Saturday, January 30, 2010

Just a note on Snowpocalypse 2010

Despite all the fun with Snowpocalypse 2010 I've been having, I'll say that all the major roads between here and Chattanooga are fine. The backroads, I cannot speak much on, but the major arteries are fine and dandy.

Please stop closing shit at 6.

I wanted to go to that used bookstore very much.

That is all.

The 2010 Royal Rumble Deadlist....

A somewhat annual event here at Big Stupid Tommyland...the WWE's Royal Rumble is tomorrow night. It's the 23nd annual...every year ('cept '88, mind you) 30 men enter the ring, vying for the illustrious label Royal Rumble Winner. Since 1993, the winner's automatically gone on to Wrestlemania as a Main Eventer...

It's the springboard for Wrestling's biggest and most eventful corridor...it's not a coincidence, I don't think, that it coincides with the end of the NFL season and operates during the lull between football and baseball.

The Royal Rumble is my favorite event. Yeah, what I watch is grown men pretending to fight in predetermined events generally designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I think what I like about the Royal Rumble is that it doesn't always follow the Lowest Common Denominator outcome...what happens is as close as wrestling can get to random and it's not easy to determine prior to the outcome. I think it's the closest that professional wrestling comes to being an actual sporting event....

This year? It's a little different. The Rumble's being held in Atlanta, a couple of hours from Casa de Big Stupid Tommy. I, and my brother-in-law and my co-worker Jeff are heading down tomorrow afternoon to take a seat in the Phillips Arena, to catch us some Wrasslin' Action. I'll take plenty of pictures for your asses.
I do this particular list every year. I'd be lying if it didn't hold a certain morbid fascination. I guess it all comes from the same place where we slow down at a traffic accident, or my own fascination with a barn near my parents' house, that is slowly falling in upon itself. I, like most, have a fascination with the bizarre. Looking at the number of odd images I have on my computer, I'd say my fascination is maybe a bit higher than the average joe's, but I don't think it's to an unhealthy degree.

Or the part of the Oscar or Emmy ceremony, where we look back at all the stars and workers who have passed on in the previous year....

Anyway.

Tonight's show will be the 23d over-the-top-rope match, and in keeping with that, we look at how many of the previous years' rumble entrants are no longer with us...

1988: (2/20) Dino Bravo and the Junkyard Dog are dead

1989: (6/30) Big John Studd, Andre the Giant, Big Boss Man, Hercules Hernandez, Bad News Brown, Mr. Perfect

1990: (7/30) Andre the Giant, Dino Bravo, Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig, Hercules Hernandez, Bad News Brown, Earthquake, Rick Rude

1991: (8/30) Dino Bravo, Hawk (of the Road Warriors), Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig, Davey Boy Smith, Hercules Hernandez, Kerry von Erich, Crush and Earthquake (thanks for the heads up, Flash...

1992: (4/30) Big Boss Man, Hercules Hernandez, Davey Boy Smith, Kerry von Erich

1993: (3/30) Owen Hart, Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig, Yokozuna

1994: (3/30) Owen Hart, Crush, Bam Bam Bigelow

1995: (4/30) Davey Boy Smith, Owen Hart, Crush, Dick Murdoch

1996: (3/30) Owen Hart, Yokozuna, Davey Boy Smith

1997: (3/30) Owen Hart, Davey Boy Smith, Crush

1998: (1/30) Owen Hart

1999: (4/30) Owen Hart, Big Boss Man, Golga, Test

2000: (4/30) Big Boss Man, Test, Davey Boy Smith, Crash Holly

2001: (2/30) Test, Crash Holly

2002: (3/30) Test, Big Boss Man, Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig

2003: (3/30) Test, Jamal/Umaga, Eddie Guerrero

2004: (1/30) Chris Benoit

2005: (2/30) Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit

2006: (1/30) Chris Benoit

2007; (1/30) Chris Benoit

2008: (1/30) Umaga

2009: None (But the day ain't over, yet).

Edit: I omitted Earthquake out of the 1991...just an oversight. He's not a 400 lb. messiah, back from the dead or anything.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Eulogy?

So, I work this afternoon. I slept a healthy nine hours (an endeavour I highly recommend for the great many of you, considering I woke up this morning feeling very much like a superhero...honestly, I'd say this is what Superman feels like when he wakes up in the morning, minus the having to pee like a racehorse).

