Mashups are my imaginary friend

Listen to some Cansei de Ser Sexy vs. L7.



Also, here's the website for the dudes that put this thing together. It's actually pretty awesome. "Gimme Sufragette City Shelter" is my fav.

Happy Winter Solstice Celebration of your choosing

Specifically, merry Christmas, but in general, I hope you, my dear readers, are enjoying whatever excuse you have this weekend to surround yourselves with friends and family.

Two things. Since we are, ostensibly, celebrating the birth of Jesus today, I'll pass along a little bit of wisdom from the man himself that I think is worth remembering not just today, but every day.

Then Peter came and said to Him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven times."

Even if you don't go to church or believe in God or believe in anything, it's still a good idea to forgive your brother when he sins against you.

Secondly, I had a chance to talk to my friend Rich yesterday. He's with the army in Iraq, and his brother brought a laptop to a Christmas party I was at and hooked us all up via Skype. Whatever your politics, there's no denying the hardship that soldiers serving overseas and their families back home have to go through, and that sort of thing is only heightened during the holidays. So if you're in a position to comfortably sit back and count your blessings today, please don't forget that there are people out there who have been put in harm's way for our sake.

I <3 puns

Bravo, Reuters headline writer. Bravo.

Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun update!

Oh noes. The dreaded "blog post about the blog." That can't be good!

Nah. I just wanted to let you, dear reader, know that for the past week I was doing some actual like, you know, professional writing, so the ol' blog took the ol' back seat. Add to that the short trip home I took for the Eagle Scout ceremony of the Office Little Brother of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, and the lack of updates starts to make a lot of sense, eh?

But I'm back, and you'll be delighted to hear that I'm taking my Precious with me back to Bayonne for Christmas break, so you all will be getting some Jersey Fresh posts. Ding ding ding!

Zelda warriors

# For whatever reason, I had to stand on the B line this morning. Maybe once every three months, a B train will originate beyond Government Center. As a guy that rides the entire B line twice every day, truly the only perk my commute has is that I always get a seat in the morning and evening. This seatless train experiment on the Red Line scares the bejesus out of me. And I can't imagine how the grizzled subway vets in New York will handle it.

# Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I <3 puns. So I'm always pleased when wacky animal stories come out. For whatever reason, if your story is about a pet, you have free license to pepper your prose with a plethora of puns. Enjoy these.

# If ever there were a tale that absolutely begged for the long form, it's the story of Clark Rockefeller. Kudos to Vanity Fair for heeding the call. For those of you who aren't local, here's a quick summary: Boston blueblood Clark Rockefeller kidnaps his daughter during a supervised visit. The subsequent investigation reveals that Clark Rockefeller is actually a con-man who's traversed the country under a half dozen different aliases. And he's a suspect in the murder of a California couple that went missing in the 80s. It's reached the point where I cannot read enough stories about this guy. Having consumed everything the local papers put together in real time, it was good to see a big-picture account in VF. Read. It's sordid stuff.

# Am I the only one worried that this will cause a Zero Hour–esque, chronology-engulfing destructive rift at the beginning and end of the timestream?

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to some Say Anything

Say Anything |MTV Music

My friends, that's not change we can believe in

Is this true? Did Barack Obama just appoint the Green effing Goblin to be in charge of the entire Marvel universe? Is this what we can expect from our new president? What next, normalizing diplomatic relations with Latveria?

Gossip Girl is the capers on the smoked salmon that is my week

So I’m chilling (literally) in my heat and hot water–less apartment. I feel kind of like Nate, except he got to squat in his parents’ posh Upper East Side apartment. And I’m not technically squatting, since it’s my own place. I guess I’m nothing like Nate. Here’s a running GG diary.

8:00 Lonely Boy and S are so getting back together. Ftw.

Did I talk about the lameness of the off-camera death? It’s lame. Glad to see CeCe is back, though. Do I hate her or love her? I’ll check later.

