Here is the J.J. Krupert Countdown for the month of this month in the year of this year, right now. I switched up my parameters a little, because I figured if I just do the shit that's simply played the most over the course of my little silver gaypod machine, then things that's been there forever and gets accidentally played even though I'm burned out on it would just rule the countdown, whereas new shit that I've been bumping like mad gets overlooked, at least the first couple months. So I will from here on out be employing a plus/minus hockey style deal, where I subtract how many times I skip that bitch from the played part to get a better recognition of shit in my brain the past month or two. New shit would still probably have to go go for a month or two to crack the Top 13, but whatever. This is for me anyways and it's not like anybody gives a fuck. It's really amusing because basically this blogospheric nonsense is the equivalent of a crazy dude standing on a downtown street corner, talking to hisself and waving at buses going past. Except "bloggers" is a media buzzword, so people think it actually means something. But it don't. Just like twitter. Anyways, here be this month's list...
#1: "Minimum Payments" by Solaris Earth Pipeline - Sigh... I guess the S.E.P. spaceship was destroyed during a crash landing trying to avoid a meteor shower of internal faggotry. We made some good music during our short run though. I've been wrestling with this bullshit, because I get all pissed like, "Goddammit, why was I wasting my time. I should've been doing this instead or that instead," but you know, you get where you're going by following the path you took. You can't switch that shit up. So I moved beyond that. Now I've been wondering if it's kosher or wack ass to go back and re-record anything in the camper with my new screwed up Ancient Hobo style or not. I mean, this song is basically a long ass loop from "Asleep in the Desert" by ZZ Top that it took me some convincing of PSY/OPS that he could actually loop it. And that's basically the entire beat. He did some ambient vocal effects on the hook and here and there, but the song's a pretty simple song. And it's actually one of my favorites off the 45s on 33 CD. (You can google search "solaris earth pipeline" and the sharebee link to dl that shit is near the top. You should check it out; it's some other shit.) Obviously, because I be playing it still. The lyrics are clusterfuck brain frame hating on internet haters, who run rampant from time to time. They are out there, packs of pasty, socially retarded wolves, waiting to turn on you when you have even a sliver of notoriety. Thankfully, I am far more aware of this than I was like 7 years ago, so I don't catch feelings over the internet at all. I mean, the internet's fake anyways; that'd be like me getting sad somebody died in a Friday the 13th movie.
#2: "Georgia (remix)" by The Cunninglynguists featuring Khujo Goodie & Killer Mike - I will readily admit I'm not the biggest Cunninglynguists fan. First off, their name pisses me off, because pretty much any more-than-competent white rapper in college in the early '90s was amazed at what a clever twist of phrase "cunning linguist" was, and for one group to just jack that as their name, I don't know, it just reminds of me someone who buys all the Chuck Taylors at the Goodwill to sell on ebay even though there might be bonafide loungers out there hoping to buy bonafide Chuck Taylors at the Goodwill for themselves or their children or their sick mother who did a lot of acid in the '70s or something. Fuck cultural cherry pickers. That being said, I stole their last CD from inside the internet's guts, and it was okay. I liked that song with Inverse (which I actually had been pumping that Inverse EP a lot, so I knew that song already), and the "Broken Van" song or whatever impressed me because it not only was a song about a piece of shit vehicle, which I always mark out for, but it had a Leon Russell sample from the Carney LP. I've listened to that LP a lot in my life, and made a few samples from it, including using the beginning of "Out in the Woods" on two copies to juggle the little bit of time I was DJing and learning myself out routines. I never would've thought to sample what they sampled for that song though. So props to you The Cunninglynguists, in case you fuckers are google searching yourselves all afternoon long, waiting to blow up like you know you should. But this "Georgia" song is some shit. First, if I was to have to pick like my five favorite rappers right now, Khujo and Killer Mike would be on that list. Khujo comes across as more for-real country than any of the shiny bullshit you hear on so-called country radio stations. And this song proves it. And then Killer Mike does what he does best - swab a very visual and very real and pretty street yet pretty intelligent picture while riding the beat like a motherfucker. I know this shit was on sharebee not too long ago, so google it up and vibe. My mental mix threesome of late has been "In the Red" by Willie Isz, then this, then "Comin' Home Atlanta" by Killer Mike; I try to work that little triple nipple of conscious babble into mixes I make for people, except I never make the mixes and just be like, "Oh shit man, I'm gonna hook up a mix of some killer shit you should check out," because we talked about rap music and the other dude was like he was down with Pete Rock & CL Smooth and shit but got out of following music and has two kids including one baby and blah blah blah.
#3: "If You Want Me To Stay" by Sly & The Family Stone - I have this on a 7-inch single and it's a wonderful single. Sly Stone was on some nonsense next level shit. They did a feature on him doing There's a Riot Goin' On in Waxpoetics magazine a few months back, and it was pretty much like I expected - a lot of great music, great musicians, plenty of drugs and whores, and Sly Stone on some warped by the rain mindframe leadership agenda. I bet there's some seriously good left field shit on tape somewhere that he's made on his own since going on sabbatical from the stupid record industry. We used to know this interracial couple, an older black dude who was like 50 but had little baby dreads and carried himself much younger, and a white girl like 30 or so, and I put this on one night, and I remember the black dude being all like shaking his head and going quietly, since he was a quiet dude, "Oh shit, Sly..." and then started singing along, sitting at the kitchen table. That was a feel-good moment. They split up and shit, and I'm fairly certain the older black dude wanted to hook up with my wife, since she had dreadlocks and a big ass and older black dudes who like white chicks see that as a pair of green lights for their approach, but he didn't really try too hard, I think because he thought I was crazy. Which I am. I've got as much anger about how shitty white people are as anybody, and I'm more than willing to channel that anger into completely different areas of my life. Like fucking up dudes being too friendly with my wife when they think I ain't looking.
#4: "Wagon Wheel (live)" by The Porch Loungers - Ha, the song makes the list again. I actually had three versions of it on my gaypod at one time and my oldest kid was like, "God, why do you have this song on here so much?" The Porch Loungers are my man Boogie Brown's bluegrass band and they'll be putting on acoustic performance around a fire in my back yard next Saturday night. This live version was from Newportfest held by fellow lounger Eric every Labor Day weekend. Hopefully, I will be there this year, DJing between bands, and maybe even pulling off a little surprise performance of some shit, but I don't know. I have a wedding to go to for a marriage that I'll be shocked if it lasts three years. Fucking obligations man, they suck.
#5: "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd - I still love this song. Even though this is part of the played-out-by-classic-rock-radio portion of the Skynyrd catalog, it's a great song, and probably the best example lyrically of how Ronnie Van Zant was the redneck buddha.
#6: "Until the Lion Learns to Speak" by K'naan - When The Trouabdour came out earlier this year, I went through a pretty heavy K'naan period, playing the new shit plus the older Dusty Foot Philosopher LP. This came off that one, and is one of my fave K'naan tracks. He actually triggered in me a search for good African rap, which didn't really net that much, since most African rap tends to have the philosophy of "Fuck Africa, let's sound like American rappers, but say African cities instead of American ones." When K'naan brings his African influence, like on this song, it's a good thing. When he gets all rapid-fire more American sounding, he sounds way too much like Eminem.
#7: "New Year's Day" by Robison Charlie - This dude Big Stoner Creek who used to be in The Secret Clubhouse shared for me some songs at some point, and this one was one of them. BSC don't seem to be around anymore, so he won't even know how much I've enjoyed this song. I'm pretty afraid of alt.country type stuff because it's usually crazy stupid and made by and for Brooklyn kids who drink PBRs ironically, so I've never even contemplated searching out a single other Robison Charlie song. I'm not even sure if his name is the right way. Seems like it should go the other way around, but I vaguely remember seeing him on the satellite radio one time and it was wrongways like that there too.
#8: "Stuntastic" by Blaqstarr - I was late to the party for the Fear & Loathing in Hunts Vegas mixtape, but I still got there and stood by the keg until it floated. It's amazing how much better Blaqstarr got once they started not spelling their name right and rapping about nonsense.
#9: "Dying Breed" by Prolo - Another fucking song by me... man I'm an egotistical dude all up on inside the internetz sugarwalls, ain't I? This was one of the first hooks I ever wrote for Boogie Brown to sing once he got all into bluegrass harmonies and I got into writing hooks instead of just verses that were 84 lines long every time. Here, I'll type out the hook, because it'll look way stupider in type on inside the internetz that it really comes across: "We from the northern end of the dirty southside/heart wrapped up in the honeysuckle vine/from southside to southwest, back roads in effect/land of the longhaired, laid back redneck/raven mack boogie brown part of a dying breed/drinking beer at night, in the morning smoking weed/ain't got a whole lot, but it feels about right/let our souls cut loose while our pockets stay tight". Now that's what I'm talking about. Literally.
#10: "Bluegrass Boy" by Woodstock Mountains - I meant to look up who actually did this, like Happy or Artie Traum or some post-Woodstock hippie who stayed in upstate New York with a bluegrass fetish. This is off of More Music from Wood Acres or something like that, which is a great assed record, even though I am playa hating upon bluegrass fetish half-rich fuckers lately, as I just was painting a space where a dude was building a wall who plays in a prominent newgrass band and looked like a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie who wore clothes he got from a Mr. Green Jeans estate sale. (Note to regular blog readers, all four of you: I will probably co-opt that line again at some point, over some shit I be plotting out, just so you're prepared beforehand, so when you read that again, you won't be like, "Man, Raven's retarded and repeats himself without knowing" and you can go like, "Man, Raven's retarded and repeats himself, but at lest he know that shit."
#11: "Asleep in the Desert" by ZZ Top - When I die, just play this, over and over and over and over.
#12: "Small Town" by Nappy Roots - Ever since David Banner never made another song even half as good as "Cadillac on 22s" and I gave up on him, Nappy Roots became my southern rap dudes not everybody knows about who have the largest potential. This was the best song off their Humdinger CD last year (unless you count "Good Day" as a song off that even though that came off an internet CD from before and they put it on the Humdinger too because it was so good). And really, with "Aw Naw", "Po' Folks", this song and "Good Day", they've already got a fatter catalogue of completely perfect southern rap anthems outside of everybody except maybe Outkast or Goodie Mobb, but probably not even them, unless you let me split it up in my brain to only Andre 3000 or Khujo.
#13: "The Mountain" by Steve Earle & Del McCoury - I heard a country ass lady inside the radios talking about the slurry slush and floods from mountaintop removal, destroying her house or some shit, and she stood up and protested it all and had rednecks trying to run her off the road and people trying to burn her house down. I have some friends who are into the whole Mountain Action Network Wondertivism Gang, and all that's great, but I sometimes mistrust the integrity of folks very obviously patch-on-their-sleeve on the helping the downtrodden tip. I have a problem with people who have had explaining to me how I shouldn't want to have because having is wrong. But when you slum it up and don't have with the safety net of your grown folks having your back, I don't know man, I just don't know. If you're gonna be a have and not a have-not, just go ahead and embrace it. Don't do this blank-eyed activist urban hippie pretend construction worker bullshit.
Tuesday, June 30
Friday, June 19
100 VINYLZ: #73 - Too Fast For Love LP by Motley Crue
(1982, Elektra Records)
This is honestly one of the greatest records ever, and it sucks that thrash metal vs. glam metal became such a divisive theme in hard rock music, because it's left shit like this in a limbo where it doesn't get it's propers from delinquent shithead dirtbags and it gets overlooked by douchebag dipshits who think "Girls, Girls, Girls" is the ultimate Crue. (Apparently, my keyboard doesn't have that satanic double dot thing. Someone should make satan wingdings, pronto.) I have very vivid memories of playing this shit in my bedroom as I would talk for hours on the phone with the girl I lost my virginity to when I was 13. "Piece of Your Action" really drives those memories home strong. Man, she was hot as fuck, and my penis wasn't hard and I hadn't seen enough Hustlers to really know where the vagina hole was, perhaps trained to into the hairy mound and not paying attention to the entryway, so I was poking my limp little dick into the wrong area with this girl, and it sucked for her and sucked for me, but it was my first time and god motherfucking bless it.
Anyways, I was at my mom's house last weekend, looking at the local paper. The girl I lost my virginity to had only had sex with one other dude, a guy like five years older than us who was her neighbor and obviously running older redneck rooster teenager game on a young budding redneck slut with fresh breast buds. Looking at the local paper, there was a picture of a girl who had gotten honors for something or some sort of scholarship and was going off to college, and it listed her parents and all. First off, her step-dad was a dude I used to run with, and I thought, "Wow, Alex's step-daughter be old." But then it listed the girl's father as the same guy who was my first's actual first. Which meant I was sexually related to this girl's dad (which you can't really let yourself start thinking about because it gets you all fucked-up in the head, especially with Facebook around nowadays to make it easier to have visuals for the freak out). That made me feel old as fuck, even though I'm only 36.
An odd aside, that girl I lost my purity too, before we ever hooked up, she was googley eyeing me at the Five County Fair while I was rolling with a friend of mine. My friend's uncle, who was like ten years older than us, was all like, "I think that girl wants you, Raven," and I was young and blowing it off, thinking that was the cool thing to do. It ended up me and her hooked up, my first ever. And even weirder, the friend's uncle ending up being that girl's first marriage, which of course ended in unmarriage. Shit, for a redneck slut who would have sex in all sorts of freaky ways, she never tolerated heavy drinking, much less using drugs. I found that sort of odd. Like I'd rather my kids smoke weed and drink beer than have sex every fucking weekend of their adolescence. I guess I could hope for them to not do either, but if you read through this blurb this far, you can probably guess I didn't exactly grow up in a place where hope runs rampant. Going on with the show though.
Thursday, June 18
100 VINYLZ: #74 - Protect Ya Neck 12" by Wu-Tang Clan
(1993, Loud Records)
The following was also written for the dumpin.net Top 100 All-Time Hip Hop Jamz list, but this was never seen as it was in the top 20 songs that stupid Mike never finished writing for to post on his stupid blog, which he doesn't care about anymore because he's got some gay-assed podcast or some shit. So I will just let this PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN OPINION FOR YOU FROM LIKE TWO YEARS AGO tell the story of me and this single...
I am going to be completely honest and admit that I bought this 12-inch in the record store first time I saw it, but was not able to wrap my brain around it. I had seen a small blurb in The Source about Wu Tang, and in a music genre full of posturing and flashiness, a bunch of grimy motherfuckers in camo, wearing stockings over their head, holding torches in front of an abandoned building with barrels full of fire hanging out, that was some shit I could get behind 1000% percent. You see, I am a child of the soil, growing up in the country... more specifically, the rural south, where blacks and whites of little wealth blend together and playa hate upon each other but combine together to build muscle car hot rods, outlandish clothing styles, and mulatto babies. So the first time after seeing that blurb that I saw this single at Willie's on Broad Street in Richmond, I dropped the $4.77 on it (still has the pricetag, so I know that's what singles went for back then, which was after they raised it from $3.99, which was okay because $4.77 plus the taxes came out to like 3 cents under a five dollar bill). I didn't get into "Protect Ya Neck". In fact, it was the B-side "Method Man" I got into, and apparently the rest of the world got into as well, as that handheld video was the one that got a lot of play on Rap City back then.
But it was inevitable; Wu Tang blew the fuck up big-time, beyond belief, and I was a HUGE Wumark for a long minute (probably until Wu Tang Forever came out, which I felt was a giant step backwards into glossy hypocrisy from their grimy ass group and solo debuts), and I still have that "Protect Ya Neck" 12-inch (from the re-issue put out by Loud when they signed them, not a blank white sleeve one I bought from like Master Killa back in the day out of the trunk of his Camry), and can pretend to be old school whiteboy Wu Tang master listener #1. Shit, what do y'all motherfuckers even know about twelve inch vinyl singles, with y'alls rapidsharing and shit? Y'all probably think Wu Tang Forever was the shit and loved that RZA book and everything. Stupid fucking kids. I hope ODB's orphaned kids use pimp psychology to train Darfur refugee lost boys who have relocated into America into a ruthless terrorist cell to murder you all with an anthrax that floats through wireless internets straight into your fucking wack-ass mind.