I sat down and wrote for a couple of hours, and then said "I think I'd like to watch a movie, as I clean up a little around Casa de Big Stupid Tommy."

The nice people at Netflix sent me the flick Sugar, and I go to pop it into the DVD player, and the DVD player will not power up. Several incoherent grunts after first pushing the power button, the eject button, any button that will push (indeed, even in my own throes of dismay, I enjoy pushing buttons). I get nada.

It is plugged in to the same surge-protecting powerstrip my TeeVee is plugged into. My TeeVee works. It had informed me of the impending snowpocalypse later this afternoon. Changing plugs on the strip does not work. My TeeVee continues to tell me about the snowpocaylpse, even after plugging it into the port my DVD player was plugged into. My DVD player, I fear, is dead.

Troublesome, since the second disc of The Survivor Series Anthology is still lodged inside.

Any recommendations before I pry the thing apart to get my disc out, and then use this lovely piece of shite for target practice?

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Clown

I hate the Wal (hyphen) Mart.

But I love one of their newest commercials.



Plus, any work that serves to increase clown paranoia, even amongst fictional children, pleases me very much.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Late Nights....

Hello, and welcome to Saturday.

Wanted to take minute to post a video, that you can watch until NBC pulls it down.



I haven't had a horse in the hunt in this Late Night mess, watching very, very little of it, and getting only the best soundbites when they replay them on my drive into work in the mornings. Of those, I can say that they are the best soundbites to come out of late night talkdom in several years. I've always believed that David Letterman's at his best when he's lashing out at somebody in particular, and I'd never seen Conan backed into a proverbial corner (such a corner, we should all be so lucky to be backed into, but that's for another four line pararaph later in this post).

I didn't really have a dog in the whole hunt. If I've watched any late night talk in the past year or so, it's been Craig Ferguson, whose sense of humor I've found is fairly compatible with my own. I used to be a regular Letterman watcher, and I'd catch Conan from time to time, as he's got a goofy sensibility that agrees with me very much. I'll also say that Jay Leno's comedy never agreed with me much, and I can't say that I've watched much of Jay Leno's run on the Tonight Show or the Jay Leno Show. It's simply a matter of taste.

Like I said, I haven't watched much late night TV in the past year. Craig Ferguson, I've caught a few times, and then only because I was getting home when his show was on. Beyond that, I made only a consciouse effort a couple of times. I think I've caught a couple episodes of Letterman, a segment of the Jay Leno show when Jimmy Norton had a segment, and one particularly troublesome segment on the Jimmy Fallon show with Steve Martin and Paul Simon that made me uncomfortable for the guests, and angry that Jimmy Fallon is still a celebrity.

I did want to take a moment, though, to speak on Conan's final speech, to the "young people," telling them not to be cynical. I guess I agree with the sentiment, although I think there's a valuable lesson in this whole deal about the intentions of management, and the value (and lack thereof) in being a team player. Seems to me that a little more cynicism, at least as it regards the intentions of the corporate folks might have done everybody a little more good.

A lot of people have wanted to make Jay Leno the bad guy in this whole deal, and that's unfortunate. I'm about to launch into a paragraph against the man, but at the end of the day, his end of the deal was made in good faith.

Yes, there are decisions he could have made, and decisions my NBC management that he could have fought. At the end of the day, Jay was a company guy. Now, whether he ws a company guy because he'd gotten the catbird seat years and years ago is not something I'm going to debate. But, when NBC came to him and said "We wanna make Conan O'Brien the guy in 2009," Jay had the opportunity to take his ball and go elsewhere. Jay was loyal to the company that had largely made him a household name, and had faith in their decisions. He agreed, largely because he felt like NBC was doing the right thing.

And I think that's where the fault lies. For better or for worse, Conan and Jay (like the majority of us) work in a corporate environment, where their values were simply numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere. For all the loyalty that Jay and Conan had for NBC, they didn't have to have any to Jay or Conan, for much longer than a couple of ratings quarters. Conan didn't do the business that Jay did, in terms of revenue. And while it left me with a sour taste in my mouth for Jay to go along to get along, when it looked like NBC was first making noises to put Jay back at 11:30, ultimately, it's not Jay's decision.

