Please, no "420" references. Grow up.
Saw a pretty cool car wreck on my walk to work this morning. Guy in a white delivery van came tearing out of this alley from a dead stop, and as soon as he started fishtailing, I knew it was all over. He overcompensated the other way, careened off a Camry, and slammed into another white delivery van parked on the side of the street.
I walked across the street and offered my business card to the guy in the Camry, just in case he needed a witness. The weird part is that he stood there tying his shoe for what seemed like a full minute while I held my business card out there. I finally said, "Hey, I'm trying to do you a favor here. You want my information or not?" He finally muttered something unintelligible and took the card. People are fucked up.
Speaking of fucked up people, lately I've been looking for blogs worth reading. Just when I was beginning to despair for the state of weblogs, I discovered a fire inside: the gentle art of making enemies.
She's a Yankee fan and a meat eater, but we seem to agree on everything else up and down the line. Not that that's required for me to enjoy someone's blog, but how can you not love someone that loves Jimmy Corrigan, the Simpsons, Gary Oldman, and Propaghandi?!?
Which begs the question: Are there any other decent weblogs out there? I read dack, kingFresh, and now a fire inside, daily (I guess I should come clean: I end up reading megnut most days too, more out of prurient interest than anything else.), but what else is out there? I can only make it through about five bloghop entries before I lose my mind, so If anyone knows of blogs that don't suck, please let me know.
Thanks to kingFresh for turning me on to the Hero Machine. Here is me, if I were super.
That was a lot of ado, but now, the news.
Scoop Casey's News Roundup
Yesterday's News, Today.
Dude. He choked you.
Drugs are bad, mmmkay?
Really bad, mmmkay?
The ax tends to hurt a li'l bit on the way down.
Wanna cyber?
Did anyone really think this was a good idea?
You like-ah the juice? The juice is good, ah? ßßß
501
So Barry Bonds casually hit the game-winner last night too. God love ya, Barry. Joan Walsh sure does.
In Dodger news, the new sheriff in town is now the former sheriff. After getting into it with a Padres fan, Kevin Malone is getting the axe. What a dumb ass.
And then there's this guy. If you saw the highlights of this ump taking square in the face an attempted throw to first base, you know it was grisly. If you didn't get to see it, then by all mean, click here! It's a little less than halfway into the clip. Yikes.
In all the baseball-related excitement of the past couple of days, I didn't get to address the fact that Aaron Sorkin got busted for possession in the Burbank Airport. Sorkin was holding mushrooms and "passed out briefly" when he got pinched. Sounds like dude needs Valium instead of psilocybin. ßßß
500!
Magic. That's the only word that can describe the events that I witnessed at Pacific Bell Park last night. I saw Barry Bonds hit his 500th career home run.
He didn't hit it against the Brewers at Miller Park, and he didn't hit it in a lopsided game that was already in the bag. Barry hit the game-winning home run at home, in front of a sellout crowd, against the Dodgers. And I was there.
I'm not trying to rub it in or anything, but it's just that you know in 10 years, half a million people are gonna say they saw it live. But I'm one of the 41,059 people that can say it and not be lying.
Allow me to set the scene for you: Picture, if you will, a sold-out Pac Bell Park. Darren Dreifort, the Dodgers starter, had given up a first-inning run on a Jeff Kent single, but completely shut down the Giants for the next 5 innings, allowing just one hit. And Bonds had never homered off Dreifort. Dodgers led 2-1. Things did not look good.
But Terry Adams came on in the 7th and continued through the 8th. Rich Aurilia led off the 8th with a triple, and Bonds came to bat. Adams got behind Bonds 2-0, and Barry had to be looking dead-red fastball. Adams delivered, and Bonds turned on it and golfed it straight up into the stratosphere. From the crack of the bat, you just knew it was gone. When it eventually did come down, it splash landed into the Bay and it was promptly collected by a soon-to-be very wealthy guy in a Zodiac. Un-freaking-believable.
Needless to say, the place went absolutely insane. My wife says I permanently damaged her hearing by yelling directly into her ear while I picked her up and swung her around like a rag doll. Complete strangers were hugging each other, construction workers and CEOs were high-fiving, cats and dogs living together — mass hysteria. They stopped the game for a good 10 minutes. Bobby Bonds came out and Barry hugged him and gave him the bat. His wife came out and they hugged. They brought out two other members of the Giants 500 club, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, and had a little presentation. Barry gave a speech in which he did not thank God, I'm happy to say, and the grounds crew unveiled the new "Bonds 500" panel on the left field wall. In a word: perfect.
