Love And Monster Trucks

And banging each other's cousins.

Oh, and public drunkenness and terrible reporting.



Poor lady. The reporter should have let her go the minute he realized she was in no condition to be interviewed, and instead delved deeper into personal questions when he saw that her being drunk led to her being open and honest. And now the whole world will know her story.

I'm tagging this with ''stupidity'', but on the journalist's part, not the woman he's laughing at and putting down.

Fathers Day

On Fathers Day, I texted my dad. I'd spoken to him for over a half hour the previous day, and I knew he was working and wouldn't have slept the night before, so I didn't want to impose another conversation that wouldn't be as ''deep'' as the one we'd just have.

Funny that I didn't have a dad for the first 20 years of my life - or not a permanent one, and certainly not the biological one - and now that I do, I treat him as if he'd always been there.

But the best Fathers Day thing I've read this year was from Enid-Raye Adams' blog, which quoted another one, and can be found here. I'll just quote her conclusion:

To all the Moms out there doing both jobs, Happy Father's Day.
And to the Dads that stay and do the work, you are a treasure beyond description.

Good stuff.

April's Blog Suggestions

I have met a lot of creative individuals in my lifetime, and vowed to stay informed and updated on/in their lives, then Life happened and it fell through.

But there are two of these people - who you may not have heard of, though you definitely should have - who have kept hacking at their dream and their voice while living normal lives and raising families and going through hardships, hard times, hard shit - and that I have moderately stayed in contact with.

In no particular order, here they are, both back in the blogging game.

First, Charlotte Martin. She is a terrific songwriter, an exceptional singer, and an even better human being. Married to Ken Andrews (formerly of Failure and Replicants, now a music producer and engineer) for roughly a decade, they have two children and live in California (though she is originally from Chicago). They take turns touring so that one can stay behind with the kids, and her fanbase and circle of friends often intertwines in an odd way that never would have been possible before the internet age. Because of that, she was able to survive and thrive even after ending her relationship with major label RCA.

You should also follow Enid-Raye Adams. She will likely write a lot less often than Charlotte, but every post will turn your life upside down. She hails from Western Canada and at some point decided it would mean a better life for her to return there, but in between she was probably on the verge of finding regular work in Hollywood; you may have seen her in Final Destination 2, The L Word, Dead Like Me, Babylon 5 and Slap Shot 2, but she has since played in a lot of TV series that were filmed in Canada, such as Fringe, The Haunting Hour and Arctic Air. She's an extremely smart person who isn't just a terrific performer but also has a couple of really good screenplays in her. She is also trying to juggle a family life with the added reality of hard economic troubles and a constant questioning of her place in the world, and her level of happiness.

They are both very open about their lives, especially their pain - though Enid-Raye perhaps more so than Charlotte, because she has this feeling that no one's reading her stuff and treats it like a diary that perhaps even her husband doesn't know about (if he does, I hope he doesn't find out about her state of mind through it at times), whereas CharMar feels like each of her readers is a close friend that she doesn't want to have worrying about her.

They are both extremely compelling and thought-provoking. And people you can't help feeling for.

Video Of The Week: Macedo

This week I decided to feature a group of indie up-and-comers, the type that is either hit or miss, who could just as well become the Next Big Thing or fall into oblivion, usually depending on one small push from one famous person, or one remarkable performance on one late-night TV show, or one impressive festival booking in the right slot...

The band is Macedo, a California act comprised (mostly) of twin sisters Michelle Alicia Macedo and Melissa Ann Macedo. The style is teenage dark pop, and this single in particular, Your Skin, really reminds me of a less-guitar-driven, softer, perhaps a tad less edgy version of Magneta Lane's The Constant Lover, a song I should have featured years ago (and can't believe I still haven't, considering it's in my top-100 of the 00s). And perhaps that's why I find it so catchy, but maybe not.

Of course, there are some oh-so-clever lyrics because we are in that age in spoken arts in general, but they don't distract so much that they overshadow the rest of the song; nor are they worthy of an award in and of themselves, either, though. Here are two:

I handed you a sentence you would never forget

(get it? like a prison sentence, or like a phrase that couldn't be repeated in song), and

I'm about to kiss my worst critic

It's cute, and a welcome change from the crappy pop too many people still listen to these days. I would have just one quip with it: it's a tad too 'rocky' at the end for my 'pop' tastes, and far too quiet in general for when I'm in the mood to rock out, like it's sitting between chairs, not knowing which to choose.

When confronted with the same dilemma, Magneta Lane decided to rock harder. Just sayin'.

Hero of The Day: Jason Collins

I know next to nothing about basketball. I mean, I know the rules for having played it a bit in high school, and I'm aware that in order to win, a team must score more points than its opponent, and that some baskets are worth 1 point, others 2, the trickiest farthest 3.

