Hey all. I hope your Saturday goes well. Mine already sucks! I should’ve taken the advise I offered in yesterday’s post. Whatever, there’s been enough “whoa is me” bullshit around here for the last month. Here’s the news.
• Remember in Idiocracy, at the very beginning of the film (the only part of the film really worth watching), they talk about dysgenics and the dumbing down of America as a whole? It’s not fiction. I’ve written about it so many times on this website that it should probably have its own label. Now TIME Magazine is reporting that SAT scores have, for a second straight year, remained at the lowest level in nearly a decade. I think the average score for an American high school student, if I’m reading this correctly, is 1017. Jesus Christ. Our kids are barely cracking 1000? That seems ridiculously low, but maybe that’s because I’m smarter than a fifth grader and the average American blogger. Way smarter, if our nationwide poor performance (1017!?) is any indication of our general intelligence level. The point is, the scores seem to drop every year, we’re getting dumber, and it’s deplorable. The learned are the weak, and we will soon by eclipsed by the illiterate. Expect more “Ow! My Balls!” style television programming in the coming years. Fucking hell. [story]
• Fucking Joe Biden. He’s pro-RIAA. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have made it a federal felony to reprogram an electronic device so that it could play unauthorized music or execute unauthorized computer programs. He also wrote a letter to the justice department urging them to prosecute those who intentionally allow file-sharing over peer-to-peer networks. Just when I was starting to shed my apathetic skin and become interested in the upcoming election, something like this comes along and pisses me off again and makes me wonder if the kind of government I desire can ever be achieved. It can’t. At the very least, I’m sure all the folks at Touch & Go Records, Merge Records, Matador Records and all those hip “indie” labels are super-geeked about Vice President Biden taking bloggers like myself to court for what amounts to free marketing and PR for the record industry: the dissemination of music to help bands find a wider audience. Fucking hell. [story]
• Sunn O))) and Boris In the New York Times!? Holy shit! What’s next, Polvo and Killdozer puff pieces to support their new tours? The piece deals with a new kind of heavy metal (they don’t call it “stoner metal” they call it “heady metal” because it’s a fucking atrocious pun on the same level of dumbness as, like, “Mothra Washington”). “…You would have noticed that surprisingly few people in the room had the look of genuine metal heads; big hair was in notably short supply, and the ratio of button-downs to heavy metal T-shirts was approximately one to one. What unified the two camps, disparate as they appeared, was an almost studious devotion to music.” A ha! But what about the ratio of men to women at the show! Did it border on Shellac concert proportions, where the ratio is something like two dozen guys for every girl? Unfortunately, the article also praises Southern Lord records, when it should lambaste them for gouging their prices and blatantly lying about pressing numbers for their “limited edition” releases. But hey, what do I know, I only heard that from someone who used to work in their warehouse. Fucking hell. [story]
• College students are now celebrating their 21st birthdays with, on average, 12 drinks for men and nine for women. They call that “binge drinking” in health class, and I learned all about what happens when you binge drink. You wrap your car around a tree and you die. You get alcohol poisoning and you die. You let someone else drive your car, they’re drunk, and you both die. You have unprotected sex, get HIV, and you die. You have unprotected sex, knock some fat, fish-faced high school girl up, she has a kid, you grow old and you die. I know all-too-well the horrors of binge drinking. A psychology professor explains binge drinking by stating, “One of the things that really struck us is now only that they’re drinking a hell of a lot but about half of participants were drinking not only more on that night, but they’re drinking more than ever in their lifetime.” Well, that might have something to do with it being illegal to drink unless you’re 21, but aside from that, people take 21 shots or drink 21 beers or do whatever because they’re morons and they want to be accepted socially. That’s why, on my 21st birthday, I had chocolate cake and went to bed. I don’t need to be accepted. I hate everyone. Fucking hell. [story]
• Oh, and Pat says that news story I posted about the Chupacabra a few weeks ago was invalidated. Turns out the creature was nothing more than a dog with mange. Fucking hell!
• Readers Kurt from MD and Sean from TN, your ‘Thank You’ notes have been mailed. Two more will ship on Monday. For all overseas readers, I’m sending all the domestic packages first, but don’t worry, you’ll get yours soon! Everyone gets free music! And weirdness! And frightening personalized letters! So strange!
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