you can see them out for dinner / with their piggy wives / clutching forks and knives / to eat the bacon

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
Part IV of IV (first three are here, here and here)

All Beatles, all the time. Y’all, I don’t think I can overstate the importance of the Beatles in my life. They were always kind of around at my house, but I didn’t really discover them for myself until I was eleven or so. I’m pretty sure the documentary The Compleat Beatles hipped me to how cute they all were, and then I started bogarting the vinyl from my dad’s stereo cabinet, and then the clipping started (I would buy or steal ANYTHING that had photos of them on it, then slice it to ribbons for collages), and the buying my own reissued vinyl, the calling myself [Firstname] Starr in school, the um … fanfic? I wrote?, the posters that blanketed my bedroom walls, the repeated obsessive viewings of A Hard Day’s Night, the videos I made with my sister in which we jumped around to play all four Fabs, the junior high English accent fakery, the Sgt. Pepper-y jacket I wore throughout high school, the repeated obsessive viewings of the Anthology series (maybe or maybe not with herbal jazz refreshment), the naming of my daughter after the one whose birthday she shares, and of course the time Jessica Blehm and I tried to call Paul McCartney from a pay phone on the Reunion grounds in the middle of the night in July 1987.

So, in no particular order:

Revolver (1966)
This is when the drugs really began to take hold – and it shows. I lost track of how many times I listened to this lying on the floor of my bedroom sophomore year of high school, stereo speakers blasting directly into my ears, lights out and tripping on nothing stronger than Coca-Cola and teen angst. From that cigarette cough on “Taxman” to the last feedback seagull on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” minus Paul’s silly wankings (“For No One” is the worst offender; “Rigby” is only good if you strip out the vocals like on Anthology), this is a goddamn near perfect album.

White Album (1968)
A little something for everyone, and it’s disintegration in action -- all the boys going different directions no matter how much it hurts. You know how large-scale destruction, like a building imploding or a war at night, can be fucking beautiful? It’s like that. Gleemonex Fun Fact: Desmond, Sadie and Julia were all on the baby-name short list because of this album.

Sgt. Pepper (1967)
They invented this shit out of whole cloth – nobody thought of such a king-hell fuckaround before the Beatles did it. I’ve never done acid, but Pepper made me want to. Such weird/downer material wrapped in such a trippy, lovely package. Gleemonex Fun Fact: My little drunken band of friends has tried to play Sgt. Pepper all the way through at the end of the night several times; Mr. Gleemonex, the Drumming Lebowski and I once got as far as “Mr. Kite” before the rest of the band got bored and wandered off.

Abbey Road (1969)
The whole album is like something really awesome happening the day after you’ve had a massive hangover. Your headache is gone, but you’re still a little logy, and you vaguely remember some raging good times and maybe a fight or something – whatever, it’s all good and you have this beautiful thing now. “Mean Mr. Mustard” is like my theme song in life.

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The best of the pre-drug best (and I do love me some early Beatles; it’s just that the first few are so full of “standard” covers that they don’t really make the list as full original albums).This one’s where George Martin started to trust the boys, a little bit. I don’t use the word “exuberance” a lot, but Internets? This is it – you can’t listen to this record without dancing around like a maniac, your heart just about lifting out of your goddamn chest.

So that's it, kids -- and it was harder than I thought to pick just five from the Fabs. Sometime soon I'll do a brief overall Honorable Mention post, along with "Goddamn, I can't believe I forgot ____!" Hope you enjoyed this stroll through the back catalog of Gleemonex Records.

Not unless you think round is funny.

Two things:

1) Peanuts do not belong in food. Peanut butter is fine in places one would expect (a PB&J sandwich), but it doesn't belong in non-dessert recipes, and the unbuttered nut* should be eaten from a bowl (shelled or unshelled is immaterial) on a bar-top only; it does most fucking certainly not have a place mixed in with regular consumables. Sorry Thailand and George Washington Carver, I'm right, you're wrong.

2) Arlen Specter may be evil or he may be partly awesome or he may be just really good at figuring out which way the wind blows, but most assuredly we can assume he has a major set of mangos. Welcome to the party, Arlie.


