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Posts tagged as “Awesome”

The Insane Clown Posse interviewed by The New York Times.

April 30, 2010 |

About Music, Music and Thoughts

It’s the interview you’ve been waiting your entire life to read. A few days ago, David Itzkoff interviewed the infamous Insane Clown Posse about all this attention they’ve been receiving lately. He delves right into all the fun that’s being made of them by basically the entire internet.

And you know what? They’re surprisingly good natured about the whole thing. When asked about Saturday Night Live’s lampooning of the Gathering of the Juggalos, they responded:

Shaggy 2 Dope, Insane Clown Posse: How can you be mad at “Saturday Night Live”? That’s what they do. They make parodies. They’re funny. That’s flattering, that you’re a large enough player in the game that “Saturday Night Live” even recognizes you.

Violent J: It felt incredible – like, wow, man, we’re on the radar.

You kind of expect them to be all pissed and up in arms about being made fun of so directly. But again, when asked about SNL’s Thrilla Killa Klownz parody of “Miracles”, they come right back and play the high hand.

Shaggy 2 Dope: I remember back in the day when Weird Al Yankovic did “Amish Paradise,” off Coolio’s “Gangsta Paradise.” Somehow Coolio got mad. If Weird Al wanted to do one of our songs, I’d be like, “Hell yeah.” To me, it’s the same thing with “Saturday Night Live.”

Violent J: When they did it again, I called my mom about that. It’s awesome.

And then again, when asked about my favorite question of theirs, “Fucking magnets, how do they work?!” they come back with an entirely reasonable, if not exactly enlightened, response.

Violent J: I know the stuff isn’t really miracles. I think we might have misused the word miracle. I think that might mean something that has happened with no explanation. These things we mentioned in the song, they can all be explained. But what we’re doing is appreciating them. Even the infamous line, “Magnets, how do they work?” I mean, yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible. You can push something across the table without touching it. And as a kid, I found that fascinating. I still find that fascinating. [laughs]

Shaggy 2 Dope: Come on, a rock that pulls metal towards it or pushes it away? Yeah, it has to do with the magnetic polar caps and [stuff]. But for real? Come on, man. You’re just holding a U-shaped thing that pushes metal away or attracts metal or something. The North and South Pole makes a rock magnetic, and if you touch a piece of metal with it, that becomes magnetic? That’s crazy.

Amazing. Fucking amazing. Giraffes?

Of course, then there’s this gem.

Violent J: Songs like “Miracles,” they’re not new to ICP. We don’t restrict ourselves to just making murder songs. When we’re talking to the Juggalos, it’s not always about chop-chop, kill-‘em-up, you know? We’ve always done songs that we attempt to be meaningful and deep over our career.

You owe it to yourself to read the whole article here: Fools’ Gold: An Oral History of the Insane Clown Posse Parodies

> Continue reading...The Insane Clown Posse interviewed by The New York Times.

The Extraordinary Book Binding of Philip Smith

April 29, 2010 |

About Writing, Thoughts and Writing

Speaking of books, I recently stumbled upon (without the help of StumbleUpon) the work of a British artist named Philip Smith who works exclusively in the bindings of books. As you know, a book is really just a stack of loosely connected papers until someone or some machine comes along and binds them all together. Usually a books binding is utilitarian at best, and shoddy at worst. Hard bound books are nice, if expensive, and then you have your mass market paperbacks which fall apart after 5 years because of cheap paper and cheaper glue.

Then you have artists like Mr. Smith here who not only return the craft of bookbinding to the highly-skilled artisanal place it held for centuries but add a surprising new dimension to it.

Here are a few favorites of mine from his site. See if you can guess which book each of these is. I promise there’s nothing esoteric here; these books can be found anywhere. Except maybe on Mars. For now.

Cool, right? I would LOVE to have one of these in my house on display. Talk about amazing art that would fit right in with my weirdo collection of things I like.

Head on over to the site to see if your guesses were correct. They’re all in the galleries.

> Continue reading...The Extraordinary Book Binding of Philip Smith

The Mysterious Phenomenon of “Yeah, Du’!” and its Ramifications in the Real World.

April 27, 2010 |

Thoughts

Recently, I’ve been spending quite a lot of social time with Mike Fiduk and Charles Vestal, two worldly, handsome men. And, as conspiring gentlemen do, we egg each other on in all sorts of situations. It’s a good time. Somewhere along the way we started saying “Yeah, Du’!” as a way to express our approval of a situation. Like this:

Mike – Man, I think I’m going to go home and nap.
Charles – I think you’re going to come with us and drink.
Mike – Ok!
Joe – Yeah, Du’!

