One Churro, Please.

I am aware that I may get public mockary for this post....BUUUUUT

amandalynferri:

Can you guys please tell me what your favorite ska albums are? It doesn’t matter which wave of ska, I am interested in all. I have recently been listening to a lot lately, but realize that I have very few ska albums past ‘99.

The Supertones: The Adventures of the OC Supertones.

So much junior high nostalgia. I’m not a hardcore christian. I just loved the melodies. This and Reel Big Fish: Turn the Radio Off and Mighty Mighty Bosstones: Let’s Face It

Heavy Pressing: Neon Neon's Stainless Style

This is the first in a series titled, Heavy Pressing: A quick and dirty determination of whether or not certain high-profile new releases live up to their press.

So, let me guess, you’ve worn last month’s Heavy Pressing pick, Vampire Weekend, down to a melted plastic coaster? Well, not me, I’m still addicted to that one, so if you have or haven’t, grab up Neon Neon’s March 18th release of Stainless Style: An album that is reportedly a concept album about the life and times of automobile creator John DeLorean, best known for creating the DMC-12 (a.k.a.: The DeLorean) and being fingered for some heavy cocaine trafficking allegations.

Sure, this album’s 1980s Americana-style is pushed well in to parody, but that is it’s purpose really. It is parody! Be not afraid. When I read about the album and it’s concept, I knew I would love it immediately; Not only have I wanted a DeLorean ever since I watched my video tape of Back To The Future until it was warped un-watchable back in 1987, but I love 80s music and I’m really a sucker for anything “revival”.

The albums blasts off with a type of theme song that could introducing any 1980’s cop show. It flows in to perfect Peter Gabriel-esque vocals for tracks 2, 3 and 4. Track 2, Dream Girls, kind of set up the album with the background vox declairing, “Your chariot awaits / To golden gates” and when track 3, I Told Her on Alderon gets going, you will imagine yourself in listening to this album on cassette. Track 10, Michael Douglas, has this awesome sound of some kind of battle involving Huey Lewis and Thomas Dolby.

Among the 80s mega-pop sounds are a few complimenting hip-hop and dance tracks that sound a little more modern. Modern enough to give Justin Timberlake bite marks. The hip hop tracks are mostly hit and miss. Track 8 for instance, Sweatshop, seems to be based entirely upon female rap stylings that mostly consists of orgasmic moans. This track is annoying, skip-able and overall, kind of embarrassing to listen to. Track 11, Luxury Pool, however serves as almost an abridged version of the whole album’s concept itself, with lyrics like, “Stainless steel from the bumper to the grill / For added appeal, they got ill / with the gull wing doors and reversible transmission / targeting the market of a man with ambition”.

The last track, the album’s namesake, reads like a self-eulogy for Mr. DeLorean but plays out more like a sweet, yet-truncated funeral for the album itself, complete with big choirs and even bigger synths: “Bury me in stainless steel, my body shall never rust.” Overall, Neon Neon now has a pretty awesome dance pop album on their hands and I am hereby declaring this piece WORTHY of it’s press.

My Life: The Mp3 Player Turns 10 Years Old Today

When I was 15, the year was 1998, I was a sophomore in high school and my cool parents got me the second mp3 player ever made: The Diamond Rio. [Pictured below. Photo by: Minuk]

$200 bought you the player and an installed 32 megabyte solid-state Smart Media card which could hold about 12 songs if they were encoded at 128 Kbps… Which they were because 10 years ago, 128k mp3s were not only acceptable, but preferred. I didn’t get broadband until 2000 so higher quality mp3s weren’t worth the extra download time.

The software that accompanied the player and the drivers were mad buggy. The transfer program was QA’d poorly and rushed to market. It usually, at the very least, crashed about three times while trying to remove twelve songs and add twelve in their place demanding lengthy Windows 98 reboots. Gaahh.

My fellow students didn’t know what to make of it. There was only like two other kids at my school who had one (and I went to a technology magnet school). I think a lot of people just assumed it was a very slim cassette player and didn’t think much of it. When I tried to explain to those who did inquire, they would usually follow it up with, “So… it’s, like, a Mini Disc?” Then I would let out an audible groan and feel superior to them thinking, “Philistines! Listening to your clumsy optical media… LIKE DINOSAURS!!”

But looking back, keeping a slim cd player and a case of 15 or 20 CDs would have been much more efficient. I mean this thing barely held the amount of music that one CD could and, with Smart Media cards being pretty costly ten years ago, you weren’t able to keep many cards on you to switch in and out. Furthermore, CDs sound way better than 128k mp3s.

For something that even I thought would just be a fad, it’s crazy to think that now, I hold 60,000 megabytes of music in my pocket rather than 32mb… only about 19,000 times more. So happy 10th birthday, mp3 player. I really didn’t think you’d make it past your 3rd.

Hot Chicks With Douche Bags, A Site You Should Be Visiting

The fifth installment of a segment titled, Sites That You Should Be Visiting.

Hot Chicks With Douche Bags
hotchickswithdouchebags.com | rss

The description near the site’s header, “Pictures of hot chicks with total and complete douche bags. With commentary.” is quite succinct but really manages to explore pretty much the entire idea behind today’s Site That You Should Be Visiting: Crawling the web for pictures of “hot girls”, or what most idiotic men would call “hot girls”, posing with men who display serious symptoms of douche-iness.

You know those awful pictures of young people “partying” (when did that become a verb?) that you seem to stumble upon while on facebook or myspace? They usually have some bar or party-site’s logo in the corner. There seems to always be someone flashing a hand-sign (westside, eastside, the shocker, sideways peace sign). There is usually a red cup or alcoholic drink in the hands of the subjects or near the subjects and, if there’s woman in the picture, there’s certainly always a douche bag present.

Your blog host, Douchebag1, believes that to be a “douche”, you really only need to have one of the many following elements on your persons while posing in a picture with a hot chick: Bad spray tan, pursed-lipped “blue-steel” facial expression, the non-punk mohawk, the fauxhawk (much worse than the the non-punk mohawk), overly flamboyant clothes, a popped collar, shirtlessness, obvious steroid abuse, huge gel’d spikey hair, a fuzzy cowboy hat, a waxed chest, an oiled chest, etc. (I could go on, believe me). Db1 finds the pics, posts ‘em and invites us all to join in on the written smack down.

[Pictured above, a choice selection: mohawk, graphic t-shirt with olde english type font, soul patch (gag) and the mega-smirk. All tell-tale signs of the advanced stages of party boy douchebaggery. God, this looks like half of the male bar-patrons in my town; Scary.]

So get out your favorite aerosol-powered body spray (cologne isn’t supposed to spray!), unbutton your button up and throw on your favorite mandana, you’re about to waste a lot of time laughing at this extensive library of douche.