Let me speak on Conan for a second. I look at Conan's run as damned for a couple of reasons. For better or for worse, the biggest part of Conan's fanbase is somewhere in my general concentric circles of age and/or bullshit, and younger. Conan got Late Night when I was in college, and that's when I did the bulk of my watching. He came out of left field, from time to time, and threw a joke curveball or three that I enjoyed. And, by the way, he had a joke style that was different from Letterman, and most definitely from Leno. I dug it, and I can't think of a better place in this rant to praise him for not changing his comedy style (fuck Dick Ebersole, by the way...precisely the reason I don't care for Jay Leno or Jimmy Fallon is that they craft their acts so that they appeal to the greatest number of people...never much cared for the lowest common denominator comedy, myself) when he took the 11:30 spot.

But here's the thing, and here's the first part of Conan being damned from the start. I'm in the middle of the demographic NBC was going for, that Conan was supposed to bring in. And I never watched.

Can't say way precisely. Part of it's the whole bit where I haven't really felt like I needed to watch a late night talk show (or a talk show of any time of the day, really). Part of it is my own schedule. And while I sometimes wish my social life was a little more burgeoning, I'll say that I'm out enough that it's just not a priority to watch late night TV.

Or, if I am at home watching TV at night, I (like many dozen Americans) have the Tivo or other DVR system, and am watching something I might have missed earlier in the night. Come to think of it, outside of Lost, I can't think of much television that I watched Live in the past couple of years. I think a lot of people are like that.

Add to that, it's 2010, and we have 3 bajillion channels full of the exact forms of comedy I was looking for when I first turned to Conan O'Brien in 1995 or 1996. Likewise, the internet is full of fun and interesting stuff that I can bring up at any time of the day.

Like this:



Last thing that damned Conan? Now, I'm not a fan of Jay, but know people who are. And there were a number of people who absolutely did not like Jay's 10 o'clock show. It wasn't what they were looking for, and they weren't watching. Did it affect Conan? Dunno. I would say so, especially if local news affiliates were bitching about Jay affecting their revenue for their 11 o'clock news programs....

Anyway, as I'm running out of steam, I would like to say this, finally. Part of the reason I never jumped on the whole Team Coco wagon was A.) I hate the name Coco and B.) I'd not watched much in the past year and C.) the dude was going to draw 8 figures whichever way the cookie crumbled. I'd like to say that it was pleasing to hear severence for the crew was something of a sticking point in the final negotiations. I'd say that most guys probably would find a way to take care of their staffs.

(I'd like very much right now to make some kind of joke about Letterman has somebody taking care of his staff for him, but I'm not nearly clever enough).

Suffice it to say, part of my not taking a lot of interest in the whole shebang was that it wouldn't really change my personal status quo, all that much. I'm still not going to be watching much late night television, even after Conan eventually comes back (to Fox, or wherever he ends up with his 32 million dollar pompadour). I guess that's my final point. The amount of money being thrown about was offputting. Somebody on Twitter made a joke (I think it was Barry, but I can't remember for sure, and I apologize), but it went something along the lines of negotiating a severance package for $45 and two free oil changes at Jiffy Lube. We should all be so fortunate to be backed into a situation where "losing" means taking home a $32 million dollar paycheck as a buyout.

It's hard to gnash my teeth about somebody who'll be making more money than I and ten of my closest friends put together will see in our lifetimes. Meanwhile, it's 2010, and I can find any number of things I want to laugh at, so I'm not relying on NBC to give me all my funny.

Y'all take it easy.

Monday, January 18, 2010

The Actor, Tom Waits

I post this, a compilation of scenes from Short Cuts featuring Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin, for a reason.

First, the clip:



Then, the reason. I have seen two movies in theaters the past week or so.

Wandered down to Chattanooga a Sunday or so ago to catch The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. A neat movie that I was a little wary of. I'm generally all about Terry Gilliam movies. Generally, they're visually stimulating like few other directors' work. And they usually leave a whisper of themselves in your brain, leaving you thinking about the flick long after you've seen it. Parnassus had a couple things working against it. Tideland and Brothers Grimm were both off, for me. Both seemed like too much style, too little substance. And, given the circumstances underwhich the flick was completed, having to re-write and re-film certain scenes after the death of Heath Ledger, I felt like the potential for a mess was pretty high.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. I thought the movie turned out well, and I'd put it into the same category as Baron Munchausen or Time Bandits in terms of fun flicks.

