Appleton, 1969. Soundboard recording, via YourArf. My fiancée; just came into the room and described it as "like Spike Jones on acid"; I doubt she is the first or last person to describe Zappa that way.
Month: November 2012
Bamboozled by Your Husband
Harder than Your Husband/Bamboozled by Love, Albuquerque, 1980.
Tron Lives
Tron: Uprising is like an amalgamation of all my favorite cartoons from the 1990's.
Like Batman Beyond, it's the story of a familiar character, a shadow of his former self but still formidable, training a brash young successor.
Like Sonic the Hedgehog, it's the story of a small group of rebels waging an asymmetric war against a ubiquitous technocratic dictatorship.
And like Beast Wars, it uses the fact that its characters aren't actually human as an end run around standards and practices in order to be the most violent children's cartoon on television.
Seriously, it turns out that if you change "kill" to "de-res" and change blood to little blue cubes, you can show a dude with half his face cut off and the outline of an eyelid still blinking over an empty eyesocket. Game of Thrones wasn't that graphic when Tyrion took an axe to the face.
Also: Fred Tatasciore's impression of Jeff Bridges is uncanny.
Anyway, in case you haven't caught the show yet, here's the first episode (which thetvdb classifies as a "special" instead of the first episode, thus offsetting the numbering of every single episode by one -- so thanks for that, thetvdb). It's hosted on the official Disney XD channel, so that means it's not liable to be taken down any time soon, but also means it's probably region-locked -- sorry 'bout that.
Dreamed I Was an Eskimo
Yellow Snow Suite -- that's Yellow Snow and St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast -- in Passaic, NJ, 1978.
Yet another upload by tomtiddler1.
Routine
If there's one thing unemployment does, it's fuck with your routine.
When I was working it was pretty well set -- get up at 6 AM, shower, pour coffee and water, grab a frozen lunch and a breakfast bar, go to work for eight hours, come home, work out.
In theory, my current schedule should be something like get up at 8 AM, pour coffee, look for work, eat breakfast, shower, look for work some more, work out. But as you might expect, the order of these things tends to vary a bit.
Slept until 10 this morning, then looked for work until about noon. Then, as I was cooking breakfast, I got a call from my agency; they told me I didn't get the last job but there's a new one open -- a new one that requires a whole lot of paperwork.
So then I spent maybe 3 hours putting together my college transcript and letters of recommendation and filling out a buggy-ass PDF form that doesn't show text in half the fields after it's entered.
Then I worked out.
And only then -- around 4 PM -- did I finally get to shower.
I don't want to make a habit of that. Thing is, I'm not likely to make a habit of much of anything -- every day is different, and it's impossible to maintain a consistent schedule the way I did when I had a set place to be for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Tomorrow? Who knows.
Let's Make the Water Turn Black
Uploader tomtiddler1 just describes it as an "outtake", 1967. Not sure what that means (outtake from what?), but not too shabby.
More Parallel-Universe Politics
You know, I got to thinking last night.
If John McCain had been elected in '08, Jan Brewer would never have become governor. SB1070 would have been vetoed.
And a McCain Justice Department sure as hell would not have dropped an investigation into Joe Arpaio right before the damn 2012 election.
I'm beginning to see why candidates almost always win their home states: sure, I still think McCain would have been a terrible choice for the country...but I'm beginning to think Arizona really would have been in much better shape if he were President.
Then again, Russell Pearce would probably still be Senate President. So there's that.
Hey Karl Rove?
My brother asked me the other night if I was voting for Goldman or Sachs.
That is largely how I feel about this race and about Obama. (I wound up going Stein, BTW.) But on the whole he's the lesser evil, and this is a victory for a number of reasons -- gay rights, taxation, healthcare, and, perhaps most importantly:
A big Fuck You to Karl Rove, Shel Adelson, Citizens United, SuperPACs, and all the plutocrats' best efforts to buy this election.
Sure, tomorrow we're back to gridlock, drone strikes, warrantless domestic surveillance, mass unemployment, high gas prices, impending sequestration, and a vanishing middle class. But tonight? Maybe I'll sleep a little bit better than those fatcats.
And then go back to looking for work while they count their money. But hey, I'll take what I can get.
More Zappa on Politics
This'll probably be the last one of these for awhile.
Per uploader dannen59, "It's from an Austrian documentary called "Das Beste von Frank Zappa - 20 Jahre Extravaganza 1969-1989"."
In a parallel universe somewhere, the 1992 election featured Bush, Clinton, Perot, Zappa, and Nader. A man can dream...
McCaskill
So that's two terms McCaskill has won now entirely because a Republican said something monumentally fucking stupid.
She really should send fruit baskets to Akin and Limbaugh.