Dear Facebook Users, Why is it that you insist on updating the masses on every trivial detail of your life? Things like "Getting ready to eat dinner" or "Shopping for tampons" are not even remotely interesting to me or anyone else and frankly, if this is all you can come up with to report, then neither are you. Or at least this is a consideration that goes through my mind every time I read about you taking a piss or doing other such unremarkable mundane activities. I mean, cmon, I know you aren't really that lame otherwise I wouldn't be friends with you in the first place. But when you post these nonsense details, please realize that it does make me question the idea that maybe you are this boring in real life too. And if you are one of those people I haven't spoken to for ten years, I really have nothing other than your Facebook posts to go by.
Have you noticed your number of Facebook friends declining?
A while ago, I posted a note about my suspicions that the Dr. Pepper fountain soda sold at the Harvard Coop may not in fact be the real thing. It has taken me several months, I realize, to take action on this matter, as I promised, but I finally got around to inquiring about this yesterday.
If you live around, work near, or frequent Beacon Street in Somerville, close to the Cambridge border, you most likely are familiar with Dial-a-Pizza.
What do you think of this place, just curious?
Because I have very mixed emotions about them, which fluctuate between love and hate with every interaction or encounter with the pizza joint and its employees. This has resulted in not only my own internal conflict on several late late night occasions when starving and they were the only place open and available to give my business to but (my frustration mostly) has also yielded a few Smileys.
The Biscuit coffee shop on the corner of Washington and Beacon Streets in Somerville is one of my favorite cafes to spend time in. They have killer baked goods- always fresh-, excellent coffee drinks and really groovy music. In fact, I would almost venture to say they are a 10- nah, nobody is really a 10- okay, they are almost a 9.5 when 1 is intolerable and 10 perfection, but if I could magically take over the place and make some improvements, these are a few things I would change:
Every year, around the same time, I receive 2 gigantic, thousand-pages long, phone books on my front door step. Yellow Pages and White Pages. Then, within a week, I receive 2 more. Since I have been a regular adapter of technology since 1996 or so, I prefer to use the internet or my Smartphone to research phone numbers of businesses and individuals. I don't think I need to get into the numerous reasons why the internet is superior to a physical phone book for these things.
So usually when receiving these books of wasted paper I just put them inside somewhere and forget about them until they build up over the years and take up too much space. I have absolutely no use for them, but I always feel bad just throwing them out before they've at least had the chance to collect a layer of dust.
But the last time around when the books were delivered, I noticed that I was nowhere near the only person who found them unnecessary and unwanted. Probably about half of the houses in my neighborhood had their delivered books sitting untouched where they had originally been dropped off on the porch for up to 2 months after they were received.
Rite Aid Store #10161, located on Somerville Avenue in Somerville, MA is a great retail pharmacy and drug store, with a great selection of merchandise, and consistently great discounts.
This is great.
What is not, is that I noticed over a 2 years span of time that the refrigerated drink coolers, plain and simply, reeked. Like rotting milk.
Here's an *official Fire Safety Poster put out by the U.S. Fire Administration. It depicts an infant standing inside of her crib, which is only half intact. The other half of it is burnt to crisps. The tagline reads, "Love alone didn't save her." You have to read below the photograph for the conclusion: "Practicing fire safety did." I find it morbid to the point of amusement. *As you can see from the photo below, which I have uploaded from my personal collection of unintentionally humorous marketing materials, I have chopped off the lower half third of the poster to better pack the punch of this advertising hilarity.
Here's an old promo flier for an URBANITY Dance Project performance at the Boston University Dance Theater.
The footnote on lower left that you may or may not be able to read clearly in your browser says the following: "DANCERS NOT TREATED WITH PERFORMANCE ENHANCING HORMONES"
To which immediately I think,
That's nice, but why then is her pregnant belly so grotesquely deformed?
As if clowns were not scary enough on their own, Big Apple Circus introduces four-legged cross dressed clown doing a disco dancing move on their promotional fliers.
Something about this man or woman disturbs me. I am not sure if it is his/her striking resemblance to Mrs. Doubtfire (whom despite his role as super nanny still does not cease to frighten me) or his/her old fashioned britches (see: underwear) that are falling to the ground.
