Unconscionably White

The other day, a fellow came into the shop looking for us to do a repair on an arm for a record player.

"This is a vintage arm for a vintage player and..." blah.

As this precious "vintage" arm was in the back having contacts soldered, I noticed that this man was unconscionably and invariably white. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm white. However, I carry myself with a degree of sullenness and attitude that prevents me from being "white". What do I mean by this?

Picture Dave Chappelle's parody of the average white man. Throw that character into some khaki shorts and a polo shirt, give him some bad wire rim glasses, and add an irritating sniffle, and you have the unbearable whiteness of being that was this guy.

To top everything, he's trying to look into our storage area and keeps asking "Do you have any vintage _ for sale?" where "_" was any piece of audio equipment that happened to pass through his head. After about the 5th time telling him that no, we do not have anything for sale and no, we are a repair shop not a vintage item store, I finally took the tone of annoyed asshole and plainly told him "No. Nothing. Period."

To this he kept trying to peer in back to see if perhaps I was lying to him and was stashing all the "vintage" audio equipment on the planet in some kind of National Treasure-esque masonic storage chamber, when finally the tech came out and handed him his contact arm.

As he left the shop, he kept looking back, not at me, but at the storage area, shuffling his sockless dock shoes as he walked away to a life filled with listening to Michael Bolton on his vintage audio equipment while scarfing down numerous egg salad sandwiches with massive amounts of mayonnaise on white, white bread.

Seriously, I could easily see this guy doing that.

The Musical Travesty Tour: Part 1: Godsmack

Hello, dear readers.

I have decided to start ranting about one of my favorite subjects. Music. When the spirit catches me, I will be bringing up bands, musicians, and songs that I feel are a detriment...not only to music, but to society in general. I call it The Musical Travesty Tour. I'm kicking this event off with rock station favorite, Godsmack.

Popular belief is that this band got their start as an Alice in Chains cover band. This is not the case. However, their musical stylings have been compared to AIC frequently, and the name of the band itself comes from an Alice in Chains song. If you can listen to the music long enough during the many Marines and Army commercials they are featured in, you can almost pick up the influence.

This is where any favorable comparisons to Alice in Chains will stop. Unlike the Layne Staley headed AIC, Godsmack is one of the most lyrically retarded bands to grace the airwaves. The music is alright, if you're into the more contrived end of the hard rock spectrum, but the words come off as hastily written attempts to end each line with an "ay" rhyme scheme.

Examples:

"I'm not the one who's so far away..." - Voodoo (rhyme continues throughout the entire song)

"Twistin’ everything around that you say (Yeah)! Smack me in my mouth 200 times every other day." - Keep Away

"I feel for you: better fu**in go away. I will behave, you better go away. I'm doing the best I ever did. I'm doing the best that I can. I'm doing the best I ever did. Now go away. " - Whatever.

"And I can’t take it any f***ing way! Can you feel it? I gotta live with it everyday. And I can’t take the pressure, I’m going insane. Now go away! " - Bad Religion

"Hey, why don't I just go and eat some hay. I can lay by the bay, make things out of clay, I just may, what'd ya say? " - Happy Gilmore

Ok, the last one wasn't a Godsmack song, but it easily could have been.

Despite the band being a musical Wal-Mart version of Alice in Chains and as lyrically capable as an Alzheimer's patient with Down Syndrome, this band maintains a sort of popularity. Personally, I blame monster truck shows, NASCAR, and crystal meth. They get steady airplay on most rock stations, and are featured on a number of motion picture soundtracks. I hope one day the world will catch up and realize what a crap band this is, and leave them in the same place I first saw them: Broken down on the side of the road, waiting for a tow-truck to haul them away.

Disclaimer: The above content is solely the opinion of the author. Anyone who thinks otherwise is entitled to their opinion, however horribly wrong it may be.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled...

David Copperfield. For those who don't have their fingers on the pulse of current events, here's a brief rundown of the situation:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - FBI agents have raided a Las Vegas warehouse owned by magician David Copperfield -- for reasons they did not disclose -- and media reports said that they seized nearly $2 million and computer equipment.

...

Media reports said FBI agents seized nearly $2 million in cash from the building, along with a computer hard drive and a memory chip from a digital camera system during Wednesday's late-night operation.

...

"We understand there is an investigation, are in touch with the investigators, and are respecting the confidentiality of the investigation," Copperfield's attorney David Chesnoff said in a statement cited by Las Vegas broadcasters.

I know this is going to sound cynical, but any time you see siezures of computer hard drives and memory chips from digital cameras, there's usually only one conclusion.

For his sake, I hope he knows how to make pictures of child pornography dissappear from his computer.

This from the guy who managed to pull Claudia Schiffer in her hey day.