Wednesday, June 17
Castles Made of White Quartz
There is a natural area nearby where we live that I don't like to tell nobody about because every time I've gone there no one else has ever been there and I'd like to keep it that way. Back home in Farmville, Va. (what you got to say?) where I was growed up has changed a lot from the Wal-Mart gutting the downtown to parasitic four-lane stretch south of town where every restaurant and store that is in every other upstart community is situated at, and that was long enough ago that the downtown section has already rebricked itself for a quaint old-timey throwback feel to hopefully trick some high end furniture stores and art galleries into filling up the spaces where it used to be a Goodwill. So my natural habitat has pretty much been destroyed, not just in the grand sense of Farmville being all fucked-up and like a commercial now, but also the 50 acres I used to roam got sold off by my grandfather, so that part of it is a black muslim trailer park, and the other part all got logged, and the main part behind my mom's house with the creeks I used to kick it are still there, but the ambiance is all different now what with it being a very separate thing as opposed to a part of a larger natural area. So this actual bonafide by legal methods "natural area" near my current five-acre compound has become a frequent stop lately, to hike/run the 3 mile loop as part of my P.A.P. training (Personal Armageddon Preparedness), from which I've dropped 30 pounds in a few months. It reminds me a lot of where I'd run when I was younger and getting high after school and wanting to disappear into the pretend wild.
At this nearby area, there's some nice tributary creeks to the Rivanna River, and down in the bottom back part of one, you can follow a creek around a rise and it's a nice little lounging spot, with tons of white quartz everywhere. We were hiking with the kids the other day, and I was getting bored waiting for the girls to get bored of soaking their barefeet in the cold creek (country girls wear no shoes, country boys wear no shirt, country folks get no service), and I just started gathering up some of the quartz to build a little tower. I worked briefly as a stonemason (like three weeks) at the last official place of employment I ever had before wandering off into self-employed nonsenseland, and I also watched like 20 minutes of whatever dude that River and Tides documentary is about. But mostly I just like white quartz and felt like building a tower, because I knew there had to be tons of arrowheads back around there, but I couldn't find them, and I figured if I offered up a tower, then I'd start finding them. I know in my mind that it's like finding four-leaf clovers and you just have to train your eye for it, because if you go looking for them (four-leaf clovers or arrowheads), you won't find shit but frustration. Nonetheless, I figured a good rock sculpture would bring me some good luck. My wife, an art major in college, seemed quite impressed by my 20-minute quartz concoction, I think because she knows how words torment me and can be surprised to see my creative anguish erect its madness in different mediums.
Today was no different than any day recently - broke, not working, not motivated to work what I could work, waking up and praying that the sun won't shine (I'm the reason it's been raining so much in case you were wondering, me and fake god), so I went to that area again, and ended up collecting 33 rocks of various sizes to build another sculpture. This one was impressive as I put a hefty rock upright into the dirty muck of what must've been a flood plain last month, and then I situated another big ass rock (a good 60 to 70 pounds I'd say) on top of it sideways. From there, I had planned to use all 33 rocks, but it kind of finished itself at around twenty-some, so I looked around. This second one was on the little plain area I said, about three feet higher from the first one I built right by the creekbed the first time. So I looked around and figured a three-pronged power point attack of quartz was perfectly appropriate, and I used the leftover rocks to make a triple chick quick brick stack on top of a dead tree sitting sideways like Paul Wall. Except there were three left when I felt like that one was done too. Instead of forcing my self-created parameters onto things and ruining my bullshit with my own bullshit (which is a long-running theme in my life, and most lives probably), I tossed the last three rocks back into the creek. The splash caused me to catch eyeballs on a little triangular-tipped rock that would've easily made a good poison arrow were I in the olden days of nomadic ninja natives who made their own weapons of minor destruction. Digging it up out the creek made me find two more, and those three I situated at odd spots on the edges of the second and third stacks, similar to like how gaudy Chinese man buffets that have those ridiculously large penny fountains at the entrance, with the weird fake rock structure climbing the entire wall, and they'll have a little Buddha statuette tucked into a crevice all secret-like that hardly anybody really notices but you do one day by accident. That's how I tucked my last little three pieces of quartz, one on a really cool ass shelf that the second structure had about a third of the way up, like I actually had known what I was doing as I was doing it.
The white quartz rock sculptures have been very therapeutic, and a great addition to my P.A.P. training regimen. I feel like I'm sort of coming out of some electronic hibernation I had been in for nearly a decade that I didn't even know was going on. Figuring out your own bullshit a lot of times is similar to an onion in that you start peeling back layers and you get to where you think you had to get yourself, but then there's more layers. So you keep going and going and eventually you realize at the center of it all is basically nothing, so get on with it. Which is what I'm doing, even if the rest of things don't get on with it with me. I feel as I'm finding my feet again, the rest of the world isn't necessarily spinning the same way I'm wandering. Which is fine. From what I read recently, the world's spinning off-kilter and Mars is going to crash into us at some point anyways. My little unseen off-path quartz stacks are built precariously where if the world really did spin off-kilter too hard, they'd fall back into the mud, which isn't really mud but just wet dirt. I am figuring personally, much like the haiku project where I wrote 1000 haiku over the course of a few years, I should probably, for my own well-being and proper regard within the way the world does actually spin, build a thousand of these things. I probably couldn't do all one thousand there at the secret natural area I don't want anybody to know about, because then someone would be like, "Hey, some crazy fucker is building all these crazy things out here in the middle of nowhere," and then a ton of dumbasses would always be walking around out there and harsh my life buzz. Life buzzes seem to get harder and harder to get what with all the electronic bzzzzzzz clouding the emotionosphere from these technologically-polluted times, and it seems whenever you are lucky enough to find one of those life buzzes, others are quick to come around and try to tag along and siphon some of that positive energy, and it seems about the only thing you can do anymore is hope to sell some oddball t-shirts your buddy screenprints in his garage before your newfound by the public life buzz is completely decimated.
At this nearby area, there's some nice tributary creeks to the Rivanna River, and down in the bottom back part of one, you can follow a creek around a rise and it's a nice little lounging spot, with tons of white quartz everywhere. We were hiking with the kids the other day, and I was getting bored waiting for the girls to get bored of soaking their barefeet in the cold creek (country girls wear no shoes, country boys wear no shirt, country folks get no service), and I just started gathering up some of the quartz to build a little tower. I worked briefly as a stonemason (like three weeks) at the last official place of employment I ever had before wandering off into self-employed nonsenseland, and I also watched like 20 minutes of whatever dude that River and Tides documentary is about. But mostly I just like white quartz and felt like building a tower, because I knew there had to be tons of arrowheads back around there, but I couldn't find them, and I figured if I offered up a tower, then I'd start finding them. I know in my mind that it's like finding four-leaf clovers and you just have to train your eye for it, because if you go looking for them (four-leaf clovers or arrowheads), you won't find shit but frustration. Nonetheless, I figured a good rock sculpture would bring me some good luck. My wife, an art major in college, seemed quite impressed by my 20-minute quartz concoction, I think because she knows how words torment me and can be surprised to see my creative anguish erect its madness in different mediums.
Today was no different than any day recently - broke, not working, not motivated to work what I could work, waking up and praying that the sun won't shine (I'm the reason it's been raining so much in case you were wondering, me and fake god), so I went to that area again, and ended up collecting 33 rocks of various sizes to build another sculpture. This one was impressive as I put a hefty rock upright into the dirty muck of what must've been a flood plain last month, and then I situated another big ass rock (a good 60 to 70 pounds I'd say) on top of it sideways. From there, I had planned to use all 33 rocks, but it kind of finished itself at around twenty-some, so I looked around. This second one was on the little plain area I said, about three feet higher from the first one I built right by the creekbed the first time. So I looked around and figured a three-pronged power point attack of quartz was perfectly appropriate, and I used the leftover rocks to make a triple chick quick brick stack on top of a dead tree sitting sideways like Paul Wall. Except there were three left when I felt like that one was done too. Instead of forcing my self-created parameters onto things and ruining my bullshit with my own bullshit (which is a long-running theme in my life, and most lives probably), I tossed the last three rocks back into the creek. The splash caused me to catch eyeballs on a little triangular-tipped rock that would've easily made a good poison arrow were I in the olden days of nomadic ninja natives who made their own weapons of minor destruction. Digging it up out the creek made me find two more, and those three I situated at odd spots on the edges of the second and third stacks, similar to like how gaudy Chinese man buffets that have those ridiculously large penny fountains at the entrance, with the weird fake rock structure climbing the entire wall, and they'll have a little Buddha statuette tucked into a crevice all secret-like that hardly anybody really notices but you do one day by accident. That's how I tucked my last little three pieces of quartz, one on a really cool ass shelf that the second structure had about a third of the way up, like I actually had known what I was doing as I was doing it.
The white quartz rock sculptures have been very therapeutic, and a great addition to my P.A.P. training regimen. I feel like I'm sort of coming out of some electronic hibernation I had been in for nearly a decade that I didn't even know was going on. Figuring out your own bullshit a lot of times is similar to an onion in that you start peeling back layers and you get to where you think you had to get yourself, but then there's more layers. So you keep going and going and eventually you realize at the center of it all is basically nothing, so get on with it. Which is what I'm doing, even if the rest of things don't get on with it with me. I feel as I'm finding my feet again, the rest of the world isn't necessarily spinning the same way I'm wandering. Which is fine. From what I read recently, the world's spinning off-kilter and Mars is going to crash into us at some point anyways. My little unseen off-path quartz stacks are built precariously where if the world really did spin off-kilter too hard, they'd fall back into the mud, which isn't really mud but just wet dirt. I am figuring personally, much like the haiku project where I wrote 1000 haiku over the course of a few years, I should probably, for my own well-being and proper regard within the way the world does actually spin, build a thousand of these things. I probably couldn't do all one thousand there at the secret natural area I don't want anybody to know about, because then someone would be like, "Hey, some crazy fucker is building all these crazy things out here in the middle of nowhere," and then a ton of dumbasses would always be walking around out there and harsh my life buzz. Life buzzes seem to get harder and harder to get what with all the electronic bzzzzzzz clouding the emotionosphere from these technologically-polluted times, and it seems whenever you are lucky enough to find one of those life buzzes, others are quick to come around and try to tag along and siphon some of that positive energy, and it seems about the only thing you can do anymore is hope to sell some oddball t-shirts your buddy screenprints in his garage before your newfound by the public life buzz is completely decimated.
100 VINYLZ: #75 - Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down 12" by Brand Nubian
(1992, Elektra Records)
At one point at dumpin.net, me and Mike Dikk pretended we were going to list and blurb out the Top 100 All-Time Greatest Hip Hop Jamz of All-Ever as decided by Expert Whiteboys who are heavily steeped into the hip hop and smarter than all other whiteboys and some black dudes too, especially ones that grew up in the suburbs. This is what I wrote about this song when we were doing that...
"When all this shit was coming out, I was dropping near a hundred bucks a week on new full-length tapes and vinyl singles, probably averaging five or six singles a week. I had both the "360" single and this single. The Puba single, and I was a big Puba fan because it was awesome that a guy with a face that looked like it got stung by a thousand bees could be a sex symbol of some sort, has long been sold off, but I still have that Brand Nubian single. And I still play it regularly. I know internet dork computer preservation fuckwad would want to put it to digitalization and save the vinyl for some far-off never-reached ebay value level, but fuck it, I bought the shit, it's mine and I'm gonna play it till it breaks. I might even go draw some shitty graffiti tag on it with a silver Sharpie right now, maybe write PARLAY in really bad 34-year-old white man cholo letters.
This song is great. I had the One For All tape, and wasn't too bummed when they broke up because like everybody mistakenly thought at the time, I thought Puba was carrying the group. This single proved that wrong completely. In fact, other than this single, I don't know what notable non-Brand Nubian albums any of these guys did (although I've been meaning to "obtain" Jamar's album from last year for a while now). And them being split up made you realize that. I think one of the last actual brand new rap tapes I bought before the form became obsolete was their reunion Foundation tape, and it's a good tape, with a grown folks vibe. More shit about community and kids growing up right and all, which jibes well with my family-oriented drunken lifestyle. However, the penultimate rap jams are not about overall concepts of community and making the world better. It's about raw emotion. And you let Diamond sample the horns from Rocky for a thick-booted beat, and then Sadat and Lord J kick a couple of fags in the face lyrically, and that's a motherfuckin' song. (The B-side of the single has a remix where Diamond gets on the track as well, which is neat if you've never heard it, but nothing compared to the original song.)"
Looking back, I would say the one thing that's changed in my opinions for you is that I really like the remix featuring Diamond a whole lot more now, probably because I made myself a screwed and chopped boom bap NYC singles from the early '90s mix through Audacity and used it. Also, I think Diamond is still the world's best kept secret, and any white person into the rap music who doesn't like Diamond and embrace Diamond and tout Diamond should not be considered a for-real rap fan. This is the curse of the white man's mind thinking about hip hop - it always has to be truer to whatever than the next white man's mind, so that we claw at each other's credibility like crab's in a barrel.
Another thing about this single, when I was in college, we used to do acid a lot, and we'd wander, which was a great way to meet homeless people in early '90s Richmond, Virginia. I remember on the billboard above the Hardee's between Grace and Broad Street, there was a credit card ad for a while, and somebody - probably an art student at the school there - climbed up and tagged a thick and drippy "PUNKS JUMP UP TO GET BEAT DOWN" across the bottom of the billboard. I always thought that was awesome. Nowadays, post-Banksy/Shepard Fairey making Obamaganda for profit, I'd find it annoying. And I wouldn't be able to do acid because all they'd have is pharmaceuticals in the dorms. Stupid world, leaving me behind. At least I still have my trusty old Brand Nubian sans-Puba's swollen face 12-inch single to play on my old-fashioned record playing machine.
Friday, May 29
Friday Love/Hate
I love a thunderstorm. Hot ass humid life cut wide open by cold ass rains, watching lightning in the distance when I'm outside the edges of the madness. If there is some sort of end times boogie and armageddon fulfillment, I hope it's just like a giant thunderstorm for about three years, sitting on the porch at times watching it happen, but also ducking in the house and hoping the hail doesn't kill off all the squash plants at times, and after it finally clears up, all the assholes on earth will be dead and gone.
I hate all this. I hate internet bullshit, hate waking up to paint stupid fucking houses where I sometimes wish my truck would blow a tire and I'd flip over and be nothing but a roadside memorial. Fucking sick and tired of a lot of the shit I'm knee deep in with no obvious branch or rope or solid ground to pull myself out of. But fuck it man. Push forward, like a retarded warrior.
I hate all this. I hate internet bullshit, hate waking up to paint stupid fucking houses where I sometimes wish my truck would blow a tire and I'd flip over and be nothing but a roadside memorial. Fucking sick and tired of a lot of the shit I'm knee deep in with no obvious branch or rope or solid ground to pull myself out of. But fuck it man. Push forward, like a retarded warrior.
J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - May '09
J.J. Krupert is the name of my gaypod, which is what I call my tiny little 2 gig iPod Shuffler, and I find it to be the perfect size, because when it comes to squeezing analogous music down into little 1s and 0s and stuffed into a tiny piece of electronical stimulation, I don't want 7000 albums all at once. With the little bitch, I change my theme every now and then, cut shit off fairly regularly, add other things, it's like survival of the fittest. It is called J.J. Krupert because when my middle kid was like 4, she always played my DJ Z-Trip CD we got back when his retard mash-up style was new and fresh and not old and played out. And she would ask what it is and I'd tell her and she'd go, "Oh cool. Mommy, I'm listening to J.J. Krupert again." So that's what it is.
I did this once before at some point as monthly mixes of songs, but fuck it man, there's enough free music inside the internets. So I'm starting fresh and will simply write about the top 13 most played songs on my gaypod named J.J. Krupert. Of course, with me and my strange halfwitted mathematically seduced brain, there are ridiculously unnecessary parameters. I will not write about a song more than once (if I even do this more than once, as this was my May list for the beginning of the month and I'm just now feeling like doing it), and there can only be one song per list by any individual musical artist, so that if I go buckwild this summer and just get high all the time and listen to Led Zeppelin constantly, it doesn't end up being just a list of Led Zeppeling songs. So anyways, here is my list of top 13 most played songs on my ridiculously small robot machine of music as it was for the start of May 2009 the year of the psychedelic goat eating all the blackberries that greedy little fucker.
