O-mazing

You really owe it to yourself to watch the whole thing. Believe me, it starts strong and gets transcendent.

Now where was I?

Ah yes... STAMPEDE!

As you travel through the beautiful rural Missouri landscape towards the Ozarks, eventually you'll hit clusters of billboards. First will come the ones advertising vacation resorts, then the various theme parks around Branson and then, finally, the various shows. Some of these will be for old standards like Yakov and Andy Williams, some of them will be pretty much inexplicable and then some of them will advertise the wonderment that is KIRBY VAN BURCH.

Every time I'd wind my little beater through the Ozark hills, my heart would skip a beat when I would spot a Kirby billboard. Would it feature his Royal white tiger? His helicopter (it appears in four seconds!)? His smoking hot wife (she has a pyrotechnics licence!)? Or maybe, just maybe, you may get a glimpse of his fucking unicorn.

That's right, assholes! HIS FUCKING UNICORN!

Check it:



Needless to say, I was pretty excited about this trip. I had just the year before made up my mind that I must witness this remarkable Bruce Jenner look-a-like and his amazing fucking unicorn for myself. However, despite all my pleading, my sister and mother (bless their hearts) had decided instead to attend something called Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede.

I held my ground as long as I could, but eventually I succumbed to the temptation of the "free" meal included in the ticket price. So I swallowed my pride, played the good son, and headed on over to Dolly's for the evening.

Hurry up and wait

After parking and walking past the stables to get to the front gate (mmm... smell that manure! Who else is hungry?) Everybody gets herded (no pun intended - not a metaphor) into the waiting room pictured above to watch a juggler. Seriously. Those fat-asses who cannot wait 30 minutes to eat are treated to sleeves of popcorn ($7 each) and specialty drinks ($7.50 each) they can consume as they watch what can only be assumed to be Dolly Parton's Favorite Juggler. Keep in mind that everyone paid about $50 just to get into this place. Well, you do get a nice plastic mug shaped like a boot to drink out of, so it's all good:

Note: this boot is made from a plaster cast of Dolly's foot - her feet are really this tiny!

After the juggling, we all made our way slowly to the arena as "Jolene" whispered from the strategically placed speakers. The mouth-watering aroma of horse shit once again greeted us as we took our seats and were presented with our drink choices by the pimply-faced teens in Civil War costumes that ran up and down the length of the bleachers and the show began.

This was just supposed to be a picture of the table!

When we called to get our tickets, we were asked if we wanted to represent the North or the South. Being a proud citizen of corn country, I chose Blue instead of Gray and as a result, we were situated on the north side of the arena and were expected to root for the dudes in blue as more and more food was shoveled onto our plates. Did I mention the lack of silverware? If you visit the Stampede website, the flash animation on the front page presents a pretty accurate depiction of what the meal looks like. See that roasted chicken? Two minutes after serving it, a guy came from the other direction asking if anyone needed seconds. *shudder*

To wrap up: the meal was... interesting (I can still taste the soup), the entertainment was... entertaining (though I was in the bathroom when they featured grown men riding ostriches :( ),
the North won and most of us (or at least the kids) went home happy.

And others will wait until next year.

*Sniff* Someday.

Saskatoon

Children of the Corn

The Beauty Queen wore flip-flops

Another year, another 17 tons of Iowa sweet corn consumed. Yes, recently YHP was privileged enough to attend the 56th annual West Point Sweet Corn Festival and lived to upload pictures from his digital camera onto his blog.

But first, a dilemma! His brother-in-law's bar had hired that scourge of southeast Iowa, Money Shot (heh heh, get it?) yet again to entertain the assorted drunken revelers and YHP had made it very clear that a molten lead enema would be preferable to listening to those hacks fumble their way through yet another Green Day cover. Would he be forced to stay in and have a quiet night with his extended family? It seemed all but certain that this would be his fate. And then he got a call.

"Have you heard about this Jefferson County Green Band thing? They're supposed to be pretty good." Well, being named after something that's not porno slang that was considered naughty 10 years ago was enough for me, so I decided against supporting my own family's business on the most crucial night of the whole year and waltzed over to the 4th Street Tavern (aka The Bar Where All The Kids Hang Out) to check it out.

White Riot

And the verdict? I thought they were pretty good, and that was before I heard the opening strains of "Baby Bitch"! That's right, JCGB rocked out a little Ween in front of a mostly confused West Pointian crowd and got a nice little laugh with the "Fuck you, you stupid-ass ho" line. From there they covered all the bases with a couple Johnny Cash tunes, some Dylan and even some Beastie Boys and Snoop Dogg to keep the kids tuned in!

Tim breaks out the bottom to make your booty shake!

I'll admit I was a little concerned, a little hesitant, at first because, c'mon a sax player? And a harmonica guy? And a hot chick violinist? But when the rain started pouring down around 10:30 p.m., they could have packed their shit and left like a certain other group of poser bitches did, leaving Phil's Pub sans entertainment for the evening, but they waited out and came back to an overwhelmingly appreciative crowd. It's called PROFESSIONALISM assholes, and all the spooky dolls, make-up and men wearing dresses in the world won't make up for it.

The hell?

As usual, by Sunday morning any evidence that the square was ground central for an orgy of drinking and debauchery was gone and the young and old lined the road waiting for the Parade. Small children grasped the plastic bags they would use to store their booty and picked the best areas for scoring some sweet candy. The elderly were helped into their lawn chairs and everyone else hid their bleary eyes and hammering headaches behind those oversize sunglasses that are so popular nowadays.

