Human League

Mucous writes:  Riddle me this, Philbony!  Do all people suck or is it just me for thinking they do?

Philbony says:  Life is complicated.  Human nature even more so. That makes answering your question difficult.

In general, I live by the following rules:  People suck.  Unless they prove they don't.  Even then, they probably do anyway and you just can't tell.  Then again, people might just blow instead.  Like I said, complicated.

Hope this helps - you suckwad.  I mean that in the nicest possible way of course...

Damp English Air

Dear Dr. Philofbaloney, uh, I mean Philbony:

When I was young (under 20) I might get a common cold during winter.  It might last 3-4 days and be over with.  Now any time I get a sniff of a sniffle, it turns into a full 3-4 week ordeal.

Symptoms include clear stages of severe sore/swollen throat, accompanied by uncontrolled headache-causing, almost blackout-causing, no-sleep-at-night-causing coughing; followed by a thick yellow/green, blood-spotted nucleus spitting sludge; cannot breath head full of snot congestion at night, usually followed by more, dry, rib-cracking, skull-splitting coughing as the infestation finally begins to leave.

What the hell has happened?  Can I go back to having a simple cold?

Thanks,

David Snotgroaner III

England

Dear English Dave:

The symptoms you describe actually induced me to vomit.  I'm 99.89% certain Dr. B will have the same reaction.

Answer to your first question first:  You are doomed.  And you're bringing the rest of us with you.  Like someone -- or something -- out of '28 Days Later'.  Do you feel angrier than usual?  For you own sake hope you're merely a carrier.  Abandon, Dave, those you know and love!

Hmm, you could also be afflicted by a mild form of the Andromeda Strain, the deadly extraterrestrial microorganism that fatally clots human blood.  Has your liver gelatinized recently?

In response to your second question, you might try moving to the desert.  Your fragile immune system would welcome the contrast of warm, dry air to your current environs.

I experienced similar bouts of near-death, uh, "thick-spit" illness while living in Germany.  It's a European thing.  Like techno music.  Or wearing socks with sandals.  Or those funky horn-rimmed glasses that scream "I'M EUROPEAN!!!!".

English air is notoriously cool, damp, and stagnant.  No wonder it's rife with the Rage Virus.  Get out before the quarantine, Dave.

Good night, good luck, and may your god go with you.

 - Philbony

Meet the Old Boss

Bruce Springsteen released "Working On a Dream" yesterday.  I heard the title track on the radio.  Not favorably impressed.

Let's back up a few paces.  I am a Springsteen fan from WAAAAY back.  Back in high school -- during the early 80's -- I regularly had to defend the Boss to friends who hated his voice, twang, over-ratedness, etc.  It wasn't his working class roots or blue collar ethic or rock poet stature that drew me to his music.  I just liked the stories he told and the way it sounded.

Following the success of "Born in the USA", Bruce started to break down the pillars that supported him.  He went "solo" by putting the E Street Band on hiatus.  He married Yoko, I mean, Patty Scialfa.  Not that marrying your soulmate is a bad thing.  But c'mon!  He brought her on tour.  The old Bruce - the one we all knew and loved - ceased to exist.  A Bruce divided against itself cannot stand!

All this would be inside-baseball trivia if not for the fact the music started to decline.  "Born in the USA" perhaps was too big to follow.  It spawned at least 4 hit singles; four times more than "The River", a (solid) double album with twice as many songs.  One of my favorite songs from "The River" is "Sherry Darling".

Which brings us to "Working On a Dream".  The title song uses nearly the exact same chord progressions as "Sherry", though in stark contrast to the raw, good time feel of the earlier work.  With the new, we're treated to a well-produced, yet soft country-western sound instead of driving rock 'n roll.  We're blessed with processed background vocals and glockenspiel accents; the former non-existent in the old (read: good), the latter worked in the song "Born to Run" but seem forced here.

And that is the irony of Bruce.  When the glockenspiel sounds forced, it's time to move on.  Back to the Future.

Compare for yourself:

Independent Bruce   (Quoth Clarence, "I love that Bruce.")