#1: "A Crippled Man Finally Rides a Train" by 1000 Feathers - Basically, this is me using my new ancient hobo style that I've been doing out the in camper, since I mostly just make the music with myself nowadays. The formula is I take funky-ish breakbeats from classic rock records, sometimes identifiable sometimes not at all, straight up just loop them using the Audacity and a USB turnstable, and then I record my vocals straight into the Audacity too, testing it's limit to process too much information at once. I got a bootleg of that Ableton Live, but that shit's got too many knobs and bullshit for me to figure out. I wouldn't be able to actually write anything anymore if I learned myself that Jap nonsense. Then I pitch shift my vocals down seven notches since DJ Screw brainwashed me into thinking that's the best way, and plus I only write lyrics about riding trains or Greyhounds or shooting pool or swimming in the river - basically outlaw country standard fodder, but in the rappitty rapping ways. This song was the first one I did, and the best one too. I used the beginning break of "Up On Cripple Creek" by The Band, which was always my favorite The Band song, but I've come to love my own song so much that when I used to have both songs on my gaypod and The Band would start singing instead of my warped vocals going "I'd like to ride the rails but I'm too far off the tracks..." I'd be bummed. I even deleted the original version because of this fact. It's the best song I've ever done in my life and makes The Band seem stupid in comparison. Basically, Robbie Robertson only existed as a springboard for me to make a retarded song in a borrowed gypsy lady's camper in my backyard about becoming a hobo out of frustration from life. Sorry bro. We all have our positions to play.
#2: "Enough Rope" by Chris Knight - I heard this on the satellite radio one Saturday morning (which I just cut that bitch off - they were offering me like 3 months free to stay on and all and I was like, "Dude, I don't listen to it. It's boring. Just cut it off.") and got some off an internet dude, and this song rules. It's the best country song ever of the past 10 years, except if he had actually sold it and like Trace Adkins did it as a follow-up to "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk", it wouldn't actually be awesome anymore because regular people would know it, and I'm an internet music nerd contrarian hipster fucker, so I can only really really really like things most people don't know about. It makes me feel special and helps me compensate for self-esteem issues I have in other facets of my life. There are other Chris Knight songs and I've heard them and tried multiple times, but honestly, I'm convinced this is the only good song this dude ever did. He is a one-hit wonder, except his one-hit is underground level hit, so he didn't even get briefly rich from Billboard charts until he realized his evil Jew manager ripped him off and actually owns the right to the song and made all the real money off the deal.
#3: "Ironhorse/Born to Lose" by Motorhead - Not the later metallic Motorhead version, but a very early, post-Hawkwind, mellow yet rugged Lemmy making the greatest biker anthem of all-time. I had this on a tape that got stolen out my car years ago when I worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in RVA, and I looked forever for it, even buying a few used Motorhead CDs that always ended up having the more metal version. Finally, this dude Sicknote who is inside the internets and can find anything you ask him for even if you make it up and it doesn't exist found me the version I had long been missing. One thing lame about gaypods is I can't just have this set to be the first thing I hear in my truck when I get in it in the morning, to motivate me to make that money and feel good working out in the sun simple man hell yeah boy. I mean, I guess I actually could figure out how to make that happen, but man, it's hard enough to get up and actually go to shitty ass work, much less plan out morning theme music to make the shitty day better.
#4: "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show - This is the greatest new school bluegrass song ever. Most newgrass is a little too college town we wear overalls ironically for my taste. Even a bit of O.C.M.S. is like that for me. But there is no denying this is a great motherfuckin' song. It makes me want to get high and hitchhike to North Carolina and see if Boomer and Shannon are around and if they've had the baby or not but maybe Boomer and me can go to Georgia and find adventure for a few days. But of course none of that happens because I'm broke, have to work, and have already had three childrens of various ages, so whenever I get money, self-indulgent retarded drug-fueled road trips usually fall too far down the financial priority list underneath things like the electric bill and paying for ballet class and fuck we need to go grocery shopping again, the baby's already out of her muesli in the weird 1970s box we can only find at that grocery store in Waynesboro.
#5: "Blue Jean Blues" by ZZ Top - DJed a party at my mom's crib last fall for a bunch of older country redneck drunkards and stoners. The next morning, when I woke late after drinking like 23 Yuenglings the night before, there was slow moving, some horseshoes throwing, fire still going, and plenty of loungers having some Sunday morning coming down beers in their hands. So before I could break all the components down, one old dude was like, "Play some Otis if you got it." This led to just playing mellow ass records and plenty of quality lounger bullshitting going on. I threw on Fandango to hear "Blue Jean Blues" and this one lady, good friend of my mom and her son and me grew up together - tight families, she looks at me and goes, "Oh Raven, what a great song." I already loved this song a shit ton, but all those top-level loungers being laid back and wasted, and Mike's mom with her outlaw woman voice saying that, it made the song even more perfect. Actually, I just copped something called The Moving Sidewalks off the inside of the internets which is Billy Gibbons' first band before ZZ Top, a late '60s psychedelic deal where you can really hear how into Jimi Hendrix ol' Billy Gibbons was back then, and it's good shit too. Billy Gibbons is a national treasure and it really saddens me that most people only think of the horrendous '80s MTV electronic hit factory ZZ Top and not the real deal dirty jeans scruffy beard professional lounger soundtrack masters. When I start a college, Billy Gibbons is gonna be one of the first people I tenure.
#6: "Country Rap Tune" by Tow Down featuring DJ Screw, Hawk, & Big Pokey - This is a great song, one of my favorite ever screwed songs and probably the most unheralded underground hit by a white rapper ever. I was in a fancy hotel with speedy internet one time and actually looked up the video for this on the youtubes and it was weird hearing it at regular speed, like it sounded all freaky and odd. But the Tow Down dude was driving like a Honda Civic painted like the General Lee, which is what I always joked I'd do with my Datsun, except I was gonna paint it orange with a Japanese flag on top and paint "GENERAL TSO" along the edges of the roof, and probably keep the 01 number. Have you ever been to a demolition derby? You'd be surprised how many cars at a demolition derby are number 69. You'd also be surprised how many different ways people can purposely misspell “get ‘er done”.
#7: "Long Haired Lounger" by Prolo - Boogie Brown has a bluegrassy group called The Porch Loungers, but some of his songs are too retarded and lazy-boned for them, so he makes them Prolo songs. This is one, with no rapping at all, where he plays guitar, sang harmonies and shit like only he can, then screwed the whole thing down. I’ve heard of people listening to country music screwed and how it works at times, but music made specifically for that purpose is some next level shit. My man Brown.
#8: "Born Poor" by The Jaggerz - 7-inch single I got from some yard sale that I didn’t know shit about and got the band mixed up with The Sylvers ends up being one of my favorite 7-inches I have. Just your standard everyday olden style soulish but maybe white dudes involved song about how being poor is golden and you are not corrupted by the bullshit uppitty affairs of this twisted world, thus you are able to truly love, and also truly long dick a chick. Well, maybe that last part is not so obvious, but it is implied. Poor people love big asses and only rich people lust for the emaciated scrawny sickliness of super models. Eat some samwich bitch.
#9: "Longhaired Redneck" by David Allan Coe - Man, I’ve been listening to a lot of David Allan Coe lately, but nothing as late as this song (from the late ‘70s or so), so I’m not sure how it got played so much on my gaypod. But it is here so I talk of it now. I went to a DAC show one time by myself in Richmond and it was bikers but no cowboys and I thought I’d be the hippie standing in the corner except a couple fake redneck college buddies of mine showed up too who don’t speak redneck, which made us more likely to get smashed by someone, except I do speak redneck since it’s in my bloodline, and probably actually nothing that extraordinary even happened, I’m just babbling. That show was the worst DAC show I saw (I’ve been to like 6 or 7) because I guess he had just made up and met his daughter, who was like 23 or some shit, so one whole set was a bunch of bullshit sentimental sorry deadbeat dad but I didn’t know no better let’s go dance in an abandoned warehouse like in The Wrestler type bullshit. Really dulled my drunk.
#10: "In the Red" by Willie Isz - Khujo Goodie is a growling pork chop breathed awesome MC motherfucker, who I’ve always loved. It was his growl and Ceelo’s wacky sang-rapping style that made Goodie Mobb so goddamned awesome when they came out. (I guess Gipp was good for a little break in the action and some funny fashion accessories, and honestly to this day I have no idea why T-Mo was in the group or what he contributed. He pretty much ruined the perfection of “Soul Food” with his “Fuck Chris Darden! Fuck Marcia Clark!” dumb shit, not to mention dating the hell out of that song now in retrospect.) Jneiro Jarel is some sort of space age indy rap producer extraordinaire who probably has sketches of a “RIP J. Dilla” tattoo in some art notebooks on his bookshelf made of milk crates and cinderblocks somewhere. Even his name - Jneiro Jarel - and I may even be right on this, but I’ve assumed it was one of the bad guys from Superman that got stuffed in that cocaine mirror and shot into space. But I will say, on the strength of this “In the Red” song, I am more stoked for this impending CD (supposed to come out in like week or two I think) than anything else hip hop related in maybe a couple years. I guess the MF Doom this year was pretty good, but it was predictable. This is some retarded next level paranoia-laced multi-generation corny swaggerless audio goodness potentially, this Willie Isz is. And if Ceelo can get famous with Gnarls Barkley, I’d like to see Khujo do the same with Willie Isz, so when they make a Goodie Mobb reunion CD where T-Mo ruins it yet again and Gipp wears like ostrich feathers in his teeth or some shit, regular white people will be more apt to lump Khujo in with Ceelo as a guy held back by his lesser potnas than lump him with the aforementioned clowns.
#11: "Better Off" by Corntooth - Corntooth is a country assed band from my old roommate Matt (also check out his rock shit at RPG) and his wife and some other dudes I know or don’t know who were or are in Lamb of God or Gwar or other shit. It’s good stuff, as Matt’s from Pennsyltucky and his wife Janey is from Roanoke so the vocal stylings make you want to drink beer while watching Philo Beddo beat up Mexicans. I’ts great shit and impossible to ever find inside the internets, but it exists. I swear.
#12: "Pills I Took" by Hank Williams III - I love some Tricephus, which is extra enjoyable now because my eldest kid is 10 and hates country music (much like I did at her age) and even drew me a wacky picture of her idea of a hoedown with people wearing plaid clothes and eating fried chicken from Wal-Mart and carrying purses made of old blue jeans and playing the banjo and harmonica in annoying hoedown ways. She hates Hank III. It’s fun to have kids growing up that you can torment. I wonder if my parents took so much pride in tormenting me or it was some regular sitcom style bullshit where they didn’t realize they were tormenting. Because I know I’m bugging my kid, and I am proud of it, and because I know it it means I’m smart. So smart. That’s why I have a blog. Only smart people have blogs, so they can share how smart they are with the rest of the stupid fucking world.
#13: "Box #10" by Jim Croce - If the current economic climate causes me to either flip out or get desperate or both and do something so stupid I end up in jail for the rest of my life, I’m gonna do nothing but tattoo Jim Croce lyrics on my body. That, and try not to let anybody know how good I braid hair. In the last month, I’ve actually become pretty good at putting a bun in a young girl’s hair (that’s not a euphemism, in case you were wondering), which is a skill I’d never thought I’d acquire. Of course, instead of just doing it half-assed, I had to look it up online, ask my wife to show me, and my middle kid’s bun got better each and every week. First week, the shit fell out, bobby pins all over the ballet school floor. But last week, shit was so tight I was tempted to not even use the little crocheted bun holder thingy to give it that added tightness. I thought I could let her roll straight bun style. I am a man who conquers things.
I did this once before at some point as monthly mixes of songs, but fuck it man, there's enough free music inside the internets. So I'm starting fresh and will simply write about the top 13 most played songs on my gaypod named J.J. Krupert. Of course, with me and my strange halfwitted mathematically seduced brain, there are ridiculously unnecessary parameters. I will not write about a song more than once (if I even do this more than once, as this was my May list for the beginning of the month and I'm just now feeling like doing it), and there can only be one song per list by any individual musical artist, so that if I go buckwild this summer and just get high all the time and listen to Led Zeppelin constantly, it doesn't end up being just a list of Led Zeppeling songs. So anyways, here is my list of top 13 most played songs on my ridiculously small robot machine of music as it was for the start of May 2009 the year of the psychedelic goat eating all the blackberries that greedy little fucker.
#1: "A Crippled Man Finally Rides a Train" by 1000 Feathers - Basically, this is me using my new ancient hobo style that I've been doing out the in camper, since I mostly just make the music with myself nowadays. The formula is I take funky-ish breakbeats from classic rock records, sometimes identifiable sometimes not at all, straight up just loop them using the Audacity and a USB turnstable, and then I record my vocals straight into the Audacity too, testing it's limit to process too much information at once. I got a bootleg of that Ableton Live, but that shit's got too many knobs and bullshit for me to figure out. I wouldn't be able to actually write anything anymore if I learned myself that Jap nonsense. Then I pitch shift my vocals down seven notches since DJ Screw brainwashed me into thinking that's the best way, and plus I only write lyrics about riding trains or Greyhounds or shooting pool or swimming in the river - basically outlaw country standard fodder, but in the rappitty rapping ways. This song was the first one I did, and the best one too. I used the beginning break of "Up On Cripple Creek" by The Band, which was always my favorite The Band song, but I've come to love my own song so much that when I used to have both songs on my gaypod and The Band would start singing instead of my warped vocals going "I'd like to ride the rails but I'm too far off the tracks..." I'd be bummed. I even deleted the original version because of this fact. It's the best song I've ever done in my life and makes The Band seem stupid in comparison. Basically, Robbie Robertson only existed as a springboard for me to make a retarded song in a borrowed gypsy lady's camper in my backyard about becoming a hobo out of frustration from life. Sorry bro. We all have our positions to play.
#2: "Enough Rope" by Chris Knight - I heard this on the satellite radio one Saturday morning (which I just cut that bitch off - they were offering me like 3 months free to stay on and all and I was like, "Dude, I don't listen to it. It's boring. Just cut it off.") and got some off an internet dude, and this song rules. It's the best country song ever of the past 10 years, except if he had actually sold it and like Trace Adkins did it as a follow-up to "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk", it wouldn't actually be awesome anymore because regular people would know it, and I'm an internet music nerd contrarian hipster fucker, so I can only really really really like things most people don't know about. It makes me feel special and helps me compensate for self-esteem issues I have in other facets of my life. There are other Chris Knight songs and I've heard them and tried multiple times, but honestly, I'm convinced this is the only good song this dude ever did. He is a one-hit wonder, except his one-hit is underground level hit, so he didn't even get briefly rich from Billboard charts until he realized his evil Jew manager ripped him off and actually owns the right to the song and made all the real money off the deal.
#3: "Ironhorse/Born to Lose" by Motorhead - Not the later metallic Motorhead version, but a very early, post-Hawkwind, mellow yet rugged Lemmy making the greatest biker anthem of all-time. I had this on a tape that got stolen out my car years ago when I worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in RVA, and I looked forever for it, even buying a few used Motorhead CDs that always ended up having the more metal version. Finally, this dude Sicknote who is inside the internets and can find anything you ask him for even if you make it up and it doesn't exist found me the version I had long been missing. One thing lame about gaypods is I can't just have this set to be the first thing I hear in my truck when I get in it in the morning, to motivate me to make that money and feel good working out in the sun simple man hell yeah boy. I mean, I guess I actually could figure out how to make that happen, but man, it's hard enough to get up and actually go to shitty ass work, much less plan out morning theme music to make the shitty day better.
#4: "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show - This is the greatest new school bluegrass song ever. Most newgrass is a little too college town we wear overalls ironically for my taste. Even a bit of O.C.M.S. is like that for me. But there is no denying this is a great motherfuckin' song. It makes me want to get high and hitchhike to North Carolina and see if Boomer and Shannon are around and if they've had the baby or not but maybe Boomer and me can go to Georgia and find adventure for a few days. But of course none of that happens because I'm broke, have to work, and have already had three childrens of various ages, so whenever I get money, self-indulgent retarded drug-fueled road trips usually fall too far down the financial priority list underneath things like the electric bill and paying for ballet class and fuck we need to go grocery shopping again, the baby's already out of her muesli in the weird 1970s box we can only find at that grocery store in Waynesboro.
#5: "Blue Jean Blues" by ZZ Top - DJed a party at my mom's crib last fall for a bunch of older country redneck drunkards and stoners. The next morning, when I woke late after drinking like 23 Yuenglings the night before, there was slow moving, some horseshoes throwing, fire still going, and plenty of loungers having some Sunday morning coming down beers in their hands. So before I could break all the components down, one old dude was like, "Play some Otis if you got it." This led to just playing mellow ass records and plenty of quality lounger bullshitting going on. I threw on Fandango to hear "Blue Jean Blues" and this one lady, good friend of my mom and her son and me grew up together - tight families, she looks at me and goes, "Oh Raven, what a great song." I already loved this song a shit ton, but all those top-level loungers being laid back and wasted, and Mike's mom with her outlaw woman voice saying that, it made the song even more perfect. Actually, I just copped something called The Moving Sidewalks off the inside of the internets which is Billy Gibbons' first band before ZZ Top, a late '60s psychedelic deal where you can really hear how into Jimi Hendrix ol' Billy Gibbons was back then, and it's good shit too. Billy Gibbons is a national treasure and it really saddens me that most people only think of the horrendous '80s MTV electronic hit factory ZZ Top and not the real deal dirty jeans scruffy beard professional lounger soundtrack masters. When I start a college, Billy Gibbons is gonna be one of the first people I tenure.
