Well I hope it's a long wedding, because it's going to be a short honeymoon.
Island Packet — Have you ever actually sat down and read the instruction manual to a Black and Decker 12-cup coffee maker? I mean, ever really taken it in, absorbed it deeply? Because it’s phenomenal, and not just because it apparently wields the power to score you one hundred thousand dollars. AMERICAN dollars! Which I know is worth about $3,550 now, but it’s still cool.
I don’t think I’d ever truly considered the possibility of receiving buckets of cash because of an appliance until last week, when I broke the carafe on my old coffee maker by placing it in the dishwasher in a manner that apparently caused several hundred pounds of force to be applied to it mid-rinse cycle, because when I pulled the thing out of the dishwasher there was a giant angry-looking crack in the side of it, staring at me, judging me, mocking me.
No, it is not often that I believe I am being personally made fun of by beverage containers, with the exception of the time that 24-pack of Dr. Pepper made fun of my popped collar, but this particular carafe and I had a very close, intimate relationship, as we were basically the first item the other greeted in the morning for many, many years. Frankly, I think it got tired of having to serve me every day, and killed itself in the dishwasher, probably with a wet fork.
GateHouse — As is generally the case with most critical holidays, the important negotiations regarding my Halloween took place in a Target — specifically, in the throughway between the G.I. Joe toy aisle and, if I am not mistaken, Dish Soap, categories that pretty well illustrate my own journey through life thus far, come to think of it.
Over the previous weeks, the Little Man had whittled his list of costume ideas from approximately 3 million down to two: Spider-Man, which had been his costume for the previous two years (one that allowed him to save a great many neighborhood children from harm, despite bumping into all manner of wagons and mailboxes due to an unfortunate incompatibility between mask size and his face), and Train Engineer, which, as anyone who knows the Little Man will attest, is a costume of crucial importance, because the Little Man has very literally not discussed anything other than trains since April 2006.
Jake "The Snake" Roberts, who could put an end to this whole thing in about two minutes.
Island Packet — Well, everything seems to be under control around here. Swine flu is getting good and vaccinated, at least among you chirpy, vivacious Younger People. Windows 7 is out, giving us Mac people another great many reasons to direct smug, self-important smirks at each other (try it, it’s fun). The Balloon Boy’s weird parents will soon be given over to torture, as they should be. Yep, everything would be pretty much as solid as could be expected, were it not for the small flotilla of behemoth Burmese pythons slithering their way from Florida to the Lowcountry to devour us all.
Now, unless you are aficionado of Celtic music or belts, there’s really no upside to learning that many thousands of snakes are en route to your town, and yet this may be the case, according to a story last week that has inexplicably not caused residents to scamper chaotically into the streets with curlers in their hair, slippers on their feet and mad rictus grins of horror frozen on their faces. Because, and I want to be absolutely clear on this, SNAKES ARE COMING TO KILL US ALL. You guys have your little slap-fights on the blogs about health care or whatever, I’ll be moving all my essential documents, potable water and slow, chewy smaller dogs to the top floor.
Island Packet – I am not a very good-looking woman, which I think is the primary reason I’m having trouble coming up with a decent Halloween costume this year. (It’s also the main reason I kept getting turned down for sororities, not that I’m still bitter about that, stupid Zeta Tau Alpha, I hate you so much.)
Indeed, if you have visited any costume stores lately, you might have noticed that they look less like costume stores and more like places that Britney Spears might shop, if she could stay sober long enough to park the car. Costume stores these days feature an irrationally large percentage of rack space devoted entirely to Sexy versions of average things: Sexy Nurse, Sexy Doctor, Sexy Soccer Player, Naughty Navigator, Sexy Mountie, Support Our Troops Sexy Adult (really), Sexy Wilma Flintstone (I can send you the link to these if you want). One newsroom staffer reported stumbling across a costume for a Sexy Cab Driver, which is, of course, something that has never happened in the history of the human experience. (However, if it does happen, I suggest immediately that we cancel Halloween and institute National I Found A Sexy Cab Driver Day, which we could commemorate by briefly increasing the national speed limit to 200 mph and growing splendid beards.)
Meanwhile, the non-sexy demographic, of which I am a proud lifelong member, is forced to resort tolame, unsexy costumes, such as Chewbacca, or Fred Thompson..
This might be a gender thing. Guy costumes, historically, are comparatively lame and most seem to come straight out of the Cliche Costume Handbook For Guys Who Prefer Ready-Made Costumes Sold In A Plastic Bag: vampire, pirate, Jedi, pimp, president.
