Two Great Tastes, and a Sneaking Suspicion

I can't believe it took this long for the venerable Ben's Chili Bowl to get its own GoGo anthem, but I'm glad we're here now.

When I first heard this song by DJ Mello T, it reminded me of...something. Couldn't quite put my finger on it, though. 

Want $2K Quick?

Sometimes you just need a couple grand to put you over the top, and you might be willing to stretch what you'd do to get it. If that's you, Gheorghe: The Blog has a hot tip.

Don't mind a few insects creeping around?

Don't have a house worthy of remaining bug-free?

Don't you just miss this guy?

Apparently The Pest Informer, a Raleigh-based extermination information company, is willing to pay you $2,000 if you'll agree to let them "release ~100 American cockroaches into your home, and give [them] permission to film, and test out a specific cockroach treatment."

What could go wrong?

Here are the rules:

• You must own the home or have written approval from the homeowner.
• You must be 21 years or older to qualify.
• You must be located in the Continental United States.
• All tested cockroach treatments will be family- and pet-safe.
• You must not try any additional cockroach treatments during the duration of the study.
• At the end of the study, if the cockroach infestation hasn’t been eliminated, we will use traditional cockroach treatment options at no cost to you.
• The duration of this study will be approximately 30 days.

Here's my question . . . if "traditional cockroach treatment options" actually work well, why would The Pest Informer need to be investing thousands of dollars into a study for new technological advances?

Here's the link!

We Will Pay You $2,000 For Us To Release Cockroaches Into Your Home

Oh, and here's a trailer for what the after-picture looks like. No big deal, apparently. Grab the $2K and run!

Jive, Turkey

Like most Americans, I get the majority of my news from social media. But sometimes I seek balance, so I'll tune in to listen to Trevor Noah's newscast on those rare evenings when I can stay up past 11:00 pm.

And so it was this week that I learned that Turkey had filed a formal petition with the United Nations to change its official name. Because, as it turns out, the association with the bird and the connotation as a thing that's a failure rubbed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the wrong way. (I guess he's not a bowler.)

Because UN policy basically allows nations to choose their own names, Turkey is now officially known as Turkiyë to the community of nations. It's pronounced turkey-yay, which is both fun and a little bit hard to say.

You may recall that I've got a colleague who was born in Turkey. I wrote about her journey to becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen a few years ago.

I reached out to her upon hearing the news from her homeland, and her response surprised me. "I think the Turkish government should worry about inflation being over 100% right now. It's absolutely horrendous."

Turns out elections in Turkiyë are scheduled for next year, and Erdogan's not in great shape. Also turns out he's running the Trump playbook, pre-shaping a narrative that will allow him to claim election "fraud" and retain the power that his family has held (and the stream of illicit cash) for decades. 

Turkey-yay, I guess, but Erdogan-nay.

HBD TD

Happy Birthday, tiny dictator!

This was supposed to add "from" before "Lester."

Interesting confluence.

zHot Takes on Science Fiction

I finally figured out what makes a sci-fi/fantasy TV show good.  Any show set in some alternate world, whether it's the future, outer space, or some mythical realm of swords and sorcery, has to explain how all the alternate world shit works in addition to explaining who all the people are.  If you botch setting things up, the whole thing falls apart.

For example, I watched a few episodes of The Expanse at Dave's suggestion.  Although I like to break his balls I respect Dave's taste in books and TV tremendously and I expected to like it.  But after a handful of episodes I'm just meh on it and I stopped watching.  There's too many people in too many places, the United Nations has too much power, and there are too many rules about living on different planets and asteroid belts for me to figure out on top of all the criminal plot lines and political maneuvering.  One plot line is clear--Mars and the asteroid belts need water and the only way to get it is by harvesting ice from some outer planets--but it makes no sense.  Yoo mean tuh tell me dat deez fuggin stoonads ken put a civiluhzashin on fuggin Mars, but dey can't make wadduh outta elemental hydrogen and oxygen?  I kawl boolshit.

Seriously though, I have too much to learn when I watch the Expanse and I can't keep it all straight.  Seeing Joey Tribiani's nephew in a spaceship is confusing too.  

I'm too stupid and too lazy to process it.

Similarly, I watched the first season of Wheel of Time and I do not plan on watching the second.  It starts out as your standard medieval type of thing, but then a lady appears who can shoot what looks like DNA from her hands and she saves the day when a bunch of random monsters appear.  

