Oh you say men rule the world but...

Coming up on this weekends show:

• hindsight on Imus
• Where did your taxes go?
• Brand Loyalty Marriage (and divorce)
• Cute Furry Piranhas
• Much Much More?

It occured to me this morning as I was thinking about writing a classic "the sexes don't understand each other" kind of trite piece of crap blog entry that if men really did rule the world, our economic system would be based on semen.

The dollar wouldn't be tied to the gold standard, the silver standard, or the GNP, it would be tied to semen. Any healthy man would be guaranteed a certain amount of sustainable income based on his ability to produce it and women would be guaranteed an even higher amount of sustainable income based on men's constant desire to share our semen.

Obviously, you'd still need to have some other form of representational currency. If you had to bust a nut every time you wanted to buy a pack of gum at the 7-11, the line would be out the door (and it probably wouldn't be especially sanitary) but if you were ever really short on cash, you could always make a little bit of money for yourself by thinking about Raquel Welsh.

Now, I know what you're thinking. except for making new life, semen isn't especially valuable. But neither was gold really. Gold is valuable now because of it's conductive properties with electronics but before the modern age it was only valuable because we decided it was. Sure, gold is a hell of a lot rarer then semen but it's much easier to keep in your pocket, so semen still stands up as valuable.

Women would have virtually no place except as sex objects and baby makers.

The fact that our system isn't nearly as misogynistic as the semen based society doesn't prove that Men don't in fact rule the world of course, it only proves that it wasn't a conscious effort on men's part to rule the world. If we had really set out to make a perfect society for us, the semen system would be way more advantageous than our current system.

Helpful Hints For The Post Modern Consumer

You may have noticed that Helpful Hints contained an awful lot of 60's Shopping Music style stuff. That really wound up being the basis for everything on the show.

It all started with Steve Dahl. Chicago Radio: The Steve Dahl Show on WCKG I grew up listening to Steve Dahl and I still listen via Podcast even though I'm no longer in Chicago. Last week he was talking about how he had been searching for the Capitol Hi-Q series of production music from the 60's and how he'd found something similar on a Swedish Blog but he never mentioned the URL for the blog.

So I wrote him, my idol, asking for the link. As a sidenote I once got thrown off the air for being too much like Steve Dahl. It's always the idols who get you into trouble that you appreciate the best. I wanted to offer him something in exchange so I told him about the Smithsonian Folkways' Background Music for Home Movies CDs from 1961 and 1962 which can be found on MP3 music downloads at eMusic cheaply or through the Smithsonian Folkways website for almost twenty bucks a pop.

In the matter of two hours Steve had written back giving me the link. Ultra Swank - Lifestyle Adventures
And there they have a couple CD's worth of currently unavailable shopping style music. And if you like that kind of thing, you can find a lot of links to other sites that share unreleased lounge music, much of which will be featured on future shows.

Anyway, as I was listening to these wonderful tracks, I started talking over them and everything on the show came from middle of the night improvisations on the first listenings of these wonderful tracks.

About half of the time I write pieces based on the music and half of the time the music comes along after the first edit of a piece and then I edit the rest of the piece to fit the music.

I think the reason these particular pieces were so dark is because the weather went from 80 degrees to snow in a day. When the weather is nice, I get prolific and when the weather is ugly, I get dark. Combine the two kinds of weather together and you get a lot of small ugly pieces put together.

The one exception to that is the Ben Cohen piece which is just a reaction to a Ted Nugent interview I heard. I love the Nuge's music and his crazy ass, march to the beat of a different drum, energy but he is the biggest blowhard on the planet too. Plus, I had some really good Pink Lady apples.

It's like winning... but it's not.

Coming up on this weekend's show:

• Quitting Smoking
• Five steps to dealing with hangovers
• Zen Koans with Ben Cohen
• Career Advice
• The Car of The Future
• Much Much More?

As a liberal I feel it's my duty to stand up for the little guy. It is in that vein that I feel obliged to stand up for George W. Bush, our president and one of the most unpopular people in the world.

For all his faults, President Bush has done nearly all the things that truly great leaders do. His problem isn't so much with his methodology as with his results.