If I seem unusually bitter about this, it’s because I’ve outgrown the only good costume I’ve ever had in my life, which was E.T. That was a good costume because it was 1982, I was 7, and my mom sewed it for me. It looked fantastic and timely, except that I kept tripping and falling down in it, and ended up resembling not so much E.T. as an extremely clumsy brownie.
I’m not sure when Halloween got like this. Back in my day, which was 1943, Halloween was a time of wholesome childlike innocence, pristine and unspoiled as the remaining 11 acres along S.C. 170 not being scraped clean for development, a time for stomach-clutching sugar highs and good-natured mischief and, occasionally, shenanigans. Oh, the shenanigans! Why, back in my picturesque little neighborhood in Indiana, we were always getting into Halloween roustabouts of some kind, knocking over Old Farmer Winslow’s scarecrow, toilet-papering the soda fountain down at Basketballington Town Square, egging John Mellencamp’s place. It was all Huck Finn-esque boyhood tomfoolery, with the exception of the one time we killed a guy with a hay baler. Long story.
But for the most part, the worst that could happen would be you went to someone’s house who was handing out healthy treats, or your Bubble Yum came already dried out, or you might be out wandering around and run into a clown, which is not cool, because clowns are terrifying, and I don’t care how old you are, but there’s nothing funny about clowns, which can appear in steadily recurring nightmares even if you’re 32 years old and should totally be over this by now. These days, it’s much harder and requires more thought. Unless, of course, someone out there has already sewn up a costume for a Sexy E.T.
How is it possible that I am in the positive of decrying people who hate the Bee Gees? Effing Cheney.
GateHouse — So it turns out that using music as a means of torture – which is an idea that all music fans have entertained, if not implemented, many thousands of times, mostly depending on how long they’ve been in high school and how many Color Me Badd tapes they currently own – is considerably less funny when you learn that music has actually been used to, what’s the word, torture people.
Like Will Ferrell movies and the third “Ghostbusters” sequel, music torture is funny only when it’s theoretical. Or it’s funny when you’re maybe in the seventh grade and your cousin has this Debbie Gibson cassette that she’s preposterously obsessed with and will not remove from her candy-pink Service Merchandise-model jam box, no matter how many times you beg and plead with her to play something different for a change, something awesome, like the Fat Boys.
But when it’s used as torture torture, not just torture – that reads funny but is actually exactly how the Bush administration described it in memos — the wacky aspect sort of evaporates. Yet that’s what happened in the early part of the century, part of what were previously dubbed with barely contained giddiness Enhanced Interrogation Techniques(TM) at Guantanamo Bay. (The word “enhanced” there always bothered me, because it always connoted to me some sort of progress was being hinted at, like, “Look, we’re using much more conductive wiring now.”)
Island Packet — For a number of extremely appropriate reasons, the music of Social Distortion serves as a particularly effective antidote — or at least an accompaniment — to adolescent-era small-town near-panicky Friday night restlessness, which is why theirs was generally the first cassette Aaron Bradshaw would snap into his tape deck on our regular, mostly pointless semi-excursions into northwest Indiana nights (usually the one with “Ball and Chain,” the band’s definitive kiss-off to a tortured relationship that either of us would have sold the other out for without a second thought).
Mixing Springsteen’s factory-overalls ethic with Southern California punk energy and outerwear, Social Distortion boiled all the wordiness and loftier ideals out of “Born to Run” and redrew the map so the highways all ended basically in the same town they just left. And they did it with a metaphorically impeccable chain of iconic dusty punk images, ideas and inventions: the albums had names like “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell,” they cooked Johnny Cash songs into fiery punk rave-ups and they starred singer Mike Ness, a mess of tattoos and broken-down proclamations whose voice sounds like he’s dragging it behind the truck on a chain. (“I’m a Cadillac tramp at the end of the road/I’m a guitar gangster without a tune” — damn right you are!)
But in the 30th year of their career, Ness and Social Distortion have managed to do one of the most un-punk things you can do these days: They failed to burn out. They’ve never become obsolete, never released a single featuring a rapper and never transmogrified into some sort of Frankenstein monster riding the rails powered by scrap parts and nostalgia T-shirt sales. This year alone has seen Ness turn up at a Springsteen concert in California to do one of his own songs (“Bad Luck,” see below); the band leaves Hilton Head Island to open for Pearl Jam for two nights in Philadelphia alongside fellow enduring punk godfathers Bad Religion.
