Blogs

StumbleUpon is a bloody great power for the old attention-grabbing, isn’t it? An awesome plugin with which to turn the collective head of the blogosphere, and make some (hopefully) viral statement that guarantees your fifteen minutes of cyber-fame? But in the past few months, I’ve noticed one little glitch in the mechanics of the social tool, and in some cases it could make or break a website’s respectability. That’s right, it’s the pesky category button, that which defines a website’s contents on the search results page. Upon being asked to provide information about their site on StumbleUpon, many are choosing the “Adult” option, in the mistaken belief that the cuss-words or financial discussion in their gourmet food and wine blog qualifies it thus. But no, people! Upon choosing the “Adult” option, you automatically have the word Pornography situated right next to the name of your site for all the Googlers to see! Or are you actually a New Pornographer in town? Nobody knows unless they click, and if they don’t click, they don’t visit, and you know where this is going…if they are looking for The New Pornographers tickets they’ll be out of luck won’t they?
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Freaks. Has all the talk of Led Zeppelin tickets going onsale got you all floppy and disoriented? Gotcha goin’ ape with eagerness, flailing like a rock ‘n’ roll whirling dervish around the ziggurat of your personal crediverse in a kinetic Led Zeppelin tickets trance? Tickets to Led Zep won’t be easy to find when they do finally get printed, that’s for sure, so you might wanna consider an alternative:
2008’s Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee – the seventh, no less; quite a feat for anything in this country, where a business is considered “successful” if it has been up and running since Led Zep retired – sees a little twist to the usual parade of Indie bands and other professional hipsters. From the (uncredible) credibility industry, in the form of some young ladies calling themselves Lez Zeppelin, we now have choices! That’s right, Lez Zeppelin. They do covers of the Zep catalog, but they’re all female and the Lezzies (if that wasn’t their nickname it is now) are the first pure tribute band to play Bonnaroo in its seven years of hipness and coolness and credible suchness. Who’da thunk it, huh? Lez Zeppelin.
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Well, it’s happened again, and it’s sad: Another young person found dead, surrounded by assorted remedies from the Western pill cabinet, naked. This time it was women’s fave Heath Ledger, the guy who bravely played the gay cowboy in “Brokeback Mountain”, and more recently, the Joker in Batman XXII, or however many remakes of the caped crusader we’ve had now (I know, it’s actually called “The Dark Knight,” and is set to come out later this year, no doubt causing a media emo-frenzy; will they buy concert tickets to go watch some celebs rap about life and Heath, and being beautiful? Will they take their African and Chinese adopted children along, swathed in their national costumes, to demonstrate their ethical superiority? Who knows?). Heath Ledger, with the young child and estranged girlfriend. Heath Ledger with the Australian family who are now shattered. Heath Ledger, blah, blah, blah.
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If someone offered me some New England Patriots playoffs tickets, or better, New England Patriots Super Bowl tickets, well, what could I say? Even I, the esteemed Doctor Watson, am speechless with awe at the invincibility of the New England Patriots right now. I mean, how good can one team be? The systematic demolition of pretty much anyone who fancies their chances this season has meant that the Patriots are now officially the top dogs of the NFL, and everybody else must bow, wow, wow, down to them and say "Yes, Sir!!!"
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Well, this past year had us rolling in the aisles, didn’t it? And weeping, and gnashing our teeth, and even crawling on all fours (if we were a photographer) in order to snap a pic of a young woman’s crotch as she struggled against the combined forces of alcohol, cocaine, and Oxycodone while alighting from a parked vehicle. Drug interactions such as the above can, er, cause you to forget to put on all your clothes, apparently, and photographers quickly seized the initiative as only the gutter press can – by appropriately lying in the gutter. But worthier things occurred this year, so let’s move away from the gutter and spend some quality time to look back on important stuff, like Classic Rock.
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It’s been a busy week for famous idiots, this. First we had Amy Winehouse’s utter toilet brush of a husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, being jailed for – wait for it – grievous bodily harm (or assault, as common people call it), resulting in Mrs. Winehouse arriving one hour late for a concert, while hundreds holding Amy Winehouse tickets traipsed out onto the pavement (as British people call it), chanting obscenities and generally making asses (as Americans call them) of themselves. That this streak of piss actually managed to successfully assault another full-grown human man I find extremely doubtful, unless the guy in question was:
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Bombarded as we are here in the United States with news items about cops shooting glass jars off the heads of skunks, and Coke and Pepsi deliverymen engaging in fisticuffs, we sometimes need distraction from the mayhem. And what better salve than to cast one’s mind to that fairer ground of the autumn glades of Olde Englande, where conker season is just beginning. When the skies turn that leaden grey over Blighty, and the leaves flash their golden effulgence in the late afternoon sunshine that cuts suddenly through the clouds, autumn has arrived. Throngs of children comb the woods, searching for plump, mahogany jewels. These jewels are horse chestnuts, or conkers, as they call them over there, the fruit of a massive tree, proud as an oak and easily as tall as a sycamore. I well remember scouring the fallen piles of orange and amber leaves as a lad, my eyes straining in the pale light of the shortened days, and the jolt of excitement upon spying a big polished brown orb. But finding a conker was only the beginning, whether you knocked it down with a well-aimed stick, or scaled a horse chestnut tree to shake the branches and send the conkers raining down on friends who were forever grateful.
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Well, the great man is no more. Pavarotti, he who gave us the most useful accompaniment to European soccer, to doing the dishes, to life itself, has finally popped his clogs, as they say in Northern England. He's dead.