Relationship Bruce   ("a Pre-Nup?" asketh Patty)

Sabres Draw Blood for Oil

One.

Two.

Three!

Four!!

Five!!!

SIX!!!

SEVEN!!!!

...We want EIGHT!!!

And it's only the 2nd Intermission!  Whoo hoo!

_________

Update (3rd period, 12-minute mark)

EIGHT!!!!  

...We want NINE!!!!!!!

_________

Update 2 (like a minute later, dude!)

NINE!!!!!!!!!!!!

....We want 10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Got it.  Sabres vanquish Oilers 10-2.

Thunderbolt & Mucous

Mucous wrote:  Canadian TV was our HBO back in the day.  My greatest memory is watching Clint Eastwood tie a belt around a tree and rip his dislocated shoulder back into place.  You would think it would be the occasional tittie we saw but something about the raw pain of that moment stays with me.  Anyway, my question is three part:  A)  name the movie B)  name Clints costar and C)  (this is my real question)  How much would that shit hurt?

Philbony says:  Indeed.  Canadian TV was awesome!  Other than frequent extended commercial breaks, between midnight and 4 AM on any given Saturday / Sunday morning (think about it), the movies were great & otherwise uncut.  First place I saw "The Good the Bad & the Ugly" (which would run until 5 AM).

            

Channel 9 - CFTO out of Toronto and Channel 11 - CHCH from Hamilton were the best.  If you could bear all-French and had a strong antenna, Channel 25 - Toronto's CBLFT showed the most, uh, 'tittie'. But in a very dramatic, European, artistic way that captured the true essence of pure budding love between two convent schoolgirls.  I digress.

Your answers, mon friere:

a)  "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" - gem of a movie, with that 70's anti-hero root-for-the-bad-guys-who-really-are-pretty-good-after-all vibe.

Not a lot of people know it was written by Michael Cimino.  Clint liked the guy's pitch so much he let Cimino direct it as well.  Cimino went on to direct 'The Deer Hunter' and the box-office disaster 'Heaven's Gate'.  Right, Dr B.?

b)  This is a tricky question.  I assume you mean Jeff Bridges.  He played Lightfoot, Clint's young-buck partner in crime.  The team is looking for stolen bank money stashed in the wall of the old one-room schoolhouse from years earlier.

But JEESH!  This film's got George Kennedy as Clint's former partner and current nemesis. George utters the most memorable line of my youth while casing out a new mark while posed as an ice cream truck driver.  A kid comes over for a cone or maybe a push-up.  Kennedy is busy and irritated.  The kid gives him some grief & George replies: "Hey kid.  Fuck a duck!"  Hilarious.

George Lewis plays Kennedy's second banana.  This is before Lewis became Clint's - and Clyde's - second banana in "Every Which Way But Loose".  Clint always seemed to "pick up" actors and crewmen along his career and come back to them repeatedly (to his detriment with Sondra Locke).

Catherine Bach and Gary Busey were even in this flick!

c)  Dude, that would freakin' hurt a LOT.  So much so that Clint probably had to beg Chopra for some vicodin.

-----

Finally, to English Dave:  I haven't forgotten you.  Just busy today. You're answers are next - I promise.

Sabres lead the Oilers 3-0.  Tivo rocks!

Video des Tages - Waterfall

The mighty Stone Roses perform "Waterfall" live on the telly - ca. March 1989.

The show was called "Other Side of Midnight" (or OSM), aired on ITV/Grenada in the UK.  In an extended version during the introduction, the host told of how he initially didn't like the Roses' early/demo stuff.  But someone he respected said "Listen man!  You gotta hear what these guys are playing now."  This was aired before the album was released.

Back in '89 I had a hat like the drummer's.  Mine was blue.

An Irishman in England

Dr. B asks:  "When I was 11 or 12, I remember watching this British TV comedy show.  It was sketch-oriented, 1970's vintage, and shown on PBS or a Canadian station.  At the end, this guy just sat in a chair -- drink in one hand, cigarette in the other;  totally cool, totally reserved -- telling funny stories.  It's driving me crazy.  Who was it?"