#6: "Country Rap Tune" by Tow Down featuring DJ Screw, Hawk, & Big Pokey - This is a great song, one of my favorite ever screwed songs and probably the most unheralded underground hit by a white rapper ever. I was in a fancy hotel with speedy internet one time and actually looked up the video for this on the youtubes and it was weird hearing it at regular speed, like it sounded all freaky and odd. But the Tow Down dude was driving like a Honda Civic painted like the General Lee, which is what I always joked I'd do with my Datsun, except I was gonna paint it orange with a Japanese flag on top and paint "GENERAL TSO" along the edges of the roof, and probably keep the 01 number. Have you ever been to a demolition derby? You'd be surprised how many cars at a demolition derby are number 69. You'd also be surprised how many different ways people can purposely misspell “get ‘er done”.
#7: "Long Haired Lounger" by Prolo - Boogie Brown has a bluegrassy group called The Porch Loungers, but some of his songs are too retarded and lazy-boned for them, so he makes them Prolo songs. This is one, with no rapping at all, where he plays guitar, sang harmonies and shit like only he can, then screwed the whole thing down. I’ve heard of people listening to country music screwed and how it works at times, but music made specifically for that purpose is some next level shit. My man Brown.
#8: "Born Poor" by The Jaggerz - 7-inch single I got from some yard sale that I didn’t know shit about and got the band mixed up with The Sylvers ends up being one of my favorite 7-inches I have. Just your standard everyday olden style soulish but maybe white dudes involved song about how being poor is golden and you are not corrupted by the bullshit uppitty affairs of this twisted world, thus you are able to truly love, and also truly long dick a chick. Well, maybe that last part is not so obvious, but it is implied. Poor people love big asses and only rich people lust for the emaciated scrawny sickliness of super models. Eat some samwich bitch.
#9: "Longhaired Redneck" by David Allan Coe - Man, I’ve been listening to a lot of David Allan Coe lately, but nothing as late as this song (from the late ‘70s or so), so I’m not sure how it got played so much on my gaypod. But it is here so I talk of it now. I went to a DAC show one time by myself in Richmond and it was bikers but no cowboys and I thought I’d be the hippie standing in the corner except a couple fake redneck college buddies of mine showed up too who don’t speak redneck, which made us more likely to get smashed by someone, except I do speak redneck since it’s in my bloodline, and probably actually nothing that extraordinary even happened, I’m just babbling. That show was the worst DAC show I saw (I’ve been to like 6 or 7) because I guess he had just made up and met his daughter, who was like 23 or some shit, so one whole set was a bunch of bullshit sentimental sorry deadbeat dad but I didn’t know no better let’s go dance in an abandoned warehouse like in The Wrestler type bullshit. Really dulled my drunk.
#10: "In the Red" by Willie Isz - Khujo Goodie is a growling pork chop breathed awesome MC motherfucker, who I’ve always loved. It was his growl and Ceelo’s wacky sang-rapping style that made Goodie Mobb so goddamned awesome when they came out. (I guess Gipp was good for a little break in the action and some funny fashion accessories, and honestly to this day I have no idea why T-Mo was in the group or what he contributed. He pretty much ruined the perfection of “Soul Food” with his “Fuck Chris Darden! Fuck Marcia Clark!” dumb shit, not to mention dating the hell out of that song now in retrospect.) Jneiro Jarel is some sort of space age indy rap producer extraordinaire who probably has sketches of a “RIP J. Dilla” tattoo in some art notebooks on his bookshelf made of milk crates and cinderblocks somewhere. Even his name - Jneiro Jarel - and I may even be right on this, but I’ve assumed it was one of the bad guys from Superman that got stuffed in that cocaine mirror and shot into space. But I will say, on the strength of this “In the Red” song, I am more stoked for this impending CD (supposed to come out in like week or two I think) than anything else hip hop related in maybe a couple years. I guess the MF Doom this year was pretty good, but it was predictable. This is some retarded next level paranoia-laced multi-generation corny swaggerless audio goodness potentially, this Willie Isz is. And if Ceelo can get famous with Gnarls Barkley, I’d like to see Khujo do the same with Willie Isz, so when they make a Goodie Mobb reunion CD where T-Mo ruins it yet again and Gipp wears like ostrich feathers in his teeth or some shit, regular white people will be more apt to lump Khujo in with Ceelo as a guy held back by his lesser potnas than lump him with the aforementioned clowns.
#11: "Better Off" by Corntooth - Corntooth is a country assed band from my old roommate Matt (also check out his rock shit at RPG) and his wife and some other dudes I know or don’t know who were or are in Lamb of God or Gwar or other shit. It’s good stuff, as Matt’s from Pennsyltucky and his wife Janey is from Roanoke so the vocal stylings make you want to drink beer while watching Philo Beddo beat up Mexicans. I’ts great shit and impossible to ever find inside the internets, but it exists. I swear.
#12: "Pills I Took" by Hank Williams III - I love some Tricephus, which is extra enjoyable now because my eldest kid is 10 and hates country music (much like I did at her age) and even drew me a wacky picture of her idea of a hoedown with people wearing plaid clothes and eating fried chicken from Wal-Mart and carrying purses made of old blue jeans and playing the banjo and harmonica in annoying hoedown ways. She hates Hank III. It’s fun to have kids growing up that you can torment. I wonder if my parents took so much pride in tormenting me or it was some regular sitcom style bullshit where they didn’t realize they were tormenting. Because I know I’m bugging my kid, and I am proud of it, and because I know it it means I’m smart. So smart. That’s why I have a blog. Only smart people have blogs, so they can share how smart they are with the rest of the stupid fucking world.
#13: "Box #10" by Jim Croce - If the current economic climate causes me to either flip out or get desperate or both and do something so stupid I end up in jail for the rest of my life, I’m gonna do nothing but tattoo Jim Croce lyrics on my body. That, and try not to let anybody know how good I braid hair. In the last month, I’ve actually become pretty good at putting a bun in a young girl’s hair (that’s not a euphemism, in case you were wondering), which is a skill I’d never thought I’d acquire. Of course, instead of just doing it half-assed, I had to look it up online, ask my wife to show me, and my middle kid’s bun got better each and every week. First week, the shit fell out, bobby pins all over the ballet school floor. But last week, shit was so tight I was tempted to not even use the little crocheted bun holder thingy to give it that added tightness. I thought I could let her roll straight bun style. I am a man who conquers things.
Saturday, May 23
These Boots Was Made What For Walking
I've been listening to a lot of old David Allan Coe lately, thanks to my ace boon limey Sicknote inside the Secret Clubhouse, and the greatest song ever forever and of all-time (of the last four attention spans of my brain) is "Walkin' Bum" by David Allan Coe. First off, Buckstone County Prison is a great ass record, and has the "Mississippi Woman" and "West Virginia Man" songs I have fucking loved forever, as it's old David Allan Coe, not really full-blown country yet, kind of a weird prison degenerate redneck Jerry Lee Lewis rock-n-country on speed type thing. Penitentiary Blues is another good album (in the form of cyber-codes that play on little machines inside my house) and has the "Walkin' Bum" song, which touches on some shit I've often thought about and have used in The Back Roads Ninjitsu Manual. One time, I visited this dude I knew out in Boulder, Colorado, and he was hung-up on his hang-ups, full color ohm back tattoo and shit, but sort of missing his mountain soul (sorry bro if you happenstance upon this). I went to some park like 8 miles away from his crib and said I'd walk. He was like, "I'll give you a ride man," like I was a fool for walking. But seriously, you ride by shit, you fly by, you don't see it or even begin to see all the great stupid things that great stupid people build in their little microcosms of a life. So I walked, step by step, through Boulder's sterile streets, up into the hills, and just vibed on it all. It was fine, nothing amazing, but I got a lot more out of that trip by walking than by cruising up, looking around, then cruising back in creature comfort. This led to a big part of a chapter in the rojonekku manual where there's a trailer park of seven trailers (based on Lindy Hamlet's Trailer Park in Hampden-Sydney, VA) and the student/kids/delinquents live in the trailer park, and oftentimes are moved from one trailer to the next in a process to get into the main big house on the compound, to truly know every trailer in that park, instead of just passing them by to their one. All the toilet handle jiggles and soft spots in the plywood by the leaky door and window with no screen that you can't leave open unless you want mosquitoes on your ass and moths all around the lights. Every detail becomes reality when you are more connected to something. I think this is part of the reason I've never flown, because I'm not afraid of flying at all. It just doesn't seem right to me, and I'm not of the lot in life where I have some godawful important bullshit where I have to be a thousand miles away in ten hours. I actually don't even like riding the interstates on road trips, preferring the old main roads that are clogged with stoplights and rundown hotels and strip malls and humanity. But fuck it man, I'm from all that shit too. And you run into cool ass things sometimes, so long as it's not new-fangled suburban sprawl with the same 23 stores you see everywhere. But even there, when you get to the edge where all the Mexicans live and there's a Big Lots, you can go into the Goodwill and find you a really nice authentic alternate black shamrock Boston Celtics Paul Pierce jersey with the embroidered numbers and name and all that shit for $4. Can't get that on the interstate.
Where I grew up in life is, to this day, at least an hour away from any U.S. interstate. And this is in Virginia, albeit southside VA - the home of textile mills with plywood windows and more crabgrass than cars in the parking lot. But still, an hour from the interstate makes me proud to be away from all that bullshit. Where I live now is only like 20 minutes from the interstate, which sucks, and you can tell. My neighbors think they live in the country, but they keep their lawn cut and don't like us having chickens and tall grass and freezers on the front porch and regular country folk things like that. At least I suspect they don't like it. Most of them don't hardly talk at us that often, unless pressed, which I like to do at times. Funny thing is the family that owns most things around here are country as fuck and all have nicknames like Gook or Beetle or Stump. They're good dudes too it seems most of the time. Seems like those dudes respect us having chickens and kids playing on homemade contraptions in the back yard and extra camper trailers out back with the light on all night long during the weekend.
Lately I've been wearing bandanas like Tommy Chong did because my hair's not quite long enough for a ponytail (unless I want the front sides to fall out and dangle while the rest is pulled back and look like some coffeeshop homo poet type). Dudes have been flashing me the peace sign at times, which bugs me, and one dude at the hardware store started talking about the '60s and free love and shit. Man, I was born in '73, I'm just holding my goddamned hair back. I think when I'm not so broke, I should go to the bar in town in my Tommy Chong bandana and get good and drunk and start a fight with one of those short little stocky redneck types who walk around like they were born a Marine and usually have some sort of rockin' ass tattoo they saw on a CD cover in high school. When people make me feel like too much of a hippie, I like to assert my alpha male hyperactivity. And then usually I'll realize, "Man, you were wearing a fucking Chong bandana and a pair of overalls with a Paul Pierce authentic jersey and some robot socks-looking ass new-fangled Converse sneaks... it's confusing and you do look half a fucking dirty hippie with your beard and all." And I laugh the type of laugh I laugh to myself at the world being the butt of my continuous humor.
Seriously though, I'm pretty proud of myself. So far as I know, I'm the first person in my family to graduate college (other than my cousin, who also graduated one semester before me, but we're the only two, and she failed sixth grade and I caught up to her and she got good grades from that point on, so I obviously secretly motivated her), and I'm the first person in my family - at least that I know of in my lifetime - that has chickens. I also had goats. I'm a true Renaissance man, if during the Renaissance they got useless degrees in stupid shit that didn't help them at all in life other than put them in debt that they ignore until hopefully it all blows up and goes away, and they had animals in their back yard. I never studied Renaissance studies in college, and honestly am not even sure if I spelled it right. (I cut spell check off automatic because fuck that, always telling me the words I make up aren't for real. If I thought of it, it's for real, cybertron-approval or not.)
Where I grew up in life is, to this day, at least an hour away from any U.S. interstate. And this is in Virginia, albeit southside VA - the home of textile mills with plywood windows and more crabgrass than cars in the parking lot. But still, an hour from the interstate makes me proud to be away from all that bullshit. Where I live now is only like 20 minutes from the interstate, which sucks, and you can tell. My neighbors think they live in the country, but they keep their lawn cut and don't like us having chickens and tall grass and freezers on the front porch and regular country folk things like that. At least I suspect they don't like it. Most of them don't hardly talk at us that often, unless pressed, which I like to do at times. Funny thing is the family that owns most things around here are country as fuck and all have nicknames like Gook or Beetle or Stump. They're good dudes too it seems most of the time. Seems like those dudes respect us having chickens and kids playing on homemade contraptions in the back yard and extra camper trailers out back with the light on all night long during the weekend.
Lately I've been wearing bandanas like Tommy Chong did because my hair's not quite long enough for a ponytail (unless I want the front sides to fall out and dangle while the rest is pulled back and look like some coffeeshop homo poet type). Dudes have been flashing me the peace sign at times, which bugs me, and one dude at the hardware store started talking about the '60s and free love and shit. Man, I was born in '73, I'm just holding my goddamned hair back. I think when I'm not so broke, I should go to the bar in town in my Tommy Chong bandana and get good and drunk and start a fight with one of those short little stocky redneck types who walk around like they were born a Marine and usually have some sort of rockin' ass tattoo they saw on a CD cover in high school. When people make me feel like too much of a hippie, I like to assert my alpha male hyperactivity. And then usually I'll realize, "Man, you were wearing a fucking Chong bandana and a pair of overalls with a Paul Pierce authentic jersey and some robot socks-looking ass new-fangled Converse sneaks... it's confusing and you do look half a fucking dirty hippie with your beard and all." And I laugh the type of laugh I laugh to myself at the world being the butt of my continuous humor.
Seriously though, I'm pretty proud of myself. So far as I know, I'm the first person in my family to graduate college (other than my cousin, who also graduated one semester before me, but we're the only two, and she failed sixth grade and I caught up to her and she got good grades from that point on, so I obviously secretly motivated her), and I'm the first person in my family - at least that I know of in my lifetime - that has chickens. I also had goats. I'm a true Renaissance man, if during the Renaissance they got useless degrees in stupid shit that didn't help them at all in life other than put them in debt that they ignore until hopefully it all blows up and goes away, and they had animals in their back yard. I never studied Renaissance studies in college, and honestly am not even sure if I spelled it right. (I cut spell check off automatic because fuck that, always telling me the words I make up aren't for real. If I thought of it, it's for real, cybertron-approval or not.)
Friday, May 22
100 VINYLZ: #76 - Abigail LP by King Diamond
(1987, Roadrunner Records)
I first had this on tape in high school, and everybody knows the King was the best because he can do death metal groans but could also sing opera if he wanted. He also could've been the European Pele but he gave up pro soccer when he sold his soul to the devil at his kitchen table one night. All King Diamond before 1990 is the greatest shit ever, the culmination of his early incubation in Mercyful Fate to where he had the Satanic theme record thing down pat. Abigail is still my favorite, and I am proud that one year in my wasting money on ebay periods, I acquired this on the vinyl. If I can't find my Death Angel LP, I will blast this through the speaker in the back yard on chicken slaughter day. They're these big ass heavy duty 1977 solid wood speakers I got from under the carport at the dump aka The Too Good To Throw Away section. I keep them in the camper, pull them out for parties, because they make big noise, but the other week I set one on a milk crate behind the shed, and my riding mower was in the shop back home where my dad worked for 30 years of his life, so the tarp that covered the riding mower was on the ground. Tarp over top speaker on milk crate, loose brick on top of tarp to hold it in place, and BAMMM! permanent back yard sound system that I didn't have to haul in and out all the time. Now, I just plug in the camper, hook my little 2 gig gaypod shufflenator into the jack by the door, and play the musics. I'm on a Los Tigres Del Norte kick lately.