The drama wasn't over, however. The hated Dodgers still had three outs left to try and get a run to tie it. And Robb Nen, God love him, gave up a lead-off walk. Now anybody that knows closeers in general, and Robb Nen in particular, knows they don't give a good goddamn about holding runners on. Apparently catcher Benito Santiago didn't get the memo. So when pinch-runner and professional base-stealer Tom Goodwin took off for second, Santiago threw down to ... well, to no one, as it turns out. Neither Kent or Aurilia covered, and the ball rolled into center field.
So the tying run's on third, with no outs. Disaster. A fly ball, a wild pitch (always a possibility with Nen), or even a ground ball will tie it up. But Nen gets Marquis Grissom to hit a grounder directly at Aurilia with the infield in. Doesn't get the run home. One out. Nen strikes out Grudzielanek, and that brings up Sheffield. The count goes to 3 and 2, and Sheffield fouls off what seems like 17 pitches. Nen finally gets him to swing at and miss his nasty slider, and the place just explodes. The agony. The ecstasy. The glory.
You really had to be there. ßßß
Music: Response
Lots of coverage yesterday of the passing of Joey Ramone, as you would expect. I was impressed by the job done by mainstream media outlets — for the most part they got the facts right and gave the man the respect he deserved.
MTV's coverage, though, was another story. Take this quote from Sonicnet, MTV's online news arm, for instance:
"I wish I could have met him and told him what a huge influence he had on my life, and what an inspiration his music was, and what a genius he really was," Blink-182 singer/bassist Mark Hoppus said. "Without the Ramones, there wouldn't have been three generations of great punk-rock music, and there certainly wouldn't have been a Blink-182."
It's tempting, of course, to say that if it meant that there would be no Blink-182 I could have made do without the Ramones, but that's just not true. That would be too high a price to pay.
It's spring, and that means the touring season is gearing up. Lotsa good shows comin' to the Bay, including:
Sick of It All at Slim's, April 25.
Rocket from the Crypt and (International) Noise Conspiracy at the Great American Music Hall, May 2.
Jets to Brazil at Slim's, May 1 and 2.
Epitaph just announced dates for their summer Punk-O-Rama tour, but the lineup is pretty weak: Guttermouth, Fenix TX, U.S. Bombs, and the Deviates. With the exception of the Bombs, I couldn't be bothered. Rock on. ßßß
Joey Ramone
1951-2001
It was 1985, and I was in pretty bad shape. At the tender age of 16 I had a healthy drug habit, a sweet mullet, and really, really bad taste in music. I mean really bad taste. If it was bad metal, I owned it: Manowar, Yngwie, Carnivore, you name it. What can I say? That was as close to real rebellion as I was gonna find in the gloomy industrial East Coast hamlet I lived in.
Luckily the heady days of punk-metal crossover were upon us. I was desperate for something that didn't suck, so I diligently tracked down all the bands that the cheezy metal bands I liked cited as their influences: GBH, Suicidal Tendencies, Misfits, and the Ramones.
Those other pseudo-metal-punk crossover bands were cool, but there was something about the cover of the Ramones self-titled debut album. Not to put too fine a point on it, they looked just like me and my friends — jeans, leather jackets, and bad haircuts — and not some Viking or liberty-spiked freak.
And the 14 4-chord songs therein taught me, and hundreds of thousands of other kids like me, that you didn't have to be some virtuoso guitar prodigy kid to rock — quite the opposite, in fact. The fact that Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy (and the drummers that replaced him) were entirely unencumbered with talent allowed them to redefine what constituted rock 'n' roll.
The album clocked in at barely 29 minutes, but that's all the time it took to make the world realize that Yes, Pink Floyd, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were not, in fact, cool. By stripping away all the bullshit rock-star shit that was suffocating rock 'n' roll, they resuscitated it. And for that, Jeffrey Hyman, the gangly kid from Forest Hills, N.Y., will not be forgotten. ßßß
Don't miss last week's brilliant insight.
