You should have heard me do "Sometimes"

I'VE ONLY SEEN ONE episode of MTV's "Rob and Big," the one where Rob decides he's going to buy a miniature pony and lets it live in the house. The show is fun in a way that catches you off guard. As Heather put it, it's like watching a 14-year-old boy with unlimited funds live his dream life, and that's strangely amusing.

On some recent episode, Rob and Big go to a car wash; the new Enrique song comes on, and Rob just goes crazy dancing to it. Behold.



This reminds me so much of high school, it's not even funny. The only difference is that rather than an overweight black man, I was with my best friend Lex, and rather than Enrique, it was Britney, and rather than dancing, I was singing the harmony part in the last chorus of "Oops! I Did it Again." But the general idea is the same.

Lint Licker!

A GOOD FRIEND GREW UP in Utah, where cursing ranks right up there with caffeine and liquor on the reasons why Utah is not a place I could ever live.

When he came to college, it took him a while to get used to using real swear words rather than shorter abbreviations that leave no room for doubt as to what you're really saying (and therefore, IMHO, negating the whole point of not swearing in the first place). It's like girls who, to protect their virginity, have anal with the entire football team - a practice that is very much alive and well at BYU, according to sources.

Regardless, to this day, we all get a kick out of responding to an insult with an indignant "fuh that."

This commercial reminded me of that friend. Voila.


"Pickle you, cumquat!"

Secret lovers, that's what we are

MY FORMER CUBEMATE AND I were obsessed with that T-Mobile MyFives commercial, the one where one guy says to the other guy, "Dude, what's my girlfriend doing in your five?" And then the other guy tries to play if off like it's nothing, but then the girlfriend calls and the ringer is that song "Secret Lovers."

HaHa! Hilarious! Oh man, and then we'd just laugh and laugh...

Alright, so it's not that funny to recount, but when you're at work the bar is lower.

Anyway, M, this is for you.

Tato Salad - "Cell Phone Five"

"The older the prune, the sweeter the poon."

The wisdom of children, my ass

THE FIRST SONG I EVER memorized was "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon. I was young, certainly far too young to grasp the song's interpersonal complexities, too young even to memorize the words correctly. By way of illustration, when Carly sang "Some underworld spy, or the wife of a close friend," I would sing "Some underwear spy and the wife of a clothespin." My mother never attempted to correct me. She probably thought it was cute. Like a lisp.

Like a lisp, if it's not corrected quickly, your son winds up a fag, and gets tormented in elementary school because not only is he singing Carly Simon in the playground, he's singing it wrong with a fucking lisp.


REGARDLESS, THIS LYRIC MADE perfect sense to my child brain. While singing, I would picture a clothespin puppet, dressed up in a pretty felt dress, yarn hair pulled back, standing next to a man wearing a cape and a pair of underwear over his eyes to conceal his identity. I may have confused spies with Zorro.

When you're a kid, your ability to discern the reasonable from the absurd is severely limited, as my friend, whose imaginary friend "Broccoli" (a human-sized head of broccoli), can testify. I think that's one of the reasons kids attach to such horrible songs. The neighborhood kids used to spend hours dancing around with Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" on repeat, and our parent's never tried to kill us! Not once!

Even if we put aside children's music (hey, remember Raffi?), there's enough kid-friendly, soul-grating music by otherwise credible musicians to fill thousands of trips to and from Gymboree, the day's playdate, and any number of mind-numbing soccer games. One key entry into this pantheon of shame is surely "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon. Why can I call you Al, Paul? And it's not Betty, okay? I'm having enough trouble with the kids in the playground and I don't need this from you.

The song makes no sense, but an entire generation of kids grew up singing the song from the wayback at the top of their lungs. It turns out it was an international phenomenon, as Jens Lekman explains, before launching into a worthy rendition of the song. Lekman gets at the heart of what makes the song so annoying - the chorus, and Chevy Chase's smile in the original video - and then does us all a favor and gets rid of both. The guitar riff in the hook is pretty amazing, right?

Jens Lekman - "You Can Call Me Al"

You need two mics to rock this hard.

The National - "Mistaken For Strangers"

THE NATIONAL, an indie rock outfit from New York, recently released their moody and fantastic album, Boxer. A lot of the reviews talked about how the album is a slow-opener, which is to say that you have to listen to it a few times before it reveals itself to you. I disagree. It hooked me immediately, and I think it ranks up there with the best indie rock releases of 2007.

"Mistaken for Strangers" is representative the album's tone. It's brooding and stylish, with a strong forward propulsion and a subtle but memorable hook. I love the way Matt Berninger's vocals rides the baseline, the way the drum beat is relentless, and the way the chorus grabs you without falling into the standard "quiet-loud-quiet" formula.

The lyrics also hit home. The song is about the way people deflate and acquiesce their way into adulthood; the drum and bass line capture that the transformation to your adult self can feel sort of inevitable, inescapable. About six months into my first job, I was spreading mayo on a sandwich for lunch and all of a sudden it hit me that this was the new life - making five sandwiches a week for the next 40 years. I think I've gained a lot in the years since college - perspective, certainly - but sometimes I wonder what was lost.

Anyway, the video is of the low budget "watch the rock band play their music" variety, and isn't much to write home about. In fact, I would recommend plugging in your headphones and listening to the song without the visual, as the song creates an atmosphere and a depth that the video works against by being rather claustrophobic.

The National - "Mistaken For Strangers"

"Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults"

We can break these things because we have before

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I went away to a summer writing camp. At the end of the program, we pulled together a compilation of the writing we did that summer, and titled it, "I can break these things because I have before." Although the writing was, for the most part, high school angst poured into high school prose and poetry, I've always thought the title's sentiment was beautiful.

I came out a few years later, and although I was blessed to have a relatively uneventful coming out process, the decision to come out was incredibly hard. Today, when I'm going through a tough spot, I remember that I've faced down bigger demons, and came out better for it.

With everything our country is going through, sometimes I wonder why we don't take a stand more often. Maybe it's because we don't think we'd be effective, or that in the long run it really doesn't matter. Maybe it's because we don't live in a world of clear rights and wrongs. This video, set to the song "Hold On" by Mavis Staples, is a reminder that if we stopped paying lip service to change, stopped spending our nights and weekends in the office or at the bar, and actually tried to make it happen, we could do tremendous good.

Mavis Staples - "Eyes on the Prize"

"Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on."

Rihanna - "Umbrella"

LAST WEEKEND, a group of us rented a Zipcar and drove down to Charlottesville to explore the town and help a good friend get excited about going to UVA next year for law school. It worked - Charlottesville is gorgeous, the school is gorgeous (so many hallways!), tons of tasty restaurants, great little community. The only downside? The scores of white chicks wearing identically cut Lilly Pulitzer dresses.

On the way down we heard this song for the first time and became instantly obsessed. We walked all around Charlottesville singing, "Under my um-ber-ella/hey, hey, hey" - the only words we could remember. The entire ride home we set the XM radio to the Top 20 station in the hopes of hearing it again, and when it finally came on we rolled down the windows and sang along, shimmying in our seats.

Rihanna is an R&B artist, but this song, off of her forthcoming album, Good Girl Gone Bad, is an irresistible little slice of weirdly dark synth-pop. Plus, Rihanna takes a distinctly unsexy word ("umbrella") and sells it like a fucking pro!

Last word: this video is also a sort of ad for some new Covergirl lip gloss, so ignore those parts at the beginning and the end and focus on how banging she is, and how the song swells at the 3:08 mark (at which point she starts dancing amidst a shower of sparks - DOPE).

Rihanna - "Umbrella"

"Um-ber-ella"

In which I represent for Long Ridge

PROFESSOR, SET THE WAYBACK MACHINE for Westhill High School, circa 1997.

Every year in Health class we learned all about gangs and why they were the devil. While this was valuable learning for certain members of the student body (I'm looking at you, homeroom girl who brought her box cutter to "kill a bitch!"), it was unnecessary for my Honors classmates. That is, unless Long Ridge was going to rumble with High Ridge over who had claim on late nights at the Bulls Head Diner.

Yes, I did just use the word "rumble," and I think that proves the point.

Although a valuable experience in the spirit of "diversity" training and knowing your "community," our primary take away was how to look hard by making the Blood sign in pictures. Which we did constantly over chicken fingers at The Diner - just like the kids in actual gangs!

Thank goodness for Regan-style social engineering - Just Say No to gangs, kids! I mean, I probably signed a fucking pledge about it. But hey, at least I managed to keep that promise.


"Are you stepping to my honey mustard, bitch? Hold me back! Hold me back!"

In which too much is revealed

THERE ARE SO MANY amazing things about this video, pulled from Atlanta Public Television. This is why we invented public access, for all the learning.

Heads up: This is NSFW, unless you have headphones.


"You can't let every man hit the root of your vagina." It has a root? I know now why it's called "deflowering."

"He won't take you to Long John Silver for some shrimp, but he will give you a mouthful of sperm, or a rectum ful of sperm... The penis will have ejaculated all up in your brain." Apparently, LJS shrimp is the way to a woman's vagina root.

A friend in college had the jackrabbit. The day she got it, a few of us went down to her apartment on our way out for the night, and she answered the door wearing her robe, hair all sexed up and a mess. "Hiiii guuuyssss... I think I need to stay in tonight..."

Now I know why, and I kind of wish I didn't.