Friday Love/Hate
LOVE: The latest homebrew we cracked open starting last night, called Spring Chicken Ale, which we made before we even had chickens I think. Has some coriander and lemonpeels in it and is light and good as fuck. My goal to make regular homebrews so I didn't ever buy beer again involved making light beers like this instead of most homebrews that taste like some poured a gallon of hops into a tiny bottle and swished it with some dirt. This is my new favorite beer ever and I'm glad my wife suggested we keep a recipe book because we didn't keep up with our every 2 weeks brewing plan, meaning we will need to get money to get started again, and this easily fills the light tasty awesome beer void that I tried to fill with Yuenglings. This Spring Chicken Ale gets me drunker though. I've drank one and a half tonight (22 oz. bottles) and have quite the buzz. 50 bottles ain't gonna last long though.
HATE: Having to pull a long day tomorrow, hopefully clock a check from folks, and spend half of it on fucking stupid bills right away that are due tomorrow. I hope the new credit card laws they are passing contains something about them issuing metal credit cards that I can then sharpen into ninja death tools and slit the throat of the fuckers in the credit industry. I know I know, it's all my fault, but I wasn't really trained properly for this bullshit world I seem to be stuck in. I'm old enough to know better, but I think I'd rather just have a temper tantrum, kill some motherfuckers, not have a revolution start because it won't be televised by the internets, go to jail, and get some really swank guitar string tattoos and hopefully not be, you know, raped, although I am white and from what I hear that makes for tasty ass in jail. I could be all white powered out in the name of self-preservation though. God what a shitty situation to get into. I apologize fake internet holographic world spun from my dorkblog... I won't use new-fangled metal credit cards as ninja throwing cards and kill credit industry fat cats. But I might use a fake social security number or two to solve my credit problems. If only I can maintain the sense to pay off actual credit cards with fake credit ones and not just use new fake ones for back tattoos and buying that lime green '65 Impala sitting at that body shop in Centenary on route 20. I'm sure that dude doesn't take credit cards anyways though.
HATE: Having to pull a long day tomorrow, hopefully clock a check from folks, and spend half of it on fucking stupid bills right away that are due tomorrow. I hope the new credit card laws they are passing contains something about them issuing metal credit cards that I can then sharpen into ninja death tools and slit the throat of the fuckers in the credit industry. I know I know, it's all my fault, but I wasn't really trained properly for this bullshit world I seem to be stuck in. I'm old enough to know better, but I think I'd rather just have a temper tantrum, kill some motherfuckers, not have a revolution start because it won't be televised by the internets, go to jail, and get some really swank guitar string tattoos and hopefully not be, you know, raped, although I am white and from what I hear that makes for tasty ass in jail. I could be all white powered out in the name of self-preservation though. God what a shitty situation to get into. I apologize fake internet holographic world spun from my dorkblog... I won't use new-fangled metal credit cards as ninja throwing cards and kill credit industry fat cats. But I might use a fake social security number or two to solve my credit problems. If only I can maintain the sense to pay off actual credit cards with fake credit ones and not just use new fake ones for back tattoos and buying that lime green '65 Impala sitting at that body shop in Centenary on route 20. I'm sure that dude doesn't take credit cards anyways though.
Entering the World of Chickens
I have not been too stoked with this world, at least not the people part of it. Seems like a bunch of snakes and fakes and flakes and folks sucking the energy right out of me half the time. If someone's not posturing beyond their knowledge about some dumb shit I don't even care about, then some other person is getting things all twisted and retardified in their own head and forcing that drama triangle on me. (Drama triangle is this bullshit where someone always has others positioned either as friend or oppressor, and usually they switch you back and forth as necessary, like say they are trying to work things out with their wife over some long-term problems, instead of facing the issues inside of themselves, they switch you over to the oppressor and a lot of their problems with the former oppressor were because of you. Some folks be so melodramatic in abundance it's more like a drama dodecahadrangle or some bullshit.)
Anyways, I solved my socialization problems and hate for the world by building a pimp-ass chicken coop, absconding a chicken tractor from some folks in a barter deal my wife did, and getting me some chicks, who will hopefully be more hen than rooster (which is a fucking retarded dead art in itself, of which I'm no good at at all, and every person you ask has some other bullshit chick dangling foot watching mountaintop science to try and teach you in 37 words). So I think I will talk about chicken breeds, both the ones I have and the ones I'd like to get, and all the stupid things I've learned immersing myself in true retarded ass Raven fashion in the written world of chicken "knowledge". (By the way, there are crazy amounts of backyard chicken websites/blogs/and even message boards. Most of them disturb me, though I do lurk and learn, and one even has this impressive very-internet-like nerd project of documenting how chickens of all breeds look at almost any age - from days to weeks to months - of both sexes to give visual aid in sexing chicks. Of course, it's unfinished, because this is the internet after all. Also, "sexing chicks" seemed to me a very dangerous google search to do on the family computer instead of my little laptop disease machine of stolen music and questionable image searches, but not that much creepy shit came up. I may have changed google settings on that computer without remembering though, as my oldest kid always likes to be trying to go onto americangirl.com and look at shit we can't afford.)
First chicks I got were from some scowl-faced short ass redneck near where I grew up. He and his ol' lady had a trailer with like two big sheds behind the place full of chicks and chickens, and it was right down the road from where my dead grandpa's house is, of which the roof I'm supposed to paint, so it gave me an excuse to go look at that roof, miss my grandpa, see a skunk under the back porch, and think about how much I fucking hate painting, especially stupid metal roofs in the age of global warming my ass the fuck up on top of metal on top of buildings on top of the surface of the earth. Anyways, little scowl-faced dude in overalls (like me actually, which was mad funny to me, and I think what pissed him off, like that was his country style or some bullshit, or I don't know maybe we went to school together and I was all fucked up on acid or something at a party and dissed him or something, who the fuck knows with country folk; we hold bizarre grudges stubbornly hard for the stupidest of reasons) picked me out what he suspected were hens, though it's hard to know at that age. Got me three 5-week-old Rhode Island Reds and two 3-week-old Leghorns, basically on his insinuation that Leghorns outlay the Reds (known in chicken nerd world as "RIR"s). I actually started building my coop after situating all these little dudes in the chicken tractor, and when I was almost done, like one good solid day of work finishing the fencing, I went to some Jesus freak chiropractor cowboy dude's house I got off of ebay and got myself a pair of Ameracaunas about 10-weeks old. He had no idea about sexing them (probably because of his god), but he told me if one was a rooster he'd replace it, but if both were, he'd only replace one. I figure fuck it, if they end up a rooster we'll eat them, which will prepare me for doing a flock of meatbirds later this summer. I'd rather my first couple chicken slaughters be one or two at a time than jumping into doing a whole batch of 25, although maybe the speaker I have permanently set up in the back yard could be pointed toward the slaughtering area and I could just pump The Ultra-Violence by Death Angel and get my chicken slaughter on. Finally, the other day after ballet class with the kids in my truck, I swung by a lady's house and she was a Shifflett (which is a whole slew of local people who are like an army of Jesco Whites who were run off the Shenandoah Mountains by the federales when they built the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park and all, so the Shiffletts are a strange, outlaw bunch) and I picked out two 3-week-old Buff Orpingtons and two 3-week-old Australorps. So here is what I have to say about chicken breeds, first the ones I've got, and then others I hope to get into.
RHODE ISLAND REDS - These are standard red-assed chickens you always see and they lay big brown eggs pretty regularly it seems. Mine are now about 8-weeks old I think, and one I'm almost completely certain is a hen, the other two I'm not sure about, leaning hard hen on one and hard rooster on the other. Very functional animals and have a chill personality so far it seems. They remind me of the type of guys who work for themselves and like to play horseshoes while high but also lead cub scout troops or coach t-ball or something like that. I think if we keep a flock of around 12 to 20 birds, I will always have 3 or 4 of these guys, especially considering their egg-laying reputation.
WHITE LEGHORNS - These are the main commercial layers of all those white assed eggs you get at the store, which I think makes the do-it-yourself type playa hate on them. There also, for some reason, is a big deal about brown eggs being superior over white eggs, and I'm not sure if there's truth to it or it's just misplaced white guilt or retarded hippie nonsense, but I do know the Leghorns aren't supposed to get as big as the RIRs so they probably don't lay as big an egg. Still, an egg a day ain't uncommon for these dudes. And they look very normal chickeny too. I guess I am operating my flock like a game of Sim City in that I want a good amount of regular people shit going on and not just crazy fucked up birds everywhere. I also know from my brief consultations with internet nerd chicken world on some breed history site that White Leghorns were highly cherished in ancient Rome and used to foretell the future. So I like to pretend that involves them being super-mental chickens and not just something that was sliced open in a cave on a mountainside to spill it's blood and see what the gods wanted us to know.
AMERACAUNAS - They lay colored eggs, and my wife named these two some fucked up Russian names or something. One of them is most definitely a hen and the other I don't know. It looks like a hen, no real heavy comb or arrowhead ass feathers or anything, but it's aggressive and bossy to the other birds. It was also by far the biggest of the bunch until the one probably rooster RIR caught up to it in the last week, so maybe it's just got a big chicken in the coop complex going on. These are strange birds, therefore I like them. Apparently, true araucanas came from Chile and most every bird in America called araucana or ameracauna is a fake ass mutt hybrid that lays colored eggs and the true araucanas are impossible to find for real though.
BUFF ORPINGTONS - Straight pimps of the chicken world, with a tight ass cream feather color and goofy fluff to their tails. Mine are too young to sex (that's what she said), but one has the demeanor of a pimp ass rooster. Most of these, if they end up roosters, they will end up stuffed with rosemary and cooked in my oven, but I'd be tempted to keep a pimp ass straight gangsta funk looking buff orpington rooster. (I also apparently decided to stop capitalizing rooster breeds halfway through this post, as rhode island reds use of a geographical place confused me.)
AUSTRALORPS - These were bred by some mad scientist in Australia and were called Australian Laying chickens, but everyone put the -orp on the end so you knew they came from orpingtons, and they were called australorps and now you know the rest of the story. Mine are small, like 3-weeks, and they hang with the buff orps so I don't even notice them really, little ugly ass black chicks.
BLACK STARS - Basically, there are two types of chickens called red sex links and black sex links that are called so because you know what sex the chick is when it's born by the color of it's feathers. This shit was done in the mid '70s in mad science fashion, but I hate that term "sex link" for a chicken. They are also called red stars and black stars too, probably by uptight people who don't like to say "sex", which I'm fine with in this case. Mostly, this is because I have had a large west African fetish the past year or two, searching out bullshit rap and old funk and crap like that (if you want to buy me a present, get me Extreme Canvas by some dude, about Ghanaiananaan handmade movie posters for VCR movie theaters they used to have back in the day). Anyways, Ghana was the first African country to get independence, and they have the standard red yellow green (or is it black?) striped flag like a ton of African countries, but with a black star in the middle of the center yellow stripe. So since then, Ghana has had Black Star culture, where dudes who are on the come-up, or the national soccer team, or a song by English rapper Sway, is called "Black Star". Thus, I want some black stars.
BROWN LEGHORNS - They have a pretty odd wacky colorful feather patch on their front ends, kinda psychedelic, and I've been listening to a lot of Hawkwind and 13th Floor Elevators in the darkness of my backyard lately as the fireflies crank up, so I think I'm pretty down with psychedelic chickens. Maybe I'll crack open one of those glow sticks and pour it over them and watch them bug out.
There's more but the second bell rang so I've got to make it to algebra real quick.
Anyways, I solved my socialization problems and hate for the world by building a pimp-ass chicken coop, absconding a chicken tractor from some folks in a barter deal my wife did, and getting me some chicks, who will hopefully be more hen than rooster (which is a fucking retarded dead art in itself, of which I'm no good at at all, and every person you ask has some other bullshit chick dangling foot watching mountaintop science to try and teach you in 37 words). So I think I will talk about chicken breeds, both the ones I have and the ones I'd like to get, and all the stupid things I've learned immersing myself in true retarded ass Raven fashion in the written world of chicken "knowledge". (By the way, there are crazy amounts of backyard chicken websites/blogs/and even message boards. Most of them disturb me, though I do lurk and learn, and one even has this impressive very-internet-like nerd project of documenting how chickens of all breeds look at almost any age - from days to weeks to months - of both sexes to give visual aid in sexing chicks. Of course, it's unfinished, because this is the internet after all. Also, "sexing chicks" seemed to me a very dangerous google search to do on the family computer instead of my little laptop disease machine of stolen music and questionable image searches, but not that much creepy shit came up. I may have changed google settings on that computer without remembering though, as my oldest kid always likes to be trying to go onto americangirl.com and look at shit we can't afford.)
First chicks I got were from some scowl-faced short ass redneck near where I grew up. He and his ol' lady had a trailer with like two big sheds behind the place full of chicks and chickens, and it was right down the road from where my dead grandpa's house is, of which the roof I'm supposed to paint, so it gave me an excuse to go look at that roof, miss my grandpa, see a skunk under the back porch, and think about how much I fucking hate painting, especially stupid metal roofs in the age of global warming my ass the fuck up on top of metal on top of buildings on top of the surface of the earth. Anyways, little scowl-faced dude in overalls (like me actually, which was mad funny to me, and I think what pissed him off, like that was his country style or some bullshit, or I don't know maybe we went to school together and I was all fucked up on acid or something at a party and dissed him or something, who the fuck knows with country folk; we hold bizarre grudges stubbornly hard for the stupidest of reasons) picked me out what he suspected were hens, though it's hard to know at that age. Got me three 5-week-old Rhode Island Reds and two 3-week-old Leghorns, basically on his insinuation that Leghorns outlay the Reds (known in chicken nerd world as "RIR"s). I actually started building my coop after situating all these little dudes in the chicken tractor, and when I was almost done, like one good solid day of work finishing the fencing, I went to some Jesus freak chiropractor cowboy dude's house I got off of ebay and got myself a pair of Ameracaunas about 10-weeks old. He had no idea about sexing them (probably because of his god), but he told me if one was a rooster he'd replace it, but if both were, he'd only replace one. I figure fuck it, if they end up a rooster we'll eat them, which will prepare me for doing a flock of meatbirds later this summer. I'd rather my first couple chicken slaughters be one or two at a time than jumping into doing a whole batch of 25, although maybe the speaker I have permanently set up in the back yard could be pointed toward the slaughtering area and I could just pump The Ultra-Violence by Death Angel and get my chicken slaughter on. Finally, the other day after ballet class with the kids in my truck, I swung by a lady's house and she was a Shifflett (which is a whole slew of local people who are like an army of Jesco Whites who were run off the Shenandoah Mountains by the federales when they built the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park and all, so the Shiffletts are a strange, outlaw bunch) and I picked out two 3-week-old Buff Orpingtons and two 3-week-old Australorps. So here is what I have to say about chicken breeds, first the ones I've got, and then others I hope to get into.
RHODE ISLAND REDS - These are standard red-assed chickens you always see and they lay big brown eggs pretty regularly it seems. Mine are now about 8-weeks old I think, and one I'm almost completely certain is a hen, the other two I'm not sure about, leaning hard hen on one and hard rooster on the other. Very functional animals and have a chill personality so far it seems. They remind me of the type of guys who work for themselves and like to play horseshoes while high but also lead cub scout troops or coach t-ball or something like that. I think if we keep a flock of around 12 to 20 birds, I will always have 3 or 4 of these guys, especially considering their egg-laying reputation.
WHITE LEGHORNS - These are the main commercial layers of all those white assed eggs you get at the store, which I think makes the do-it-yourself type playa hate on them. There also, for some reason, is a big deal about brown eggs being superior over white eggs, and I'm not sure if there's truth to it or it's just misplaced white guilt or retarded hippie nonsense, but I do know the Leghorns aren't supposed to get as big as the RIRs so they probably don't lay as big an egg. Still, an egg a day ain't uncommon for these dudes. And they look very normal chickeny too. I guess I am operating my flock like a game of Sim City in that I want a good amount of regular people shit going on and not just crazy fucked up birds everywhere. I also know from my brief consultations with internet nerd chicken world on some breed history site that White Leghorns were highly cherished in ancient Rome and used to foretell the future. So I like to pretend that involves them being super-mental chickens and not just something that was sliced open in a cave on a mountainside to spill it's blood and see what the gods wanted us to know.
AMERACAUNAS - They lay colored eggs, and my wife named these two some fucked up Russian names or something. One of them is most definitely a hen and the other I don't know. It looks like a hen, no real heavy comb or arrowhead ass feathers or anything, but it's aggressive and bossy to the other birds. It was also by far the biggest of the bunch until the one probably rooster RIR caught up to it in the last week, so maybe it's just got a big chicken in the coop complex going on. These are strange birds, therefore I like them. Apparently, true araucanas came from Chile and most every bird in America called araucana or ameracauna is a fake ass mutt hybrid that lays colored eggs and the true araucanas are impossible to find for real though.