Tom Waits plays an integral role in the flick...antagonist/playmate of the titular Dr. Parnassus, and it's a role that Waits revels (wallows?) in. You can see he's having tremendous fun playing Mr. Nick. I give the movie a thumbs up, as I say...it's not on par with 12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing or Brazil, but it's a trip, and definitely worth seeing, especially for Tom Waits snatching pretty much every scene he's in.

Then, today, wandered out to see Book of Eli. Another fun flick. And considering my mood's been something akin to Post-Apocalyptic lately, this hits the spot. Lots of normal stuff you'd find in a flick about a world that's moved on, with a couple nice shout outs to Mad Max & A Boy and His Dog.

Plus? Tom Waits shows up as the operator of a trading post of sorts.

He doesn't do a whole lot in the flick...and I honestly should probably have written this little part of the mini-review first...

But I never claimed to be all that bright.

Text & Messenger Conversation Digest

In a condensed form, this is a digest/highlight version of the text & Blackberry Messenger conversations I had over the last few days:
  • I have seen the movie District 9, but I am welcome to come watch it on Blu-Ray at my buddy Chris's house. I have not yet begun to read the book Tokyo Vice which he lent me before Christmas, but it's next on my list.
  • Apparently, I talked myself into a corner in a conversation with my brother-in-law, simply because I thought both ESPN's Hubert Davis and Lophonso Ellis both look like Klingons. Ellis looks like a high Klingon. As such, I wandered into the land where apparently all black people look like Klingons. I would like to take this opportunity to say that all black people do not look like Klingons. Only some of them.
  • I found an armful of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books at the Goodwill store one evening. I was pleased. My friend Julie was equally excited. It is a good thing that we are both geeks. Her significant other was less so, saying simply Steven Seagal Lawman > Choose Your Own Adventure books.
  • My sister is largely concerned with whether I have seen the movie The Sandlot. As I have told her several times: I have seen it, and do not see the charm surrounding it, to the point where people include it on their lists of favorite sports/baseball movies. I find the movie largely underwhelming, while respectfully recognizing that a great many people whose opinions I respect are dreadfully wrong about this shitstain of a movie.
  • My sister thinks Denis Leary is creepy looking in the movie The Sandlot, and that he hit the kid with the baseball on purpose. I think Denis Leary is a little creepy looking, in general. Like the Cryptkeeper, before he desicates completely.
  • People are generally unimpressed when you send burps, farts or Meow sounds over the voice message function of Blackberry Messenger.
  • I did not have to drive to Maryville to get toilet paper for a sale at my store. I was muchly relieved, as this would have been roughly 95 miles out of my way, round trip.
  • The score of the Colts/Ravens game, at the time of my text to my boss, was 17-3, and the Ravens were largely defeating themselves in the game. A mutual friend, who is a huge Ravens fan, had gone incommunicado, and we suspected had largely destroyed portions of his house, at the time.
  • My sister beat her record and the game of BrickBreaker. She taunts me.
  • Golden Globes award winners talk too much, according to both Jason & me. I had never before wanted to run Meryl "T-Bone" Streep over with my truck before last night.
  • The general consensus was that Harrison Ford was largely the drunkest man in the room at last night's Golden Globes, with Brendan Fraser coming in second. Kevin Bacon was likely the highest. Kevin Bacon might be a zombie.
  • Helen Mirren, consensus says, is a sexy old broad.
  • Christina Hendricks' boobs are the boobs God looks at up in heaven.
  • Crowd control at the Golden Globes was lacking. Shut the fuck up, if you're in the gallery, and get the hell out of the way, if somebody's trying to get to the stage.
  • The Golden Globes needed more Ricky Gervais.
  • The comic/tragic potential was high when Ricky Gervais slammed Mel Gibson. Think of the headlines if Mel had just come out and started beating the living shit out of Gervais...
  • James Cameron is a blight on humanity, as it that stupid movie, although I respect the honesty of the statement "I gotta pee something fierce."
  • Jason has civility pouring out of ass.
  • Simple question: Could you relax if Touchy-Feely Mike Tyson was standing just behind you?
  • Nobody would bring me Barbecue Potato Chips last night. One particular negative response was met with the accusation: Communist. One reason given for no potato chips: Hitler was eating barbecue potato chips in his bunker, just before he offed himself. This particular conversation devolved into the statement "I have no way to explain the previous statement that does not involve punching you."
  • The six-sided ring for TNA wrestling was retarded, an ill-informed way of trying to make your own recognizable niche. Moving back to the squared-circle, however the change came about, is probably a good move.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Asshattery...