This is the kind of thing I would have expected from Doug Henning. He always seemed a bit creepy. But David Copperfield? The guy did a cameo on Scrubs, for chrissakes.

Finally, a candidate I can get behind.

Mr. Colbert has announced his bid for the presidency of the United States, running in South Carolina and South Carolina alone on both the Democratic and Republican tickets. Announcing that the ticket would possibly be Colbert-Huckabee, Colbert-Putin, or Colbert-Colbert and attempting to fill out the paperwork to be part of the debates, you know this is a gigantic joke. Sadly, it's a joke that the country can get behind. If he actually decided to pursue this to it's apex, he could actually pull it off. He managed to get a bridge, a sea turtle, a state of the art 747, and a hockey mascot named after him. What would stop him from rallying his "nation" from pulling off the ultimate joke? As Colbert himself put it : "...it's clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative."

This is going to be one hell of a ride.

Dante's Lament

"I'm not even supposed to be here today!" - Dante Hicks

This, technically, isn't true for me. I'm supposed to be here today. Part of me enjoys the fact that I'm working again and getting paid steadily. The downside is that I'm worried that my class work will suffer. When I had an abundance of free time, the projects I turned in for class were masterpieces of technological artistry. This is not my opinion, but that given by my instructors and fellow class mates. Now I feel my class work will suffer as I don't have much free time at all to complete the assignments. Gotta love Catch-22s.

On the work front:

Things are going alright, despite the butting heads of the 2 owners and their conflicting ideas on the direction the company should go. This usually leaves me as the involuntary red-headed stepchild of disagreements, as one of them will tell me to handle a situation one way, while the other wants it handled another way, leaving me to bear the brunt. It's pretty shitty, but I'm used to handling that on a much grander scale, so it's not too big a deal.

On the school front:

I have no idea how things are going. I'm failry sure I'm passing all of my classes with at least a B, but I never can tell. My Tuesday night teacher is usually in a rush to just get us out of there, which is fine as I want to be home in time for House. Thursday and Saturday classes are the same instructor, who is cool as the other side of the pillow, he just drags class out beyond the time they're supposed to end, mainly because he has a lot of information we'll need and not enough time to get it to us. As there's nothing usually pressing on these days, it's no big deal.

Anything else:

Britney Spears. Holy fuck. If there's a white trash Hall of Fame, she'd be the main attraction. The local morning DJs have said that the only mother who's worse than Brit is the prostitute in New York that was busted for snorting cocain off her 2 month old's stomach while breast feeding. Those kids are screwed if K-Fed is the positive rolemodel in their lives.

Danny Bonaducci (sp) is now my hero.

And I'm bored off my ass.

The CSI Suite and the Trip Home.

While in North Charleston, SC, stay at the lovely Masters Inn Motel. Amy and I had booked what was apparently the CSI Suite. This wasn't just because the strong probablity that if you shined a black light on the comforter it could be picked up by Voyager as far away as Neptune, but because the box spring of the bed had what appeared to be a massive, massive blood stain on one side, and blood spatter on the other. This was a bit disconcerting. The staff, however, was very friendly.

I had to spend a good deal of time in the room as 1) Amy couldn't get off work for most of the weekend and 2) I had no form of transportation other than my 2 now blistered feet. My first morning spent there treated me to a car horn in the parking lot that went off for no apparent reason, and no visitor to the motel stepped outside to claim it as theirs. I walked to a local check cashing place (to cash a check of course) tripped a bit over some broken sidewalk to be ridiculed by a passenger in a passing vehicle. On my way back to the hotel, this same vehicle was at either Subway, Burger King, or the encased ATM between the 2, where I was met with "Haha...you're the guy that tripped." "Yes," I replied. "But I'm walking fine now, and you're still a douche."His friend got a kick out of this.

Sunday met with the hotel being visited by the local constables 3 times, once with a paramedic. The first time was about a drunk white guy beating on peoples doors demanding to use their phones. The second time included a paramedic. Not sure what this was about as they had shown up during a trip to Subway. I can only assume that 'something bad happened.' The third time was about a domestic dispute between an "ashy crack head" and a "no good chicken head ho." I caught this part as I was leaving to go to Subway again, and caught the tail end with the cops as I got back.

The trip home was fairly uneventful. There was a drunk guy and his girlfriend (Yes, Ashley...the same one as on the trip up.) There was the disgruntled asian employee. The overly chipper bus driver taking me from Orlando to Tampa. (Though, admittedly, he was better than the first bus driver I had.) Then the hour wait for someone to come pick me up at Tampa Union Station. Now I am home, road weary but glad the weekend was, at the very least, eventful.

For a little added fun, enjoy the pool rules for the Masters Inn: