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As it turns out, the cottage where Bruce Springsteen wrote Born to Run is up for sale. If we think about it, what good has come out of New Jersey? Let's see.... Bon Jovi... Springsteen... Chris Christie... me... Nah, that house should be bulldozed.
- Tom Brady says Frosted Flakes and Coca-Cola are 'poison.' He's just pissed that he can't figure out how to let the air out of either of them. And there, ladies and gentleman, is my sports reference for 2015.
The nightmare continues: My wife, in a severely altered state, spent so much time on Faceyspaces that her cousin referred to her as a Faceyspaces Whore. It was an ugly sight (site), with her making a sandwich while looking at her phone. Minute after minute elapsed. By the time I cleaned a sink full of dishes, she was still standing there, sandwich half-made, drool coming out of her mouth, catching up on the latest selfies from her nieces, who were posing in front of toxic waste dumps and in bathrooms.
While out visiting over the weekend, there were two Facetime sessions at once, involving my mother, brother, cousin, cousin, Philly and Israel. I am so embarrassed that I can no longer attend family functions (as if I did in the first place). My family is a bunch of iHoles.
Speaking of visiting family, one of the visits involved a relatively recent baby. What does one say when visiting a home with a new baby when one doesn't like babies? Yup, that's the most recent baby I have ever seen. He looks just like his father, if his father looked like the mailman. Here, have this very silly baby outfit. Hey, how about them [insert sports team]? Please show me baby pictures - better yet, videos!
I also discovered that we have a serious anomaly in the family: hot cousins. My family is so devoid of attractive females, I just naturally assume they're from someone else's family. Question: is it still incest if we have no babies and they're third cousins? And how, exactly, do you bring this up? "Hey - wanna pretend to make three-eyed babies?"
- THREATS IN OUR SKIES continue, as a drunk passenger stripped and asked a stewardess for sex. As a result the plane had to make an emergency landing. Be fair - the drunken Irishman (redundant?) took off his undies before waving his penis about. I'm wondering what the problem was - in the pre 9-11 days, this would qualify as in-flight entertainment.
- Another drunk man (no word on whether or not he was Irish) was thrown off an American Air flight for making gun signs with his fingers. I wonder what the finger sign is for box-cutter....
Homosexuality discovered to be caused by dead parents' curse or grief over ex-parrot. Or so it is thought in China, where a man was beaten and tortured to cure him of his homosexuality. Officials blamed his condition on parents or parrot. Unfortunately for China and, by extension, the medical establishment all over the world, he still prefers penis.
- I think I have an interim solution for the immigration issue: tell the Mexicans that the Muslims are coming here to steal their illegal jobs and healthcare.
ThermionicEmissions salutes the unnamed K-9 officer who died in the line of duty in Anderson County, SC., on 10/21/2015, of a gunshot wound.
- Remember the hack of the CIA director's AOL email account? The CIA has condemned Wikileaks for publishing documents from it. You know, rather than condemning the CIA director having an AOL account. To be fair, I predict that there will be no official inquiry into the CIA director, unlike Hillary.
You've got to hand it to the Germans... after Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed a Palestinian leader told the Nazis to kill the Jews, Germany stood up and insisted it was responsible. Next week, Cancun, Dick Cheney, and Poland will claim responsibility.
- Joe Biden has announced that he is not going to run for president in 2016. He said, "I will sit this one out because the election doesn't need one more clown. It would be impossible to distinguish myself from this bunch."
Remember the drought in California? Because everyone did so well at conservation, Los Angeles is raising its water rates.
- SELFIES R US: This week's installment features migrants in Slovenia setting fire to their own tents in protest of having to wait one day for their UK papers. While the fire burned, they took selfies.
SAD NEWS: Years back, my little hamlet discovered that an adult video store would be opening locally. The natives came out with pitchforks and torches and pledged to do anything possible to avoid having this plague in their town. They even tried to get their business license denied for silly, trumped up reasons. Law triumphed and the store opened on schedule. At no point did the crime statistics rise or the hamlet turn into some sort of modern Sodom and Gomorrah. It just sat there, silently, out of view due to bushes and the lack of windows. The only real excitement came when I discovered The Religious picketing the store by holding bibles and saying words at the building.
