SPONGEBOB QUEERBAIT

James Dobson officially needs a hobby. Failing that, he needs to get it over with and come out of the damn closet already. By now you've all seen his protest that SpongeBob SquarePants - a cartoon about a sponge who lives in a pineapple - is pushing a gay agenda. Under the code name of "tolerance" (sub-irony: "christians" opposed to tolerance. Discuss.)

James, you are a flaming fucking homo. There is no other possible explanation for you and your existence. It is utterly impossible for someone who is not gay to be so completely obsessed with men having anal sex. You think and talk about it 24 hours a day. You accuse the media of pushing a gay agenda yet you are the one who is trying to get on TV every 30 seconds to bring up the subject of homosexuality.

Did it ever occur to you that attempting to indoctrinate people with the idea that everything is secretly pushing homosexuality is FAR MORE LIKELY to fuck kids up that just LETTING THEM WATCH THE FUCKING CARTOON and SHUTTING YOUR GREEDY FUCKING MOUTH?

No? I didn't think so.

Dobson: Father, Preacher, Cum Dumpster

What a cocksucker this man is. "GAYS ARE BRAINWASHING YOUR KIDS! SEND MORE CHECKS!" Fuck you, James. Fuck you and your stash of panties and the reams of gay porn in your attic. Fuck the little drama that goes on in your head every night as the angel on your shoulder tells you to say another rosary but EVERY FIBER OF YOUR BEING desperately wants to be in an abandoned warehouse somewhere with a death-grip on your ankles while a whole lacrosse team plays target practice with your large intestine until your asshole looks like a pound of ground beef.

Everyone can see what you are, and I know it's mighty dark in that closet. Come on out. It's OK. Better to come out now than end up in the 9th ring of hell - Hypocritical Cocksucker Hell. Not only is it extremely hot, but Hoover and Thurmond both snore.

So then there were "NO RULES"

**Warning, this is going to be another post potentially irrelevant to people outside of Champaign or Urbana Illinois**

-Sub-warning, I don't care.-

That said, down here in central Illinois we have a radio station 107.1 with the call WPGU. Having lived in this town for nearly 8 years now, I can say with near certainty that it spent the majority of its life sucking. I am not talking about your typical run of the mill sucking, I am referring to that rare and special, Dennis Miller trying to get the conservative viewers sucking.

We are talking about a radio station that would play whatever flaming pile of shit billboard had recently placed onto its top 40 list. Showing little regard for theme or continuity, the radio station resembled the musical equivilent of a portal to hell being cracked open on the Earth's surface spewing whatever minion of satan happened to be first in line.

So anyway...

You can imagine my surprise when sometime late last summer I tuned in to the station to find that they were playing music that I actually enjoyed. I thought that I had entered into some odd parallel universe. They were playing Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Dead Kennedys, and all sorts of other fantastic artists never before heard on 107.1 in its "The Planet" incarnation. I felt like the "Friends" on the episode with the free porn. I honestly believed that if I turned off the radio this magical dream would end and I would once again have to listen to Creed, or Hoobastank or whoever the hell it was that made 107.1 sound like a constipated old man after having eaten a Grande Meal from Taco Bell. However, I was thrilled to find out that this was not in fact a wonderful dream (the good music, not the constipated man) 107.1 had changed their format. The station actually had DJ's choosing music and talking about it instead of mindless computer generated shit.

Considering this, I was amazed to see that in the school newspaper today an opinion columnist was complaining about the new format and calling for a reversion to the "good old days" (yes, this time I am referring to the constipated man).

You can read the column here

This blew my mind. It is one of those revelations that force you to rethink the entire framework of how you view the world. While I have always known of the existence of bands like Incubus, I have never truly been able to figure out how someone can listen to them. Much like attempting to reconcile how light can simultaneously be a wave and a particle, I had to make some assumptions.

Postulate 1: Whereas Incubus et al. suck the ass of various domesticated and wild animals. and Such musical groups have fans. Said fans must have such ambivalence toward their music that it is impossible for them to have any deeply felt opinions.

Now, much as Einstein's photoelectric theory paved the way in quantum mechanics for a substance to be both a wave and a particle, Chris Kozak (ckozak@uiuc.edu) has come along, revolutionized the field, and forced us to think about the possibility of people simultaneously enjoying shitty music, and having an opinion about it.

It would seem useless for me to, at this point, attempt to refute Mr. Kozak's theories music and the like. If you agree with him, I would wonder how you ended up on this site in the first place. If you don't, the reasons why his article is exceptionally ridiculous should be abundantly apparent.

However, it seems like I would be shirking my responsibility if I did not at least point out some highlights.

The winners of 1992 who are apparently all that college students should be listening to.

"How many students regularly listen to or have even heard of bands like Ambulance Ltd., Rilo Kiley and Of Montreal? I certainly have not."

A lot. It is mysterious that he knows their names yet has not heard of them. Perhaps this fellow should realize that it is actually A GOOD THING that the student radio station is introducing people to new music that they have not heard before.

