A Mission Possible: Get Your Drank On

I was gonna save this video for Thanks4nothing, but I ran out of content before that, and the sidebar is a vanishing domain upon which we feasty dogs must fight to survive.  Before I exhorted my commentariat to find video of TV’s Michael “The Worf” Dorn talking about monkey lovin’, but it proved to be something I’d hallucinated in the past.  What I’m going to ask of you now is actually possible, so please do it.

Observe…

Now I know what you’re thinking.  “That sounds interesting, except maybe I do this this and this instead, until it no longer resembles original concept in any respect.”  And I get that.  This is FtB, and like the bloggers here, we are all fierce individualists who anarchistically never accomplish anything.  But resist the impulse!  Resist it, I say.  One, this is worth doing right, at least once.  Two, I don’t want to be the only person in the world who has ever done it.  Please don’t leave me hangin’!

I wasn’t hugely clear on the specifics of method, so take this in recipe form.

Toolz

  • 1 paring knife
  • mixing bowl
  • one ziploc sandwich bag
  • two ziploc freezer bags
  • three regular bowls, small to medium size
  • big clear glass mug
  • wide-mouth straw like they do at bubble tea joints
  • maybe roll of paper towels or a small regular towel handy for messes

Ingredience

  • 1 pomegranate
  • 1 small thingus of lucky charms, generic may be adequate
  • 1 20 oz bottle of pepsi

Destructions

  • put one freezer bag inside another, just in case of tiny holes.
  • pour the pepsi into the inner freezer bag and seal both.  do not seal a bunch of air inside because these will swell as the water within freezes, and you don’t want them to pop open.  squeeze a lil air out, careful not to spill liquid.
  • put that shit in the freezer.  set a timer for maybe forty-five minutes.
  • keep checking on it every forty-five minutes, busting up crystals so it freezes slushy, no big hard chunks within.  you may also have to let more air out as it expands.  it is finished when this is a frozen pepsi, more crystal than liquid, but slushy – not a big slab.
  • you can do more of these steps while you wait for freezing.  depending on your freezer it could take hours.
  • rinse the pomegranate.  use the paring knife to notch the rind, circumnavigating the sumbitch with the cut in at least two directions, so you can pull it apart in quarters.
  • put maybe three inches of water in the mixing bowl, and get it, one ziploc sandwich bag, and one regular bowl at least medium size, and have them within reach – along with optional towels for spills.  put on a movie or some podcasts; you’ll be here a while.
  • gently pull apart pomegranate, sinking the quarters in the mixing bowl of water.  they don’t have to be fully submerged, but water should be accessible.
  • remove all the rind and mesocarp (inner membranes) from the pomegranate arils, placing them in your medium bowl.  if it’s white, it goes.  sometimes a lil strand of pulp will be stuck to the base of an aril.  i individually knock these off, tho it makes this take a ridiculously long time.  even the best pomegranates most of us can get have some amount of rotten seeds.  chuck them in the garbage bowl too.  the water helps you get junk off your fingers as you go.  a towel may also be useful.
  • as you go, put the fresh arils in the ziploc sandwich bag.  when you got all the good ones, refrigerate.  they’re nicer slightly chilled.  these will be in better condition than the ones you get from a grocery store.  super primo.
  • at the end you will also have one bowl of rind pieces plus a few rotten arils.  garbage or compost.  the bowl of water will be yellowish and have tiny bits of plant matter in it.  send it down the drain.
  • get two more bowls and your lucky charms.  one of the bowls can be pretty small.
  • separate the marshmallows from the oat cereal pieces in the lucky charms.  the bowls help, give you something to divvy into.  you don’t need a lot of the marshmallows, maybe a little less than a handful, depending on the size of your hands.  at the end pour the oat bits back in the box, to sadden the next child who tries to pour some of their favorite cereal.  set the bowl of ‘shmallows aside.
  • you might have to wait longer if your pepsi ain’t frozen yet.  when it’s good, it’s time to play bartender.
  • make a lil conical pyramid at the bottom of your mug.
  • pour lucky charms around the base of it.
  • pour a similar amount of pom arils on top of the lucky charms, maybe a lil less.  you will have a lot of arils left.  you can use for more of the recipe for pals, or save as a treat for later.  i like to eat ’em straight or with cool whip from a lil ramekin.
  • top it off with however much of the frozen pepsi fits in your mug.
  • serve with wide-mouthed straw.
  • WARNING – the arils are a choking hazard.  careful how you succc.