“It’s still a rush, no matter what, when you’re walking out there,” Ness said by phone last week from New York City. “You spend the whole day sometimes toiling, and you walk out there and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah. This is why I’m here.’ ”
GateHouse — In this world there is sadness, and there is gloom, and there is being a fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes, and of course there is the choking, gasping sensation you wake up to every morning knowing that you’re the kind of bargain-bin consumer-mall legless burrowing lizard who would cajole your easily nauseated 6-year-old into being an unknowing hood ornament for some goop-brained balloon-based plot to hoax yourself into a reality teevee show, which sounds like a rock-stupid goal for most of us, but when your day job involves chasing aliens with flightworthy popcorn containers, is probably more or less like writing “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” come to think of it.
But for true despondency, for a crystal-pure emptiness, for a beautiful cold icicle void that would make Morrissey play water-balloon games at a youth group lock-in, there is really nothing like realizing that you are in a Big Box Home Improvement Store – I can’t say the name, but it rhymes with Schlome Schlepot – at 8:15 p.m. on a Friday evening purchasing baseboard and cutting up pieces of quarter-round on a Customer Saw whose whines of disconsolation echo down the deserted aisles accompanied only by the store’s heartbreaking attempts to inject a little zip into the evening by spinning B-52’s music over the PA. (No, not even “Love Shack” – it was “Deadbeat Club,” because when it comes to Home Depot’s Friday night B-52’s playlist, they are all about the Deep Cuts.)
This is how it goes when you are attempting Home Projects on a weekend, which you are doing because you are extremely stupid, because when you look at a bit of drywall that needs replacing and think, “I can replace that,” what you really mean to say is, “I could replace that, but since I am clearly failing to predict many of the 900,000 things that will go wrong, most notably the breathtaking discovery of a universe of ants behind the drywall and the inevitable revelation that a piece of wood that is 6′ long on a miter saw magically transmogrifies into 14.8′ when you carry it into the other room, I should run screaming at the top of my lungs out of the store instead.”
Billboard — Of all the bands pursuing comebacks this fall, Living Colour is certainly among the most welcome. But the band’s first release since 2003, “The Chair in the Doorway,” is too scattered — and occasionally silly — to make a serious re-impression. The parts are all here: guitarist Vernon Reid is a monster (behold him on “Bless Those,” the album’s funkiest moment) and singer Corey Glover retains a solid volume of howl. But the group is stuck deploying its skills in pursuit of quite a few rock-funk clunkers with lyrics from the blank-alienation handbook — stuff like, “I thought I had control/I felt I lost my soul/I can’t get outta this hole” (from “Out of Mind”), and so on. Happily, “The Chair in the Doorway” is back-loaded and hits a stride in its more measured second half, including the snaky first single “Behind the Sun,” the stomping “Hard Times” and the melodic “Taught Me.” Unfortunately, a good bit of it comes off as colorless.
Billboard — It would be easy — well, easier — to continue to dismiss the Insane Clown Posse as novelty jokers on the band’s eleventh album. But frankly, the only thing separating these particular cornballs in face paint from KISS is that you can buy the group’s new album, “Bang! Pow! Boom!,” outside of Wal-Mart. The new set heralds the return of ICP’s Dark Carnival popcorn mythology and stars a vengeful hellbeast known as Bang! Pow! Boom!, who is probably angry for having his name stolen by the Black Eyed Peas. But weirdly, the album weaves 1950s rock carbonation (the title track) and snappy surf-pop (the charming narrative “The Bone”) into the usual torture-porn (“To Catch A Predator,” basically an extension of the show). But credit ICP with this: The band is hip to its little corner of hell. And things get considerably more horrific on happy-time tracks like “Juggalo Island” and “Miracles,” a hilarious carpe diem about finding ordinary magic “everywhere in this bitch.” Stick with the hatchets, fellas.
GateHouse — Well, everything seems under control down here: What’shisname, the dingus politician, is off “Dancing with the Stars” because of a deviated coccyx or whatever; Jon and Kate have been quietly locked away and are, with any luck, currently being tortured; health care reform is pretty much done, except for the details about excluding the very short. There’s only one thing to do when things have reached such a state of calm, measured stability here on Earth: destroy the moon, immediately.
Luckily, NASA’s with me on this excellent plan, though they have been resistant to some of my awesome other ideas, such as the Scaffold to Jupiter and the Space Crocodile and the Buzz Aldrin Memorial Floating KFC, which was scuttled when I couldn’t secure funding from KFC and it was also revealed that Buzz Aldrin was not dead. Last Friday morning, the organization, which once actually got a bunch of federal dollars to do this kind of space stuff, catapulted a spacecraft named LCROSS into the moon’s South Pole, to kill off all of its remaining penguins.
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