She tells a bunch of people that she's looking for "The Dragon Reborn" and it could be one of them.  It takes a while to clarify all this hooey, and there is blatant theft from Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings.  Yes, the whole swords and sorcery genre rips off LotR but this is ridiculous.  They're practically running through Mordor at one point.  "The Dark One" has an army of creatures that are orcs with dog heads.  Superpowers randomly flare up in a bar.  A wizard guides a band of trusting, less experienced people through a harrowing journey to defeat an evil force that has been silent for 3000 years, and only one of them can save the world.  

Meanwhile, they run into all sorts of random people in random places that can do random superhuman things and there is no explanation for it.  There are flashbacks to battles where neither side of the fight is identified.  Eventually they explain the lady with the DNA hands--she's part of this sisterhood of badass DNA slingers (the DNA comes from The True Source (but not The Source)), and the whole society of them is very complicated and political, so you have to wrap your head around that while trying to understand how their powers work, when suddenly a man who can sling DNA shows up and that unleashes a whole new set of rules and backstory to digest.  It's ridiculous.

Which is to say there's a fair amount of theft from Dune.  A society of women who can use The Voice/touch The True Source to do stuff and men can't do it ... except sometimes they can.  

And then some guy eats something that makes his mouth bleed.  No idea why.

Game of Thrones got this right.  Season 1, episode 1 opens with a big scary slightly obscured monster killing people.  The rest of season 1 is just regular humans with differing UK accents establishing themselves and their motivation.  When something weird happens, like a Dothraki wedding, there is an outsider who sits in for the audience to ask "What the fuck is going on?" to another outsider who knows the deal.   

By the end of season 1 you forget that that there is any magical shit involved whatsoever, until this:

And then you're like "Oh right, I forgot there was magical shit on this show!" but you're ready for it because you know who everyone is and what they're trying to do.  You can wrap your head around all the mystical stuff starting in season 2.

So if you're going to run a sci-fi/fantasy TV show, explain the people first and the science/sorcery afterwards.

zHot Takes After the 2022 French Open

On Sunday, Rafael Nadal won his 14th French Open in his 18th attempt at the title.  He won his first one at 19 and this year's at 36.  Think about how much changed in your life between your 19th and 36th birthdays.  Now imagine winning one of the world's most prestigious sporting events essentially every year of your life over that span.  It's unfathomable.  It's also a testimony to him and his family that he remained focused and scandal-free (poor Boris Becker) despite success at such a young age.

Nadal now has 22 Grand Slam titles, the most of anyone ever.  Roy Emerson held the record with 12 Slams until 1999 when Pete Sampras won his 13th.  Pistol Pete retired after winning his 14th in 2002.  So Nadal tied the old record just based on his work at the French Open alone.

Nadal is 112-3 at the French.  Those 112 French wins are more than some Hall of Famers had in all their Grand Slam appearances combined, guys like Kuerten, Ivanisevic, Stich, Kafelnikov.

He is 8-8 in other Grand Slam finals.  So if he never played in the French Open, he would have more Slams than McEnroe, Wilander, Becker, and Edberg; he would be tied with Agassi, Lendl, and Connors; and he would have as many as Ashe, Murray, Roddick, and Ivanisevic combined.  All of those guys are in the Hall of Fame except for Murray because he's still playing.  And those non-French 16 finals appearances would be more than anyone except four other players (and tied with Borg).  And he always plays his ass off, even when he loses.

I feel like I've written this before--perhaps I have, just about someone else--so you're probably tired of reading my rants.  Just realize that this age of preposterous tennis can't go on forever, so appreciate it while it lasts.  

Gheorghasbord

Writer's block is real, y'all. Pushing through because I know our fan demands content.

I hope you caught Tim Kurkjian's moving ode to his older brother Matt this week on ESPN.com. Matt Kurkjian was one of the best baseball players in the history of Catholic University. He's now fighting ALS. Tim's tribute is a paean to the game, to brotherhood, and to joy amidst sorrow.

New Drive By Truckers? New Drive By Truckers. And in a sort of celebration, W&M grad Jay Busbee wrote a piece on the sublime experience of going to a rock show. I reckon he'd fit in with us.

New Wilco? New Wilco, and countrified Wilco at that. Here's Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche talking about it with NPR's Scott Simon.

Because I know you care, the kids that you fell in love with during Season One (and only) of Rob Lasso won the Virginia High School League (VHSL) Region 4C title on Friday night with a well-deserved 1-0 victory over local rival Broad Run. The girls host Salem in the quarterfinals of the state tournament on Tuesday. In a cool coincidence, the boys team is also hosting a state quarter that night, so if you're in or around Leesburg, there's a double helping of high school soccer in a couple of days. If you remember Sid, one of my favorite characters (she was a freshman who struggled with self-confidence last year), it'll warm your heart to know that she was named first-team All-Region this year after moving to her natural position at center back. Seems she's learned to be a goldfish, after all.

