Back with the regular Friday free music and trivia challenge. The free download of the week again comes from my band, The Caucasian Boys. Here's a cover of U2's "One". Enjoy! Or not, whatever.
You can find new music from Michael Penn at his MySpace site. He's one of my favorite songwriters of all time. If you only remember him for 1989 "No Myth", you should really check out some of his other stuff. He is a fantastic storyteller. If I could write lyrics like anyone, it would be him.
And your 80's challenge of the weekend, snippets from five songs from the 80s. Since nobody got more than 3 of the 5 last week, I'm trying to go more mainstream this week. Can you name them? First one to do it gets a free haiku, or other prize of no real value.
The bag of leftover skin that used to be Star Jones has decided to give up her day job on the View. Apparently, she is deathly afraid of Rosie O'Donnell pointing out that Star lost most of her weight through surgery, vomiting, and the use of a belt sander.
She sprang this news on her cohosts Tuesday, surprising everyone and getting tossed off of the show. I'm sure Star will go on to continue her lifelong career of being famous for no apparent reason.
Axl Rose got into trouble in Sweden, biting a security guard in the leg. You know, about fifteen years ago, Axl was getting Swedish supermodels. Now, he's got to attack the Swedish rent-a cops. In 1991, hot chicks would have been lined up around the block for the opportunity to have that done to them. Now, that action is no longer consensual, and it cost Rose 1300 bucks.
Rush Limbaugh was caught trying to get on a plane with a prescription for Viagra that wasn't in his name.
At one point, I felt certain no one would ever make me feel creepier about Viagra than Bob Dole. I stand corrected.
The one-time Boy George got in trouble for refusing to do court-ordered community service, saying if he did outdoor activity, it "would turn into a media circus." I hate to break it to you, Boy, but unless you dress up like you did for the "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me Video" and dance on the roadside with your bag of trash, chances are nobody is going to recognize you. The 80's were a long time ago. At least that's what my Starbucks Barista, Adam Ant, told me.
And Naomi Campbell isn't exactly fun to work for. While she's in court defending herself after throwing a phone at one employee, yet another maid is accusing her of assault. Why do these people keep taking these jobs? I would think if you worked in the service industry in Hollywood, you would at least want to subscribe to Entertainment Weekly and read the "Arrests" page so you'd know what to expect. You don't want to be Naomi Campbell's maid, you don't want to be responsible for getting Hank Williams Jr. to his concert, and you don't want to do anything at all for Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown.
Well, my first weekly 80's trivia challenge must have been pretty good, because nobody got it. Our winner is Martha from Massachusetts, a woman who is the biggest Neil Finn fan I've ever met. She got 3 out of 5 correct.
Here are the five snippets, with the songs they came from.
#1 - Billy Joel "You May Be Right" #2 - Nik Kershaw "Wouldn't It Be Nice" #3 - Motels "Take The L Out Of Lover (And It's Over)" #4 - Jackson Browne "Lawyers In Love" #5 - Crowded House "Don't Dream It's Over"
Thanks to everybody for playing (and for the kind words on my band). I'll put another challenge up this Friday.
Paris Hilton, onetime easy lay of football stars, was recently seen partying in Montreal with Canadiens hockey goalie Jose Theodore. However, Theodore's girlfriend of eight years (and babymomma of his three-moth-old daughter) promptly threw him out of the house, which is completely understandable.
Face it, ladies, if your man came home and you found out he'd been anywhere near Paris Hilton, you'd require more safety tests than a porn star applying for a government job. Her oft-used vagina gives new meaning to the term "Penalty Box".
As an aside, can you imagine how confused Hilton was by hanging out with a French-Canadian guy named "Jose"? I'll bet she had no idea where she was.
New Friday feature here at Reid About It, thanks to MySpace (Slogan: "We're not just for molesters anymore!"). Every Friday I'll pass out a free song from one of my bands, and also some free music from one of my favorite bands. Being a pop culture guy myself, I'm throwing in some 80's music trivia as well.
To begin with, absolutely free of charge to anyone who wants it, an MP3 of my band, The Caucasian Boys, doing a cover of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On". Enjoy! Or not, whatever.
And one of my favorite bands, Head Automatica, has a new album out. Check out their MySpace site with songs from the new album. "Graduation Day" is the first single. Great pop stuff here, you can really hear the Squeeze and the early 80's influences in them.
Finally, your challenge for the day. I'm giving you snippets from five songs from the 80s. Can you name them? First one to do it gets a free haiku, or other prize of no real value.
