Because I’m a fabulous driver, I haven’t been without my car for a prolonged period of time in the past decade or so. Which is to say, I’ve never had to actually listen to real radio in nearly ten years.
I was one of the first 50,000 people to sign up for XM, because I thought Detroit radio kind of sucked at the time. By circumstance, I switched from XM to Sirius when I got the Lancer, but I’ve had continuous satellite radio since about the time it was available to the masses. I listen to Drew and Mike on my way to work, and beyond that, I genuinely couldn’t care less about whether or not my car is capable of getting AM or FM.
From what I can piece together, something happened. Something bad.
The only time I’ve listened to music on WRIF has been accidental, when I’ve forgotten to switch to Sirius when I park at work, more often than not. But for as long as I’ve been alive, WRIF has kept true to ensuring that you’re never more than six minutes away from the shittiest song ever. I can respect that.
So I was traveling the dial. 89X used to be home, but they’ve decided that their demographic enjoys Green Day, bands even shittier than Green Day who sound like Green Day, and some emo whiny shit that should make any Belle and Sebastian fan feel as butch and self-confident as the Old Spice guy.
89X is the only station that was notable, as “Channel 955″ (who the fuck thinks that sounds cool?) and WDVD seemed to actually be the same station, rotating some shitty Rihanna song, a shitty Eminem song, and an amazingly shitty Katy Perry song.
I get Rihanna. I’m not a huge fan, but I understand the appeal. But level with me, kids. Eminem is copping Weird Al these days, and Katy Perry… what the fuck?
Even WJLB. Rihanna with Eminem, and a series of guys going “Oh! Uuuuuuh!” and singing off key to 80′s samples. If the 80′s are back in R&B, why the fuck aren’t you playing Public Enemy? And on this tangent here, Puff Daddy and The Notorious B.I.G. were doing this “Let’s sing an 80′s song off-key” shit in the 90′s. It sucked then. It’s shameless now.
On Drew and Mike, they run commercials for HD Radio which all but beg you not to get Sirius / XM. Their big push: “It’s free!”
Know what else is free? The bag of dog shit in my back yard. Want it?
I guess for legal reasons, I shouldn’t delve too far in to why my beloved Lancer is at the collision shop getting fixed. So for the sake of brevity, it was damaged by another car in a parking lot, and no intoxicants were involved (to my knowledge).
My precious.
I’ve had it for just under two years, and I can honestly say, it’s the best car I’ve ever owned. In fact, it’s the only car that I’ve had that would leave me feeling sad if someone had stolen it after having owned it for more than a year.
And yet, for anyone around for The Great Crash of 1994, I think I took the incident with an almost disturbing amount of restraint.
It looks dumb and doesn't go fast, but at least it gets shitty gas mileage.
So with my beloved Lancer off to be made whole again, I was presented with this flaming piece of shit.
For about a year or so, I thought that the Chevy Cobalt was the embodiment of everything that’s awful and wrong with modern American cars. Chrysler, however, has managed to rock my perceptions.
This fucking thing can’t get out of its own way, and somehow manages to get a whopping 21 miles to the gallon in doing so. For reference, my Jeep got about 20 on the same commute, and could feasibly tow your house through some ridiculous trail that I never took it on.
That got me thinking… I typically like Chrysler. I loved my Shadow, and my Avenger was pretty good before the engine blew. And my Jeep takes a very close second on my list of favorite cars.
But then it hit me… The thing I liked the most about the Shadow was that it was a 5-speed with a relatively large V6. That trusty and fast V6 was made by Mitsubishi. And the Avenger? Everything but the engine was great… but the Avenger was basically a rebadged Mitsubishi Galant with a modified Neon engine. And the Jeep? I had the straight V6 — the last year they made it, after carrying over the design from American Motors Corp. for longer than I’ve been alive. The rest of it was designed when Chrysler was content to leave the Jeep division alone — before they were sticking seven-slot grilles on not-very-good cars built to look like SUV’s.
I genuinely hope that GM and Chrysler unfuck themselves.
Fortunately for me, the PT Cruiser smelled like a fucking corpse had been stored inside (and had evidentiary stains all over the interior that made corpse storage seem almost feasible), and I was issued a new car. This time, a Pontiac Vibe.
Even if you know fuckall about cars, you probably know that the Pontiac Vibe is a rebadged Toyota Matrix. So now I’ve got “sudden acceleration” to worry about, when I’m not trying to uncover the mystery of Toyota Engineering.
Seriously, guys. When will you and Honda allow someone taller than 5′ 9″ to sit upright in one of your fucking cars? Mitsubishi figured it out. Maybe that’s what they’re talking about when they say “Different for a reason.”
1) The Emergency Alert System is actually broadcast in Dolby Digital, making the screeching sound come out of the rear channel, and the announcer sound like he’s hiding behind my television.
Fucking terrifying.
2) Like anyone 30 or older who paid attention to anything ever, if the screen doesn’t say “TEST” somewhere, the only logical conclusion to make is that the Russians dropped a bomb somewhere.
For the first time since I can remember, the EAS got my attention tonight.
Fix your fucking graphics, Channel 7.