I spoke in a prior post to the idiocy that surrounded the Lane Train Derailment earlier this week, but I want to point out a very, very interesting piece of video that emerged prior to the Kiffin statement.



The Channel 10 rep gets an entire table full of beer should he and I meet up, for calling bullshit on not one, but two scummy moves.

A big tip of the hat for this video goes to Newscoma and Michael Silence.

Saturday Morning...

And here we find ourselves at another Saturday morning. Don't have anything particular on my mind. There are simply a few thoughts from the previous week that may not even warrant their own bullet point. But, here goes:
  • I want to preface this whole thing that I spent so much time working, that outside of what I was reading on Twitter, I had very little idea of the devastation going on in Haiti until I sat down in front of my Tee Vee yesterday. Felt bad about bitching and moaning for the bulk of the week. Ended up looking hard at my Tee Vee jar. It's a gallon-sized jar that I've been dumping my pocket change into for several months now. I'd resolved since my last change-out (in June, or July) to use the change I saved for a new television--the logic behind this being I don't have enough free time to warrant going out and dropping a few hundred dollars on something I watch less than an hour a day, at this point, but if I saved pocket change. Anyway, I felt a little callow about all that yesterday, given just how much I'd bitched and moaned this week about everything. Ended up cashing the jar in (which, at $372.31 was quite a bit more than I'd thought) and donating it to the Red Cross. We'll get a TV some other time.
  • That said, there was still fun at the bank this week. I write one paper check a month, at this point, and somehow, my rent check ran through the bank twice. I try to keep as much in savings as I can, nowadays, and the double-debit ended up causing an NSF charge for the gas I'd bought earlier this week. Flummoxed and pissed, I couldn't get anybody on the phone Thursday evening. Friday, I'd calmed down muchly. A quick telephone call (made mostly so I wouldn't have to wander to the bank to lecture about minding the p's & q's) showed that it was an error that affected many people that week, and that the proper amount would be credited back to me, and I would also not be liable for the $32 NSF charge incurred as a result. This news resulted in a much happier Tommy.
  • Did I mention excessive bitches and moans? Here are a couple:
  • I would dearly love it if you folks learned to stop farting around. This bit of sentiment comes to you from the twin vantage points of customer service representative And fellow consumer. I'm salaried in retail, which means I'm there until the job gets done. And too often, this requires waiting on you to do little things like remember your ever-loving phone number, or go back to the farthest corner of the store to get coffee creamer, this despite it being the sole reason you came to the store. I spent ten minutes in line at CVS the other night, running in there thinking it would be quicker than running into Wal (hyphen) Mart or the grocery store (having spent 13 hours that day waiting on customers there sending me in another direction). I spent 14 minutes in line, with the three customers in front of me combining with little misgivings like being in the wrong line (you gotta get the pseudoephedrine drugs from the pharmacist, dippy), or not having their CVS card out, despite standing there and waiting for 10 minutes in front of me.
  • Some asswipe ate my lunch at work, the other day. Part of it. Minor New Years Resolution meant no fast food for 2010, which meant more turkey sandwiches. I work grocery, so I buy a loaf of bread and a pack of turkey, and make my sandwiches at the store. That's the theory, anyway, a loaf of bread and pack of lunchmeat left out in the fridge is apparently fair game for anybody that traipses back into the back room. Never figured I'd need to put a $1.79 loaf of bread under lock & key, but it appears to be the case. Seems like this is a lesson I should've learned before, but such is apparently not the case...
  • Got my first check of 2010 with our new Insurance taken out. What a gyp. Even at the lowest setting for single folks, I'm still shelling out a ridiculous amount of money for something I use twice a year (and still have to pay out a percentage then, mind you). The government taking what it does is annoying, but paying so much to Blue Cross Blue Shield is irksome, as well.
  • Those of you not living in Tennessee, and even then, those of you living not living in East Tennessee, were spared the bulk of the media onslaught that was the derailment of the Lane Train. Kiffin resigned his post at the University of Tennessee the same day as the Haiti Earthquake. Granted, the news coming out of Haiti was slow, but there were 30-40 Twitter posts concerning it on my feed. Around 8:15 or 8:30, a local reporter put something up about having to go to a news conference at U.T., and that "this didn't look good." Now, the Tennessee Football program, I can take or leave. But I've really gotten behind Bruce Pearl and the basketball program, and given the New Year's Day hit they took with Tyler Smith & compatriots arrested (& suspended & in Smith's case, dismissed from the team), I was afraid some manner of trouble was coming for the Tennessee basketball team...Pearl was getting fired, or had suffered a heart attack. It was minor relief to see that Kiffin (whom I've regarded as a shithead even in his Oakland Raider days) was leaving. None of which is to say it was a move that showed a lack of class, even if the guy was leaving for his Dream Job. It wasn't so much that the move happened suddenly, it's that the guys playing football for Kiffin seemed so completely unimportant to the process, many of them learning the news from ESPN. But I digress....my issue was not so much with that, as it was that we went from 30-40 twitter-posts on Haiti on Tuesday to more than 400 on Kiffin leaving. In the interest of full disclosure, I had 5 posts on Kiffin (trying to be funny) to 1 on Haiti. So, I'm an asshole, too....