Mood

 

Tributes Are Pretty Great

A wild and crazy friend of mine who resides in the OBX is getting married again, against the advice of some of his pals. I'm not one of the cautionary cohorts, though, as (a) who the hell am I to coach another's marital pathway through life, and (b) he's not going to listen, so why create an unfillable chasm over which you'll later need to build a bridge? [Hmmm... I seem to be randomly drawing from some Sting lyrics there. Not sure what's going on.]

Anywho, our buddy the maniac (whom some of you OBFTers have met) has insisted that he'd like his bachelor party to take place in Colombia. When he tells people, they usually ask whether he means South Carolina or the Maryland town where Merriweather Post is. Nope, he means Pablo's Place. You know, Coloooooombia. Alrighty then.

Well, I'm sure I'm bowing out of any such trip there. While people say it's far more visitor-friendly than the images on the telly and the reputation it carved out for itself over a couple of decades, the country can be scary and dangerous. Just ask Taylor Hawkins, who died in Bogotá, Colombia in March.

Plus, if anything happened to me there, I doubt you guys would muster up 1,000 people to play a Les Coole or Random Idiots track like this for me!

But it'd be cool if you could get like 10 people to do it.

Not that I'm going.

Carry on.

Summer of Punk

[Read this post with Whitney's punk playlists as the soundtrack.]

Scream was one of the pioneering bands in the legendary D.C. punk scene of the early 1980s. You may be more familiar with Minor Threat or Government Issue, but the very first full-length LP released by Dischord Records was Scream's. Dave Grohl was the band's drummer for a time late in the decade. 

But their original (and current) drummer is named Kent Stacks. And when he was stricken with cancer recently, the D.C. punk community did what it does, and came together. 

Scream will be headlining a benefit show on June 2 at Black Cat. Ian MacKaye is going to be there, as will seven other bands spanning the 40+ years of punk in the nation's capital.

And so will my kid. By herself. I sent her the link to the story above and she bought tickets. She also bought tickets to see The Circle Jerks at Black Cat in July. I'll join her for that one. She's got a half-dozen Richmond-area punk shows on her calendar later in the summer. (And if we can count Rage Against the Machine and Run the Jewels as punk-adjacent, I'm seeing them with Mark and the Teej in August.)

The moshing scars are gonna be real.

Resume

 Now back to your regularly scheduled dipshittery.

Two Things

Two things offering different perspectives about an unspeakably shitty thing. One from a poet. One my teacher wife posted on Facebook. We're lost. And we've lost.

Kids Who Die

This is for the kids who die,

Black and white,

For kids will die certainly.

The old and rich will live on awhile,

As always,

Eating blood and gold,

Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi

Organizing sharecroppers

Kids will die in the streets of Chicago

Organizing workers

Kids will die in the orange groves of California

Telling others to get together

Whites and Filipinos,

Negroes and Mexicans,

All kinds of kids will die

Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment

And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned

Who pen editorials in the papers,

And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names

White and black,

Who make surveys and write books

Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,

And the sleazy courts,

And the bribe-reaching police,

And the blood-loving generals,

And the money-loving preachers

Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,

Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets

To frighten the people—

For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—

And the old and rich don’t want the people

To taste the iron of the kids who die,

Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,

To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die—

Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you

Except in our hearts

Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp

Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field,

Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht

But the day will come—

You are sure yourselves that it is coming—

When the marching feet of the masses

Will raise for you a living monument of love,

And joy, and laughter,

And black hands and white hands clasped as one,

And a song that reaches the sky—

The song of the life triumphant

Through the kids who die.

(Langston Hughes, 1938)

The Life and Times of a Disappointed Idealist

If you have the access to the new HBO documentary on George Carlin, do yourself a favor and spend the four (4) hours to soak it in. It's worth it for a host of reasons:

- Most obviously, for the laughs. There are hundreds of jokes in there. Real belly laughs. Ones I'd seen many times, plus loads more I hadn't. 

- Then, for the sardonic truths. Head-shaking cynical acknowledgments about the shortcomings of humankind, civilization, and especially organized religion. Powerfully relevant right now.

- The appreciation for a 45-year career that saw a man simultaneously evolving into a new version of himself and yet unabashedly (save for Carlin v1.0) dedicated to the consistent theme of being allegiant to his truest self.

- The story. His life, the travails and true loves, his huge successes and pointed failures, his family saga, and his rocket ride through drugs, alcoholism, sobriety, and health challenges. 

He wouldn't want you to take a lesson, but he would want you to be entertained. And I was.

