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

p.s.

p.s.

Unless you plan on using one to suck Dick Cheney out of his bedroom window. We could probably stomach one more, then.

A Child's Letter to God

Dear Jesus,

Please stop with the fucking hurricanes.

Your friend,

Steve

What to do when your Saturday goes belly up

To Natalie and Andrea, thanks for sitting on the curb with me last night. It meant more than you know.

--The Robo-Pirate

NEXT BLOG!!!

You know when you go eat Mexican food and you have two quarters left over so you go over to the put-quarters-in-and-turn-the-knob prize dispensers and there is a Homie prize dispenser, and the top part has really awesome Homies like the guy in the wheelchair or the big cholo-looking one who's restraining a pitbull and then you put quarters in and turn the knob and you don't get either of those but instead get the chick with a pink coat on, who looks pretty much like the other chicks with the pink coats (I went to high school with those chicks, by the way) who you got the last two times you purchased a Homie out of a Homie-dispenser? Well, that's how I feel when I hit the NEXT BLOG >> button on this thing. I want a funny or interesting blog, but what I get is one about how research shows that lizards cure cancer or how research shows that smoking makes your eyeballs fall out or some other such sponsored nonsense. So when one of those pops up, I push NEXT BLOG >>, and then this next one is in Spanish, and I don't read Spanish very well, and so I push NEXT BLOG >> and this one appears to be in Arabic, and I don't read Arabic at all. So of course, why not check out the NEXT BLOG >>? Because the NEXT BLOG >> looks like the layout desk in Juggs' editorial department, because it is haphazardly covered with pictures of amateur topless women with preposterously large breasts.

I gave it one more shot, and the NEXT BLOG >> did not make me laugh as much as it made me consider how I probably should get around to learning Norwegian, so I can learn how Alexander feels about David Cronenberg's Videodrome. I will admit that I am interested in learning Norwegian now, because of the proliferation of decorative diacritic marks on Norwegian letters. While the English alphabet is basically limited to the occasional breve and umlaut, the letters in the Norwegian alphabet look like you could hang them on a Christmas tree.

So anyway, when you click on that button, chances are you aren't going to get what you're after. Certainly not a cholo with a pitbull.

--The Robo-Pirate

The Skin-Thinning Properties of Bad-Day Projection

I found out this past week that my mom had a blog. Long story short, by taking a sentence out of context and framing it within the context of the bummer weekend I had and the crummy day I was having, I handily found hidden implications from which I took umbrage. The two emails I sent her in response were not directly unkind, but they were unwarranted and unecessarily indignant. The consequence of all this was that I hurt her feelings to the point that she took down her entire blog.

If you are interested in making yourself feel like a really awful person, make your mom sad. It works nearly every time.

So of course, I feel like a big jerk, and here is why: my mom is not particularly adept at using computers, and the fact that she was able to navigate Blogger (or Blooger, as I nearly typed a second ago, which I think is a hilarious word, incidentally), follow the instructions and successfully create a blog is wonderful and astounding. I say that with absolutely no sarcasm. Furthermore, I can imagine her sheer joy at having an outlet to write and relate sometimes hilarious, often frustrating stories about my dad, my brother and myself. The fact that I effectively squashed that joy by being a titty-baby makes me feel about an inch tall. I know I wasn't the one who deleted her blog, but shit. Seriously, this is me telling me, grow up, dude. It's not like it's the first time my mom has made light of something I've done. I did, after all go to high school in the early-to-mid '90s, so you can imagine the number of terrible haircuts and goofy clothes I had, most of which practically begged for informed mockery by sensible adults.

Anyway, I'm not trying to feel sorry for myself, but I am sorry for being a jerk. So mom, will you please put up another blog? Pretty please? I know people will read it (especially Wink), and they're fun, and therapeutic, and so are you gonna put it up now? Please?

--The Robo-Pirate

Now I feel cool!!!

Driving to work this morning, zoning out, appreciating the fact that it is not yet a thousand degrees in Fort Worth..... And some dude who I did not know was blaring my band's most recent CD out of his pickup. If everything falls apart today (don't know why it would), at least I have that moment of giddy joy. Sounds kind of gay, but it's a really cool feeling to know that a stranger is enjoying one's creative output.

--The Robo-Pirate

How to Make Sense of History When You've Watched a Lot of Television

Based upon this PBS show I watched last night that had to do with what a big deal 1968 and 1969 (and how they made the things that happened in '70-'74 happen) were, I arrived at two conclusions:

1. Vince Neil is the rock and roll equivalent of Ted Kennedy. Both are fat, bloated and the wrong person to ride in a car with.

2. Arlo Guthrie looks and sounds like he is being portrayed by Darrel Hammond in an SNL skit about a guy tailgating before a Jimmy Buffet concert.

--The Robo-Pirate

p.p.p.p.s.

So is Prince.

Y? Because I have two more minutes on my lunch.

A short list of famous musicians whose first names begin with the letter Y:

Yngwie Malmsteen
Ytzahk Perlman
Yesod from Pepper
Yellowman
Yuri from MxPx

oh Christ--I almost forgot.... YANNI

--The Robo-Pirate

p.s.
Can you believe I almost forgot Yanni? It would have been like leaving Skeletor off of a list of scary purple things.

p.p.s
Grimace is definitely on that list.

p.p.p.s.
So is the anthropomorphic onion on the new Eclipse gum commercial.

Hi. My name is America, and I'm a oilcoholic.

I recall a Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin is bitching about the future not being very futuristic. "Where are the flying cars?" he gripes. "I mean, we still have weather?"