Friday, January 15, 2010

Friday Random...

Friday Random...

Bit of a long week, campers. Returned from the 3-day weekend to days of 11, 12, 13 and 11 hours. My current disposition says Don't Ever You Go Salary in Retail....

Anyway, took the morning to catch up with chores and online activities. Even got a little writing done....

For lack of anything better to put on the blogamathing, and with a tip of the hat to Elisson...here are the songs I listened to as I went through my morning...

1. "Kiss me, I'm shitfaced..." Dropkick Murphys
2. "The Ballad of Jimmy Durante" The Blanks



3. "Ring of Fire" Social Distortion
4. "Fall on Me" R.E.M.
5. "Dragula" Rob Zombie
6. "God Only Knows" Petra Haden & the Sellouts
7. "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us" Allison Krauss & Robert Plant
8. "A Game in Town Like This" Corb Lund
9. "Final Countdown" Europe
10. "The Sloop John B" The Beach Boys

It was a disorienting morning....

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Chapter MMMCC: Shemp < Curly

If I understand things correctly, this is post #3200 in the annals of that wonderment that is the Blog called Big Stupid Tommy (if you knew how many times it took me to type that correctly, you'd be close to guessing just how many Magic Hat Winter Seasonals I've taken in).

All I have to say is this: There are three major personality types in America, today.

We have Moe.

We have Larry.

We have Curly.

There is a fourth type. But Shemps are in prison.

Thank you, and Good Evening.

Friday, January 08, 2010

Friday Random....

With a tip of the cap to Elisson, and to all those Ipod memes floating around, these are what I listened to as I completed a few chores about the compound:

1. Goose Creek Symphony "(Lord, Won't You Buy Me a) Mercedes Benz"
2. Deep Blue Something "Breakfast at Tiffany's"
3. The Proclaimers "Cap in Hand"
4. Joaquin Phoenix "Folsom Prison Blues"
5. U2 "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
6. Weird Al Yankovic "Your Horoscope for Today"
7. Grandpa Jones "Eight More Miles to Louisville"
8. The Chieftains w/ Sinead O'Connor "The Foggy Dew"
9. Rancid "Ruby Soho"
10. Del Shannon "Runaway"
11. The Waifs "The Waitress"
12. The Dillards "Yesterday"
13. Mojo Nixon "You Can't Kill Me"
14. Old Crow Medicine Show "Fall on my Knees"
15. The Rev. Peyton's Big Damn Band "Glory Glory Hallelujah"
16. Spectre General "Nothing's Gonna Stand in Our Way"
17. R.E.M. "Leave"
18. U2 "Sunday, Bloody Sunday"
19. Mojo Nixon "Tie My Pecker to my Leg"
20. Willie Nelson "Rainbow Connection"
21. The Asylum Street Spankers "Whatever"

Thursday, January 07, 2010

If I ran the Knoxville News-Sentinel

A fellow named Scott Bishop had a letter to the editor in the Knoxville News Sentinel, lambasting the paper for referring to 2010 as the beginning of a new decade. Specifically, Scott writes:

The year 2009 was the ninth year of the decade, which will end Dec. 31.

