This is probably a dumb post when I have other things to write about buuuut....

....I think, in terms of iconic symbolism, musical representation and overall coolness, Black Flag is the best band name ever.

Also, I really, really hate the word schnockered. Can't we just say drunk? Hammered, shithoused, shitcanned, plowed, plastered, wasted, geez--even bombed, but please, stop saying schnockered. It's the sort of word that is said with sneering self-righteousness by those guys who stayed in the dorm playing penuchle on Saturday nights when the rest of the floor was out sucking down trashcan punch and keystones and getting turned down by girls.

In hindsight, I probably should've spent more time with the penuchle-playing guys. I'd probably be an billionaire astronaut by now.

--The Robo-Pirate

p.s.

I just glanced at some Amazon reviews of The Truth about Diamonds from people who have actually read it. One of them begins, "I don't like to read..." I think that sums Nicole Ritchie the author up pretty nicely.

Angry and Nauseas

I am busy right now, but I am so enervated that I could probably cut my arm open and molten fire would spray out instead of blood.

It was this phrase, found on a Yahoo news post, that did it:

"Television personality and author Nicole Ritchie"

Author? Really? What did she write? Oh, this book? This "novel" about the daughter of an entertainer who gets on a reality show and becomes famous? You mean the one with the picture of herself wearing a tiara on the front cover? It looks a lot more like a thinly veiled, heavily-promoted vanity project, if you ask me. You know whose fault this is? It's yours, America, for continuing to pay attention to these vapid, inflated celebrities, who if not for being fired out of some rich woman's vagina, wouldn't get to "write" books and get them published.

Nicole, honestly, what have you had to do thus far? Grow up being friends with crappy human beings like Paris Hilton, get everything you want (which, apparently included at some point being an author), go score heroin on Sunset, never go to jail for scoring heroin, be on TV, etc. etc. etc. Hmmm... I didn't see consistent disappointment from rejection form-letters on that list. Well, fuck you, Nicole. This book is the last straw. When I think of every writer who gets his or her stories, articles and manuscripts rejected over and over again, who works a nine-to-five in order to be a writer because writers don't usually make livings off their passion, who may get to experience a divorce or a drinking problem or some other misery because of his or her drive to do what he or she loves, well I hope, just a little bit, Nicole Ritchie, that your personal hell involves having to eat every copy of that novel, after the rest of us have wiped our asses with them.

--The Robo-Pirate

Nuclear with Pride

My little brother is a senior in high school, and he recently played his final high school water polo game. He's pretty good; so good in fact, that at the end of the season, he was named an All-American, as well as being named to the All-Section First Team as well and the Northern California First Team, which means he's in like the top fifteen of Northern California.

It's very possible that my family will have a Division-1 Collegiate athlete in it. I am so stoked and have never been prouder of him.

--The Robo-Pirate

Do they bother to go listen to themselves later? Or do they just not care how stupid they sound?

Regarding the Senate's handy defeat of the Democrats' effort to call for a Iraq withdrawal timetable, Senate Majority leader Bill Frist said this:

"They want an exit strategy, a cut-and-run exit strategy. What we are for is a successful strategy."

Right, because we've been so successful at everything else in this war, like supressing insurgents and getting the lights turned on and the toilets unplugged. I don't really trust your party to do anything successful beyond successfully lying and cheating.

--The Robo-Pirate

It's time for the indie kids to break out their scarves and v-neck sweaters.

North Texas is apparently getting a cold front this week, which means that the THIRD WEEK IN NOVEMBER will feature temps in the upper 60s and low 70s. For those of you in other parts of the country, I think you call your cold fronts "fall" and "winter."

--The Robo-Pirate

I'm actually not sure who the jerk here is, oh well. I hate indie kids.

Real fast, as I have to get back to work, but my band, Darth Vato, just received its first two pieces of hate mail, which I pasted below, followed by my response.

Dylan S., probably from Saddle Creek, NE writes:

you dudes totally look like a bunch of losers who listen to sugar ray, and
sublime. perhaps your name which abounds in originality was thought up listening to one of the afformentioned bands whilst smoking some form of illicit drug. i am sorry for not speaking
monosyllabically for you guys to understand, but i just thought i would say you suck...

and then:

i just downloaded one of your many songs, and realized you guys sound like 311, which is worse that i previously imagined. that skeleton with the sword is like a harbinger of death to you guys, seeing as how im going to steal the cutlass he is holding and cut off all of your fingers, so as to save the world from the hell that is darth vato. you guys would probably have been better in naming yourselves "going nowhere cause we are frathouse wankers". oh sorry for being a bit "rude", but bands like you give the world of music a bad name. just thought i would give you guys a word of encouragement by saying "quit now". by the way 311 sucks, but not as much as you guys. oh yeah you guys should return that year prescription of rohypnol you got from your buddy at the pharmacy, because dosing chicks at your venues is sooooo last year.