3) Based on the number of hits I get on the Channel 7 articles, I should just turn this site in to strange aspy observations about what’s on that channel, and only that channel.
So I just went outside to take the trash to the curb, and thought “what the fuck happened to my garbage can?”.
It looked like someone might have rolled it in ash.
Upon further investigation, I discovered it was covered in more maggots than I’ve ever seen in one place.
No fucking way am I touching that.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll need to douse it in gasoline and set it ablaze, unless they have the good sense to turn in to flies and go away before I get home from work.
Local ordinances be damned. This is the only way I can purify my driveway.
Update:
Apparently, there are two schools of thought on getting rid of them in such a way that the police and / or fire department won’t pay me a visit.
The first is to boil water, mix bleach and Pine Sol in to the boiling water, and throw it on the maggots. Because cleaning up boiled maggots soaked in bleach and Pine Sol is less gross than using my ShopVac and hoping they starve.
The other is to use pesticide. I’ve got a bunch of that around, and I’ll give it a shot. Thing is, the boiled concoction proponents say pesticide doesn’t work at all.
Steph and I went to see Owl City, Lights, and Paper Route at the Royal Oak Music Theatre on Thursday. Personally, I was in it almost exclusively for Lights, but I didn’t hate Owl City and I thought I could tolerate Paper Route.
Off the top of my head, I can’t recall an experience that changed my perceptions so quickly.
The light distorts what a self-important asshole Adam Young has become.
For starters, Paper Route is about a million times better live. In trying to explain the difference, the only accurate thing I can come up with is: they sound less bitchy. They sound like they mean it. And they seem weirdly polite. Maybe it’s that they’re from Nashville. Maybe it’s because a Detroit crowd would go nuts over someone taking a festering dump on a guitar on stage. I can’t say for certain.
They opened for everyone, I guess you could say. At least, in my mind. I think they had two or three actual fans, so getting a good view at the SRO Royal Oak Music Theatre was surprisingly easy to accomplish. They were loud, and seemed sincere enough, and try as I might to deny it, they were good. In retrospect, I probably should have picked up their CD and given them another chance.
Lights was basically what I expected. She did the Old Navy repertoire, and what are unarguably the best tracks off of The Listening, but that was more or less it. I was disappointed that she seemed rushed and that there were none of the fabled covers (particularly Coldplay’s Lost), but at the same time, her performance and presence was so adorable, I wanted to put her in my pocket.
Finally, it was time for Owl City.
Now, being a moderate Death Cab for Cutie and a stupidly huge fan of The Postal Service, I’ve never been terribly overjoyed by the way Owl City progressively co-opts The Postal Service. But short of Fireflies, other Owl City songs aren’t complete ripoffs, so I went in to it prepared to give them the benefit of doubt.
Right out of the gate, they have this overblown “light up everyone in the band” opening that took far too long. Look! A guy on drums. Oooh! A violinist and a cellist! Holy shit! Keyboards! And then… Adam comes jumping around in an owl hoodie, looking more tweaked than your typical City Club regular.
The gaggle of 15 year-old girls absolutely lost their shit, while me and their parents tried to figure out what the big fuss was about. Frankly, I would have been fine with him sitting in front of a MacBook and fucking around. But no, dude’s making the absolute most of his fifteen minutes. The ridiculous amount of aping he was doing in conjunction with “HOW’S EVERYBODY FEELING?” after every second song was almost embarrassing, at least to me, having paid for the ticket.
Seriously. I’ve seen some real nobodies before, and none have approached the crowd-whoring on display here. Not even Steve “Give it up for me!” Ballmer could touch this guy.
As we had moved around the theatre throughout the night, we ended up really close to the soundboard, and that’s where my hope was successfully killed off.
I know how a soundboard works, and not just because I mastered the hell out of South Lyon High’s 1993 production of Mame (yes, I am going to take full credit on this one, unless you can prove otherwise). The amount of engineering, and pre-prod, and all around fuckery that was going on was almost too much for me to take in.
It’s one thing to rip off another artist and be somewhat original about it. It’s something else to be devoid of talent.
For example: I love the hell out of Oasis, and I’d never dream of arguing that they spent the greater portion of the 90′s dipping in to The Beatles’ well. But in the same regard, you’re legally retarded to suggest that the brothers Gallagher can’t write and perform the shit out of a song.
Owl City, on the other hand… I’m not 100% convinced that the audio engineer doesn’t help Adam shoot up backstage, because he sure as hell does everything but jump around in an owl hoodie when the music’s playing.
Perhaps the most amusing incident of the night was when they got to Fireflies — clearly the only song the Peanut Gallery had actually heard of , as evidenced by them going nutty, and singing along for the first time after twelve other songs.
We left early, and met a woman in the elevator who had taken her kids to the show. “It’s much different than where I was last night.”
“Where were you last night?”
“We went and saw this guy… Johnny Rotten… he used to be in a band called The Sex Pistols.”
It made me feel nice that she thought we were too young to know who Johnny Rotten was, or who the Sex Pistols were. Success.
P.S. If you haven’t seen me whoring this video out before, enjoy:
