Pro Wrestling vs. "Real" Sports

Recently, I was by my parents’ house to visit and the subject of wrestling came up. My mom asked me if I had watched Smackdown the night before, to which I quickly replied “No.”

“Did you just not watch it last night, or what?”

“No, I don’t watch wrestling much anymore,” I said.

“Why is that? I thought you liked wrestling,” my mom persisted.

“Uh, I just don’t. I don’t really know.”

I supposed that exchange shouldn’t really surprise me; I made it a point over the last three years or so to watch both RAW and Smackdown every week, I’ve ordered myriad pay-per-views, I own no less than five wrestling-themed t-shirts, and I’ve been to more than a few live wrestling shows. To say that I wasn’t a wrestling fan at one time would be a lie.

So, why am I not a wrestling fan anymore?

Back in June 2007, wrestler Chris Benoit was found dead in his home along with his wife and son. At first it was thought to be a straight-up triple murder; WWE consequently canceled that Monday night show to show a tribute to one of their most-respected stars. Thanks to the power of the Internet, reports were updated as the show was airing. Those reports said that the police no longer thought it was a triple murder; it was now being investigated as a murder-suicide. The lead suspect? Chris Benoit.

This is not why I stopped being a fan. The Benoit murder-suicide thing is why I took a self-imposed break from watching wrestling. Obviously, the show must go on, so WWE taking a break was out of the question. Personally I thought that it would have been a classy move out of respect to the family of Nancy Benoit, but classy and Vince McMahon don’t go together.

Yes, I realize that for some of the wrestlers the only way for them to grieve would be to keep wrestling. Perhaps some of the fans saw it that way as well. I don’t want to go all Dr. Phil here, but a week off might have been a good time for some self-examination. What made this tragedy happen? Are there any wrestlers that are going through something similar? How can we stop this from happening? Can we stop this from happening?

Alas, it was not to be.

Instead, life went on as usual and Chris Benoit was scarcely mentioned on television. It’s fine, really, because I don’t believe his problem was as widespread as the media made it out to be.
But yeah, I took a break. The line between what was reality and what was fiction became blurrier than normal for a wrestling fan, and I decided the only way to clear things up (and to come to terms with the fact that a widely-respected superstar was also a cold-blooded murderer) was just to take a step back for awhile. After a couple of weeks I found that I didn’t miss wrestling all that much. I kept up with wrestling news for a while after that, but determined that it simply wasn’t worth it. My interest in pro wrestling had been waning for at least a year before then, and now my hiatus from watching it on a weekly basis was the final nail in the coffin.

I should note that I didn’t stop watching because I thought WWE produced an inferior product. I am not a smark. I stopped because I was burned out and bored with watching what is essentially the same thing every week: good guy versus bad guy, hot girls with breast implants, so on and so forth. Not only that, but wrestling is fairly predictable. This is not a bad thing – I think predictability is part of its charm – because the “sameness” that bored me is exactly what keeps wrestling fans coming back in droves.

The stoppage of my watching of wrestling is not an anomaly by any means. Throughout my life, I’ve grown bored or sick of many things. Television shows, music, video games, people (!)… it doesn’t really matter. Things that I take an interest in have a short shelf life with me and they probably always will.

This got me to thinking: Is there anything else that I’ve liked for a long period of time besides oral sex and beer? The only thing I could come up with is professional sports.

Now it should be said that at its very base, football and baseball (my two favorite sports, easily) suffer from the very “sameness” week in and week out that wrestling does. A football game is always going to look like a football game that I’ve seen one hundred times before: there will be passes, running plays, big hits, and at least once per game Brett Favre will do something completely ridiculous.

Where “real” sports win out is with unpredictability. How many of you thought the Giants were going to win the Super Bowl? How many thought the Giants would be easy pickings in the NFC championship game? See what I mean?

This is not to say that you always know what’s going to happen on any given wrestling show, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to handicap a football game than a wrestling match.

The other reason I think sports have held my interest for so long is that there’s an offseason. For some, that just may be more time to dwell on a certain loss or obsess over the draft or free agency. For me, it gives me time to do other activities.

But perhaps the most important side effect of the offseason is that it creates anticipation. In football, you only get 16 weeks of meaningful games, 20 if the team goes to the Super Bowl. By the time August rolls around, I’m jonesing for some football.

The baseball season does indeed slog on and on for six months, but I’m a damned liar if I say that I’m not excited about the upcoming season. Finally, the Brewers might make the playoffs!

Wrestling simply doesn’t offer that kind of anticipation. Yeah, the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania are big events, but aside from that it’s hard to get worked up for a show that airs every four days or so on basic cable.

I think the final reason I’ve lost interest in wrestling – and this might be considered a personality flaw by some – is that to truly enjoy it you have to immerse yourself in it. You have to watch every week or you’re out of the loop. You have to discuss it with others – whether in person or on the Internet – because otherwise it will occur to you at some point that all you’re watching is two sweaty, over-grown men rolling around on a mat pretending to punch one another. (Trust me, the distraction was necessary for me because trying to come to terms with something so ridiculous, is, well, trying.)

With sports, you don’t need to watch every game to follow the team. Sure, you might miss out on certain things – “Holy shit! Did you see that catch last night?” – but ultimately the experience isn’t completely ruined by missing a game or two.

I don’t know what any of this means, so I’ll just stop now before I ramble on for another 1000 words.

Annoying Songs to Play in Bars, Vol. 3

Band: Battles
Album: Mirrored
Song: "Atlas"
Length: 7:07


In my later college years and beyond, I gravitated away from what can kindly be called radio rock and into the wonders of the indie rock scene. This is not to say that I don't enjoy the more "commercial" acts; it's just that I have broadened the sounds I seek out on the musical landscape. That being said, I wouldn't have sought out Battles in a million years.

This is where my co-worker comes in.

He and another guy were talking about this band, and described seeing Battles live as "amazing" -- there's that fucking word again -- and how he wanted to hear their new album. The other guy just happened to have it and would make him a copy the next day.

My co-worker got the copy and immediately put it in his CD player.

My first thought upon hearing the vocals was "Wow, I didn't know the Oompa-Loompas started a band."

So it went and I had forgotten about Battles for the most part, except that whenever "Atlas" came on I'd catch myself bopping my head in time to the beat. There was something catchy about this decidedly experimental band. What the hell?

Pitchfork Media describes the album thusly: "Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097." They also go on to describe it as "robot-rock" and I couldn't agree with those two statements more. The closest comparison I can come up with is Nine Inch Nails. Both bands' music -- Battles more so than NIN -- have a sterile, clincal, almost soulless quality to them. The guitars and drums are so damn perfect and calculates that, in my humble opnion, denies the music the ability to breathe.

"Atlas" is easily the catchiest song on the album, thus fulfulling my requirement that I actually like the song. It does indeed have a groove to it that makes you want to bob your head and tap your feet. Whether or not the bar wants to hear seven minutes of that is another matter altogether.

I have devised a ratings system just for fun, and mostly because I thought it incredibly funny to use "Lars Ulrichs" as my rating instead of stars or numbers.

Ratings go from 1-5, least to most.

Obscurity: 5
Unless you are musically adventurous, you've never heard of Battles.

Length: 4
Much like the live version of "Seek and Destroy," "Atlas" goes on far too long. The single version of it is far more accessible, but it's doubtful that it would be on a jukebox.

Tuneoutability: 5
If no one in the bar goes "What the fuck is this?" you're in the wrong place to try and annoy people with music. Aside from that, the riff is pretty catchy, so that also makes it hard for people to just tune it out. The icing on the cake, of course, is the Oompah-Loompa vocals.

Overall:








Ultimately, "Atlas" gets knocked down one Ulrich because the distinct possibility exists that it will get skipped on a digital jukebox. Some bartenders are just douchebags like that. However, if you're sick of Soulja Boy and Flo Rida and in a place where they let the music play no matter what the genre is, "Atlas" is a prime choice for annoying, yet unmistakeably catchy, song.

A Day Late, As Usual: 25 Unromantic Songs

I found this via Fark, and it's kind of right up my alley because my girlfriend and I occasionally talk about inappropriate songs to play at our theoretical wedding.