Just this week, he bravely broke with the tradition of throwing out the first pitch at the start of the baseball season. Not since 1910 has any President declined this honor bestowed by our national past time. Sure, some people think that this was an act of cowardice; that his abysmally low poll ratings ensured that he would step out onto the field to a cacophony of boos and public humiliation. I see it as an act of bravery. Clinton wasn't so bold as to leave baseball to the experts, neither was Reagan or Roosevelt or even Nixon. Give the man his due, he's taking this presidency to a whole new level.

Look at his unprecedented appointment of Sam Fox to be Ambassador of Belgium. When Sam Fox, Swift Boat ad creator and huge Republican cash cow was rejected by the Senate, Bush just waited until they went on recess and made him a recess appointment. No president has ever thought to do this before. In fact no president has ever made a recess appointment until after 14 days had past. Anyone else would've thought that it was unseemly or would be un-ethical but Bush knew it was the only way to return a favor to a man who had donated so much money and so he pushed on through to meet his objective without regard to appearances or tradition. Hey it's legal, that's good enough for The President and should be good enough for us.

Likewise this whole Attorney General scandal is also perfectly legal. Any other president could've replaced prosecutors mid-term and for political reasons, they just weren't bold or decisive enough to do so. That past presidents were too timid to exercise their power is no reason to punish Bush.

These are all the kinds of things that great men have done from time to time. Look at FDR who, many think, allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked in order to get around the Republican isolationists who refused to let him fight Hitler. That was totally unethical and probably illegal and we revere him for his bold leadership.

The only difference between bold men like Roosevelt, Lincoln, or even Kennedy is that when they made bold moves of questionable ethics and legality, it worked. We, the people, will put up with all manner of power grabbing, backroom dealing and downright criminal behavior from our leaders when they do a good job. Great men take great risks and succeed and we love them for it. Bush has taken great risks, the only thing separating him from greatness is that he consistently makes a big gamble or takes a big risk and then screws it all up. Theoretically, he's making bold moves and re-defining the presidency just like all the greats did. It's only the small matter of his continual failure that keeps him from success.

Brilliant Ideas commentary track

Wearios - this came from the incongruous sight of a box of cheerios in a store window next to a bunch of piled up t-shirts. I immediately said, "Wearios" and first thought that it might make for a kind of edible chain mail and then of course my mind went to the risque' Oat Bran I think is because Whole Foods just opened around here and I've been thinking about healthy stuff.

Intro - I seriously can't get all 12 minutes of this song out of my head

Printing on Cereal - Obviously this turned into a sort of Garrison Kellior rip off. It started with the idea of printing on cereal which quite literally came to me in a dream. I've been waking up early lately because now that there is a Whole Foods nearby, I've been keeping espresso in the house. Where I used to slap the snooze alarm, I now am lured to the cappuccino that awaits in the kitchen.

A few days the Cappuccino was pulling me awake while I was still dreaming so I wrote down my dreams as I was waking up. The notion of a cereal printer was one of those ideas.

Printing on Pasta was just a logical extension but I have a long history of combining pasta and art in brilliant ideas, including the stigmattaghetti which would have the sauce on the inside of the noodle, saving you a pot.

The Smorkle or smoking snorkle... came from a conversation I had but I'll be damned if I remember what it was about.

The Lucifer throughpoint just sort of popped out as I was telling the story. Looking back at it with the religious wife, the crazy childhood, the grand religious gesture and the smoking underwater, I think I was channeling or at least writing about Danny Bonaduce who has mentioned the idea of a diving bell for smoking without bothering people and is a troubled but entertaining fellow.

"I hope you fucking die" grows out of a fond affection I have for a friend of mine, "Eat shit and die". There's no deep meaning behind it or anything it's just fun to say really inappropriate things in the wrong tone.

Notice that the Pink Dye killed Jane and the preceeding spoken word piece was MAUVE. A theme? Not really.