"Another common theme in Indie music is band names beginning with the word "The." Gracing the WPGU play list are songs from bands named The Delays, The Faint, The Good Life, The Music, The Postal Service, The Stills - and don't get confused now - The Thrills. Do you know these juggernauts? Me neither."

Well played sir, making fun of the typical them of "The" and a plural noun. Really, no one had noticed that before. I hear that effects how their music sounds. (oh yes, Incubus- the evil spirit that has sex with women as they sleep- is a fantastic band name) Let me take this moment to point out that it was here in the article that it became abundantly obvious that Mr. Kozak had simply looked at the WPGU current music list from their website and made whatever joke immediately came to mind.

What really got me, was the fact that this fellow seemed offended that the local radio station played local music he hadn't heard of.

This honestly made me sick. We have a fantastic music scene in this town. How are these local musicians to be expected to get any sort of following if the college station in their town won't play their music because a few assholes don't think it is a good party mix to drink Busch Light to?

For Christ's fucking sake, here is a list of local bands who have release fantastic albums recently (mostly in the last year)

The Blackouts (now The Living Blue) The Beauty Shop Emotional Rec Club Rob Mccolley The Headlights Terminus Victor Poster Children

Yes, I know I probably forgot some, but I made the list quickly. Still a decent list. We have great live venues like The Highdive, and for fucks sake, lets be thrilled that we now have a radio station that actually promotes the bands playing there.

As a final note: Jesus Christ, Chris Kozak could you have any worse taste? Oh wait yes, you could, in your previous column you were lamenting the loss of R&R's and the Shark Bowl. Please just graduate quickly and leave this town as fast as you possibly can.

Letters in the Daily Illini today in response:
Erik Kraft- "Where's Hootie"
Jim Finnerty, program director at WPGU -"Letter: to WPGU listeners"

.........

WARNING: FANCY BOOK LEARNIN' MAY CAUSE EMPHESYMA

By now everyone has read - and expressed the requisite amount of educated, cosmopolitan scorn toward - the Georgia "Evolution stickers" that a court has recently ruled cannot be included in textbooks.

This replaces the controversial but popular "We ain't had no lynchin's 'cept for them nigger boys that had it comin'" sticker

Don't get me wrong, posting any such notice that material in a textbook is inaccurate is prima facie ridiculous. If something in the book is wrong, don't give it to your children. If you have no evidence other than an opinion to "disprove" parts of the book, shut the fuck up. "God created everything" is a cop-out, not a theory. When I was 5 and I asked my dad how electricity is made, he told me it was magic. It was amusing, but more importantly it was a cover-up for "I don't know." When learning about the true origins of electricity later in life, I hardly expected the "It's magic" theory to get equal time.

But aside from the surface aspects of the issue, the amazing part about this story is that there is so much hoopla over the contents of science textbooks in Georgia. Georgia has some of the worst schools in the nation, was the last state to have unprosecuted lynchings, and has one of America's highest illiteracy rates. And don't forget its top-10 teen pregnancy and spousal abuse rates. Honestly, what the fuck are these idiots' children even absorbing from their textbooks?

Those who bother to graduate high school before getting a job at Jiffy Lube or Farm & Fleet are probably oblivious of 99% of the material presented to them in their academic lives. You could issue textbooks that state man originated on Saturn and flew here on winged intergalactic unicorns and it wouldn't matter. The entire "southern culture" is so anti-education, so willfully ignorant, and so stuck in the past (the Scopes trial was eighty fucking years ago and they're still debating evolution) that it literally makes absolutely no difference what these people are "taught." So long as the society in which these people live reinforces the idea that beliefs supersede facts or empirical evidence, they're going to remain the backward, mongoloid retards of America and there's nothing any textbook can do to halt (or propogate) that.

I mean, for Christ's sake, people. We're talking about a place called Cobb County in rural Georgia. If that doesn't make banjos fire up in your mind over images of the General Lee racing down dirt roads with Sheriff Coltrane in hot pursuit, you're giving them too much credit. Fuck'em all. Let them teach phrenology for all I care. They couldn't possibly come out any dumber.

My Favorite 2004 Moments: DVR, Boston Legal

2004 Sucked. That's ok because (a) 2005 is already much better and (b) there were some good things that happened last year, of which I'll put to (electronic) paper over the next week so I can remember those and forget the rest.

First off, the DVR. Although I've been around cable television for as long as I remember, after college I never signed up for it (I would make my parents tape the HBO shows I watched). Part of me would like to think this is a result of some sort of "there is nothing ever good on why aren't you reading more Proust?" cultural snobbery, but I really know it was more out of behavior avoidance to prevent myself from ending up awake at 3am, 50 pounds heavier, watching Carson Daly count down the top 70 moments of 1993.