Charles – Let’s eat Polish food!
Mike – Yeah, Du’!

Joe – I drank too much and spent the night hitting on a lesbian.
Mike – Awesome! Yeah, Du’!
Charles – Yeah, Du’!

And so on and so on. It has become a celebratory cry used for basically anything. It’s a verbal high five. And, it has a very specific pronunciation. Listen.

[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/yeah-du.mp3|artists=Joe|titles=Yeah, Du’!]

Now listen again. One more time. Got it? Good.

Yesterday morning I was having my customary Monday morning chat with Mike where we bitch about the coming week and catch up on things we might have missed. I worked all weekend, so I only had a couple of fun stories, but he spent the weekend in New Jersey for some reason that I’m not sure I want to know. Either way he told me about how he went dancing and spent some time dancing with an old lady who was ripping it up on the dance floor. Then he send me this GEM.

Lovely, right? Right.

I immediately thought, “Yeah, Du’!” and then inspiration hit me and I told Mike I had to do something that I would be back later. This is what I had to do.

Beautiful, right? Mike loved it. I love it too. I was thinking of saving it for my 500th post which is rapidly approaching, but then even more inspiration hit me. I’ve got the layered Photoshop document, why not apply it to more photos of my friends and see what sort of hilarious magic I could create? Right? Right. So that’s what I did.

Click the damn link and enjoy The Black Laser’s more specific sister site! I only intend to use photos of friends and friends of friends, so if you have any really great party photos, send them to me at joe at yeahdu dot com and I will make them famous! Well, internet semi-famous. YEAH!

> Continue reading...The Mysterious Phenomenon of “Yeah, Du’!” and its Ramifications in the Real World.

“Ode To Spot”, the finest piece of poetry I have ever experienced.

April 26, 2010 |

About Writing, Thoughts and Writing

Here it is. For you to enjoy.

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Bonus points if you can name the source without Google. Mikey, I’m looking at you.

> Continue reading...“Ode To Spot”, the finest piece of poetry I have ever experienced.

God, I love you all so much.

April 22, 2010 |

Thoughts

To all my lovely readers, I just wanted to write to tell you that I love you. Thank you for reading The Black Laser. It means a lot to me that you spend your valuable time reading and enjoying the sometimes/sometimes-not nonsense I post here. I’m not the most clever man, nor do I have the most insightful thoughts, but I hope that I can provide a smidgeon of entertainment for you or a break from work or maybe even a new sweet band you’ve never heard. Even better, my readership has soared over the past few months.

Let’s look, shall we?!

This is a map of my monthly hits over the lifetime of The Black Laser. On the left there you can see where I started the site in November of 2008 (it’s been so long!) and where we are now on April 22, 2010. You can see the little numbers on the Y axis, but how about a little reference for you?

These are The Black Laser’s two slowest months on record at a paltry 509 hits in February, 2009 and 520 hits in September, 2009. Pathetic. You’ll notice that these dips on the graph don’t really dip so much for the period between November, 2008 and January, 2010.

January, 2010 was about on par with my previous highest traffic month of April, 2009. Then, as you can see, something changed.

My hits nearly double. Wild! Where’s all this new traffic from? Have I made a bunch of new friends? Do people like it more when I post random crap instead of stories? Heartbreaking? Who are all you people visiting The Black Laser? I want to know! Why aren’t you commenting? I love you!

Here’s where we are now with 9 days left in April at pretty much the same level of traffic experienced in both February AND March. Unless the world explodes, we’ll probably break 2000 hits for the month which is pretty fucking amazing for a blog by me that doesn’t advertise anywhere nor have any specific purpose or goal. I just post things I like and I guess you guys like the things I like and that makes me super happy. My ego swells.

Of course, for a site like Gawker or whatever—for whom, incidentally, my friend Megan writes—this level of traffic is like a dust mote in the eye of the Kraken. But I’m just….*counts*…. one man. One man with one snarky fucked up attitude and the desire to share with friends, enemies, and strangers on this wild, wooly thing we call the internets. So, readers, thank you. I appreciate you all. It also helps me know that if I ever do decide to put ads on The Black Laser (I won’t) that I could make some ok extra cash off it. Sweet!

In appreciation, here’s a killer photo of a bald eagle eating a crow that I found on Fucking Delicious. Enjoy!

> Continue reading...God, I love you all so much.

Meet my friend Alden.