This is not a triviality — it goes to the core of your newspaper’s job, which is largely concerned with being accurate and truthful.

It is not truthful to say that we are beginning a new decade when we are not.

Were I the owner/editor of said paper, I would respond thusly:

Dear Scott:

You're a douchebag. Anybody who takes time to argue with somebody about when a decade or a century or a millennium begins is a douchebag who's never gotten over the fact that being the smartest kid in the classroom counts for very little in the real world.

On the one hand, I'll say that the rest of us decided, that since anybody who was alive in the time of that first decade, has long since been dead (with the possible exceptions of Jesus Christ, the Kurgan and Vandal Savage), that that first decade would simply be a 9 year decade. Further, the first century? A 99-year century. They've been given their chance for 2,009 years to voice their concerns. We'll just consider it something along the lines of starting a song on the third quarter note of a measure, instead of the first.

On the second hand, I can declare that the week begins on Tuesday. Or Thursday. Or Saturday at noon. And that the year actually begins with the Spring Equinox. Or on the Opening Day of the baseball season. None of this truly means all that much. It's simply a way of keeping track of stuff, mostly so that the trains run on time and everybody knows when the new season of Wheel of Fortune starts.

As an addendum to that thought: Those calendars and years probably got screwed when we made the Julian/Gregorian transition anyway. So I'd get over it. We're due to be taken over by a calendar-changing tyrant any day now, anyway. Don't get attached.

And also, can I say that our friends the Jews and the Chinese probably don't have these kind of arguments, mostly because they've been playing with the calendar for a couple millennia more than we have. They probably decided, that in the face of a few thousand years of history, arguing about when a decade starts and ends just so we can rank our favorite Oasis albums is probably not all that important.

Look, I get it. I sat there and argued with my TV for weeks last spring, when the WWE referred to Wrestlemania 25 as the 25th anniversary of Wrestlemania. So I get the whole thing about being smarter than everybody. At the end of the day, it got me nowhere, except a sore throat for screaming at my television.

My advice to you is this: Keep it in your pants, and remember that there are always bigger douchebags than you in the world (like me) who are more than willing to write inane posts about your writings and/or deliver a Nature Boy Chop to the first person who declares themselves the arbiter and watchman of who it is that delivers truth in the world. I'll just say that if it's in your craw just how little the Knoxville News-Sentinel is dedicated to the truth, hit them where it hurts, and stop buying their paper.

Me? I enjoy it because they're kind enough to run Get Fuzzy on a daily basis. Our priorities are decidedly different, but then, I tend not to send many bitchy letters to the newspaper. Also? If you are no longer going to buy the Knoxville News-Sentinel, I want to let you know that I'll be buying two copies. For shits and giggles, and also because I tend to work the sudoku puzzle in pen, and sometimes I'm not nearly as smart as I like to pretend.

Lastly? Looking for truth in the newspapers is like looking for decency in our elected officials...if it's in there, it's purely by happenstance and not design at all. That seems to me to be your biggest mistake.

Knock it off.

Kindly get fucked,

Tommy Acuff

P.S.: I'm not sure what you're referring to with the K not meaning 1,000, but I'll say that it depends on the usage. We have got the Metric system, where K is the accepted abbreviation for Kilo.

Kilo, of course, is 1,000 or so of the accepted base measurements for volume, length and mass, etc. I'm not defending Y2K for Year 2,000 as 100% correct, but K does mean 1,000 from time to time. I would have to see what you're referring to before I smacked you in the mouth, though. I have a feeling you might be on to something there....

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Wednesday Morning Music Videos...

Good morning, and hello. If all goes according to plan, I start four days without customers tomorrow. Considering I've had something like 3.5 days off since the 14th of December, I will consider this very much the Cheeseburger in Paradise it is all cracked up to be.

Anyway, here's a little bit of Weird Al for you:



And, if you like trucks animated singing songs, here's a Patsy Cline classic that ended up making my head hurt:

Monday, January 04, 2010

Hello....

No real reason to post it, except that I heard it on Outlaw Country the other day, after kinda forgetting the song.