Go Ask Lemmy

Today's show is a tribute to the music and spirit of legendary drummer Joe Smoker, founder of seminal 70's grammar-rock band Big Dictionary, a band that defined the short-lived heyday of gram-rock with their bizarre combination of Strunkian philosophy, Bacchanalian excesses, mega-syllablic words and I-IV-V chord progressions.

Big Dictionary was preparing to tour in support of their first LP, What Would We Do Without Rhetorical Questions? ( released in 1975 under the now-defunct Alexandria label), when Smoker was severely injured in a proofreading misadventure, leaving him with the language skills of an eight-year old.

The band's tour was canceled and Alexandria withdrew support for the LP, which was given extremely limited distribution and quickly vanished from the public notice. The original master tapes for Questions have never been located and are rumored to have been destroyed when employees at the Alexandria warehouse triggered the building's sprinkler system during an ill-fated attempt at insurance fraud.

Following a year of rehab, a diminished Smoker briefly re-united with Dictionary bassist Ashton Verb and toured under the name Smoker's Pole, but Dictionary's cult following of voracious readers were soon disenchanted with Pole's new material, which was largely composed of ham-fisted atonal guitar feedback, incoherent guttural consonants and dull male thuds.

After several poorly-received shows, Smoker disbanded the Pole and retired from music altogether, taking a job writing technical manuals for the U.S. Government.

Decades later, a garbled bootleg cassette of a Smoker's Pole live performance surfaced in Oslo, Norway and quickly spread throughout Scandinavia. Some rock historians credit the influence of this tape for inspiring several generations of Nordic Umlaut Death Metal bands.

"That n-not my fault", stammered a terse Smoker during a recent telephone interview. "Go blame Lemmy."

That sounds like a good idea to me.

Lemmy, this is all your fault.

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The New Breakfast Snob, Sat. May 16th

Motorhead- Killed By Death
Is Lemmy still alive? He must be, because the current version of Motorhead are getting ready to tour Scandinavia. Really.

Mothers of Invention- Happy Together
Happiness is a warm Turtle.

Crack The Sky- Maybe I Can Fool Everybody Tonight
"The last place I want perspiration odor is under my arms"

Jethro Tull- No Lullaby
Flute Metal at it's best.

King Crimson- 21st Century Schizoid Man
This is a great song for testing the endurance of speaker cones.

Alan Parsons Project- The System of Dr. Tarr & Prof. Fether
A literate rocker! This is what Big Dictionary could have sounded like.

Pere Ubu- My Friend Is A Stooge For The Media Priests
Aren't we all?

Jane's Addiction- 1%
He's right.

Cop Shoot Cop- Two At A Time
"I've been using up my lucky days two at a time"

Ross Phazor- You'll Never Change
This band is from a big city in Massachusetts that already has a band named after it. This track is a great "fuck-you" song that fits my mood quite well. This is one of the bands that I want to interview for my radio project, but they don't know it yet. Shhh. Let it be a surprise.

Kelly Richey- Leave The Blues Behind
My buddy Dave called me after this cool rocker and asked me if this was Chrissie Hynde, which is high praise, I think. Like Hynde, Richey is from Ohio, plays guitar and spins a good musical tale. Look for an interview in the near future.

Paw- Seasoned Glove
A bitter song generated a bitter call. My friend was explaining to me how he just quit his band after nine years. He sounded wounded and angry. I grok.

Pretty Things- Bitter End
I dedicated this to my bitter friend. I feel almost cheerful in comparison.

Golden Palominos- Work Was New
"You better shoot me, electrocute me
Put the hood over my head and execute me
Put me outta my misery like a broken horse"

P.J. Harvey- Rid of Me
I'm hurting.

Agony Column- Bayou
This band has a bummer name.

Suicidal Tendencies- A Little Each Day
Another bummer name.

Coffin Break- Stupid Love Song
One more bummer name.
"Why do/you do to me/what makes me write this/stupid love song?"

The Damned- Just Can't Be Happy Today
The last song of the "bummer name" set.

Nikki Barr- Go
I hate war, but I respect our troops and the bands that entertain them. Props to Barr's band for doing that.

Neil Young- Welfare Mothers
"Dee-vor- cee...beautiful."

Area 27- Wild Card
Wonderfully produced wrathful sex machine song.

Anouschka- Good Girl Gone Wild
This jaunty blues goes out to my favorite Scorpio.

Jenn Cass- Forever Damned
This one also goes out to my favorite Scorpio, because once is never enough for her.

Lou Reed- Vicious
Have another!

Stephanie Seskin- Stay Where You Are
This song sounds nice but isn't. Seskin is another artist that I'm planning to interview for the radio.

Iridesense- Obvious
It took me forever to find this band on-line because of the mis-spelled name. Bookmarked now.

Sexsha Brayne- Armageddon A Go Go
Did you know that Revelations is part of the Gay Agenda? I think that's kinda cool.

***************************************************
Next week: Smooth, 'lite' jazz.

Erm.

Question Authority

Do you pay attention to your blog's Technorati 'authority' ranking?

Why?

I can't fault you if you do- for years I had one of their icons on my sidebar and I paid careful attention to my ranking, agonizing when my 'authority' dropped, exulting when it rose- what a waste of time that was.