--------------------------------------
*Heh. I said unbuttered nut.

He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.

Everybody run for your lives! Pig death flu is cutting vast swaths of pestilent destruction through the very fabric of humanity!

This is stupider than stupid, y’all. The news* was all “OH GOD IT’S COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN, REPENT YE, REPENT YE” and when they showed the number of confirmed cases – no more than 15 in any country – I hollered “What a bunch of bullshit! That’s IT???” almost loud enough to wake the baby.**

I could really get behind this pig death flu if it looked like it were actually going to do the job – The Stand is one of my top ten favorite books of all time, and I’ve always been a fan of apocalyptic shit in general – but people, we gotta get a fucking GRIP here. You’re making President Obama*** take time out from trying to fix REAL SHIT to TELL US to get a fucking grip – what’s he supposed to do, flip out like Gerald Ford, get vaccinated on Teevee, set up tent cities for quarantines, tour hospitals in full Pete-Coyote-in-E.T. spacesuit hazmat gear, weep and holler at Mexico, send his children to the English countryside for the duration?

This is gettin to be rigoddamndiculous.

-----------------------------------------------

*Which was on in the brief moment between when we finished a TiVoe’d Amazing Race ep and Mr. Gleemonex resumed Breaking Bad, which is really good but which is so fucking bleak and grim that I had to give it up so now he watches it in bits like while I brush my teeth.
**And this is a baby who sleeps through five hours of very loud amateur Journey covers on the other side of a fiberboard wall on a fairly regular basis.
***Oh my full-bellied SHATNER does that still feel so wonderful to say! President Obama. Feel the rush!

What the hell is ANSKY?

Know what's fun? Doing a load of laundry and finding your bathtub half-filled with dirty, soapy water, and also roots. And also your one (1) toilet is suddenly out of commission, due to aforementioned drainage/roots issue.

Know what's fucking ridiculous? The fact that the new Yankee Stadium vends not only appletinis, but also an item called "American Fries." It gets a little harder to defend you fuckers with every "American fry" you sell, and every Fatass American La-Z-Boy Padded Heated X-Tra-Wide field-level seat bought by corporate assholes as perks several years ago that now goes unfilled, silencing the crowd and making you look like a forgotten midmarket team that hasn't had an over-.500 season in about 37 goddamn years.

Would you like to smell the bottlecap?

William H. Cheese-Eating SHATNER, San Francisco – you guys are such a bunch of PUSSIES. Bitching all day for four days because it’s over 80 degrees. No wonder everybody else hates you.

But meanwhile, I’d like everyone on the Internets to immediately please pay attention to this, because it is the most awesomest thing in the history of ever. It begins, “So there’s this guy up on stage with on-fire barrels and the Santa Carla crowd is just loving it,” and it gets even – impossibly – more better from there. I mean it. The phrase "oiled saxophonist" is included. See? I don't lie. I curse too fucking much, but I don't lie.

I’ve got my pencil … gimme somethin to write on!

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
This is where the going gets tough. The first ten (here and here) were easy; most of them just popped into my head and made the list. The last five will be easy (there’s a common theme -- wait for it!). But this group is where I had to make some tough decisions. Honorable Mentions will appear at the end of part four.

1984 (Van Halen, 1984)
I was ten. My brother was 13. He had 1984, his friends all had 1984, they played it as loud as their sad early-80s boom boxes would allow ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT. I mean it. All day. All night. They drew the flying VH logo all over everything, they air-guitared, they endangered lives and property with jumps and kicks, they commandeered the goddamn TV when I was watching That’s Incredible! so they could mainline the videos ten hundred times a day. To me, this was what ROCK MUSIC sounded like.

Nevermind (Nirvana, 1991)
Bought this the first week it was out. Could not stop listening to it. I don’t often catch music trends on the way up, but this one I got, with a quickness. And you can’t even say it’s about Grohl. Him, I didn’t know about until the "Big Me" video, at which point I was like, "ohhhhh … Grohl. Yes, I see what you did there." And then it turned out he was a D superfan like myself, and shit, kids -- that’s all you had to say.