In walks the DVR, a TIVO-like device offered through our comcast service. It tapes up to 80 hours, up to two channels at time. Whatever interface issues people complained about in the past have more or less disappeared, and anybody who can navigate a computer can handle this. It makes it so that you can enjoy TV on your own time/on your own terms. Everyone who has one of these things raves about it, so I'll limit myself to a few things about specific shows that have changed since I started DVRing them.

First off, you can become a master at watching shows in fast-forward. I can watch 8 hours of Gilmore Girl in 30 minutes, stopping only to stare and blush at the scenes with Lane Kim in them. Thanks to the internet, I can use episode guides to find which episodes of Beavis and Butthead have the videos that cracked me up 10 years ago and see if they still do (they still do - "these guys are called smashing pumpkins, but they aren't smashing anything" - brilliant!).

One of the biggest impact is reserved for those shows where the parts that are good are completely seperated, like oil and water, from that parts that are awful. Which brings me to Boston Legal. I never watched The Practice until it's last year, where James Spader was brought on to try and breath new life into the failing show. Legend has it that David E. Kelley offered Spader a job playing a lawyer immediately after seeing "Secretary" for the first time; this makes sense as the vaguely sinister, sexually deviant, somewhat likeable but morally challenged character Alan Shore seems straight out of that movie. Later brought, of all people, William Shatner as the powerful, though possibly senile, named law partner Denny Crane. The show got cancelled anyway.

Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, ABC decided to take these two new characters and build a show around them. With no history of Awards and Strong Moral Dramatic Situations that The Practice evidently had going for it, Spader and Shatner are free to chew the scenery as much as they'd like (while poor Odo tries to keep them in check). Shatner (who just got a Golden Globe for this role) tells a jury that he hates old people, and that the jury can go ahead and find the drug company civilly-liable as they'll just increase the price of medication to cover the judgement. James Spader waxes reflectively on his love affair with a midget ("best two years of my life") and his "frequent flyer miles" he gets with the local escort agency with a reptilian charm you can't quite stop watching.

The rest of the show is a photocopy of a photocopy of any of those crappy David E. Kelley lawyer shows for which the fast-forward button was designed. There's some idealistic young lawyer with big boobs, there's some hard-headed "my-way-or-the-highway" lawyer that has a short skirt, and so on. Evidently not everyone watches Boston Legal via DVR, as ABC is now gutting the show a bit to keep the women making "Desperate Housewives" (the lead-in show) a huge-hit around for a second hour of TV. The last weeks have seen the firing of one of the super-model women lawyers, Candice Bergen entering as a regular playing another named partner to rival Mr. Shatner, and one episode in which a women playing Spader's secretary (whose likeness to Maggie Gyllenhaal is notable) complaining that Spader is sexually harassing her (the in-joke is quite funny). It may be enough to keep the show interesting in the long run.

The ability to fast-forward through crap is one of the big selling points of the DVR, but I find it equally useful in re-visiting scenes that need a second (or third) viewing. So far, every episode of Boston Legal has ended with Spader and Shatner at night, seated in bubble chairs on the roof, cigars and brandy in hand, contemplating the events of the show against the void of the Boston skyline. The snark and defenses of the characters are dropped for that moment, and it's usually quite touching. It's certainly interesting enough for a mutiple viewing via the rewind-button.

(that went long - sorry, later in the week is best documentary, and best liberal breakdown, among others. stay tuned)

AN EXCITING ETYMOLOGICAL EXTRAVAGANZA

Have you ever wondered what the ubiquitous phrase "O.K." means or what its origins are? Ginandtacos.com was recently observing a thread on the Electrical Audio message boards in which dozens of people were posting dozens of increasingly silly postulations, some even taking the form of assertions, about its meaning and origin. As the duty of setting the matter straight fell upon me, ginandtacos.com would like to share this information widely as a public service.

Where did "O.K." originate? Like most things that are great about America, it came from.....the 8th President, Martin Van Buren.

Van Buren's other popular phrase - "Well, fuck my petticoats!" - never caught on.

Yes, one of our irrelevant Presidents contributed the only phrase (aside from possibly "Coca-Cola", depressingly enough) that exists untranslated in every spoken language on Earth. You see, ol' Marty was known to his closest associates by his nickname, "Old Kinderhook" - a reference to his birthplace and home town. An obstinately lazy man, Van Buren approved White House documents not by signing his name but by scrawling "O.K."

The phrase, which struck the White House staffers as inherently memorable and sonorous, was adopted as an all-encompassing positive. It spread through Congress quickly and, by the end of Van Buren's first year in office (1836) it had filtered out to most of the country. Unlike most slang expressions that disperse and evaporate quicker than flatulence in a wind tunnel, the term became a permanent fixture in the American lexicon and eventually, aided greatly by the first World War, the entire world.

Van Buren was also, as seen above, the first President (chronologically) to be photographed. Some historians claim that John Quincy Adams (the sixth President, while Van Buren was the 8th) was photographed shortly before his death, but no evidence remains to support the claim.

Ginandtacos.com - your one stop shop for Van Bureniana.