April 19, 2010 |

Thoughts

That’s him at about 1:30 with the beard. I’ve known Alden for, oh, about a million years. He’s a gentle giant of a man who can grow a kick ass beard. But, uh, Alden, I think you need to wear a beard hair net in the kitchen. Just sayin’.

Here’s what the Huntington, West Virginia Herald Dispatch has to say about what he’s doing with celeb-super chef Jamie Oliver.

During the past three weeks, chef Alden Cadwell of Sustainable Food Systems has been to Village of Barboursville, Nichols and Geneva Kent elementary schools. He will be at Spring Hill on Jan. 4 and 9, then conduct two countywide cook trainings on Jan. 14 and 15 — two days that students are off. Eventually, the 70 percent of the student population that accounts for more than 8,500 lunches each day all will have a healthier meal choice in the lunch line.

Cadwell’s main focus is shifting from the use of processed foods to whole and fresh ingredients. The schools where training has taken place already will have new menus in January. The elementary schools will dine on items such as macaroni and cheese, quesadillas, barbecue chicken, cheesy cornbread and beefy nachos with cheese and lettuce. Also being served in January are rotisserie chicken, baked pizza noodles and homemade tomato soup with a toasted cheese sandwich. Other elementary schools are serving cheeseburgers, chicken patties and nuggets and steak with gravy.

Good job, old boy! You are a champion. Keep kids healthy. I’ll be needing them to fill my army of the stars in my conquest of the universe.

Here’s the rest of the article.

> Continue reading...Meet my friend Alden.

Serendipity and the remembering of things.

April 13, 2010 |

About Music, Music and Thoughts

Last night I was at The Belmont Lounge for my friend Dumaine’s birthday party. We arrived just a little after 8 right in the middle of some sort of unsigned R&B/hip hop artist showcase which sounded like an open mic, but wasn’t. Dumaine and his fye-ance Erika had reserved a table in anticipation of the friends who would eventually show up. A smart move, I think. We spoke to the hostess and got her to seat us at the table. Apparently, the woman running the showcase had placed some record company folks, whatever the HELL that means, at the table with the delicately lettered “Reserved” sign on it. When the hostess did her job and moved the record company folks to seat us, this woman raised a hell of a stink.

Instead of doing the right thing and saying, “Hey, you know, I know you have this table reserved and everything, but I would love for these folks to be able to see the rest of the show from here since I’d love for my performers to make some sort of deal with them. Would you mind if they stayed here?”

You know what we would have said? We’d have said, “Of course! No problem. There’s only three of us right now and we’d be happy to share the table for the remainder of the show.”

But, no. She had to pull the passive aggressive card and give us stink eye all night and bitch to the staff and call us out on the microphone. We were polite and didn’t let her bother us, because, really, what’s worse for people who are passive aggressive than to reply to them with straight positivity and politeness?

We sat and listened to the second half of the show. After 2 or 3 7 dollar Brooklyn Lager bottles (I know, right, what the fuck), I’m getting lost in my own head a little as all this not-very-good R&B blares through the bar. Conversation was impossible with the volume, so all I had was my own brain. Luckily, at this point, we’re friends.

I recognized that every song we heard was about how much the singer loved someone and how they either wanted to spend their lives with the other person or how they were the most beautiful in the world or how they wanted to take them home and sleep with them or whatever. You get it, I think. It was all hyperbole and adolescent descriptions of love and relationships. Kind of silly, really. Not realistic at all.

I got to thinking that it would be really awesome to do a song in the same style where the guy basically told the woman that she was all right, maybe a little annoying, but that he liked fucking her. That he didn’t want it to get too serious since he really couldn’t see them in a relationship. That he thought she was ok, but not really that great and, in the end, he didn’t care too much about her and that she’d probably be better off with someone who respected her. All of it sung in that “I can’t just hold a single note” style of modern R&B singers that I dislike so much. It’s like constant vocal gymnastics that seems to me more often cover up the fact that the singer’s not really hitting the note they’re trying to hit. Instead of just singing, they’re masking that they can’t sing. But whatever.

On the way in to work this morning I was thinking about the song still when I realized that I already KNEW a song like that. Funny, right? It took me 12 hours to process that the song I thought would be so funny pretty much exists. Here it is.

[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Our-Love-Would-Be-Much-Better-If-I-Gave-A-Damn-About-You.mp3|artists=Dag|titles=Our Love Would Be Much Better (If I Gave a Damn About You)]

Now, the Dag track isn’t quite exactly perfect, but it’s pretty close. Do any of you brilliant people out there have any songs like this? Let’s start a collection!

> Continue reading...Serendipity and the remembering of things.