My Favorite This American Life episodes

I listen to a lot of This American Life. I listen to old episodes at work, and downloading the latest episode is usually the highlight of my Sunday evening.

Here are some of my favorite episodes, that I’ve listened to over and over again. You can click on the title of each one below and listen to them online – for free!

The Super

This episode is all about apartment building superintendents. The second act “Super Duper” is one of the funniest stories ever. I remember laughing out loud pretty hard the first time I listened to it. I want to talk about it, but don’t want to spoil it. It is really, really good.

Kid Logic

This is another hilarious episode, especially the intro where they ask kids about the tooth fairy. I’m usually not a fan of “kids say the darndest things” type humor, but the logic these kids use is really damn hilarious. “Because no one has brick teeth” is the absolute most hilarious answer to a question I’ve ever heard. Please listen to this.

In Dog We Trust

The 3rd act called “Resurrection” is my favorite short story of all time. It is a good read, but it is even better being read by the author. It is touching and funny and the end chokes me up a little. And I’m secure enough in my manhood to admit that. I also like boobs and steaks.

Heretics

This episode is dedicated to one story, about a Reverend in Oklahoma who decided that he couldn’t believe or preach the concept of hell. The backlash he receives not only from the church but from the churchgoers is not only astounding, but quite telling in how much fear is used in religion today.

Houses of Ill Repute

The first act about a man in Brooklyn is a great story, because at first it seems incomprehensible. But after listening to the story you can see this weird logic and how a lonely old man changed with the environment around him for better and for worse.

I have about a million other favorite episodes, but I’ve listened to these the most. I would have to say “Resurrection” on In Dog We Trust is the best story. If you are more into reading stories than listening to them, I found the short story here.

Enjoy!

stipulations?

Oh yeah – so I’ve still only spent 60 cents this entire week on food. But let’s mention alcohol.

I’m going to Choke Motorcycle Shop, then heading to SMOG CUTTER right down the street for Jenny’s birthday. Of course I will have a few drinks at SMOG CUTTER. I will pay for these with cash money.

This does not count as food, ladies and gentlemen. This counts as birthday party/karaoke booze, and I can spend as much of that as I want. The challenge was for FOOD MONEY, and I still have about 6 and change for the rest of the week!

This is how homeless people are made.

that elf

Last night I got home pretty late, and all the lights were out and I figured no one was home. I promptly took off my pants. Just kidding. I looked through the mail for a few minutes, then headed for my room.

Jaxon was hiding in the hallway by my door, crouched down with my ukulele. He went “wraaaaaaaa” and struck the strings, promptly scaring the living shit out of me. I heard the ukulele first, which was confusing and startling, then making out what I thought to be a little person in the corner going “wraaaaaa” sealed the deal. It was easily the most confusing scare I’ve had in a while. He got me good.

This weekend will be unprecedented.

In nerd news:

The new Indiana Jones trailer was leaked online today, so I’ll probably just spend the rest of the day watching that.

Good day!

GOOD DAY!

brown brush bear trap

I spent 60 cents on some macaroni and cheese today, because there was no free food at work except for a slice of lemon poppy seed cake and a handful of M&M’s. I was so hungry I cursed this challenge! So I ate the macaroni and cheese, and then went to Westside’s wrench night and promptly received my calories from many beers and working on many scooters and having so much damn fun. 

Westside Scooter Club forever! Beach Invasion III coming soon!

daredevil!

This morning I remembered an amusing anecdote from the past!

I was bored one weekend, so I decided to do some awesome stunts. I think I was probably 11 or 12. I pulled a large cardboard box out from behind our garage (about the size of a large microwave box, but there was no way it was a microwave box as my parents had the same microwave for about 20 years). I placed this cardboard box in the middle of the driveway, sprayed lighter fluid all over it and lit it on fire. Then I got on my motorcycle and got up a lot of speed and rammed through it. Ash went everywhere, the box sort of collapsed in flames and I thought I was the ultimate bad ass.

My Dad came out of the garage and said “what the hell are you doing?!” I guess he didn’t want me riding through flaming boxes.

