The Monk Bought Lunch

addendum to previous post

Looks like your friendly neighborhood Monk is going to have a rock baby of his very own. That's right, I got me a kidney stone! Wish me luck for a short labor and a quick delivery.
This could mean some strange, Vicodin-fuelled blog entries too, you lucky surfers you.

a real live wire

Thank Odin for YouTube. I stupidly ended up watching Rock Star just now, and, since my turntable's broken, I had no recourse for an antidote to Ryan singing Baba O'Riley and Dilana singing Psycho Killer but to run to the computer and watch the real things.
While I was watching David Byrne and Co. perform Psycho K on the Old Grey Whistle Test, I noticed in the "related videos" box something called "Grace vs. The Talking Heads", with a still frame of a young girl looking like she was in the throes of a major tantrum. I had to check that out. Now, your turn:

Kinda makes havin' kids look not so bad, eh?

I bet it's heat vision!

Or a superhuman ability to perceive appetite.

we hate it when our friends become successful

Funny how these things happen in clumps. Last weekend I picked up the August issue of Mojo only 'cause I hadn't read it in a while and 'cause the CD that came with it looked like it had some good stuff on it, and casually flipping through it I see a big ol' picture of the badn Vetiver, of which a guy I know is a member. A guy, I might add, who probably had a boner for weeks after having his picture in Mojo (full disclosure: so would I). Then, after living with the mag a couple days to the point where I was reading all the reviews in the back, I see a review of his other band, Espers- with another picture!
Fuck me.
So THEN Broadway B at Titivil posts a link about these 24 Hour Plays that are supposed to be so good for you, and the link points to this Playbill article including the following sentence:

Original casts and other alumni performing include Dratch ("Saturday Night Live"), Elizabeth Berkley ("Showgirls"), Matthew Lillard ("Scooby Doo"), Andrew McCarthy ("Pretty in Pink"), Ally Sheedy ("The Breakfast Club"), Andre Royo, muMs ("Oz") and Brent Cox.

Let's just say that "Brent Cox" is someone very close to the man behind the Titivil curtain. Now putting aside the fact that nobody has ever seen "Ernio Hernandez" and Brent Cox in the same place at the same time, and also putting aside the fact that, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Berkley, Brent is the most talented person in that list, still, what's he doing there?
It's weird, is all I'm saying. But then B ups the weirdness ante but letting us all see how Mike Doughty appropriates somewhat dusty urban slang to give a shout out to his "homeboy Brent Cox. Who is fresh". So now my friends are all up in my CD collection and shit. Fine. See if I care.
Yesterday, at the Indian Buffet, the topic of yet another friend comes up. This friend happens to be one of those Mountain Goats boys. One of our company was complaining that he'd called Peter's cell phone and been greeted by a "Why are you calling me? I'm in Europe!". Peter has only implied that I'm his homeboy and am fresh, and not in print, so whatever.
I console myself with the knowledge that I'm a damn fine library assistant, and look good in a dress. And I have head shots, if anybody's interested.

I staked out that guy only it didn't work out like you said. Please call me. Room 234, County Hospital.x

I remember loving The Rockford Files as a kid. Could explain a lot, really. I don't remember paying much attention to the answering machine messages in the title sequence of every episode.
I also can't imagine taking the time to transcribe every flippin' one of 'em for your reading pleasure.
Yet, I'm glad someone did. This is the magic of the internets.

Hello, I'm Gelatin

There's a chinese restaurant that recently set up shop around the corner that's in a former KFC. I think the big bucket had been gone for some time already, which is too bad because with a little ingenuity they could've transformed it into one of those wire-handled take-out containers.
Some years ago a friend told me about an establishment in his old home town called "Hello I'm Gelatin". They had moved into an old Jell-O store, which, geez, I would've called it "Hello Nobody Needs a Whole Store for Gelatin". "Hello I'm Gelatin" became a favorite catchphrase between we two. Actually, after a Google search, it turns out I may not have the details right on that story.
In the spirit of the above trifles: Not Fooling Anybody.

ps- very tangentially related memory that just popped into my head: I once lived across the street from a donut shop in Toronto (which, if you live in Toronto, kinda goes without saying) called Country Donuts World.

schlock star souper no-soul

Why do I do it to myself? Every night I seem to find myself slumped on the couch, emptily gazing at one "reality" program or another and hating myself for it. And the worst of them all?
Rock Star.