The Muppet Movie (the Jim Henson Company, 1979)
I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times I played this LP. I had this little plastic record player, and I’m pretty sure only the one record (until Thriller and Footloose came along). Looking at the track listing, there’s not a song on there that I don’t know the words to (and better & more reflexively than I know the alphabet), and also, it occurs to me that this stuff – while unquestionably awesome – is for the most part really fucking depressing. Maybe not “Can You Picture That,” but certainly “Never Before, Never Again,” “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday”, and “Rainbow Connection.” Yikes. No wonder I was such a moody, angsty kid, with this stuff packed deep into the fatty cells of the brain tissue.

Trompe le Monde (Pixies, 1991)
Look, I told you I have a problem with always being late to the party. I could lie and tell you I totally knew all about Surfer Rosa, but I didn’t, until I got this one (after reading a review in Rolling Stone). Fuck you. But it’s got “UMass” and “Motorway to Roswell” and the JMC cover “Head On,” so who cares which came first? Besides, like I said, converts are the worst zealots.

Vauxhall and I (Morrissey, 1994)
The summer of 1994, Mr. Gleemonex (then BF Gleemonex) and I shared a cockroach-infested Harlem apartment with six other people from school, doing unpaid internships and getting our “groceries” (I use the term loosely) at a severely downmarket store called C-Town. But our friend T. had his parents’ place way out on Long Island all to himself that summer, and we went out on the LIRR pretty much every weekend. T would pick us up from the station, we’d get real groceries & some booze, we’d pick the best of his parents’ amazing garden, we’d cook and drink and go to the beach and listen to the new Moz. It was one of the best summers of my life.

Also: Stamos.

Men My Daughter Might, Unfortunately, Date Someday But Is Not Allowed to Marry or Otherwise Commit To
An incomplete list.

The one who refers to himself as “boyish” or “a big kid.” You know what, fella? I’ll take your word for it.

The Republican. (The one good one I know is already married -- hi there, Jenn & Larry!)

The one who let his parents pay his rent/housing past college. I know you can’t afford a place as nice as your folks’ house. You’re young, that’s the fucking point. Figure out how to do it yourself.

The one who mistreats waitpersons, flight attendants, baristas &c. Obvious, but it bears repeating. Entitlement goes hand in hand with generalized assholery, and this person is most likely a miserable angry fuckhead even if he’s crazy-good-looking. Or probably especially then.

The one who Never drinks and/or has Never smoked (anything). He’s either a liar, some sort of religious, or a self-righteous prick – better not to tangle with it in any case.

The one who Always drinks and/or brags about what/how much he smokes/ingests/applies topically. These are called drunks, junkies and future inmates. You’ll never be more important to them than the substance is.

The one who doesn’t disapprove of his friend who cheats on his girlfriend.

The incredibly rich one. That’s not his money -- he didn’t earn it -- but he’s never known what life is like without that soft fluffy coating all over everything. This is not a man who can handle reality.

The willfully poor one. Dates consisting of store-brand pasta cooked over a two-burner stove, a couple of bong hits, and a borrowed DVD might be fun when you’re 19, but trust me, this shiftless a-hole’s scavenged futon feels a lot less comfy when you’re 30.

The one who calls himself a poet. Not somebody who has written or writes poetry – I mean the one who calls himself a Poet. There might be bigger douchebags out there, but I doubt it. And besides, he probably has a vandyke beard or other Sensitive Facial Hair. Which: no.

HELLO! {ello … ello …} ANYBODY IN HERE? {ere … ere …}

That’s the sound of Jim Bob Duggar’s man parts taking a tour of wife Michelle’s downtown bizness district.

Which reminds me of the news this a.m.: Citizenship of Duggartopia reportedly is to increase by one; the new offshoot tribe begun by eldest son J-something, 21, will bear its first fruit this harvesting season. The movie Idiocracy gets funnier in that put-your-head-through-a-plate-glass-window type of a way pretty much every single day, don’t it?