I don't trust celebrities, especially Hollywood people. Never have. The very nature of the profession of pretending to be someone else for a little while does not inspire my devotion.
That being said, there are still levels of coolness to me. Paul Newman races cars, makes salad dressing, and is cool. Tom Hanks has done goofy comedies, and now picks and chooses some pretty good movies, and is cool. Edward Norton is cool because he's the best actor of my generation, has done great movies ("Death To Smoochy" aside), and most importantly, has seen Salma Hayek naked.
It's not that hard. Be nice, don't complain about being famous, take care of your children, and don't try and make us believe it's going to last forever with your backup dancer baby-daddy. Anytime I hear about someone being involved with Scientology, I automatically lower them two points on my own personal Wonderlich test. And if they jump up and down on Oprah's couch, that's another three-point deduction. Here's some of the items on my sliding scale of celebrity coolness.
Host Saturday Night Live and be funny: +1 pt
Go on Daily Show and be funny: +2 pts
Appear on TV to complain about the media: -2 pts
Give birth in Namibia: -1 pt
Give birth in Narnia: +2 pts
Release an album: -1 pt
Release an album under a pseudonym (i.e. "Bruno"): -3 pts
Be in a Ron Howard movie: +2 pts
Be in a Clint Howard movie: -2 pts
Endorse a product with sales going to charity: +2 pts
Endorse a product on Home Shopping Network: -1 pt
Publicly state your Scientologist beliefs: -2 pt
Jump up and down on Oprah's couch: -3 pts
Pretend to conceive a child to squelch gay rumors: -4 pts
As many of you know, one of my favorite pop culture hobbies is bad movies. And even better than a stand-alone bad movie is a good actor in a bad movie (a "GABaM"). An article on MSN talks about good actors working in bad movies, and my buddy Christine added in some of her own well-chosen "What Were They Thinking" picks. Not everybody can be Tom Hanks, and use their Oscar clout to pick good movies. Some people apparently feel like they have to pull a Jude Law, and take every script that comes their way. Here are a few of my favorite GABaMs.
Kevin Spacey is a good example. After years of working his way up, he makes it big with first "The Usual Suspects," and then "American Beauty," getting Oscars for both. How to follow it up? Why, by playing a mental patient who may or may not be an alien in "K-Pax", of course! Lift a plotline from "Happy Days" and run with it!
Then there's Cuba Gooding, Jr. An Oscar winner for "Jerry Maguire," but sadly enough, not for the fake-gay boat movie ("Boat Trip") or the movie with the talking dogs ("Snow Dogs"). Cuba was so forgotten, he had to take the old reliable career trick of playing a mentally retarded person just to rebuild his acting creds. Perhaps firing Reuben Kincaid and hiring new management would help.
And of course, my favorite GABaM of all time, Michael Caine. He won his first Oscar for "Hannah and Her Sisters," but could not attend to pick up the award, because he was on location filming "Jaws: The Revenge", a touching story about a woman who, being stalked by a shark, refuses to move to a land-locked state such as Kansas or Nebraska, opting instead for the Bahamas. Yeah, one look at that script should have produced more logic holes than the Tom Cruise-Katey Holmes marriage, but Caine signed up anyway.
It all started this week when a report came out saying coffee can "counteract alcohol's poisonous effects on the liver and help prevent cirrhosis."
One cup cut the risk by 20 percent. Four cups a day reduces the risk by 80 percent, and also increases the chance 130% that you will never sleep again, enabling you to stay at the bar and drink more, safely.
Well, buoyed by this goofy method of research, America's fat, drunken, all-male research staff went right back to work. Now, they've unveiled a new study that proves that it's good for your prostate if you drink 17 beers a day and eat 4 large pizzas.
What next? Well, we're in trouble if we drink 17 beers a day, but washing it down with four cups of coffee will keep us from getting cirrhosis. I can't wait for the next big scientific advance for guys. Remember, we're the ones who completely ignored cancer so we could work on Viagra.
Top 5 Other Scientific Advances Compiled By Guy Scientists
Having sex with overweight men reduces the risk of breast cancer by 87%.
Weekly intake of BBQ increases SAT scores.
The semen of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fans is a powerful analgesic.
Slow Pitch Softball proven equivalent to rock-climbing in caloric burn.
Daily absorption of "Seinfeld" reruns shown to enlarge frontal lobe, reduce "shrinkage".
Feel free to add your own. Or better yet, for a real Top5 list, check out TopFive.com. Great stuff there, delivered to your email every morning.