Some from the link:

I Used To Love Her (Guns N' Roses)
Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now (The Smiths)
The Smile Has Left Your Eyes (Asia)
Don't Tell Me You Love Me (Night Ranger)
I Don't Care Anymore (Phil Collins)
I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues (Elton John)
You Give Love a Bad Name (Bon Jovi)

"Used to Love Her" was one we both agreed on; last night there was a little band playing at the restaurant we went to, and she said I should go up and request it. I'm sure there's tons and tons more, but I came up with two off the top of my head this morning: "Cocaine Blues" by Johnny Cash and "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix. Any others that I'm forgetting?

Highly Recommended: King of Kong

I rented this movie from Netflix yesterday and it did not disappoint. I really don't watch movies that often -- I haven't been to a movie theater since May -- so why I chose to join Netflix I don't really know except to say that they have a far bigger selection than Hollywood Video or Blockbuster.

But back to the movie.

I tend to read a lot of non-fiction, so it makes sense that I would be drawn to documentaries. Add to that the fact that I've been playing video games all my life, and "King of Kong" is an obvious choice.

The basic story of the movie is that there's a long-standing high score in Donkey Kong -- in fact, there is a whole culture of people who play classic arcade games competitively -- and a guy from out of nowhere claims, with videotape evidence, that he has beaten it. Of course, the reigning champion (Billy Mitchell) disputes the score. The movie shows this guy's (Steve Weibe) quest to show that he is indeed the better Donkey Kong player.

I liken the movie to that of a good wrestling feud: the director does a wonderful job of portraying good vs. evil. Billy Mitchell is the heel; he's cocky, manipulative, and in true bad guy fashion, he refuses to play Steve head-to-head. Steve Weibe, on the other hand, is humble, dedicated, and totally willing to put his money where his mouth is.

You meet a lot of characters throughout the movie, and all of them are every bit as stereotypical as you'd imagine a competitive 80's video gamer to be. They all look like they live in their mother's basements, some have greasy hair, others have thick glasses. They were charming in an odd sort of way.

I'm not a movie reviewer and I don't want to spoil the story, so I'll just end by saying that it was hard not to -- and ultimately enjoyable -- cheer for Steve to beat the high score and knock Billy down a notch or two. It may sound dorky, and it is, but that's really the draw of the movie.

Annoying Songs to Play at Bars: Vol. 2

Band: The Beach Boys
Album: Pet Sounds
Song: "God Only Knows"
Length: 2:53

How is it that one of the most brilliant pop songs of all time can be so annoying when played in a bar?

Well, you could start with my description of "God Only Knows" as a "brilliant pop song." You see, not many people want to hear that type of music. True, it is "pop," and when you're at a tavern with all types of people, popular music is the order of the day. Some people want to listen to Nickelback -- which is their version of rocking out -- and others still insist on dancing to the latest rap single. Especially with young people, new music is of the highest importance.

"God Only Knows" is none of those things, therefore it falls in no man's land.

I can vouch for this song because I played during a run of nearly all annoying songs at a bar I occasionally visit, and the Beach Boys pushed the female bartender over the edge.

"It isn't Christmas! I hear jingle bells!" she said.

"Yeah, I guess there are in the background, but this is a really damn good song." I replied.

She was having none of it, and proceeded to skip the song altogether. Had I not been in Cudahy -- a venerable cesspool of musical taste if ever there was one -- I might have tried to debate the finer points of the track with her, but I knew in the end it would be fruitless.

I have devised a ratings system just for fun, and mostly because I thought it incredibly funny to use "Lars Ulrichs" as my rating instead of stars or numbers.

Ratings go from 1-5, least to most.

Obscurity: 3.5
Everyone knows who the Beach Boys are, (right?) but I'd wager that the average person is far more familiar with songs like "California Girls," "Fun Fun Fun," or, God forbid, "Kokomo." Brilliant as the song is, it's probably a hidden gem as far as most people are concerned.

Length: 1
Clocking in at 3 minutes isn't going to get the job done if you've only got one song to play.