You're the Cream in My Coffee - I figured that since we had started with two cereal pieces I might as well have some coffee with that. Plus, I just love Mel Tormé

Sandwich - This came from one of the 100 word story about sandwich. I thought this one was good enough to stand alone

The Sunni Side of the Street - I know most of you wish I'd sing less but I couldn't help myself. I'm actually a much better musician than you'd think but two things are working against me. I'm not especially good at playing with myself (insert joke here) and the other is I have a number of technical issues with my computer right now that make recording songs much more challenging than you'd think.

Lithium - this is another 100 word story that I think is getting short shrift in the competition. It uses real 2001 music and is mostly scientifically accurate except for the robot extracting lithium from batteries. That'd be a little bit backwards.

Fun fact: there is no pure Lithium occuring here on Earth? It's too reactive because it has three electrons. It's like Hydrogen if Hydrogen was a metal.

The Prodigal Son Has Returned

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I apologize for my recent absence from both the blog and the podcast but sometimes real life gets in the way of the creative life. I won't bore you with the details but you can always scour the internet for my other personal blog where the details are there in agonizing blow by blow action.

Anyway, spring has sprung and I'm all backed up on material. As I have mentioned a time or two in the past I am like a manic depressive but with weather. The sunnier and warmer it is, the more ideas and energy I have and of course the flipside is that through the long, cold winter I struggled like hell to come up with anything for the shows.

This weekends show will primarily feature brilliant ideas, as I've had a lot of them recently. It will also feature some edible underwear and probably a story or two so be sure to dig on that.

And now there's a little bit of business to take care of. Would you please go into the iTunes music store and review the show? It doesn't have to be a good review but it'd be very gratifying to me personally to know that someone cares enough to say something.

Lastly, I'm running out of space on the server so I'm going to have to begin archiving old shows soon. So if you want to download them for posterity, bootleg them on the internet or turn people on to the show from it's inception, now is the time.

I have seen the future and brother it is murder

Coming up on this weeks show:

• A command performance of "Smoke Smoke Smoke (That Cigarette)"
• For Them By Them
• Some Terrible Puns (I Think)

I just want to take credit here for being a soothsayer. I'm assuming that if you're reading this you listen to the program. Did I not hit the nail on the Gays In The Military head just a day before General Peter Pace starting up the Military V. Gay debate all over again?

Speaking of that, am I the only one who is so paranoid as to think that this was done on purpose? It seems to me like the fallout from Pace's comments have all but pushed the Walter Reed Scandal, The FBI Lying About Investigation Scandal, and the Libby Scandal. Thank goodness that the Attorney General Scandal still has staying power against something as distracting as our institutional hatred of homosexuality.

But that's not all I want to take credit for being a soothsayer about. Back when all those Christian Pharmacists were in the news for denying women their Emergency Contraception and they were claiming that firing them for not doing their job was religious persecution, I blogged in my LiveJournal (aka personal) blog about the logical extension of that being Muslims and Jews refusing to ring up bacon at your supermarket. Everybody laughed but then a year or so later, it's come true. http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/mar/14/some_muslim_cashiers_refuse_handle_pork/

And this seems to be drawing more ire than pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions, which boggles my mind.

Of course now that I know I have this awesome power of divination, I'm officially predicting that in the next week I'll be seduced by no fewer than three buxom redheads, (dyed or natural I'm not too picky) and that someone will come along who wants to pay me for being amusing so I can quit my day job.

We'll see how that works out I guess. I smell a streak being broken.

Another Week Another Republican Conviction

Coming up on this week's show:

• Private Security Firms Recruiting Strangely
• Mike Ness Goes Lounge
• God Makes You Violent
• God Makes You Scared of Violence
• Much Much More?

I was thinking about the Anti-Abortion people and how they're defeating their own purpose. If they let all the people who don't share their views, not pass those values down to their offspring by allowing them to not have offspring, while they breed like christian rabbits, eventually abortion will become a moot point.

Which reminded me of Eugenics in general and a strange fact about the Bush family. Our President's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was one of the key proponents of Planned Parenthood back in its early days. Why? Was Prescott Bush a social progressive? No. He wanted to make sure that lower classes and minorities didn't breed. He supported reproductive health in exactly the way his grandson doesn't just because he believed in Eugenics.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, eh?