A little history: I was a rock kid. First of the lame-o variety, as in the first music albums I purchased were The Mask by Billy Joel and Cornerstone by Styx (the ones with Movin' Out and Babe respectivley). Then, and I still remember this crystal-clear, a friend played me the cut from the Woodstock album with Jimi Hendrix playing The Star-Spangled Banner, and from that point the aforementioned records went untouched by my phonograph needle.
Instead, I spent most of my free time in front of my full-length mirror trying to emulate the moves of Hendrix, Townshend, Moon, Jagger, Richards, and yea Morrison et al.
So it would seem that Rock Star would be a thing I could relate to, but instead whenever I watch it I feel as though I'm undergoing abdominal surgery without anesthetic. I mean, holy shit, have you seen this thing?
I don't even mind that much Dave Navarro has the biggest, greasiest head since John Holmes after a roll in the butter with Seka (and something tells me he'd take that as a compliment), or that Tommy Lee is, well, Tommy Lee. And by the way, will somebody please ask Navarro if Perry Farrell would have had a chance on Rock Star?
It's really the contestants that give me ulcers. I'm very sincere in my belief in nonviolence, but these cretinous goons cause me to reconsider that. I'm not saying I dislike them, I'm just saying that if they were marched single file into an abbatoir to be slaughtered kosher-style, it would be too good of an end for them.
And it's not just the utter lack of soul or heart exhibited by these cartoons, or that the arrangements of songs, many of which hold a dear place in my heart, are criminal (guitar player: Oh, it's Teen Spirit? Let me just hit the Pepsico Patented Cobain effects pedal and I'll be ready to go! Rawk!), no I think the thing that makes the surgeon who's performing the surgery on me give the rib-spreader several extra twists is the bizarre word pronunciations the contestants use.
When did it happen that it became an accepted practice in rock to pronounce every word as though it's being spoken by the illegitimate love child of Carol Channing and Jim Morrison at his most overblown?
Last night one of the contestants performed Layla. I don't remember the kid's name, but he was the Australian one (although I suspect that, like everything else about the contestants, could be fake). I'll call him Digby Dickbreath. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with smoking cock- I think that's a perfectably acceptable past time- it's just that I think rock has always been shamefully unaware, or unawaredly shameful, of its obvious and inherent fancypantsness, and that makes it more fun to vocally question these guys' masculinity. I also would have no problem if the female contestants were all lesbians- it's just that I think that is no excuse to sound like Melissa Etheridge. I won't accept that excuse from Melissa and I won't accept it from anyone else.
So, um, yeah Digby's singing Layla. And this is probably not the thing I'm proudest of about myself, but I really like that song. But what the hell is coming out of his mouth?
"Lu-Hay-luhrrr, gee-yot me ow-un mah kneee-uzhuh
Luh-HAY-luhuhlowah, gee-yacht meh own mah kneej,
chah-lee-uhn wow-uhnt ya eeedge mah wood my-hindyah"

Huh?

They ALL do this, this Channing-Jo Risin' thing. I try to add some levity to the situation, telling my girlfriend that "AHum gow-uhn chew the feeudgeratuh to gyetch 'nudda Bu-HEE-yah. Jew wu-howuhnt wuh-HUN yeah?", but we both know there's nothing funny.
The girlfriend and I reserve special animosity for this guy:

Last night, while he was "singing", I said "I bet the judge guys are thinking he's too faggy for Supernova" and the girfriend says "I was just thinking 'I bet he really likes to put a dick in his mouth'". Again, Ain't nothin' wrong with that. But If someone thought that about me I wouldn't care at all, whereas I would lay money that this dude would crawl in a corner with his eyebrow tweezer and pout for hours if he knew people were saying such things about him. There's just something about these guys, and him in particular, that makes you think that if he was getting his ass stomped in a bar nobody would lift a finger to stop it.
Look, I'm no starry-eyed idealist. I know that rock has been thouroughly corporatized and stripped of its heart. It's just when they taunt me with it like that, it hurts. It wounds. It marks. Uh-Henny-uh Haht, not tu-HUFF-uh, ow-uh stru-hong eeenuufhuh- well, I'm sure they'll do that one before the season's up.

