight pimp. The one I saw was North Carolina, which normally I would’ve snatched up, as Carolina del Norte ranks high on my list of desirable localities, but the old bitch at this stand was wanting six bucks a glass. I stretched my limit one time and bought a few at five per glass, when I was accumulating, but mostly I ain’t paying more than three bucks a glass.
See, obviously I’ve hit the mad homo stage of the state glasses, because now it’s no longer just straight up collecting of the style, but it’s become more like a sports team, with salary caps and shit, where I’m not paying a lot for minor members of the collection, and even if I find a shelf full of these things for three bucks each, if it’s not a good state or wacky looking, I won’t get it. I could turn my blog super-internetty and post digital pics of my favorite glasses, but even me in all my personal faggotries can’t come that far out the closet.

S14: NHL Franchise Post-Season Power Rankings

I established a power franchise system for the major American-based sports leagues (NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB... haha, fuck you soccer) which is fairly simple and completely unnecessary. Basically, take the most recent season, 3 points for winning it all, 2 points for losing in finals, and 1 point for losing in semifinals (usually conference championships). The most recent year, I multiply by ten; last year, multiply by 9, year before that, multiply by 8; all the way down to ten season ago it gets multiplied by one (which I don’t really do, I just leave as is, because I learned that trick when it comes to multiplying things by one a long time ago). And then I have a stupid sports list to do for the sporting lists that I sort of gave up on a while ago but decided to force myself to start again.
I actually did this first one right after the Stanley Cup ended and before NBA finals got all retro-crazy, but I never wrote nothing about it at all, mostly because I didn’t care. I mean seriously, they could have that outdoor NHL game in my back yard, and if there was a halfway decent cooking show on my fuzzy PBS channel, I’d probably watch that instead. I don’t know about next year when it all goes digital, because I can tolerate the fuzzy picture, but I can’t watch the acid trip digital melts that digital TV does when you live too far away from their cybertronics. I loved some hockey when I could go watch minor league Richmond Renegades all the time and Trevor Senn would end up fighting somebody for little reason while they blared Lynyrd Skynyrd over the P.A., but NHL hockey’s just a little boring to me. I tried to watch a few of the weekend games on NBC and I don’t know what’s missing. I used to love watching hockey. I think maybe it’s the fact there’s no consistency, like players switch teams like crazy, even superstars. So it’s hard to follow long-term unless you’re all rabid about learning weird Euro-fuckers names. I briefly cared about the Washington Capitals, getting caught up in Alexander Ovechkin-mania, but I also did the same with the Wizards, and they play at the same time of year and Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler, and Antawn Jamison are far more interesting than some stupid Russian fucker. But yeah, here’s the top 14 NHL franchises of the past ten years, according to my semi-scientific calculating method...
#1: Detroit Red Wings (57 points) - Really, one of the reasons I got into hockey on TV when I did actually watch it was because the satellite TV at my mom’s house gave me free NHL the first year I hooked it up when I was sleeping on the living room floor there, working the second shift in Richmond, and never seeing anyone in the process. Like the first month I was watching was that big Red Wings/Avalanche game where they fought for forty minutes and the goalies even got to mixing it up. When goalies fight, that’s entertaining hockey. I just read in the paper that Patrick Roy’s son is a goalie too, and he got into a fight with the other goalie in some minor league hockey game this past season, and the local authorities charged him with assault. When Patrick Roy’s son gets arrested for beating up the other goalie in a hockey game, it’s difficult times man. We live in difficult times.
#2: Anaheim Ducks (47 points) - I think they won a season ago, but I’m busy downloading DJ Screw music and it’s tying up my internet welfare, so I’m not gonna look it up elsewhere. Anaheim Ducks is the stupidest name ever for a professional sports team at the top level, even if they did drop the Mighty. In fact, I’d say the Mighty made it less embarrassing. Also, did they ever do an Air Bud hockey movie?
#3: New Jersey Devils (35 points) - The New Jersey Devil is a legendary creature described by witnesses much like the West Virginia Mothman and the Bat Monster my mom and dad claimed to have seen when they were fucking in the back of a stationwagon in the early ‘70s. To be honest - and I readily admit my own ridiculous prejudices - that’s the only saving grace of that entire state of New Jersey that I can think of. I used to think the Wu Mansion being there was another, but c’mon man, RZA is straight shitty now, and deluded by Hollywood. I doubt Ghostface spends much time at the Wu Mansion.
#4: Carolina Hurricanes (26 points) - The last time I made a half-hearted attempt at caring about the NHL was when Hurricane-mania was sweeping the Piedmont during their Stanley Cup run. But it petered out pretty hard afterwards because, let's face it, hockey is a side show in the south, meant to be seen at the minor league level where dudes fight for no real apparent reason other than to spike beer sales during the second period. Major league hockey makes no sense aesthetically in the south, just like having Nascar races in Chicago seems retarded. Fuck global multiculturalism. Some shit is meant to be regional.