Pavarotti exploded into the popular consciousness after performing Nessun Dorma at the opening ceremony of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. For the first time, England's beer-bellied idiot fat slob violent thugs were able to experience the soaring joy of release provided by the legendary Italian tenor, in between vicious baton charges and truncheonings from the Italian Carabinieri. Where the working classes in most countries were more accustomed to lending an ear to pop music or jazz, Pavarotti introduced the great tradition of Italy to the European masses that memorable year, and soccer and opera were forever wed. The first of the now globally loved "The Three Tenors" concerts was held on the eve of the World Cup Final, when Pavarotti performed with fellow tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. From that moment, the common people of Europe, even the pig-ignorant English, developed a great love of opera. The rest is history.
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Is it just me, or was there a ludicrous spectacle broadcast live on national TV last weekend? I refer, of course, to the long-awaited debut of David Beckham for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Never has a single (and apparently not very intelligent) individual allegedly rocked America since Elvis Presley in the late 1950s!

General Manager of the Galaxy Alexi Lalas – whose team finished second bottom in the league last season - declared recently that Beckham can be "bigger than Tiger". At first I took this to be a reference to an aspect of their relationship that was best left to the tabloids, until I realized Lalas was actually inferring that Beckham was perfectly capable of picking up a golf club and becoming the best player in the world. Outrageous! Further in that article, which is featured on an unofficial Beckham website, Lalas says that Beckham can be bigger than Michael Jordan, which frankly had me laughing out loud. One, Beckham’s skeleton is over twenty one years old, and if my years at Harvard Medical School taught me anything it’s that the human bone machine stops growing at that point. And two, Michael Jordan was a basketball player for the Chicago Bulls, and so is really very tall and not likely to be topped by a dimwitted Limey superstar whose wife has never read a book in her life.

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Well, it’s almost that time again. I’d almost forgotten about football season, to be honest, until the Mayor pulled up in his car the other day while I was tending my herb garden, honked his horn and shouted, “Watson! Let’s take a trip down memory lane!”

The Mayor’s trips down memory lane are legendary in this part of town, and this one was no exception. My herbs had to wait another day. Having made a brief visit to a certain, er, gentleman’s club downtown to pick up some lady friends of his, we installed ourselves in his plush private theater and he brought out a stack of DVDs to play on his six-foot television screen, with surround sound. And once more the magic began.

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