Oh! Well allow me to retort!

Dear Dylan,

Wow. You are the first person in three years to directly express antipathy for Darth Vato. We assume that people make fun of us behind our backs, but no one has ever made his or her loathing as explicit as you have. For your honest opinion, we thank you.

I do take issue with a few items in your emails, however. Though I applaud you for checking your spelling, grammar and punctuation (are you a journalism major, perhaps? Are you using your reporting class as a podium by which to disparage your town's music scene?), I am puzzled as to why, in your second email, you chose to enclose the word rude in quotation marks. Did you mean something other than the definition of rude that is commonly agreed upon by nearly everyone who competently understands the English language? Because otherwise, I can only assume that you were trying to emphasize your point that we are frathouse morons. I suppose you drove that point home sufficiently; in the event that you were trying to be funny, I am sorry to say you failed.

Furthermore, in the first email you accuse us of emulating Sublime and Sugar Ray and in the second, 311. I would like to clear up any misconceptions you might have about our musical tastes. Kerry (the bearded guy who plays guitar) and I (the sometimes-bearded guy who plays bass) both love Sublime. Though we both like many other types music (Kerry is really into jazz; I am all over the place), Sublime was common to both of us when we met in college, and our band largely sprang from jamming on Sublime songs (oops--sorry, jamming is a gerund probably too fratty and stupid to use with you). I will also begrudgingly cop to liking a couple Sugar Ray songs. For good or for ill, Mark McGrath (or whoever writes them) crafts sickeningly good hooks. That's partly why he doesn't have to have a day job beyond appearing on television and singing at state fairs. He is likely a millionaire, and if you are accusing me of aspiring to be one of those, I can only plead guilty. As for 311, our drummer likes 311, and we ridicule him mercilously and ceaselessly. We hate 311, despite what it says on our Myspace page. Bad Brains are awesome, however.

Finally, my last issue with your emails involves your contention that we give music a bad name. We have no pretensions about being a type of band different than the one we are, but I think you are thinking of The Bravery. The bass player should have stuck it out in whatever ska band he was in.

As for you as a person, we sincerely appreciate your honest feedback. It would have been better if you had articulated your enmity without using verbiage such as "abounds," because in total, your emails lead me to believe that you are, in fact, an eigth grader who has recently discovered what pressing the shift and F7 keys does on your keyboard (which opens Microsoft Word's thesaurus, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about). But really, I know you even less than you know me. I might, for example, guess that you are some burgeoning indie snob, who after purchasing Good News for People Who Love Bad News became a Modest Mouse authority, especially after you found out they made albums prior to getting Top 40 spins. If I were to make these types of assumptions, (which I'm not, of course), I might suggest that you take your devastatingly original, ironically-worn, size-too-small "Virginia is for lovers" t-shirt and use it for wadding when you cram that unopened Yo La Tengo album you bought two months ago up your ass. Or, I could assume that your email address pays homage to that underground hip-hop guy, which means you are light years beyond us in terms of indie cool and therefore intelligence and overall human merit. Either that, or you are a Dragonball fan, which confirms my suspicions about your being in eighth grade.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. See you at the Warped Tour!

Steve

p.s.

I'm not sure how to get rohypnol, but if I do, the first girl who is going to get it is your grandma, so I can take the ten dollars out of her purse she intends to put in your birthday card.

What I Learned from Saturday Night Commercials

According to television, touching a brand new Nissan Maxima creates some weird, crack-like, contact high that is instantly and perilously addictive, so addictive in fact, that if the Maxima you have touched boards a ferry and the ferry steams away from a pier, you are liable to continue to chase it to the point of madly running off the end, presumably drowning in the water below. Either that or you swim after the ferry and end up in Vancouver. Or Alcatraz. I'm pretty sure those are the only places that use ferries.

Needless to say, I don't ever want to touch a Maxima. Or swim to Vancouver.

--The Robo-Pirate

Hey! Mine is fulla thumbtacks!!!!

So one aspect of my job involves writing titles and descriptions for internet search terms. I typically get a list of keywords for whatever company's campaign I'm working on and write the stuff that pops up as a sponsored link when you type it in Yahoo, Google or MSN. These lists always include terms that make me scratch my head in bewilderment because of their specificity, unwieldiness or general idiocy. Today, as I was cruising through a list that had to do with frozen gourmet seafood, I encountered this gem:

Seafood stuffed crab shells.

Aren't crab shells already stuffed with seafood? On account of being full of crab? As if you might crack open a crab shell and discover a bunch of lettuce or loose change.

I'm just saying is all.

--The Robo-Pirate