8:05 Dan being the rock feels natural; probably because him and Serena were born for each other. Look at him next to Aaron. It’s no contest, S!

Oooh, CeCe catches Rufus walking away from a rendezvous with Lily. Her evil countenance makes me think I hate her.

8:07 I think I like Chuck as the creepy, cocked-head, tousled-hair, unhinged loner whacko. I’m sure it’ll be less endearing when he’s wreaking havoc, but we’ll see how this plays out.

8:11 I like the completely non-veiled disdain Dan and Aaron have for each other. It reminds me of my own loathing of that greasy-haired, dirt-stached creep.

A search through the DD&U archives tells me that I described CeCe as a “good lady” during the season premier. I have a feeling she’s about to disappoint me.

8:14 Did we just witness the formation a Chuck-CeCe-Aaron entente mauvais aligned against Dan? Holy smokes!

And yes, I definitely do like Chuck as the creepy, cocked-head, tousled-hair, unhinged loner whacko.

8:21 Isn’t this back-and-forth between Dan and Rufus a little too jaunty? Bart’s dead. And Chuck isn’t necessarily wrong to be pissed at Rufus. There’s almost blood on his hands!

I bet CeCe loved that she was kind of related to chuck. He’s her kind of guy.

8:24 Jenny, once again flaunting her ability to not only design and make an outfit overnight, but an outfit worthy of Elanor Waldorf.

Of course Aaron wants to take Serena away from her family in a time of crisis. Selfish jerk.

8:26 Aww, Jonathan.

8:29 Sorry. I had to tell my roommate about the broken hot water heater, so now I’m a minute or two behind. Woops!

8:31 This hospital in France sounds as juicy as it gets. I’m pumped!

8:33 Wow, Chuck. That was cold as ice. Also, thanks to the commercial break, I’m up to speed. Yay Tivo!

8:34 Of course Aaron would go to a weird place like Buenos Aires. Who goes there for vacation?

Dan’s passive aggressiveness and fear of confrontation remind me a lot of my own passive aggressiveness and fear of confrontation.

8:38 Serena DID beg Lily not to get together with Rufus. The blood is on her hands!

Jenny is right. Sometimes you do have to play games!

8:40 I’m a sucker for true love, but even I find the haste with which Lily and Rufus are trying to get together to be ghoulish and morbid.

8:48 Serena is such an idiot. Why do I even like her? Seriously.

AARON IS THE WORST! ! !

8:51 Are they not gonna tell us lily’s secret? Really?

8:55 Woops. I guess I didn’t realize that the episode wasn’t over.

Serena so obviously doesn’t even like Aaron. Why is she spinning her wheels? Because she’s an idiot.

8:59 So wait. Is Lily pregnant? Or does she have some sort of lovechild out there? This ending was too ambiguous!

9:00 And there’s no new episode until January. What the hell am I supposed to do for a month?

Official friend of DD&U

I meant to do this the other day, but got tied up in...forgetting to do this.

Anyway, here's the blog of my pal Christy, Chitown Fan in Boston. She blogs about sports, sports journalism, sports photography, and other sports-related topics. Christy says the blog is for a class, but Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is hoping she keeps things going once she gets her undoubtedly sterling grade, because she's wicked sharp and a general delight. Leave her some comments and tell her to update more!

Peeled

So the Boston College football team lost its second straight Atlantic Coast Conference Championship Game to Virginia Tech. Later on in the day, the Boston College hockey team lost its game against hated rival boston university. The next day, the New York Giants lost their game against hated rival Philadelphia. And then my gas got shut off. Awesome.

And yes, those peels are from one of the oranges I bought on Saturday, so that I would be prepared to celebrate BC's Orange Bowl berth. What a jinx, right?

Pre-Christmas miracle 2?

There are no words to express my joy.

Pre-Christmas miracle?