BUFF ORPINGTONS - Straight pimps of the chicken world, with a tight ass cream feather color and goofy fluff to their tails. Mine are too young to sex (that's what she said), but one has the demeanor of a pimp ass rooster. Most of these, if they end up roosters, they will end up stuffed with rosemary and cooked in my oven, but I'd be tempted to keep a pimp ass straight gangsta funk looking buff orpington rooster. (I also apparently decided to stop capitalizing rooster breeds halfway through this post, as rhode island reds use of a geographical place confused me.)
AUSTRALORPS - These were bred by some mad scientist in Australia and were called Australian Laying chickens, but everyone put the -orp on the end so you knew they came from orpingtons, and they were called australorps and now you know the rest of the story. Mine are small, like 3-weeks, and they hang with the buff orps so I don't even notice them really, little ugly ass black chicks.
BLACK STARS - Basically, there are two types of chickens called red sex links and black sex links that are called so because you know what sex the chick is when it's born by the color of it's feathers. This shit was done in the mid '70s in mad science fashion, but I hate that term "sex link" for a chicken. They are also called red stars and black stars too, probably by uptight people who don't like to say "sex", which I'm fine with in this case. Mostly, this is because I have had a large west African fetish the past year or two, searching out bullshit rap and old funk and crap like that (if you want to buy me a present, get me Extreme Canvas by some dude, about Ghanaiananaan handmade movie posters for VCR movie theaters they used to have back in the day). Anyways, Ghana was the first African country to get independence, and they have the standard red yellow green (or is it black?) striped flag like a ton of African countries, but with a black star in the middle of the center yellow stripe. So since then, Ghana has had Black Star culture, where dudes who are on the come-up, or the national soccer team, or a song by English rapper Sway, is called "Black Star". Thus, I want some black stars.
BROWN LEGHORNS - They have a pretty odd wacky colorful feather patch on their front ends, kinda psychedelic, and I've been listening to a lot of Hawkwind and 13th Floor Elevators in the darkness of my backyard lately as the fireflies crank up, so I think I'm pretty down with psychedelic chickens. Maybe I'll crack open one of those glow sticks and pour it over them and watch them bug out.
There's more but the second bell rang so I've got to make it to algebra real quick.
Thursday, May 21
100 VINYLZ: #77 - Soul Power '74 7" by Maceo & The Macks
(1974, People Records)
Kind of forgot about this, and had planned on finishing the list by end of 2008, to revisit and re-list every Presidential election year. Oh fucking well.
This is a jukebox single I got out of the dollar bins in the basement of Plan 9 in Richmond's gay ass Carytown, an instrumental funkdown of the James Brown song, complete with crying baby, breaks galore, horns getting the type of ill that diseases DJ Premier's mind, and a side A part 1 and side B part 2. One of the greatest 7-inch singles I own and how the fuck it only ended up #77 confuses May 2009 Raven immensely. Spring 2008 Raven was on some bullshit methinks.
Thursday, April 30
That's So Raven! #001
So we haven't cut our grass this year yet because first I needed to tune up the riding mower, and then when I got it running, the shit was all fucked up smoking the deck belt. I got it apart on Tuesday and figured out one of the blades was gummed up, loosened it, made it good, except in the time of not being good, a pretty good spot on the deck belt got wore out almost to nothing. I had bought an extra, but it was the wrong size when I went to hook it up, so I put the old one back on and seriously cut one swath at the side of the yard (like 2.5 acres for my yard btw) and the belt gave out. Fine enough, I'd get the right one today.
Well, before we bought this place, there's a retired state pig two neighbors over, and he had called our landlord complaining about how we don't cut the grass. Firstly, this is a rural ass area, like I have 5 acres and just because the next four houses past mine are all clumped together and they keep their grass cut like a marine head has no bearing on me. Fuck them. But secondly, neighbors be keeping their shit clean and probably hate (2 junk cars, freezer on the front porch, tall grass, dilapidated camper on property, also tipi on property, also pigs and chickens on property, also scrap metal pile on property, but whatever... I digress).
Well today I walk out on the porch as my wife gets home and all the kids run out to greet her, and this halfwit landscaper fuck is riding by on his lawn mower, even though he lives like a quarter mile away. He's looking my way, so I suspect his halfwit ass already. Wife comes in, I split to town to get 2 chickens to throw in the oven for dinner, and as I'm driving off, the halfwit guy is like an 1/8 of mile past my house, heading back. All he had cut was this one strip in front of a guard rail where some kid wrecked his motorcycle and died 3 years ago and there's been plastic flowers in the turn ever since. He looks at me retardedly but I can see in his halfwit eyes something is up. I go to the store, figuring he's cutting the front fenceline in front of our field, which other motherfuckers have tried to cut before too.
I should mention my wife is a certified herbalist and harvest a lot of shit out of the yard. In fact, when I do cut the yard, there's always like 37 different clumps of plants I'm supposed to leave alone. I never thought in my life at some point I'd be all like, "Yeah, that's a patch of yarrow, so don't fuck with that. Also, I better swerve around all these violets because the kids like to put the flowers in salads," and so on and so forth. But I am man enough to admit I can grow.
Anyways, when I get home, dude has cut along the road, only one strip coming up to the house, so I drive past, looking at fenceline, hoping that motherfucker cut it. Nothing though, so I turn back around and ride all the way past my house again to see if he cut anything else on the side of the road at the one other neighbor going that way. A little maybe, not much, but enough were I could justify going in my head, "Okay, the retard just wanted to ride along and trim the edge of the road. It's all good. Go cook your chickens."
Then I pull in the yard and notice almost all of our front yard cut, including the violets and a couple huge patches of peppermint. I'm pissed, but I go inside and ask my wife, "What's going on?" Apparently, halfwit dude, having seen me drive by, comes in my fucking yard and starts cutting the grass. My 10 year old is playing in the back yard, runs in the house to tell my wife. Wife goes out, dude stops, and she's like, "What are you doing?" He mumbles about helping out, blah blah blah, she tells him she collects the plants and he's already cut shit he shouldn't have. So he leaves.
This is not good enough for me, because I know country dudes, and women don't count. So I roll up to his house, except I see no sign and up the road I see him cutting another dude's yard. I roll up there, even though it's probably a paying customer for him. He sees me, stops the mower, and is like turned sideways like he's trying to figure out what to say, or preparing to get his ass kicked. As I get out of my truck, he starts walking over with his hand out saying, "Man, I fucked up. I really fucked up," which of course takes me off my game, but not really. So as he apologizes constantly and says he apologized to my wife and tell her he's sorry again, I'm like, "next time you want to help somebody, you might want to ask first." But then I'm like, man fuck this dude, and I say, "You saw me drive by, didn't you? I find it odd you drove up into my yard and started cutting my grass when you saw me drive by." He dropped his retard eyes on that one. Then he's like, "I know. And I want to thank you for that time you stopped and helped me," which is funny because I had completely forgotten how he was broke down at one end of the road one time and I stopped to see what was going on but he already had somebody bringing him some oil but I helped him get the car off the road at least or something. That's how I roll. (In fact, side note, the census is doing prelim eyeball canvassing right now to make sure where to mail things, and I've had two people stopped on surrounding roads that I've stopped to make sure were okay, and they acted like I was crazy. Actually, the lady was cool and appreciative and explained what she was doing, which is how I know this is going on, but the old dude just looked at me and didn't even answer me. Fuck him too.)
Anyways, I end up, after the 39th "I'm sorry, I'm really really sorry," tell him, "Forget it. I just want to make sure it doesn't happen again." And he says it won't. (Oddly enough, this is the second halfwit who has done this exact same thing, and now the other one won't even look at me when he drives past. Hopefully this will go the same way.)
I am a stubborn fucker too though, and now I'm pissed because I finally have my mower running, and the right size deck belt for it, but now when I put it together tomorrow and cut grass if it's not raining, I'm gonna look like the chump who got bullied by the halfwit who was probably coaxed into action (perhaps even paid) by the shithead retired state trooper two houses down.
Also, and my wife talked me out of this, I was going to take some extra paint and go up there to the halfwit's house and paint his front door while no one was home, and claim I was just trying to help, because I noticed his door hadn't been painted in a few years. But I think my wife has finally caved into allowing me to erect some sort of half-assed plywood sign. I wanted one during the election to say something I thought was super clever back then, but I can't really remember now. It might've even been "OBAMA - He's one of the good ones," but then I realized only hardcore racist rednecks would understand that and regular people might actually think I was actually gonna vote for Obama. But I think I can have a sign now that says "KEEP OFF MY GRASS - NO MATTER HOW TALL IT GETS."
Well, before we bought this place, there's a retired state pig two neighbors over, and he had called our landlord complaining about how we don't cut the grass. Firstly, this is a rural ass area, like I have 5 acres and just because the next four houses past mine are all clumped together and they keep their grass cut like a marine head has no bearing on me. Fuck them. But secondly, neighbors be keeping their shit clean and probably hate (2 junk cars, freezer on the front porch, tall grass, dilapidated camper on property, also tipi on property, also pigs and chickens on property, also scrap metal pile on property, but whatever... I digress).
Well today I walk out on the porch as my wife gets home and all the kids run out to greet her, and this halfwit landscaper fuck is riding by on his lawn mower, even though he lives like a quarter mile away. He's looking my way, so I suspect his halfwit ass already. Wife comes in, I split to town to get 2 chickens to throw in the oven for dinner, and as I'm driving off, the halfwit guy is like an 1/8 of mile past my house, heading back. All he had cut was this one strip in front of a guard rail where some kid wrecked his motorcycle and died 3 years ago and there's been plastic flowers in the turn ever since. He looks at me retardedly but I can see in his halfwit eyes something is up. I go to the store, figuring he's cutting the front fenceline in front of our field, which other motherfuckers have tried to cut before too.
I should mention my wife is a certified herbalist and harvest a lot of shit out of the yard. In fact, when I do cut the yard, there's always like 37 different clumps of plants I'm supposed to leave alone. I never thought in my life at some point I'd be all like, "Yeah, that's a patch of yarrow, so don't fuck with that. Also, I better swerve around all these violets because the kids like to put the flowers in salads," and so on and so forth. But I am man enough to admit I can grow.
Anyways, when I get home, dude has cut along the road, only one strip coming up to the house, so I drive past, looking at fenceline, hoping that motherfucker cut it. Nothing though, so I turn back around and ride all the way past my house again to see if he cut anything else on the side of the road at the one other neighbor going that way. A little maybe, not much, but enough were I could justify going in my head, "Okay, the retard just wanted to ride along and trim the edge of the road. It's all good. Go cook your chickens."
Then I pull in the yard and notice almost all of our front yard cut, including the violets and a couple huge patches of peppermint. I'm pissed, but I go inside and ask my wife, "What's going on?" Apparently, halfwit dude, having seen me drive by, comes in my fucking yard and starts cutting the grass. My 10 year old is playing in the back yard, runs in the house to tell my wife. Wife goes out, dude stops, and she's like, "What are you doing?" He mumbles about helping out, blah blah blah, she tells him she collects the plants and he's already cut shit he shouldn't have. So he leaves.
This is not good enough for me, because I know country dudes, and women don't count. So I roll up to his house, except I see no sign and up the road I see him cutting another dude's yard. I roll up there, even though it's probably a paying customer for him. He sees me, stops the mower, and is like turned sideways like he's trying to figure out what to say, or preparing to get his ass kicked. As I get out of my truck, he starts walking over with his hand out saying, "Man, I fucked up. I really fucked up," which of course takes me off my game, but not really. So as he apologizes constantly and says he apologized to my wife and tell her he's sorry again, I'm like, "next time you want to help somebody, you might want to ask first." But then I'm like, man fuck this dude, and I say, "You saw me drive by, didn't you? I find it odd you drove up into my yard and started cutting my grass when you saw me drive by." He dropped his retard eyes on that one. Then he's like, "I know. And I want to thank you for that time you stopped and helped me," which is funny because I had completely forgotten how he was broke down at one end of the road one time and I stopped to see what was going on but he already had somebody bringing him some oil but I helped him get the car off the road at least or something. That's how I roll. (In fact, side note, the census is doing prelim eyeball canvassing right now to make sure where to mail things, and I've had two people stopped on surrounding roads that I've stopped to make sure were okay, and they acted like I was crazy. Actually, the lady was cool and appreciative and explained what she was doing, which is how I know this is going on, but the old dude just looked at me and didn't even answer me. Fuck him too.)
Anyways, I end up, after the 39th "I'm sorry, I'm really really sorry," tell him, "Forget it. I just want to make sure it doesn't happen again." And he says it won't. (Oddly enough, this is the second halfwit who has done this exact same thing, and now the other one won't even look at me when he drives past. Hopefully this will go the same way.)
I am a stubborn fucker too though, and now I'm pissed because I finally have my mower running, and the right size deck belt for it, but now when I put it together tomorrow and cut grass if it's not raining, I'm gonna look like the chump who got bullied by the halfwit who was probably coaxed into action (perhaps even paid) by the shithead retired state trooper two houses down.
Also, and my wife talked me out of this, I was going to take some extra paint and go up there to the halfwit's house and paint his front door while no one was home, and claim I was just trying to help, because I noticed his door hadn't been painted in a few years. But I think my wife has finally caved into allowing me to erect some sort of half-assed plywood sign. I wanted one during the election to say something I thought was super clever back then, but I can't really remember now. It might've even been "OBAMA - He's one of the good ones," but then I realized only hardcore racist rednecks would understand that and regular people might actually think I was actually gonna vote for Obama. But I think I can have a sign now that says "KEEP OFF MY GRASS - NO MATTER HOW TALL IT GETS."
Sunday, March 22
S14: NCAA Tournament 2nd Rd Sunday Top Returning Scorers
The first round has come and gone, and these are the fourteen guys stealing scholarships from more deserving young people to bounce a fucking orange ball around for big money for the universities on the TV that have scored the most points thus far in their allegedly amateur career in the NCAA March Madness tournament. This list shifted around a bit from the Friday one, because that part of the tournament actually was fun to watch...
#1: Sherron Collins (Kansas Jayhawks, 107 previous tourney points) - He must have bloggered himself and saw me talk shit, because he lit up North Dakota State like mad on Friday. Of course, that is just N.D. State, but still, perhaps I shouldn't talk so much shit. Haha, like anybody reads this, much less the people I talk shit about. I am public, yet anonymous. Welcome to the future. #2: Levance Fields (Pitt Panthers, 99 previous tourney points) - Had a quiet yet efficient first round game for the #1 seed Pitt Panthers, which is really what you'd hope for from a point guard. #3: Sam Young (Pitt Panthers, 98 previous tourney points) - Pretty much works with the above Fields to be the perfect complement and set-up pairing for DeJuan Blair inside. #4: Taj Gibson (USC Magnums, 85 previous tourney points) - Led his team over Boston College on Friday, and really, they don't have that bad a team, and if Taj can keep it hype, not shocking to imagine them beating a rather unheralded Michigan State team. #5: Earl Clark (Louisville, 84 previous tourney points) - Hard to really gauge what Louisville's all about after routing a #16 seed. #6: Edgar Sosa (Louisville, 80 previous tourney points) - PUERTO RICO! HOOOOOOO! BLACK PEOPLE! HOOOOO! #7: Jerry Smith (Louisville, 77 previous tourney points) - A common man's name builds a fundamentally-solid player to lay the foundation for his flashier teammate's success. I don't know all that to be true at all, but it reads well. #8: Raymar Morgan (Michigan State, 75 previous tourney points) - Raymar has promised to show the world "something you haven't seen" during this tournament. I am wondering if he's not an Al-Qaeda cell, fixing to blow up the Triple H Metrodome. #9: Jerel McNeal (Marquette Golden Eagles, 74 previous tourney points) - Honestly, as bad as they've played the last month or so, I was shocked they won. They were my 1st Round Upset Special Lock of the Week. Good thing I don't gamble. Unless you consider over-extending myself through credit to where it all could crash in on me at some point, causing me to lose what few actual financial assets I have amassed as gambling. #10: Derrick Brown (Xavier Muscatels, 74 previous tourney points) - I used to look at this hobo book at my college library, and there was this martini glass graffiti saying "THE RAMBLER". I thought that mentally noteworthy. One time, while walking four miles home from the used book store one Sunday afternoon while living on southside, where I'd bought a $1 Thoreau collection, being I only had $1, a train came and I had to wait for it to pass. And I saw a martini glass "THE RAMBLER" graff on a grey boxcar. I was adrenalinized by this. #11: Terence Williams (Louisville, 72 previous tourney points) - Another Louisville Cardinal. #12: Goran Sutton (Michigan State Spartan athlete, 66 previous tourney points) - Senior center, at 6'10" is a towering presence because, for some reason, nobody grows tall anymore, unless they are some weird oafy kid from Russia. You'd think with all the hormones in our food and milk, and how girls are all growing way larger breasts now, dudes would be getting taller, and we'd have more 7-footers in the NCAAs, but it doesn't seem to be working that way. #13: Jason Bohannon (Wisconsin, 62 previous tourney points) - Solid Badger contributor for a couple years now, and still has another season of eligilibity to go. Wisconsin vs. Xavier should give me time for an Andy Capp-style nap on the couch this afternoon. #14: Dominic James (Marquette, 62 previous tourney points) - And all he did was wave a towel around on the end of the bench. You've actually got to feel bad for the dude, being their best player, but broken-footed, and impotent to help out with the game at all, although he's got the same, if not more, emotional investment than his teammates does.