should i paint pictures, should i sing songs

I wish I could paint. I'd do a series of paintings based on items from police blotters, starting with one called:
A suspicious person was reported on Smiley Terrace. It was a magazine salesman.
And the next one would be:
An East Bentham Parkway resident reported someone tasted her meatloaf. No evidence of such crime was found.

ready kids? begin to saw!

Sometimes in life we get so wrapped up in shaking our eyes and sawing things we lose track of what's really important.
The Big Snit:

intestinal fort

Dude, it smells like ass in here!

I'm convening a conference to redefine 'boombastic jazz style'*

Maybe if we keep redefining things, eventually we'll have a fish that's also a planet!

*(those impertinent Dream Warriors had no right to define it without consulting the boombastic jazz community)

The President: not the existentializer

There's been some fuss about the presidential summer reading list. Evidently, Prez has graduated from My Pet Goat to Camus' The Stranger. However, anonymous sources tell me that this was a miscommunication, and that Bush has actually slogged his way through this.
My source tells me that, for extra credit, the president contributed a customer review under the pseudonym "A reviewer":
I think The Stranger should be 5 stars because is a great book!!!!!!!
What a great book The Stranger is!! Chris Van Allsburg is GREAT at making stories, I liked this one the best!!

Lest we go overboard in deriding our stupid, stupid president, let me remind you that he did take time to pore over some serious historical documents while on vacation.

wow!

"Two-thousand and eight presidential contenders"? Now that's a crowded field!

whiff of plot

As usual, Broadway B over at Titivil is right. This post by John Rogers puts it rather nicely, although B's no slouch in the putting of things either.
I especially liked this passage:

I am absolutely buffaloed by the people who insist I man up and take it in the teeth for the great Clash of Civilizations -- "Come ON, people, this is the EPIC LAST WAR!! You just don't have the stones to face that fact head-on!" -- who at the whiff of an actual terror plot will, with no apparent sense of irony, transform and run around shrieking, eyes rolling and Hello Kitty panties flashing like Japanese schoolgirls who have just realized that the call is coming from inside the house!

And, barely related, I've decided to stop trying to argue with this administration's abuse of the english language and employment of cheap NLP techniques and embrace such in my own life. For example, from now on everything is a "stark reminder".

*holding up empty juice carton* "This is a stark reminder that we are out of juice".
"Phew! I just got a stark reminder that the litter box needs changing!"

I wonder if there's a band called The Stark Reminders? They could cover Iron Man (if you got that last joke you're very,very nerdy).

sometimes it's hard to find the right words

Lebanon? Israel? Foiled plots? I know nothing of these things.
I just have one thing to say to my loyal readers:
You've got me hangover hills.
And that's not near Madir.

late-nite talk show monologue joke about some old jerk

Hefner denies stroke claim, says he's OK

He does, however, have some damaged tissue.

Damaged tissue!

When we come back, Randy Quaid leaves a sweat stain on my chair!

never hit your grandma with a shovel- it makes a bad impression on her mind

Here's a Flickr pool of unintentionally funny government document titles. Degree of funny varies, but here's a favorite:
Elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation : are we doing enough?

And speaking of exploitation...

our (first) lady piece

Ooh, things got a little risque' at yesterday's press briefing:

Just a couple of little announcements. Actually, you know what, I've already misplaced it -- can somebody pull the First Lady piece for me?

MR. SNOW: It's a piece of paper that regards the schedule of the First Lady -- and I'm ashamed for all of you. (Laughter.)

And also: ew.

her blog could be your life

Serious as a heart attack: Dana of #1 Hit Song is calling it quits, and her goodbye is much more eloquent than she'd ever admit.
Good luck, or should I say take five, D!