Green Day

Last night I went and saw Green Day in concert, and wow, that’s all I can say. They put on an absolutely fantastic show.

The set was a really well put together mix of new and old and even though a couple of albums weren’t as well represented as others, I have no complaints. Everything they did play was played well, and every performance had energy to spare. It always helps the experience when it seems like the band is having fun onstage, and if they weren’t last night, they had me fooled.

They also did a lot to get the crowd involved. Call and response, sing alongs, getting people to come up onstage and play their instruments, it was all there. They even let the guy playing the guitar keep it, how cool is that?

So if you get a chance to see them when they come to your town, go, you’ll have a hard time not having fun. Ok, so I saw 1 person not having a good time, but she’s kind of a bitch anyway so who cares? Well actually she was probably dragging the guy she was with down and he’s not that bad of a dude so I guess that could have messed up his night since I know he was stoked to be there.

My Chemical Romance was the opening band and they managed to pack a lot into their 30 or so minute set. They did their best to get the crowd going and for the most part it worked. People seemed to be into them, and even I dug their set though I’m not really a fan. I left with a bit more respect for them and their music than I had going in though so I guess you could say that they did their job.

The most memorable part of their performance for me wasn’t a song, it was something that the lead singer said between songs. He was calling out to the crowd and getting the girls in the different parts of the building to scream. Then he quieted everybody down and said something that for some reason stuck with me.

“Ok, now that I’ve got your attention girls I want to tell you something. You’re probably going to go to a lot of different shows and see a lot of different bands. Some of them may look like us, some of them may look like Motley Crüe, you never know. But a lot of these bands are going to come up to you and tell you the same thing. If you show us your tits, we’ll give you a backstage pass. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to get right up close to them…and spit right in their fucking faces, because you’re better than that! You’re all better than that!”

I guess the reason that was so memorable to me is that I never thought I’d hear a guy in a band say something like that, and I thought it was kind of cool in a way.

My biggest complaint about their part of the show would have to be the sound. It wasn’t horrible by any means, but I’ve noticed that for some reason concerts in arenas generally have one band that sounds a lot better than the other from an actual audio perspective. I’m not sure why that is, but the opening bands always seem to sound technically worse than the headliners. If anybody knows why that is, let me know because it’s bothered me for years.

Before I get out of here I want to let everybody know that things might be slow around here for a little while. I’m out of town visiting my family for a few days and Carin’s got a lot going on too so updates could be few and far between until at least next Tuesday. I’ll try to get some stuff up here when I can and who knows what Carin will be able to do and hell, maybe Matt will even come back, yeah right. But keep checking back, things will be back to normal real soon.

Sticks and Stones…

You know the old saying, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names, or words, will never hurt me?” If that’s true, then why is there all this political correctness bullshit? It’s always bothered me, because it doesn’t solve anything.

Let’s think about this. Back in the old days, the actual technical terms, with no bad intent, for someone with a developmental disability were idiot, imbecile and moron. Then those words got stigmatized, so instead of dealing with the attitude, they changed the word. I think the next one was mentally retarded. And when you think about that word, there is nothing offensive about it. Mentally slower. That’s all it means. It’s the most honest word we’ve had so far. But that wasn’t good because people started calling them retards. So let’s change the word again. How about handicapped? Delayed? Nope, same problem. How about challenged? Special? Well let me ask you this. Ever heard the sentence, “You’re special, in the olympic sort of way.” Or, “He has…challenges.” to describe someone who someone thinks of as stupid? What’s happening, boys and girls? Different words, same stigma. And now the words’ meaning doesn’t even come close to what it’s being used to describe. AT least retarded and delayed were honest words.

And, ever notice that an asshole can still be an asshole even if he uses the “right words”? Changing the words doesn’t change the problem. And the funny part is, while it gives assholes the means to veil their attitudes in polite words, it makes the honest good people become too afraid to so much as speak to people who are different than them in any way, for fear they’ll use the wrong word to offend them. Nothing is funnier than watching someone go, “So, have you been v-b-v-um, uh, that way since birth?” Or, “Can I say see and look and watch?” All political correctness does is make it very obvious who is different, and put up barriers.

I’m not saying we should use the old words. It’s too late for them. But I’m saying stop making new words. Put the brakes on PC and let’s start changing the attitudes! If we don’t, we won’t be able to say anything because anything could have a bad connotation.

Radio Is Stupid

I was just listening to the song “No Surprise” by Theory of a Deadman a minute ago. Everybody seems to hate that song, but I’ve been digging it since the first time I heard it. Maybe I suck, who knows, but that’s not why we’re here.

I noticed something about the radio edit of the song that I should have caught a lot earlier than I did. Whoever did the censorship on this thing must have been on crack. They cut out the word shit, but leave in fuck and bitch. What sense does that make? When did fuck become more acceptable than shit? I always thought it was the other way around. But whatever, my popcorn is getting cold so I’ll let somebody else worry about it, I just thought it was sort of strange.

In Case You Didn’t Know

I just got an email from someone who I thought knew better than to fall for this crap. He emails me and says, “Do you think this is real?” Below his excited message is one of these international lotto messages. Yeah, he won a million dollars and all he has to do is respond, give them all his personal information and pay some, um, well, legal fees. Yeah, right. It’s a scam. So I figured I’d explain why in case someone else reading this might have happened across one of these messages for the first time and was considering replying and handing over all their info.