Shriners. They live for this kind of shit.

They all were not disappointed. There was a scary moment late when one of the horses got spooked and headed towards the crowd. It was eventually calmed down with no injuries which is good because YHP didn't even think to catch that shit on video and send it to ebaum.

Here's some of the political stuff - as you can see it's mostly republican:




On that last picture, the driver must have accidentally left off the political affiliation of the candidate - otherwise people would think that having "Republican" on their literature would be some kind of kiss of death or something even in this tiny town which is almost the perfect embodiment "blue collar America" that all those guys in suits give lip service to on TV news channels! But that would mean the whole town is full of elitists! And that's just silly!

These next photos are of stuff that doesn't exist. Somebody probably photoshopped them or Hannity would have mentioned something:






And I'll wind up my report with something that transcends politics: pictures of The Official West Point Sweet Corn Festival Bitchin' Van! Enjoy!

Yeah, so I chased it down the street snapping pictures. You would have too, be honest.

Fred Williamson: Kicker of Mens Asses

Fred enjoys some white pussy - YHP makes the most obvious joke in the world

Stop reading this and head over to The Onion's AV Club and read this month's "Random Roles" feature on Fred Williamson.

Why?

The Hammer on his small role on a Star Trek episode:

I was still playing football when they talked me into doing that. I was the mole man coming out of the wall, and the only reason I agreed to do that was because I got to kick Captain Kirk's ass. So I came out of the wall and jumped on Captain Kirk, kicked his ass, and dragged him away as a captive.

The Hammer on "blacksploitation" movies:

This is not an opportunity to kill white people and come out a hero. In my films, I was an equal-opportunity ass-kicker. I'd kick white people's ass, black people's ass, pink people's ass, blue people's ass. If you were bad, you got your ass kicked. So my films never really fit into that genre.

The Hammer on the other Hammer:

I think they called him "Hammerin' Hank." That's specific to baseball. They didn't call me "Hammerin' Hammer." It was The Hammer. Hank was baseball, and I was never a baseball fan. I don't watch sports that have incidental contact.

SEE? NOW GO!

I Give Up

All I want to do this summer is kill people and take their money!


It is my duty to inform you that as of this day, August 7th of 2008 at 12:37 p.m., the pop single Paper Planes by the group (or rapper or terrorist or whatever) M.I.A. has officially been chosen by yours truly as the official Theme Song for the Summer of 2008 (or TSftS 2008)! Congratulations to all parties involved!

And to think back in May when YHP first heard the song back in May, he was initially disgusted by it, thinking it was yet another modern dance group seeking to anally violate the still warm corpse of The Clash for their own monetary benefit. But alas, the song did eventually worm it's way into his consciousness and his heart, helped by it's endless repetition during the trailers for the movie Pineapple Express which YHP is TOTALLY going to order when in becomes available on On Demand since he hasn't been to a grown up movie since Reno 911 Miami. Thug life!

Anyway, congratualations again to M.I.A. for joining the ranks of Alannah Myle's Black Velvet (TSftS1990, dredges up painful memories of past relationships) and Wreckx-n-Effect's Rump Shaker (TSftS 1992, also dredges up painful memories of past relationships) which rattles around in YHP's brain when he tries to remember how Paper Planes goes. Additionally this may make it the first ever TSftS that YHP does NOT associate with painful memories of past relationships now that that part of his life is more of a hollow, empty, fridgid vortex of unecapeable loneliness (or HESVoUL). But even then, I still find the time to get fly like paper, get high like planes!

Joy Division

Joy Division is a depressing band to be a fan of and I don't necessarily mean because of the "morose" lyrics or the haunting image left by singer Ian Curtis after his suicide. The depressing thing is that, given their relatively short shelf life, if you have both of their studio albums - well, congratulations! You now have the complete Joy Division catalog!

Of course, they left behind some crumbs for the completists. A few badly recorded shows, a book written by his wife and a few BBC show appearances are really all that's left of a band so was influential, so vital to the evolution of post-punk rock & roll that it's really hard to underestimate their impact on popular music.

So I wasn't completely sure what to expect from the new documentary. What I really wanted to see was some footage of the band on stage that I hadn't seen or perhaps some MTV Cribz-type segment with Ian introducing people to his pimped-out SUV and his swimming pool shaped like a man screaming in pain. In the end, I guess there was enough of the former for me to give it a semi-interested thumbs-up.

I just noticed that the IMDB entry for this movie has the keywords hidden by a "Spoiler Warning!" notice (I guess that's because one of them is "suicide") so I'm sorry if a gave anything away in my opening paragraph.

A couple of notes on the "talking head"-type sequences: Someone (and it's kind of hard to tell who's talking most of the time) mentioned how much their signature sound developed out of mixing the loud, Sex Pistols-derived punk of their early days as Warsaw with the proto-disco, R&B that was pretty popular at the time, which I guess should have been pretty obvious to me but having watched 24-Hour Party People, I just assumed it was another invention of mad scientist producer Martin Hannett (who, incedently, says in an interview that he loved working with Joy Division at first because "they were clueless").

All in all, not a bad flick - certainly worth the 4 bones I paid to "rent" it. I'm sure that any Joy Divisionite will find some interesting tidbits and the grizzled visages of the current New Order chaps will surely produce a few thrills. Just don't be expecting any re-inventing of the Joy Division mythos or a collection of all the commercials they did for Dunkin Donuts ("Dreaming of darkness, walking the line, one dozen crullers, for $2.99!") and you won't come away depressed.