Like baseball, I stopped following the pros over a decade ago, so while I watched a lot of games involving Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Larry Bird when I was younger, I haven't seen Kobe Bryant, or LeBron James or Dwayne Wade play.

I stopped caring when the Toronto Raptors came in, and when Shaquille O'Neal became a superstar. Not because of those events, but around the same time. I went from casual fan to not caring at all. So that's for context.

What changed? Not much. I likely won't watch a game any time soon, but my respect for its players has increased a tad now that Jason Collins has come out of the closet. For a while now, basketball players were up there with football players as athletes whose egos got so big they thought they were above the law: allegations of rape, selling drugs, gun violence, robberies, gang affiliations... the only ones who didn't get prison time settled out of court - not exactly a plea of ''not guilty''.

And yet, just when everybody was looking at the NFL for the first openly gay in the top-4 of North American pro team sports, in comes a basketball player to take a stand. We'll see where that gets him, though, because as of the end of the season, he'll be a free agent. His twin brother - Jarron Collins - became a free agent two seasons ago and never got hitched to a team; now teams would have an extra reason to exclude Jason if they had any inclination in that direction...

Speaking of Jarron, he was completely unaware of his brother's orientation. So much for twin telepathy!

Hopefully, this starts a chain reaction of coming out and acceptance, and we can get back to what really matters: the sports themselves. And when we focus on the athletes and try to figure out what type of person they are, we can assess how they treat those they get in bed with (i.e. 'not a rapist', 'doesn't cheat on his wife'), and not bother with their gender.

Not My Day

Your boss tells you on Friday : ''no need to show up in the morning on Monday, 1 PM will suffice. Sleep in.'' Sounds like a great thing, right?

But of course Murphy will take exception to this and fuck it right up, evil scheming invisible bastard that He is.

So I go to bed at 10 PM-ish, I think, which is early as fuck for me. My roommate/little brother Yan got home at 3:30 AM and woke me up – and I couldn’t fall back asleep. At least I got some reading done – Pearl Jam Twenty (the book – while I await the arrival of the Blu-ray in the mail, possibly Friday). I’m at the year 2000 – Binaural.

But the worst part was the subway ride to fucking work: squeezed up, like fucking mushrooms in a can, and getting pushed by all those sweaty animals as they take the longest possible fucking route to the train’s exit, by bumping into 20 people rather than 5. For that kind of fucking swine, the fastest way from Point A to Point B is by Texas via the fucking moon, with a pit stop for coffee.

Murder might have been the case they gave Snoop Dogg, but I was tempted to follow that path as well. As a matter of fact, I was abnormally over-aggressive on the mid-day hour, considering.

The evening’s looming and my energy level’s dropping, my vision is blurring, and I know I’ll have to share another ride with those fucking worker bees in just a hundred minutes or so. I recently saw a phrase online, possibly on Facebook, that read ''You are not stuck in traffic; you ARE traffic''. Well, I’m not. Not at all. The 9-to-5 crowd is not my crowd, unless you mean the people who start drinking at 9 PM and only stop at 5AM to shower and start their day. In which case, that literally is my crowd, the one that comes to my fucking shows, the ones I owe a lot to.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Hockey Night In Goofy Land

If you know anything about hockey, you might be disappointed at how this 1945 Disney short featuring Goofy (in most roles...) depicts my national sport... ripe with multiple fights, gratuitous violence (yes, it's a Disney flick!), few actual goals (but more than 700 total!) and lacrosse-inspired slap shots.

Oh, and it's called Hockey Homicide... great title!

Foxing Up The Hartford Whalers

It's a slow summer on my blog, I must admit. May and June were relatively productive, but July, because I'm way too busy renovating my house so two roommates can move in (including one of my brothers).

But I don't want to leave you hanging with nothing, so I'll give you Megan Fox, sporting a Hartford Whalers t-shirt, which is special considering the team hasn't been in existence since 1997, when they moved to Raleigh to become the Carolina Hurricanes. The link is here.

So, either she is well versed in hockey, or has someone who takes care of her wardrobe who is very indie - or she is one slick woman with a definite sense of style and irony.

Either way, I got to plug Megan Fox once again.

Bagging Megan Fox

Most guys would love to; she's the ''it'' Girl Of The Moment, like Angelina Jolie was, at some point.

I know for a fact one of my kid brothers' dream is to bag Megan Fox.

Well, the guys at National Lampoon did it, and they put it online.

Oh yeah.

The video appears below.

Speaking of Megan Fox, anyone see her Rolling Stone pictorial? Apparently, they put all the pictures up so you'd be tempted into buying the magazine for the interview. It's what people call ''thinking outside the box''. Except this is the reason why there actually is a box to think in...