Well, now I’m all grown up and I think I know what I’m doing this weekend.

boo buddy Vespa

Well, I went the entire day without spending any money on food. I ate a bagel at breakfast at work, then skipped lunch but ate some unsalted peanuts as a snack, and ate a rice dish at home for dinner. I didn’t go shopping yet because I did something more fun.

I made my order out for my Vespa. Warning, extreme Vespa-nerd talk ahead.

I won’t be rebuilding my crank… I’ll probably just buy a Mazzucchelli cut crank for added power. I’ll pair that with a new Polini piston and replace all the seals and gaskets, rebuild the clutch and the engine should be good. Then I’ll replace my Del Orto 19/19 with a Mikuni 24mm carb and a Polini reed valve intake, then for the exhaust I’ll throw on a Polini noisemaker pipe. Add a new back tire and some new teflon cables for the hell of it, and kick it over in a couple weeks. (This means I’ll miss the Mods Mayday, which means I am 0 for 4 this season for rallies. Summer will be awesome, though).

What does all this mean? Well, for just over 600 dollars, my Vespa Primavera will be faster than yours. Solly, kiddo!

We’ll see how the food thing goes tomorrow. I counted out my change in my jar, and I have 4 dollars in there! That means I have 7 dollars to shop for four more days… no problemo. 

Wonders: All Men Are Freezing

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Surprise – another Robert Pollard song deconstruction!

Steven Soderbergh’s first film-distribution experiment “Bubble” was an odd little film. Simultaneously released in theaters and on DVD, after watching it I couldn’t help but feel that the “experiment” would have had more weight to it if it were a bigger film. In fact Soderbergh was the only real “name” involved with the film, unless you looked a little closer and notice that Robert Pollard did the soundtrack to the album.

Bob released it as a 6 song EP, and its actually a good little soundtrack. “Boring About” is an instrumental version of “Boxing About” that was released on From a Compound Eye. “747 Ego” is a genuine rocker and repeated twice on the album, the second time with “Oh Yeah” added to the title and Pollard adding his own harmonies and backup singing seemingly from the next room.

However, the first song on the EP is the standout track. It is just over 2 minutes long and just about perfect. The lyrics aren’t available online, so after the jump I’ve done my best to write them out.

green bean

Weeks can be boring and routine – why not mix it up? Like challenging yourself to do silly things? With food?

Last night I was thinking “what if my bank account was wiped out and I didn’t have any access to any of the money all those ones and zeros say I have?” My immediate thought was that I would be very hungry. Then I looked in my kitchen and realized I had almost no food. Sometimes I get free food at work, could I manage a week on a few dollars and scrounging food?

Let’s try it! I will not use any electronic form of payment for the entire week (for food – gas doesn’t apply of course), until Saturday. I can eat all the free food I want, and I can buy any food I want, as long as I use the cash on me. I can also eat anything I want in my kitchen, which I inventoried this morning:

1 can of tuna
1 can of green beans
About 2 cups of rice
Half a bag of noodles
Half empty bottles of vodka, tequila, whiskey, and gin

I also have 3 dollars, a jar full of change, and a workplace where free food frequently shows up. I’ll report each day here of course.

I wonder if I can make it. I have confidence in myself. It will be a like a post apocalyptic experiement, like what would happen if 006 would have succeeded in firing the Goldeneye satellite and fried all of our electronic information! Well, all of Britain’s electronic information.

I found a Misfits funny

marriedtothesea.com

How I will be stimulating the economy

Yahoo, we all get 300 or 600 or 1200 dollar checks!

So what is everyone spending theirs on? And you have to spend it, don’t you see? Or else the brilliant plan won’t work. If you don’t spend it, then the economy will continue its stagnation of doom! BE A CONSUMER!

I am getting these items:

A new crank for my Vespa, and possibly a new pipe.

An Oregon Scientific SD Card digital camcorder – suitable for strapping on a helmet and/or motorcycle.

And a little something extra, just for you sweetheart.