#5: Pittsburgh Penguins (24 points) - Starring Sydney Crosby, the NHL's future. A pre-eminent franchise (I'm assuming, since they used to be big, and had a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, which is more than most pro sports team can say) that almost went under recently, but has been saved by young ice phenom Crosby, who is supposed to save the NHL too. Haha, stupid NHL... like people are gonna care because of one young superstar. I don't understand why leagues like the NHL and NBA work under these "Michael Jordan/Tiger Woods" assumptions, because the NFL is by far the most popular thing, and it goes way deeper than a single superstar. Plus, when you hitch your wagon to the superstar theory, once that dude goes down (or retires to play baseball or whatever), you are fucked. Oh well, it's their money, not mine.
#6: Ottawa Senators (24 points) - I like the Senators. You know why? When I watched shitty Richmond Renegades minor league hockey, one of the most awesome players was the goalie for the Roanoke team, I think Daniel Berthume (my spelling is deficient probably), and he had played in the NHL for the Senators, but somehow devalued himself to a blacklisted career as a guy too good for the minor leagues but not welcome back to the NHL. Thus, I like the Senators, because they are one of only a handful of teams I have any notion of something deeper than uniform colors.
#7: Edmonton Oilers (24 points) - Just because they won mad Stanley Cups with Gretzky and Mark Messier, I don't like them, partially because I like to playa hate wildly successful sports franchises, and partially because Mark Messier looks like a fucking retarded baboon.
#8: Dallas Stars (23 points) - The Dallas sports tradition as usually good but not good enough is not quite played up enough for my tastes. The Cowboys have not won a playoff game in years, and both the Stars and Mavericks seem to be perpetually good, but bridesmaids instead of brides. Of course, even after doing the research for this, I may have forgotten that they won the Stanley Cup recently, but fuck it. It's only hockey.
#9: Buffalo Sabres (22 points) - The Sabres logo where it looks like a heart with a knife through it is one of the few hockey jerseys I'd want to wear were I the type to wear hockey jerseys (which is probably about two steps lower on the social degenerate scale than I'm currently ready to accept in my personal life). Plus, they had Miroslav Satan as well, who I think is on war crimes trial in Nuremberg now.
#10: Colorado Avalanche (22 points) - For me, I will always associate the Avs with that punishing thug Claude Lemieux, who looks more like evil Germans in old Sgt. Rock comic books than anybody else I've ever seen. Man, Marty McSorley-enforced Red Wings vs. Claude Lemieux-enforced Avalanches, that's how hockey should market itself if it wants to get big with that highly sought after retard delinquent with money young male demographic, not with goal-happy pretty boys like Sydney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin.
#11: Calgary Flames (21 points) - I don't know, I'm really struggling to make comments on some of this shit.
#12: Philadelphia Flyers (20 points) - Aren't they more of a finesse team now instead of their standard Broad Street Bully image? Or was that during the days of Eric Lindros? What ever happened to that dude anyways? Didn't he get like 37 concussions?
#13: Tampa Bay Lightning (14 points) - See, hockey in Tampa seems ridiculous to me. And I think they were the one with the female goalie too, which just goes to show how hockey is a freak show to us southerners. They should've had a grizzly bear goalie too, chained to the net inside the crease. Now that's what I call hockey!
#14: San Jose Sharks (7 points) - I guess hockey in California makes sense to me because California is a far off retarded place to me where people do all sorts of trendy nonsense as standard fare, standing around outside Sharks game waiting to get PBRs in plastic bottles and sushi orders. But then I think about how many Mexicans live in California and I realize my stereotypes of the state are not correct and I should be more careful. Like that old Bo Diddley song "You Can't Judge a Book By the Cover", except Hank Williams Jr. did a really shitty remake of the song that makes me want to judge books by their covers, so fuck California. I bet for all the cool ass spics that have lived there, there's also a bunch that are co-opted by soulless trendy Califuckfacers and become clean cut pseudo-spics standing outside Sharks games waiting to get Coronita plastic bottles and burrito wraps orders.

MNZ: Raw Vision Summer '08

I miss getting Raw Vision in the mail, because it's an enjoyable magazine, and this issue was great with Howard Finster and James Harold Jennings (both self-taught artists of a southern variety), and got me to looking up more shit and finding some dude who makes chainsaw critters outside of Raleigh and an old dude who does metal whirligigs on his farm headed towards the beach in Carolina. But shit man, art magazines are crazy with their self-importance. This was $14 for a single issue, and I guess it's printed on fancy paper with soy inks or whatever, but really, I could do without the gloss for like five bucks cheaper. Still, I'll probably resubscribe at some point soon since it's hard to find at the magazine store unless I'm really lucky. In fact, I think I found it at Barnes & Noble this time, which I've never seen it at before, nor since.