In the video I also failed to adequately describe it.  First up, frozen pepsi is what you’d expect.  Nice, if wildly sweet.  Second, you’d think the marshmallows would disintegrate, but not really?  And the way they almost crunch in the mouth is weirdly pleasing.  Also very sweet, with a touch of food coloring taste.  Lastly, pomegranate arils explode in the mouth real nice, and when they do?  Release a slightly sour taste into the excessively sweet beverage, lending it a lot of interest.

Let me know if u dun it, or if you’re a boring anarchist who had to do your own shit.  I’d be curious about an alcoholic version tho I total tee.  Comment on the blog, not on yewchoob.  Thanks.

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Essential Milks

I made a playlist of what I deemed the best Dead Milkmen songs, following my exhaustive review of their discography, trying to have at least one from most of their albums, to get the range of what’s going on there.  Does it hang together?

The biggest problem with making this kind of thing is often the volume difference from one album to the next, however I think yewchoob might equalize stuff to have a similar noisiness, from one video to the next?  At least, I don’t recall having any radical changes causing issues – unlike burning one’s own cd, where that’s a perennial annoyance.

Another issue is appended intro or outro material on a track, no way to skip without editing.  That’s why I left “Life is Shit” off of this list, tho it’s usually considered essential to tha canon.  Anyway, top 20 Dead Milkmen songs in whatever order seemed the least jarring with minimal effort.  A number of these tracks break my ableism and/or doomerism policies, so beware…

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Brainjackin: Let’s Play

Didja know, there are yewchoob channels where all the person does is play video games?  Sometimes they do it straight, like, only the sights and sounds you would see if you were playing the game on your own, with their invisible hand on the controller.  Other times they do a voice over, with varying degrees of snark or foolery.  Other times, they have a face on the screen – either their actual mug, or a cartoon avatar of some kind.  Originally these were called “let’s play” videos.  I’m not hip to the current lingo.

I wouldn’t know about these if it wasn’t for my husband and his perpetual search for distractions.  He introduced me and I have enjoyed many hours of diversion as well.

Let’s play videos evolved into the more recent generation, which is people running live video streams on a place called twitch.  They play the game live while the chat runs on the screen yelling nazi memes and throwing fractional bitcoins at the players.  idk, never created an account over there.  But it’s all good.  Time marches on.  And there are still plenty of let’s play videos on yewchoob to choose from.  I favor John Wolfe.  Currently he does most of his gaming content on his second channel, which is something he had to create because yewchoob’s algorithms are crap for the liddle guy and even the middle guy, which is where he finds himself these days.

Before James? Stephanie Sterling came out, and before she?they? became too doomy and repetitive for me to watch (hence my lack of awareness of current pronouns), they occasionally did this kind of content for their own channel.  They were especially focused on playing the shittiest games polluting steam and itch.io.  A fan made collections of the best excerpts from those videos, and I include one below, for your delectation.  The Lenny Kravitz near the beginning is from Neil Cicieraga’s amusing remix.  Enjoy.

edit to add cw:  for the none people who still care, this does have a ton of ableist language.  technically some of these are horror games but the horror content has trouble breaking thru the wall of mangled medium.

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Be Still and Know

I was in the parking lot of home despot, when I saw this sign at a distance.  Initially I thought it said, “I AM GOD.”  Strange place for fundie horseshit, I mused, until the actual product was revealed: “FARM FRESH SOD,” where the words farm and fresh were de-emphasized.

I had been primed to see these words by this ornament dangling from the rearview mirror of my ride’s coach:

Sit still and know that if you misbehave, jesus will fuck you up.  Bes’ believe.

I like to mix the ideas.  KNOW THAT I AM SOD, THE FARM FRESH GOD, like a parody of this jam:

If you haven’t thought of that song since your homeboy in college DL’d a midi of it in 1989, you’re welcome.

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Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Yankee Doodle Fvck the USA

I’ve mentioned my pants before, in an article that was no doubt much more entertaining than this one will be.  When I was a wee child I got some 4th of July themed underwear, which meant I was wearing 4th of July themed underwear for as much of the year as they continued to fit my growing ass.  I remember little snare drums like you’d see in front of a juvenile revolutionary war reenactor, betsy ross flags, fireworks.  Something in this imagery interested me enough to remain now as a sliver of a memory.  I found out about “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and other patriotic hokum, and thought this was all in good fun.  Yay, freedom!  My country ’tis of-

I don’t remember when, specifically, I started to get the facts.  While history classes tended to stop before Vietnam, sometimes the textbook itself would have a section we just magically never got around to, and maybe out of boredom I read ahead.  Sometimes I’d just happen to be around while a movie about Vietnam was playing.  War is the impossibility of reason something something.  Maybe it was the inevitable question raised by the parts of history they didn’t manage to skip – what actually was wrong with white people that slavery and Jim Crow were things?  The Trail of Tears?  The Japanese Internment?  Seriously, white people?