I’ll “save” the rest, and by save I mean I’ll eat the most extravagant meals known to man – succulent foie gras and grey goose martinis (two goose things!). Ok, ok… probably just a really good hamburger and a PBR.

Life’s a pretty sweet fruit.

paper ring cold storage (Best Summer Songs/Albums)

I know how to get Los Angeles out of this crap weather and back into summer. Listen to summer songs. Here are some of my favorite summer albums:

R.E.M. – Reveal

Unabashedly a “summer concept album,” admitted by Michael Stipe himself. In contrast to the wintery Up, Reveal feels warm and poppy and… well gosh darnit it’s a great summer album (just look at the album cover). Songs like “Summer Turns to High,” “The Lifting,” and “I’ve Been High” are a pretty easy reflection on the concept. Every song, no matter how weird (“Beachball”) screams hot pavement. If you like this album, I really recommend you get the DVD Audio version of it – tres magnifique!

Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

One verse from “Gold Soundz” pretty much sums up summer for me –

So drunk in the August sun
And you’re the kind of girl I like
Because you’re empty and I’m empty
And you can never quarantine the past

First off, August is my favorite month of the year hands down. And this album is all about sitting around in the hot sun, drinking those cold drinks and feeling careless.

The Clash – London Calling

What? Why this album? London is the antithesis of summer! I don’t know, maybe it is because I bought this album in the summer of ’96 and pretty much listened to it for 2 years straight? “Rudy Can’t Fail” and “Police and Thieves” draw on Strummer’s Jamaican influences, maybe that has something to do with it. I think it is mostly memories of driving around all summer listening to this on repeat.

Belle and Sebastian – Dear Catastrophe Waitress

One song does it for summer on this album, this sickly-sweet titled “Asleep on a Sunbeam.” Even though it sounds like it was named after a 13 year old girl’s Trapper Keeper, it is really quite a nice song about summer and camping and the best things in life.

Another summer’s passing by
All I need is somewhere I feel the grass beneath my feet
A walk on sand, a fire I can warm my hands
My joy will be complete

Of course, the entire album feels much lighter after the dreary “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant.”

The Silver Jews – Tanglewood Numbers

There is no better lazy album. Don’t put this album on at a party, unless it is that point at a party where it is 3 a.m. and everyone is on beer number 25 and you realize it is time to settle down and talk because your neighbors probably hate your guts. This isn’t sleepy music, it is lazy music. You know the difference, right my dear reader? Anyway – put this album on when it is 4 in the afternoon and the sun is in your eyes and there is no better time for Root Beer floats.

Honorable Mentions – Lily Allen (Alright Still), Stooges (Fun House), Elton John (Tumbleweed Connection)

Oh.. there are two Pavement related albums on this list. C’est la vie! There are also two overused foreign language phrases in this post as well. I digress…

Please do tell me some of your favorite albums / songs that remind you of summer. Because we all need to work together on this! Let’s warm this weather up using our collective music listening! Put away those Smiths albums! Pack up that Joy Division! Get summery with me.

Wonders: GBV’s Sister I Need Wine and Frostman

I will be writing this entire post without the use of commas. May god have mercy on my soul.

I was working at Ground Kontrol the day Isolation Drills came out and I told the guy I was with to watch the counter while I ran down to Ozone to pick it up.

We put the album on and listened to it a while. My only exposure to GBV at this time was their slickly produced Do the Collapse and a copy of Sunfish Holy Breakfast a coworker let me borrow. Me and my coworker were talking about the album when he mentioned that Robert Pollard had just got divorced. I was reading the back of the album and saw the song “Sister I Need Wine” and immediately thought I saw a correlation.

I fought the law…

… and we both won?

Long story short – I got to pay 180 dollars (the original fee) for a ticket that had ballooned to almost 800 dollars due to a number of reasons. One, they recorded my birthday wrong (5 months later), and they misspelled my last name as Heydon. Whoopsy! So I went to court, sat through the lines and whatnot and finally got in the courtroom.