Tuneoutability: 1.5
It's gentle and mellow, but perhaps the vocals are distinct enough to be noticed by someone.

Overall:






It's kind of sad to admit that the easiest path to annoyance is to pick a song that's fast and heavy. "God Only Knows" fails on all counts, yet if you're in a smaller place where you can actually hear the music, it is a great choice to take the piss out of the crowd.

Unfinished Business: My Last Day in Las Vegas

(Warning: This is a long post, 3,000 words or so.)

As a one-time writer – I don’t count this blogging business; any schmuck with a keyboard and an opinion can do this shit – it hurt the most when I thought I had a story to tell but never was able to finish it. It didn’t matter why I couldn’t finish it; all that mattered was that I had failed. This sort of thing became a recurring theme after I left college. I would come up with something, feel great about the possibilities, write a few paragraphs and then give up. Maybe I lack passion or ambition. Maybe there was no story to tell to begin with. Whatever the case it’s always discouraging and I’ve never quite had the gumption to get back on my feet.

I thought that maybe my trip to Las Vegas would help me write. Surely I could come up with something universal yet intensely personal about Sin City. I had it all planned out after the trip was over; I was going to write about, even with all the glitz and glamour, that somehow Las Vegas was soulless. I can make anything a bummer.

I had imagined this piece as a travel diary in chronological order, from takeoff ‘til landing four days later. I even went to the trouble of coming up with clever section headings. Of course, I got through two sections and felt as though I had written myself into a corner. Failure reared its ugly (and unfinished) head once again.

***

I’ve been obsessing about Vegas lately. I desperately want to go back and I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve been tracking flight prices and hotel deals for weeks now and pestering my girlfriend even though neither of us really have the money for such an excursion.

“You’re obsessed!” she said in one text message.

“You need to find a new hobby,” she replied after I text messaged her that I’ve read every hotel and casino review on CheapoVegas.com.

I went back to that story I wanted to write about Las Vegas to try and find some clues as to why a trip there would excite me so much. Obviously the story was unfinished and revealed nothing, so I began to daydream about it. Even after that I still can’t think of anything that’s remotely logical beyond there being 24-hour gambling and drinking and the fact that Las Vegas is far, far away from the cold, snowy winters of Milwaukee.

I could see wanting to go badly if I were single. If there’s one thing Vegas advertises in their commercials besides gambling, it’s sex and sex and more sex and I’m not just talking about the hookers. They have a nightclub called “Tryst” for God’s sake. It should be noted that I’m neither good-looking (not enough, anyway) nor rich enough to get into an ultra-lounge like that. Besides, even if I did get into the land of $12 rail drinks, if the girls there weren’t thinly-veiled “ladies of the night,” they surely wouldn’t be looking for a little bit of Kevin; they’d be looking for a lot of something a sugar daddy with more money than brains could offer them.

I guess, in that respect, being single and in Vegas would be a lot like being single and in college. Would I hook up with somebody I met in the casino bar? Not likely. At least there’s the idea that lingers somewhere in the back of my mind that some girl would actually want to hear about my record collection and contempt for mankind. And then, of course, we’d do the bow-chicka-bow-wow.

Know what else would make sense? If I were looking for some quality male bonding time. Call it a man-cation if you want – and could they have come up with a gayer name for it? – but it sounds, at least from the marketing that I have been bombarded with and the stories I have read, that it would be a hell of a time. Blackjack and booze and boobs – can it get any better than that? Perhaps not, but there’s a slight problem with that. I don’t have enough male friends to fill a blackjack table. One of them I haven’t seen in two years; the other one is chronically poor and hates gambling unless its small-stakes tournament style poker. As you can see, this cannot possibly be a reason I long for Las Vegas.

You may be reading this and thinking that I’m suggesting that the trip with my girlfriend was boring. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It wasn’t the kind of fun found in the commercials, true, but it was fun nonetheless. Maybe all I was really looking for was the comfortable – not intense – satisfaction of going on a vacation with the woman I love, to a place that features two of my all-time favorite vices: gambling and drinking.