Amazing but true: two days in a row, I got at the end of the line to enter the T at the Boston College stop, and the person standing there asked me to go ahead. Why? Because both times, that person was paying with cash, and didn't want to hold up other people. A tear of joy could have been seen trickling down my cheek.

Depressing

In honor of Friday night, play with this widget that converts your alcohol intake into its food equivalent. Maybe you should wait until Sunday morning, actually.

You know I always wanted to pretend that I was an architect

Nice little piece on Slate today about the much-maligned brutalist style of architecture, and a possible comeback in the offing. A quick lesson (if you don't actually read the story): brutalist structures are more often than not made out of large quantities of concrete, and are marked by their squarish forms and, in this writer's myopic opinion, their monumental quality. A few examples, including Yale's Art and Architecture Building, are Northwestern University's library, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, and Habitat 67 in Montreal.

The granddaddy of them all, though, is Boston City Hall. I don't say that because I'm a homer (even though I am a homer). I say that because travel website VirtualTourist.com compiled a top ten list of the world's ugliest buildings, and Boston City Hall was the undisputed champ. The understanding that city hall is wicked ugly is a shared heritage of all Bostonians, so much so that Mayor Tom Menino can suggest demolishing the building and moving the seat of government to the waterfront, and we all don't immediately and indignantly scoff "why the hell would we move city hall away from the middle of downtown, away from a location at or near every major subway line?" By way of comparison, just recall how quickly this endeavor got the kibosh put on it.

Anyway, I'm glad I got the opportunity to actually go on record as saying that I like Boston City Hall. What do people want? It's distinctive. If you saw it and didn't know what it was, you'd make sure you found out. It looks sturdy and strong. Isn't that what we want out of our government buildings? A sense of security and steadiness? There's nothing wrong with a piece of architecture being of a time. Tastes change, but that doesn't mean we should act as if old tastes never existed. Art deco isn't a particularly ascendant style any more, but we're not about to knock down the Chrysler Building. (Please don't. The Chrysler Building is the best.) So, in conclusion, leave city hall alone!

The Secret of NIMBY

I came across this post today about President-elect Obama's sweeping stimulus-via-infrastructure-improvements plans. The thesis of the piece is a decent point: that there's a lot more involved in building bridges and roads and train tracks than just mixing the concrete (i.e., lengthy surveys, feasibility studies, environmental impact investigations, etc.) There are also some rather dubious generalizations, like this one:

In fact, Obama's people don't want anybody operating a noisy, smelly jackhammer anywhere near them. It's not that they're against infrastructure per se. Indeed, they would like infrastructure to have been built, but Obama People are going to oppose via lawsuits the actual building of infrastructure anywhere close to them, with its attendant racket, odors, and traffic jams. Not in my back yard!

I'm not familiar enough with Mr. Sailer's work to know if this is just a cheap jab, or if he has some special insight into the intentions of Obama's supporters. Irregardless, even the remotest possibility that this statement even approaches a whiff of truth scares the bejesus out of me.

All-time great Boston College graduate and former speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill once said that all politics is local. And while it may not be true that ALL politics are local, most of them are. I understand that Barack Obama amassed the largest margin of popular vote victory for a non-incumbent in the history of presidential elections, and that he managed to pick up stalwart Republican states like North Carolina and Indiana, and that he raised more money than any person ever in the history of everything. But Barack Obama doesn't stand a chance against oh, say, the garbage-transfer-station-opposing residents of Isabella Avenue in Bayonne, or any of a million such populations of incredibly motivated, incredibly short-sighted citizen activists who will oppose any project that will keep them up an extra 15 minutes at night or cause them to have to park around the corner for a week.

To counter Mr. Sailer, it's not just Obama's people that "don't want anybody operating a noisy, smelly jackhammer anywhere near them." Obama's people don't want that, but neither do McCain's people. Or Palin's. Or Ron Paul's. Or John Edwards's. Or Lydon LeRouche's. Nobody wants jackhammers! Jackhammers are like brussels sprouts. They're good for you. Just choke 'em down!