We had to sit and watch a ten-minute video of our Constitutional rights, then the bailiff reiterated the key points of the video, and then the judge came out and said these things again. He said “I want to be clear – when I call your name, you come up here and say one of three things. Guilty, Not Guilty, or No Contest. If you come up here and don’t say one of these three things, I will tell you to sit down and you will spend the next 3 hours here.”

So the first guy goes up and says “Guilty.” Gets his ticket reduced and leaves. Took about 10 seconds. The next guy comes up and says nothing. There is a silence and everyone is looking at the guy. The guy looks at the judge and says “YES.” That was his plea… yes. He pleaded yes. He was told to sit back down. This happened to TWO people by the time it got to me, and there were only about twelve people in front of me. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyway, that was all done and it took me about two and a half hours start to finish. Two people tried to cut in front of me and I SHUT THAT DOWN!

In other news, I have a comma problem. I comma the crap out of things. It only seems to be on this blog, and perhaps it is because I speak with commas and I’m trying to write in my common voice. However, I’ll go back through a post and delete about 300 commas per post! So I’ve decided that the next 5 posts I will try and write without ANY COMMAS AT ALL. I’ll prefix these posts with COMMA PROBLEM. And I won’t use any dashes/hypens/etc. Because I don’t write this blog to be professionally edited (of course) and I don’t edit my posts with my Journalistically Trained Mind (c) because this is just general blabbing. But the commas… the commas… the COMMAS!

grin and chariot

First things first: a hearty welcome to my sisters and their entrance into the world of drunk blog commenting. Remember your first times, dear reader?

Second things second: Nate just informed me of Weezer’s new song on their website by calling me and reading me the lyrics. At first, I genuinely mistook it for a “Beach Boys Love You” era Brian Wilson song. I listened to it on their website here, and I really really tried to listen to the whole thing. But because I already heard the train wreck lyrics in their entirety, I had to stop it half way through. Oh Weezer, you are truly and genuinely a bad thing now. It hurts.

This evening, in lieu of having any parts for my Vespa and/or a CB160 to start stripping, I made a list of ways to lighten a bike. Now, of course all CB160 racers lighten their bike, but there isn’t a hard and fast list that I’ve come across. Of course, the easiest way to lose weight off a bike is in the rider! At the races, I saw the fattest man (in full racing leathers) on a CB160 and HE WAS RACING. He must have weighed over 300lbs. He looked ridiculous, and the amount of cows it took to create his leathers must have been like a bovine massacre.

I digress. Anyway you can drill all the holes you want in a bike in places that won’t weaken the frame, but dropping 20 pounds off the rider would be huge! I’m 180 pounds now – 160 pounds would put me back to 8th grade weight… a skeleton racer. Anyway, this is way way way way way down the line, but fun to think about. I’m calling a place in Lancaster tomorrow to try and line up a bike.

So I played some “Super Smash Brothers” this weekend, and I am unstoppable as Kirby. No one can mess with me. I even made up some combos and junk. (total nerd here)

Growing a beard again. It is easier than shaving. Plus, I really am digging this homeless man look I’ve been cultivating in 2008.

Gettin’ stabbed

I just read a story on the internet about this guy who got stabbed by a screwdriver in Hollywood while getting mugged.

I was thinking “oh, that’s interesting! I’ve been stabbed by a screwdriver type device!”

Then I remembered that it is like, story week or something here at work, and we can post our most interesting stories on this board and people get to guess whose story it is. It certainly isn’t my most interesting or funny story, but that’s what stabbins are for! Stories!

I’ll write a song version for my blog:

Stabbin’
By Robert Slaythem

Stabbin’!

Yeah I been gettin’ stabbed
cuz I tried to save a puppy
It wasn’t that bad
because I drank all those beers beforehand!

Stabbin’ yeah yeah, stabbin’ ouch ouch yeah

It bled a bunch, getting stabbed
And the stabber looked like Ganandorf from Zelda
oh yeah, ouch oh yeah
Getting stabbed!

Then I went to court and made a statement
And told them I didn’t want her thrown in jail, oh no no no
And a few weeks later I got a check for 5 dollars
For getting stabbed!  (stabbed, stabbed ouch yeah)