It doesn’t look like I’m going to get to go in the near future, so to tide me over until then, I will attempt to recall my last day in Las Vegas. I feel like it was the best day to write about because there was none of the sensory overload of the first two days and no feelings of being fed up with the fakeness of the third day. I hope I can put it in the proper perspective and do the city of Las Vegas some justice.

***

We had to check out at by 11 o’clock which for some people might seem like cruel and unusual punishment considering Vegas is a 24-hour city. However, neither of us was up late into the night at the slot machines or roulette wheel so this wasn’t a problem. We checked our bags – I kept my man purse, a bad decision – and we set out to walk up the strip.

In the previous three days we had made it as far north (we stayed at the Excalibur) as Treasure Island. Looking at the map of the strip, there’s really not all that much to see after that until you get downtown. Still, we didn’t come to Las Vegas to see half of the strip, so we decided to hoof it as far as we could before coming back to make our shuttle to the airport at 9:30 PM.

It was so nice to be able to skip past all the swankier places on the Strip where we (well, at least I) didn’t belong anyway. It was even nicer to be able to say to the approximately 100,000 street salesmen “No, we’re leaving tonight. We don’t need tickets!” and actually be telling the truth. We made our way north and eventually hit the first of many “North Strip” casinos, The New Frontier.

The New Frontier was probably one of the last bastions of “Old Vegas” left on the strip. I say “was” because it was demolished this past year, and both my girlfriend and I are kind of sad to see it do. Despite the fact that it was kind of dingy inside, especially compared to newer places like Bellagio, it was still had a strange kind of charm to it. A lot of the slot machines were old school – they only paid out in coins instead of the tickets that are in every casino now. Even better was the fact that they had a deal going at the bar: 1.99 margaritas and $2.00 pints of draft beer. I would be lying if I said we didn’t load up on the phenomenally cheap (for the Strip) booze.

For some reason, I wanted to take it easy on the gambling as my stockpile of $450 or so for the first two-and-a-half days had dwindled to somewhere around $150. I wanted to return home with something so I played some penny and nickel slots before getting bored out of my skull and moving onto the quarter slots. Neither of us won much of anything at the New Frontier, so we ordered one more drink for the road, took it with us, and headed still northward.

You may not know this, but it’s perfectly legal to walk around Las Vegas with a drink in your hand. And it’s not legal in the way “Oh, the cops don’t care because they have better things to worry about like dead hookers and rappers getting shot,” no, it’s actually on the books that it’s A-OK to booze it up on the street. In the words of Yakov Smirnoff, “What a country!”

***

As I remember it, there’s a whole lot of nothing between the New Frontier and Circus Circus. Actually, there is a place that is more or less in the Circus Circus parking lot: the Slots-of-Fun casino. We stopped in there and it actually wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

The place itself is criminally small – the cheap gaming is of much appeal to me – and naturally packed wall-to-wall with people. I searched and searched for the $3 blackjack table, and when I found it saw that the waiting line to get a seat was three people deep.

A note on blackjack: the game now terrifies me. I dropped a couple hundred bucks on it in Milwaukee because I suck at it. Add to that the fact the people insist on telling me how to play – I realize there’s a basic strategy to follow – and I just get fed up with it. The last time I played it, I was in a small casino that just happened to have a $3 minimum. It went okay for a few hands, then the dealer went on a brilliant run of eight straight hands where she either hit until 20 or 21 or got blackjack outright. Most people would curse under their breath at this; I decided to laugh hysterically after about the 5^th hand or so. Now you know why I’m a gigantic pussy and only play slot machines.

The machines at Slots-of-Fun weren’t all that friendly, and they paid in tokens to boot. After a while we got the hell out of there, but not before we bought the “world famous” 99-cent ½ pound hot dog. Interestingly enough neither of us got sick. While outside we spent a few dollar bills on the gigantic slot machine – again, not winning a damn thing – and watching a piece of white tarp burn. The fire department was called to put it out. Our interest soon faded and we made our way into Circus Circus.