[This video has language not suited for high volumes at many of your in-person workplaces]

Farewell of a Different Sort

Pete Davidson, Aidy Bryant, Kyle Mooney, and Kate McKinnon are all planning to leave Saturday Night Live after this season. Davidson and Bryant had some very funny moments. Mooney was okay. But we're here to celebrate McKinnon, who is pretty damn high up the list of best SNL ensemble players of all time. 

You might be here for her RBG impression, or her sendup of Elizabeth Warren, or her turn as a cat lady, or her teaming up with Bryant to play lesbians washed ashore on Gal Gadot's island of amazon warriors. But for me, this is the best thing McKinnon did on SNL, which is high praise, indeed.

Final Out

The legendary writer (sportswriter seems not enough to fully encompass his insights into the human condition) Roger Angell passed at the age of 101 today.  

Because I'm nothing if not a half-ass, I'm going to offer two passages from his work. The first, from the collection Game Time: A Baseball Companion is universal. The second from 1972's The Summer Game, speaks to a pair of Gheorghies but stands in for all of us.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

“This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.”

What Is G:TB Muppet Content Without Muppets?

Which Dave Is Right?

 You be the judge.

 

The Kids Are Alright, Volume the Next

Kapil Dev is one of the most famous cricketers in history. That's irrelevant to this post. But I figured you should know who he is before I quote him.

The actual point of this post is to celebrate a couple of GTB:TNGers (TNG in this case meaning The Next Generation). Dev once said, “The next generation has always been and will be better than the previous one. If it is not, then the world would not be moving forward.” Speaking from my own experience, my kids and their friends are kinder, more compassionate, more tolerant than I. And I believe that my generation can say the same thing about our ancestors.

We have some visual evidence from GTB:TNG to show a little bit of that next generation's creative chops. For starters, AQ, daughter of KQ and Mr. KQ, made this video celebrating her grandfather for a class project in this the final semester of her college career. It's beautiful and heartfelt on top of being really well done. Bonus footage of KQ!

My own kidlet and her friends also had a class assignment that involved video production. Setting aside my questions about how this relates to the AP English curriculum standards, I enjoyed it because it features a lot of kids that I've known since they were toddlers. And there's one edit that stopped me cold - the kids did a great job creating drama in something that could've been trite. In my very humble and completely unbiased opinion.

The Elegy for a Dive Series, Pt. 3

Dusting off this recurring segment which actually recurs, a couple of years later. Thanks to OBX Dave for contributing the elegy for one of his College Park haunts. To the rest of you . . . sod off.

The "Elegy for a Dive" Series

Wherein we pay tribute to dingy bars of yesteryear which served us well on many long-forgotten nights of revelry-cum-debauchery.  Three at a time, like shots of Jäger.

The Texas-Wisconsin Border Café
Richmond, VA
Closed 1999

Ah, the Tex-Wis. The cream of the crop in dive bars in The Fan in the 90's. Lone Star beer in the bottle, widow-maker chili in the bowl. Badger-State-born VCU Arts school profs (later a Dean) and Texan named Donna built a place where you could get Tex-Mex plus brats and cheese and all the cheap swill you could guzzle, Animal heads and license plates adorned the walls, and they had bands quite a bit. It was written that "The Texas-Wisconsin Border Cafe’s divey, eccentric nature attracted everyone from musicians to judges, and rockabilly and blues bands, including Drive-By Truckers, played for cash and unlimited PBR."

We used to go in there for the cheap suds and the chicken-fried steak.  The place was often packed, always loud, and you could count on getting yelled at by the waitresses. Our buddy Coby was a budding attorney then, and this was his dive of choice. He's a partner with a large national firm now, and he'd give quite a bit to have this gem still nestled in the edge of the Fan. 

So sad, the Texas-Wis
A place that we all miss
Though our arteries do not
With Rolling Rock on tap
Lord, I hated that crap
Especially served hot

Whitlow's on Wilson
Arlington, VA
Closed 2021

WOW! That's what the mugs they'd give you used to say. Whitlow's-On-Wilson. This staple of the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington was a good little family bar . . . that kept buying up parts of the block and expanding until it was a big one. It was a strange combo of seeming a half-step up from our greasy spoon super-dives but never really classy in the least. It was a plain old neighborhood bar. And often packed to the gills.

Rob and I spent a good amount of time there. We shot lousy stick and talked to a (very) few females with lousier shtick. Our Cowboy barkeep Manny quit the 'boy in the early 2000's and defected to Whitlow's, where our fraternity brother Jay's fiancée was already catching shifts. Hence, our increased attendance there. Thursday nights were Mug Nights, $5 for the mug and $2 refills on the cheap stuff all night. 