Technorati 'authority' has nothing to do with gravitas or credibility and everything to do with advertising and revenue- it's a tool for modern-day Thugee cultists to quantify their virtual Ponzi machinations, sometimes pronounced as 'Ess Eee Oh'- an acronym for a phrase that rhymes with Birch Fringin' Croptimization- the idea is to fill your website with catch-words that will direct traffic to your site, traffic that (hopefully) will click on your advertising links , generating .008 cents per click- if enough clicks are made, the web-site gets a payout. Generally speaking, one needs a great many websites to generate any significant revenue- dozens of redundant websites under the control of a single 'Web Master' are not uncommon.


What's wrong with that? Not much. In fact, it's advertising that keeps services such as Blogger free...Blogger isn't a public service, after all, it's an advertising medium, just like MySpace , Facebook et al- content is secondary, traffic is King as far as Bloogle is concerned- and that's OK with me since I would rather see Bloogle ads than pay a monthly blogger fee.

But.

I take umbrage when self-appointed arbiters of 'blogworld' behavior start telling other bloggers what they should and shouldn't do on their own blogs; specifically those who leave angry comments about blogger memes that involve links...
...don't put links to your friends in your posts, don't link to yourself, they kvetch, you are disrupting our Technorati rankings...
This is akin to a telemarketer calling you at home and lecturing you on the proper way to use your telephone.

I stopped taking Internet 'authority' seriously when I discovered that I had a great deal of it- at any given moment I'm in the Bloggle top 10 for a large number of subjects ranging from cryptozoology to fossil-fuel alternatives- in my favorite example, I 'invented' Whalanol on this blog- a satirical discovery that was plagiarised by an Ess Eee Oh outfit and passed off as real 'news'. I tracked down the offender; after some hassle I was given twelve dollars for making stuff up- the Ess Eee Oh outfit stopped paying for content at around the same time. I don't know if my kerfluffle had anything to do with it.
It doesn't matter if whalanol exists or not- all that matters is if you believe in it. If you believe in whalanol ,you will buy it, abstraction or not.

Information is the Schroedinger's Cat of the Internet. The Consumer is Pavlov's Dog.

Caveat Emptor, motherfucker.

-Do possums attack people? (#2 of 13,000; the more I mention it, the more 'authority' I get.)
-Eating hagfish? (#2 of 11,800)
-Doing dishes as erotic foreplay? (#2 of 2800 -and trying harder!)
-Umbrellas on airplanes? (I am #1 of 375,000 for this, a higher ranking than Time Magazine!)
(Update: This post is already #2 on Google for umbrellas on airplanes, I just checked. Still believe in Internet 'authority'?)

Believe it or not, the Internet is full of bullshit. I have created my fair share of outrageous claptrap and have been rewarded with 'authority' for some of my most egregious transgressions against reality- seriously, there is no such thing as whalanol.
Yet, I mean.

My satirical come-on for hagfish farms may have been a bit more prescient than I like- according to my burgeoning sitemeter referrals, there is an uptick of global interest in the economics of hagfish husbandry- an accurate, if overlooked, barometer of the current world financial state.
Do you remember oil shale? Hagfish farming is like oil shale extraction, it comes up when economic times are tough-and oil shale is back in the news- this time the technology involved seems to have some serious weaponization potential- using microwaves to melt the earth sounds dangerous...is it true? We will find out someday, I'm afraid.


P.S. Bonus 'authority' points if you can name the man on the book cover (above) that isn't Gandhi.

Answered!

Do possums attack people?

According to Google , there are 87,400 answers to this question and answers #1 and #2 are both provided by this blog.
My site meter tells me that, on average, three people per day visit this site asking : do possums attack people?

The answer is : No.

Unless they have rabies.
Or are cornered. Or hungry.
Or mutants.

Why are they asking this question anyway? It's the sort of question most people would only ask when confronted with a snarling possum; by which time it's usually too late to cry for help, much less go on-line and Google "do possums attack people?"

I mean, have you ever seen a possum snarl? Of course not. No one living has.

According to one expert , human encounters with possums lead to over 2 million fatal attacks per year. These attacks are almost invariably fatal only to the possum.

In one of his lesser-known experiments, Nik Tesla discovered that possums possess an acute sensitivity to minute changes in the Earth's magnetic field, such as those produced by solar flares on our own sun.

Shortly before he vanished while demonstrating a prototype 'time weapon' to the U.S. military, Tesla established a link between increased solar activity and unusual possum behavior. He observed that during periods of flare-ups, the possums outside his squalid New York boarding house would engage in otherwise unheard of behavior, such as devouring automobile tires and holding strange marsupial orgies involving ceremonial headgear and human sacrifice. He speculated that possums could be exposed to a combination of solar radiation and negative energy and transformed into 'electro' warrior-animals designed to act as advance troops in the obsolete art of trench warfare.



This idea was rejected by officials from the U.S.A., England and the Soviet Union, who were more interested in developing tanks, planes and artillery. Tesla's research into weaponized possums was lost when he vanished nearly two years later.

So, no. Possums don't attack people. But they very well could have.