BTW, I thought it was beyond hilare that sfgate’s headline for this was “Duggars breeding again.” Well played, sirs. Well played.

It's really laughable

Things that are never not funny

--pants

--the last name McCracken

--this video

--the six original mini-eps of Tenacious D

--little figurines of Jesus making a jackass of Himself in little kids' sports games

--referring to someone’s mouth as their cake-hole, yam-hole, or pie-hole

--Bill O’Reilly falling for a fake Howard Stern-related phone call on air and going, “WELL, Mister Meehoffer!” (Guess what the caller’s alleged first name was.)

--Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV’s itsy bitsy running shorts

--the handsome face of Derek Jeter

--Top Gun

--the thought of that time during an Algebra II test when, during a period of total silence as we all worked on word problems, CF raised his hand and said “Coach C.? What’s the fastest anyone’s ever ridden a bicycle?”

We asked for Mojo Nixon, they said HE DON'T WORK HERE

Internets, I bought a very pricy Nicole Miller dress the other day (for about $130 from Bluefly.com, heh! only suckers pay full designer price) to wear out to a schmancy dinner with Mr. Gleemonex for our 10th wedding anniversary. The dress was great, but there was this snotty little tag in it with a line drawing and the words:

OUR ZIPPERS ARE INVISIBLE
NOT INDESTRUCTIBLE
PLEASE BE GENTLE
AND TRY ON YOUR
CORRECT SIZE

Well well well, Missus Miller. Do you find there's often a problem with fatties busting the seams of your precious wee creations, causing you to weep hot acid tears onto your concave stinking bosom? Croissant-fondling Shatner, bitch.

Read this out loud: I am wee Todd did.

PSA from the crusty black heart of Gleemonex Industries:

• A regimen is a systematic plan (as of diet, therapy, or medication) or a regular course of action.
• A regime is a mode of rule or management, a form of government (e.g. a socialist regime), a government in power, or a period of rule.

They look a lot alike, but they are not, in fact, interchangeable. And the next time SHAPE magazine uses them as such, I will go to there and burn them down.

And the cards are / no good that you're holding / unless they're / from another world

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
Part II of IV [I is here]

Bootleg Series, vol.1-3 (Bob Dylan, 1991)
I went to the mall with my grandmother, who – just because that’s how she rolled – bought me an entire stereo system, complete with 6-CD changer. She also insisted I get something new to play in it, so, being a big ol’ Bob Dylan fan, I went with Rolling Stone’s recommendation and bought this 3-disc set. I played it all spring and summer long, and it’s still one of my faves; best tracks are “Blind Willie McTell” and “Series of Dreams.”

Pretty Hate Machine (Nine Inch Nails, 1989)
Ohhh, kids. How the little white middle-class suburban high-schooler longed to pretend she was not a member of the Methodist Youth Fellowship, but rather a hard, gritty cynical tough grrl with a nihilist streak a mile wide, and ohhh, how she played this disc again and again and again and wrote bits of the lyrics all over everything for like THREE YEARS …

Footloose soundtrack (Various artists, 1984)
My second non-Muppet-related musical obsession. I had the LP of this, then the cassette tape, and y’all. Y’ALL. Permanently burned into all the nooks and crannies of my brain tissue, this one, at a time when the crenellations were still forming.

OK Computer (Radiohead, 1997)
This soundtracked my time in exile – the 20 months Mr. Gleemonex and I spent on the moonscape of west central Texass while I was in grad skool. We had a lot of fun there, but it was just such a strange part of our lives. We roasted our own spices to make garam masala, we drank a lot of Lone Star out by the pool, we watched Dazed and Confused sixteen hundred more times, we drove to Dallas to see Empire Strikes Back, we made plans to move to San Francisco (sight unseen, on my part), we listened to OK Computer.

One Chord to Another (Sloan, 1996)
When we weren’t in the mood for people bitching about some guy who buzzes like a fridge, like a de-tuned radio, we listened to the Beatle-y bopping-around sounds of Sloan, Nova Scotia’s finest. It never fails to lift the mood.