If your opinion of Las Vegas is that it’s loud and obnoxious, Circus Circus certainly validates that opinion. There were two things that we set out to find in the casino: more $3 blackjack tables (no luck there) and the bar with a 2-for-1 happy hour (bingo!) The happy hour only lasted until 4PM (it started at 8AM) and it was going on 3, so we had to act fast. Steph was already feelin’ it from the margaritas, so she didn’t have a whole lot of beer. I, however, was ready to get drunk for the first time all trip, so I double-fisted those mothers for all they were worth.

We settled on some nickel and quarter slots across from the bar and played for a while. Neither of us won a whole lot (a theme for the latter part of the trip) but at least the casino didn’t rape us of our money right away.

We made our way to the Wynn and looked around a bit, but that place is way too rich for our blood, so we didn’t spend a lot of time there.

Our last stop northward was the Riviera. My boss had told me before we left that there were statues outside of the casino of naked mermaids or something that she always rubbed for good luck as she passed by them; I don’t know if it was the beer or what, but I didn’t see any naked statues.

We spent a good amount of time there. As such, I decided to bust out the $100 bill I’d been saving and tried to regain my slot machine swagger of old. Between playing quarter and dollar slots I’d managed to parlay that into $150. Briefly, I thought of calling it a day, which would have been the wise thing to do.

Nope. I played that whole $150 trying to get back to my former glory… and for my effort I lost it all. Being out of money and unwilling to take any money out of the ATM, we left the Riviera, me penniless and her down for the trip.

***

We walked down the strip silently; only stopping at a McDonald’s to get a soda. I think both of us were bummed that we didn’t win any money, me more so because I had won and won big compared to the $100 that I originally had taken out. It was kind of tough once we got to the heart of the strip seeing all the people reveling in the fun knowing that we were going to leave soon.

Darkness descended. We soon realized that we hadn’t a single picture of the both of us together. We could’ve had one from when we saw the fake Beatles – fucking awesome, buy the way – but for $13.00, we passed. In fact, not only did we not have pictures of us together, we had no pictures whatsoever. So we took out our cameras and snapped recklessly all the way down towards our hotel. Depressing signs, the New York New York skyline, the fountains in front of Paris and Bellagio… all taken haphazardly but pictures of Vegas nonetheless.

And then, the opportunity arose to take a picture of the what we deemed the Holy Grail pictures: a snapshot with the guys on the strip who hand out cards of “escorts” to call. We talked about it all trip; we even thought it would be a coup if we could get them to hand over one of the t-shirts that they wore.

Well, I didn’t have the balls to ask them for a t-shirt; I didn’t want to trade them my “Cudahy” shirt (white trash represent, son, woo woo!). But as you can see below we did get a picture and it was awesome.

***

Finally we got back to the Excalibur with a half hour to spare. Steph went to the bathroom, and in that time I rationalized with myself that taking out another twenty dollars wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. So I did. It turned out to be the best decision I made all trip.

She still had some cash on her, so we sat down at a circle of dollar Wheel of Fortune machines. One three dollar spin…nothing. Next spin… I got the bonus spin which I had gotten a quite a few times before at other casinos. I watched it go round and round before it settled on my biggest win to date: FIVE. HUNDRED. DOLLARS!

I’m not really one to show my emotions – this was no different, all I could say was “Steph, come here and look at this!” – but in my mind I was running through the casino with my hands raised and screaming Ric Flair style “WOOOO!s” at the top of my lungs. The guy next to me told me to take the money and run, which I did. I cashed out at $517 dollars, up about $120 for the trip. All of this happened about 15 minutes before our shuttle was to leave.

I left for the airport a happy, happy man. Steph was happy too, if only because I wouldn’t be surly and bitchy the entire flight home. This would’ve all been a great coda to our trip except that when we got to the airport, we found shortly after that our flight had been delayed. Apparently there was a storm in Milwaukee, and the plane that was going to pick us up hadn’t left yet.

I dealt with it the only way I knew how – with beer. The lounge in the airport charged six bucks for a 20 oz. Budweiser. I drank a few of those until they made me tired, then we made our way back to the gate.