#1: Sherron Collins (Kansas Jayhawks, 107 previous tourney points) - He must have bloggered himself and saw me talk shit, because he lit up North Dakota State like mad on Friday. Of course, that is just N.D. State, but still, perhaps I shouldn't talk so much shit. Haha, like anybody reads this, much less the people I talk shit about. I am public, yet anonymous. Welcome to the future. #2: Levance Fields (Pitt Panthers, 99 previous tourney points) - Had a quiet yet efficient first round game for the #1 seed Pitt Panthers, which is really what you'd hope for from a point guard. #3: Sam Young (Pitt Panthers, 98 previous tourney points) - Pretty much works with the above Fields to be the perfect complement and set-up pairing for DeJuan Blair inside. #4: Taj Gibson (USC Magnums, 85 previous tourney points) - Led his team over Boston College on Friday, and really, they don't have that bad a team, and if Taj can keep it hype, not shocking to imagine them beating a rather unheralded Michigan State team. #5: Earl Clark (Louisville, 84 previous tourney points) - Hard to really gauge what Louisville's all about after routing a #16 seed. #6: Edgar Sosa (Louisville, 80 previous tourney points) - PUERTO RICO! HOOOOOOO! BLACK PEOPLE! HOOOOO! #7: Jerry Smith (Louisville, 77 previous tourney points) - A common man's name builds a fundamentally-solid player to lay the foundation for his flashier teammate's success. I don't know all that to be true at all, but it reads well. #8: Raymar Morgan (Michigan State, 75 previous tourney points) - Raymar has promised to show the world "something you haven't seen" during this tournament. I am wondering if he's not an Al-Qaeda cell, fixing to blow up the Triple H Metrodome. #9: Jerel McNeal (Marquette Golden Eagles, 74 previous tourney points) - Honestly, as bad as they've played the last month or so, I was shocked they won. They were my 1st Round Upset Special Lock of the Week. Good thing I don't gamble. Unless you consider over-extending myself through credit to where it all could crash in on me at some point, causing me to lose what few actual financial assets I have amassed as gambling. #10: Derrick Brown (Xavier Muscatels, 74 previous tourney points) - I used to look at this hobo book at my college library, and there was this martini glass graffiti saying "THE RAMBLER". I thought that mentally noteworthy. One time, while walking four miles home from the used book store one Sunday afternoon while living on southside, where I'd bought a $1 Thoreau collection, being I only had $1, a train came and I had to wait for it to pass. And I saw a martini glass "THE RAMBLER" graff on a grey boxcar. I was adrenalinized by this. #11: Terence Williams (Louisville, 72 previous tourney points) - Another Louisville Cardinal. #12: Goran Sutton (Michigan State Spartan athlete, 66 previous tourney points) - Senior center, at 6'10" is a towering presence because, for some reason, nobody grows tall anymore, unless they are some weird oafy kid from Russia. You'd think with all the hormones in our food and milk, and how girls are all growing way larger breasts now, dudes would be getting taller, and we'd have more 7-footers in the NCAAs, but it doesn't seem to be working that way. #13: Jason Bohannon (Wisconsin, 62 previous tourney points) - Solid Badger contributor for a couple years now, and still has another season of eligilibity to go. Wisconsin vs. Xavier should give me time for an Andy Capp-style nap on the couch this afternoon. #14: Dominic James (Marquette, 62 previous tourney points) - And all he did was wave a towel around on the end of the bench. You've actually got to feel bad for the dude, being their best player, but broken-footed, and impotent to help out with the game at all, although he's got the same, if not more, emotional investment than his teammates does.
Saturday, March 21
S14: NCAA Tournament 2nd Rd Saturday Top Returning Scorers
The first round has come and gone, and these are the fourteen guys stealing scholarships from more deserving young people to bounce a fucking orange ball around for big money for the universities on the TV that have scored the most points thus far in their allegedly amateur career in the NCAA March Madness tournament. The fourteen for this day are the same, in slightly altered order, from Thursday's first round list, which means no upsets occurred, which also means the tournament sucked on Thursday. And fuck Jay Bilas...
#1: Tyler Hansbrough (of the UNC, 242 tourney points thus far) - Again, I do not like Tyler Hansbrough, but honestly, having been near UVA and its ridiculously deluded fanbase which thinks getting VCU's Anthony Grant to be their new head coach is below them (even though the rest of the country knows he's a top tier candidate for any job), when I close my eyes to the certain invididuals like Hansbrough I do not like, I actually don't mind seeing that powdery blue-trimmed Tarheel uniform succeeed. It is a secret shame of mine. #2: A.J. Abrams (Texas, 174 tourney points thus far) - And Abrams pretty much lit it up from behind the 3-point line on Thursday, getting the Longhorns into their match-up today with Duke, who, unlike UNC, I could never root for, even if they were fighting AIDS. #3: Darren Collison (UCLA, 153 tourney points thus far) - Collison shut down Eric Maynor on the final shot Thursday, ruining what has been a glorious spring of VCU basketball fandom for me, where I took my 10-year-old kid to a couple games, and she was all stoked too. When she awoke Friday morning, I told her they lost, and she was sad. Actually, I made it all dramatic and explained how they were down by 1 with 13 seconds and Eric Maynor went down and took the shot... and missed. So fuck a Darren Collison (but even more so that weird Fast & Furious-looking Dragovic dude). #4: Antonio Anderson (Memphis Thuggers, 142 previous tourney points) - John Calipari's highly athletic team has been trash talking their second round opponent in Maryland, which won't mean they'll lose, but also shows what a bunch of streetballing all-star who can't properly conjugate normal verbs he has brought together. They'd be a shoo-in at Rucker Park, but I think, like usual, a Calipari-coached team will stumble somewhere along the way. #5: Wayne Ellington (UNC, 139 previous tourney points) - Picking up the inside/outside slack with Hansbrough well with Ty Lawson on the bench during their first round exhibition against Radford. #6: Ty Lawson (UNC, 113 previous tourney points) - And none of them this year. I haven't heard the reports about whether he's back for this second round game today against LSU or not, but the sports dork consensus seems to be the Tarheels need him back to win it all. I don't buy that. I think they're a better lock for the title with him, but even without him, that only downgrades them to amongst the five or six schools that have a shot to win it all. #7: Josh Shipp (UCLA, 110 previous tourney points) - Again, fuck UCLA. #8: Robert Dozier (another Memphis husky gentleman, 103 previous tourney points) #9: Danny Green (UNC, 99 previous tourney points) - The defensive minded starter in their line-up. #10: Scottie Reynolds (Villanova Wildcats, 88 previous tourney points) - And this should grow even more with the second round as they are playing a home game against a west coast team that travelled more than anyone. #11: Deon Thompson (UNC, 84 previous points) - Thompson, like Hansbrough, for some reason I cannot stand, and have to ignore his presence when I quietly and internally hope for the Tarheels to win. #12: Josh Carter (Texas A&M Agricultural Kids, 75 previous tourney points) - I hope this dude, in his senior year, lights it up today, because if I have learned to accept UNC in recent years, I have also learned I hate Connecticut more than almost any other team out there, other than Duke, because basically they're like Duke of the northeast with lower academic standards. #13: Damion James (Texas Syzzurp, 74 previous tourney points) - Wow, with the Longhorns facing the stupid Blue Devils tonight, I guess I'm pulling for Texas teams across the board today. #14: Greg Paulus (Dookie Blues, 74 previous tourney points) - Continuing a long tradition of fucking ugly ass whiteboys that Coach K constantly recruits to help them feel more empowered about being an ugly ass whiteboy. It is a cause close to Coach K's heart.
#1: Tyler Hansbrough (of the UNC, 242 tourney points thus far) - Again, I do not like Tyler Hansbrough, but honestly, having been near UVA and its ridiculously deluded fanbase which thinks getting VCU's Anthony Grant to be their new head coach is below them (even though the rest of the country knows he's a top tier candidate for any job), when I close my eyes to the certain invididuals like Hansbrough I do not like, I actually don't mind seeing that powdery blue-trimmed Tarheel uniform succeeed. It is a secret shame of mine. #2: A.J. Abrams (Texas, 174 tourney points thus far) - And Abrams pretty much lit it up from behind the 3-point line on Thursday, getting the Longhorns into their match-up today with Duke, who, unlike UNC, I could never root for, even if they were fighting AIDS. #3: Darren Collison (UCLA, 153 tourney points thus far) - Collison shut down Eric Maynor on the final shot Thursday, ruining what has been a glorious spring of VCU basketball fandom for me, where I took my 10-year-old kid to a couple games, and she was all stoked too. When she awoke Friday morning, I told her they lost, and she was sad. Actually, I made it all dramatic and explained how they were down by 1 with 13 seconds and Eric Maynor went down and took the shot... and missed. So fuck a Darren Collison (but even more so that weird Fast & Furious-looking Dragovic dude). #4: Antonio Anderson (Memphis Thuggers, 142 previous tourney points) - John Calipari's highly athletic team has been trash talking their second round opponent in Maryland, which won't mean they'll lose, but also shows what a bunch of streetballing all-star who can't properly conjugate normal verbs he has brought together. They'd be a shoo-in at Rucker Park, but I think, like usual, a Calipari-coached team will stumble somewhere along the way. #5: Wayne Ellington (UNC, 139 previous tourney points) - Picking up the inside/outside slack with Hansbrough well with Ty Lawson on the bench during their first round exhibition against Radford. #6: Ty Lawson (UNC, 113 previous tourney points) - And none of them this year. I haven't heard the reports about whether he's back for this second round game today against LSU or not, but the sports dork consensus seems to be the Tarheels need him back to win it all. I don't buy that. I think they're a better lock for the title with him, but even without him, that only downgrades them to amongst the five or six schools that have a shot to win it all. #7: Josh Shipp (UCLA, 110 previous tourney points) - Again, fuck UCLA. #8: Robert Dozier (another Memphis husky gentleman, 103 previous tourney points) #9: Danny Green (UNC, 99 previous tourney points) - The defensive minded starter in their line-up. #10: Scottie Reynolds (Villanova Wildcats, 88 previous tourney points) - And this should grow even more with the second round as they are playing a home game against a west coast team that travelled more than anyone. #11: Deon Thompson (UNC, 84 previous points) - Thompson, like Hansbrough, for some reason I cannot stand, and have to ignore his presence when I quietly and internally hope for the Tarheels to win. #12: Josh Carter (Texas A&M Agricultural Kids, 75 previous tourney points) - I hope this dude, in his senior year, lights it up today, because if I have learned to accept UNC in recent years, I have also learned I hate Connecticut more than almost any other team out there, other than Duke, because basically they're like Duke of the northeast with lower academic standards. #13: Damion James (Texas Syzzurp, 74 previous tourney points) - Wow, with the Longhorns facing the stupid Blue Devils tonight, I guess I'm pulling for Texas teams across the board today. #14: Greg Paulus (Dookie Blues, 74 previous tourney points) - Continuing a long tradition of fucking ugly ass whiteboys that Coach K constantly recruits to help them feel more empowered about being an ugly ass whiteboy. It is a cause close to Coach K's heart.
Friday, March 20
S14: NCAA Tourney 1st Rd Friday Top Returning Scorers
These fourteen dudes playing the basketballs today in the NCAA tourniquette, mostly all from major teams, have scoreded the most points in the previous three tourniquettes...
#1: Levance Fields (Pittsburg Panthers senior guard, 93 previous tourney points) - DeJuan Blair gets a lot of the gloss off this Pitt team, but Fields runs shit on the floor. #2: Sam Young (Pittsburgh Panthers senior guard) - And this guy is a hot shooter from the outside to complement Blair; really, it's a cliche, but having a pair of really good senior guards carries teams this time of year. #3: Tyrese Rice (Boston College Eagles senior guard, 76 previous tourney points) - Richmond, Virginia's, own gangstariffic b-ball scoring threat; I anxiously await him getting caught with weed on I-95 once he's in the NBA. #4: Sherron Collins (Kansas Jayhawks junior guard, 75 previous tourney points) - Highly overrated Kansas asshole, and you should never trust black dudes who end up going to play for Kansas, because I remember Menace II Society. #5: Earl Clark (Louisville Cardinals junior forward, 72 previous tourney points) - Rick Pitino has brought back quite the collection of thugonomic majors for what's probably his best shot at a national title since back when he had that Kentucky team with basically two five-man rotations of starters that he alternated using. #6: Edgar Sosa (Louisville Cardinals junior guard, 71 previous tourney points) - Matters not to me if he's from Puerto Rico or not because when I see him balling, Frankie Cutlass classics start echoing through my head, but all muffled like they're coming from inside a cinderblock building I'm walking past. #7: Wayne Chism (Tennessee Volunteers junior center, 70 previous tourney points) - Chism's style of wearing a headband all yamulke style is pretty damned pimp, but probably only because it goes well with Volunteer orange; if he played in red uniform or some weak ass dark blue, it'd look stupid, although maybe purple would look tight too; it's really a shame they don't let teams both wear dark jerseys because Tennessee/LSU games would be an aesthetic pleasure. #8: Jerry Smith (Louisville Cardinals junior guard, 70 previous tourney points) - I've never even heard of this guy. #9: Dominic James (Marquette Golden Eagles senior guard, 62 previous tourney points) - But won't be playing this year, as he broked his foot; still, he'll get to wear a suit at the end of the bench with class, doing his best Gilbert Arenas impersonation. #10: Derrick Brown (Xavier Muskateers junior forward, 61 previous tourney points) - My brain works like so - Muskateer turns into Muscatel, which makes me think of winos, which makes me imagine a pack of well-trained and groomed hoboes playing college basketball as part of a $1 bet by those two old white guy who switched Dan Akroyd with Eddie Murphy. #11: Taj Gibson (USC Trojans junior forward, 59 previous tourney points) - Saw O.J. Mayo come and go through Los Angeles, and now the media glare's not so bright this year; but Taj holds his own. #12: Jerel McNeal (Marquette Golden Eagles senior guard, 60 previous tourney points) - Must shoulder a heavy load with James gone from the active roster for the tourney, making Marquette one of the most likely early exits, considering they were a Top 10 team for half the year. #13: Raymar Morgan (Michigan State Spartans junior forward, 59 previous tourney points) - Tom Izzo's best hope to lead him to another big bonus for his already ridiculous college coaching contract. #14: Terence Williams (Louisville Cardinals senior forward, 59 previous tourney points) - Seems like he's been playing forever.