Additionally, what's with the pearls? And the housewife dress? This person is definitely ill equipped for dancing, even if he/she is rockin' 4 legs. It is obvious that the circus official who created this character did so under the bizarre notion that old grannies sell and did not give any thought to the practicality of the idea.
And yeah, okay, I'll give them that the granny clown is definitely optimal to the typical drunk old man clown grabbing his balls while the makeup runs down his face. But is this really all they could come up with? Couldn't old granny be wearing something a little less homely, and dare I say maybe even a little risque? Now that would for sure draw a crowd. The little kiddies might not understand why they keep looking at her, but their parents will. Or at the very least, why does it have to be grandpa dressed up in grandmas clothes, instead of grandma dancing around in her own getup?
"Every Seat is so close it makes your pulse race!!"
I don't know about you, but when a company or organization tries to get me to take action by appealing to my guilt, I am immediately turned off. Take, for instance, this letter I received in the mail from SOS Children's Villages, asking me- no, scratch that- shaming me into donating.
Or at least attempting to, that is. I'm sorry to say this because after conducting further research into the non-profit, I found that SOS Children's Villages really does look like a legitimate and worthy place to support. But as soon as I saw the pitiful slogan, which was also printed outside of the envelope, the genuine emotion and compassion that I really do feel toward impoverished children became instantly overshadowed by the sense of amusement.
Does anything about this announcement for Harpoon Fest 2011 seem a little off to you? I'll give you a second to peruse the information, as it was published on the Harpoon Brewery website.
I took this class in college called Interpersonal Effectiveness. For the record- before you start jumping to conclusions about me- it was a required course for Communications. It ended up consisting mostly of ongoing excuses to shoot the shit with other people in the class, disguised as interactive exercises. I didn’t hate it.
There was one particular lesson I learned that I took with me and find myself referring to on a regular basis in my social life. That is the peeling of the onion theory. The concept used the layers of an onion as an analogy for the layers of our social selves. The innermost core of the onion is like the deepest roots of our self. It is where our strongest emotions and beliefs reside, where the dreams we feel most passionately about hide out. And just as in the case of an onion, we too have more shallow layers that must be peeled in order to get to our core selves.
This scene from The Big Hitis a Classic! example of sexual innuendo. Melvin Smiley (Mark Wahlberg), hitman, has kidnapped a girl named Keiko (China Chow) who, in typical hollywood movie fashion, falls in love with him. He eventually softens up and gets her help with preparing a meal in the kitchen- which she craftily performs still wearing handcuffs- and that's when the implicit soft-core culinary porn begins. The way in which the two fondle that turkey is so suggestive that I almost feel as if I maybe should be covering my eyes.
Have you ever noticed that cover songs often suck?
It takes both creativity and confidence to cover another musician's song and do so in a way that doesn't repel listeners. When performing a cover version of an existing song, the artists are faced with two major challenges: One, they must tweak the song stylistically to fit in with their own identity as a singer or band, and two, they must do this so expertly that those who have actually heard the original version will appreciate the changes the covering musician has brought to the piece.
Performing greatest hits cover songs is an excellent way for bands to attract new listeners; if done skillfully, you can earn the appreciation of fans across multiple music genres.
Successfully remaking an old classic, though, is not an easy feat, which would easily explain why so many musicians fail. The musician(s) must sing and play with the same emotional intensity that can be heard in the original version of the song, yet still pull off a maneuver to create a cover version unique to their own sound. This creates a fine line for artists, as they want to create a remake that their current fan base will be attracted to, but they obviously don’t want to make the song too different, so as to subconsciously offend the fans who worship the original.
While I tend to be harshly critical of greatest hits cover songs (hey, I’m picky, so what?), and simply cannot stand to listen to most of the ones I ever have the unfortunate occasion to hear, I have been lucky enough to stumble across a few really great exceptions.
Below is a list of some cover songs with covering artists that I like so much I listen to several times a day.
These cover versions are so well done and have so powerfully, carefully, adeptly been altered to fit in with the covering artists' styles that I must admit I now prefer the newer versions over the originals. I realize that is quite a bold thing to say and I give all due respect to the original writers and performers but something about these renditions of other artists' songs seem to really intensely touch my emotions and soul.
Here are 8 of my favorite cover song versions, in no hierarchical order:
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