Yes, Calvin, we most certainly still have weather, and right now, our still-extant weather is further proving that America (and the rest of the world, if we are going to be honest with ourselves) will be forever hidebound by our addiction to oil, an addiction which mires us in costly mid-east wars, poisoned air, and stymied innovation.

Want to keep living in the twentieth century? Then let's keep the oil pumping. Throw more money at finding more oil, rather than spending money on retrofitting our infrastructure to accomodate hydrogen or other renewables.

I know I'm oversimplifying this, but seriously, how many more natural, energy-crippling disasters do we need to recover from to realize that pursuing an alternative is better for everyone and everything in the long run. How many more theocratic despots must we tolerate before we hit (bed)rock-bottom?

When will we have a clean-burning flying car?

--The Robo-Pirate

OHHH YEAHHHH!!! MY WAAAAR!!!!

The more I think about Henry Rollins, the more I get the impression that he would be partial to grape Kool Aid. And that he would also be likely to come smashing through a wall screaming "OHHH YEAHHH!!!!, resplendent in his little black shorts and with his huge carotid arteries bulging and pumping with furious, sugary purple punch, because he likes grape Kool Aid so much that he has completely supplanted his blood with it. And if you like grape Kool Aid that much, you know who to bite in the neck.

--The Robo-Pirate

p.s.
I thought this up with Kerry. He likes Kool Aid too, probably.

(a + b) 121/c = TRIANGLE?????

Really, launchcast radio? Shania Twain? You honestly thought, given all your algorhythms and research and ratings that I might like to listen to a Shania Twain song? I fail to see which variable, selection or rating might have even remotely suggested that I wanted to hear Shania Twain. Because I don't. Not even a little bit. Remember when you thought that I might want to hear some Aerosmith, maybe from the Big Ones album? And remember how you were wrong? Well this is like that time, only worse. Is it because I picked Jack Johnson, and you know that some people who like Jack Johnson like Shania Twain and that if you were to present a Ven diagram illustrating that overlap, my tastes might overlap there in the middle? Well, they don't. You're not listening to me, because I also have told you that in addition to Jack Johnson, I like Black Flag and Minor Threat, and I think it's a safe assumption that the average fan of either of those bands does not like Shania Twain. Moreover, I know for a fact that Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye definitely don't like Shania Twain, because when the three of us (along with Greg Graffin) got together to play Dungeons and Dragons last Saturday, I was about to make the scenario when Rollins goes, "You know who I'm sick of? That stupid Shania Twain!" And then Ian is like, "Yeah, bro, I totally know what you mean." So then I changed the campaign and made up this really easy-to-kill troll who was loaded in gold and called him Sh'naya T'weyne, and it was really funny, and we laughed and laughed and laughed some more, especially when Greg Graffin spilled Dr. Pepper on his pants.

--The Robo-Pirate

Dammit (I guess this is growi--BLAM BLAM BLAM!!!!!

So last night, I went downtown to the Flying Saucer to meet Jackie and her friends for a beer (which really turned into three or four given that they had Sierra Nevada IPA on tap). As I crossed Sundance square, I saw three people held hostage on a park bench by a busker badly performing "Just Like Heaven." Then, as I stepped into the crosswalk at Fourth and Main, some asshole in a Mercedes jerked out of his parking spot and through the red light. If not for the techno pumping out of his car, I probably would have been nailed. Of course he wouldn't have noticed, unless the impact had made him drop his cigarette or phone, which he was operating simultaneously. He was obviously commanding the car by the power of sheer concentration, so it's understandable that he didn't notice athe red light, let alone a human being stepping into the sanctioned walking area.

The other thing that happened was that when I got to the bar, I saw this girl I graduated with. I don't think I have ever spoken to her, but with characteristic creepiness, I know that she was a Chi-O, an Ad/PR major, and from Overland Park, KS. Anyway, she was sitting at this table with this dude, and the dude looked like he was in his early-to-mid 30s, and when I saw him, I thought, "Whoa, that dude she's with is old. He must be like, 32 or 33!" and then I realized that 32 or 33 isn't really that much older than someone who is 27 or 28. I never thought I'd feel old until I had kids. The fact that going to the Flying Saucer and buying expensive craft beers was something I did when I was 21 and 22 didn't help anything either.

This is why I shouldn't go out on Sundays.

--The Robo-Pirate

p.s.
I had a beer called Old Scrimshaw, brewed in Fort Bragg, CA. It tasted like your grocers freezer, like licking a Lean Cuisine package.

Fun Fact #1

According to the Internet Movie Database, Robert "Freddy Kreuger" Englund's father designed the U-2 spy plane.

Bonus fun fact: He auditioned for the part of Luke Skywalker. My guess is that he couldn't get the whole petulant space-teenager thing down.

--The Robo-Pirate

Angry Lesbian Breasts Part II

Oh man, that sounds like a new John Waters movie, if he eschewed the subtlety of his other films. Anyway, I forgot to mention that I read an article about Antigone Rising in Spin or EW or Here's Some Label Money to Promote Some New, Terrible Band a day or two after posting about them. It turns out they are a female JAM BAND, which means that not only is their sound the musical equivalent of a menstrual cramp, it is a cramp that lasts the entire month.

--The Robo-Pirate

p.s.
I should probably mention that Angry Lesbian Breasts is a referrence to a line Stephen King used to describe inappropriate modifiers (and bad slam poetry) in his On Writing book. If you like to write and haven't read this book, you need to pick it up.

p.p.s.
Also, I gathered from Antigone Rising's interview comments that my eye-rolling and criticism is not original at all and that they hear that sort of thing all the time; in that case, let me say that I have never been ashamed of pointing out the obvious. If you have shit on your shoe and everyone can smell it, expect to hear about it until you scrape it off.