4th of July underwear on my baby ass, made me feel some type of way.  America the beautiful.  Three cheers for-

Brainjackin: The Normal

There are some things in life I only know about because of my husband’s evil influence.  Once upon a time he got on a jag of listening to a musician known as Fad Gadget, aka Frank Tovey.  Good lookin’ guy, passed too young due to a congenital heart defect, made wacky art-influenced electronic music.  While he was digging that guy, he told me all sorts of other adjacent things.

It starts with a guy named Daniel Miller in 1978 releasing an indie electronic track called “Warm Leatherette,” for his solo project The Normal.  That song did well for the indies, inspiring Grace Jones to do a more successful cover of it in 1980.  “Warm Leatherette” is very basic, even crude, and has lyrics that are just basic bitch fanboying about J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.  You know, the one that was portrayed in cinema some years later, with James Spader and Holly Hunter getting their rocks off by experiencing car crashes.

Meanwhile, Miller established the soon to be ultra-successful Mute Records.  One of his other projects there was a silly little album of classic rock and roll covers as The Silicon Teens.  According to wikipedia Miller provided the vocals, but they do sound rather like his friend Frank Tovey, who posed as the band’s singer.  Who actually sang?  Dunno.  But Mute Records had all sorts of interesting artists.

Of primary interest to my man, Frank Tovey’s Fad Gadget, who had several cool songs, most famously “Ricky’s Hand,” “Collapsing New People,” and “Lady Shave.”  Did Collapsing New People make you think of Einstürzende Neubaten, whose name means Collapsing New Buildings?  No coincidence, that band was also on Mute, and the song was about them.

That’s not what made Mute a gazillion dollars.  That would be Depeche Mode.  I love those guys.  Once upon a time they were young men, and there’s a picture of lil’ Dave wearing a Fad Gadget T-shirt.  At least, I remember seeing that somewhere.  Might be misremembering it.  Anyway, the world wouldn’t have all that great Depeche Mode music if it wasn’t for these weirdos, and if it wasn’t for The Normal, and if it wasn’t for Warm Leatherette.

Join… the car crash set.

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Simile Songs

“Human Cannonball” by the Butthole Surfers and “Chewing Gum” by Amyl and The Sniffers both feature similes at the end of the chorus.  Not sure why else I’m associating them tonight.  Incidentally both of these artists are problematic (former much more than the latter), cancel at will, but I like things about their work.  Even within these songs there are things to offend, while far from their worst in that regard.  Prominent ableist language in the second video, if you’re one of the three people who are still bothered about that.

I would like to know if I’m missing something about The Sniffers by not being Australian.  Is that band conservative-coded and/or nazi-friendly?  Amyl appeared on a rap track by some dudes who sounded like they were complaining about graffiti.  On the other hand, hard to imagine them lining up with any party down there besides the Sex Party.  I ask because I’m liking them, and wanna know if I should nip that in the bud while I’m new.

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Mah Spoon is Too Big

Hey who remembers Don Hertzfeldt?  His early masterwork circulated in low quality bootlegs for a long time, having been released just in time for massive expansion of the internet, to be downloaded at 320p a quarter bazillion times.  Edgy wiggly cartoons.  Funny voices.  Violence.  Amusing nonsense.  More importantly, artistic use of the medium.  I don’t think Adult Swim even existed back then, tho it was young enough to have been influenced by Matt Groening and MTV’s Liquid Television.  Content warnings:  This shit be violent, including against children.  Very brief fatphobic joke.

I am rather fond of this little film.  Don has more -and more important- works, tho sadly his personal website bitterfilms.com is no longer as artistic as it used to be.  I imagine some kind of hassle came along and broke the cool navigation and format stuff he had done, and he didn’t feel like struggling against that particular river.  One of these years, I want to make a cool personal website again.  I’ve purchased bebemelangedotcom but it is presently nothing at all.

During a window of time when I happened to be majoring in animation at art school, Don teamed up with Mike Judge to produce a thing called The Animation Show.  I attended one of those events and got his signature in an old sketchbook.  Good times.

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