Whitlow's was never one of my favorite DC area bars, but it was always solid, and it was always there. Any people I'd meet who lived up that way in the 17 years since I vacated the area would always have been Whitlow's drinkers at some point. It was a mainstay . . . or at least it was until a year ago.

So sad, my Whitlow's mug
And the beer that I would chug
Gone for evermore
I'll miss the drunk times spent
But I shall not lament
That long line out the door

The Weeping Radish Brewery
Manteo, NC Grandy, NC
Closed 2022

Okay, okay. So the Radish was never a dive per se. It was a brewery, and it was a German restaurant, and it happened to have a little barroom. That little room was our dive, a hideaway in which you could congregate a group of knuckleheads once a year to drink between 1 and 3 liters of rather strong German beer, throw darts, play Ms. Pac-Man, gather in a circle for a xenophobic drinking game, and ultimately fall down and get pinned under a tiny cup of horseradish made of lead. You know, the usual kind of joint.

Dave, rob, and others spent the summer of '91 in Nags Head, and they came back with stories about this microbrewery (North Carolina's oldest, 1986) with super strong beer, and you drink a big mug of it and get hammered. Real juvenile stuff. So then we graduated from college and got jobs and girlfriends and came down for a summer vacation with friends . . . and drank big mugs of the super strong beer and got hammered. Dave like the Blach Radish blend, while Rob and I enjoyed the Fest. Lesser palates would get the Corolla Gold. Evan asked for PBR every year.

Oh, the stories. Many too esoteric to enjoy, but just know that the 12-24 of us would leave the comfy confines of the Martha Wood deck mid-sunny afternoon -- after drinking for hours -- to drive over the bridge into Manteo, annex the barroom, and drink a couple of beers before returning home. Wrecked. On those special occasions, we wouldn't go straight home, as the go-karts were en route, but we wised up after a handful near-incarceration/death experiences. One year, we traipsed in to hear the bartender say, "Oh, lord, has it been a year already?" It was a ritual.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, about the same time that a sect within the OBFT crowd called Brothers Against the Radish (BAR) won favor and negated our annual death sojourn, the Weeping Radish moved out of Manteo and full-time into its farmhouse on the mainland in Grandy. We never went. And this article I read yesterday indicates that the Radish is closing its doors for good. Fare ye well, Radish Weepers, and keep 'er between the lines on the way home.

The Radish packed a punch
One time rob e'en lost his lunch
Liter mug in hand
The tale we'd later tell
We told the Radish, go to hell
We were actually banned

Notify, Volume VI

You know the drill... don't look for this stuff on Spotify or the major streaming services.

Did You Know??? The Smithereens' Pat DiNizio and Suzanne Vega worked together at an office in the early 80's. By the end of the decade, they were both on the charts. After he died a few years ago, she wrote: 

“I met Pat DiNizio when I was in my early 20s, in 1983. He needed a job, I had a job for him, so for a while he was my assistant, a receptionist in an office at a typesetting company in midtown New York. He called his mom in New Jersey every morning, first thing. Unfortunately, a couple of months later, my boss told me I had to fire Pat, which I then did. I was gone myself in a few months, as I had gotten a record deal. We both laughed about that later, and he asked me to sing on the track, ‘In a Lonely Place,’ which I’ve always been proud of. I loved doing the video, too. I ran into Pat constantly through the years, and he was always the same: smart, funny, driven, confident but never arrogant. Full of soul. Playing at his 60th birthday bash so recently brought it all home for me. I was shocked to learn of his death. He is still a part of my life. I feel the loss.”

This song is cool, and should be on Spotify. The Smithereens' entire album Especially for You is MIA there.

The Grey Album... I haven't heard much about it in a while, and you'll never see it on the big streamers, so here you go. 

40 years ago this week, Clash drummer Topper "The Human Drum Machine" Headon was sacked from the band for outrageous drug addictions, and nothing was ever the same for The Only Band That Matters. After that, Mick Jones was dumped, which is like booting Paul McCartney. And then three stiffs were scooped up for one final album called Cut the Crap. Later disowned. The "Cut the" part was superfluous. Anyway, they never recorded this tune for the record, but it and the song "This Is England" represent the only listenable latter-day Clash cuts. Worth a listen. God bless Joe Strummer, even if he destroyed what he loved.

David Lowery from Camper van Beethoven and Cracker is now a professor at UGA telling kids how not to get screwed in the music biz. Half of both bands' stuff is greyed out on Spotify. This tune was always one of my favorites. 

Total Coelo. "I Eat Cannibals." Ridiculous. Fun.

Fun? You want fun? Have some Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction. Never on Spotify.

Enjoy.