By now it was almost 1 in the morning, and after walking around the airport a while – and wasting money on their slot machines – we tried to take a nap. Trying to sleep in an airport is hard enough, but when there’s people still playing slot machines it’s damn near impossible. “WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!” kept repeating itself over and over again, impeding my ability to drift off, but eventually I did. I awoke maybe an hour and a half later, in time to see some very travel-weary people get off the plane.

You’d think that after such a long day that I would be able to fall asleep on the flight home, but no. Steph was out like a light after taking some Dramamine, but I stayed awake for the entire thing. The images I saw outside of the window were straight out of a dreamscape. The blues and purples and oranges of the sunrise in the clouds seemed surreal and were so vivid I can still see them now. In those three or so hours, I was able to put the trip in perspective. True, the place is incredibly fake. It’s impossible to get drunk there just playing slots or video poker at the bar. But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t an escape of the highest order. There is seriously nothing like it that I have ever experienced. At its base it might just be gambling and booze and pretty people, but unless you’ve been there, you really wouldn’t know the extent of the excess.

We touched down somewhere around 9:45AM local time. Exhaustion set in as we waited for our bags; nothing seemed as welcoming as our own bed. Finally, we left the airport and went home. Thoughts of slot machines and roulette wheels and palm trees danced in my head as I headed towards a deep sleep. You’d only be kidding yourself if you think that, when I woke up, I didn’t immediately want to head back to Sin City.

(I realize this post was really long; I tried to do the "read more" code thing, but it worked like shit. Perhaps it's the scotch or perhaps I am an idiot, but either way I'm fed up with it. )

Annoying Songs to Play at Bars: Vol. 1

I decided -- due to lack of anything else to write about -- to try my hand at a recurring feature on this here blog. As you can tell by the title, this particular feature revolves around music. (I swear, this isn't a music blog! I'll write about something else at some point...)

I don't know about any of you, but when I go to a bar with a jukebox -- I don't go to clubs or bars that employ DJs -- the music inevitably sucks most of the time. Now I realize solving that problem is fairly easy: hang out at a place that has a crowd that has the same tastes in music as I do. Except that 1) I don't like people, so fitting in with a "crowd" or "clique" isn't easy for me, 2) I grew up in a cultural wasteland (read: suburb) and still go to bars there, so a place like that doesn't actually exist in my part of the country, and 3) That's no fun, anyway.

So what's a boy to do when some douche at the jukebox thought it would be great to play ICP or Nickelback or Dream Theater for 30 minutes straight? Fight back with some songs that'll take the piss out of him/her/everybody!

You have to be aware of your surroundings: I couldn't walk into a heavy metal bar and play Slayer because they would dig it, and I couldn't play Elton John because they would kick my ass. It's far easier to pull this off at a bar that caters to all sorts of demographics, yet it can't be a place that's completely indifferent to the music being played.

Walking that line between annoyance and indifference really is the key to making it work. You don't want to piss off the crowd too much. If you're single -- and I am not, so I guess this doesn't apply to me -- you wouldn't want to chase off the cute girls/guys with a 25 minute set of Hank Williams Sr., would you? Or, more applicable to me, I wouldn't want to piss off the bartenders: they could serve me slower, not consider me for free shots even though I tip fairly well (compared to my drinking buddy, anyway), or even worse, they could skip the song altogther. So you gotta be careful with these songs.

I'm not sure if this goes without saying but I'm going to say it anyway: A digital jukebox is essential for this mission. Hell, if you're in a bar that still has a CD jukebox (they're becoming extinct where I am) you're probably comfortable enough with the music inside anyway, so why even bother?

Finally, it's very important that you actually like the song. Sure, if you really wanted to assault the ears of certain patrons by playing some tracks from any of Nine Inch Nails' remix albums. But no one -- not even Trent Reznor himself -- wants to listen to that garbage.

With this in mind, I give you (and I promise there will be no more long-winded intros in the future) the first of hopefully many Annoying Songs to Play at Bars.

Band: Metallica
Title: Seek and Destroy
Album: Live Shit: Binge and Purge (this is key!)
Length: 18:06

This song is kind of deceitful because at first it's like, "hey, it's Metallica, all right!" At least, if you are a current fan or one that likes their older material... and if not then the song is annoying right off the bat, making it an easy choice. But back to the deceit: it starts off like any other good Metallica song - heavy riffs and an awesome solo or two. But then it gets, well, interesting.