Alec Baldwin is now required to consult with a therapist before he can see his daughter. Baldwin tried to get the judge to force ex-wife Kim Basinger for therapy, and he thought that neither one of them was stable enough to hang a nail on, so everybody gets a talking-to. You name your daughter "Ireland" and you let Daniel or Stephen babysit once or twice, you probably could use some professional help.
The article refers to him as "The Hunt for Red October star." That's not a great endorsement, is it? He's been in probably 20 movies since then, and all we can think of is something from 1990 that he wasn't invited back for the sequels of.
If Tom Hanks gets an award, he's not "the star of Bachelor Party." Meryl Streep isn't always followed by her "She-Devil" credit. Kevin Spacey isn't haunted by "K-PAX".
Apparently Scientology has decided that the next avenue for them, the next area where there are a lot of suckers who will believe anything and have lots of disposable income, is NASCAR.
You know, I've actually been to a NASCAR race or two, and I really didn't care for it. Maybe a Scientology connection would help. I remember thinking at the time, "There sure are a lot of rednecks here. I bet they'd appreciate if I told them that mankind descended from aliens, and the only way to Heaven was through purchasing magic beads from the estate of L. Ron Hubbard. If they could only sit down for a few minutes, and talk with John Travolta, they'd all be so much happier."
You know, if anybody is going to make up a religion to convert the NASCAR crowd, it's not going to be anybody from Hollywood. More likely, it'll be Larry the Cable Guy and his Ten Commandments of Getting-R-Dun.
And speaking of Scientolgy, and nutballs in general, Tom Cruise and Katey Holmes have worked out an agreement where she will pretend to be married to him, bear somebody's child, and smile with a glassy-eyed stare, all for the cost of only three million dollars a year. It's like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life, isn't it? "Gay Guy Pays Teen Star For Vagina Rental" was one of my favorite of his works.
As my Grandad used to say, "nothing says true love like an annuity, compounded annually with an interest rate unattached to the amount of affection in the relationship." He always was a wise old bird.
Televangelist and nutball Pat Robertson now claims that his god gives him the strength of the Hulk. Robertson, who can't be more than 6 feet tall and a couple of bills, says that at the age of 73 and stricken with prostate cancer, he squat lifted a ton.
A ton. Two thousand pounds. Seriously. A 73 year-old guy with bad knees squat thrusted more than the strongest football player ever. This is even funnier than when the head of the Christian Coalition came out in favor of assassinating foreign leaders and nuking our own State Department.
Bear in mind that whatever god he's talking to frequently uses Robertson to amuse the rest of us, such as when he told Robertson to run for President in 1988, and then kept quiet while Robertson was beat down like Jim Bakker was in prison.
Robertson's website has a video of him leg-pressing 1,000 pounds, and giving the credit to an "age-defying protein shake." He's sold his name to a company that makes a product called Pat's Diet Shake.
Hell, why stop there? Load up all of Robertson's vitamins, and package them together as a trail mix called "Crazy Pat's Nuttier Nutballs". Serve it with an energy drink, "The Christian Cola-lation!" How about a candy bar that gives Robertson the inner Christian strength to hate people of other faiths, called "Smote"?
Hey, you may laugh, but if we'd have invested our money in that horrible contemporary Christian rap scene about ten years ago, we'd be able to retire by now.
Have you ever been around speakers, or a PA system when someone's cell phone goes off? It makes a horrible, cyber-grinding sound as the phone creates interference in every single electronic device around. But it's fine on your brain, don't even worry about it! Those synapses of yours are much better insulated than expensive computer speakers. There's very little chance that you get to sixty, and wet your pants and bark like a dog every time a garage door opens in your neighborhood.
I always get hungry for Chick-Fil-A on Sundays, when they're closed. I think Chick-Fil-A should be required to maintain a shift of Seventh Day Adventists and athiests so I can get a chicken sandwich during the NFL games.
I have a good cable TV system. Clint Eastwood is always murdering somebody on one of my networks.
Now that I'm working at a college, I'm going to take some graduate classes. Not sure what, since there is no degree in narcissism. I checked.
I saw a commercial on cable for a movie with David Arquette and giant spiders. If they'd throw in a Rosie O'Donnell nude scene, that's pretty much every nightmare I've ever had right there.
I really should rededicate myself to kicking ass. I've been preoccupied for too long with the whole "taking names" thing.
My favorite hobby now is going to Target and buying clothes to make my six year-old daughter look like a porn star. I remember fondly the days when you could actually go out and purchase clothes for little girls that weren't BeDazzled with words that you called women in moments of anger.