Ok, let’s start breaking it down. First of all, and most importantly, if you didn’t buy an international lottery ticket, how do you expect to win an international lottery? You know how a lottery works. You buy a ticket, you enter to win. How come in this case, people throw the rules of common sense out the window? “It came to me in an email. It must be legitimate. They mention lawyers in it, it must be legal.” No no no! It’s like viruses. If it’s not expected, it’s likely trouble.

Next, how did they get your email address? If they don’t say how they got it, chances are pretty damn high that it was through illegal means or just random spamming. They didn’t find you because of some promotional technique unless they tell you what that is. For instance, “you deal with company X. We are one of company X’s affiliates, and as part of something you signed that allows company X to share information with its affiliates, we got your info.” Of course, you’d have to actually deal with company X and you would have had to have signed something that they refer to for this to be valid.

Next, how do you even know who this person is, and since you don’t know who they are, how can you just tell them all your personal information? Shouldn’t there be something a little more official or formal than, “send all your stuff here”? Doesn’t that make it way too easy for them to get enough information to, oh, say, commit identity theft?

And, don’t you find it a bit odd that you’re having to pay legal fees and they don’t even tell you how much they are or what they will entail?

Finally, this email came from the Netherlands. That is the place where a lot of these international lottery *scams* come from. So if it’s from the Netherlands saying ya won big bucks, chances are it’s big bullshit.

I was just so shocked that this person, a smart person in so many ways, fell for this. So please! Everyone! Don’t send money and personal information to people who claim you’ve one big international bucks. You haven’t, unless you actually bought a ticket. That stuff doesn’t just come for free. All that comes for free out of this crap is trouble.

No Thanks

I just learned something that I really didn’t want to know. Apparently you can rent sex toys. Yes, rent them, like you would a video or a car.

If you’re interested, and judging by some of the stuff that shows up in our search results more than a few of you probably are, have a look at
Rent-a-Dildo.com – Sex Toys Online.

Of particular interest to me is the
How It Works
section, where great pains are taken to not tell you how they clean this stuff before the next guy gets his hands and everything else on it.

Ug, I may never visit a second-hand store again.

All Things Pope

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about
The Incredible Popeman comic books and action figures?
Well, if that’s just not enough JP2 swag for you, perhaps you might be interested in your very own set of
A Pope for the Ages trading cards.

As for me, I’m holding out until I can buy a “My Pope went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” shirt.

I’ll let someone else make the joke about the soon to be released John Paul II commemorative breathing tube, because that’s just not nice.

Chain Mail Wisdom

Somebody sent me one of those tell the people in your life how much you love them chain emails today. I’m sure you know the ones, everybody gets them and they’re all pretty much the same. What would you do if one day you woke up and someone you care about was gone? Would you have any regrets? Anything you wish you would have said? Would that person know truly how you felt? Yeah, you know the ones.

The sentiment was nice, though I can’t help but think whenever I get one how much more it would have meant if the person sending it had taken a couple of minutes to actually sit down and write it on his or her own just for me, instead of blindly forwarding somebody else’s words to an addressbook full of people, words that have no doubt been around the net millions of times over the years. Maybe it’s just me, but when I know that these nice words I’m reading that were sent by somebody I care about are also at any given time being read by some fat guy in Iowa and everybody else this person knows, they tend to lose most, if not all of their meaning. It doesn’t take much longer to write your own email to tell me that you’re thinking of me, and I can’t speak for everybody, but I for one really appreciate the personal touch.

But that’s not even why I’m writing this.

Like most chain letters, this one had the standard set of instructions at the end. The ones that tell you to send it on to everyone you know so that they’ll all know exactly how you feel. But a line in this set really stood out to me. It said “pass this message on to everyone you know, including the person who sent it to you. IF you don’t, the sky won’t fall, but somebody in the world won’t be smiling.”

First of all, who worries about the sky falling? I know I don’t. And why should I be upset if only 1 person on the planet isn’t smiling? It seems to me that if we somehow managed to get the ranks of the non-smiling down to just 1 person, that would be a huge improvement compared to the way things are now. Think about it. There are somewhere around 6 billion people traveling around the sun with us. And when you stop and consider the kinds of situations that millions of them find themselves living in day after day, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that quite a few of them aren’t going to be smiling whether I send the email back to my friend or not. What would they care? I’m sure that if you were somehow able to ask those people what would make them smile, a hot meal or an end to the conflicts that threaten their very existence on a daily basis would rank far higher on the list than the fat guy in Iowa getting his chain letter back. So please, next time you think about hitting forward to pass on the nice letter, think about what it actually says, and think about how much more you could do to make the people around you smile.

Quote Of The Day

“White people…we CANNOT be black. It’s not possible. We cannot “wave our hands in the air, and wave ’em like we just don’t care!”

We, as white folks must “raise our digits vertically and oscillate them like we fear no repercussions.” We are corny, white people. Fuckin’ embrace it. We can’t “drop it like it’s hot.” White people all dance weird, kind of like Elaine from Seinfeld.”

Shawn M. Smith of InsidePulse.com.