Philbony says:  Dude, that was 'Dave Allen at Large'.  Without the internet, your question would have had me up all night long for the next fortnight (always throw in English words when discussing England).

In fact, Dave Allen was surprisingly hard to find info on.  Searching for "1970s British Comics who sat on a chair drinking and smoking telling funny stories" didn't return the best results.  But a process of elimination (ie. it wasn't Eddie Izzard or Frankie Howerd or Alan Davies, but something like that) and deep meditation on Benny Hill routines yielded a lucky guess that Wikipedia and Google confirmed.

Anyway, here's the short bio Dr. B:

     Dave Allen (1936 - 2005) was an Irish comedian popular

     in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada in the 1960's,

     1970's, and again in the 1990's.

     Allen's act was typified by a very relaxed, intimate style.  He

     would sit in a chair, smoking and holding a glass of whiskey.

     Along with his seated routines, his television shows were

     interspersed with sketch comedy.

     An atheist himself, he would often make jokes about religion -

     particularly the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of

     England.  At the end of his act he would often toast the audience

     with the words:

     "Goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you."

And Dr. B -- as promised -- see several clips below courtesy YouTube:

Funky Open

I Don't NEED to Smoke

The Haunted Cottage

An Italian Funeral

Video du Jour - Loud & Proud

Black & white and out of tune.  But young, loud and proud.  Keith Moon really loved his job back in the day.  Entwhistle never did look good, did he?  Can't imagine even trying to dance to this -- well, without drugs I mean.

Why Bruins Win

I emailed a description of this scene a week or so back.  Good hockey is fun to watch.  Wish the Sabres could play with this much passion.

[BTW - the best way to view is to click twice on the picture so it opens YouTube in a new window.  Click "watch in high quality" just under the video frame.]

Video of the Day

Saw this tour back in 1993.  High as a kite.  "Come Talk to Me" opened the show.  When the phone booth emerged, my brain exploded.

Another Brick in the Brave New Wall

So now the steel industry wants a bailout.  It was only a matter of time.  Where did I hear this prediction?  Hmm, let me think...

Well if newspapers, auto suppliers, general retailers, and an expanding raft of others get a piece of this magically self-perpetuating pie, why not steel?

The one thing I can't figure out is why world governments are so intent on thawing frozen credit markets; getting folks to lend and borrow again.  Don't we all have enough debt and distressed collateral?  Shouldn't companies and individuals instead be encouraged to save, pay off loans, and rightsize?

That is, unless money really doesn't have any meaning after all.  In which case, let's just cut to the chase:  have the government guarantee all loans, then default on all of them.  So the dollar craters, so what?  In comparison to what?  The Chinese Yuan?  Big deal.

China's economy is built -- like most Asian economies, an official policy pioneered by Japan -- on mercantilist principles of exporting everything you can, cheap, to the U.S.  Unlike Japan, China relies on strong economic growth to placate its population.

It's a Faustian bargain where Chinese citizens acquiesce to autocratic control in return for a swift and steady improvement in living conditions.  And where the U.S. outsources industries otherwise subject to rigid standards for pollution, occupational safety, consumer protection, and basic product quality in exchange for ever cheaper goods.

The U.S. will likely remain a stable society through all this.  But China?  Where are they going to send their lead-painted GI Joes and melanin-infused dog food?  Their unregulated herbal supplements and vitamins?  Their substandard steel, contaminated chemicals, bleached papers, shoddy clothing and wobbly furniture?

China long ago resorted to propping up the American dollar by buying Treasury bills to offset the titanic surplus of dollars in their trade account.  If the dollar craters, so does the value of China's holdings. They cut our jugular, we cut off their balls.  Somewhere Damocles is smiling.

And with Chinese social strife rising due to accelerating plant closings and no social safety net -- not to mention the existing poisonous tension between urban growth built on the backs of vast numbers of poor, ignored rural farmers and laborers -- China will be too busy quelling civil strife than to punish the West for its flagrancy.  [Yes Dave, "V is for Vendetta" applies more to Beijing than London or Chicago.  Always has.]

They'll be dropping bails of cash out of helicopters before this is over.

Pass the Soma!