NIMBY is real. NIMBY is like the Green Lantern's ring. It's like, the most powerful force in politics. No matter how great a project is, no matter how many jobs it creates, no matter how many people it helps, there's always a nigh-omnipotent faction of nearby NIMBYists who will sacrifice their lives to stand in that project's way. In fact, NIMBY is so prevalent that when I worked in City Hall in Bayonne, my boss proposed the next logical step in its evolution: the BANANA theory. As in "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone." Watch out, America. And Mr. Obama, stay strong!

Gossip Girl whispers mellifluous nothings in my soul's ear

It's been a while, so here's a little running diary of tonight's episode of Gossip Girl.

8:01—Another charity ball, this one of the "Senior Snowflake" variety. Awesome.
* Finally, Serena ditches her friends to see someone besides Aaron. Of course, it’s to rub her gifts to Aaron in Dan’s face. Ugh. Old books, Serena? You're going to give your new boyfriend a gift that your old boyfriend clearly wants? What's wrong with you?
* Aaron doesn’t do paintings or sculptures. He does installations. What a wanker.

8:04—Jenny says she's organizing her dad's record collection because she has to keep herself busy. I wonder if there’s a place where kids spend the majority of their days in some sort of organized, structured activity. I’m drawing a blank.
* V to Penelope: "Bye, sad Blair wannabe." Somebody had to say it!
* Rufus is (platonically) helping Lily put together the charity ball. Didn’t we see this in The Wedding Singer? Haven’t I already made a Wedding Singer reference in a GG blog before?

8:07—Of course Aaron’s ex-girlfriend Lexy is a complete harpy. They were made for each other. They should probably get back together.

8:13—Eating dinner. I hope nothing amazing happens.
* Ugh. C'mon Dan, I’m hungry. You can’t flirt with Lexy the harpy!
* It’s a shame Jenny is so hung up on Nate. Maybe she can meet a nice boy at school.

8:20—Jenny is getting mixed up with Blair’s flunkies again. That always works out.

8:26—Tuxedoed Aaron looks like he wandered off the set of Interview with a Vampire.

8:30—Bart Bass’s assistant is named Mrs. Landingham? Like Jeb Bartlet’s assistant in The West Wing? Coincidence?

8:31—Remember the episode where Mrs. Landingham died, and they flashed back to President Bartlet’s early days, and it turned out that she was a complete fox back in the day? That was a good one.

8:33—Have you seen the Fiber One yogurt commercial with Mrs. Landingham in it? I love her!

8:34—Precious. Chuck and B found look-alikes to be each other’s dates for the Snowflake Ball. I bet there was like, a casting contest or something.

8:37—I’ve seen this written elsewhere, so I’ve avoided bringing up here in Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, but it cannot be avoided: are they purposely making Serena’s breasts look enormous? Each week is more ridiculous than the last.

8:39—Huh? Jenny’s half-baked revenge plot is about to backfire? What a twist.

8:41—Are V’s latent telekinetic abilities going to manifest right now? That's what this dress thing is about, right?

8:42—They’re making a movie out of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”? I loved that story! Although I would have been even more pleased if someone made “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”

8:54—I think Nate and V are good together. Do you?

8:55—So is Jenny now gonna be the friendless renegade prowling around the UES? How many characters can Jenny possibly be in two and a half seasons? Why am I asking so many questions?

8:59—I don’t use the term deus ex machina often (ok, yeah, I do), but isn’t Bart getting into an off-screen car accident a little TOO convenient? C'mon, GG writers, you’re better than that!

Timestamped Gossip Girl prediction

Tonight, we'll discover (via Bart Bass's PI) that Lily Van der Woodsen did a stint in a mental institution and was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and that she secretly leads a double life as Gossip Girl. Just watch!

xoxo