You see, "Seek and Destroy" in its original album configuration is "only" a seven minute song. So what does Metallica do to fill the remaining 12 minutes of this behemoth of a track? They jam. And not improvisational jamming, just the main riff over and over and over again. But that's not all folks, no, they decide that it would be really cool to have crowd members sing "seek and destroy!" into the microphone about a million times. This is already incredibly annoying, but to make it worse they're in Mexico city, so now you have people who already speak poor English doing their worst James Hetfield impressions.


This song is annoying on sheer length alone, but compounded with there's far too much crowd participation and the fact that it's actually a good song to begin with makes this particular version of "Seek and Destroy" a prime choice to annoy the living hell out of anyone in earshot, especially those who thought it a good idea to play Justin Timberlake and 50 Cent over and over again.


I have devised a ratings system just for fun, and mostly because I thought it incredibly funny to use "Lars Ulrichs" as my rating instead of stars or numbers.

Ratings go from 1-5, least to most.

Obscurity: 2 Everybody knows who Metallica is and have probably heard their music at some point. However, only hardcore fans would know that they have a live box set with some ridiculously lengthy songs. That, and stuff from Kill 'Em All isn't all that popular with the average music fan.

Length: 5 18 freaking minutes? Are you kidding me? That's long by even Metallica standards.

Tuneoutability: 5 You try ignoring a pumped-up Mexican screaming "Seek and Destroy!" in broken English at the top of his lungs.

I will explain that category, because it is weird:

I made up "tuneoutability" as a way to explain several different factors. The musical arch-nemesis and I discussed this and came up with something that may or may not make sense. Is the song played out or -- and this goes hand in hand with obscurity -- will it garner a reaction like: "wow, I haven't heard that in a while. Cool!" This is important because, though both are actually negative reactions to something that's supposed to be annoying, the former suggests indifference which is not what we want. T-O-A (I will come up with a new word at some point) is also about whether or not the song grabs your attention. This can be as simple as quietness or loudness, but (hopefully) also makes the listener go "What the fuck is this shit?" That is really what I'm aiming at here with these songs. As far as the rating is concerned, the higher the Ulrich count, the LESS easier it is for one to tune it out.


I hope that helps.


Overall rating:


Goddamn, I can't stop laughing at that image. Anyway, "Seek and Destroy" gets knocked down half an Ulrich because even I can't stand it for all 18 minutes. Which is, of course, the very reason why it is easily one of the most annoying songs you could ever play.

This Must Mean I'm Perfect

A week has passed since I posted the final songs of my "groundbreaking," "earth-shattering," "seminal" Top Songs of the 1990's. Zero comments. I take that to mean that everyone who read it agreed with my every word.

(I'll wait for you to stop laughing.)

...

(Done?)

...

(Okay.)

All right, so it wasn't perfect. I'm sure I had some songs too high, some too low, and some songs that I just plain forgot. Actually I did have some dissension among the ranks, though I have a feeling my musical arch-nemesis would've disagreed if I made numbers 1-12 everything off of Metallica's Black Album and then everything afterward an assortment of Tool, Alice in Chains, and then some Load/Reload era Metallica. Whatever. It's my list and that's just how it is.

Anyway, I had planned to go over some of the better disagreements (ie: something with solid reasoning behind it) but since no one spoke up I can just skip this part. (Yeah, I could do this with the arch-nemesis but it would have just devolved into "Your taste in music sucks!" "No, your taste in music sucks!" and so forth.)

Instead, I'll just do "Top 100 Songs of the 1990's: By the Numbers."

Total Words: 11,732

Longest Title: "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth (With Money in My Hand) - Primitive Radio Gods (54)
Shortest Title: Many tied with five letters

Longest running time: "November Rain" - Guns N' Roses (8:57)
Shortest running time: "Song 2" - Blur (2:01)

Year with most songs: 1996 (20)
Year with least songs: 1990 (3)

You know what? I don't feel like crunching any more numbers for you ungrateful bastards (kidding!).