#1: Levance Fields (Pittsburg Panthers senior guard, 93 previous tourney points) - DeJuan Blair gets a lot of the gloss off this Pitt team, but Fields runs shit on the floor. #2: Sam Young (Pittsburgh Panthers senior guard) - And this guy is a hot shooter from the outside to complement Blair; really, it's a cliche, but having a pair of really good senior guards carries teams this time of year. #3: Tyrese Rice (Boston College Eagles senior guard, 76 previous tourney points) - Richmond, Virginia's, own gangstariffic b-ball scoring threat; I anxiously await him getting caught with weed on I-95 once he's in the NBA. #4: Sherron Collins (Kansas Jayhawks junior guard, 75 previous tourney points) - Highly overrated Kansas asshole, and you should never trust black dudes who end up going to play for Kansas, because I remember Menace II Society. #5: Earl Clark (Louisville Cardinals junior forward, 72 previous tourney points) - Rick Pitino has brought back quite the collection of thugonomic majors for what's probably his best shot at a national title since back when he had that Kentucky team with basically two five-man rotations of starters that he alternated using. #6: Edgar Sosa (Louisville Cardinals junior guard, 71 previous tourney points) - Matters not to me if he's from Puerto Rico or not because when I see him balling, Frankie Cutlass classics start echoing through my head, but all muffled like they're coming from inside a cinderblock building I'm walking past. #7: Wayne Chism (Tennessee Volunteers junior center, 70 previous tourney points) - Chism's style of wearing a headband all yamulke style is pretty damned pimp, but probably only because it goes well with Volunteer orange; if he played in red uniform or some weak ass dark blue, it'd look stupid, although maybe purple would look tight too; it's really a shame they don't let teams both wear dark jerseys because Tennessee/LSU games would be an aesthetic pleasure. #8: Jerry Smith (Louisville Cardinals junior guard, 70 previous tourney points) - I've never even heard of this guy. #9: Dominic James (Marquette Golden Eagles senior guard, 62 previous tourney points) - But won't be playing this year, as he broked his foot; still, he'll get to wear a suit at the end of the bench with class, doing his best Gilbert Arenas impersonation. #10: Derrick Brown (Xavier Muskateers junior forward, 61 previous tourney points) - My brain works like so - Muskateer turns into Muscatel, which makes me think of winos, which makes me imagine a pack of well-trained and groomed hoboes playing college basketball as part of a $1 bet by those two old white guy who switched Dan Akroyd with Eddie Murphy. #11: Taj Gibson (USC Trojans junior forward, 59 previous tourney points) - Saw O.J. Mayo come and go through Los Angeles, and now the media glare's not so bright this year; but Taj holds his own. #12: Jerel McNeal (Marquette Golden Eagles senior guard, 60 previous tourney points) - Must shoulder a heavy load with James gone from the active roster for the tourney, making Marquette one of the most likely early exits, considering they were a Top 10 team for half the year. #13: Raymar Morgan (Michigan State Spartans junior forward, 59 previous tourney points) - Tom Izzo's best hope to lead him to another big bonus for his already ridiculous college coaching contract. #14: Terence Williams (Louisville Cardinals senior forward, 59 previous tourney points) - Seems like he's been playing forever.
Friday Love/Hate
I love my family. It is a strange bunch, and the fake lord fucking knows the last thing anybody wants to read about is somebody else acting like they know shit about having kids. But still...
I hate writing with eyeballs in mind. The internet is for haters and the eyeballs have judgementality and self-import. I don't sweat it, but I think about how reactions will be reacted, which is fucking stupid. Like, typing this is stupid.
I hate writing with eyeballs in mind. The internet is for haters and the eyeballs have judgementality and self-import. I don't sweat it, but I think about how reactions will be reacted, which is fucking stupid. Like, typing this is stupid.
Thursday, March 19
S14: NCAA Tourney 1st Rd Thursday Top Returning Scorers
These fourteen dudes playing the basketballs today in the NCAA tourniquette, mostly all from major teams, have scoreded the most points in the previous three tourniquettes...
#1: Tyler Hansbrough (North Carolina Tarheels senior forward, 220 previous tourney points) - I have coached youth soccer for the past six years, and one major reason I do not like Hansbrough is because he looks like every asshole 7-year-old (yes, such things exist) who is less concerned about sharing sliced oranges at halftime than he is running up four goals on the assortment of halfwits, homeschoolers, and ADHD Christians I inevitably always end up with. #2: A.J. Abrams (Texas Longhorns senior guard, 148 previous tourney points) - Pint-sized sharpshooter with sculpted beard, so cuddly and soft in his little Allen Iverson armwarmer. #3: Darren Collison (UCLA Bruins senior guard, 143 previous tourney points) - Bruins written off pretty early by plenty of sports talking heads, but damn, Collison has played in three Final Fours already. #4: Antonio Anderson (Memphis Tigers senior guard, 129 previous tourney points) - Dude missed the potential game-winning shot in last year's championship game against the stupid Jayhawks, so should be playing with a burning heart of desire. #5: Wayne Ellington (North Carolina Tarheels junior guard, 114 previous tourney points) - Fucking inside/outside game with stupid Hansbrough and Ellington setting up to drain 3s... man I fucking hate UNC, and not so much because they're good but because they're stupid assholes that are good. #6: Ty Lawson (North Carolina Tarheels junior guard, 113 previous tourney points) - Luckily, he's got a sore ol' big toe right now, hopefully ruining UNC's hopes to cruise to another national title. #7: Robert Dozier (Memphis Tigers senior forward, 97 previous tourney points) - Another comeback from last year's rec-league all-star team John Calipari's mob-affiliated self-important ass, trying to help the ol' shithead get that national title he needs to justify himself to everyone who is tired of listening. #8: Josh Shipp (UCLA Bruins senior guard, 94 previous tourney points) - Is John Wooten still alive to be propped up in a luxury box to pretend he still understands what's going on and the UCLA faithful can feel like God is looking down on Ben Howland's newest collection of SoCal blue chippers? #9: Danny Green (North Carolina Tarheels senior forward, 84 previous points) - Well, they have like seven scoring threats, so Green concentrates on defense. #10: Scottie Reynolds (Villanova Wildcats junior guard, 80 previous tourney points) - Carried this team through extra postseason play last year. #11: Deon Thompson (North Carolina Tarheels junior forward, 78 previous tourney points) - Good fucking grief, the entire starting lineup makes this stupid list, meaning they play deep in tournament's every year, and they haven't really had anybody bolt early since Roy Williams' last national championship team, which I think was also his first. #12: Greg Paulus (Duke Blue Devils senior guard, 69 previous tourney points) - Somehow, during his illustrious whiteboy point guard career, Paulus got demoted down to coming off the bench for Coach K; only thing worse than UNC is Duke, and I'm pissed because the local CBS affiliate is running the Duke game instead of VCU's game, because it's so UVA-centric, even though everybody here hates Duke, and VCU is only an hour away. #13: Josh Carter (Texas A&M Aggies senior forward, 65 previous tourney points) - Shows you how solidly competitive, although unnoticed Texas A&M has been; they always make the tourney, win a game or two, then disappear into the maelstrom of second-tier major level college basketball programs. #14: Damion James (Texas Longhorns junior forward, 56 previous tourney points) - I don't even know anything about this dude to even maek a wisecrack about.
#1: Tyler Hansbrough (North Carolina Tarheels senior forward, 220 previous tourney points) - I have coached youth soccer for the past six years, and one major reason I do not like Hansbrough is because he looks like every asshole 7-year-old (yes, such things exist) who is less concerned about sharing sliced oranges at halftime than he is running up four goals on the assortment of halfwits, homeschoolers, and ADHD Christians I inevitably always end up with. #2: A.J. Abrams (Texas Longhorns senior guard, 148 previous tourney points) - Pint-sized sharpshooter with sculpted beard, so cuddly and soft in his little Allen Iverson armwarmer. #3: Darren Collison (UCLA Bruins senior guard, 143 previous tourney points) - Bruins written off pretty early by plenty of sports talking heads, but damn, Collison has played in three Final Fours already. #4: Antonio Anderson (Memphis Tigers senior guard, 129 previous tourney points) - Dude missed the potential game-winning shot in last year's championship game against the stupid Jayhawks, so should be playing with a burning heart of desire. #5: Wayne Ellington (North Carolina Tarheels junior guard, 114 previous tourney points) - Fucking inside/outside game with stupid Hansbrough and Ellington setting up to drain 3s... man I fucking hate UNC, and not so much because they're good but because they're stupid assholes that are good. #6: Ty Lawson (North Carolina Tarheels junior guard, 113 previous tourney points) - Luckily, he's got a sore ol' big toe right now, hopefully ruining UNC's hopes to cruise to another national title. #7: Robert Dozier (Memphis Tigers senior forward, 97 previous tourney points) - Another comeback from last year's rec-league all-star team John Calipari's mob-affiliated self-important ass, trying to help the ol' shithead get that national title he needs to justify himself to everyone who is tired of listening. #8: Josh Shipp (UCLA Bruins senior guard, 94 previous tourney points) - Is John Wooten still alive to be propped up in a luxury box to pretend he still understands what's going on and the UCLA faithful can feel like God is looking down on Ben Howland's newest collection of SoCal blue chippers? #9: Danny Green (North Carolina Tarheels senior forward, 84 previous points) - Well, they have like seven scoring threats, so Green concentrates on defense. #10: Scottie Reynolds (Villanova Wildcats junior guard, 80 previous tourney points) - Carried this team through extra postseason play last year. #11: Deon Thompson (North Carolina Tarheels junior forward, 78 previous tourney points) - Good fucking grief, the entire starting lineup makes this stupid list, meaning they play deep in tournament's every year, and they haven't really had anybody bolt early since Roy Williams' last national championship team, which I think was also his first. #12: Greg Paulus (Duke Blue Devils senior guard, 69 previous tourney points) - Somehow, during his illustrious whiteboy point guard career, Paulus got demoted down to coming off the bench for Coach K; only thing worse than UNC is Duke, and I'm pissed because the local CBS affiliate is running the Duke game instead of VCU's game, because it's so UVA-centric, even though everybody here hates Duke, and VCU is only an hour away. #13: Josh Carter (Texas A&M Aggies senior forward, 65 previous tourney points) - Shows you how solidly competitive, although unnoticed Texas A&M has been; they always make the tourney, win a game or two, then disappear into the maelstrom of second-tier major level college basketball programs. #14: Damion James (Texas Longhorns junior forward, 56 previous tourney points) - I don't even know anything about this dude to even maek a wisecrack about.
Wednesday, March 18
S14: Top 14 Scorers From Past 4 NCAAs
Since I will dork out and list the top 14 returning scorers (meaning scored the most points in previous NCAA tournament games) every day of the March Madness (because I did all that data-looking bullshit last year, so I'm gonna get something out of it, though it's mostly for my own entertainment, I just put it out inside the internets so people who know me think I'm weird and people who don't know me think I'm stupid), I figured I would share the top 14 accumulative scorers from the previous four tournaments, and where they is right about now...
#1: Chris Douglas-Roberts (226 total points, formerly of the Memphis Tigers, now of the overall past four years NBA's New Jersey Nets) #2: Tyler Hansbrough (220 total points, still with them UNC Tarheels, for one more stupid fucking year) #3: Corey Brewer (198 total points, formerly of the Florida Gators dynasty, now of the shitty NBA Minnesota Timerbwolves) #4: Joakim Noah (166 total points, formerly also from the Florida Gators dynasty, now with the Chicago Bulls of the NBA even though his teammates don't like his longhaired stuck-up ass) #5: Aaron Afflalo (166 total points, formerly of the mighty mighty UCLA Bruins, now with the NBA's Detroit Pistons) #6: Taurean Green (164 total points, used to be part of the Florida Gators Fab Five v2.0, now cold kicking it with Cai Zaragova in the Spanish League) #7: Brandon Rush (162 total points, was with the Kansas Jayhawks last year, with the NBA's Indiana Pacers this year... and I guess I don't need to clarify NBA) #8: Lee Humphrey (aka The White Guy on the Florida team, 159 total points, with the Gators like I just said, but now with Ratiopharm Ulm - which I think is a designer drug - in the German Bundesliga - which I think is some sort of S&M harness) #9: Stephen Curry (158 total points, still with Davidson in college, though the selection committee held out from mid-majors teams this year, so he's in the NIT, but he'll be back next year fools) #10: Randy Foye (155 total points, of the Villanova Wildcats, now also on the shitty Timberwolves) #11: Al Hoford (152 total points, was the final fifth of the Florida Gators, now starring with the upstart Atlanta Hawks) #12: Mario Chalmers (150 total points, on last year's championship Kansas Jayhawks team, now clocking groupie sluts with the Miami Heat) #13: A.J. Abrams (148 total points, was and still is a Texas Longhorn) #14: Darren Collison (143 total points, was and still is with the stupid UCLA Bruins)
#1: Chris Douglas-Roberts (226 total points, formerly of the Memphis Tigers, now of the overall past four years NBA's New Jersey Nets) #2: Tyler Hansbrough (220 total points, still with them UNC Tarheels, for one more stupid fucking year) #3: Corey Brewer (198 total points, formerly of the Florida Gators dynasty, now of the shitty NBA Minnesota Timerbwolves) #4: Joakim Noah (166 total points, formerly also from the Florida Gators dynasty, now with the Chicago Bulls of the NBA even though his teammates don't like his longhaired stuck-up ass) #5: Aaron Afflalo (166 total points, formerly of the mighty mighty UCLA Bruins, now with the NBA's Detroit Pistons) #6: Taurean Green (164 total points, used to be part of the Florida Gators Fab Five v2.0, now cold kicking it with Cai Zaragova in the Spanish League) #7: Brandon Rush (162 total points, was with the Kansas Jayhawks last year, with the NBA's Indiana Pacers this year... and I guess I don't need to clarify NBA) #8: Lee Humphrey (aka The White Guy on the Florida team, 159 total points, with the Gators like I just said, but now with Ratiopharm Ulm - which I think is a designer drug - in the German Bundesliga - which I think is some sort of S&M harness) #9: Stephen Curry (158 total points, still with Davidson in college, though the selection committee held out from mid-majors teams this year, so he's in the NIT, but he'll be back next year fools) #10: Randy Foye (155 total points, of the Villanova Wildcats, now also on the shitty Timberwolves) #11: Al Hoford (152 total points, was the final fifth of the Florida Gators, now starring with the upstart Atlanta Hawks) #12: Mario Chalmers (150 total points, on last year's championship Kansas Jayhawks team, now clocking groupie sluts with the Miami Heat) #13: A.J. Abrams (148 total points, was and still is a Texas Longhorn) #14: Darren Collison (143 total points, was and still is with the stupid UCLA Bruins)
Friday, March 6
Friday Love/Hate
Love: I love the way my simple assed paranoid mind works, that there's always a conspiracy behind things. I read the story of that Chinaman dude in Canada who cut the carney kid's head off on the Greyhound, and it made me think of how the one Chinese guy cut off a Chinese girl's head at Virginia Tech a month or two ago. I mean, cutting a head off a body can't be easy. But when I was reading the story today about the Greyhound killer (who got off because God had told him to do it), I got all spooked like there was some sleeper cell Chinese beheading crew walking among us all. So I went to the trusty internet (of course, started by the Department of Defense as an agent of disinformation), and the explanation was far simpler than I imagined. You see, in China, they still have public executions by beheadement, so it's not out of the frame of reference of your average Chinaman to have that in their minds when they get all bugged out and want to get medieval on somebody.
Hate: Pretty much everything. I haven't been doing shit creatively lately, haven't been working much at all, am broke as fuck, wrecked my truck into a deer, had to settle for aftermarket parts since no junkyard within three states had my shit, applied for food stamps, borrowed more fucking money from my mom, not much sexing going on, kids be needing thangs... it's just a lot going on. I have been reading more (meaning reading) which is nice. I never actually read books anymore because I feel it's a waste of the little free time I have. The thing is, I'm reading now because instead of thinking I'm gonna write dumbass books, I'm starting to think maybe I should just watch more old Hercules movies and forget about trying to actually do something with my life. I mean fuck it, I'm typecast by now. This all goes against my whole 36 year spiral of soaking it in, 36 year spiral of shooting it out theory that is part of the Rojonekku Redneck Ninja Manual (a work in progress), but I am full of contradictions. And then again, it's gonna be warm enough to kick it in the camper this weekend, rock out some hobo raps. The wife got her wizdom teeth yanked, so there's hydrocodone in the house. It feels like one of those rebirth spring weather let's get fucked up like the world's ending type of feelings building up.
Hate: Pretty much everything. I haven't been doing shit creatively lately, haven't been working much at all, am broke as fuck, wrecked my truck into a deer, had to settle for aftermarket parts since no junkyard within three states had my shit, applied for food stamps, borrowed more fucking money from my mom, not much sexing going on, kids be needing thangs... it's just a lot going on. I have been reading more (meaning reading) which is nice. I never actually read books anymore because I feel it's a waste of the little free time I have. The thing is, I'm reading now because instead of thinking I'm gonna write dumbass books, I'm starting to think maybe I should just watch more old Hercules movies and forget about trying to actually do something with my life. I mean fuck it, I'm typecast by now. This all goes against my whole 36 year spiral of soaking it in, 36 year spiral of shooting it out theory that is part of the Rojonekku Redneck Ninja Manual (a work in progress), but I am full of contradictions. And then again, it's gonna be warm enough to kick it in the camper this weekend, rock out some hobo raps. The wife got her wizdom teeth yanked, so there's hydrocodone in the house. It feels like one of those rebirth spring weather let's get fucked up like the world's ending type of feelings building up.
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