Either The Big Man<tm> took a while to come through or economics succeeded where prayers didn't and the store is closing. Wife says this is just like Playboy being beaten by the availability of free online material. It's kinda sad, like the end of an era when hobby stores started closing [sigh]. The only bright side is the 50% off sale. Perhaps the store in the next town over will succeed due to their emphasis on items that aren't video (or so I hear).
To borrow a theme from public radio beg-a-thons, this is the type of information that you won't get on other blogs. It is attention to detail that successfully combines economics and porn in the same story. But please don't send money - I'd feel horribly guilty, as my heritage dictates. But please do tell your friends, family, and people you don't like about the blog: I need to break the ten reader mark.
SNAKES ON MTV
Way back in the 80's, another group I enjoyed watching on MTV (when they played actual music) was Whitesnake. Whitesnake actually goes waaaaay back, through quite a lot of incarnations, with the only common element being the singer, David Coverdale. Mr. Coverdale was in Deep Purple for a while, as well as doing vocals on a Jimmy Page album, causing Robert Plant to refer to him as "David Cover-version" (the British like to hyphenate).
Where was I? Oh yeah, MTV. After the band's shift from bluesy rock to a more metallic tone, someone had the brilliant idea of making videos featuring David and his incredibly hot girlfriend at the time, Tawny Kitaen. Tawny's performance generally involved having impossibly large hair and looking impossibly good, while wandering about, storming out, or gyrating orgiastically upon a Jaguar (presumably David's). This was all a young, hormone-filled guy could want in a video. Fun fact: Mrs. Whitesnake eventually dated a baseball player and went to jail for beating the crap out of him. That's hot.
I can't help but consider Whitesnake a guilty pleasure: metallic leanings but still managing to stay tuneful.
Is This Love is a perfect power-metal love song. I wound up playing it and humming it a lot after purchasing the album. Round about this time, David was having a really difficult time with guitarists. I don't know if they kept exploding, imploding, or doing horrible things to their nostrils, but a number of them came and went. This was ironic, as the people in the video were not the people on the album. This continued through two albums and featured John Sykes, Adrian Vandenburg (in the video), Vivian Campbell (Def Leppard), and Steve Vai (Zappa, David Lee Roth, solo). This being the 80's, Vandenburg's hair was almost as big as Tawny's (he's Dutch, you know). The criteria for the video seems to be large hair and long leather coats.
The band was rounded out by Rudy Sarzo, who became notable because he'd lick the neck of his bass and Tommy Aldridge, late of Pat Travers, on drums. Tommy is a world class pounder and is in the band to this day. He occasionally came onstage dressed in only a diaper. Did I mention he's a drummer?
The really huge hit was Here I Go Again, in which the band wanted to convey that they were Very Serious about music. They were so serious that the video featured two Jaguars (and Tawny doing her own stunts). Right before the guitar solo, David hits a note that only dogs and the random hedgehog can hear. Seriously - there are overweight classical music altos that cannot hit that note.
An earlier song that classic rock aficianados might remember is Slow An' Easy. This song kinda illustrates why Robert Plant made that comment. I really like the song regardless. The video personnel seems to include John Sykes and someone who looks like Cozy Powell (Jeff Beck Group) on drums. This song did not do too well on MTV, probably because Mrs. Whitesnake was not in it.
Another Whitesnake staple is Give Me All Your Love. I think part of their musical success recipe was doubling the guitars with keyboards (give it a listen) and a really memorable sing-along chorus.
I'm having a blast at their expense but I do like them and I'm really jealous that I can't be flying across that stage, having the time of my life, and getting more tookie than Elvis. David is the prototypical frontman and still hits just about every note - the man does some serious vocal gymnastics, even though he's ninety. Ok, sixty-something. The latest incarnation of the band features Tommy Aldridge and Reb Beach (Winger). They still sound good.
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