MNZ: Mass Appeal #51

I don't know if I'm getting more out of touch with things, or certain magazines I used to really love have fallen the fuck off, but I didn't get a lot out of this issue of Mass Appeal. This used to be one of my top 3 must have mags, but damn man. It did hip me to those faggot Scandinavian kids doing the Wu-Tang covers before the internet went nuts over that, so I guess it was worthwhile. And it taught me about Yahoozie boys in Nigeria, which I still need to try and download those songs. My shitty rap groups myspace page, I got sick of real friends being there and caring about top 8 or whatever the fuck, so I used my internet welfare (aka dial-up) to friend up a bunch of west African rap groups and make them my top 8 friends. Back to the motherland and shit, by way of NYC.
Oh yeah, the big piece of the San Francisco area transit bus graffiti bombers was cool, but I think I watched some shit ass documentary off of Netflix like a year ago about the same thing. So it wasn't like some groundbreaking shit to read about. But probably who suffered the most was The Knux. Stupid Shade 45 on the satellite about the time I purchased this had already been bugging the fuck out of me by playing the remix for "Cappucino" like every time I happened to be in the truck tuned into Shade 45. And then there was a feature in this Mass Appeal on The Knux, and they came off like a couple of chump ass fuckers. And not because they seemed nerdy, because I can get down with someone authentically being a nerd and still being who they are in a loud and proud manner. But these dudes came across like they were trying to have a nerd image, to be that backpacker crossover super act or some shit, like syphoning off the Kidz in the Hall/Cool Kids/Lupe Fiasco and I guess even stupid closet homosexual Kanye West's newfound "I'm not ignorant because I don't rhyme about killing people, even though I ain't really that smart unless your vocab consists mostly of text messaging shorthand" pseudo-Native Tongues fashion district bisexual rap genre. So I came out of thinking, "Man, these guys are stupid fucks. And probably not even for-real gay." I have little respect for people who seem gay but aren't gay, because I imagine if you are truly gay, sucking dicks can be a very satisfying thing. I mean, the penis is a strong appendage visually, and stuffing it into your mouth is probably aesthetically empowering, if you were apt to be that way. But to come across like a fag and not really be a fag, I don't know, it seems a shame to me.

August O.C.D. #4: Dirt Track Racing video game

This is a computer game that probably nobody on earth still plays except me, but it’s just a shitty race car game based on dirt tracks. You can race regular stock cars (which has three classes), or pro stock cars where you can customize bullshit (with five classes), or bonafide late models just like at Eastside Speedway (with four classes). But rather than just play the game, I have to be all parametric about it and set up a plan for conquering it, or at least immersing myself in it, which I’ve done on two other computers as well, but just in the past five weeks set the bitch up on my latest computer (I think the game’s from around 2000 or so).
Basically, each class year-to-year has its own schedule with its own set of dates, sometimes conflicting with other classes, so what I did was just start with the lowest stock class and run the three lowest classes I’d never won first place for the year in, going with the lowest as most important, marking them off my list as I finished first for the year. I am deeper into the game this time than ever before, having won all three stock classes, and beaten the first two pro stock classes in the same year (which is amazing dork game accomplishment, right up there with finding the perfect way to run through the Pac Man final screen on the Atari 2600 one day when I was ten, but having to abandon to go to All-Star practice, even though all I was was the shitty left fielder on the All-Star team), and am about four races away from finishing my sixth year, where unless I become retarded from a car accident but still play video games, I’ll beat another level of pro stock. That means I’ll start doing the late models, which go too fast for dirt, so you have to do the illogical thing of turning your wheels the opposite way of what you’d think to control your slides through curves. Luckily, the last pro stock class is a figure eight one, to learn you about using the right turn arrow cursor as well. I used to always use #69, like anybody with my limited cultural upbringing would choose, but this time I went with #0, all into that Agent Zero mantra by Gilbert Arenas (who is putting a million dollar shark tank into his house, with three sharks because that’s all the guy who would get them for him said he’d climb into feed). It was after this that I noticed with the computer drivers, usually the guys with the lower number (which starts with #1) do the best in each class. So I have been working under the assumption that I actually benefitted myself with computer love (you know how games will just screw you over oftentimes) by having the lowest number possible.
I can see this falling off the list pretty quickly though, as just like in real life, once football season starts, I don’t give a fuck about race cars. My newfound retarded Madden ‘08 project will probably preempt Dirt Track Racing dorkery. So hopefully this computer won’t become dead or poisoned by devils like my other ones (I now have a shitty cheap laptop that I relegate all questionable things like music stealing and masturbatory inspiration searches to, which keeps my main one more pure) and I can pick up again next spring.